Introduction
Hello and welcome to Loading... ! If you're looking for a fun deck to play casually, you’ve come to the right place.
If I were to rate this deck’s viability, I would say that it’s a casual deck with which a dedicated player can climb to Diamond 5. Beyond that, it’s not worth the struggle. Nevertheless, you can definitely steal games from meta decks, and in lower-powered formats (primarily in events such as Link Regulation), this deck performs surprisingly well.
Variants
To be more accurate - this article is actually a general guide to playing going-2nd Insects, which includes - but is not limited to - Giant Ballpark. If you want to play insects going-1st, I encourage you to check out this excellent Introduction to Beetroopers. Anyway, here is a brief rundown of the variants this guide will cover:
Giant Ballpark
A blind 2nd beatdown deck that utilises various Insect cards. It typically aims to do two things;
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Summon lots of Insect Normal Monsters and then... attack, and sometimes OTK!
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Like Beetroopers, Ballpark aims to loop Resonance Insect multiple times in a turn. But in addition to the usual search targets, we add Kaijus to our arsenal (two of them are Insects for some reason), which function both as removal and as extenders. You know that thing that the best deck does that’s really unfair? Well if we were the best deck (we’re not), then that thing would probably be searching multiple Kaijus in one turn.
While at first glance the deck may appear to be an OTK strategy, as I alluded to above, that’s often not the case. Indeed - I, too, was shocked to discover that 3 x 2000 does not equal 8000. There are certainly many routes to OTK, but Ballpark itself is often not the best facilitator of that. Instead, you typically use the Main Phases and the Battle Phase to break apart the opponent’s board, then seal up the game with an Loading... and a searched Loading... to prevent them from regaining control of the duel. (Notably, Apollousa can be protected by Giant Ballpark by sending Gokipole in the Damage Step, so even if the former’s ATK is low, your opponent won’t simply be able to clear it by attacking over it.)
One big downside of Giant Ballpark is that it’s unsearchable. In the event that you don’t draw it, you’ll essentially be forced to play a worse version of our next variant…
Parkless
Parkless is similar to Giant Ballpark, but instead of dedicating 7 main deck slots to a gimmick, you just play more extenders and non-engine cards. This results in a version of the deck that can OTK far more consistently, as you’ve replaced the bricky vanillas with more gas. The downside is that Parkless is more of a glass-cannon, as what it gains in offence, it loses in recovery. (Admittedly, Ballpark doesn’t exactly excel in this area either.) I think that Parkless is a bit better than Ballpark because, in addition to being more consistent, I don’t like letting my opponent live past turn 2. Any differences in ratios between Ballpark and Parkless will be mentioned in the deckbuilding section.
8-Axis Parkless
This takes the same approach as Parkless, but with an emphasis on using Level 8 monsters to access the Rank 8 pool. This provides us with more tools for breaking boards and OTKs. The key trade-off here is increased power at the cost of consistency; you are more likely to brick on high-Level monsters in this build. There will be a sub-section later on covering cards exclusive to this variant.
Ballpark Tenyi
The Tenyi archetype has natural synergy with Ballpark thanks to the latter’s use of Normal Monsters. This is the least viable variant, so it will only briefly be covered in a dedicated section towards the end.