Notes & Combos

Early M1 - Dinomorphia Labrynth

For routine readers of my profiles, this blend of Lab likely comes as no surprise now given its previous success. There are several factors that keep this approach on the radar and desirable to pursue, but the biggest one is simple: the Metagame remains a notably aggressive, Tenpai splattered landscape drizzled with a decent amount of decks that flirt with being too greedy or just outright embrace being so - a factor that this build thrives against by design. That said, the overall toolkit here is still very favorable, carrying a lot of the A-listers you would want from a control deck in terms of interaction right now and then some, all without having to make hard concessions to do so which stays being a very nice perk here. Couple that with its underlying ability to generate value and compress games that was appealing in November still being firmly in place, and it becomes easy to see why this was chosen for yet another climb.

Notes

• The counter trap suite has taken a shift sharing a bit more space between Intact and Strike. The 3/1 split allows better hedging against combo while still respecting the Tenpai MU. Strike scales better in the early game, helping ensure you get your SS traps past Ash and occasionally eating an opposing monster, while Intact is a bit better down the road - the negation is solid but the damage reduction is great for pushes from power extenders that attempt to play over the top of your usual pieces of interaction. Being on more counters of this nature overall inherently helped out more when going second, which is always welcomed with control decks like this.

• Lilith overperformed and deserves some attention. She’s a strong starter and can double as a key piece of interaction based on your needs, making her far from redundant even when you have access to the both Lab and Morph engines. Compared to Arianna or Therizia, Lilith is more resilient to hand traps and other disruptions, making her particularly valuable against midrange decks that frequently interact on the terms. Additionally, she scales well throughout the game—if she appears while your board is developing, you can often get multiple uses out of her, such as sacrificing a used Arianna or Therizia to activate her on your opponent’s turn and still having her around to fetch more traps when the game gets back to you on the follow-up. Future dark monsters you summon can also avoid interruption if you leave her on the field, whicb comes up a good amount. Was happy with moving to the full playset of her for this month.

• The Dinomorphia package continues to impress in this season. I love the speed and brutality with which it closes games and the output for its investment remains fantastic; Often north of 6k damage onboard, two relevant bodies in battle that both float, one-sided Skill Drain-ish flooding, and attack modification at scale on top of that from a single trap. It's been said before but it's very much worth repeating: Frenzy is easily blow for blow one of the strongest normal traps in the meta, and thus, one of the best NTs Lab can be flipping up and that outlook doesn't particularly appear to be changing anytime soon.

  In the bigger picture, this package has essentially been optimized at this point. Beyond the etched-in starters, Intact is a powerful alternative search off of Therizia when you already have this engine that has extra upside into the meta's most common MU but poor alone, so it's just at 1 and the same can be said about Alert; Nice for games that may stretch and ripe for Lovely to abuse but an option you rather not see by itself and one you can live without in faster metas, so it ends up as a meta call. The rest of the Morphia traps are more thorny in their own ways, be it in activation hurdles or results, and generally not good in isolation so they stay left out.