Arbalest's Big Crossbow

So a little over two weeks ago a friend of mine gifted me the game Don't Starve Together so that more people in our friend group could play a co-op game every now and then. It has been a huge learning experience, and I wouldn't consider myself to be remotely good even after I managed to take down a Bearger (scary, quit running at me plz) in my solo world. Still, it's a fun game and I'm looking forward to exploring more of what it has to offer.

Tagforce 1 #24: Ivan

Ivan can be found hanging out at the Harbor before class. When you talk to him, he will mention taking a night stroll that has him pass by the lighthouse there, showing that he really likes this place. Unfortunately you cannot find him taking this stroll, which would have been really cool if you could have. Instead, he does mention seeing two figures standing near the lighthouse and you can find those people during nighttime. It's Zane and Alexis. It is neat that Ivan will point out that they hang out by the lighthouse, EXCEPPPPPPT... the game tells you this on its own. When you go to the map, the game tells you where all of the "major" characters are, including Zane and Alexis. This ultimately makes Ivan's line of dialogue useless in a mechanical sense. This would've been really good chatter if it weren't for the game spoiling it.

If you wanna find Ivan during the afternoon, you will have to check the Duel Field. Due to the vagueness of the game, I'm not entirely sure if Ivan is there to practice dueling or just to spectate. Given the state of his deck, I imagine that it's more of the latter. Either way, he is interested in getting better at Yugioh, he just has a lot of work set out for him. He is always accompanied by his friend Terence. Well, except during 7:00 PM where Terence leaves him for food for an hour, the jerk. That's right, there's another friendship pair that never interacts with one another! At least they team up for tag duels, but I still wanna see them talk to each other and maybe become boyfriends or something.

Ivan surprisingly has a bit of character to him. It isn't much but when you've set the bar on the ground even a little bit of character detail will be neat. He wants to become good at Yugioh but he's just so bad at being good that it's a tougher challenge for him than for most. His heart is in the right place but his brain is in the trash can.

Ivan's deck of choice is Fairies. Wait, no, sorry, that's incorrect. This is a deck of fairy-like monsters that may or may not actually be Fairies. There are more Plants in his deck than Fairies. He runs all four of the Attribute Spirit monsters that existed at the time (Aqua Spirit, Garuda, Spirit of Flames, and The Rock Spirit) as well as monsters that can fuel their summon requirements. This lets him Tribute Summon monsters more easily as well as giving him some battle position-changing shenanigans (along with Prickle Fairy). And while he can make good use of changing your monsters' battle positions occasionally, his Tribute Summonable monsters are just awful. Fairy King Truesdale is cool as hell and is amazing in Duelist of the Roses, but unfortunately that doesn't carry over to the regular game. The rest range from being equivalent to his Level 4 monsters to being actually worse. The rest of his deck doesn't really do anything of note. He's got Raging Flame Sprite which can be a dangerous card if he can protect it, but he doesn't have any way to actually do so. He can equip his Fairy's Gift with Elf's Light and it'll still be bad. He has not one, but three Spirits of the Pot of Greed so he can draw a card if you play Pot of Greed, which admittedly is a card you should be running in every deck but in no situation does he actually put this monster in Attack Position for its effect to go off. Wait, it gives the person playing Pot of Greed an extra card, and since he doesn't even run it, this means that he runs three copies of a card that actively helps his opponent on the rare occasion that it's ever set up properly. No wonder why he's bad at the game, holy shit.

This is one of those decks that I would just start over from scratch on. This idea is too far gone from any semblance of a functional deck.

So I just hastily threw together a Fairy deck. Its main focus is to Ritual Summon Shinato, King of a Higher Plane, though it also packs some power via the Majestic Mech cards and Mudora. It also could make good use of Last Will, which is a busted card and can tutor up Mudora, D.D. Warrior Lady, or even an emergency Marshmallon. I haven't really tested out the deck much but even by looking at it it's going to be significantly better than whatever the fuck deck Ivan runs. Like, I'm not too sure about running Agent Venus+Shine Balls at any point before the 2011 Agent Meta where Venus suddenly became incredibly powerful. I'm also not too sure if I should be running Goryu at all.

Score: 5/10

So that's it on this Slifer Red whose fatal flaw was to build a deck around an archetype that wasn't officially certified by Konami as being a real archetype. The next entry will be an Obelisk Blue student who doesn't make this mistake. He runs an actual archetype!

God damn mother of fuck it is too fucking hot and it's gonna be too fucking hot for the next 3-4 months. The sun is a fucking bitch and I will see it burn.

Tagforce 1 #23: Hiro

Bonnie Tyler, come collect your mans. You'll find him at the Slifer Red dorm in the morning or hanging out in the shop during the evening. This makes him an important character to farm in the early game as you can just duel him a bajillion times and buy as many packs as you want in the shop. Unless you wanna farm Giry instead. If you wanna do this in the morning, then Aite is your guy. However, they both stop being useful once you craft a deck that you can confidently defeat Obelisk Blue students with.

When conversing with him, he references a minor plot point in the show, talking about rumors of something being buried under the island. I actually don't remember what that thing is, maybe it had to do with the Shadow Riders? Hiro thinks that whatever it is must be worth a fortune.

The one thing he definitely did is steal something, I'm sure of it.

To headcanon a personality for the guy since he doesn't have one:

Ok no, he's not a greedy businessman CEO president executive or whatever. But he is into dueling mostly for the money. Maybe he needs it, maybe he just wants it. Given his deck choice, maybe he leans more towards the latter, since he uses a lot of cards that a certain someone else used in the DM show.

First I would like to give a huge shoutout to the Yugioh Wikia for having these duelists' decklists, making it that much more convenient for me to link to every card I talk about. I'm particularly a fan of how on Hiro's page they say that he only runs 1 Gokibore, 3 Korogashi, 2 Steelcages, and no Shallow Grave. This game's been out for about a decade and a half now, get your shit together.

Hiro's deck is built around Parasite Paracide and its ability to turn all of your opponent's monsters into Insects. I said it before, but there are a LOT of Insect decks in this game. He can increase the odds of his Parasite making it into your deck using cards like Book of Taiyou, Desert Sunlight, the Steelcage, and Waboku. Then he can force you to draw it using the Jade Insect Whistle. And after all of that, he either gets to prevent you from attacking with Insect Barrier or nuke the board with the Aerosol. Gokipon helps him find his little guy faster. And then he threw in a bunch of pointless bullshit. Giant Flea makes a tiny bit of sense since you get to search it with Gokipon, but it's not that good. The other vanillas do not belong here at all. Even if he resolves both of his Token-making cards, Parasitic Ticky only gets 2000 ATK, and there's a huge chance that the second card is gonna Tribute a Token. And then there's Cockroach Knight, a card designed to make anyone who uses it lose the duel the moment is gets put in the GY. The only good play that this deck has is to get the Parasite onto your opponent's field and then throw down an Insect Barrier so you can't ever attack.

