Notes & Combos

Decklist: https://duellinks.konami.net/att/026863c81f168f02ddce0fe6952cc7fe8a2afe1344

I'm back once again! After a 2-year hiatus from Duel Links and playing IRL, I thought I was truly done with Duel Links due to the crazy overtuned Skills that have basically taken over this game. However, my closest friends invited me to play in the 3v3 YCS in Las Vegas in April, which inspired me to play Yu-Gi-Oh! again. So, here I am with one of my favorite decks, Dark Magician.

I chose to play DM because I've always really liked this strategy, and Dragoon was a massive boost to the Deck. As a returning player, it was nice to be able to come back into the game with a relatively cheap build, especially because I already owned most of the cards for the Deck. I went from Rookie to KoG (using different variants of DM the whole way) and the climb was super fun.

Here is the rundown of the deck (paragraph warning. TLDR at the end):

• Master of the Dark and Chaos: The only weakness of this Skill compared to The Eye of the United Dragon is that you can't play Kaijus or Lava Golem. In all other cases, I believe MD&C is better than Timaeus for a few important reasons. Firstly, you have way more starters in this Deck than in the Timaeus version. Timaeus maxes out at 9 possible starters, which is super unreliable (plus opening multiple Illusion of Chaos + Preparation of Rites just feels like absolute sh!te). Meanwhile, this MD&C build has 14 starters, which is even more insane when you remember that this includes what would normally be a garnet (Dark Magician Girl). Speaking of garnets, though...
• Hieratic Seal + Protector Whelp + Imduk + Grandtusk Dragon: This was a tech from Team6K, so shoutouts to them. This is my least favorite part of the build. This deck can produce very awkward hands partly due to Grandtusk Dragon being a hard garnet. The brick chance with this deck is around 6%, which definitely hurt me on my climb. However, because this build has very limited access to Dragons for Dragoon (I chose not to run Timaeus; more on that later), you kinda need to play this combo. It's not all bad, though. Both the Skill and Illusion of Chaos can shuffle back garnets, which is super helpful in fixing hands.
• 0x DMC, 0x Timaeus, 0x Navigation, 0x Expanded: These cards are nice to have in theory, but they're not very good. They're "win-more" cards and none of them are starters. The only card that came up was Dark Magical Circle. Most of the time, it came down to RNG on whether or not I'd be able to play the game, since I sometimes really needed DMC to add DM for the Skill. It was in the deck for a while and I replaced it once it really started griefing me. It even clogs backrow, which this build cannot afford to do going first. The only reason to include DMC would be to improve the matchup against Shinobird going second, which I think is DM's worst matchup (I'm pretty sure I have a 0% winrate against Shinobird in general). I took all of these cards out to make more room for the following techs:
• 3x Droplet, 3x Lancea: These are the tech cards, and they were incredible. I chose to run 3x of each since it gave the highest odds to draw at least 1 of them without compromising the starter count of 14. Droplet has been in the build since the very beginning throughout all my builds; it's just a broken card this format. Meanwhile, Lancea just annihilates Branded + some rogue decks. This slot originally belonged to Book of Eclipse but I got tired of losing to Branded going second so I replaced it with Lancea, which is broken in that matchup to stop Albion and Branded in Red. The best part of these techs is that they are interchangable with any other techs you'd like to play. Soul Servant being almost constantly live is just the icing on the cake because it means you can draw into these more often, making them even more consistent. Unfortunately, this build can't run Kaijus due to the Skill restrictions, which may be why the Timaeus Skill is still more popular.
• Extra Deck Choices: I wish this Deck had room to run I:P + Underworld Goddess, but I couldn't justify running it over the Seals combo. You could maybe run them instead of the Knightmares, but I think it'd be too clunky. I chose to play The Dark Magicians over DMTDK to play around Imperm/Veiler targeting Magicians' Rod. I'd never make DMTDK over Dragoon even if my Eternal Soul was threatened. Master of Chaos is actually really good going second and it came up quite often, but unfortunately I don't have any replays featuring him :(

TLDR: MD&C is better than Timaeus and the techs were vital to my wins. DM isn't top-tier but it can definitely compete with the meta. I had a lot of fun building and piloting this deck. I hope this write-up helps anyone who is interested in playing DM. Shoutouts to Coolsy and Undead for spreading good love to DM and the Duel Links community.