Deck Ideas – Bionicle YGOPro Expansion

Deck Idea: Mechanized Springtime in Onu-Koro

March is right around the corner and large parts of the world are entering the beautiful season of spring; Sylphs are abound in Flourishing Hills and Awakening Forests, reviving EARTH monsters and getting their shit kicked in by ghost girls. What better time to look at a new decklist revolving around Onu-Koro, the perhaps even second best Field Spell That Lets You Draw 3 Cards?

Onu-Koro, Village of Earth

Field Spell

You can target up to 5 EARTH monsters in your GY; shuffle them into the Deck, then gain 600 LP for each card shuffled into the Main Deck this way. If your LP are higher than your opponent’s: You can send 1 EARTH monster from your hand or field to the GY, then pay LP in multiples of 1000 (max. 3000); draw 1 card for every 1000 LP paid, then, if your LP are lower than your opponent’s, send that many cards from your hand to the GY. You cannot Normal or Special Summon monsters the turn you activate this effect, except EARTH monsters. You can only use each effect of “Onu-Koro, Village of Earth” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.21.6)

My main goal with this build was setting up a standard combo line that actually leaves you able to use and resolve this card’s pair of effects to their full potential, by filling the GY with material used to build your board while never summoning any non-EARTH monsters in the process. Previously, the importance of Isolde in the Gouki-based EARTH Warrior shell usually forced you to fail this condition and relegated the village’s ability to just a neat thing you sometimes got to use on later turns, but with the latest banlist, that has become a thing of the past.

For what it’s worth, I still think Gouki is a good fit and meshes well with the general Onu-Koro strategy, but I specifically wanted to experiment with something else here. That “something else” being Vernusylphs, who do a good job of filling both field and GY, coupled with a few Machines that allow us to have some sort of payoff without leaving the confines of our Attribute.

The Deck

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=14840983

.ydk Download

The lineup of monsters in the Main Deck can be divided into three categories:

EARTH Matoran, specifically Taipu and Onepu , plus the Ussal to go with the latter. What you’re meant to do is get either of the Matoran on the field by some means and link off into Whenua to search the other, thus providing even more bodies to combo with. Rookie Warrior Lady is also in here as a third potential search target, since she can help refill your hand and even easily sets up Onepu’s Normal Summon effect (sadly it doesn’t do much).
Vernusylphs, which are frequently going to be the “by some means” mentioned in the previous paragraph. We play the two that search the rest, and as a one-of search the target the one that dumps an EARTH monster into the GY. Using all three of these already puts up to 4 EARTH monsters in the GY and 3 on the field, and even if we just use one search and the mill, that’s 3 and 2 – basically a complete Onu-Koro setup. The primary target for Awakening Forests is of course going to be the Ussal that will trigger to revive yet another monster (and can then itself be brought back by Onepu), but if you happen to draw that, you can do a cute thing where you discard it for cost with Forests, send something else from the Deck, and then actually do get to bring back that sent monster right away – if it’s Level 4 or lower.
EARTH Machines. Just a small package, not the whole deck that kinda does this whole “combo and then draw a bunch” thing way better already. The three names represented here serve three different purposes: Planet Pathfinder is an additional way to get to Onu-Koro, Revolution Synchron is a Tuner so we’re able to access the Naturia Synchros for a reasonable end board, and Regulus is another negate we can add to that if we find him. Which is also possible by means of Discolosseum, which in turn can be provided via Planet Pathfinder, who as a Machine also sets up Regulus’s own Summon (i.e., Planet Pathfinder is an omni negate). The Power Tools are also here for additional Revolution lines, but without Isolde making Equip Spells worth playing they’re not all that useful.

Other than that, we just have a good helping of handtraps that Onu-Koro will hopefully draw for us, as well as generically good EARTH monsters Fenrir and Mudora. Keldo is there in the side deck too, but I only found room for one shuffler, and Mudora was the one to make the cut simply because its Special Summon effect works even without a search target.

The EARTH payoffs in the Extra Deck consist of the aforementioned Naturia Synchros Beast and Barkion, Power Tool Braver Dragon, and Soldier of Chaos. Saryuja is for those times we have a full field but lack the right cards in hand to get anywhere, while Cerberus and Dolmen are mostly just to get stuff linked away in niche scenarios. And Plan B for Bagooska is here too, turns out that fucker is EARTH.

Now you may notice we have also spent some Extra Deck slots on non-EARTH bosses; Baronne and Crystal Wing in the Synchro half, I:P and S:P in the Link half. These are for the times we actually do not manage to get to Onu-Koro, at which point we will have a bunch of material on the field and nothing locking us out of any summons. So might as well put up some good proper household names instead and switch our strategy to the old style where Onu-Koro just shows up as refueling help in the mid to late game.

Sample Video

Watch this video on YouTube

Takeaways

To me personally, this build honestly feels like a bit of a failure because it doesn’t really seem to get a lot of mileage out of the concept of “combo then draw 3”, despite how solid that sounds on paper. The good news is that there’s some specific reasons for that located within my own designs, which I may be able to fix in future updates. The Onu-Koro cards just trip over themselves in some small ways that didn’t become obvious until I really tried to rely on the Field Spell’s effect that’s supposed to be central to the whole thing.

Onu-Koro, Village of Earth

Field Spell

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.21.6)

First, there’s Onu-Koro itself. This is a design from an era before Runick Fountain, which means I was super careful with an effect that basically reads “draw 3” and restricted the hell out of it. Only works if you have higher LP (which it does try to provide natively via the shuffle effect), requires sending an EARTH monster from hand or field to GY so you don’t plus as hard, makes you discard as much as you drew if you’re not still ahead on LP after paying the cost, and on top of all that it locks all your Summons into EARTH for the whole turn, including retroactively. Let me tell you, after trying to build this deck, I now fully understand why Vernusylphs went with an effect lock instead – there just aren’t a whole lot of good payoffs in this particular Attribute.

This heavy balancing even bleeds into the shuffling effect, which only gives you back LP for cards you shuffle into the Main Deck, essentially forcing you to choose between valuable Extra Deck recycling and the resource you need to pay for draws. And as a small but nasty detail, it shuffles the cards instead of placing them on the bottom, meaning any deck filtering your combo did to ensure you only draw into, say, handtraps at the end is at least partially undone.

So how would I change this? Well, assuming we stick with the full EARTH Summon lock, I think that can be allowed to carry a lot more weight as a restriction and we can in turn take off some others. Specifically, the requirement to send an EARTH monster for cost always hurt like a bitch in testing, so I’d like to drop that. The discard if you lack sufficient LP is probably fine since it fits the flavor (and we can capitalize on it by making Onu- cards with GY effects), but I’d make it a bit more avoidable by making it easier to gain LP when you return cards to the Deck. The shuffle effect could say “gain 600 LP for each targeted card, then shuffle them into the Deck” or something like that and it would already be much better. That way it would even work properly with Midak too.