Like many other Slifer Red students, Hiro's deck teaches the player a lesson in deckbuilding. For Hiro, there are actually two lessons to learn here. The first is that combos can be difficult to pull off, and if you don't have all the cards you need then those combo pieces can be useless. Hiro tries to circumvent this problem by running a ton of cards to get his Paracide flipped, but Book of Taiyou and Desert Sunlight are almost entirely worthless if he doesn't have that card. On the flip side, if he drew the Paracide but no way to flip or protect it, then it's just gonna die almost as easily as that Korogashi. The second lesson to learn here is that if you are going to build your deck around a certain card or combo, it needs to actually be good enough to win the game with. In order to get Parasite Paracide to do its thing, you need

• The Paracide itself
• A card to either flip it or to protect it long enough to Flip Summon
• Jade Insect Whistle or RNGesus on your side

After you have all of this, only then will you get the reward of turning your opponent's monsters into Insects and 1000 damage. You even give them a free monster to use as Tribute fodder. Turning your opponent's monsters into Insects also doesn't do anything unless you have even more cards to interact with them. Instead of jumping through all of those hoops just to do this, you can instead play DNA Surgery. Really, that's it. Just play that and you get the most important benefit of Parasite Paracide. It's that easy. This one card obsoletes Hiro's entire deck.

I don't really like this deck. The Paracide is so weak but having only 3 DNA Surgeries is too inconsistent. Cards like Breaker and D.D. Warrior Lady are great because you don't have to run Insects in this deck. I still ran Gokipon and Howling Insect to try to get the Paracide faster, but you could take them all out for a Magical Merchant instead (which is also searchable by Gokipon wtf). I'm working on one myself, but haven't really made a satisfactory build for that either. Insect Princess is an actual win condition for this deck as she is a walking, talking, growing Final Attack Orders. I could have tried to make room for Pinch Hopper, Saber Beetle, and Doom Dozer. All the more reason to have gotten rid of the Aerosol since it would wreck your field too. Probably only run 1 Paracide since I can search it, AS WELL AS searching for its searcher.

Score: 3/10

The next character I would review is a teacher, who like the previous teacher I will have to skip as I haven't unlocked his decklist yet. It's a bit hard to find opportunities to duel most of the teachers in the first part of the game. So instead I'm gonna talk about another Slifer Red whose deck is... well, a masterpiece in wtf.

It's about that time that I crawl back to this forum then make exactly one post before I run off and

Tagforce 1 #22: Hide

Sometimes I feel like a broken record when I say that some of the students spend time at their respective dorms, but guess what this guy does in the morning? Yep. It's something that makes a lot of sense, but it just doesn't really say anything about the students. Fortunately, we do get a good glimpse into Hide's character, as well as how the school functions, by where he is in the afternoons. After school, he volunteers to watch over the classroom alongside Dean and another Obelisk Blue student. A line from Alexis while she's in the classroom suggests that the classroom is used for detention after school lets out, but some students may be there trying to study. This means that Hide also spends a lot of time tutoring Slifer Reds and Ra Yellows, much more than the other Obelisk Blue guy given that dude's personality.

Oh, so that's why his name is Hide.

Hide is the kind of person who will work his ass off to climb to the top of the ranks, but he has to put in the effort in or else it isn't a real accomplishment. His sandwich refusal line says that he only eats sandwiches that he drawn himself, and I really like how such an unimportant line works to further establish his character. He is one of those people who would hold himself to a higher standard than he holds everyone else, which, honestly, same.

Of course, since he isn't the protagonist of a Yugioh show, Hide isn't the best duelist around, which is something he's jealous about. As shown above, he thinks that Bastion is a posh little showoff. If the two dueled, my money would be on Hide. His deck has a better matchup against Bastion, at least against Bastion's EARTH deck. If you're in Hide's way as he climbs to the top, he will take you down.

One part of this game that I don't really talk about is that after beating certain duelists 10 times, they will give you a card. I've neglected this because 99% of the time it's just some completely random shit irrelevant card. Also, the Wiki only has info on some of the cards given to you. Hide is the exception here. Instead of a trashy vanilla of some kind, Hide instead gives you RAIGEKI. A card that has been banned for about two years by the time this game came out. I just love the sheer audacity he has in doing this. Nobody else does this, except for Alexis's friend Jasmine who gives you Harpie's Feather Duster.

Hide runs an utterly vicious Skill Drain deck. The idea is to pay LP with Skill Drain or Solemn Judgment, then boost your monsters with Megamorph to deal a massive amount of damage quickly. Which his deck's name cleverly alludes to! Speaking of cool synergies, there's also Goblin Elite Attack Force, which has enough DEF so that the opponent has to run into Bottomless Trap Hole if they want to attack it. Fusilier Dragon is an incredibly versatile card, which is something that this game makes heavy use of. This is only the first of three unique ways in which the AI will use that card. Here, Hide uses it with Skill Drain to effectively summon a 2800 beater without Tribute.

Now for the downsides. I've brought it up before, but the AI refuses to use Solemn Judgment unless they have less than 2500 LP, which hampers the Megamorph play. He also is too cautious whenever he doesn't have Skill Drain out. Without it, you can play monsters in Defense and the only monsters he will attack with are Chainsaw Insect and Fusilier. He will still go for direct attacks and attacks against monsters in Attack position. Even with Skill Drain out, I've noticed him being a bit too unwilling to attack at times. Despite these AI flaws, he is still one of the tougher Obelisk Blues to go up against. It's just that if the AI knew how to play his deck, he would be the very best.

When it comes to editing his deck, I actually think that this build is nearly perfect. The only questionable choice is the Ultimate Obedient Fiend, which he can't play effectively without discarding it with Card Destruction. I would change that out for Book of Moon.

Score: 10/10

In conclusion, Hide is best boi. He has a great character for a generic duelist, his deck meshes together impressively, and he is a force to be reckoned with. They really knocked it out of the park with him.

Made myself some sandwiches before starting up this post. Ham, Muenster cheese, with a bunch of spices that may or may not go on sandwiches. Mmm.

Tagforce 1 #21: Hayden

As you can tell from my previous entry, you can find this guy in the Slifer Red Dorm's cafeteria in the mornings. That's when breakfast is served, right? For normal people? And when class is through for the day, he comes back for whatever meal people eat in the late afternoon. If you thought Chumley was the hungriest person in the school, you would be wrong. Chumley doesn't live in the cafeteria, as much as he may want to, but Hayden spends as much time as he possibly can in this very room.

Help the guy out, will you! Give him a sandwi-

Of course. You can't give sandwiches to any of the generic duelists in this game, and the eternally hungry guy is no exception. Just day 195 of ABC wishing he was able to bond with these duelists more than not at all. Oh well, future Tagforce games will let me, even if a little bit,

To avoid having Hayden be nothing more than a major disappointment whose entire sliver of character mocks the game's inability to let you befriend these generic duelists, it's headcanon time, babey! Hayden has an eating disorder, but is trying to overcome it. He only eats during breakfast and dinner, but tries to control himself. The rest of the time he spends in the cafeteria isn't helping him out though, the smells and the environment just making him hungrier. That's why he doesn't accept your sandwiches.

