#spyral tough

Guess who just got top 8 at a Regional with his SPYRALs~? Hoo boy you better believe it was me.

The deck list is up there for you all to look at, but I’ll go into my tournament report below. Also at some point I’ll probably make a deck profile with my friends which might be enjoyable to watch and I can explain all the card choices and stuff~

Round 1 vs Spirit/Kaiju OTK, 2-1 Win

Despite about 90 people being in this tournament, I somehow managed to get paired against three of my friends throughout the day, including in round one. My friend was playing a really silly deck that still had some nice potential. Essentially it relied on using Aratama and Nikitama to make rank 4s and Nikitama was really good for drawing cards (you could also send it with Brilliant Fusion) and then Pre-Preparation of Rites would get out Shinobaron Peacock which cleared all the monsters OR Kaiju Slumber would clear out all the monsters and then Peacock would bounce the monster you summoned to the opponent’s side and OTK with something you then normal summoned. Essentially he did this to me game 1 but games 2 and 3 he didn’t and a combination of Terrortop and Misty + Agent ended in victory for me.

Round 2 vs Synchron Quasar, 2-1 Win

I did get OTKed one of these games, despite using Ghost Ogre to hit Hyper Librarian, but the other games I held off with the Zoodiac engine keeping his plays in check one game and using Agent + a couple of Quik-Fixes to keep my Utility Wires coming to hold him off before drawing Ratpier and winning from there.

Round 3 vs 60 Card Infernoid/Zoodiac, 2-0 Win

Another round against my friend, this game was weird.He goes first and opens Ratpier which he does the combo with and he makes Bujintei Kagutsuchi with the two Rats he summons. The 5 cards he mills are allspells and the rest of the cards in his hand are either backrow or Infernoids he can’t summon because he literally has milled 0 Infernoids. I clear the board eventually, he stops me with Spiritual Swords of Concealing Light which I later get rid of with Tough and Agent. Then he has an empty field and 7000 life points while I have Drident with Whiptail attached, Agent and Misty on the field, Tough in my graveyard and Big Red and Speedroid Taketomborg in hand. I’m trying to figure out how to get 7000 damage on board, but Drident + Agent + Misty + Tough is only 6500, or 6900 if I make Misty and Agent into Gagaga Samurai, but then I realise that Tough is a Wind and I can special summon Taketomborg from hand for the extra 600 damage! But just before I go committing to any plays, I check his graveyard and see the Spiritual Swords and comment to myself “ah damn you can stop the OTK with this anyway”, which prompts my friend to look at the graveyard and go “oh I completely forgot about that”, so my reminder delayed my win by a turn :P

Then game 2 I opened Artifact Lancea, Maxx “C”, 2 Interrupted Kaiju Slumbers and Torrential Tribute and think “gee this is terrible”. My friend opens an equally awkward hand of Fairy Tail Snow, Zoodiac Whiptail, a couple of Infernoids he can’t summon and something else I can’t remember. I drop the Maxx “C” on the summon of Whiptail (which I probably shouldn’t have, I was planning on using Slumber anyway) and he passes where I then Slumber him after drawing something unhelpful. He’s forced, next turn, to use Infernoid Harmadik to get over my Kaiju and then summons Snow and starts beating me down with that. To which I then, next turn, respond with my OTHER Slumber and, weirdly enough, end up winning with Kaiju beatdown. He never even got enough cards into the graveyard to use Snow’s effect.

Round 4 vs Zoodiac, 2-1 Win

One of the great advantages about playing a rogue deck is taking advantage of the fact that your opponent has no idea what your deck and the individual cards do. He goes first and makes Drident with backrow and Emeral, but by using Assault, Resort, Tough and Agent, I’m able to break through his initial board and clear out his backrow, allow me to then go through the Zoodiac part of my deck and establish a board. He hits some wrong cards with Drident and I eventually overpower him and he scoops.

