The Tuners: Level 4

As Claudio just postet a comment to my last article which said that he would prefer Flamvell Magician or Mist Valley Solider over Rose, I just decided to write about all tuners and their pros and cons. I will start with level 4, and will post about level 3, 2 and all other out there within my next articles.

Until now, there are 8 level 4 Tuner available in the TCG:

• Trap Eater
• Flamvell Magician
• Hyper Synchron
• Royal Swamp Eel
• Mist Valley Solider
• Rose, Warrior Of Revenge
• Road Synchron
• Debris Dragon

At first, all of them are searchable with Summoner Monk (except Trap Eater and Royal Swamp Eel) for easy level 8 Synchro Summons (or level 6 with Road Synchron).

Trap Eater:
I think this guy is the most played level 4 Tuner. The reason? Many players use him instead of Dust Tornado in their Side decks. Especialy Dark-Decks can do this, as they can also remove him for Allure of Darkness. As sending a card to the graveyard is a cost, not even Royal Oppression can stop him.

Flamvell Magician:
One of the two new level 4 Tuners available in Hidden Arsenal. His biggest advantge is that he can not be touched by BTH, so summoning him with Summoner Monk will be a save synchro summon. Diwsadvatage? He cna do nothing else.

Hyper Synchron:
Just forget I wrote him down, he's just here because I want to bring a complete list.

Royal Swamp Eel:
This guy is pretty interessting with Colelacanth. If you find a save way to bring him up,you can simply discard one card from your hand to bring up two level 8 Synchros. This is also a got setup for Pot of Avarice. This deck would only need some small support for becoming a deck worth playing I think.

Mist Valley Solider:
I think this guy is one of the best level 4 tuners available. You can tribute him for Icarus Attack, he's a first class out against Synchros and Heraklinos, and he's a WInd monster you can remove for Dark Simorgh.

Rose, Warrior of Revenge:
The first level 4 Tuner came up as Sneak Promo in Crossroads of Chaos. While she's searchable with Reinforcements Of The Army, her effect is useless I think. Flamvell Magician can't be touched by BTH and Mist Valley solider has a much better effect. I would only play her in decks with Reiforcements, and even there I would consider playng one of the other two guys as nearly every deck runs 2 BTHs nowadays.

Road Synchron:
Did you ever summon Goyo Guardian, Tempest Magician or Brionac with Summoner Monk? In fact, you can do it with this guy. At first, this idea doesn't sound that bad, but we can simply summon Rescue Cat and can get even more options. The reason he's here is the same as for Hyper Synchron.

Debris Dragon:
Last but not least, this guy comes up. His restrictions are quite hard, but you can simply summons Black Rose Dragon with him. You can also use him for level 8 Synchro summons if you use a Treeborn Frog or a Dandylion Token. I just mentioned his best target to use: If you use him with Dandylion you get 2 extra tokens which you can use of effects, as a tribute or what ever comes to your mind.

I don't want to give you a rankign here, as this is only my personal oppinion of these guys. The fact would be that Road and Hyper Synchron would be place 7 and 8 xD
Good luck for everyone who visits this weekend's SJC, if something interesting reaches the playoffs, I will give you one more analysis.

The Champions: Ronny Reitz "Catfish"

I'm back!
Sorry for not writing last week, but an IT classtest and an addicting Nintendo DS Game (Disgaea DS) keept me busy xD.
Today, I will for the first time show you a deck by a German player:
Ronny Reitz' "Catfish". Ronny became established after wining 2 larger tournaments with his very own rebuild of the old Cat Synchro Deck.
Here is his list:

3x Gravekeeper's Spy
3x Deep Sea Diva
3x X-Saber Airbellum
2x Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter
1x Neo-Spacian Dark Panther
1x Rescue Cat
1x Cyber Dragon
1x Spined Gillman
1x Gravekeeper's Guard
1x Gorz the Emissary of Darkness
1x Sangan
1x Blackwing - Gale the Whirlwind
1x Summoner Monk
1x Rose, Warrior of Revenge


