Sunday, January 5, 2014

Deck Profile: Exploding Water (Version 1) [Sep 2013 Format]

Hey guys, welcome to another "dead deck" profile! This is likely the last deck I'm going to show you that I made and that was seriously damaged by the new banlist. So without further ado, I present Nimble Atlanteans!


The inspiration for this deck came from a post on The Organization that covered a deck idea for a Baby Raccoon/Nimble crossover deck that was posted on the Japanese Yugioh website. You can check that out here. Although I wasn't too interested at first, I took another look some days later and realized that it could be a totally solid concept with some work. I thought that the biggest thing holding the deck back was the publication's lack of competitive focus, since most of the decks on Konami's sites appear to be geared towards this weird thing that they call "having fun" instead of creating a powerful, working machine of a deck.

So right off the bat, I ditched the concept of relying on DNA Surgery to spam multiple copies of Sandayu. Make no mistake, Sandayu is an amazing card and you won't go many games without summoning him. (DNA Surgery also just so happens to be a good card to counter a few different meta decks nowadays.) But I felt that he was nowhere close to being a win condition all on his own, since he can be answered relatively easily and requires good conditions to really make a deadly impact on the game. And with less of a reliance on Sandayu, it made sense to go ahead and cut most of the Beast-type support, which primarily left me with Nimble Angler. Not exactly a bad card to be left with, in my opinion: anything that summons two monsters straight from the deck tends to be pretty good.

Refocusing the deck to center more on Nimble Angler soon brought me to realize the worth of playing Genex Undine, since, like Tidal, it was another card that could trigger Angler without me having to draw it. And using Undine and Tidal in the same deck made it a no-brainer to add the Atlanteans, who would also benefit from those two power cards and give the deck more depth and some removal power. But the Atlanteans began to weigh my hands down with multiple monsters that needed a way to be triggered when drawn, so I added cards like Abyss Soldier and Mermail Abysspike that could trigger both the Atlanteans and any Anglers if I happened to draw them.

Later on in development, I realized that the best strength of this deck is its ability to OTK. Thus, I added Magical Mallet to make it easier to put together the combinations of cards in your hand that make that happen. It also solved the age-old problem of "drawing cards you don't want to draw" that constantly plagued this deck. Trust me, it's not fun to draw Controllers and Anglers/Atlantean monsters for which you have no trigger, or copies of Nimble monsters that are of much more use to you when they stay in your deck. I also switched out my playset of Typhoons for Trap Stuns, so that drawing a single one could take care of an entire backrow if needed. Swift Scarecrow is there to give you time to setup.
 
I'm currently working on a list of a few of the OTKs that I discovered while playing this deck and plan to post them soon. Hopefully at that time, this deck will make a lot more sense. EDIT: The guide is now up! Check it out.

So what does this deck have in store for its future? Well, OTKs will probably be a lot harder to come by with Tidal being Limited now. But personally, I don't mind that since I'm not a super-aggressive player anyways. To be completely honest, I really have no idea what this deck will look like in the current format. I assumed that the entire strategy was pointless with only one Tidal, and started working on Tempest Simorgh instead since it was obvious that a deck like that could still survive. But now, it's becoming extremely clear to me that this deck still has a fighting chance to be playable too (as long as I ditch the whole "exploding water" approach, which I'm all too happy to do). So I'll give it a fair shot and see how it works out. But until then, you have both my OTK Guide and the second version of this deck to look forward to here on the blog. Thanks for reading!

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