Matoran Tender Midak

Effect MonsterLevel 2 | EARTH Warrior | ATK 500 / DEF 500

If you control a “Matoran” monster, except “Matoran Tender Midak”: You can send this card from your hand to the GY; send 1 EARTH monster from your Deck to the GY, and if you do, gain 400 LP. If this card in your GY would be returned to the Deck by a card effect, you can add it to your hand instead. You can only use each effect of “Matoran Tender Midak” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.21.6)

Speaking of Midak, why was that guy not in the decklist at all? Because, dear reader, the dumbass who wrote his first effect made it basically unusable if you’re not spamming Matoran enough to always have one around. That wasn’t the case in this deck, though, and after wishing for the nth time that I could just search Midak with Whenua and actually use him reliably, I sadly had to cut him.

But yeah, that’s also my solution: Make it so he actually always works when you search him with Whenua, because there aren’t a lot of good search targets for our Turaga anyway. To achieve that, the first line simply has to change to “If you control a “Matoran”, “Toa”, or “Turaga” monster” – perfectly reasonable because they belong together in the lore anyway.

Turaga Whenua

Link Effect MonsterLink-2 [▼ ▶] | EARTH Spellcaster | ATK 1450

2 monsters, including an EARTH Warrior monster
Each time an EARTH monster(s) is sent from your hand or field to the GY, gain 400 LP for each. If this card is Link Summoned: You can pay 1000 LP; add 1 Level 4 or lower EARTH Warrior monster from your Deck to your hand, with a different name from the cards in your GY. You can only use this effect of “Turaga Whenua” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.21.6)

Whenua himself isn’t safe from my complaints either, though only in a minor way. I’ve mentioned here and there that any numbers I write on cards tend to be guesstimates, and the 1000 LP cost is a good example of that. Only now, after actually playing in a way that made it important to earn it back, have I realized that the correct number was 800 all along: The exact amount you need to break even off a single instance of using two EARTH monsters as material while Whenua watches, and also the amount you would gain from using a Midak he searched. Fool that I was to disregard the ancient mantra of “pay 8, feel great”.

Matoran Racer Onepu

Effect MonsterLevel 2 | EARTH Warrior | ATK 700 / DEF 500

When this card is Normal Summoned: You can target 1 of your banished EARTH monsters; place it on the bottom of the Deck, then you can reveal any number of “Matoran” monsters in your hand, and if you do, gain 500 LP for each. During your Main Phase: You can Special Summon 1 Level 4 or lower Beast “Rahi” monster from your hand or GY, but banish it when it leaves the field. You can only use each effect of “Matoran Racer Onepu” once per turn.

Bionicle: Challenge of the Rahi (v3.20.4)

Onepu has served us well as an Ussal fetcher, but his other effect has really proven to be damn useless – especially in a deck that, once again, isn’t filled to the brim with Matoran. I think I wanted to hold back on this one because the main purpose is just to get a spent Ussal back into rotation, but surely you can expect more from a Normal Summon. My initial idea of having it draw à la Chaos Space was rejected (by me) because a) Onu-Koro is supposed to be the draw provider, everything else just makes “money” (LP) to pay for it, and b) “but Chaos Space is so strong, that would be broken”.

Regarding a), I now realize that a second source of draws probably wouldn’t hurt at all, as the old saying about putting all your eggs in one basket could have told us all along. And b) was always stupid when you consider that Chaos Space does its thing from the GY rather than at the cost of your Normal Summon and supports Attributes that are significantly better equipped than EARTH.

The current LP gain does have the funny flavor of “Onepu brags to the Matoran in hand and gets rewarded”, but we can actually retain that if we just let you do the same thing after drawing a card – or even just reveal the drawn card itself.

Side note to fully tie the loop here, notice how Onepu makes the Rahi he summons get banished when it leaves the field? That also means it can’t be used to pay the monster cost for Onu-Koro, so even if we weren’t getting rid of that cost entirely it would at least have to change to say “Tribute” or something like that. Nothing feels worse than the cards that are meant to go together in a deck locking themselves out of actually working with each other.

For now, I’ve compiled these notes on the secret Pending Changes page, and will be trying to work them in over the course of upcoming releases.

Deck Idea: Kenny and Genny go to Po-Koro

A slightly belated article for a build cooked up throughout the past week and first posted in video form a few days ago. You can find that right here:

Watch this video on YouTube

Kenny and Genny go to Po-Koro

So what is the idea? Well, it revolves around Ken the Warrior Dragon and Gen the Diamond Tiger, a pair of TCG-exclusive cards Konami released in the latest set (as of this writing). Their effects essentially let you artificially create a situation where your opponent controls a monster and has activated its effect before even getting a turn, letting you freely use things like Triple Tactics Talent and Thrust when you’re going first. This, combined with additional benefits they provide, enables all manner of bullshit in decks like Mikanko and Dark World, but when I saw them, the pile of goo I call a brain was permeated by but one thought:

“Oh, these are Warriors, now which Koro deck can spare a summon?”

Since the best fit seemed to be Po-Koro with its buttload of extenders, here we are. And then I also made a Chronicler’s Company variant because I was laughing so hard about the thought of these weirdos showing up and thrusting their talents around until they just get shoved into the next best band of zany characters.

Po-Koro

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=14058109

As per usual, this build simply aims to spam lots of monsters with the help of Po-Koro generating Tokens and Onewa bringing back banished EARTH Warriors. Ken & Gen here simply act as options to Normal Summon (or Special Summon off Isolde) that most importantly let Thrust act as a searcher for things like ROTA, Terraforming, or revival cards to help assemble the combo. Also they fulfill Huki ‘s Special Summoning condition when placed correctly, so that’s cool. I went with a ratio of 3 Gen and 1 Ken, since Gen is the one you want to Summon first so that Ken triggers on the opponent’s field to draw you 2 cards, increasing the chance of finding the Triple Tactics Spells that make them go from good to insane.

The combo itself uses another fairly new card in Revolution Synchron, searchable by Junk Converter, which is in turn searchable by Turaga Whenua – and its required discard can be your Isolde search. What this line accomplishes is reliable Tuner access, which is exactly what we need to properly utilize the Po-Koro Tokens despite the fact that making them locks us out of the Summoning mechanic used to do so.

What I consider the best play is to get Junk Converter banished (by Onewa’s effect 0r a Kakama search), Special Summon one of your Level 2 extenders to Onewa’s zone so he triggers and brings back the Converter, and then combine the Revolution Synchron in your hand with those two monsters to make Power Tool Dragon. Then Converter brings back the Synchron, you make a Level 10 with those two EARTH monsters (Chengying, Baronne, whatever you prefer), and Po-Koro makes two Tokens that are free to be linked into I:P. Yes, it needs to be specifically Power Tool because it’s the only EARTH that works with Revolution – our boy is finally relevant.

Beyond that, the deck contains other formidable boss monsters like Borreload Savage, Crystal Wing, Naturia Beast, and Avramax that can be made either on subsequent turns or in case you can’t quite assemble the primary goal.

It’s all quite flexible, but any significant amount of disruption is still going to ruin your day, and the end boards are still fairly breakable. I doubt this is much of a competitively viable strategy, more of an exercise in creativity putting together a reproducible combo with some new cards while working under Po-Koro’s strange requirements and restrictions.