I forget how game 2 goes, but I think it went something along the lines of “he does Zoodiac things and I don’t get cards to out it hard enough”

Game 3 is great, we both fight through a bunch of each others’ resources, until I’m down to Quik-Fix, a set Starlight Road, a Drone that I searched and another Big Red in hand, while he has very little. He attacks over Quik-Fix with, I think, Whiptail that I stop from going into an Xyz with Dimensional Barrier. I get out something bigger than the Whiptail and also summon Drone which lets me see his top three cards, a Cosmic Cyclone, a Tenki and a Twin Twister. I know I want the Twin Twister on top, but I pretend to be thinking long and hard about the cards that I see to give my opponent the idea that I don’t want him to use them. I then Big Red to get back the Quik Fix and he drops the Maxx “C”, which I feign annoyance at, search a Big Red, attack him for a little bit of damage, set the Big Red as a bluff and pass my turn. He draws the Twin Twister off Maxx “C” and the Cyclone for turn, then goes to Twin Twister my two set cards which of course gets the biggest smile from me as I flip the Starlight Road. He tries to make a play next turn and attacks into my Drone, which I tribute for its effect to increase Quik-Fix’s atk in the damage step, meaning he can’t do any damage. We’re in time by this point, so he concedes.

Round 5 vs Artifact Zoodiac, 1-2 Loss

Another friend of mine, although not as close as my other three friends, I did know his deck beforehand and he went on to win the tournament, so I can’t be too upset I lost I guess? The slightly bothersome bit was that he got a game loss for a decklist error and I still lost despite having the lead anyway, haha.

So game 1 immediately went to me, game 2 I figured out a pretty troublesome fact about the Artifact variant that being it’s much harder for me to play through backrow with cards like Tough and Agent because they wantme to destroy Sanctums and Artifacts. Despite this, I do fight through a Drident and Emeral board and hit a correct backrow, but when I start my Zoodiac play with Barrage he flips Torrential Tribute on the summon of my Broadbull and I’m left with nothing, so he makes a big comeback afterwards and finishes me with Gagaga Samurai.

Game 2 I open really mediocre, with Agent, Taketomborg, Starlight Road, SPYRAL Resort and something else I can’t remember, might have been Big Red. I blind call Agent wrong so I can’t go into any rank 4 plays and have to pass just sitting on Starlight Road. He opens Terrortop and is able to go into the Zoodiac plays and also sets 4 backrow. My turn doesn’t get any better and he flips Sanctum in the end phase to summon his Beagalltach which then destroys his set Scythe. He makes Pleiades and, with his existing Zoodiac board, attacks me for game.

Round 6 vs Atlantean Mermail, 0-2 Loss

I can’t remember the last time I beat Water actually, something about the deck’s sheer explosive, OTK potential just makes it hard for SPYRALs to deal with. It’s like, the OTK power they output just overrides the defensive capabilities I can make with the deck.

It also probably didn’t help that I didn’t open any Zoodiac cards, so I couldn’t even get out a Drident, but oh well. I get OTKed game 1 and game 2 I open bleh and can’t break his board of Toad, Mizuchi and Megalo.

Round 7 vs Metalfoe/Zoodiac/Kozmo, 2-0 Win

Final round and I’m paired against my friend for the fourth time today, which kinda sucks. He goes first, opening pretty decently but I break through it and set up Misty, Agent, Invoker and Drident, which keeps his Pendulum scales from going up and nets me the win.

Game 2 is pretty ridiculous: I accidently sided wrong. So normally, if I expect to be going 2nd, I’ll side out my Zoodiac engine for the Kaiju engine. Over the course of the day though, I figured I only ever could get out Master/make proper use of Assault with the Zoodiac engine, so I decided to side that out to make room for more cards that would help in the matchup. In doing so, I accidentally left in 1 Ratpier, my Whiptail and 1 Barrage. So he goes first and made a first turn board of DOG Fighter, Tincan, a Metalfoes card, a set Counter and complete Pendulum scales. I open Kaiju Slumber, Radian, Terrortop and some other irrelevant cards and think “gee I can get over the board but he still has Pendulum scales so next turn he’ll just do everything all over again”. Regardless, I activate Kaiju Slumber to wipe the board (after first summoning Radian over the DOG Fighter) and then, as I’m going through my deck to get out the Kaijus, I see that I’ve left my Rat and Whiptail in the deck and have an internal moment of “holy crap I can make Drident I accidentally might have won this” and then normal summon the Terrortop, search the Taketomborg and do a liiiitttlleee bit of Zoodiac shenanigans to get out Drident. I hit one scale during my turn, force him to make suboptimal plays the next and then draw Resort which gives me the massive resources necessary to maintain my lead and bring the duel to a close.

