Notes & Combos

Duelists from the TCG and OCG once warned of a deck that possessed Tier 0 status. "They can play on your turn!", they said. "It makes every other deck unviable!", they cried. Finally the day has come and Ishizu Tearlaments has lost a whopping 10 cards from the MD banlist! Will these hits stop the Tier 0 menace? Uhhhhh, not exactly.

So let's get this out of the way: is Ishizu Tear a Tier 0 deck in Master Duel? In my humble opinion, yes. Here's a list of stuff that makes Ishizu Tear so good:

• They can play on your opponent's first turn. No other deck in the entire game can do this.
• They are very consistent. Almost every card in the deck is searchable, mills, or floats.
• They don't lose to Maxx "C". If they use Maxx "C" on you, you simply summon Kitkallos to search Sulliek and pass. This allows you to have a monster negate and continue your plays on the opponent's turn for the cost of 1-2 Maxx "C" draws.
• They don't lose to most hand traps. Similarly to Spright, many staple hand traps are not enough to stop a Tear player's plays since they'll just keep going.
• They don't lose to most board breakers. Decks like Spright have a big weakness to cards like Dark Ruler No More, Super Poly, and Raigeki but not Tear. Since your Tear monsters all have floating effects, none of those board breakers actually do anything substantial.
• They have infinite grind game. This is not an exaggeration. Since Tears shuffle themselves upon fusion summon and the Ishizu shufflers can shuffle any card in your GY, they basically have unlimited resources.
• They have perhaps the most versatile Extra Deck in the game. You've got negates, floodgates, removal, board wipes, reborns, floating effects, Spell Speed 2 disruption, targeting protection, and an out to unaffected monsters. That's not even all you can do! You could even include a Baronne or Winda package if you really wanted to.
• They have constant access to the Ishizu shufflers which means that any GY focused deck just cannot make plays.
• Their fusion monsters naturally have high ATK which is then bolstered by both Perlereino boosting your own ATK and Scream lowering your opponent's ATK.

So how do you beat Tear? In short, the best option is to play the Tear mirror match. This is because Ishizu Tear naturally counters itself. If you don't want to do that, you need extremely targeted Tear hate cards like Shifter, Soul Drain, D.D. Crow, etc. Master Duel has never had a deck like this, so you best be prepared!