Chronicler’s Company

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=14159833

This one isn’t too different from a regular C.C. deck, with the main Extra Deck payoffs being I:P, Avramax, and/or a Borreload Savage made with Cupid Pitch so you can get your Hop Ear Squadron to upgrade into a Level 10 or the Level 4 Herald of the Arc Light. But the presence of Ken and Gen adds the interesting aspect that sometimes, you just have an additional Level to work with since they’re 3s rather than 2s. And the wacky alternate Synchro boss I found for those cases is Power Tool Braver Dragon, continuing the theme from Po-Koro.

With the help of the Equip Spells you run anyway for Isolde, it can negate a monster or change its battle position, and the latter option is even worth considering when one of your Equips is specifically Life Extreme, which has a destruction effect triggered by just those battle position changes. We still use Cupid Pitch in this line, so Psychic End Punisher also makes the cut as a Level 11 Hop Ear target.

Other than that, it’s worth nothing that you don’t really want Ken or Gen to be your Isolde summon here, since at that point you need to focus on gathering up the Level 2s so the numbers work out optimally. Unlike in Po-Koro, where it was legitimate to bring them out one way or the other, here you’re generally only going to use them if you open Gen as your initial Normal Summon. On the other hand, there is one unique benefit this deck also gets if you do that: Place the monster you give your opponent in an empty column, and the activation of its effect will also allow you to bring out Maku from your hand or GY, who can then protect another card from disruption once while you perform the rest of the combo. Oh, and the battle position change that she does on summon also triggers Life Extreme. Truly the age of Power Tool is upon us.

Deck Idea(s): Things You Can Do With Toa Nuva

Back when the Toa Mata first (or second, if you want to be technical) assembled in card form, I put together a few different builds to help get a handle on how they could be played and how to approach the remaining support. With the newest release, that time has come for the Toa Nuva.

This can also be considered a follow-up to the deck featuring Isolde and Spright Elf that has been included in recent versions. Or rather, the experimentation documented here started mainly because that particular deck was ruined once Elf got banned, which is why the first ideas still resemble it pretty closely

For a quick overview and duel footage of each deck, you can also check out the video.

Watch this video on YouTube

Toa Nuva: Beyond the Elf

Spright Cope Nuva

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=12178919

This is the same convoluted Elf replacement I came up with in the previous release already, but to briefly reiterate: Isolde plus a Level 2 Warrior summoned with her effect makes Gigantic Spright, which summons Spright Jet, which searches Spright Double Cross, which revives Chamber on the next turn for another Fusion Summon. Unfortunately you need an extra monster to do your first Fusion Summon and set up said Chamber via Energized Protodermis Destiny , so the Warrior you bring out is ideally Hafu while another Level 2 Warrior is already in the GY.

Such conditions as well as the various bricks you need to play make this approach pretty clumsy and you’re probably better off just playing triple Emergence . This particular build is here mostly for historical reasons.

As with most decks of this form, you can pretty much play any assortment of Mata/Nuva you want along with their matching symbols. The Kanohi Nuva are similarly exchangable, but you should make sure to always have a Spell searcher and a Trap searcher (unless you e.g. forgo Nuva Symbols entirely). For a 40 card deck, four Toa seems to be the most that can really be fit in – here Gali, Kopaka, Lewa, Onua, but it could be any other four. I even awkwardly shoved a whole Pohatu package into the side deck to potentially swap if needed.

2 Attributes Nuva

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=13771135

Here’s what it looks like if you just play triple Emergence, with the extra twist that our four Toa Nuva are limited to two Attributes, WATER and EARTH. This doesn’t do anything other than make it marginally more likely you might be able to Tribute Summon a Toa Mata at some point, but it’s a nice way to identify the deck. Irrespective of that, this arrangement of Toa just happens to be pretty decent since it offers monster negation , GY control and recycling , Spell/Trap removal , and monster removal and blanket protection .

The Extra Deck also features some minor, but impactful tweaks compared to older builds, namely double Onua to be extra sure your Toa Nuva stay in rotation and Underworld Goddess to deal with monsters that resist everything else we can do.

60 Cards Nuva

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=12179095

If 40 cards fit four Toa Nuva, then it is only logical that 60 cards would fit all six. And for the rest of the slots, we might as well include a bunch of Toa Mata support since we need to play those anyway. So the basic idea behind this deck that mostly operates along the standard combo lines, but occasionally can also do a whole bunch of other neat things that are best explained via reference to the Toa Mata Theme Guide.

In the spirit of being fancy, I’ve even included Energized Protodermis Flow without so much as an Instant Fusion, so if you ever open with two Chambers you can turn them into an Extra Deck rip and eventually a Fusion from the GY. That’s one less way to brick at least, shouldn’t hurt when the deck is 60 cards thick.

EARTH Pile Nuva

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=13771160

Wait, what’s this? Where are the Isolde combos? Well, dear reader, this is a deck that makes use not of the Warrior type, but of the EARTH Attribute. Vernusylphs let us search and send Ishizu millers and shufflers to promptly fill up and curate the GY, modern Naturias provide a repeatable combo line, and Emergence lets us recycle materials amidst all of that to make Toa Nuva for even more GY control or just to pop some cards. Also Kashtira Fenrir is here.

Aside from the various engines doing their thing, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Energized Protodermis Flow is here with Instant Fusion this time. Since it’s Level 4, we can use it to overlay into Gallant Granite and search Nemeses Keystone, which is an extender if you have a banished monster (shufflers make this easy) and recycles itself if it’s banished e.g. by a Kanohi Nuva. Once you manage to resolve Emergence with this setup, that essentially means a Special Summon of a Rock each turn, which is pretty powerful with Pohatu Nuva and Granite Tenacity . Or you can just put up a Barrier Statue. You know, for those among us who enjoy “”fun””.

Kopaka’s Bad Day

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=13771179

Speaking of “”fun””, this one is what I came up with trying to abuse the fact that controlling exactly a single Kopaka Nuva in Defense Position translates to a monster banish every turn while all your backrow is untargetable.

Foolish Burial Goods, Ice Barrier, and maybe Trap Trick help you set up what you need to make the icy dude, while There Can Be Only One and Summon Limit act as the best floodgates we can hide behind the protection without interfering with it. Ko-Koro complements that as a one-sided effect negate and protection for Kopaka so long as we don’t use his activated banish effect. What’s still missing from the equation is a way to win the game while ideally keeping Kopaka in Defense Position, and there Cauldron of the Old Man and Amano-Iwato come in. The former fits in perfectly as backrow, while the latter can be summoned on your turn after using up the OPT banish, attack for some damage, and go back to the hand in the End Phase so your banish is live once again.

So is it good? Not really, setting up Kopaka Nuva is actually pretty hard when you don’t want there to be any other monsters on the field at the end of it, and even then you instantly lose to standard board wipes like Harpie’s Feather Duster and Lightning Storm unless you lucked into drawing exactly The Huge Revolution Is Over. But this failure in deckbuilding is perhaps indicative of a success in design, since apparently Kopaka’s unrestricted targeting protection isn’t that easily abusable after all. Or maybe I just tried to hard to also make the banish work, and setting up a bunch of toxic monsters alongside him would be the way to go.

Takeaways

Unlike the case of the Toa Mata, this exploration of the deck space was not really meant to inspire the design of future support as much as it was checking how the potential of the current cards can be unleashed. Still, I suppose it might be useful to consolidate the experience into a few useful points.

