It is undeniable that Perfect Circle has been the dominating Monarch archetype for some time now. It's reasonably consistent, but certainly fast and hits hard. It is easy to see why the original Soul Control Monarch archetype is rarely played now. However, the recent shift in the metagame might give it a second life.

One thing bad about Perfect Circle is its distruptibility. It simply depends on the graveyard too much. Almost all of its tribute fodders are graveyard related: Treeborn Frog, Destiny Hero - Malicious, Destiny Hero - Fear Monger. Macro Cosmo's recent population explosion reflects this fact. Perfect Circle's tribute engine is also mainly DARK, so a Shadow Imprisoning Mirror can cause havoc on a Perfect Circle player's game plan. Now all of this wouldn't be so bad if Perfect Circle didn't run such weak monsters. Believe it or not, being malicious or a commander of disks doesn't really help in battle. Attack points do.

Although Light and Darkness Perfect Circle did score a first place finish at SJC Orlando, I assume that it's also the most widely played deck type at that event. Sure, a lot of Macro decks were there too but random bad hands can cause even a deck to lose even when in a good match up. The sheer number of Perfect Circles certainly had something to do with its success. I'm not saying that Perfect Circle isn't powerful, but I am saying that its SJC Orlando win isn't as much as a testament to its power as it seems.

That said, I want to advocate traditional Monarchs. For those who don't know that that is, it simply uses the best and high utility cards in the game to generate tribute fodder for Monarchs. Traditional Monarchs is less susceptible to graveyard hate because it simply doesn't use the graveyard as much. Multiple copies of Soul Exchange can create absurd amounts of card advantage without going through the trouble of setting up infrastructure. Here's a deck list to ponder on:

3 Mobius the Frost Monarch
3 Raiza the Storm Monarch
2 Cyber Dragon

3 Gravekeeper's Spy
2 Apprentice Magician
1 Breaker the Magical Warrior
1 Gravekeeper's Guard
1 Magician of Faith
1 Marshmallon
1 Mystic Tomato
1 Old Vindictive Magician
1 Sangan
1 Snipe Hunter
1 Spirit Reaper
1 Treeborn Frog

2 Nobleman of Crossout
2 Soul Exchange
1 Brain Control
1 Heavy Storm
1 Mystical Space Typhoon
1 Pot of Avarice
1 Premature Burial
1 Scapegoat

2 Sakuretsu Armor
1 Bottomless Trap Hole
1 Mind Crush
1 Mirror Force
1 Trap Dustshoot
1 Torrential Tribute

This deck is not messed if someone plays a Dimensional Fissure. Macro only messes up 3 cards in the deck: Mystic Tomato, Treeborn Frog and Pot of Avarice. in fact, it's triple Mobius should give Macro a hard time instead. The reason for the Mobius instead of other Monarchs is that there is already a lot of monster removal in the deck. Soul Exchange and Old Vindictive Magician are 2 cards that not many other decks have to remove monsters. The rising use of Pulling the Rug also benefits Mobius since the frosty king is the only Monarch that has an optional trigger effect when summoned. That means its effect doesn't have to be activated. The benefit of this is that many players will just reveal Pulling the Rug upon its summon, before its targets are chosen. I, seeing as how the opponent has a Pulling the Rug facedown, can just not activate the effect. I might have done so had I not seen the facedown Pulling the Rug, but that's a lesson to not be so eager to activate Pulling the Rug against an optional trigger effect.

The bad part about playing this deck is that it has a bad match up against Perfect Circle because it's just slower on average. However, Perfect Circle has a horrendously slow opening. It will typically do nothing for the first few turns, which gives you the time to start spamming Monarch and hopefully win first. The Mobius are quite bad in this match up because Perfect Circle runs little traps, and most of them are chainable. In this match up, the only thing to hope for is to simply get a good hand.

One more thing is that this deck doesn't run Light and Darkness Dragon because there's no Disk Commander to revive when it dies. Without the +2 card advantage from Disk Commander, there is much less incentive to play the half-albino dragon.

There's also a Monarch archetype called 15 Gauge Monarch. It's not very popular since few people are willing to give up consistency for power, but nonetheless, it has done well at an SJC before so it can't be all that bad.

3 Granmarg the Rock Monarch
3 Mobius the Frost Monarch
3 Raiza the Storm Monarch
3 Thestalos the Fire Monarch
3 Zaborg the Frost Monarch
2 Destiny Hero - Malicious

3 Gravekeeper's Spy
3 Mother Grizzly
2 Peten the Dark Clown
1 Treeborn Frog

3 Foolish Burial
3 Soul Exchange
1 Brain Control
1 Fiend's Sanctuary
1 Heavy Storm
1 Mystical Space Typhoon
1 Scapegoat

1 Mirror Force
1 Sakuretsu Armor
1 Torrential Tribute

This deck has the ability to summon a Thestalos first turn often which could be devastating if it hits the right card. It can summon Monarch after Monarch which is devastating against any deck. It also has the capacity to run 3 Foolish Burial. One of them gets out Treeborn Frog, the second gets out Destiny Hero - Malicious. The third one gets out Peten the Dark Clown, which acts like a Destiny Hero - Malicious. It's pretty screwed against Macro Cosmos though because the deck only has Gravekeeper's Spy as undisrupted tribute fodder and that's really bad. This fact makes this deck particularly bad for this metagame, but it might be playable if Macro ever declines in popularity.

I hope this blog has inspired an alternative Monarch archetype. If anything, Soul Control Monarch is much more inexpensive to build than Perfect Circle. So give it a try! Thanks for reading.