Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Caius The Shadow Monarch


Is an Awesome card this format.
Why? This format is slow as hell and its likely Caius will remove any important/vital card of the opponent. The removal effect is key especially when it can remove "Royal Oppression" or "Jet-Black Whirlwind" from the game.
It serves as a beatstick after it has removed your opponent's cards.
Also, it is likely to take out 1 more card by battle after removal, meaning it was basically 2 cards for one.
Lets say you tributed frog/token/snowman eater/ gravekeeper's spy, its almost 2 cards for none.
The burn effect can take out 1/8 of your opponent life points and can often be used to go for game if people can remember to remove itself from the game when your opponent's life points are low. In late game, that 1000 is a damn huge chunk.
In late game, Caius works best. Because it does too much damage when your opponent's at his/her weakest.
Eh, remember how annoying Shining is? Just remove him from play and no heroes are returned.
You are advised to do the same thing to Machina Fortress too so he doesn't come back and when you are handless :D But of course not really advisable.
Surprisingly, I totally forgot about Caius and left him in my binder until i saw some Hero Beat deck on Shriek utilising him and Doom Caliber Knight.
Awesome awesome. Tributing Heroes like Absolute Zero or Shining or a simple Alias can get you lots and lots of advantage.
Tributing Zero and removing a spell/trap on opponent's field usually means destruction of the entire field.
Tributing Shining ensures you a +2 in terms of card advantage.
Tributing Alias can let you use Hero Blast!
So, i decided to mix just 2 copies of Caius into my Hero deck, and it worked wonders. Just like on paper.
Its incredibly easy to summon Caius in a Hero deck.
You can draw a random Battle Fader/ Brain Control or tribute a floater like Snowman Eater or Crystal Seer.
Or better, tribute Shining and return 2 Heroes, then fusion another Shining again. Crazy explosive plays involved. Lol. Its like playing Caius FOR FREE.
Some other Hero decks can tribute that random Cyber Dragon/ Gorz token/ bla bla bla.
Sometimes, that lone Caius is enough to win the whole duel if your opponent has a bad hand.
Trust me, I've seen many tourney reports that ended in "I poked my opponent to death with Wicked Emperor Gaius" or "My opponent died to 2400 damage lol"
But after such a successful testing period, I decided Mobius The Frost Monarch is awesome too.
Why? Mobius is WATER type so you can do more Absolute Zero tricks.
Instead of a +1, it is a +2, and is the ONLY monarch that has a +2 effect built in.
Sometimes, that plus 2, is exactly like Heavy Storm, which is THE MOST GAME-BREAKING card in the game now, imo.
Spells and Traps are just as important as monsters this format. Especially with people maining 3 Dimension Prison. BF is like shit without their spells and traps. Heroes/ anti-meta beat dies when their s/t are gone as they will lose control of the game. Glads will die too because they are a simplification deck.
So, after much debate, I still haven't decided which card is better.
Caius's range is larger but is it worth playing over Mobius. Take for example, raiza, it was good because you could choose s/t/monster but then its still not as game-breaking as Mobius.
To be honest, in the Perfect Circle Monarch era in the TCG, i had no idea why they liked to run 3 Thestalos and 3 Raiza. Sure, Raiza is understandable but, imo, Mobius or zaborg was 1000x better than Thestalos.

6 comments:

Aozu Akazu said...

I believe they ran Thestalos as Soul Exchange into Thestalos was a great play or something, though I don't know too much about it as I only recently started playing.

mike9944 said...

True, but imo, field control was more important than hand control that format.

Anonymous said...

I believe The Shining's Graveyard-trigger effect is optional, and would miss the timing if you sacrificed it to summon Caius.

Anonymous said...

Thestalos was used for simple card advantage. Mobius and Zaborg have specific targets. People ran Pulling the Rugs, Bottomless Trap Holes and, other chainable Traps, so Mobius wouldn't much of a help. Zaborg became a nuisance when it's only monster (which happens very often). Soul Exchange handles monster removal already.

GQ said...

Shining Misses the Timing. Thats confirmed, if its not then you'll see Shining OTK ... ALOt MORE.

Exiro said...

Thestalos was run these days because 2400 was the big ATK line. If there was a threat and you had no Raiza/Soul Exchange, at least you could suicide run into it. It doesn't work like that anymore.