Zauber
3x Book of Moon
3x Pot of Avarice
2x Lightning Vortex
1x Heavy Storm
1x Brain Control
1x Mind Control
1x Mystical Space Typhoon
1x Scapegoat


Fallen
3x Threatening Roar
2x Bottomless Trap Hole
1x Call Of The Haunted
1x Mirror Force
1x Torrential Tribute

(Side Deck missing)

As you can see, this deck is very similar to the old Cat Synchro decks, but wth some modification, it also became playable in the new format. Ronny decided to add a Deep See Diva Engine, comprehending 3 Divas and a Spined Gillman. With this, his deck becomes extremly Synchro-friendly. He also added 2 Rykos as additional targets for Rescue Cat, which also serve as great opening play and can fill his graveyard for his 3 copies of Pot Of Avarice. You read correctly, he added the full three copies instead of the more standart pair of Pots. This is a simple decision if you want to use your combos as often as possible, and filling the graveyard is not realy a big deal in this deck. Ronny also added a pair of Lightning Vortexes, an exelent card in the current metagame, especialy in combination with Threatning Roar (which he runs three times). Let your opponet overextend, stop his OTK with Roar, punish him with Vortex. Sound simple? In fact, it is. Another card that was rarely seen in Catsynchro is Rose. With her, Ronny gets access to level 8 Sychros. Stardust Dragon is a gamewinner against Gladiator Beasts, and Colossal can kill a Blackwing deck on his own (I speak from my own experience...).
The rest of the deck is nothing special. The only thing that still might be mentioned is that Ronny decided to run Spies and one Guard. I think the main reason for this is the limitation of Mind Control, which could disturb your plays with Flip-Effects while it was unlimited.
In summary, you can say that the revival of Cat-Synchro is still a deck you should anticipate when you're heading to a larger tournament. It got even more power with Hidden Arsenal, as it has easy access to Castator, Brionac and Mist Worm. I think I will test this deck when I have the time to do so.
At this point, I want to congratualte Ronny for his success with this deck, I hope we get the chance to play once more somewhen (1:0, I'm leading :P)
I will try to post one more interview within the next few days. Stay tuned and have fun ;)

Dual Village

As I promised you, I will today discuss an Anti-Meta deck featuring some cards from Stardust Overdrive.
In fact, I will rebuild an older deck that was introcuded some months ago at TCGPlayers:
Little Village

Build as heavy anti-meta deck, it would always have one of it's keycard on it's starting hand, simply because it plays 4 cards which hurt the metadecks hard (Village,Oppression,Skill Drain,and eventually Thunder King) in triples and 2 cards to search them.

Let's have a short look at his list:

3 Beast King Barbaros
1 Breaker the Magical Warrior
2 Gemini Elf
3 Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer
3 Skilled Dark Magician
3 Thunder King Rai-Oh

2 Book of Moon
1 Lightning Vortex
3 Secret Village of the Spellcasters
1 Smashing Ground
2 Terraforming

3 Compulsory Evacuation Device
3 Dark Bribe
1 Mirror Force
3 Royal Oppression
3 Skill Drain
3 Solemn Judgment

Now, we hat to adjust the deck to our new banned list. In fact, there is only one thing we have to change:
-2 Solemn Judgement

Now, if you read the tital you will have recognized that I want to call the new deck "Dual Village". In fact, I will be playing the 2 new Dual Monsters from Stardust Overdrive:
Tuned Magician and Crusader of Endymion.
As you can see, both of them are SPellcasters and fit perfectly in out deck. Now, why do I have to add Dual Monsters and not any other random Spellcasters?
Look at this:
Gemini Spark
We just have to give up one of our monsters to destory any card on the field that annoys us.
In addition, we are allowed to draw one more card from our deck. Of course,usualy giving up field presence is not the best thing in Anti-Meta strategies, but we get some speed and can get rid of cards like Royal Decree,big defenders, opposing Spellcasters, we can destroy a freshly sommuned Blackwing to prevent the Whirldwind search, and more options.

