Notes & Combos

After both seeing and getting cheesed by Rollback→Earthbound Release + Nightmare Archfiends FTK variants, I wanted to give it a try myself. Release seemed like a funny albeit gimmicky replacement for Elemental Burst in Paleo, so that's what I went with.

Before the Labrynth package, I originally went for the fuller combo with Archfiends + Archfiend Heiress + Trap Tracks, and while I occasionally resolved both halves of the OTK, the rest of the time they're pretty wasteful draws. Paleo is pretty slow, and so a decent chunk of the time if I was resolving Release, it was basically just waiting for the opponent set up into it instead of donating tokens.

So eventually I ended up splitting the difference and just keeping Release as a garnet. It isn't uncommon for opposing boards to eventually reach over 8k attack, so the OTK potential is still there. But besides negates, the big issue with Release is its activation condition. Some decks don't bring out high level lads, or the order isn't ideal for when I want to activate it. Since the card doesn't specify by whom or to which side the level 6+, I included a Labrynth package since the big ladies count.

It works okay I think. The big ladies are very powerful and definitely boost the ceiling of the deck, but it does feel a bit win-more at the cost of the Labrynth stuff eating interaction I could otherwise ignore or feel less bad about. Even without the fiend lock from regular Welcome Lab it feels like most games I mostly only get to play either the Lab half or the Paleo half (unless the opponent is also on a trap deck).

Evenly is an unrelated addition. I just wanted more to do going second. Set-backrow-pass is perfectly valid, but playing mindgames against I:P→S:P and other removal is annoying. It's been enough of a blowout that I'm decently happy with it, but it's definitely more bricks going first. By a similar token, Arias over Arianna might be more correct but I wasn't sure how I felt about drawing or landing her off Reasoning. Enough people are calling 4 for Snow that maybe I should have swapped. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Centaurea is the card I least like in the ED. I wanted it when I wasn't running it, and it's never come up since I added it. Even without the dragon package, Elf still seems pretty nice for targeting protection and link-2 recycling.

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For the record, even in this deck I'm pretty sure Burst is a strict upgrade, but it is pretty funny to blindside with Marrella. Something something she wanted my Elemental Burst, but all I gave her was an Earthbound Release 😔