Hieratic Sun Dragon Overlord of Heliopolis

Believe it or not, this was the card that got me interested in the Hieratic archtype 9 months or so ago. As of now, I like this guy better than all of the other Hieratic and possibly better than other XYZs. This card is dirt cheap in Malaysia because no one who plays Hieratic (if theres any left aside from me and Kyde) would play him. Often overlooked, I've always consider this to be the true boss of Hieratics, but a boss that could not fit into the Hieratic deck. Over the months, there's numerous attempts to play this card effectively, and some really succeeded in integrating this card into Barboros based decks and also as a tech for Dark Worlds. 

Since a few weeks ago, I started to look at this card at a different point of view. Not as a boss monster that you summon to sit on the field, but as a counter for HEROs. Kinda like how Chimeratech Fortress Dragon is a side deck option for Machine that resides in the extra deck. I've been intensively playing Lightsworns for the pass few weeks and while the deck has very very powerful beaters, sometimes I still wanna get rid of my opponent's field without triggering Shining and Zero.

Lets say your holding a Judgment Dragoon alone, you could very well special summon it and blow the field. That could get rid of the opposing HERO, but Zero will drag you down with it and Shining is gonna make sure Excalibur kills JD the next turn. Of cause, if you have 2 JDs, then that wouldn't be an issue, but lets stick with when you only have 1. Tragoedia is a card that has been a semi-staple in Lightsworns and even Chaos Agents. Why is Trago mentioned here? Cause it could make you a 3000 beater without losing your field or let your opponent access to more strategies.

Ditching JD to gain control of a Shining or Zero might sounds stupid at first, considering how powerful JD is. But look at it this way, Heliopolis is also a 3000 beater that ca take out your opponent's cards; not as convenient as JD, yes, but I wouldn't say that far off. You CAN summon JD and take out the field, but that JD is gonna get killed in the end (considering you don't have Honest or Necro Guardnas), Heliopolis however, could very well stay on the field. HEROs don't really have that many cards they could use to get over 3000 once their Miracle Fusion into Shining fails to net a profit. They could try to top deck something but thats just playing with luck.

My Lightsworn build plays copies of Herald of Creation, getting JD back into hand is no difficult task. Not to mention I could also get Tragoedia back if I want to. You could also always have Big Eye in your extra deck, ditching a Dark Armed or Gorz to get hold of the opposing Gorz or even Hyperion. Herald and Trago open the deck to a lot of options, espeacially in a deck where the graveyard could be viewed as a second hand.

Also, I would like to point out that Lightsworns and Agents have 1 thing in common, they tend to have a lot of useless monsters in hand. Maybe let me rephrase that, they tend to have a lot of monsters stuck in hand where you would rather have them in the Grave. Heliopolis helps solve that problem. If you could drop it early game, it could very well help you set up your grave for a Krystia or JD play. Trago ditching Krystia to capture Shining, making a Heliopolis and play Call of the Haunted on Krystia sounds like a game winning play to me. Also, spot removal cards (except for Compulsory Evacuation and BTH) aren't gonna do anything to Heliopolis.

Of cause, I'm not suggesting you try doing this every time you have the chance. A duel is not so simple, and a HERO deck isn't a deck with 1 trick only. But I really consider this as a devastating play against HEROs, I almost always win if I get Heliopolis out this way. I once saw this video on Yugitube, suggesting that we treat our extra deck like a secondary side deck, it was back in Frog Monarch format, where he would have Thought Ruler Archfiend in the side instead of something like a Colossal Fighter, why? Because Thought Ruler is immune to Enemy Controller and also Soul Exchange. By having Thought Ruler, he could afford to have lesser cards in his side deck against Frog Monarchs. I believe this theory applies here as well. HEROs are a very big deck in OCG, and there are tons of cards you need to side just to get rid of those pesky spells and traps. Having outs to the big monsters really helps, especially since Lightsworns and Agents (arguably) aren't tight in extra deck space.