Hayden uses a unique hybrid Ninja-Insect deck that aims to get Ultimate Insect LV5 (or perhaps even 7) into play early by using cards like Insect Imitation or Ninjitsu Art of Transformation. While that is his strongest play, he also can put Fuhma Shuriken on Sasuke (not the guy from Naruto) for a 2500 ATK monster that insta-kills face-up Defense monsters. He can also banish his Scout Planes with Strike Ninja to get them back on the field, but this is a teaching moment from the game. This combo may look cool, but the Scout Plane does nothing for the deck. He could possibly Tribute Summon an Ultimate Insect, but that's it, and he has better ways of getting those monsters into play. You shouldn't run combos just because you can, you gotta make sure you can benefit from them. Lady Ninja Yae is also practically a vanilla here because of how few WIND monsters he runs, and the ones he does run he kinda wants to keep. Then there's the list of Transformation targets to choose from. While I think Ultimate Insect is one of the better LV chains in the game, perhaps the 2nd or 3rd best in Tagforce 1, it's also one that really wants to evolve into LV7 by their own effects. So while cheating LV5 into play and protecting it for a turn is fine, using the Ninjitsu Art on LV7 just gives you a 2600 vanilla.

Also, new headcanon: Hayden can't take your sandwiches because he's on a strict sports diet or something. Except for him, it's the "ninja diet." I am pretty sure I just made that up but it could totally exist in anime. Hayden will attack and dethrone Naruto.

This was just a quick rebuild of this deck around some better Transformation targets. This deck has two primary targets for it: Green Baboon for the ability to come back if a Beast is destroyed, and Big Koala which not only is a 2700 beater but a Fusion Material for Master of Oz. You can also search up Des Kangaroo with Transformation if you wanna, and you can even do that with the weak little Level 1 Ninjas too! I didn't test this yet, so I don't know if this deck needs more Beasts, and if so, which ones. I could totally see myself swapping out The Warrior Returning Alive and maybe a Crimson Ninja for Nimble Momonga if I had that card.

There just aren't that many good Transformation targets in this game, unfortunately. I can't see anything else that I'd really want to go after. Simorgh, Bird of Divinity would have been an interesting choice but it can't be SSed.

Score: 2/10

Phew, all this hard work posting is making me hungry. But don't worry, I'm in for a treat with the next character. Maybe you are too, maybe they'll just be yet another generic duelist to you.

Holy shit it's the 20th character. I've talked about 20 of these dorks. Anyways, the legend of Deron lives on, in a lesser form.

Tagforce 1 #20: Giry

Out of all of the Slifer Reds in the game, there's only three of them who get breakfast in the mornings. And Giry is one of them. Huh. So yeah, he hangs out there in the mornings, then you can find him in the Shop during the afternoons. A neat thing is that Giry will actually return to the cafeteria in the Slifer Red dorm at 7 P.M. for dinner. Dinner lasts for an hour, so he goes back to the Shop just as it closes, which is kinda weird, but Dorothy and Sadie don't seem to care if students hang out after they close up for the day. Good thing that stealing is humanly impossible.

A minor plot point in Yugioh is that the school doctor, gym teacher, and head of the Obelisk Blue Girls dorm, Fonda Fontaine, is too hot. Many of the guys there are madly in love with her. It's actually kinda weird, I'm pretty sure she's too old for them, and teacher-student relationships are almost always a huge yikes. The game references this character detail with Giry's dialogue, as well as a few lines from Syrus.

Oh yeah well I chain Royal Decree. Get rekt simp.

The reason why he acts so weirdly about Fonda is that his time at Duel Academy has left him very tense. The mysterious disappearances, the threat of the Shadow Riders, evil duel spirits, and the most dangerous of all, exams, have all taken their toll on Giry's well-being. This makes him very jumpy when he talks about anything except for that one teacher. I guess you shouldn't underestimate the power of horny, huh.

Ooooooooh, look out, the sandwich is gonna get ya!

Overall, I think Giry does a decent job at providing environmental storytelling. Not only are Duel Academy's standards high, but the island is host to a trove of dangers that would set many people on edge. And students are a bit weird about the school nurse. I think that if anything, I would want to hear him vent over why he is so tense all the time. I see these generic ass side characters and I want more from them.

Remember when I said there was another FEEEMALE deck several entries back? Here it is! Giry runs a FEEEMALE Warrior-themed Heart of the Underdog deck. Given enough time to set up a decent board and/or Cyber Jar, he can have some pretty decent monsters boosted by The A. Forces. His primary weakness is his insistence on his own take of Ladies Looking Left Tribal, preventing him from using cards like Axe Raider or Dark Blade which have better stats than cards like Kanan or Protector of the Throne. He also for some reason doesn't run the extremely good D.D. Warrior Lady at all.

If I were to remake this deck, I'd drop the FEEEMALE-only theme because why are you doing this. Buuuut, that makes deckbuilding less fun, so I'll just keep that theme. Plus I kinda already did the generic Warrior deck with Anca. Obviously put in the D.D. Warrior Lady because this dude has no removal aside from the Invaders. I'd also take out a few of the weaker monsters like Vishwar Randi or Protector or the Throne to put in Performance of Sword and her ritual spell to help him swarm the field for a bigger boost. Maybe even add Gaia Power since all of his boss monsters are EARTH. Well, the Succubus Knight is DARK but it's also just really bad. 1650 ATK for a Level 5 monster? Gross.

At this point there may not be enough of a vanilla-to-everything-else ratio to warrant running Heart of the Underdog, but at the same time, that card makes it so that if you dead draw you just keep drawing. You could probably take it out to focus more on other support cards at that point? Or keep it in for the drawing? I don't even know.

Score: 2/10

Coincidentally, the next student I will be reviewing is another member of the... Breakfast Club? Uh, he's one of the three kids who show up for breakfast like I had mentioned at the start of this post.

Actually, since I believe that person has some dialogue that I cannot get to yet, I will be skipping that person until a later point in the game. Rip Georg. Instead, I'll be writing about a basic bitch.

Tagforce 1 #19: Gillian

Well since I never draw anything ever, I'm surprised that this isn't as bad as I thought it would be. Yes, I was expecting it to be even worse.

When you talk to Jaden, Syrus, and Chumley in the introduction, they mention that you get a dorm room all to yourself, which is a bit weird given that the three of them all share a dorm, but why complain about uneven dorm arrangements when they benefit you? So after the introduction segment is through, you wake up in your room. You step outside, and immediately waiting for you is this guy. Dude's just standing by your door. "Ok," you think to yourself, "This guy must be excited to meet the new student." And that's all fine and dandy until a few days later and you notice that he's still standing there. Morning, afternoon, Gillian spends every moment waiting at your door. Since Gillian is a character who exists purely for gameplay purposes rather than a story prop, he will just stand there forever. He is there so that when you leave your room, he is the very first guy you meet. Gillian will remind you that no matter how advanced of a duelist you may become, that you should never forget the basics. His deck is also built to suit his purpose, as I will get to later on in this post. But some Slifer Reds are just tougher than others, so you gotta have an easy opponent such as Gillian right there camping out in front of your door.

He serves an important purpose for new players, but he's taken up the word 'basic' as his entire life philosophy. His sandwich rejections are basic, his lines when he loses a duel are basic, the entire dude is basic. And basic is boring. The most interesting thing about this entire dude is that he spends way too much time at your door forever.

