Yugioh reminds me of Magic: the Gathering right now. Not modern day Magic but several years back when there were essentially two decks: Affinity and anti-Affinity. Now you don't have to know what Affinity, but let's just say it warped Magic's metagame so badly that Magic constructed tournaments essentially had two decks. Now Yugioh isn't that bad yet but two decks were being played a lot at the last SJC.

SJC San Mateo has showed us that the deck to beat right now is Light and Darkness Dragon Perfect Circle (LADD PC). The runner up is Macro, which is the anti to the first deck. The rest of the top 16 that weren't these two deck types were Monarchs, Burn. Except for the lone Demise OTK and Zombie of course.

What does this mean? If the deck that theoretically should beat LADD PC didn't end up beating it, what can? Granted, there were a lot of LADD PC and it could be by shear number that one of them ended up as top dog, but if there were so many of them, then it would be worthwhile to specifically play a deck that beats it. Wait, doesn't Macro do that? Well, let's play a deck that beats Macro too. While we are doing that, let's beat Burn too.

With so many Monarchs running around, main decking 3 Pulling the Rug is an obvious metagame choice. As a side effect, it stops Volcanic Rocket, Breaker the Magical Warrior and Gadgets. There's a high chance that it will be useful game 1 and can be sided out when not needed.

Macro Cosmos and Dimensional Fissure are the most obvious ways to attack Perfect Circle's infrastructure so they are in. But then aren't we suppose to beat Macro too? Playing the mirror match isn't exactly beating them, but we'll worry about Macro later.

Macro still lost to LADD PC though at SJC San Mateo, so let's put in more hate. Royal Oppression essentially says "no" to LADD PC's tribute fodder engine. Premature Burial? No. Call of the Haunted? No. Cyber Dragon? No. The list goes on. It even stops Light and Darkness Dragon. Cool. Oh, Royal Oppression completely hoses Demise OTK and negate D.D. Survivor.

That should be enough hate to take down LADD PC, but what about Macro. Royal Oppression negates D.D. Survivor and effectively shuts down the engine, but builds that run D.D. Scout Plane still has tribute fodder for their Monarchs. It's pretty hard to stop D.D. Scout Plane when the deck is playing Macro Cosmos and Dimensional Fissure itself, but we'll do the next best thing: beat the life out of D.D. Survivor. Enter main decked Kinetic Soldiers, which happen to beat Six Samurais and inflicts much damage on Elemental Stratos as well. That's good because we know everyone loves teamwork and all that good stuff. Macro also runs a lot of negation, so let's just show them some end phase Royal Decree goodness. Don't we run Pulling the Rugs too? Well, they have a lot more traps than us.

But if we play Macro, then D.D. Survivor is an obvious inclusion, but Royal Oppression negates our own D.D. Survivor and Royal Decree negates our own Royal Oppression. So we have an off switch for Royal Oppression but that's still pretty bad. the thing I want to say now is that if D.D. Survivor can be negated by Royal Oppression, the removal engine is in place which means your opponent's graveyard infrastructure should be removed hence no special summoning. That means no need to activate Royal Oppression. The opposite is I activate Royal Oppression when my removal engine isn't in place so D.D. Survivor doesn't need to be negated anyway.

Now Burn is probably the hardest deck to beat just because it operates differently. Removing stuff from play, warrior beaters and rug pulling doesn't really do much against Secret Barrel, Ojama Trios and Wave-Motion Cannon. Are we defeated then? Pretty much if we don't have first turn Royal Decree, at least for game 1. Game 2 begins after a lot of side decking.

3 Twister, 2 Mei-Kou Master of Barrier and 3 White Magician Pikeru are... White Magician Pikeru? Now some, perhaps all of you are like this guy is obviously the biggest loser ever but seriously, White Magician Pikeru attacks under pretty much every stall card printed except Wall of Revealing Light. It's also a must answer card for any Burn deck because 400 LP per monster makes Ojama Trio useless and an unanswered continuous stream of Life Points makes the game un-winnable for the Burn player.

So if we put all that together with some basic good stuff then bake for 30 minutes, we get the following deck:

2 Cyber Dragon
2 Mobius the Frost Monarch

3 D.D. Survivor
3 Kinetic Soldier
2 Exiled Force
2 Gravekeeper's Spy
1 Breaker the Magical Warrior
1 Morphing Jar
1 Snipe Hunter
1 Spirit Reaper

3 Dimensional Fissure
2 Enemy Controller
2 Reinforcements of the Army
1 Brain Control
1 Mystical Space Typhoon
1 Scapegoat
1 Twister

3 Pulling the Rug
3 Royal Oppression
2 Royal Decree
1 Macro Cosmos
1 Mirror Force
1 Torrential Tribute

Sidedeck:
3 White Magician Pikeru
2 Mei-Kou, Master of Barriers
2 Solemn Judgment
2 Twister
1 Book of Moon
1 Cyber Dragon
1 Enemy Controller
1 Green Kappa
1 Heavy Storm

The Mobius the Frost Monarch helps out with Burn, if it for some reason does not get negated, and kills the random Blaze Accelerator or anything.

The LADD PC player will almost always side into D.D. Survivor, especially if s/he doesn't see Kinetic Solider game 1. What happens now is that you can beat him down with Kinetic Solider or Enemy Controller him to your side to somehow get rid of him or play Book of Moon on it then attack. You can also use Royal Oppression to negate its summon when things becomes bad then just beat him down with your own D.D. Survivor which hopefully can't even be removed from play because they have nothing to actually kill it.

If the Macro player does an early Solemn Judgment, then Kinetic Soldier can easily take down the remaining Life Points. I don't even know what the Macro player is going to side in but Lightning Vortex to kill Kinetic Solider and Jinzo/Mobius to stop our traps are most likely. Pulling the Rugs stay if they are running Macro Monarchs but go out if they just go the aggro path. The Twister can be sided out for an Enemy Controller to stop both D.D. Survivor, Jinzo and Mobius. You can also side out your own Macro Cosmos and Dimensional Fissure. If s/he sides them out as well, we get the upper hand because of Kinetic Solider. If s/he they don't, then we got the upper hand because we don't need to waste our cards on a removal engine.

Against Burn, just side in all the S/T removal but keep the Pulling the Rugs if they seems they would side into Monarchs. If they do play Monarchs it shouldn't be too bad because of the continuous stream of D.D Survivor. Enemy Controller is a help here because it kills Monarchs. Keeping Pikeru online is pretty crucial here. Solemn Judgment comes in as well. Activate only when you're low on Life Points of course.

This deck is obviously really anti-meta because it main deck cards that are mostly seen in side deck. It also runs several cards that negate each other, but because the player of this deck gets to control when to activate these effects, the contradiction can be minimized, though it takes good judgment when to activate an effect or not because it can have dire consequences later in the game.