This is the first Tier List post-Infernity Destruction's release. It is also the Tier List heading into the upcoming MCS this Saturday.
Chris.
Infernity Destrction is interesting at first glance because we got a lot of different decks (Infernity , Weather Painter , Simorg and Demise Rituals) iin addition to support for older archetypes (Fur Hire , X-Saber). However, while everyone thought Infernities would be instantly Tier 1 thanks to Loading... and Loading... , turns out to not the case due to the deck's consistency issue, and if you play the Infernity Inferno skill to help resolve these issues, the deck becomes very slow. Weather Painters are a consistent deck that gets a lot of card advantage but it lacks power plays. In my opinion, the biggest winner of this Box is Darklords because of Loading... . Since the nerfs, Darklords were forced to play the Lightsworn engine. which meant they couldn't use Loading... , thus making them weak to backrow decks, but Simorgh of Darkness helps with this problem by not only being a big resummonable body, but also providing a way to play through backrow. Darklords have the potential to come back to the Tier List since most other decks have also been nerfed, so I wouldn't be surprised if they made a comeback.
Tier 1
TPC Comments
gift
Blackwings have been promoted back to Tier 1. In this meta, there are many decent decks and each of those decks have hard match ups, so determining the Tier 1 and 2 decks is not easy at all and depends a lot based on the week. Blackwings could be very solid against High Tiered decks like Witchcrafters or Blue-Eyes but have been plagued with very difficult matchups against control decks, most specifically Elementsabers. At the moment, Elementsabers are in a weird spot in the meta, as matchups against decks like Witchcrafter can be really difficult. As a result, if less players are playing Elementsabers, then it will only help improve Blackwings' tournament results.
While not as popular in the west, Level Reduction Blackwings is very popular in Japan and showing to be a very good variant. One of the main benefits of Level Reduction is simply the ability to easily play through cards like Loading... and Loading... . Normally if a Blackwing player does not have Loading... , then Verre constantly negating an already established Loading... can be very annoying. However, with Level Reduction you usually have multiple ways to apply pressure. For example, if you have Raikiri and a Loading... (which is level 2) in hand against a Verre or Fiendish Chain, you simply can reduce your Raikiri's level by 2, summon the Harmattan, and use Raikiri's effect. When they choose to negate, you simply summon Loading... , re-summon the Raikiri, and use its effect again. This is just a basic example and there are ways to summon Raikiri 3 times in a turn, which can be very overwhelming for many decks.
Tier 2
TPC Comments
Herbel
It took a week, but Shiranui has finally adapted to the current meta, and started to build their decks around it. The more stable the meta is, the easier it gets for Shiranui to pick their tech cards, to be able to fight against the other top decks. The current lists are runningg Loading... s to get rid of problematic monster monsters such as Loading... and Loading... permanently. Some of the lists also swapped Loading... s for Loading... s. Canadia is way better in the Witchcrafter matchup, since Witchcrafters have an easy way to dodge Floodgate by tagging out, or by summoning Madame Verre on Chain Link 2. As we go into the week of MCS, Shiranui can be a popular pick, since their only hard losing matchup in Dark Magician has started to fall in popularity. A well-teched Shiranui deck can perform well against any other meta deck.