If you're wondering why Gillian's deck has a starter deck aura, it's because he has the same exact deck as you when you start the game. This is your deck. Because of that, I'll be commenting on its functionality as a starter deck and how to improve it as such. It has a variety of tricks, but all in a limited amount. You got a little bit of monster removal, backrow removal, bouncing, stat boosts, Tribute Summons, and even protection. You also have a bunch of 1100-1200 ATK vanilla monsters. There's 12 of them, not counting Aqua Madoor as that card is there to serve as a defensive wall. This means that there is definitely a little bit of room to throw in a Fusion. My recommendation would be Huamnoid Worm Drake since Humanoid Slime is already in this deck, but the other fusion material is EARTH and would throw off the WATER theme a bit. If you wanna keep all the monsters WATER, then use Deepsea Shark instead. You could even toss in a Ritual too to introduce the player to Rituals just a little bit earlier. Crab Turtle or Fortress Whale would be great contenders for this role. It would also give the deck some more Special Summoning ability, since at the moment all you really have is the bear. And Special Summoning is a core mechanic of Yugioh! Especially now!

Him having your deck is a good choice for a few reasons. Firstly, when you're new he provides you with a fair mirror match in case the other Slifer Reds prove to be too tough for the starter deck. And there are a few out there who would cream this guy. Then when you start getting new cards, you get to use this guy to test if your deck is doing any better or worse than it was before. And finally once you find out how to make a superpowered deck that crushes everybody, you get to look back at this guy and laugh at how pathetic your deck was at the beginning.

Score: 3/10

On a side note, I really wanna make a deck based around the Orca Mega-Fortress of Darkness card, but that card just consistently underperforms. Maybe I'll figure out how to make it work, maybe it's doomed to only being good in the DM era and nothing more. Either way, the next duelist is a simp who I will be getting to in the next entry. There is no reason to skip him.

It's too cold for any of this today. What the fuck, meteorologists.

Tagforce 1 #18: Faty

You can find this person hanging out at the Ra Yellow dorm in the mornings. You know, because he's Ra Yellow and that's where they tend to be. In the afternoon he spends his time at the base of the Cliff, completely alone except for the short time that Bastion joins him. There are a few duelists in this game who insist that they're manly to an almost comical extent, and this is perhaps the first of the ones I'll be going over.

All women do is not this, steal, eat hot chip, cheat, and lie.

Another thing that he does is talk about his role model, and he thinks you should meet said role model. Who is his role model, you ask? Well, uh, he doesn't say. It's most likely either Zane or Bastion, but it could also be Jaden. Personally, I think it's Pharaoh the Cat. If I had a role model, it would be Pharaoh the Cat. And then there's his line where he rejects your sandwich.

The next time someone offers me a sandwich, I should also make karate noises at them. Maybe it will go well. Maybe I will instantly die.

I suppose I should also address the elephant in the room. That elephant being, WHAT IN THE MOTHER OF FUCK IS THIS DUDE'S NAME? In the Japanese version he's Toshihisa Furusawa, and I guess that they just translated it into a random name. As it turns out, Faty is an actual name, but it's not a very common name. I'd be fine with that if the name wasn't Faty. It sounds like we're fat-shaming someone over here.

Overall, this is a serviceable character. I wish we knew who his role model is, and that his name was... not that. But he has a few silly lines and his deck is interesting enough.

This is a vanilla fusion deck. The goal is to get Heart of the Underdog to draw up a bunch of monsters, then use Fusion Gate to put them all together. In theory, this sounds pretty good, but most of the time he just pulls fusion materials that don't end up going together, and his biggest threat tends to be his 1600 Blue-Winged Crown. And even when things go well for him, his Fusions aren't that strong either. Finally, if things do go well, he can either boost his monsters with Fusion Weapon or immunize them from Spells with Non-Spellcasting Area. But he can't do both, since Fusion Weapon is a Spell. He also cannot Fusion Summon Mavelus as he only has one of the Fusion Materials for it.

While it is pretty neat to make a deck with all of the Winged Beast Fusions in the game, there aren't any gameplay advantages to doing so. He doesn't run Icarus Attack or anything else that supports this monster type. He could take out the Tyhones for an Icarus Attack, and that would also reduce his deck size to 40 cards. He could also switch out the Curses of Anubis for copies 2 and 3, because like I said with Deloge earlier, if this card was good then you would see more people running Windstorm of Etaqua instead. He could even run Return from the Different Dimension pr the incredibly broken Dimension Fusion to get his Fusion materials back to remake some Fusions. Maybe even King of the Swamp so he gets a lot of flexibility in his Fusion summons, or Terraforming since he needs Fusion Gate in order for his deck to function at all.

I have a few Fusion decks made, but they all fit the other Fusion duelists in this game more than they do with this guy. The problem is that Winged Beasts don't really do anything yet. They got Icarus Attack, Sacred Crane, and that's pretty much it. There's also Harpies but they're still in the stage where they get screwed over by their monsters all having the same name all the time.

Score: 3/10

The next character will be someone whose decklist I haven't actually acquired yet in game. It may be possible for me to duel this guy 10 times to get it, but I can only duel him once a day (and it took me a while to find him) so I may end up doing the next post without a decklist image.

I've been testing out a few more silly deck ideas. One of which being a deck that takes advantage of the fact that King of the Swamp can be recycled with Salvage and making a deck with fusion materials that are also Salvage targets. It's surprisingly functional. as bad as it is. I might replace one of the Slifer Red fusion dork's decks with it when I get to one of them.

Tagforce 1 #17: Enzo

Enzo can be found at any time in the Forest. Morning, evening, he's there. Presumably, he's hiking, but since NPCs barely move around he ends up taking the worst hikes ever. He also is interested in the island's power station in the mornings, so if the power ever goes out, you know who to blame. As busy as he is hiking in small circles every day, he will still make time to duel you.

He also knows how to annoy Dr. Crowler. Just use a cat, and it'll make him mad. In this game, if you pet Pharaoh the Cat in the correct spot, he will follow you for the rest of the day. So you walk up to Crowler with the cat in tow... aaaaand nothing is different about Crowler's dialogue. This is such a missed opportunity for the game. There might be a certain event later on where you need to use Pharaoh or something, but annoying Crowler with the cat in regular conversation would have been great.

If that had happened, and if the Forest area was expanded well enough to allow him to take an actual hike, he would be a pretty neat character. He wants to see... uh... trees, and he is a bit of a jokester. But unfortunately he's a generic duelist and as such dropping the ball with him is mandatory.

The worst Ra Yellow deck in the game. Enzo runs a bloated Fire Princess Burn deck that also seeks to wear out the opponent by wiping out multiple monsters with Des Counterblow. Both of these work really well with a healing deck. The problem is that in Enzo's 51-card deck, he only runs one of each. If he doesn't draw Fire Princess, all he can do is stall and heal until he dies. And if you kill his one Fire Princess, it's over for him. He can stall pretty decently by setting a wall and defending it with Draining Shield or Trap Hole, or by using cards like Nimble Momonga and Numinous Healer to rack up LP. The problem with this is that he has nothing to stall into. His only win condition is his one singular Fire Princess. Oh, I suppose he could also deck out the opponent, but he barely tries to do that.

