Notes & Combos

Piloted Yubel Lab for this season's run, finishing it smoothly. For those who are still new to it, the overachieving appeal of this variant is fairly straightforward: If a control deck can have a powerful, yet proactive and lean one-card combo with even decent synergy, then you can heavily mitigate their weaknesses where they lack agency over the pieces of interaction they're seeing, can’t play resource-light games, or are suffering from being too sluggish on the draw in matchups against decks that are much more athletic then them.

With that said, the joint effort of Yubel and Lab ultimately offers better dictation of the pace of play and a considerably higher ceiling than its predecessors. The core benefits of being a Lab deck are still in place - a potent grind gamed tethered to efficient, toolboxable disruption that can be looped. But now is backed by Yubel's aggression and often ignorant game states it can produce. Yubel alone usually has trouble with control decks, since they lack handy main deck means to openly deal damage, out backrow or even deal with something like a Fossil Dyna. So the benefits of this hybrid aren't just one way either, as Lab's normals and typical choices in non-engine really help out in those departments, giving Yubel a better matchup spread in the process.

If you're interested in playing Yubel Lab there's actually a guide on it. It's not for this decklist you're seeing on your screen here, but it has decent information to get you started if you're new to the variant in general. The guide is on Note and in the MDM discord in the Lab channel, so you can take a look at either of those if you want to learn more.

Notes

• Rather than what's there, let's begin with some of the bigger iterms that are missing: I'm not on Terror, Escape, Chamber, multiple Spirits or Squirmers, etc. One of the beauties of Yubel Lab is that you're not actually married to the Yubel cards like Pure Yubel is, and thus, you can cut the fat here and reduce the bricks (which is what I opted for) - even to the point that you don't necessarily need something like Sharvara if you don't want it. Furthermore, being on two engines allowed the deck to naturally get away with being thicker so the potential bricks that have to be run at a minimum are at least seen at a reduced amount of time than they otherwise would be elsewhere. All in all, I was comfortable with the rates I was seeing them, and things like Furniture and Nightmare Pain helped convert them into actionable cards when they did come up - so I really didn't have an issue here.

• Arias is a bit of a departure from Yubel Lab lists that have popped up in the early conception of the deck, particularly my own. I was going with the full playset here, and unlike in her namesake variant (Arias Lab), my priority wasn't trying to build around her to create a turn-zero interaction (although it still comes up here and there). More so, Arias is here to act as an extender - I actually used her to summon out Lab monsters equal to if not more than I used her to set traps. In that role, she's very good, since she can contribute nicely to link climbing but also helps bait HTs and preserve your normal as needed (usually for Lotus). Was satisfied with the choice and had a good amount of games where she even overperformed.

• Among my interaction suite, the one choice that probably deserves mentioning is the inclusion of Crackdown, as it's not traditionally associated with Lab's trap lineup. Crackdown was a tech call that I went with for this season, mainly for how it shines in the mirror. Being able to take any of the Yubels is powerful (especially OG and Phantom), as the main deck ones have extra benefits for you, but even stealing something like Rage, Lotus or Yama can also be huge - as it not only avoids letting the cards hit the grave for the opponent, where they're often still a resource, but also gives you a dose of tempo since it provides immediate link value when the turn gets back to you.

• Even beyond the mirror Crackdown was a rather solid piece of interaction with some nice synergies within the deck. I had a few Tear games on my run where I Crackdowned Kitkallos and the opponent couldn't run her over to get her back in circulation due to Nightmare Pain. The card, of course, was also very nice with Daruma.