Notes & Combos

Duelist Cup March 2025, playing Fiendsmith Control (or Fiendsmith Bystial) Blind 2nd. In total it took 63 game to go from DLv. 12 to DLv. MAX with a winrate of 61,9% (39 wins and 24 losses). It wasn't easy, I deranked 3 times (almost 4), I think Fiendsmith Control is a decent deck, but its not the ideal deck to climb.

The deck is supposed to be anti-meta, but even tho the Bystials are great agains Fiendsmith and Azamina, both Snake-Eyes and White Forest have way to much gas (and the Bystials don't do much agains the Snake-eyes cards themselves), so at the end of the day my winrate agains meta decks wasn't that high.

Besides, only about 25% of my games were against Snake-Eyes/White Forest/Fiendsmith/Azamina variants, I faced a lot of Stun and Rogue decks on the climb. Fortunatly, the deck is competent enough that it has a pretty good winrate against rogue too. That said, the deck relies a lot on matchups and on the starting hand (both yours and your oponnent's) to do well. Troughout the 63 games I was forced to go first only 3 times, so it was good to play a Blind 2nd deck for a change.

The exact list varied over time and the list on the video os the list I ended the climb with. Some obvious missing cards (Veiler, Imperm and Fuwalos) are because I don't have any UR CP left. My list uses Cyberse Gadget to get into the Fiendsmith engine, but there are lists that use Steam the Cloak, Dotscapper or Formud Skipper. I don't know which is best, all of them seem perfectly valid, with ups and downs, but I already had Cyberse Gadget, so I went with it so I didn't have to craft anything more.

In fact, my list is far from optmized and there's many ways to build the deck. Some people go Blind 2nd, others prefer to go 1st, everyone has a different opinion on what handtraps to play, some use Kashtira, Millenium, Azamina, DPE, among other engines. It's hard to say which build is the best, but mine's probably not it chief.

I liked having the 2nd Tract, it reduced the chance of having a Engraver stuck in hand, but it's optional. The Extra Deck is also very flexible. Link Disciple, Devotee and Linkuriboh are necessary to play with Cyberse Gadget. Besides those, the only mandatory cards are 1 Requiem, Sequence and Lacrima. You also probably want at least S:P and Caesar, but the rest are flex spots. The only card I never used was Zeus. And no, I don't have TY-PHOON.