Notes & Combos

I played Yubel Lab this season to wrap up M1, and with a list that's roughly similar to recent ones from me as of late. So if you're totally new to this deck and are curious about what's going on you can look at past profiles on this concept as well.

I went with Yubel Lab again because it felt like a safe choice. Both its proactive and reactive game plans are sound with clean pivot points bewteen them, card quality is fairly high, and it has access to some of the best pieces of interaction in the environment. This build for this season in particular is aggressively slanted in that last department - dense enough in its HTs and other disruption to not really allow the 60 card piles and the other premier combo decks of the meta to routinely play over top of you, but value-laced and flexible enough where you can get into a trade war with the slower, grind-centric midrange decks (like Voice) and still comfortably cross the finish line.

This version is a midrange deck itself positioned closer to the truest sense of that label than usual - it almost exclusively wants to play for concrete resources while remaining adaptable in approach, so being smart with how you sequence your interaction and the exchanges you choose to pursue is extra sensitive to the deck's rise or fall.

Notes

• While more noticeable at a glance, the Bystial package shouldn't need real elaboration. They're a clear nod to the key players in the meta right now and so happen to be specifically efficient here as Lab can reuse them with Big Welcome, making them an even more attractive pick. What's a little more noteworthy is its depth and adjacent choices. The package is easily on the heavier side opting for all 4 names alongside the set of Lubellion. Compounding on that they're accompanied by the full set of Belle which is indicative of how hard we're pushing back on certain matchups. Unlike Bystials, Belle has more range in the metagame - being able to catch Saffiras, Pre-Preps, Spirits, etc in addition to the more typical targets. Going heavy on the GY HTs, and this blend in particular, was strong and helped make this climb much easier than it otherwise would be without them.

• The only other choice that deserves some text here is Shared Ride, a tech that was pretty good during this run. Shared Ride always had potential, in a sense it's a search version of Maxx C. It really just needed the meta to line up for it to be viable and this one happens to be fairly search-happy with the popularity of Voice contributing nicely to that. Unlike Maxx, Ride doesn't have much counterplay - it doesn't lose to Gamma, Called By or get instantly punished by triggering a Tactics card. it would be very, very rare for it to get hit with Crossout, so in reality, it's a more reliable defensive option to actually resolve while still being pretty promising as far as value is concerned which was nice. The "add back" from GY bit makes it better in certain MUs than you may initially think and was catching people off guard left and right during my climb. When going second with it, it wasn't overly difficult to break even in CA at the very least.