Ryan Murphy writes another irrelevant article on the traditional format, and more importantly, SJC Costa Mesa has gone by (along with several ruling errors in games posted on Metagame alone) and to no one's surprise, Dark Armed Dragon (DAD) took the prize. Actually, it took a lot of prizes. The sheer amount of DAD decks obviously contributed. I think a field of 25% random / E-Hero decks, 25% DAD decks and 50% anti-DAD decks is a good rough estimate. Yet the power of DAD is undeniable. Or is it?

Some people seem to think that DAD is easy to beat. The following quotes I made up are based upon actual, and laughable, posts on none other than ccgrealms.com, which is most famous among other things for their poorly written front page articles (although some are ok, don't read their deck garages, it's poison).

"Just use Bottomless Trap Hole!"
"Divine Wrath!"
"Shadow-Imprisoning Mirror pwns the DAD"
"DAD dies to Royal Oppression"

The people saying these things obviously underestimate the power of DAD. Bottomless Trap Hole? Ok, I'll destroy your monster with priority then summon another DAD. Divine Wrath? Ok, 2 for 1 yourself. Shadow-Imprisoning Mirror? Ok, I summon DAD and attack. Royal Oppression? Snipe Hunter, roll, DAD for game. I'm not saying these aren't foils to DAD because sometimes they do work, but rather each individual card can not take down all aspects of DAD, but sticking all of these cards into the same deck will lead to tech overkill and auto-lose to any other deck. I think Shadow-Imprisoning Mirror comes pretty close to stopping DAD, but it's not always drawn, and there's still Mystical Space Typhoon and Heavy Storm to deal with.

The problem with beating DAD is hard to splash in some tech that destroys the deck, but a dedicated deck designed to beat it will simply lose to other decks. Some players have tried another method: outspeeding it. First up is Chris Moosman's Exodia deck.

5 Exodia Pieces
3 Destiny Hero - Dogma
3 Destiny Hero - Plasma
3 Cyber Valley
1 Elemental Hero Stratos
1 Sangan
1 Dark Magician of Chaos
1 Destiny Hero - Disk Commander

3 Allure of Darkness
3 Destiny Draw
3 Machine Duplication
3 Trade-In
3 Upstart Goblin
1 Dimension Fusion
1 Monster Reborn
1 Premature Burial
1 Spell Economics

3 Reckless Greed

The deck tries to win on about turn 2 to 3. However, I think this deck was a poor choice for a 17 round tournament. The chances of getting unrecoverable hands it very high, as a hand of draw cards without the necessary discard fodder or vice versa means good game. The deck also fails when the opponent decides hand control is a good way to beat DAD (don't ask me why, I am as confused as you are). Searching a piece with Sangan only to have it discarded via Drastic Drop Off kills the deck's win condition. Someone inflicting damage with Goblin Zombie or flipping Needle Worm and knocking off an Exodia piece to the graveyard is a different story with the same ending.

Lance Leonhardt thought Rainbow Dark OTK was the way to go. Seriously, Raindbow Dark OTK in a 17 round tournament? Every Rainbow Dark OTK shares essentially the same list and they all suffer from the same inconsistency problems. Lance quoted a 87% success rate with the deck. I have no idea where this number came from and am having troubles believing in that number but let's assume that number is accurate. Let's also assume that if the deck doesn't go off on turn 1 it has a negliable chance of winning because if the chance of drawing a card that makes it possible to go off on turn 2 is slim to none. The chance of winning 17 games in a row is 9%. That's still pretty high, until we change the word game into match. The raw percentage actually goes up to 95% chance of winning the match because it's hard to lose 2 games if the chance of winning a game is as high as 87%, but that's not taking account the side deck. The deck is completely hosed by D.D. Crow and Wobaku / Threatening Roar. Although I'm not taking the time to calculate it, my instinct tells me the chances of a deck winning a match with sidedeck becomes much lower than 87%. If the deck had a 60% chance of winning a match, the chances of winning the tournament would be about 1.5%. That's just too low.

I was in disbelief when I read that Paul Levitin decided to pilot Gladiator Beasts. I think everyone saw it coming that he's not going to top 32. The key card Heraklinos dies to Royal Oppression, which people were running, and monster form removal, like... Dark Armed Dragon! But he was running Shadow-Imprisoning Mirror which means he's a smart person, but he would be smarter if he just didn't run Gladiator Beasts in the first place. Oh, Heraklinos also dies to Neo-Spacian Grand Mole and Exiled Force, and both are those are commonly found along side the previously mentioned Royal Oppression.

27 out of the top 32 decks ran Dark Armed Dragon. So that shows how effective the anti-DAD strategies were. So how the heck are we suppose to take down DAD? Well, it's not easy, so the best strategy for hard core players is to just run their own DAD decks. For the rest of the world's players, they can either sulk and wait for September 1st, quit the game, think of new strategies, or earn money to obtain DAD then follow the same stragegy for hard core players. The last one is probably the most rewarding as the end product actually contains Dark Armed Dragon, but the second last choice is decent too.

So what are these new deck ideas? I don't know, as if I knew I would be winning a lot of tournaments then using the prize to obtain DAD and build the DAD deck instead of blogging. I'll blog any new ideas that come to mind next time. Ciao!

P.S. By the way I didn't attend SJC Costa Mesa because I'm not rich enough to buy plane tickets while skipping classes to play a children's card game.

Tags: SJC Costa Mesa Dark Armed Dragon