The shared HOPT on all the Kanohi Nuva GY effects is the biggest limiting factor to how much you can pop off, and makes it absolutely crucial to Fusion Summon on as many turns as possible. The newly added Nuva Emergence has proven to be the best and most splashable way to do so.
Isolde is a powerful setup tool, but kind of railroads you into playing a lot of Warriors. Other strategies are well worth exploring.
I wonder what you’d play in WATER Pile Nuva …

Deck Idea: Mikanko Ta-Koro

An unexpected guest joins the Takara with her own fiery dance moves. The stage? The Battle Phase, of course.

Basically, this is a spin on the basic Ta-Koro OTK strategy that also mixes in the Mikanko archetype, with which it shares a similar focus on inflicting massive damage through battle with the opponent’s monsters.

Specifically, we integrate a small engine of Water Arabesque (which removes problem monsters while Summoning a Mikanko from the Deck), Ha-Re (a FIRE Warrior just like most other monsters in the Ta-Koro deck), and Fire Dance (searchable by Ha-Re, lets us get her back to the field after being used as material). The gist of the synergy is simply that smashing the equipped Mikanko into a big monster deals a bunch of extra reflected battle damage before you run it over via Ta-Koro, making it that much easier to hit lethal.

For more detail, let’s finally look at …

The Deck

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=13350901

.ydk Download

You have a few different avenues to pull off the going-second OTK that forms the strategy’s ultimate goal. Generally it starts with a classic Isolde combo, here enabled mainly by Knights of Sublimation and Squeak, to dump some of your many Equip Spells and Special Summon one of your many FIRE Warriors. An easy route is sending Water Arabesque for Renaud, adding back the Arabesque, and bouncing an opponent’s monster to get Ha-Re, netting you enough material to make Vakama (and subsequently a Link-4) as well as a Fire Dance to revive your Mikanko. But under different circumstances, you might instead want to send Equip Spells including the Kanohi Hau and bring out Jala , who can then Normal Summon the Tahu searched by the Hau during the Battle Phase.

In fact, there’s a very powerful interaction between Mikanko damage reflection and Tahu specifically: A battle where your opponent takes the damage is, of course, still a battle, and therefore Tahu can trigger after damage calculation to turn an opponent’s monster into a 0 ATK bomb. This play alone, if you crunch the numbers, comes out to 8500 damage against an attack position monster with 3000 ATK. You know, like the Dogoran that’s also in the Deck. And combos really nicely with Water Arabesque, while we’re at it.

Since you only really need a few things in the Extra Deck to make all this work, Pot of Extravagance is our consistency booster of choice, and in consequence the important parts of the ED are secured with doubles and triples, while the 1-ofs are just for edge cases like being forced to go first. I should mention that the ratios here aren’t fine-tuned or anything – not all that much testing was done, so some things are just in here at a certain number of copies because that’s how they happened to fit. I figure even an optimized version might not be super consistent since all the OTK lines I know need several cards to work, but there being a few different combos like that has the nice effect of making each game a little riddle about stumbling your way into lethal with whatever hand you have vs whatever your opponent put up.

Sample Video

Watch this video on YouTube

Mikanko Ta-Koro

Showcasing two of the many ways to OTK, one splendidly combining the titular Mikankos and Ta-Koro and the other, uh, not doing that at all.

Deck Idea: Toa Nuva ft. Link-2 Enablers

As of version 4.2.5, 4 out of 6 Toa Nuva have been implemented, accompanied by their Nuva Symbols and Kanohi Nuva. That’s not quite enough to make a final Theme Guide just yet, but in testing these cards, I’ve come up with a pretty interesting build that seems to make pretty good use of them.

The core idea of this deck relies on a few convenient properties of the Nuva-related cards: Kanohi Nuva search Nuva Symbols when sent to the GY, Nuva Symbols can search any Energized Protodermis card if you already have the matching Toa in hand, and Energized Protodermis Chamber just so happens to be Level 2.

Energized Protodermis Chamber

Effect MonsterLevel 2 | LIGHT Aqua | ATK 0 / DEF 0

If only your opponent controls a monster, you can Special Summon this card (from your hand). If this card is Normal or Special Summoned (except during the Damage Step): You can Fusion Summon 1 Fusion Monster from your Extra Deck using this card and 1 monster in your hand as material. If this card is used as material for a Fusion Summon, except by its own effect: Target 1 Special Summoned monster on the field; send it to the GY. You can only use this effect of “Energized Protodermis Chamber” once per turn.

Bionicle: Protodermic Evolution (v4.1.3)

The consequence is that any combo that makes Isolde will be able to search you Energized Protodermis Destiny (because she adds a Toa Mata on summon, and the Kanohi Nuva sent to GY as cost for her other effect can get the matching Nuva Symbol), which in turn can send one of your monsters to the GY and get Chamber from the Deck, triggering its effect to fuse with the Toa Mata searched by Isolde. And by linking into Spright Elf (Isolde is valid material for this!), you can bring back the Chamber every Main Phase to make additional Toa Nuva as long as you have a Toa Mata in your hand. Which is usually going to be the case when Toa Nuva search Nuva Symbols on summon, and Nuva Symbols search Toa Mata.

The Deck

… comes in two flavours – a 40 card version optimized for consistency, containing pretty much just the bare minimum to make the combo work, and a more bricky 60 card version that also takes advantage of various Toa Mata support cards.

Compact 40 card version

The combo is facilitated either by Neo Space Connector (summoning Aqua Dolphin) or by Kopeke (searching Taipu or Tamaru, potentially also returning a garnet to the deck). As outlined above, you make Isolde one way or another, add a Toa Mata to your hand (usually the one whose Nuva form you want to make), and send some number of Kanohi Nuva to your GY to Special Summon a Warrior monster (my preference is Taipu or Tamaru, depending on what has already been used). One of those Kanohi Nuva will then be able to trigger and place a Nuva Symbol from your Deck in your Spell & Trap Zone, and by getting one that matches a Toa Mata in your hand, you will be able to search Energized Protodermis Destiny.

Next, you use Isolde and the Warrior you summoned as material for Spright Elf and immediately activate it to bring back any Level 2 from your GY. Activate Destiny targeting that Level 2 monster, send it to the GY, Special Summon Energized Protodermis Chamber from your Deck, and Fusion Summon your first Toa Nuva. All of them have the effect to add a “Nuva” Spell/Trap and discard 1 on Fusion Summon, so if you can spare a card from your hand, you can get a Kanohi Nuva, a Nuva Symbol, or the Nuva Cube depending on your needs at that particular moment. And with Spright Elf on the field and Energized Protodermis Chamber in the GY, you are ready to bring out yet another Toa Nuva as soon as your opponent’s Main Phase rolls around. Furthermore, since the collective once per turn clause on the Kanohi Nuva will have reset by that point, the search and discard lets you put another Nuva Symbol on the field immediately, and since you control a Toa Nuva, you even get a nice little buff for your whole field along the way.

All currently implemented Toa Nuva are included in this Deck, but Gali and Lewa are slightly prioritized as our main disruption providers with a monster negate and a bounce, respectively. We run one of each Kanohi Nuva and Nuva Symbol to have a variety of benefits available, but realistically you could easily cut a few Kanohi Nuva – without a Suva, they’re mostly used for searching, and Kopeke putting a card back in the deck means Isolde will be live even if you happen to draw all of them. The Nuva Cube helps you dodge removal on your Nuva Symbols to escape their adverse effects, while granting you benefits including a quick swap to another Symbol and a Spell/Trap negate depending on how many of the Symbols you have gathered.