Obviously, the first thing I'd do to fix this deck is to add extra copies of Fire Princess. Then cull some cards so that his deck isn't too large; since he runs a lot of healing he can afford to have his deck contain more than 40 cards but 51 is way too many. The Blessings of the Nile, Elemental Discharge, and Dancing Fairies can go. I don't think that Skull-Mark Ladybug fits with this deck quite as well as it seems, since it's going to be very difficult to get a heal out of it while you have a Fire Princess on the field. (Nimble Momonga on the other hand thins your deck and provides more healing and stalling.) If you want, you can change out some of the Souls of the Pure for more Goblin Thieves. Some more cards you can add would be revival cards, Sangan, UFO Turtle, and some Continuous defensive cards like Astral Barrier, Messenger of Peace, or Mirror Wall. The first works with Numinous Healer and Nutrient Z, Messenger of Peace makes attacking nearly impossible for your opponent (which sounds amazing but kills your Draining Shield), and Mirror Wall gets to stay up longer due to the heals and possibly open the opponent up for a direct attack. If Enzo could get out multiple Fire Princesses and then play a few healing cards, he could be a force to be reckoned with.

Score: 4/10

Next up will be one of the game's several Fusion duelists.

4 minutes ago, radio414 said:

i don't like sand. it's coarse, and rough, and irritating... and it gets everywhere.

I'm not British but the recent drama involving their royalty is a pretty funny coincidence given that the next character I'm reviewing is this particular one.

Tagforce 1 #16: Disa

Disa makes sure that she's never late to class by arriving to the school at least two hours early. Honestly, I can't relate at all. I'm late to everything all the time. You can find her at the Main Gate during this time. After school, she heads back to the Obelisk Blue Girls Dorm to chat with her friend Lily, while being spied on by Deron. She's one of the many duelists who will give you deckbuilding tips, hers being that if you run Ritual cards, you should also run Manju of the Ten Thousand Hands as well. Then she comments on how obvious of a tip she just gave you. One thing I really liked about Andrea was that you could actually see how her tip impacted her deck. She got wrecked by Gravity Bind once, and because of that she put in extra ways of dealing with that one card. Unfortunately for Disa, she doesn't run a Ritual deck, making her own dueling tip completely unrelated to herself. There's a Slifer Red student who runs a Ritual Deck with Manju, and he'd be a perfect candidate for giving this tip. He has his own tip, but that's also irrelevant to him and it could go to someone else instead.

Anyway, this is about Disa, not a Slifer Red student who I won't even get to this year. Judging by her deck and how early she is to class, she is definitely someone who takes dueling very seriously. Other than that, she has a plain style of speaking that makes it difficult to get any sort of glimpse at her character. She exists more so that there's another difficult generic duelist for you to face.

No this is a shadow duel. I'm evil now

So, Disa runs Monarchs, and she does your typical Monarch player things. She's got the Treeborn Frogs, she can steal your monsters with Brain Control, Snatch Steal, or Soul Exchange, she even runs Last Will so she can tutor up D.,D. Warrior Lady or Exiled Force for extra removal. She also deviates from the typical Monarch build a tiny bit, by running notably more Trap Cards than others would. This creates some problems with her AI. The AI will usually set up to 2 Traps per turn; they will also refuse to use Solemn Judgment unless they have somewhere around 2500 or less LP. This means that Disa may set a Solemn and then inadvertently shut off her own Treeborn engine for most of the duel. Another thing that bothers me about her deck is that she runs only 7 Tribute Summonable monsters: 3 Mobius, 2 Zaborg, 1 Granmarg, and Jinzo. This just doesn't feel like enough, though the Pot of Avarice helps alleviate this by a lot. She's also got Card Destruction and Morphing Jar to help draw into them.

Monarchs were a popular deck that scourged the meta of Yugioh for quite a while around this time period, if I remember correctly, so trying to fix her deck into the shape of one of those decks might be a bit of a boring venture. Instead, I'm going to try to do something else: Build a Monarch Deck that has a strong backrow game.

This idea came to me when I looked at Vampiric Orchis (which is a Vampire in this game, but got its name changed because it isn't a real Vampire) and Des Dendle and making a Tribute Summon deck based around them, as Des Dendle gives you Tokens when the Orchis kills something. I threw in Lord Poison to help support the deck, and then tossed in Dandylion and Foolish Burial because Dandylion just worked really well with this idea. As you could probably tell, the Dandylion engine eventually overtook Vampiric Orchis entirely. While the Orchis was nice against some Slifer Reds I was testing against, it felt like I would have trouble getting it to work against duelists that could summon monsters with over 1700 ATK easily.

I said I didn't like how few Level 5+ monsters Disa ran... and then put in just as many in my own deck. Ok, no, I have one more boss monster than she does. That Mystical Knight of Jackal card. You can force your opponent to topdeck the monsters that it destroys, essentially putting your opponent in a lock if you can get this out and protect it. I just threw this in because it's one of the better Level 7+ Tribute Summonable monsters that worked with the deck, but it isn't too important. You could totally run Invader of Darkness or The Wicked Dreadroot or even Thestalos the Firestorm Monarch in its stead if you wanted.

If I had them, I would definitely run Snatch Steal, Creature Swap, or Enemy Controller since this deck doesn't steal the opponent's monsters at all in its current state. I don't know what I'd take out for them though.

Score: 6/10

Don't think that we haven't stopped plowing through all of the Ra Yellow students, because we definitely haven't! We reviewed two of them in a row before Disa, and we're gonna see two more of them in a row! Make sure you savor them while you can though, because after those two we won't be seeing any Ra Yellow students for a long, long time.

Did you know that this character is Raeg's favorite character in the entire game? True story. He even admitted to it.

Tagforce 1 #15: Deron

A staple of any anime, no, any media in general that features teenagers, is the horny bastard. Today, we will be talking about the horny bastard. The dude hangs out at the Obelisk Blue Girls Dorm 24/7, never leaving. Well, except to go to class. He can't let his horniness hurt his grades, after all, or else he'll be expelled from the academy and will never be able to see a girl ever again. He is busy with the daunting task of looking for girls, at the girls dorm, a task that he plans to accomplish by walking around in the area like the rest of the NPCs. He could see plenty of girls if he used his eyes, it's not like they're hiding from the creep or anything. But then he might see Vyga! And Vyga isn't a girl! Oh no!

If you wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, he does say that he's looking for female duel spirits, not just girls. Regular conversation has him asking you if you're more horny for the Dark Magician Girl or Injection Fairy Lily. While he may be more interested in card spirits than actual girls, he's still really horny for girls of all stripes. Girls wear stripes, right?

He will only reluctantly duel you on the condition that you don't waste too much of his time, and he is vocal about how he would be much more willing to do so if you were a girl.

And if you defeat him, he complains that he lost to a guy.

Every bit of dialogue he has is about how horny is he for girls. He even turns down your sandwich offer because you're not a girl - Deron may reluctantly give up his search for female duel spirits to go to class but he draws the line at eating food that isn't from a girl. He would probably starve to death if Sadie and Dorothy at the shop were guys.

