Must. Be. PLAYABLE!

Deck building, why must you anger me so much!

After tossing and turning between hundreds of different archetypes that I can play, I finally found one that excites me. A combination of two personal interests that I love in a fantasy setting, knights/warriors and the mighty power of the elements. In Yu-Gi-Oh!, they are referred to as Elementsabers.

They are cool, each from a specific attribute which is Light, Dark, Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind. Everyone one of them has a cool effect and when they are in the graveyard they can change their attribute to whichever one you desire out of the 7, yes they can even change to the Divine attribute as well. Furthermore, they have these incredible boss monsters known as Elemental Lords that just cause devastation when they are summoned. I immediately fell in love.

What sealed my fate was that you were able to play my most favourite card in the entire Yu-Gi-Oh! game, which is my childhood clutch card,

Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning!

This guy has won me so many games as a kid, I literally cried when my parents threw out my entire Yu-Gi-Oh! collection.

Well now he is back and better than ever, and time to win me some games......

... Except deck building is HARD! I have spent countless hours trying different ratios, putting and taking out cards to make this deck playable.

For those who aren't aware, in Yu-Gi-Oh! there are a few deck rules you must abide by. One is that you have a Main deck with the size between 40 - 60 cards. Not bad, the closer you keep it to 40 the higher probability you have of drawing the card you want. You can only have up to 3 copies of the same card, unless it is "Forbidden" (no copies allowed), "Limited" (only 1 copy), or "Semi-Limited" (only 2 copies), and this knowledge comes from the Forbidden List from Konami themselves. Cards must be legal to play in your country, also found on their site, can have an Extra deck full of those fusion monsters like normal Fusion, XYZ, Synchro, special Pendulum guys and Link, with a total maximum of 15 in that, and if you are going to be competitive, a Side deck, max of 15 as well, full of cards you use to swap with ones in your other decks to counter against whoever you are playing in a Best of 3 match.

Now with that in mind, the Elementsaber deck is a bit hard to work with. At minimum they have 9 different cards each useful than the last, so at worst by running 3 copies of each, you hit 27 cards. They are also very reliant on their field spell card known as Palace of the Elemental Lords.

This card is incredible and powerful. Allows you to search for an Elementsaber from your deck and add them to your hand, due to the Elementsaber's effect of needing to send a fellow Esaber from your hand to the graveyard in order to activate it, this card lets you send one from your deck instead, and also gives all your monsters an extra 200 attack and defence multiply by the amount of different attributes in your graveyard, and as we discussed earlier, Esabers can change at will to one of the 7 so you can have a total of 7 different attributes in your graveyard at once, giving your monsters an extra 1400 ATT & DEF. Talk about power!

But the truth remains that the deck is very reliant on this card in order to get a great play and sometimes you can get stuck with multiple Esabers in your hand, only to realise a lot of them require using up your one normal summon and so you can't even do nice plays since you only get one monster on the board and pass your turn.

So why play a deck that is so difficult to build? My obsession with this deck to be playable in the competitive way has driven me mad. No amount of testing and trying out different tech cards leaves me satisfied or with the feeling that hey, this deck is super strong. I had to learn the hard way after spending hours and late nights about the current state of Esabers.

Unfortunately, this deck won't be a highly competitive deck only because it doesn't have amazing flow sometimes and can be difficult to recover, but can still be used in a competitive way. After playing around with some ratio's, I found a way that to me, this deck is so freaking good. Granted there are some times I brick, or if I get handtrapped I might as well just cry, but when I have at least 2 or 3 of the cards I need, which kind of happens a bit more than you might realise, this deck EXPLODES and you could potentially end your turn with either winning in one turn, or having these big beasts that can't be destroyed.

I still want to keep testing it around and see if I can squeeze it and make it more fluid and strong, but for the mean time it can be playable, probably against friends in a casual way. I do recommend giving them a look, because they sure as hell can surprise you and if you happen to find a way to make them work then great! Hopefully soon I can settle on a deck list that I am proud of to take competitively and that way I can share it with you guys soon.

Until next time!

~ George Wakim