Yu-Gi-Oh! Metagame

With the upcoming release of this year’s Mega Tins, we get the introduction to a once Korean OCG exclusive, Elder Entity Norden!

Elder Entity Norden Level 4/Water Fairy/Fusion/Effect 1 Synchro or Xyz Monster + 1 Synchro or Xyz Monster

When this card is Special Summoned: You can target 1 Level 4 or lower monster is your Graveyard; Special Summon it, but its effects are negated. When this card leaves the field, banish that target.

Also worth noting is another card that originally released in Cyberdark Impact, Instant Fusion:

Instant Fusion Normal Spell

Pay 1000 Life Points; Special Summon 1 Level 5 or lower Fusion Monster from your Extra Deck. (This Special Summon is treated as a Fusion Summon.) It cannot attack, and is destroyed during the End Phase. You can only activate 1 "Instant Fusion" per turn.

Reading Norden’s effect, you can already see the possible plays that exist because of a single Instant Fusion. This card’s upcoming release on September 18th in the 2015 Mega Tins is not news, but this card’s impact is enhanced by the recent changes to Konami’s F/L list. It allows the best decks in the format to make 1-card Synchro and Xyz monsters, and gives more power to Tier 2 decks. The first deck I would like to discuss is Mermail.

Mermail

On Konami's last F/L list, they released our boy Atlantean Dragoons from his chains and allowed us to play 2 copies of this card instead of 1. This may not seem like a big change, but it most certainly will affect the consistency of the deck, which could make Mermail a huge threat in the upcoming meta. With a good portion of Mermail's power cards being Sea Serpents, it's clear that the Mermail deck wants to resolve the effect of Dragoons as much as possible. In previous formats with only one Dragoons, it was relatively difficult to resolve multiple Dragoons’ effects per game. But with the introduction of Norden, and its ease to Summon through Instant Fusion, you will now be able to reliably resolve Dragoons’ effect multiple times per turn, while also Summoning cards like Abyss Dweller or Number 101: Silent Honor ARK!

The good thing about Mermail is that they can actually get to Dragoons and trigger its effect without drawing it. The deck often abuses Genex Undine, which has the ability to send a WATER monster from the Deck to the graveyard to add a Genex Controller to your hand. This allows you to search a card with Dragoons, like Mermail Abyssmegalo or any of the other Atlanteans. After you resolve your effects, you could use Instant Fusion to Special Summon a Norden from your Extra Deck to bring back that Dragoons that you sent. You can then Xyz Summon a WATER Xyz Monster and use the effect, which would allow you to activate the effect of Dragoons again. Something also to note is that the deck can easily Synchro Summon into Black Rose Dragon or Gungnir, Dragon of the Ice Barrier by reviving a Genex Controller with Norden’s effect. This gives Mermail a variety of plays with the addition of just Instant Fusion.

Shaddoll

As we discussed in my article, Shaddoll’s most optimal build will be running the Performage monsters, which create a very powerful and resilient Rank 4 engine. Not only does the addition of Norden to Shaddoll make this more powerful, but it also solves another problem for the deck. With Norden, it is no longer necessary to play WATER monsters in the Main Deck for the Nekroz matchup. When Norden is Special Summoned, you can use it to revive a Shaddoll monster, then Fusion Summon with those two monsters to make a quick El Shaddoll Anoyatyllis, which absolutely shuts down Ritual Summoning. With Djinn, Releaser of Rituals Forbidden, Nekroz players are no longer playing cards like Book of Eclipse and the Warrior Djinn outs, so they don’t have as many outs to a walking floodgate. Be aware, however, that Nekroz are also playing the Performage engine, and are able to remove the Anoyatyllis with Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer or any other Rank 4 spot removal.

One last thing to note for Shaddoll: Norden allows you to make an easy Trishula, Dragon of the Ice Barrier by using an Instant Fusion and one other monster (Falco, Hedgehog, Mathematician).

Nekroz

With Nekroz, Norden just pushes them even further into their Extra Deck, They have a lot more comeback potential with better top deck options that give them late game one-card access to Evilswarm Exction Knight and Castel, which can steal games on their own. Along with putting bodies on the board to use as tribute fodder for Ritual Summons if absolutely necessary.