My thoughts on Deron is that he's just a worse Colin. The Anti-Colin. Colin at least warns you about adding card crushes to your deck (and then hilariously sidesteps his own advice), whereas Deron's entire life revolves around girls. He breathes and eats just for the sake of girls. Plus, with the limited interactions with the NPCs, nobody reacts to him being the most obvious creep ever to exist. Nobody runs him into the  sea for acting this way. He's just there because someone decided it was really necessary to add a horny bastard to the roster of generic duelists. Maybe if he cared exclusively about female card spirits, and is just mistaken for a horny bastard, that would be kinda funny. Especially if he doesn't even like real girls at all. But nope, he's just a horny bastard.

These near-highlander decks are such a pain. Anyway, Deron's deck is what happens when you take both of Colin's decks and mash them together. It's disgusting. He runs Charmers, Princesses, and the one Doriado because look she's a girl. And as it turns out, he likes both Dark Magician Girl and Injection Fairy Lily. There's not much I can say about this deck that I haven't already said for Colin, except for an emphasis on why would you build this. Well, aside from the obvious answer. Like, he could've just had Colin's second deck. The Wiki describes his deck as being more aggressive than Colin's, except that's only barely true. He focuses a bit more on his singular copies of the Familiar-Possessed Charmers but he still only has one copy of each, and yeah he can use Magician's Circle to summon DMG but, again, one copy.

If he wanted to make an aggressive deck full of girls, he could make Amazonesses. I don't really know all the cards they have in this game or if someone else in game uses them, but it's probably the only other functional female deck he could possibly make that isn't taken by Colin already. And then there's another female-centric deck that someone else is using, just haven't gotten to that character yet. Aggressive Spellcasters is out of the question since I know for sure that someone else runs that deck. He could also make a Doriado deck since I didn't actually suggest focusing on that card in the Colin entry. The downside to that is that it would involve running Manju and Senju and they aren't distinctly girls, oh no. Also there's a dude on the card art of Fuh-Rin-Ka-Zan, can't have that now can we.

Score: 1.5/10

After dealing with this creep, it's only naturally fitting that the next duelist that I will be covering in this thread is a queen. "If she breathes," and all that.

Did the translation patch rename all the places places of origin or is everyone in post-apocalyptic Germany from the U.S.? COINCIDENTALLY, Rammstein's Amerika was also released in 2004

Anyways, I loved reading this!

I regret to inform you that I have found another website. It takes, uh, how do I describe it, conversations that you might've seen in memes or something, but you can have the characters you want play them out. There's only a few prompts depending on the number of characters you wanna get involved. If you're curious, here it is.

Some of the ones I got:

I'm trying to get this entry out early because Geneforge 1 - Mutagen, the remake of the first Geneforge, is finally coming out on the 24th. I am very excited to play that game, and might end up neglecting this little blog for some time because of it.

Tagforce 1 #14: Deloge

The Ra Yellow dorm is understandably the best place to find students of that dorm. That's where you can find this guy before school, talking about how much he doesn't like the Ante rule. With the Ante rule, whoever loses in a duel has to give the winner their best card. Deloge thinks this is stupid, and he is correct. Even if it were in effect, he wouldn't even use it. Fortunately you don't have to deal with this rule at all in the game.

You know how sometimes there are those characters that just want to be your friend? Well, Deloge is the opposite of that. He wants to be your enemy.

Bitch, next time I'll offer you a knuckle sandwich.

After school, you can find him hanging out in the classroom. He's got detention every day, probably for trying to be everyone's rival. You, Jaden, Crowler, the cat, everyone is his rival. Ok, it's probably more likely that he's just studying after class in the classroom, but that's such a boring answer. No, he's rough and loud and he wants to fight. Shut up. When you challenge him to a duel, he warns you that he doesn't stop until his opponent surrenders, which, um, is kind of how card games work. You don't stop in the middle and call it a draw, unless you're on Duelingbook, then I guess people will try to pull that stunt on you. If you manage to beat him, he will blame his defeat on topdecking regardless of how decisive your victory is. He's lucky that I can't steal all his cards with the Ante rule, or else he won't have a top to his deck.

IMO, Deloge is the third best Ra Yellow character, and during Tag Duel Sundays he teams up with the #1 player in that spot. I love the rival tension he has with the player for no reason. He isn't a jerkass, he's just your rival. This one random generic student is your rival. Forget the characters from the show, Deloge is the true rival character. He's also got a creative deck. Speaking of which, here it is!

Deloge runs a FIRE deck that goes all out on taking advantage of Tenkabito Shien's effect. Tenkabito Shien is immune to Trap Cards, so he can survive TT and Needle Ceiling. while ignoring cards such as Gravity Bind and Begone, Knave!. His deck does have some flaws though, first of which being Ultimate Obedient Fiend being in a deck it does not belong in once again. He also goes a little bit overboard on some of these Traps that work well with Tenkabito. D.D. Trap Hole is still going to be worse than Nobleman of Crossout, and if a one-sided Curse of Anubis was good you would have seen people running Windstorm of Etaqua much more often. Then there's The Warrior Returning Alive, which doesn't have any targets in this deck. It's unplayable here. He also has only one answer for Jinzo and Royal Decree, both of which destroy his deck.

I think in order to improve his deck, he would need to remove the TWRAs, the Fiend, the Blind Destructions, Curses of Anubis, D.D. Trap Holes, and Two-Pronged Attack. I'm also not interested in The Thing in the Crater. Masked Dragon is also not enticing since he has no need to fill his GY with FIRE monsters, but at the same time his monster count is already pretty low. He can run Mask of Darkness to get his Traps back. Bottomless Trap Hole and/or Sakuretsu Armor for being great cards that he can even recycle with the Mask. Book of Moon because it's an incredible card with that tiny bit of extra synergy with Needle Ceiling. Furthermore, even with the Molten Destruction and Little Chimera, his Tenkabito Shien tends to sit around 2000-2500 ATK, which is not great. I think he would benefit a lot from adding United We Stand and Mage Power to further boost his Tenkabito. Maybe even Iron Blacksmith Kotetsu to help search those cards (and Premature). It even benefits from the FIRE boosts. Finally, he should look into running Pot of Avarice, Dark Hole, and perhaps even Double Snare as narrow as it is so that he doesn't auto-lose to Jinzo/Royal Decree.

I wanted to find a way to fit Elemental HERO Wildheart into his deck as it has the same effect, but that can't really happen since his deck focuses heavily on the FIRE attribute. Plus, if you're running Wildheart you're probably just running HEROes more than you are running a Trap Immunity deck thingy. Begone, Knave! isn't as useful if you Fusion Summon.

Score: 8/10

That's all I have to say about Deloge... or at least I think it is. I tried to go to bed like 5 hours ago and couldn't, so I'm half-groggy yet unable to sleep. The next duelist is another Ra Yellow (woah 2 of those in a row) and is basically an evil form of a character we've already seen on here. It might be a while before I get to him though.

NECRO!!!!!!!ing this thread with some updates. Mostly new additions, but with one card (previously known as Vanguard) nerfed a bit because I didn't like how easily it could just sit at 2800 DEF with Snipers.

