Notes & Combos

Quick Breakdown

• 10 Starters in 45 (3 Debug, 3 Mining, 3 Circular, 1 Small World; 73.4%) is nearly comparable to 9 Starters in 40 (3 Mining, 3 Circular, 3 Small World; 74.1%)
• 14 Going 2nd Cards in 45 (3 Maxx, 2 Gamma, 3 Belle, 3 Ash, 3 Bystial) amounts to a 50% chance to open 2 of them. Note that the Maxx & Gamma have the potential to end turns on their own in a variety of matchups, so a pair isn't always necessary. For specific matchups, Bystials (Tearlaments), Ash (Branded/Labrynth), & Belle (Labrynth) also have the capacity to end turns.

Going over 40 is not recommended as a rule of thumb. However, rules can be broken provided that you have a good enough reason. I felt justified going over 40 with the above two reasons.

Shout out to Baburu who also made Master 1 this season with a similar build. This is a unique list that achieved Top 100 in the May 2023 WCQ and it was a good learning experience with surprising results. One main thing that separates this deck from other lists is that it incorporates a 1-Card Lady Debug line to set up Superfactorial using V-LAN Hydra, Code Talker Inverted, & Wicckid. In Season 18, I already ran Cynet Codec as a way to beef up the Matchmech endboard and protect Superfactorial, so adding Debug as another way to grab Micro Coder felt like a natural fit.

I did not utilize the 1-card Debug combo, but mainly because this would only come up if you opened Debug and no other extenders. This does not diminish Debug's usefulness because it can soak interruptions so that you can Circular combo or extend past a negated Circular. The level 4 body lets you achieve the Laplacian's handrip T1 or Laplacian's boardbreaking capabilities T2 much more frequently. Then the searched Micro Coder lets you pivot into Heatsoul + Conflict more easily. Final Sigma is cuttable, the main use case is vs Spright to ignore Avramax's attack redirection effect and OTK through a stray link in attack. During this climb, I did not face much Spright.

Matchup Breakdown (122 Duels; 60 Heads, 62 Tails)

• 25 Tearlament (20.5%)
• 12 Branded Bystial (9.8%)
• 11 Labrynth (9.0%)
• 9 Spright (7.4%)
• Runner-Ups: 7 Traptrix, 6 Floowandereeze, 5 Dragon Link & Generaider
• Out of these decks 51 played Bystials (42%). The Bystial trends I highlighted in Season 18 remained the same.

Overall, I am impressed with the power of this deck. My winrate going first was 75%, and I stayed at a baseline 50% winrate going 2nd.