Notes & Combos

Standard Grass variant of Branded. I tried a lot of different ratios and techs on this deck, from multiple copies of Shrouded and Lubellion to a more Bystial-heavy variant with Baldrake, Regained and Beast, passing through situational one-ofs like Branded King, Branded Sword and even stuff like Evenly and Dimensional Barrier (to grab with Thrust). Eventually, I decided to cut everything that I felt was unnecessary and ended up with this 55-cards decklist, which I'm a lot more comfortable with.

The Extra Deck is extremely tight. I used to play Mudragon instead of Quaeritis, but the ability to fuse away any Light or Dark monster with Aluber/Quem (usually through Branded Banishment) was too important to be left out. Quaeritis is also a decent float off Granguignol's effect, providing protection and additional floating, which is why I picked it over Masquarade (although it isn't a bad option either). Sprind, Luluwalilith and Proskenion are situationally useful, but I can't really justify cutting anything for these.

Branded is undoubtly a good and super fun deck, but the climb was also pretty frustrating. The deck is very much prone to bricks, also hands that can play through a common handtrap are bad against another one (e.g.: Aluber + Fusion Deployment vs Imperm/Maxx "C"), when it's possible to play around them in the first place. Of course, Ash Blossom still hurts a lot. With Snake-Eye being everywhere, the ladder feels like an handtrap spamfest and sadly Branded cannot play too many handtraps itself to fight against 1-card combo decks.

On top of everything else, this deck is VERY complicated and I had a huge problem fighting against the timer during the whole climb: probably around 50% of my losses were caused by a time out. But this is more of a skill issue than a deck issue.