Notes & Combos

Early M1 - Odion Labrynth

With the metagame largely solved and in the waiting room for a shakeup from both the January banlist and its relevant pack (presumably offering Yummy), it's a good time to take advantage of a lot of complacency happening at the moment. This angle on Lab aimed to do just that, bringing a solid chunk of well positioned choices and harmonies to the table to make this season's climb a fast one.

Given Dracotail, Ryzeal and Mitsurugi make up 3 of the top 4 decks and a significant share of the ladder, having a ton of access to D-Barrier is a natural blessing and one of the biggest appeals of this mix is you get accentuate that with Odion. Their role as a sub-engine here is appreciable upfront: it's a low cost way to immediately reinforce your opener, it’s an ongoing source of card advantage that baits and stresses Ash, and it lends an in-house functionality that Lab as a theme doesn't already have - omni negation, rounding out its toolkit.

Particularly in this consideration, Verdict is a ridiculous card and a nice insurance piece to have as a control deck, especially in this meta that's still notably plagued by Red Reboot.

Beyond that, there's some key synergies between the two themes; Daruma is excellent with the Apophis cards as you reset them for free, Anubis is a good fiend extender for link climbing, a sneaky user of Big Welcome’s bounce, and pairs neatly with Trap Holic to create disruption. Similarly, Trap Holic popping your snakes will trigger your Lab cards - all these bits were helpful in the climb.

It's worth mentioning, by going this route you get to onboard Odion while mitigating some of its conventional downsides: Matchup wise, Odion is vulnerable into Ryzeal - Detonator makes life hard on critical cards like Treasures and the Apophis monsters (Lode too if it's a Primite variant) but with Lab as the main engine you're not nearly as susceptible, and conversely, have some powerful tools into them you wouldn’t have otherwise. The mirror can also be variance heavy, but Lady is specifically fantastic in it and Lab cards in general swings that to more consistently favorable grounds as well.

Likewise, you don't have to compromise on interaction. Playing Odion generally means the use of Ash and Impulse are going to be awkward and rather costly from hand in the latter case. Both of those cards are quite good currently so skipping out on them is rough, but here that isn't a real issue as the primary threat base is a much friendlier host to each of those choices.

Ultimately, I enjoyed playing this approach; It gets by on well greased control mechanics that makes its gameplay stout and mixes that with some decisive silver bullets to help you swim with the bigger fish out there. It’s a neat little one-two punch that doesn’t have to dress it up or take heavier construction risks to win at a good rate - it can land flush just off its fundamentals and that’s a great place to be until the next pack arrives and the new meta rolls in.