Notes & Combos

Paleozoic is amazing and it can really take the opponent by surprise. Its playstyle is extremely different from other decks: your gameplan is basically to summon as many unaffected Paleos as possible and prevent them from being run over by battle with Waboku, Rise to Full Height, Daruma Karma Cannon etc., then dismantle the opponent's resources afterwards with Zeus or the Anemone + Zealantis combo and outgrind them to victory. Often times they will not have a clue on how to deal with your cards: they will use their removal and interaction with suboptimal timing, they'll waste Ash and Veiler on Opabinia, they'll overextend thinking they can OTK and make many other misplays.

Furthermore, this deck has a pretty good matchup against some meta decks like Snake-Eye and Rescue-ACE even when going 2nd (assuming they're not able to make their Synchro plays), because they don't really have a lot of ways of effectively dealing with backrow and multiple recursive unaffected monsters. It also beats Stun almost every time, which is always a plus.

However, keep in mind that it's still a rogue deck and a competent opponent will most likely be able to stop a lot of your plays, usually chainblocking your Paleos and avoiding overextending when unnecessary. You also have no 1 card combos or anything like that, therefore this deck is as non-linear as you can get, which means that it's very hard to pilot and easy to misplay/timeout with; coupled with its very slow playstyle, it makes for a rather exhausting experience when playing it for multiple games in a row. Lastly, it still has some bad matchups like Chimera, Mathmech and Salamangreat, which can all remove a large part of (if not all) your backrow before you even get a chance to activate it.

Still, the deck is so fun and rewarding that it was worth the harder climb. I did play a few Labrynth games around Master III to regain my rank more quickly (I got demoted twice due to a 20% coinflip winrate, it really got THAT bad), but more than 80% of my games were with this deck.

The decklist is just Joshua Schmidt's decklist card for card, pretty much. I added in Laundry Trap at some point, but then decided to remove it as it didn't seem impactful enough. Morganite, Traptalizing Tune, Lost Wind and Balance of Judgement are all Main Deck cards that I would consider swapping for other options, but I feel like the rest are pretty much mandatory.