Clownblade

One final deck that I think will be boosted by the release of Norden is what players commonly call Clownblade. It’s a deck that uses the Performage monsters in the similar way to Nekroz and Shaddoll, but are a self-contained deck. Unfortunately, the loss of Lavalval Chain to the F/L list cost it some consistency, but Norden is here to make up for it. The deck focuses on the interaction between Performage Trick Clown and Heroic Challenger - Thousand Blades. Without going into too much detail, the deck excels at Summoning Rank 4 Xyz Monsters. Norden obviously only boosts that. With a grave of both Trick Clown and Thousand Blades, you’re able to Summon any 2 Xyz Monsters by reviving Clown, making the first Xyz Monster and using its effect. Clown Summons itself again, but Blades activates since you took damage and you have 2 more Level 4 Monsters for another Xyz Summon. But, if you happened to summon King of the Feral Imps for the first Xyz Monster, then added Jigabyte from your Deck to your hand, you could use the Clown, the Blade, and the Jigabyte in your hand to Xyz Summon Tellarknight Ptolemaeus, then Rank Up into Stellarknight Constellar Diamond (with a Clown under it to float on your opponent’s turn!). But, in the TCG, there haven't been any tournaments with this deck yet, so we will have to see if Norden makes much of a true impact

Currently Yu-Gi-Oh! seems to have taken the same direction it’s gone since the release of Nekroz. One deck ruling the format. Variety seems to be a thing of the past due to the ability of one deck being released every 6 months with a significantly higher power level (or ceiling) than anything else already out (normally due to ban hammer). During the format you’ll see people top with other decks and think “wow so this deck is good as well”, however there is almost always one deck that’s better than the rest. Normally the success of other decks (such as Ritual Beast and Satellar) are due to these decks just playing traps to attempt to prohibit these broken decks from playing. Though these traps do end up working sometimes, it is still clear by which deck takes the most top spots at each event that there is actually a ‘best deck’ in a sense.

That best deck this time around is Nekroz, and although I myself am not playing it, I will openly admit that I currently think it is the best choice to play. The deck does a lot; it has multitudes of 2-ofs and 3-ofs that search the entire deck for an answer to almost any board you establish. With the introduction of Performages into the game, a lot of decks have started using these as a very consistent and useful Rank 4 engine. This seems fine and dandy until you realize that Nekroz can also utilize this consistent engine on top of their own very consistent engine. Which, as you can assume, presents the same problem of one deck presiding over the rest.

With the release of the Performages I have taken a strong liking to Performage Shaddolls. The deck seems to have become nearly as strong as it once was with Super Polymerization. Although we all know it’ll never be that good again, we still have a better variant of Shaddolls that synergizes well. Patrick Hoban has written a lot of articles referring to the ceilings of decks and how to raise them, and Performages did just that for Shaddolls.

As mentioned previously I do think that Nekroz is currently the best deck, but I can assure you that Shaddolls is a very close contender for that spot. Shaddolls and Nekroz are a lot alike in the sense that once their engine gets going, it takes awhile for them to lose steam, and they seem to be able to play on through quite a bit. They both have amazing outs to floodgates in the form of Main Decked monster effects as well as Rank 4s in the Extra Deck. Aside from them being able to out nearly any problem you present, they also can establish very strong boards very quickly while gaining resources. Nekroz can Tribute cards for Ritual Summons that replace the monsters they’re summoning (Shurit is a prime example of this), and when their board is cleared, they can also use Ritual Spells in the graveyard to add new ones. Shaddolls also have cards that let them generate advantage from nothing, ranging from simply Normal Summoning a Mathematician to trigger Shaddoll effects and float to using Shaddoll Fusion to Fusion Summon from Deck and triggering up to 3 Shaddoll grave effects! The deck is also very good at Summoning El Shaddoll Construct, which has a high attack on top of a Catastor-like effect.

One way I’ve found Shaddolls to be better than Nekroz is that Dolls actually have access to better floodgates, both in forms of monsters (such as El Shaddoll Anoyatyllis) and traps (Mistake) that both shut down Nekroz and are relatively easy to access. With the forbidding of Lavalval Chain and Djinn, Releaser of Rituals on the recent Konami F/L List, Nekroz no longer can stack their answers and draw them with Nekroz of Valkyrus or send Djinn to floodgate you out of the game. Therefore, they are left to try and beat you in a resource game and attack for game much more often than lock you out and beat you down. Although Shaddolls has Nekroz on that one, Nekroz has the ability to recur much more easily. With the Ritual Spells’ abilities to banish themselves to add others to hand and the fact that half the deck searches the other half of the deck, they can remake their boards quickly and with little to no resources, which can in-turn net them advantage. It’s much easier for Nekroz to come back with one or two cards than it is for Shaddolls, especially with Nekroz’s ability to play extremely well without touching the extra deck.