A great feature of this Deck I would like to point out is how well it lines up for Small World searches. Practically any monster you can draw has a bridge into all the others, be it starters, extenders, or handtraps. This is largely made possible by the fact that we play Neo Space Connector and a single copy of Fire Flint Lady, both of which share exactly the Warrior Type with all of the Matoran and Toa (except the Lady/Tahu pairing). This excellent consistency boost is more or less the only reason Connector is even in the deck over Takua (who wouldn’t need any additional bricks).

The Extra Deck has Xyz lines for Rank 2 (Matoran) and 8 (Toa Nuva) as well as a Zeus, none of which ever came up. Almiraj is a way you can trigger Kanohi searches from awkward positions, letting you still get to Destiny and therefore a Toa Nuva provided you have a Toa Mata in hand already. As for the Side Deck, a pretty funny detail is that Nibiru Tributes by effect and would therefore trigger a Nuva Symbol of Soaring Vitality if you activate it while already having an established board. Again, never came up.

Fancy 60 card version

This version is built on the same core as the other one, but uses the additional 20 cards of space on some fun things. First and foremost, that means redundancy on the remaining Toa Mata and a slew of their classic support cards: Kini-Nui lets you easily access a Rank 6 or Isolde if you draw 2 different Toa Mata, the Suva lets you actually easily equip Kanohi to Mata and Nuva alike, the Suva Kaita can bring back Mata from the GY as well as any Toa that is banished, and Coming of the Toa lets you get up to 3 Toa Mata straight from the Deck. Depending on your luck, Call of the Toa Stones can set all of that up, and Quest for the Masks allows you to get a bit more value out of all those Kanohi.

To keep some amount of consistency, Takua was included as an additional starter. If Normal Summoned, he offers another guaranteed way to get Taipu or Tamaru onto the field, which translates to a full Isolde combo. Still, the overall amount of playable hands you open in 60 cards is obviously going to be less than in 40.

In the Extra Deck, the Xyz package has been replaced by one each of the Toa Mata Combinations, which actually are quite useful if you go through a line with Kini-Nui, Coming of the Toa, and/or Suva Kaita. A spicy detail set up long, long ago is that Storm does not prevent using the monsters it summons from the Deck as fusion material, so Destiny can totally upgrade one of those into a Toa Nuva. The deck also includes Instant Fusion and Energized Protodermis Flow, which gives you the option to make Toa Nuva via the GY and also mess with your opponent’s Extra a little.

Sample Video

Includes a duel in EDOPro, as well as a little walkthrough of the base combo in Duelingbook.

Watch this video on YouTube

Toa Nuva ft. Link-2 Enablers

Deck Idea: Turaga Nui Turbo

Do you enjoy unnecessarily long combo lines? Is linking off your Link Monsters to make more Link Monsters one of your primary sources of endorphins in these trying times? Do you consider the existence of handtraps and disruption a mere myth that can be safely ignored? Are you a truly skilled player with the ability to draw exactly the right combination of three cards every game? Do you respect your elders for their wisdom and ability to utilize Noble Kanohi as well as minor elemental powers? Then boy, do I have the deck for you.

As the name may suggest, the centerpiece of this silly little strategy is Turaga Nui, a card first included in version 3.19.4 of the expansion.

Turaga Nui

Effect MonsterLevel 9 | LIGHT Spellcaster | ATK 2000 / DEF 3000

Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must be Special Summoned by its own effect. You can send this card from your hand and 1 “Noble Kanohi” Equip Spell from your Deck to the GY; reveal 1 “Turaga” Link monster in your Extra Deck, and if you do, Special Summon 1 Level 4 or lower Warrior monster with the same Attribute from your hand. When your opponent activates a card or effect, while you have 6 or more “Turaga” Link Monsters with different names in your GY (Quick Effect): You can Special Summon this card from your GY, and if you do, negate the effects of all face-up cards your opponent currently controls. You can only use each effect of “Turaga Nui” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.21.6)

This supremely wise sage is the united form of six different Turaga, and like many combination models from the early years, was never ever formed in canon. Similarly, the card’s summoning condition of having 6 different Turaga Link Monsters in the GY makes it so it will likely never hit the field in a sane player’s hands, considering the Turaga aren’t even meant to be used together in the first place. However, if you do make it happen, it acts as an omninegate that hits your opponent’s entire field at once, so that’s a decent motivation to try anyway.

The Deck

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=9798612

Basically, the idea is to go through an elaborate Link climb that ideally ends up putting 4 Turaga Link Monsters plus Turaga Nui into your GY while establishing a board consisting of (a relatively small) The Arrival Cyberse @Ignister and Knightmare Gryphon, and then completing the setup using the effect of Dogmatika Maximus.

The main engine carrying the Link climb part are the C.C. Matoran (AKA The Chronicler’s Company), a sub-archetype of Matoran across all Attributes that work together to swarm the field with appropriate Turaga materials. Helping them out is the classic combo of Neo Space Connector and Neo-Spacian Aqua Dolphin, which gets to Isolde while potentially taking out a handtrap, thus increasing the chances of actually pulling off the best-case scenario. For the Dogmatika part, we have Maximus as the crucial piece plus six searchers for it in Nadir Servant and Ecclesia, as well as a Dogmatika Punishment to have an alternate search target for Ecclesia in case we draw Maximus.

While the stated goal is to fully set up the Turaga Nui in one turn, accomplishing that is a bit of a pipe dream, since even in the absence of all disruption, you still need to actually find no less than three different pieces to even stand a chance: A Warrior starter to get you to Isolde, some way to access Dogmatika Maximus, and, curiously enough, a C.C. Matoran Tamaru that is not required to make Isolde – more on that in the following section. Failing that, you can usually still get to the Arrival + Gryphon part of the payoff, which may keep you alive for another turn to finish the job.

The Combo

Watch this video on YouTube

Turaga Nui Turbo

One of the most ideal combo lines I found is showcased in the above video, and starts with the following cards:

