Notes & Combos

Early M1 - Labrynth

After a pack turnout just a season ago that presented a buff in Songs, Konami quickly relapses, putting pen to script and releasing indirect support for Lab again, and even better, doing so while coming off the heels of furniture finally being unbanned. With that said, it doesn't take much play to realize Lab is simply in much better shape than it was before the gifts started rolling in, and even when viewing certain hands, that can feel like a bit of an understatement.

The list of it that I went with is largely my current take on a standard furniture build, just voiced in a fashion that's more concerned with being less flat-footed and more adaptable than anything else - respecting the meta’s level of width with its choices.

Bouncing off of that, there is a more glaring exclusion here. The amount of furniture is a casualty of the desire to play more interaction and a nod to the fact that they have rapidly diminishing returns. Beyond the initial copy, you technically don't need to see more unless your resource loop is broken, and until then, subsequent copies quickly become redundant and low value.

Hands that are engine heavy with multiple copies of furniture on top of Welcomes, etc tend to be the ones that are more weaker and vulnerable than the inverse; I rather see enough engine to keep the lights on in the house and the rest be interaction. Four furniture was more conducive to this stance, and Lab of course is no stranger to playing at this amount either and having success.

But that’s just a direction for this particular build though, and I think there are a few different ways to build a strong Lab deck right now (going full furniture with heavier payoffs has looked good and mitigates some of their issues). I’m looking forward to playing a few different approaches this month, but this is what worked well for this season’s climb and you can read more on it in the notes below if interested.

Notes

• Trap Holic is Lab's latest weapon and it's a good one. It’s the ideal setup card in the early turns as it's representative of every normal trap in your arsenal, a versatile response in a deck that's constantly looking to efficiently line up answers with the opponent's threats, and it lets you swiftly stitch together multiple traps with your usual suspects like Roll, both on crackback opportunities and during bigger defensive stands. The very top of the meta is headed by two powerful combo decks and Holic gives you the card quality and agility to stay afloat in those fights.

  And while there's a bunch of incidental upside to be reaped with this new addition when it comes to graving certain cards and how you can physically go about building your deck now - more routinely getting your disruption to tag the opponent's key plays without locks has been a specifically big plus in my experience. All in all, this has been a visibly nice boost to Lab.

• An uncommon departure in the interaction suite is the option to go with Bystials. Doing so pays more respect to Mitsurugi and Orcust, which I anticipated to be more popular in Ranked than other game modes, all while still being sound into top shelf matchups like Gem-Knight. Being on them also provides some extra grit: In games that stretch, recycling them with Big Welcome is appreciable and provides another layer of insurance to edge out resource wars - an aspect that's decently relevant as the metagame right now has its first share of midrange decks in tier 2 and below that are happy to try to out value you.

• Sticking with the interaction suite, the 4-point cluster of Barrier, Goat, Simul felt good. Barrier is a mainstay of the theme basically since its inception and given its current matchup spread, is prioritized in quantity, while the other two round out the level of prevention that can be offered on a dime. The coverage this combination provided was strong, it was rather hard for this list to be out of place when trying to manufacture an answer to the opponent, a particularly nice benefit in wider metas like our current one where a range of decks can and are reasonably seeing play.