Here is the one change:

Crusolar Vanguard
Warrior/LIGHT/Level 4/ATK 1300/DEF 1800
If your opponent declares a direct attack while you control a "Crusolar" Continuous Spell: You can Special Summon this card from your hand, and if you do, change the attack target to this card. If this card inflicts Battle Damage to your opponent: You can target 1 card you control; shuffle it into your Deck, and if you do, place 1 "Crusolar" monster from your hand, Deck, or GY in your Spell & Trap Card Zone as a Continuous Spell.

Crusolar Rethresher
Fish/LIGHT/Level 4/ATK 1300/DEF 1800
If your opponent declares a direct attack while you control a "Crusolar" Continuous Spell: You can Special Summon this card from your hand, and if you do, change the attack target to this card. If this card inflicts Battle Damage to your opponent: You can target 1 card you control; shuffle it into your Deck, and if you do, place 1 "Crusolar" monster from your hand, Deck, or GY in your Spell & Trap Card Zone as a Continuous Spell. Each effect of "Crusolar Rethresher" can only be activated once per turn.

Every card has a generic name and then there's Punny McGee over here.

-------------------------------------

New cards:

Crusolar Conjurer
Spellcaster/LIGHT/Level 4/ATK 1000/DEF 900
If this card is Normal or Special Summoned: You can Special Summon 1 "Crusolar Drake Token" (Wyrm/LIGHT/Level 4/ATK 1800/DEF 1500), and if you do, place this card in your Spell & Trap Card Zone as a Continuous Spell. If a "Crusolar" monster(s) is sent from your field to the GY: You can send this Continuous Spell to the GY, then target 1 of those cards; place it in your Spell & Trap Card Zone as a Continuous Spell, but its effects are negated until the end of the turn.

Crusolar Magus
Spellcaster/LIGHT/Level 4/ATK 1200/DEF 1000
If this card is Normal or Special Summoned: You can target 1 "Crusolar" monster in your Spell & Trap Card Zone; Special Summon it. This effect of "Crusolar Magus" can only be activated once per turn. During the Damage Step, if this card attacks an opponent's monster: You can send 1 "Crusolar" Continuous Spell you control to the GY; destroy the opponent's monster.

Crusolar Dual Advance
Normal Spell
Reveal 1 "Crusolar" monster in your hand; add 1 "Crusolar" monster with the same Type to your Deck to your hand, then place the revealed card in your Spell & Trap Card Zone as a Continuous Spell.

Crusolar Skycavalry
Xyz/Fairy/LIGHT/Rank 4/ATK 2000/DEF 1700
2 Level 4 monsters
Once per turn, when your opponent activates a card effect during the Battle Phase: You can detach 1 Xyz Material from this card; negate the activation, and if you do, destroy that card. During your opponent's Main Phase: You can detach 1 Xyz Material from this card; place this card in your Spell & Trap Card Zone as a Continuous Spell with the following effect:
* Decrease the ATK/DEF of all monsters your opponent controls by 500.

Conjurer lets you start filling up your backrow while still having a decent monster on the field so you aren't wide open. Magus offers you effect destruction, not similar to how it did in the original archetype, but it also gives you a way to Xyz Summon as well. That's because this archetype finally has an Extra Deck monster. Skycavalry hoses dangerous BP effects and then can toss itself onto your backrow for a small stat debuff. Idk how useful that part would be but it is spell-speed 2 so that's gotta be nice for something. Dual Advance helps you set up your backrow if you don't open with the Field Spell, and I suppose it makes it easier to use the (about to be nerfed) Balance skill for the deck as well. It's because of this card that Rethresher is a Fish now btw. It felt like it would get a little too annoying with Sniper+old Vanguard.

The surprise is that this next installment is only one week later (and a day), rather than two or three.

Tagforce 1 #13: Dean

Who knew that you would find teachers at an academy? Well, more than just Dr. Crowler. Dean is one of the probably six generic teachers in this game, and one of the two that you can converse with normally, at least in the first part. Dean spends his time in the place you would expect all teachers to spend their every waking moment: inside the classroom. No home to call his own or anything, this guy lives in the classroom.

Dean is stationary for a good reason, though. He serves a practical purpose. Each day you have a chance of receiving a random email from Chancellor Shepherd, saying that you've won the lottery. Or, to put it more accurately to what the game calls it: You were randomly selected as a Recommended Duelist. So you won the lottery but in a less gambley way. If you speak to him on the day you win the lottery, you gain a whopping 1,000 DP, which is anywhere between 2.5-4.5 worth of duels depending on who you're dueling. A nice bonus, but kinda small and isn't that important since you can just infinitely duel the same dude a bajillion times a day for infinite DP anyway. That feature gets removed in later Tagforce games, which makes sense but rip to my infinite DP.

Edit: I forgot about the auto-acronym thing suggesting that DP stands for Draw Phase, when in this context it's the currency you use to purchase packs. Yes, I have infinite Draw Phases, and no I will not "deck out." I refuse.

Unfortunately by being a practically useful character there is no room for Dean to have any character of his own. He's just the guy who gives you points for receiving emails. Hooray. I mean, maybe he gets annoyed by students saying they got an email when they didn't actually? That's it really.

Found the Blue player.

The teachers in this game are supposed to be among the toughest duelists you'll face, and while I don't know how meta Counter Fairies were in this format I do know that Dean's Counter Fairy Deck is built pretty decently. One thing I don't like about early-era Counter Fairies is that Voltanis the Adjudicator just simply does not work with Bountiful Artemis. It's a disaster. If you have Artemis on the field and Voltanis in the hand, after playing a Counter Trap, things will go like this:

• Bountiful Artemis's effect activate.
• Voltanis is chained.
• You tribute Artemis, Summon Voltanis.
• Artemis fails to resolve because it has to be on the field in order to draw you the card.
• Voltanis's destruction effect can't go off. You missed the timing because you were too busy failing to resolve Bountiful Artemis.
• You break down in tears.

Thankfully this combo actually works in Duel Links, because damn does this fuckup fucking hurt.

Because of that, I would remove the Voltanises, and by extention, Synthetic Seraphim since that's a card that really only work with Voltanis. Since Fairies don't matter anymore, you could also replace Kelbek with Wall of Illusion for that slightly higher DEF, and also for another reason. By doing this, the deck now has a lot of LIGHT and DARK monsters, so you know what that means, right?

CHAOS SORCERER, BABEY. You kinda want more win conditions than those 3 Van'Dalgyons. Finally, I'd probably remove either the Curse of Royal or the Judgment of Anubis since idk about having more than one copy total of both of those cards.

Score: 3/10

That's all for Dean. The next duelist that I'll be covering is yet another Ra Yellow. They've been scarce and now all of a sudden they're all over the place! Also, he runs a FIRE Deck of his own. Lots of fire lately, huh.

What could possibly be a better way of warming up in this winter than to read another entry of ABC reviewing a bunch of generic NPCs, and getting to the guy who only speaks in cheesy fiery lines all the time?

Tagforce 1 #12: Dante

The Elemental Master of Fire, in case the name didn't give it away. Like the others in his group, he is always in the Dueling Arena in the mornings and the Obelisk Blue Boy's dorm during after school hours. He talks about the Volcano area, because, you know, fire. Too bad for him, he has to remain glued to his friends at all times so he can't ever visit the volcano. Unlike Brown whose character we can somewhat glimpse at despite his cheesy dialogue, there isn't really any character to Dante at all. It's just a bunch of lines reminding you that he is the Fire guy. At most, there's his line when you offer him a sandwich.