Activate Matoran Nui and select Tamaru, Taipu, and a third Matoran of your choice – it doesn’t actually matter which one ends up in your hand, but the most efficient case is Tamaru, so let’s assume that (so Taipu + other Matoran go to the GY)
Normal Summon Connector and use its effect to Special Summon Aqua Dolphin
Optional: Use Aqua Dolphin to discard 1 and look at your opponent’s hand – you can only afford this if Tamaru is in your hand!
Connector + Dolphin -> Isolde, search anything that isn’t mentioned in the following steps
Use Isolde to send two Noble Kanohi to the GY and Special Summon Takua
On Summon, use Takua’s effect to stack Hafu on top of the deck and become EARTH
Discard one of your spare cards to activate Takua and Special Summon Hafu, who in turn Summons Taipu from your hand or GY
Isolde + Hafu -> Onewa in the Extra Monster Zone
Takua + Taipu -> Whenua into a zone Onewa points to – the Taipu summoned with Hafu’s effect gets banished when it leaves the field, so Onewa can immediately summon him back and Whenua can search a second copy
Whenua or Onewa + Taipu -> Amaja-Nui (placed so it points to a free zone), on Summon send Turaga Nui to the GY
Use Amaja-Nui to Summon Takua from your GY to the zone it points to, on Summon stack Kapura on top of the Deck so Takua becomes FIRE
Special Summon the second copy of Taipu from your hand
Takua + Taipu -> Vakama
Use Vakama’s effect to Special Summon Kapura to your field and a Vision Token (or some FIRE Warrior they happen to be playing) to your opponent’s
Special Summon the Tamaru in your hand (by discarding itself for cost) or in your GY (by discarding a spare card)
Tamaru + Kapura -> Matau
Onewa + Vakama + Matau -> The Arrival Cyberse @Ignister (in the Main Monster Zone pointed to by Amaja-Nui, so the upwards arrow only points to the Extra Monster Zone at most)
Activate The Arrival to destroy your opponents Vision Token and give yourself an @Ignister Token
Amaja-Nui + @Ignister Token -> Knightmare Gryphon (co-linked with The Arrival, and not pointing to the opponent’s field)
Optional: If you still have a spare card to discard, you can activate Gryphon’s effect on Summon to draw a fresh card and maybe set a useful Spell/Trap from your GY
Activate Nadir Servant, sending one of your remaining Extra Deck monsters to add Ecclesia (sadly no Turaga can be used here due to their ATK being all below 1500)
Special Summon Ecclesia (linked, because Gryphon!), on Summon search Maximus
Banish something that isn’t a Turaga from your GY to Special Summon Maximus (linked, because Gryphon!)
Activate Maximus, send Nokama and Nuju from your Extra Deck to your GY

Final payoff: Full Turaga Nui setup in the GY, 3000 ATK The Arrival and a Knightmare Gryphon on the field

Many hands fall short of fully achieving this combo due to lacking access to either the Dogmatikas or the free Tamaru to make Matau, but even those tend to manage putting up enough material for Arrival, Gryphon, or both. And if you don’t have a complete Turaga Nui setup, you actually don’t need to leave the previously summoned Turaga in the GY and can instead tribute off stuff like a leftover Token or the Dogmatikas for Onewa + Komau (preventing your opponent from activating the effects of their weakest monster while they control multiple) and/or Vakama + Huna (giving you a draw should something else be destroyed by battle, while not being available as an attack target himself).

Deck Idea(s): Things You Can Do With Toa Mata

At the time of this writing, the Toa Mata have yet to receive their Theme Guide, because even with all members of the team implemented, they’re still missing some support cards from old BCOT that have a major role in their playstyle. However, to modernize those missing cards, I do need to have a solid idea of what the updated Toa can do and what they need help with, so I have been experimenting with a few different builds using what we have so far. This is a brief account of those ideas and the rationale behind them.

The Kanohi Build

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=9539889

This one was included with the 3.17.4 release, and represents what is probably the most functional way to play “pure” Toa Mata at this point. The sole combo it revolves around requires a hand of any 2 different Toa Mata plus Kini-Nui (or Mata Nui to search it): Activate Kini-Nui, Normal Summon one Toa by Tributing the other one from your hand, trigger Kini-Nui to revive the Tributed monster, and use the two Toa to make Isolde, searching another Toa for the next turn. Then, you activate Isolde for 6 and watch your opponent quiver in fear at the sight of such a power move while you send all the Kanohi to the GY and Special Summon a Toa Mata from the Deck. The sent Kanohi let you add two more Toa of your choice by banishing the materials used for Isolde, the extra Normal Summon from Kini-Nui means you can get one of those out right away if you wish, and during the End Phase Kini-Nui can summon a Suva from the Deck by destroying itself, which will also bring a Mata Nui in your GY (if there is one) back to the field.

In summary, the turn 1 payoff consists of:

2 Toa Mata with at least 2000 ATK, each providing a more or less potentially disruptive trigger effect during the opponent’s turn (such as monster effect negation, Spell/Trap destruction, bouncing monsters, or returning cards in the GY to the Deck)
A Suva that lets you access any of the 6 Kanohi in your GY to buff your Toa Mata with things like protection from either targeted or non-targeted effects, battle protection, or simply +1000 ATK.
Isolde (largely useless at this point, but still there)
1 Toa Mata in your hand (searched by Isolde)
Optionally Mata-Nui, which gives your Normal Summoned Toa Mata +600 ATK/DEF
The 2 other cards that were initially in your hand

Going second, the deck has some convenient properties that may help it do its thing in the face of an established board. First of all, 18 of the 21 monsters it plays have 2000 or more ATK and don’t take any field setup to bring out, so sometimes you can just Normal Summon, immediately hit over a boss monster, and then safely do the combo in Main Phase 2. Also, if the monster you Normal Summon to trigger Kini-Nui is Gali, she will be able to negate one of the monsters on the opponent’s field to prevent interruption (but doesn’t do anything against handtraps, sadly). Lewa can also help clear the field because he’ll be able to bounce something when you summon your Suva (whether from Deck or GY).

If you don’t manage to pull off the combo, what you usually fall back on is still a boss-sized monster that may or may not have meaningful disruption and/or protection, which may just be enough to keep you in the game. And with the Kanohi constantly repleneshing Toa Mata in your hand plus Mata Nui being able to search Kini-Nui every turn, you should be able to try again easily.

Can a deck that puts up 2 disruptions at best, needs intensive micro-managing to achieve protection, and has almost no room to run staples be called good? Probably not. Does it do its thing impressively well for having no major plays beyond a (more or less) 3 card combo? Yes. I rate it “Isolde is a stupid card”/10.

Aristotlean Hybrids

The following decks are all based on the idea of combining the Toa Mata with other archetypes that also have their monsters spread across the Attributes WIND, WATER, FIRE, and EARTH. The idea is basically to perform the usual plays of such an archetype X, ideally get a Kanohi into the GY along the way for a search, and then use either a leftover Normal Summon or the extra one from Kini-Nui on a Toa, adding an extra miniboss or even a Rank 6 to the field. The matching Attributes are meant to help consistency by letting you use excess monsters from archetype X in your hand as Tributes for the Toa Mata, though in practice it certanly felt like hands such as Tahu plus anything except another FIRE monster were way more common than they should be.

C.C. Matoran

Prank-Kids

Brave Token

Kaiju

Ghost Girls

The order in which the decks appear in the slideshow above is also an approximate ranking of their playability, ranging from actually kinda decent to complete garbage. The ratios in the Toa Mata portion differ between them because I threw them together at various points in time and never tested them deeply enough to figure out what’s best.