I may just be pointing out the obvious here, but I feel like getting my massage across. I see Agents siding in cards like Leeching the Light to get over Shining. I'm not saying thats a bad card, with the right combination, that is an OTK in itself. But I wouldn't really wanna attack to get rid of a HERO, maybe its just me, but I don't like to risk a Dimension Prison. Also, Leeching the Light isn't really useful when Zero is the one standing across the field. Lightsworns are a deck that could do very well in Asia Plus and with the right build, I say, anywhere. I would like to suggest a copy of Heliopolis in the extra, just for those moments where dropping JD is awkward. I mean, even if Heliopolis got BTH'ed, at least you got rid of the opposing HERO without triggering anything right?

Preparing for Asia Plus - 3

While everyone thinks that Dark World as a major pain in the ass for this event, I see a different deck as a threat. Like Dark World, this is a deck that can be fitted into any of the 3 players and would be able to deal with the opponent just as well. The deck I'm having very high up my alert chart, is none other than Lightsworns. Now, the deck has fell in favor ever since the end of its pinnacle a few years back, but the deck has never truly been dead. Everyone knows how much a punch Judgment Dragoon packs, the only problem keeping it from being a top contender would be consistency.

Back to Asia Plus, or "good luck making your decks consistent with the shared banlist". While every other deck on the planet loses consistency, Lightsworn's mill engine is as powerful as ever. Yes, its often luck based and when you mill bad, your screwed; but that didn't stop the deck from tearing apart the format years ago. Some would prefer Chaos Dragons, another deck that utilizes the Lightsworn engine, as the more competitive choice. True, Chaos Dragons has quite a few tricks up its sleeve and a tons of boss monsters that could only be match by Agents. None of these monsters are anywhere as powerful as Judgment Dragoons.

Starlight Road is a card that is seeing play in every deck nowadays, Judgment Dragoon is basically a Stardust magnet in a normal game. BUT, remember, this is Asia Plus, we share banned list, so there would be but 1 Heavy Storm across the board. Many would not have the balls of steel to main Starlight Road (siding is a whole different story thou), and logically, thats the right thing. Without the extra protection, JD can clear the field for a mere 1000 life anyday. Also, because of the high chances of playing against rogue decks, people can't have too many cards for a strategy. While Macro Cosmos and Skill Drains are to be expected, lets not forget that Lyla and Ryko are some of the best backrow hate in the game, and the deck could play them in 3. MSTs and Dust Tornadoes, even Twisters are still very much effective against this decks.

Jain is a card that can walk over HERO's 1900 line and a powered up Venus, not to mention everyone's public enemy number 1, Thunder King Rai-Oh. Also, Lumina is still one of the best supporting monsters in the game. Divine Dragon Apocralypth (Chaos Lightsworn) and Herald of Creation (Pure Lightsworns) are great cards that lets you reuse THE most powerful monster in the game. Call of the Haunted makes it even scarier.

While the general strategy behind Lightsworn is sacky and easily countered in an everyday duel, due to the lack of resources (and a better word) in Asia Plus, it's tier suddenly rose quite a bit. Your opponent would only have half the cards they had to deal with you, while you are generally not weaken by the shared banlist at all.

Again, this is just my opinion and I do believe everyone has their own stance. Be it Lightsworns or Dark Worlds, both these decks are gonna be doing serious damage for the coming weekend and those who had yet to submit their deck list should definitely take these decks into consideration. For an environment with a defined metagame, Dark Worlds might be more suitable as it could be fitted to suit the environment. But as I've mentioned, the metagame in Malaysia is none existence, and like every Lightsworn's capability in doing damage is more suited for a non-defined metagame in my opinion.

Its like, if you know where your opponent is hiding, you bring a sniper rifle; in guerrilla warfare, assault rifles are the weapon of choice. 

Preparing for Asia Plus - 2

I'm not gonna go stating things like you should play test more, sleep well and have a good proportioned breakfast; although I do feel the majority of Malaysian need these advise, especially the breakfast part. Normally I find everyone I talked to not taken breakfast and are struggling through round 1 for the lunch break. Good thing seeded players start late and we can enjoy lunch with much spare time while the others fight with an empty stomach.

