Notes & Combos

I tried to play Sky Striker for the first 5 days of the month, and I got to Legend 3 before deranking back to Legend 1, so I swapped to Chimera because at least it almost guarantees a win going first if I'm allowed to fully set up, and going second is miserable for everyone anyways.

This is Chimera as Konami intended since Lava Golem and Radian are Fiend monsters and can be used as fusion material. Chimera still has the best going first board in my opinion - it can make as many points of interaction as the usual Therion/Tachyon deck, and although the interactions are not all strong negates, the board is naturally very resistant to Kaiju-like cards since multiple interactions come from the quick-play Fusion and from the Graveyard! Going second is the major issue, most of the time I needed a Kaiju to stand a chance, but this is true for pretty much all non-meta decks in this meta.

The skill is not often impactful going first, usually I search Chimera Fusion normally before using the skill to shuffle back Chimera Fusion for Chimera Fusion. It is great defense against Effect Veiler/Infinite Impermanence on the normal summoned Gazelle though, also allows the deck to fold less often to Droll if Coatl does the first search. Going second, the skill searching Chimera Fusion means the deck is allowed to consistently free up the normal summon and play Lava Golem, which is the biggest reason to play this skill when other skills that provide more card advantage such as Precious Cards of the Dark are available. The free body is only okay, occassionally a bit better if Coatl is the starter to easily negate targeting interruptions. Maximum copies of every skill target should be played, so there is no space for extra copies of Apprentice or Tao, even though a second copy of each of them (especially Tao) would have been great for redundancy.

Book of Eclipse is weird because it's hard to OTK over a full board of defense position monsters, but it is really strong going first as an extra safety net and will easily bait a negate going second.

All of the cards in the Extra Deck get used often other than the Link monsters, but they are still situationally useful and are the best options. The 3rd copy of Fusion Berfomet comes up if I get hit with Kaiju-like cards and have to fuse into the second Berfomet on the opponent's turn, which is a common occurrence in this meta.

This is a pretty cheap deck, classified as "free to play" by DLM standards as it costs less than 30k gems.