A quick summary of each of these ideas:

C.C. Matoran: The most lore-friendly of all builds, and quite competent due to both halves being Warrior archetypes. Normal Summoning Kopeke gives you easy Isolde access by searching either Taipu (at the cost of an attack lock) or Tamaru (at the cost of only putting 1 monster in the GY instead of 2), and Isolde can then dump 2 Kanohi to search up to 2 Toa Mata and Special Summon Hafu, who will in turn bring out an additional C.C. Matoran from hand or GY. That gives you the material for a Link-4, and if you have Kini-Nui, a Toa Mata or two to back it up as well.
Prank-Kids: The problem with Kanohi being the main searcher for Toa Mata is that you first need to put both the Kanohi and a monster into the GY. A Link-1 is quite possibly the easiest way to accomplish that, and Prank-Kids are an archetype notoriously capable of getting ridiculous value through a simple combo that starts by summoning their (now sadly limited) Link-1 monster. Better yet, the combo doesn’t care if the Prank-Kids stay in the GY beyond their activation as long as you ultimately end up with WIND+FIRE+WATER in your hand or field ready to fuse, so banishing them with a Kanohi along the way is pretty much a free Toa Mata. Only downside is that Prank-Kids usually take up the Normal Summon, but that’s what Kini-Nui is for.
Brave Token: The OCG’s recent hot meta thing, the Brave Token AKA Adventurer Token AKA Isekai Engine, also has the correct Attribute mix, and actually gets by with no Normal Summons needed. In fact, it actively discriminates against Normal Summoned monsters by making you unable to activate their effects the turn you use the engine, but since your Normal Summon is going to be a Toa Mata that generally reacts to something during your opponent’s turn, this restriction is quite stomachable. My impression of the deck is that it works, but the Toa Mata’s contributions of big stats, situational disruption, and Rank 6 access unfortunately feel a bit overshadowed by the insanely consistent omni-negate engine that is Brave Token.
Kaiju: The main idea behind this one, Attribute matching aside, is that Special Summoning a Kaiju to your opponent’s field triggers Lewa to bounce it back, which is obviously a pretty cool play. Sadly it doesn’t do much more than that plus plain old beatdown, and that’s not quite enough to win unless you get really lucky.
Ghost Girls: Stuffing leftover deck space with handtraps is a well-tested competitive strategy, so I figured I’d try doing that as well, using the ones that have the appropriate Attributes. Sadly those particular handtraps aren’t exactly impactful enough to totally prevent an opponent from bringing out anything a big beatstick can’t deal with, so it doesn’t quite see the same results here as it does in actual meta decks.

60 Card Monstrosities

Another archetype with all the right Attributes I tried out was Nemeses, however they are not featured in the previous section because I ran into a bit of a problem: Just like the Toa Mata don’t really do anything unless you can get out multiple and/or set up your GY with a Suva and several Kanohi, Nemeses don’t really do anything unless you get some monsters banished first. And since the main way to get monsters banished also relies on sending Kanohi to the GY, neither half of the deck is particularly capable of getting itself or the other started despite having good synergy once they’re running.

In trying to resolve this, I attempted stuffing a bunch of extra “spicy” techs into the deck, eventually blowing it up to a pile of 60 cards that somewhat reliably worked.

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=9557017

Aside from the obvious, the most significant addition here are probably PSY-Framegear Gamma + Driver, as a powerful handtrap that conveniently can also set up some banished monsters for Nemeses plays. Driver also happens to be Level 6, so you can use it to pay the cost of Celestial Observatory and feel like an absolute king. However, at the end of the day, these additions only bring a slight reduction in the amount of luck you need to actually set up the really good plays, so I took a second stab and tried to fill up the 60 cards by bringing in a third archetype instead.

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=9557112

C.C. Matoran proved quite competent at quickly dumping a few Kanohi to the GY when I previously tried them as the sole partner archetype for the Toa Mata, so I figured adding them might be a fine way to handle the observed issues with getting the deck to its initial velocity. And it does indeed seem like doing the good old C.C. Matoran play of letting Isolde send 2 Kanohi to the GY provides just enough setup for both the Toa Mata and the Nemeses portion to perform actual plays. Maybe it would even be possible to condense this triple mix down to 40 cards somehow, but I haven’t tried.

Single Attribute Soup

A common problem with the mixed-Attribute decks was getting Toa without any of the right Tributes, so to bypass that issue I also tried building a deck that only uses Toa of the same Attribute along with matching support. The candidates for that would be WATER (Gali and Kopaka) or EARTH (Onua and Pohatu), and I picked WATER because then I can also incorporate Kopeke for that sweet C.C. Matoran Isolde combo.

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=9563264

The rest is just Frogs as a compact WATER package with a pretty good payoff, plus a single Ko-Koro to search with Mata Nui. Because I guess falling back to stall in cases where you don’t have anything else might at least keep you alive.

My verdict on this after a brief test run is that it can definitely do something more consistently than the decks that try to make multiple Attributes work, but what it does tends to be less impressive. For example, playing only 2 Toa gives you much less Rank 6 access via Kini-Nui, and even summoning one plus a Suva doesn’t do as much when the Kanohi selection is limited to Akaku and Kaukau. Also, I don’t really like it in concept, because the only reason there even are multiple Toa with the same Attribute is because ICE and STONE aren’t a thing in Yugioh.

Takeaways

The difference between a worthwhile experiment and a waste of time lies in whether or not you learn something in the process, so after trying all this, we face the big question: What does it tell us about Toa Mata and their future design requirements? I will end this on a quick summary of my observations, don’t hesitate to tell me in the comments if you feel I missed something.

There need to be more ways to get at least two Toa on the field. Kini-Nui is nice and quite accessible now that Mata Nui exists, but even assuming you find it every game, it’s still a gigantic choke point and negating it might just end your turn on a single big monster with a moderately useful effect.
Continuing from that last point, a single Toa Mata should provide a bit more value than it currently does. I kinda made this harder for myself than it needs to be by deciding the standard archetype support effects (searching, revival, etc) should be supplied only by support cards (and eventually Extra Deck monsters) rather than the main monsters themselves, to represent the Toa starting out as scattered amnesiacs before gathering towards the climax of the ’01 story. We’ll see if I can get away with sticking to my guns there.
A mix of all the Toa plus another engine/archetype that covers the same Attributes isn’t as good as expected, probably because it gives you more wrong ways to combine Attributes than right ones. As far as Toa Mata Tribute fodder goes, other members of the team or the multi-Attribute (in the hand) Suva have proven to be far more reliable options.
Early in the duel, going into Isolde with two Toa Mata and dumping all your Kanohi seems way better than making any Rank 6, which always bothers me a bit. I’d like to design the archetypal Xyzs to provide more value than even that, but it’s hard to imagine a way to do that without getting ridiculous. Maybe the better solution would be introducing additional ways to set up Kanohi, since Isolde is only so crazy good while you haven’t done that yet.
Another problem with making a Rank 6 out of Toa is that it usually removes all the Toa on your field, which takes away their potentially disruptive effects, Suva access, and Kanohi benefits. Isolde at least can give you another Toa by dumping 6 Kanohi, so it’s less of an issue there. This honestly might be resolved just by the fact that the upcoming dedicated bosses will also have “Toa” names, but I already have some ideas how this point could be addressed even further.
The banishing cost I somewhat spontaneously added to the Kanohi searches so stuff like Isolde wouldn’t get out of hand too much comes with some interesting practical challenges. On the one hand, the fact that you need to get both the Equip Spell and a monster into the GY makes them too unreliable to really act as the archetypal search cards, not to mention they can only get one specific monster each. On the other hand, if you do get them going, and especially if you get a Toa Mata + Suva setup where potentially every Kanohi swap translates to a search, you end up accumulating a lot of banished monsters that don’t really have any use if you’re not playing specifically a Nemeses hybrid. Not sure yet if it makes sense to add support that takes advantage of the big banished pile, since it tends to only exist when you’re already popping off anyway.