Player B is usually viewed as the dark horse of the team over here. Why is this so? The leader usually plays a META deck and player A plays control more often than not. This leaves B with card pool that basically forces them to play high-risk-high-reward decks. Decks like Lightsworns, Dark Worlds etc are among favorites as they need few staples and rewards the player with their super powerful bosses. Others might prefer strategies like Countdown, Exodia or Chain Burn. In a nutshell, if your deck isn't suited to deal with rogue decks or your not playing these strategies, try to avoid being player B.

Player B is the one who would play over powerful decks and try to score a fast-cheap win against you. They would usually hope that you won't have the necessary side deck cards for their decks. People here usually only side for the really popular and powerful decks. Yes, these top decks need to be taken seriously, but I feel the fact that they are so uber powerful is a trap for the player B's. More likely than not, you would not meet the top tier decks.

Usually, player B will pack cards like Shock Ruler, Prohibition among others to counter these strategies. More often than not, the deck for player B is usually pretty straight forward. Powerful, but straight forward. Hence it is easily sided against. These players can also afford to waste less precious side deck space for the more expensive tier 1 and 2s. This is because Malaysian would rarely put an expensive and competitively proven deck as player B. The majority of the guys here would have their ace be leader, and he will get the more powerful and expensive deck. This is mostly because people here believe in some sort of chivalry where the strongest players should face off in an epic battle to the deaths. I'm not sure why we have this mentality, as I would normally just pit our weakest player with a luck based deck against their best player. If he wins, good; if he doesn't, we would just score off wins from the side.

I feel Dark World would have a strong showing this time around, based on the Singaporean qualifiers and the fact that the deck was once very well celebrated over here. Player B's definitely should pack cards that would deal with them, ie Shadow Imprisoning Mirror and DD Crow. I don't really advise siding deck specific cards for the event (ie Gemini Imps), unless you really have side deck space. Remember, the chances of you hitting a deck specifically is actually very slim.

Also, I feel it is important to post rulings that you might need to your advantage on the various Facebook pages regarding Malaysia YGO and also clarify these with the judging panels. You don't wanna get a game loss because the judges don't know the exact rulings. I've experienced this several times before. Sometimes, judges would scroll their iPad for rulings and this would take time out of the clock; going into time may affect your chance of winning, especially if your not running something OTK based.

Rule sharking and some amount of stacking cannot be avoided in such large scale events. My advise, play every game like your opponent is a cheater. This might sound wrong and all, but that's actually a very safe mind set, as you are prepared for the worst. Do check with the judge and not take what your opponent's words for granted, NO MATTER WHO HE IS.

Again, sorry for the messy post. I've not write in a long time and I'm having problems organizing my post (not that I was writing quality articles before my short break).

Preparing for Asia Plus - 1

I'm gonna start this as a mini-series, basically stuffs that I think we need to at least take into considerations regarding the coming event.

First off, let me start by saying we got trolled, and we got trolled very very hard. I received news today, online decklist registration is NOT compulsory and the only merit you get from it would be free deck boxes. However, the 8 teams that had been seeded to top 16 HAS to register online before the end of the day (since it just past midnight as of now) or our positions would be terminated and we would have to play off from the bottom.

While being in the top 16 is a great advantage, as you get to go into tournament fresh, have proper lunch and time to do some trading before the event. We lose out in having less time to test our decks. Arguably, most teams (if not every team aside from mine) have already planned their decks weeks ago and seeing no new set is due by next Saturday, all seems fine. BUT, what if someone build this super special awesome deck over the weekend? Some crazy tech that no one saw coming and is super good? 

I guess for the guys who are forced to submit our decklist 2 weeks earlier than everyone else, some form of complains are unavoidable. But look at the bright side, we now could officially throw deck building out the window and focus on mastering our plays. Maybe picturing how your gonna win games helps?

