Notes & Combos

See season 14 notes for the gameplan, but the main difference is the handtrap suite. This list was developed after Strong Will released so I will also share my thoughts on Ishizu.

3 Nibiru is the best handtrap in the game, even in the Spright matchup. No handtrap is good enough on its own - with this in mind, this build plays 18 handtraps in 41. This puts your chance of seeing at least 2 handtraps at 74.2%. This is comparable to having 9 copies of Circular in 40! Revisiting Nibiru, this is the most reliable card to pair with another handtrap with Crossout as its only counterplay.

Take this scenario vs Spright: A Gigantic protected by Red loses to any handtrap chained to Gigantic and Nibiru. The xyz materials for Gigantic Spright, Red and a tribute for Red's negation requires 4 summons - this makes Gigantic the 5th summon. If you activate Ash in response to Gigantic and they respond with Red's monster negate, you can chain Nibiru to remove Gigantic so that it does not resolve anyway.

The release of Ishizu increased my confidence in Nibiru so much that I cut Belle to 1. These Ishizu mill decks rely on PUNK as the backbone of the combo which is vulnerable to handtraps. During games, I am not worried about Mudora and Keldo shuffling my Superfactorial targets - in my 15 games vs Ishizu decks this has never happened. You have plenty of warning as they still need to fire off mills which you can disrupt with handtraps or Superfactorial before they get out of hand. Going 2nd they lack defensive cards and handtrapping them is usually an instant scoop. You are not concerned with resolving Superfactorial going 2nd - Mudora and Keldo are toothless without a board so I've concluded that handtraps that answer the PUNK combo is a more efficient strategy than using Belle defensively.

For the Extra Deck: 2nd Laplacian and Crystal Heart were rarely summoned - they can be whatever edge case you want.

Out of 153 duels, Pure Spright was my most common matchup at 23 duels. Branded Despia was the 2nd most frequent at 11 duels. Exosister, Mathmech, Runick Stun, Spright Live Twin tied at 9 duels.

If I were to lump all Spright variants together, they would represent 44 duels.