Deck Idea: Kaiju Makuta

No, not talking about Miserix, we still have quite a few years to go before getting to that guy. The Makuta in question here is the one and only who was released as a Ritual Monster in BCOR:

Now this particular form of the master of shadows is certainly a bit too small to qualify for the “Kaiju” title, but of course that term here refers to the actual archetype. Those are high-level monsters summoned to your opponent’s field by tributing one of their monsters, and if you add to that Makuta’s ability to return high-level monster to the hand when he is summoned, the bit of synergy that prompted this deck idea should be quite apparent.

(The above deck is also included in the new BYE release for EDOPro as BYE_Makuta)

Basically, you want to use Makuta to clear the field of monsters, and to do that you have to make sure as many of your opponent’s monsters as possible fulfill the condition of being at least Level/Rank 5.

Back in ze day, the trick to doing that was the Mangaia Field Spell, which can increase Levels and Ranks by up to 4 by self-milling. It also serves as a searcher for Makuta or his Ritual Spell and protects them from negation, so using this was usually enough to get pretty much anything off the field. Until Link Monsters came along, because those have neither Levels nor Ranks to be increased and so literally do not care about any of this. They can, however, still be tributed for Kaijus, so that’s a convenient way to fill that gap.

Once you have successfully summoned and resolved Makuta, he can tribute himself to summon a Rahi from anywhere, ideally going into some big Synchro for a quick win. Failing that, his Ritual Spell does allow summoning him once more from the GY, so that can still give you a second chance (remember, any Kaijus you used before will also be back in your hand ready to go again!).

Some additional interesting inclusions in this deck are the Ritual Djinns, which can be used as material for a Ritual Summon while in the GY and thus go well with Mangaia’s milling effect. Cherubini can send not only those directly to the GY, but also any of the Level 3 Rahi to trigger their effects, and Cross-Sheep gives you one of its better effects for summoning a Ritual Monster, which the Makuta Ritual Spell conveniently does twice. Finally, if you’re wondering why the deck uses specifically Gadarla as part of its Kaiju lineup, that’s because some genius thought it made sense to let the Kewa search every single WIND monster. Very balanced.

Deck Idea: Nokama’s Secret Village

Once upon a time (last week or so), in the middle of building this website and uploading cards, my mind wandered to Secret Village of the Spellcasters. And in that moment, it hit me. “Wait a minute”, I thought. “I made Nokama a Spellcaster!”

And thus was the birth of Nokama’s Secret Village.

You see, Turaga Nokama has the effect to make herself and the monsters she points to completely unaffected by two out of the three card types, depending on what you banish from the GY as cost. Secret Village prevents your opponent from activating Spell Cards as long as you control a Spellcaster and they don’t. Therefore, with Secret Village active, Nokama could make herself and one other monster you control unaffected by every single effect your opponent can legally use.

Add to that the other two benefits she gets from pointing to a monster – being indestructible by battle and recycling a WATER monster from GY or banished during each of your opponent’s End Phases – and you end up with a fun little challenge to the opponent. Can they use their restricted options to break through your protection, or will you get to recover your resources for a followup push in the next turn?

This by itself is certainly not an unbeatable challenge. Even assuming just running over the monster next to Nokama’s arrow isn’t feasible (due to protection or beefy stats), it’s still possible to use single cards like Kaijus or Evenly Matched that don’t care about “unaffected by effects”, or just use monster-based removal to get rid of Secret Village before exploiting the Spell-shaped hole in Nokama’s defenses. Since Nokama needs to activate an effect to turn on her protection, a negation or removal in response to that will also really screw up the plan. And if your opponent manages to get at least 9200 damage on board, they can just disregard the challenge entirely and beat you to death straight through your feeble little Turaga.

So to make this idea reasonably effective, we still need to combine it with additional threats and/or disruption. I tried to achieve this by tweaking the Mermail/Atlantean-based build I originally came up with for Ga-Koro a bit, here’s how it turned out.

Theory

Most of this is just standard Mermail/Atlantean stuff and you can probably find much better descriptions of that elsewhere than I’m able to write, so I’ll just explain the other additions that specifically help this deck idea.

Crusadia Arboria, being a WATER Warrior, serves as the honorary Ga-Matoran that allows reliably making Nokama. She can either be Special Summoned directly from the deck by Crystron Halqifibrax, or searched out by ROTA or Mermail Abysspike and then Special Summoned to your zone a Link Monster points to (which is why playing Salamangreat Almiraj can really unbrick certain hands). Instant Fusion and Elemental Hero Steam Healer are also a possible route to Nokama.

In addition to Secret Village itself, we play the extra field searchers Metaverse (because getting to the Village anytime before your opponent’s Main Phase is good enough) and Set Rotation (because giving your opponent Ga-Koro probably isn’t going to hurt much, also they can’t activate it anyway with Secret Village up).

For the Abyss-scales that go on Abyssmegalo or Abyssgaios, I included both Cetus and Mizuchi – the former actually gives some additional benefit (such as negating Evenly Matched) when we’ve already locked the opponent out of Spell Cards, while the latter is much better in cases where we can’t get to Secret Village. And the combined ATK boost from having both equipped makes it a whole lot harder to solve the challenge via battle.

A last-minute addition to the side deck that unfortunately never came up in my brief tests is Ice Dragon’s Prison, which in theory should have a bunch of utility in this deck. You can use it to fill Nokama’s zone during your opponent’s turn in case whatever was there originally gets removed, and chances are you’ll actually get the banish for free since your monster will be unaffected by Traps. Honestly might be main deck worthy, but I’d have to test more to be sure.

Random sample hands:

Again, most of this is standard Mermail/Atlantean stuff that probably could be done better, the interesting part is just how Nokama is worked into this.

Practice

I ran about half the usual AI testing circuit with this deck and got some, well, mixed results. The basic strategy of sitting on an invincible pair of Nokama + big body and recycling monsters every turn does often work, but the fact that it only slightly disrupts the opponent’s plays with maybe an Atlantean discard here and a negation there does give them a lot of room to break through the small gaps that do exist. And if they do, it’s going to be pretty hard to turn the tables back because setting up the initial board eats up a lot of resources. Similarly, if they just don’t bother with Nokama and instead build up an annoying board of their own, the one monster you get back in the End Phase might not be enough to mount the kind of offense you need at that point. These issues could potentially be fixed by moving away from pure WATER monsters a bit and including more cards that hinder your opponent with relatively low investment, but that would take some additional effort to figure out and feels a bit less interesting to me since it’s off-theme.

Also, another source of problems was that I’m straight up not smart enough to play Nokama competently. The fact that she immunizes monsters on both sides of the field against a specific, variable subset of cards has been the source of many fuckups leading to probably avoidable losses. The existence of this effect irrefutably proves that I know much more about making Yugioh cards than about playing them.

Anyway, despite the problems found in testing, there were definitely times when things did go as envisioned and I was able to enjoy being on the dispensing end of a soft lockdown facilitated by a 28-piece Lego set from 2001. For an example, check out the video below.

Watch this video on YouTube