I wanted to say I expect the Meta to be similar to the Singapore Meta, but who am I kidding. Malaysia is famous for having unexpected showings and random decks winning major events. The fact that most people shun away from HERO beat, as oppose to Singapore's dominance of HERO beat is pretty determining. I wouldn't be surprise if I'm going against a random Agent-Scrap-Exodia team. Another thing we need to take into account is, playing retarded tech choices usually helps in the final games in Malaysian qualifiers. Something I learn over the years would be logical thinking and careful planning doesn't always guarantees a win; while playing retarded cards scores you the coolest wins.

A fellow blogger's idol stated this "I'm gonna win top shop qualifiers with Crystal Beast.". 

And for some reason, I can't take that as a joke, because somewhere deep down, I don't wanna got caught off guard and this guy really won with it. That's how random Malaysia's Meta is, even the most random of decks might have a showing.

So, in a nut shell, preparing for this event would mean starting with throwing the textbook out the window. Cause I'm damn sure your gonna curse it when you reach top 4. Its funny when you think about it, in other places in the world, a tech card is normally celebrated with words like innovative, genius, carefully-planned, etc; here, I normally hear comments like "I'm not sure why, but that tech choice is so retarded it works ..."

Next post would be something regarding deck choice and how I think this event will shape in comparison to Singapore's. Sorry bout the little rant up there as well.

Asia Plus (Update)

The dateline for submitting our deck list is near (2 days from now to be exact). Instead of taking more time and trying to beat around the bush, we basically build our decks and post it on facebook, did a rough check and submitted.

Whether the deck we built are perfect or not, we don't know, and for the most part, we don't wanna know. All we have to do is play like our lives depend on it on Tournament Day. We've made it into top 16 already with 0 planning, and now, with 2 weeks of planning (sorta), I say we are good to go.

Good luck team! And to everyone who is participating in Asia Plus Malaysian qualifiers.

Semi-Retiring from Blogging

I've not blog for the past 2 or 3 weeks now, its not because I'm busy in real life or anything, its just that there are nothing to talk about happening in the world of YGO. Aside from tournament reports, I really don't have anything I wanna share with the world. Its not that the format's boring and all, far from it. This is one of the better formats we've got in a long while now, and I'm enjoying every bit of it. As of now, I'm preparing for the team tournaments in Asia Plus, which my team had been seeded to top 16 a few weeks back.

Now, why aren't I blogging in such a great and balanced format. Simple, I don't have anything to talk about. The meta of Malaysia as of now is so diverse that anything could top as long as you know what your doing. Its easy talking about a format where a few decks reign supreme. As I could talk about their evolution, how to play with and against it, among others. But in a diverse format where a different deck win Top Shop qualifiers each week, there is really nothing I could talk about, since it would most probably be irrelevant. The only things I could think of would be card prices, which is a topic I really don't have much interest in as I con't make a living off the game.

In such diverse formats, one would expect bloggers like myself to create new crazy deck types and test it out. Unfortunately, I'm not a innovator and I'm not good with creating new stuffs, I'm more of the type that takes an existing deck, make it mine and make it better. I do enjoy building new deck types and creating new ideas, I'm just not good with it.

Another thing that makes blogging dull at the moment, is that there are no really hardcore matches to watch down here. For Top Shop qualifiers, players fight for all 56 seats; meaning there would be several tournaments across town every weekend and players won win their respecting qualifiers gets into the tournament. This is a good idea, as it keeps the players busy and shops lively. The only problem is, most of the qualifiers have "pre-selected winners". Don't get me wrong, no shop (at least in my knowledge) selects their own reps, everyone has to fight for it. But, the better players (so call "pros") avoided each other. E.g, you won't see Sung Lee playing when Michael's playing. And one thing I notice, the skill gap between "good" and "average" players is MASSIVE. You could easily pinpoint the winner of the day just by looking at the player's list. While this ensures we get into the actual tournament, the qualifiers themselves are a joke if you ask me, the only reason a good player doesn't win one, is some other good players decides to wreck your day.

Thanks for reading my rant.

Asia Plus Team Tourney Qualifiers Report

So, I finally get my hands on real YGO in a long while, and I'm playing the promo format for the first time since its introduction.

