OCG: The champions: Ivan

Okay. From now on, Im gonna divide my posts into TCG and OCG. IM playing the Official Card Game but there are some TCG players out there who read this blog so , oh well, i guess it isnt hard to goup my posts into the two groups.

Allright, here is another post on the champions. ^^ Last time i did Jeff Soh, currently the best players in Singapore (according to Alex and sam and everyone else LOL) and now im gonna post. OK last Saturday the KL shop in Sungei Wang called Gamers Arena organised a Christmas Tourney and yeah u guys probably saw the pics from my last post. And the number one guy is Ivan. Congrats to him for winning the tourney. In this tourney, promos werent allowed to be used so there is no undead synchro around (except for the ones running IL Blud and turtle which is so =P blek ) Luckily I was able to attend the tourney to bring a live coverage since i was at KL at that time enjoying holidays anjd my hotel is like 3-4 minutes walk from Sungei wang

Im sorry for the stupid picture that is outside down but im really lazy to rotate it and send to this comp agian via bluetooth n bla bla bla. Anyways, Ivan took down around 160+ players in this tourney with a Destiny Dark Armed deck (Tele-DAD) Normally this wouldnt seem special BUT he tweaked his deck to run a Return engine and was special from others. Check it out!

Tele-DAD return (40 cards)

Monsters (20)
2 necro gardnar
2 armagaedon knight
1 plaquespreader zombie
1 psychic commander
3 clevonse
2 Dark grepher
2 D-hero Dasher
2 JINZO
3 D-hero Diabolic guy
2 dark armed dragon
Spells (15)

3 allure of darkness
3 reinforcements of the army
2 destiny draw
3 emergency teleport
1 monster reborn
1 brain control
1 Mystical space typhoon
1 Heavy storm
Traps (5)

1 Crush card virus
1 Torrential tribute
3 ESCAPE FROM THE DARK DIMENSION

Now we have read and read many of metagame articles and practically everybody knows that the one way to shine among everybody is to TECH> Thats what Ivan did, and boy did he do it well. In the past format, no one can deny the speed of Destiny Arm return but then its too bad that Gladiator beasts took over (my next champions article is GB!) and then since return and dimension fusion was banned it made things worse and everything sucksed suddenly.

Before one plays in a tournament, one must analyse the situation. In this tourney its liek a whole different format since promos cant be used. Everything from stratos, gorz mezukis and thousands of other promos are not within reach and the whole format seemed much slower all of a sudden.

Furthermore in Malaysia, the duelists there play lots of traps. The obvious choice to make now is to find a way to negate traps and to fit it in your deck and bring benefits to you. It could be Royal Decree, Jinzo shocker and for all you know even sky scourge invicil but for Ivan it was Jinzo. According to Ivan, he told me that the deck was designed by a guy called Sung Lee( who some of you Malaysians and Singaporeans might know).

Now i saw in Shriek's OCG news the decklists of some of theJapan top decks. And i AM VERY VERY surprised to see darklord zerato, jinzo and dasher plus lots of escape and return combos! Its mind boggling to see an old strategy suddenly sweeping the tourney scene again. I wonder ifSung Lee and Ivan got this idea from there too -.-

What made this so very special is that it runs Jinzo andescape i even bolded this. Jinzo destroys traps totally. It thwarts opposing copies of Royal oppresion before they are played,phoenix wing wind blasts and other impportant ones like raigeki break, Crush card virus and torrential tribute. This deck runs Destiny hero dasher as well so drawing Jinzo at the draw step will let you bring out a 2400 attack titan to take care of all the opposing problems. With traps gone, its impossible to have your Stardusts, Thought Rulers, Collosals or anything get destroyed that easily. Dont forget Jinzo is a level 6 so if u ever run out of Malicious it can take te place easily

Escape is a very versatile card. according to Ivan he picked this strategy because it was chainable and very useful. Heavy storm, MST and giant trunade are very good cards and packed into almost everydeck and by chaining it to Escape, you got yourself a free monster and your opponent loses a card (provided that is ta4rget is Jinzo) Moreover chaining escape to cards such as skill drain and Royal Oppresion will totally stop all those Meta Beat decks out there (except for GB decks) Escape isnt only used to bring Jinzo it could also be used to bring out a Malicious and then tune it with Clevonse 2bring out the Synchro of his choice. If GB bestiari destroys escape it can always chain itself to bring out Jinzo so the GB player is put into a hard position. Then he will have to use a Fissure or a Smashing ground to destroy Jinzo. Thats meant he wasted 2 cards to destroy one. Card advantage is useful so this is a good move (:

The deck is buiklt consistently packing 2 D-draws, 3 teleport, 3 allures,3 reinforcements and 2

knight of the ends for absolute deck thinning. Removing Jino for allure isnt the only method to it. U can send Jinzo through knight and then tune knight with clevonse through Teleport to create a big monster, bring Dark arm out and then set escape. With so many cards to thin down the deck, Ivan is gonna see alot of his deck in a game provided he doesnt have a sucky hand (which is a big problem) n Jinzo is accesible in 80% of the duels.

Next up i heard many many people saying that Tele-DAD runs out of steam quickly and that controlling the first few turns will destroy the deck already. think about it. If u run Jinzo and escape its another option for you if ur monsters/ synchors are dealt with. And its not a easy problem to deal with either its attack is 2400 and it'll take a synchro to destroy it. And then if u can get the escape and Jinzo combo it makes it mcuh harder for the opponent to break your combo and take out your 2 sycnrhos. Looking at it in this point of view, it solves the two problems of Tele-DAD since it lengthens ur life and makes it harder to disrupt you in the early games since phoenix wing blast, karma cut, bottomless and raigeki break cant be chained. Sems like the only way to solve the problem is by Brionac ^^ (:

Combining Tele-DAD with escape and jinzo is ingenius and brought Ivan the title of malaysia number #1. Ivan did it, the japanese did it, so can you. (: Happy netdecking

(on a side note: i just realised this is this blog's 100th post!) wow!