"Sorry, I can't accept your sandwich, because it doesn't make me horny." Thanks, Dante. That's your entire character now.

On the bright side, that means I can get through this part of the character analysis faster.

First of all, I would like to apologize to Celia for making fun of her deck for including a singular EARTH monster. Please accept my apology, fictional girl. I should have instead saved it for Dante, because what the actual fuck is this. He gives up on making a FIRE deck halfway through and just starts tossing in cards from the Inpachi series and a few cards that feature Kozaky in them. They have little to no synergy with one another, and he doesn't run any of them at enough copies for it to be a primary strategy for his deck. On top of that, what combos he does have are just plain shit. He can use Level Conversion Lab to make Ultimate Obedient Fiend (and no other monsters in his entire deck) easier to summon, but that card only works as a giant obstacle because he will almost always have other cards in his possession that he can't get rid of on his own. He can use The Thing in the Crater in order to float, but he only has 3 possible targets for this: Jigen Bakuden (which sucks and won't even be able to use its flip effect if summoned this way), Gaia Soul (which will just die at the end of the turn), and Guardian Ceal (needs the Bow to be on the field in order to even work). He can combo Big Burn with D.D. Dynamite, but then it makes his Blasting the Ruins unplayable and weakens Cemetary Bomb (TIL: that card's name has a typo and it was never fixed). If he ever gets Ceal out onto the field, he can equip it with Black Pendant so that when Ceal's effect goes off you take 500 damage. Hell yeah 500 damage. His only good plays are to bring out Gaia Soul or Spirit of Flames for some semi-good attack power, even if those Gaia Souls die in the End Phase. As bad as his character and deck are, I at least appreciate the presumably unintentional Dante's Inferno reference. Congratulations on accomplishing one thing.

How would I fix this guy's deck? Easy. Burn it.

I would consider my own take on a FIRE deck incomplete. I made a Baseball deck as a young child/teenager, and it included Return from the Different Dimension and Dimension Fusion so that you could banish monsters for Spirit of Flames/Inferno much more liberally, then get them back so that your Baseball Kids could be stupidly strong. Unfortunately I don't have either of those cards yet. For the sake of FIRE purity, you could remove the Exiled Force, though Sangan and Cyber Jar are both so good that I would be hesitant to remove them as well. I used to run Twinheaded Beast as well, which worked great with your Field Spells and Chimeras, but I don't want to run more than one monster that requires a Tribute Summon and I think that Thestalos is ultimately the better choice.

Score: 1/10

The next character will be a surprise.

52 minutes ago, LordCowCow said:

you're not cow here you're not supposed to do ur mom jokes smh

ur mom is cow

I had meant to make this entry on Craig at least a week ago, but I had gotten distracted by a recently released mod for Duelist of the Roses that makes everyone significantly harder, makes leveling up monsters significantly faster, and lets you actually obtain any card in the game in one form or another. So I've been busy playing the hell out of that (and I haven't even started a new playthrough for the intended experience, silly me). It's a great mod and I'm really glad to see that game get some sort of love after all of these years, even if it isn't the dream that is DotR 2. Anyways, this isn't a blog about DotR, it's about Tagforce. And right now, it's about Craig.

Tagforce 1 #11: Craig

You can find Craig at the Cliff before school, but he goes to the Volcano afterwards (hey, we were just there!) In both instances, Craig is with an Obelisk Blue student named Matthew. It's really neat to see the generic duelists have friendships, I just wish they would at the very least acknowledge each other instead of standing together at every given moment of the day. The deep juicy lore between the two is that Craig takes dueling much more seriously than his friend does, yet Matthew is the one who's in Obelisk Blue. The most logical and BORING explanation would be that Matthew was here first, but I like the idea that Matthew is just a lazy genius vs. Craig being a determined idiot. That theory would actually make Craig's deck fit perfectly to his character.

When you talk to Craig, he says that there are rumors that Zane has a brother who goes to this school. You have to talk to Syrus before even getting the chance to speak to any of the generic duelists, so, yeah, thanks for telling us what we already know, Craig. Craig wonders if this mysterious brother figure that Zane has is as good a duelist as Zane is. People call Zane "Emperor Zane" in Yugioh GX, but in Tagforce 1 the generic duelists usually talk about one thing, making Craig probably the only person who actually calls him Emperor Zane. It just makes it a lot funnier than it really is.

And speaking of goofy things that Craig does, Craig likes to say your name. Most duelists don't say your name even one time, but Craig has at least four lines where he says your name.

I-

Craig's deck is full of naming errors. I think I already mentioned that Mist Body is called "Mistobody" here, but all of the Machina cards are "Machiners" cards. You can probably see why I said that his deck reinforces the idea that Craig is a determined idiot; he has an incredible backrow lineup featuring BTH, Sakuretsu Armor, MST, Heavy Storm, both revival cards, and even Dust Tornado. Craig's backrow makes him an annoying opponent to duel against, BUT, he is still easy. His backrow is meant to buy him time to bring out his boss monster, Machiners Machina Force. On paper, this is a pretty sound archetype for what Machina cards we have so far: You summon Soldier, SS Sniper, put Mist Body on Sniper so your monsters are safe. Then get out Machina Defender and flip it up to get Commander Covington, and bam, there you go, one boss monster. But it just doesn't work. You still need to get four monsters whose stats range from bad to mediocre onto the field just to put them together for a boss monster whose only effect is that it can detach itself to put those monsters back onto the field Valkyrion-style. You even have to pay LP to attack with Machina Force. What the actual fuck, Craig.

I even copied over his deck to see just how inconsistent it is, and yes, it is terrible. You sit there and counter cards until you dead draw enough crappy Machina cards to lose. I'd fix this deck by swapping out... uh... the Gaia Powers and the Noblemen of Crossout for 3x Giant Trunade to recycle your Steel Cages/Swords/Premature while also clearing up backrow for when you go on the offensive. I also added a copy of Cyber Jar which as insanely OP as it is, it is essential if you want to bring out this shitty boss monster. Like, I could never summon Machina Force until I added Cyber Jar. The stall spells, BTH, Saku, and Widespread Ruin are great for making sure you can flip it on your turn.

If you want a Machina deck in Tagforce 1, this is probably the best you can do since the archetype in its state when this game was made is not good for anything but making Machina Force. Maybe switch some card ratios around like -1 Widespread for +1 Sakuretsu. If you want to further fix Craig's deck, just switch out the Machina cards for a monster lineup that isn't garbage.

Score: 5.5/10

After the next duelist, we will be halfway through the cycle of Elemental Masters. The other half won't show up for a long, long time.

The good ol' days of seeing people make this exact card in CC.

Also in addition to multiple copies not stacking, this doesn't work as well with multi-attackers like Cyber Twin or other multi hitters, which is a big rip. This half looks like it could fit into a future box in Duel Links as a UR card within the next year or two. On one hand, we've had Riryoku since forever and that's been fine, on the other hand it gets more versatility out of being a hand trap and by being a monster it gets extra benefits.

Give me the deck, Joseph