Me, Sunny and another friend, Yap Zian formed a team, with the humble name of "GQ's Team", no shit, that was the name I summited.

Team order was : Me, Yap Zian (Leader//fodder), Sunny

Decks played were : E HERO, Agents, Frog Monarchs (yes, Frog Monarchs)

Instead of spending weeks and weeks to build the perfect set of decks, we came a bit earlier than the usual crowd to GA and spend 15 minutes discussing whose gonna play what. Remember, a team shares a single banned list, so something like Heavy Storm or Monster Reborn would only be present in 1 deck.

Match 1 : VS Hanzo Laggia

Duel 1 : I couldn't draw a single monster in 7 turns, and when I finally draw something, I won, with no damage dealt to me, thanks to my heavy backrows and SuperPoly making Nova.

Duel 2 : My opponent was very easy to read so I basically wreck all of his plays and ended the game with 5 sets, Rai-Oh and Nova, with 6 hands. Wonderful field presence indeed.

Team Score : 0X0

Match 2 : VS MY Team 2012 (aka last years Malaysia's rep aka Dato Tan's, the Malaysian rep for 2010 and 2012, team) - Tan Sung Lee - Quickdraw

Duel 1 : I open Allius and set 3, he showed me Decree in the end phase and made Quaser.

Duel 2 : I drew one of each sided cards and Airman, awesome hand indeed. Because this is team, I figure the leader, Michael (not the blogger) would be playing Storm so I summon Airman (Veiler'ed) and set 4. I got Heavy Stormed. Nuff said.

Team Score : XX0

Match 3 : VS Agents

Duel 1 : I Prison and BTH every Agent he has so his Kristia and Hyperion are dead, I draw into monsters late, but he had nothing.

Duel 2 : My opponent wanted to make Kristia, but it was obvious, so I refuse to attack until I have any sort of removal, he had Herald of Orange Light attack me for 4~5 turns. I drew Mind Crush and it was over the next turn around.

Team Score : 000

Match 4 : VS Mermails (a long time friend of mine, who I still have no clue what his name is)

Duel 1 : I open Allius, Allius, Bubbleman, Bubbleman, Forestman and Ocean ... How the hell is this hand even possible? My opponent has Spiritual Art and was basically start to feel sorry of beating me. LOL.

Duel 2 : After extensive shuffling, my hands look very much better. And I manage to open Soul and Skill Drain, locking out him completely.

Duel 3 : I was holding an advantage, his life was 4000 and has 2 set, nothing else. I play Miracle to make Zero, attack for 2500 and play Mask Change. He shows me Starlight Road. My hand had nothing against Stardust.

Team Score : X00

With 3-1, our team got into the finals, yes, there are no top 4 or 8s. It was 4 rounds of swiss and the finals. And our opponent was, with no surprise, MY Team 2012. Revenge perk activated.

Match 5 : VS Dato Tan's Quickdraw

Duel 1 : I open with Mirror, BTH, Judgment and summons Forestman, which my opponent stares at for a long time. He did had Decree, but I think ZERO into Acid was a splendid move. Thanks to the Poly Forestman grab for me, I was able to score a quick win.

Duel 2 : The game was grinding down with both of us having no cards, but he was at 3000's while I was at a perfect 8000. At this point my team mates told me one of them won and the other lost, so effectively, my match against Sung Lee is the one that would bring us to the qualifiers, and I wouldn't want it in any other way. He made a field of Road Warrior, Stardust and Doppel Warrior to attack me, which ended up in 2 Prisons. I drew a Spark and ended. He did something retarded and summons another Doppel and switching Level Eater into attack, which I have Mirror Force for, he had an empty field. I topped A HERO Lives, but found Airman dead, so I got Allius, since I have Spark. Game ended when he finally ran out of monsters to set, with me having Allius, Warning, Judgment and Spark. His last top was Tuning, which god says no to.

Team Score : 0X0

We manage to get into Asia Plus top 16 I believe with a team that is so randomly organized, it wasn't funny. Sunny won all 5 of his matches using Frog Monarchs.