I finished up in 8th place, thanks to excellent breakers and a solid win-loss ratio, earning me a fancy Zoodiac mat and my invite to WCQs!

So the first thing you can probably notice here is that I sure am siding a Zoodiac engine. My logic was that I wouldn’t win every die roll and there would be games where I’d go second, thus I built the deck to go second since the Kaijus and SPYRALs are both really good at playing through fields. Then, if I lost a game, I’d side the Kaijus out for the much stronger Zoodiac engine and opt to go first, meaning I’d have an engine that is much more synergistic with the SPYRALs and also a powerful engine in general that was guaranteed to get its plays off because I was going first (well, more likely, plenty of handtraps still exist.)

I felt this logic  was quite sound, however, my problem lay with the fact that I only own one Zoodiac Barrage (and I borrowed the second Barrage, Drident and Bull off a friend, although having tested I believe I only need 1 Bull anyway). Having only one Barrage meant that I only saw it once the whole day (I opened Rat a couple of times) but Barrage really makes the whole combo come together and having only two in the deck hindered the consistency a fair bit. The rest of my side deck I didn’t use that much, the Lancea’s I used once to good effect against ABC but otherwise didn’t come up against any Infernoids and the Twin Twisters and Ghost Ogres were very effective against Metalfoes and Metalfoe variants, as was Ghost Ogre, D.D. Crow and Veiler nice to use against D/D/Ds (although I only ever got to resolve a Ghost Ogre against D/D/Ds, the theory was good.) Solemn Warning was my choice for a replacement to Barrage because, while it couldn’t do what Barrage did, it did put an effective stop to a single play of the opponent’s turn. If I owned a third Dimensional Barrier, I’d have probably used that instead though. Thinking back on it I probably should’ve gone with Vanity’s Emptiness, but it ultimately didn’t really matter because what I’d reallywant would be a third Barrage.

The extra deck is solid, the only thing I’d change is the second Broadbull for something else, maybe an Abyss Dweller? There are heaps of good rank 4 options so I’m not too fussy and I’m sure I’ll come to the optimal decision soon enough. SPYRAL Resort is really exceptional in this variant for putting back your extra deck monsters or the Zoodiac monsters not shuffled back by Emeral, meaning that it can repeatedly make use of the Zoodiac engine, as well as Drident comboeing really nicely with SPYRAL MISSION - Assault and SPYRAL Master Plan.

As for the main deck, I was actually really impressed with the effectiveness of the Kaiju engine, however, I did struggle sometimes with heavy Kaiju hands, even going second. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I might flip the two engines; main the Zoodiacs and side the Kaijus, with more main-decked protection cards like My Body as a Shield to counter cards like Zoodiac Drident. The SPYRAL cards, notably Misty, Tough and Super Agent, are all actually very effective at playing through fields themselves, meaning that I should be able to still play through fields provided I have some cards like the aforementioned Shield. I’m not 100% on what ratios I should have with the new build, since the Kaiju engine and the Zoodiac engine are both 7 cards. I may go over 40, but I don’t want to get any higher than 42 really, or I start to run into consistency issues (and this variant had a fairly large amount of consistency). Summoner Monk is really powerful in this deck, and so long as I run him I can’t afford to cut cards like Dark Magic Veil nor cut down on the Assaults, but perhaps I’ll do some experimenting.

My next regionals is on the 3rd of March, so I’ll be practicing until then! We’ll also have the Invoked cards by then, so maybe I’ll look into Invoked variants of SPYRAL as well~

All the new SPYRAL cards got announced/leaked a few days ago, but I’ve been taking some time to play around with them for a bit before posting here so I could gain a better understanding of their place in the deck before sharing with you guys!

So first up we have SPYRAL Tough, and he brings some pretty awesome field clearing to the deck! First and foremost, him being treated as SPYRAL Super Agent is phenomenal, meaning you can access your Quik-Fix, Drone, Resort Staff and Utility Wire effects while he is on the field or graveyard, making him already useful in that regard. His stats match Agent, and while he can’t special summon himself, his effect is incredibly useful. Firstly, unlike Agent, he can hit monsters which is awesome for clearing the field. But what’s also important that distinguishes him from Agent is that his effect is not a hard once per turn. If you can bring out multiple Toughs or summon the same Tough multiple times a turn (easy with Assault and/Big Red!) then you can potentially blow away multiple cards in one turn. But the biggest factor contributing to Tough’s usefulness is his ability to look at the top card of your opponent’s deck, like Misty or Drone. Now, between Misty, Drone and Tough, the deck has heaps of ways to set up for Agent’s special summon effect, making it almost guaranteed that you’ll know your opponent’s next draw and be able to extend your plays.

The SPYRAL GEAR - Utility Wire is up next and this card is AMAZING. The most important thing about it is, of course, that it is searchable by Quik-Fix, making it really, really easy to access. Requiring Super Agent (or Tough) on the field to use it is not really a cost as you should be getting Super Agent out onto the field quickly in the first place anyway. The card offers non-destroying removal and returns cards to the deck, the most disruptive form of removal there is in that it not only does not trigger any monster effects, but forcing your opponent to draw a potentially useless card can set them back a whole turn. Naturally, setting a main deck card back to the top of the deck also means you can accurately call Agent, Tough and Misty’s effects correctly, so the synergy is significant. Utility Wire is an excellent, excellent card.

And then SPYRAL MISSION - Recapture is a little less impressive. The effect sounds great when you first read it, but unfortunately there is no in-theme way of special summoning a SPYRAL on your opponent’s turn. As such, the card, although a trap, offers no effective way of interrupting your opponent’s plays on their turn like Utility Wire does, which is what would have made this card really nice. But instead you have a card that takes a turn to set up and effectively offers you little in the way of advantage. The two most crucial, positive applications of Recapture are this: to take control of your opponent’s monsters and use them for Xyz or Synchro summons on your turn (hint, hint, Zoodiacs) or to set up chain links with Super Agent so that he is chain link 1 and Recapture is chain link 2, effectively letting him dodge cards like Solemn Strike, which is okay. The graveyard effect also isn’t anything to write home about; it only protects SPYRAL monsterswhen Resort is the card that mostly needs protection, and even then, it only protects one SPYRAL monster if multiple would be destroyed. Super Agent is usually strong enough to resist any destruction by battle anyway, and then cards like Master or Quik Fix WANT to be destroyed and sent to the graveyard to use their effects anyway. And it can’t protect SPYGAL Misty, who also would benefit from this protection. The card, while searchable, is slow, has rather specific activation requirements and has no in-theme way of being used on the opponent’s turn which is where it needs to be used to be good. If our last set of of support gives us something that lets us special summon on the opponent’s turn, then this card we definitely have its uses. For now though, it’s certainly playable but I feel there are better options.

All in all, from my testing I’ve concluded that Misty, Tough and Wire are all exceptional cards, but Misty is proving to be the most effective. She sets up Agent, draws cards and gives you disruption during either player’s turn. I’ve found that cards like Dark Magic Veil and Summoner Monk give easier access to her and allow you to make full use of her effects despite her SPYGAL limitations. Tough and Wire further enhance the deck’s natural plays and maintain your board and field advantage whilst furthering the deck’s goals of simplifying the gamestate to eventually start hitting them with Drone for the win. With the addition of Symphonics and Zoodiacs in Raging Tempest as well, the deck is highly versatile and I’ve yet to settle on the best build (although it’s looking to be a build with Summoner Monk/Dark Magic Veil and Zoodiacs) and from initial testing I’ve definitely been having success against Zoodiacs and meta decks of the prior format. I’ll keep you all updated as the set is actually released, but I’m really looking forward to playing some more SPYRALs this upcoming format!