So we want to add:
3 Cruasder of Endymion
3 Tuned Magician
3 Dual Spark

With Solemn limited, we allready got 2 free slots, so let's look what else we can kick. As our new monsters are farly better than Gemini Efls, frist let's kick those. Also, I am not a fan of Barbaros, simply because he's only a senseless beatstick in this deck. To get 1 more free slot, Breaker also has to go back to the subs bench. Now,let's look which spell or trap cards we can kick. As you can read in his article, Shaw only played CEDs to get rid of opposing problem monsters. With Dual Spark, we can get rid of them forever, while we're also albe to handle spells and traps: Result: Kick!
With Tuned Magician on board, we also have to option to Synchro Summon if we need to.
Now,we still have 2 free slots.
Let's look at the Spellcasters that are jumping around in todays metadecks:

Lyla
Lumina
Chaos Sorcerer
Breaker
Kycoo

Exept Lumina, all of them have more than 1500 ATK, so let's add our 2 copies of Bottomless Trap Hole. This card is great against every deck played nowadays. As we play Royal Oppression,we could also use Trap Hole to handle Lumina, but I don't want to relay on having Oppression on my field.

Now, you may have seen that, with Evacuation Device gone, we have very less ways to deal with large monsters on the field. As the Crusader we just added is a Light monster, we would be able to add Honest. Thunder King also is a Light, but 3 Honest is too much for 6 Lights I think, so which other Light/Spellcasters do we have?
*uses card search engine*
Here we go:
Herald of Creation
1800 ATK,Light,Spellcaster...any other whises? Okay, you could use his effect if you would still play Barbaros, but that doesn't matter now. Let's kick our 3 Skilled Dark for 3 copies of him. Now, we would have 9 Light Monsters for Honest. There's only one problem: We still don't have any Honest in our deck. Let's try to make space for it. As I already told you, Dual sparl has the disadvantage of cosing field presence, so simply let's cut this down to two copies. With 1 Spark gone, I thin two Tuned Magician are enough to feed the Sparks. The third Honest can simply be put in the deck, so we play 41 cards:

Main:
3 Honest
3 Crusader Of Endymion
3 Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer
3 Herald Of Creation
3 Thunder King Rai-Oh
2 Tuned Magician

2 Dual Spark
2 Book of Moon
1 Lightning Vortex
3 Secret Village of the Spellcasters
1 Smashing Ground
2 Terraforming

3 Dark Bribe
2 Bottomless Trap Hole
1 Mirror Force
3 Royal Oppression
3 Skill Drain
1 Solemn Judgment

Of course,this is only my personal version of this deck. If you like, you can also play it more focused on dark Spellcasters, so you can add Allure:

3 Dark Elf
3 Breaker the Magical Warrior
3 Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer
3 Skilled Dark Magician
3 Thunder King Rai-Oh

2 Book of Moon
2 Allure of Darkness
1 Lightning Vortex
3 Secret Village of the Spellcasters
1 Smashing Ground
2 Terraforming

3 Compulsory Evacuation Device
3 Dark Bribe
1 Mirror Force
3 Royal Oppression
3 Skill Drain
1 Solemn Judgment

Just find you very own build of Village-Anti, be creative ;)

Stardust Overdrive Sneak Peek Results

As I came home very late yesterday, I will show you my results today:

- Explosive Magician
- 1. Place, winning a Stardust Overdrive Playmat

Also, three people got a Dark Simorgh from their Boosters. Of course, non of them wanted to trade me his one.

If you want to read the previews again,here they are:

Fortune Ladies
Dark Simorgh
Guardian Eatos
Archangel Kristya

As school just started last week and Ill start writing class test tomorrow, I will not be able to post as frequently as I did the last weeks, I hope you understand :P
Next week, I will inter alia show you a Metabeat deck with additions from Stardust Overdrive.
See you next time ;)