FPP: YCS Miami | United Gosus

Five Point Preview: YCS Miami

On January 18, 2013 by Kyle Schrader

Photo Credit: Kazuki Takahashi

1. Fire King

Fire King is a new deck which will debut at YCS Miami, and its boss monster, “Fire King High Avatar Garunix,” is everything “Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys” wishes it was and more. A recurring “Heavy Storm” has its perks, but with its subpar stats, the amount of trapless decks and copies of “Abyss-sphere” in this format, Nepthys is far from ideal. Garunix, however, has great stats and clears the field when it comes back on the NEXT Standby Phase after it was popped by a card effect. However, unlike “Black Rose Dragon,” Garunix sticks around for more fun.

Next up in the Fire King line-up is “Five King Avatar Barong,” “Onslaught of the Fire Kings,” and “Circle of the Fire Kings.” Barong has great stats for a Level 4, and snags Garunix or one of the Fire King spells on the next Standby Phase, if it is popped by a card effect. Onslaught might as well read, “Special Summon Garunix or Barong from your deck, then giggle,” and while the Quick-Play Circle trades a FIRE monster in play, for a FIRE monster in the grave, it generally reads about the same as Onslaught.

Those four cards seem rather intimidating, but when you consider Barong’s 200 DEF, several other powerful cards come to mind, such as “Rekindling,” “Flamvell Firedog,” and “Flamvell Magician.” This opens up the deck to a new levels of aggression, explosiveness, and enables it follow the trend of Agents and Mermails which allows for Synchro access. This is a deck that can easily produce instant spot removal with Scrap Dragon and Dire Wolf, and maximize those outputs due to its ability to float. Moreover, this deck can easily borrow the more powerful of the Fire Fist cards in “Fire Formation – Tenki,” “Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Bear,” and “Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Tiger King.” As a final note on the upsides of Fire King, all of the cards come in a Structure Deck making this deck extremely cheap to run.

Fire King is by no means perfect, despite all of these strengths, the deck has several downfalls. These downfalls mainly revolve around it being graveyard-oriented and its lack of a Premier track record. Explosive, big monster, grave-oriented decks are nothing new this format, and people will have to change little in their Main and/or Side Decks to deal with Fire King. The deck is very weak to popular cards like Macro, “Dimensional Fissure,” “Soul Drain,” “Abyss Dweller,” “Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer,” “Soul Release,” “The Transmigration Prophecy,” and even “D.D. Crow.” This can be very off-putting, but also off-putting is the risk involved in playing a deck with no Premier track record and no standardized build. However, this risk is not without reward as it creates the ever enticing window for innovation and the always important surprise factor.

With all of that in mind, whether you are considering playing it or pondering how to play against it, it is important to take a look at how Fire King stacks up against the competition with its estimated win-percentage: