Lunalight Zoodiac [Deck Showcase]

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Wait
Is this a yugioh topic?
A deck showcase?
In WDA?!
WHAT IS THIS?!


I've been playing a bit of ygo lately and made a deck and decided to post it. With this, I should be able to argue about keeping "dueling" in our name for like a year or something.
The deck is Lunalight Zoodiac because Zoodiacs are stupid and Serena is best girl. Here, have some more Serena before we talk Zoodiacs

Now let's take a moment to talk about Zoodiacs



We haven't done any ygo'ing in a good while so I won't confuse you with details.
Zodiacs have a bunch of lv4 earth beast-warriors with meh effects as well as 2 meh spells and 1 meh trap.
What makes the archetype is their 4 xyz monsters.
Each one of them can be overlaid over any other single zoodiac monster, main deck monster or xyz monster, with the only restriction being that each xyz monster can be special summoned only once per turn. That means summoning any single one of the regular zoodiacs can let you cycle through all 4 of the xyz monsters, getting all their effects.
Here's an example, let's say you have in your hand a
Zoodiac Viper

Zoodiac Viper:

Just that, nothing else.
You now special summon over it a Zoodiac Tigress and over that a Zoodiac Boarbow, both from your extra deck. Their effects don't matter, they are just spare xyz materials.

Zoodiac Tigress & Boarbow:

Now you overlay over your boarbow a Zoodiac Broadbull

Zoodiac Broadbull:

Broadbull gets you a Beast-Warrior monster from your deck, with the only restriction being that it can be normal summoned/set. You detach Tigress to add the card you want. Then you overlay on it Zoodiac Drancia

Zoodiac Drancia:

Drancia can destroy a face up card by detaching an Xyz material. This is a quick effect, it can be activated during either player's turn, so with the 2 extra Xyz materials you can destroy a face-up card for your play in your turn and then you can disrupt an opposing play in your opponent's turn.
Lastly, with the effect given to the monster due to Zoodiac Viper being an Xyz material, you can attack an opposing monster to banish it (hitting a defense position monster would be optimal, your 1200 ATK means most things will kill you), and more importantly, to get rid of the remaining Drancia on your opponent's turn by battle, to take advantage of the low stats, they'd have to suicide a monster into Viper's banishing effect. Should Drancia remain on the field instead, the process can be repeated next turn.

Out of having a single Zoodiac Viper and nothing else, you have searched a card, destroyed 1-2 cards (one of them via quick effect to control a play) and potentially banished up to 2 cards by battle.
In short, what Zoodiacs give you is about 2 very cost effective  plays during the game in exchange for half your extra deck space.
Of course you don't have to commit that much, you can have just a broadbull and a drancia for 1 search and 1 destruction, you don't even have to have a zoodiac in your deck, just 2 lv4s can get you a 0 atk broadbull, then a 0 atk drancia for 2 destructions.

Made it to here? Good, with those boring top tier supercards out of the way let's YUUGO SHOKAN!


The point here is summoning Lunalight Leo Dancer, a 3500 double attacker that cannot be destroyed or targetted by card effects.

Lunalight Leo Dancer:

Now this can be a bit hard because one of the materials is a fusion monster that has to be fusion summoned using another fusion monster and we cannot substitute it, but we can still get around it with this: Lunalight Kaleido Chick

Lunalight Kaleido Chick:

With that we can both send the critical material requirement out of the way by sending it to the graveyard and getting its name (think prisma if you want, sorta, not exactly) while getting the polymerization back when we do the fusion.
To get the polymerization and help us with making back the fusion costs we have Lunalight Black Sheep

Lunalight Black Sheep:

And to round off our summon engine, getting us extra materials we have Lunalight White Rabbit, Lunalight Tiger and Luna Light Perfume

Lunalight White Rabbit, Tiger & Perfume:

Using Black Sheep and Kaleido Chick (with another monster), having White Rabbit in your graveyard or as the 3rd material and a Tiger in your Pendulum Zone is ideal as it allows you to summon another Leo Dancer next turn. A good play would go like this: Discard Black Sheep for Polymerization, activate Tiger to summon the Black Sheep from the graveyard, summon White Rabbit, Special summon Kaleido Chick from the graveyard with its effect, use Kaleido Chick's effect to send Panther Dancer from your extra deck to the graveyard and copy its name, then activate Polymerization using Black Sheep, White Rabbit and the Kaleido Chick now treated as Panther Dancer to summon your Leo Dancer, getting back White Rabbit with Black Sheep's effect and Polymerization with Kaleido Chick's effect. With White Sheep and Polymerization in hand, assuming Tiger stays in your Pendulum zone, next turn you can summon another Leo dancer.

Of course there are other ways, the silliest Leo dancer summon I've done was with Black Sheep and 2 Perfumes, no other setup required. Discard Black Sheep for Polymerization, activate Perfume no1 to summon Black Sheep, activate Perfume no1's graveyard effect, banishing it to discard Perfume no2 and search Kaleido Chick, then activate Perfume no2's graveyard effect, banishing it to discard Kaleido Chick and search White Rabbit. Normal summon White Rabbit, special summon Kaleido Chick, copy Panther Dancer and use Polymerization on Black Sheep, White Rabbit and Kaleido Chick to summon Leo Dancer, getting back Polymerization and White Rabbit. It should be noted that Tenki and Zoodiacs also help searching your combo pieces.

Enough of all that, let's move on to the deck





Yugioh Pro deck file: mediafire.com/file/443ytg16tw7bz3z/



MAIN

20 Monster

1 Luster Pendulum, the Dracoslayer
1 Brotherhood of the Fire Fist - Bear
2 Lunalight Blue Cat
1 Zoodiac Thoroughblade
3 Lunalight Kaleido Chick
3 Zoodiac Viper
3 Lunalight Tiger
3 Lunalight White Rabbit
3 Lunalight Black Sheep

17 Spell

2 Allure of Darkness
2 Polymerization
2 Pot_of_Desires
3 Luna Light Perfume
1 Upstart Goblin
2 Twin Twisters
2 Elemental Triangle of the Zoodiac
3 Fire Formation - Tenki

3 Traps

2 Solemn Strike
1 Solemn Warning

EXTRA

5 Fusion

2 Lunalight Leo Dancer
2 Lunalight Panther Dancer
1 Lunalight Cat Dancer

10 Xyz

1 Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer
1 Zoodiac Tigress
3 Zoodiac Drancia
2 Zoodiac Boarbow
3 Zoodiac Broadbull

SIDE
Matches in the anime are best of one

Now let's go to some short explanations

Luster Pendulum: You can get off the other effect of Lunalight Tiger and refresh the Pendulum effect for another use, giving you 2 extra grave summons, if you have the grave to use it.

Bear: You have 3 Tenki

2 Blue Cats: It's ok for searching, it can get itself, it's a fine option for Tiger's pendulum effect when you can't really convert off of it and the ATK boost can end games easily because of the multiple attacks the fusion monsters can do. It's not really a combo piece but it helps when you are lacking things, so I could make arguements for 0 to 3 copies. I prefer 2, if I were to change that I would probably be including less.

3 Vipers, 1 Thoroughblade: I explained what Viper does. It's pretty good for a standalone card in a small engine, so I feel that's the best to have at 3 if you have no way of abusing Zoodiac Marmorat. Iunno, I guess I'm just not that big a believer in Mormorat - Triangle Shennanigans right now. I wanted a 4th Zoodiac in for consistency and went with Thoroughblade because it's on field effect can be ok (you don't really need the second Zoodiac in hand most of the time) and the extra attack can be good for something. Given that the other 3 Zoodiac monsters protect against targetting from a different cardtype each, the 4th Zoodiac is very much a metacall. A metacall I am not making.

3 Kaleido Chicks: It Leos, iz gud. Works half the time from the hand, half from the graveyard with Rabbit or Perfume.

3 Lunalight Tigers: You don't actually Pendulum summon in this deck, it's just a spell that can be a monster, its main function is getting back Black Sheep after it was discarded so that it can be used again in a fusion for its other effect. Or you can get a cat when you don't have much going. Or you can make a fancy play where you have fusion summoned a Dancer and you use your Zoodiac Drancia to destroy the Tiger, getting a Blue Cat from the graveyard and using it to double the Dancer's attack to go for game. REMEMBER Tiger negates the effects of the monster it summons (as well as not letting it attack and destroying at the end of the turn) so Kaleido Chick cannot change its name, it's just another Lunalight when you summon her like that that.

3 White Rabbits: Makes 2 monsters out of 1 while keeping effects, simple and effective. It's what you'd be getting back with Black Sheep most of the time, since it can get back whatever else itself.

3 Black Sheep: While in the hand, can be discarded for a Polymerization from the deck or to return a Lunalight from the graveyard. When used as a fusion material it can return to the hand a Lunalight from the graveyard or even a Tiger that's face up in the extra deck! And it does not have a once per turn
clause on any effect! So good! Play 10 of them!

2 Allures of Darkness: You get cards for your Cats, your extra Chicks and your extra Rabbits, it's ok.

2 Polymerizations: You can make arguements for any number of copies (except 0 ofc). You can have less because Black Sheep searches it, and black sheep in turn can be searched by Tenki or Zoodiacs, while you won't run out as Chick returns it, and you should be using it with Chick most of the time. On the other hand you can have more because Polymerization itself is a combo piece and it could be that you can't spare a Tiger or a Perfume or a Rabbit to return the Black Sheep after discarding it.

2 Pots of Desires: I wanna be a cool edgy ygo player

3 Luna Light Perfumes: Really good, Black Sheep retrieval and fast search in the same card.

1 Upstart Goblin: It's limited so it has to be broken

2 Twin Twisters: They destroy stuff

2 Elemental Triangles of the Zoodiac Beasts: The obvious part is fetching Zoodiacs. But there are 2 less obvious parts to it. One is, the destruction effect can get off a Lunalight Tiger or Blue Cat effect. The other is that the act of normal summoning a Zoodiac to use it so that Broadbull can search a Lunalight combo piece will most likely hold back the fusion of Leo Dancer because under normal circumstances and barring Perfume shennanigans, you are going to have to normal summon either Kaleido Chick or White Rabbit. Most often Kaleido Chick as early on you wouldn't have a real grave settup other than a discarded Black Sheep. Basically,
Regular Broadbull = Lunalight search that eats your normal summon
Triangles Broadbull = Lunalight search that does not eat your normal summon
Also, you can use it again next turn, which is nice. I could see myself using 3 of those.

3 Tenki: CHEATING! CHEATING! This is cheating! There are OCG cards but 3 Tenkis even though it's limited in the OCG. That's more important than you think actually, Zoodiacs are pretty good but a bit less good with just 1 Tenki.

2 Solemn Strike: I WANNA BE A~
Solemn Warning: COOL, EDGY DUELIST~

Dancers:1 Cat is enough to my experience, going Leo Dancer isn't as hard as you think, and going Cat Dancer isn't as worth it. The 2 Panthers are for Chick to dump for Leo fusions. Alternatively, if you are low on cards, you could throw Cat for Chick to make Panther, it's still indestructable by card effects, but on the other hand it can be targetted and it's sub 3k atk. I feel like you don't need more than 2 Leo Dancers, their damage potential is high enough that even if you lose the 1st, it would be quite rare for you to lose specifically because you lack a 3rd one.

Castel: If you are going to have 1 out of them extra deck monster, might as well be this one. It's a decent out. Iunno, maybe it's gone out of style and was replaced, been out of the loop for a while.

Zoodiac Xyz numbers: It's nice to have the two extra Xyz materials for the 2 destructions from Drancia while holding on to the Viper, so there is both a Tigress and a Boarbow. However it is more often that you'd just want the one to use on your opponent's turn, so I don't have 2 of both, just one (meaning if you don't need the extra one you'll just go Viper, Boarbow, Broadbull to search and Drancia to hold for your opponent's turn). I picked Boarbow to have 2 of since you can use it to poke for 1200 if needed, as it can attack directly. At the end of the day though, it's not necessary that you hold on to Viper, so if you draw a 3rd Zoodiac you can just summon Broadbull and Drancia in defense, search and hold to destroy.




At the start, the point was fitting Zoodiac somewhere, and I am glad I was able to fit them somewhere where they are useful, even if there is sort of a meta violation. It turned out to be a pretty good deck, if you ignore the fact half the decks out there run Gameciels while you are trying to run a deck that depends on an indestructable untargettable boss monster to win.



But hey, at least when they hit your Leo Dancer with a Gameciel and they summon a Gameciel of their own, then on your next turn you can summon Leo Dancer again. Then when you are hit with the 3rd Gameciel you'll have the story to tell to people online about how you got triple Gameciel'd, so you see there are upsides to being able to throw out a second Leo Dancer in a row.

Woo, that was tiring, I remembered why I don't write these anymore. That and because nobody reads them. Also, forumotion formatting killed my family.
Looking back at the post, it should be indicative of the state of the forum that the only deck posted in ages has to be filled with the images of a cute anime girl.
Anyways, I needed an excuse to post this image as well, so happy new year

Latest Build (01-01-2017):

it almost feels like a waste seeing this article posted here since it was actually p' fun to read but holy shit this cute girl

Do they synergize that well? Can't visualize it myself. Give or take a few months/years and I'll dabble back in ygo just to catch up to the meta and see what's new.

Al-Bhed wrote:

2 Solemn Strike: I WANNA BE A~
Solemn Warning: COOL, EDGY DUELIST~

Pffffft

Have card effects gotten longer?
Upstart Goblin is limited now?
I'm sure it's a good deck and I'll try it out if I ever play Yugioh again!!!

Wait, wait! Quick comeback for the update, there is something I left out which I feel is worthy of mention.

Yeah, sorry Serena, I know, my b, anyways

So last time I kinda skipped over Zoodiac Marmorat

Zoodiac Marmorat:

I do think it is overrated, but still good, so it is a valid alternative. Here I'll tell you about some cool stuff about it.
Brace yourselves, card intricacies are coming

First of all the basics. Once per turn, the Xyz monster that has it as an Xyz material can summon another Marmorat from the hand or deck. This seems pretty cool once you think about how the xyz work, less cool once you realize you have only 4 of them to summon that way each turn, and two of them need at least 1 extra material which is usually another monster.
What this means is: I summon Marmorat, Overlay over it a Broadbull. Now I can detach the Marmorat to summon another, but if I do that Broadbull is left with no material and now I can't search with it. To fix that I overlay over Marmorat Boarbow first instead of Broadbull and then Broadbull over that, so next I can detach Boarbow to summon the second Marmorat and then the first Marmorat to search a Beast-Warrior. That means I am left with only 2 extra deck Zoodiacs I can Xyz summon: Tigress and Drancia, and Drancia is in a similar situation as Broadbull, meaning I want at least one extra Xyz material on it, or even 2. All that means I am not really getting that much by spamming Zoodiac Xyz with Marmorat's effect. It sounds good to get 1 search, 1 destruction on my turn and a Utopic Future, but then you have to keep in mind how much you could get with a single Viper instead.

(I know this is getting wordy, so I'll do my best to spam slightly relevant Serena pictures to keep this bearable)

  Now don't be discouraged! There is still a way to get something useful without setting up other things.
The problem here is that we have to depend on single overlays, we summon 1 marmorat and want to do something with it, so we want to overlay a zoodiac xyz on the single monster. If we had a second monster out we could go for other rank 4 xyz monsters, so if we somehow had out two marmorats instead of one this would be a lot better.
  We can do just that. Marmorat's effect is once per turn on the summoned Xyz monster, but that only applies to the monster that uses it. I'll explain what I mean:
You summon a Marmorat, now overlay over it a Boarbow, and over that a Tigress. Now use the effect Marmorat grants to Tigress to detach the Boarbow and summon the 2nd Marmorat. Now overlay Broadbull on the Tigress. Broadbull's materials are Tigress and Tigress's material, Marmorat. So now you have a Broadbull with a Marmorat material which has not used the effect granted by Marmorat yet. Use that effect, detaching Tigress to summon your 3rd Marmorat, and you can also detach the 1st Marmorat for your search. Now you have searched with Broadbull and have 2 Marmorats on the field, the one Tigress summoned and the one Broadbull summoned. Using those 2 you can summon a rank 4 xyz, including another Broadbull as it is a generic 2 mat rank 4 itself (there is no restriction in summoning it properly, you just can't do single overlays).
(Alternatively, you can use the Marmorat effect with the first Boarbow, overlay Tigress over Boarbow and use Tigress's effect to trade Boarbow for the Marmorat in the graveyard, then use the Marmorat effect to summon the 3rd Marmorat. In this scenario, since we are primarily concerned about the searches, it ends up doing the same, in other decks it also gives you more options)


Let's see how that works in the deck with a sample play. Here we have a mediafire link for a replay showing off a play: mediafire.com/file/w11zxdszv9rpnsk/
Below in the spoiler the play is spelled out.

Marmorat Search:

Of course you could have gotten a different rank 4 xyz instead of ff tiger, you could have searched Zoodiac Viper instead of a Lunalight and attached it with its effect to get the Viper benefit as well, you could have even summoned Utopic Future at the end. As it stands your trade-off over the viper play is 1 less destruction and no Viper benefit in exchange for 1 extra search and an on board ff - tiger. It should be noted that if with tenki you got Viper instead of Kaleido Chick to attach to Drancia, you would have also expended all your main deck Zoodiac monsters.
The trade-off is between combo settup and control.

But that's not all we can do, we can go fancier by combining the Zoodiac tricks with Lunalight Tiger. Here's an example with a hand of Lunalight Blue Cat, Elemental Triangle of the Zoodiac and any other Lunalight monster, again in replay: mediafire.com/file/4lla10acedcw20l/
and spelled out

Tri-Cat:

Now that's a pretty good result, starting with 2 3-ofs and one of over a 3rd of your deck, you got White Rabbit and Polymerization in hand, kept the face up Elemental Triangle of the Zoodiacs (and the face up Tenki), you still have a Lunalight Tiger in your Pendulum zone, your field is an FF - Tiger, a Drancia with a mat, a Broadbull without mats and a Leo Dancer. Using 2 of your Xyz you can also summon Utopic Future, so you can use your ff Tiger and Broadbull to make your board more sticky or your 2 Zoodiac Xyz to go for an OTK (you have a 3600 double attacker, a 2300 monster and Utopic Future can steal an opponent's monster for the battle phase). Also if you choose to summon Utopic Future using any of your 2 Xyz (except from Drancia and Tiger, that's just stupid, don't do it) you will have exactly 5 EARTH monsters in your graveyard in case you play Grandsoil.
Also, instead of the White Rabbit in your hand you could have had a second Lunalight Tiger in your other Pendulum zone and a Blue Cat on the field which will fetch another Lunalight in the end phase, but I'd say that's not as good since your main deck Lunalights are far from great, Blue Cat won't get you much and all double Tiger is getting you is maybe a free Castel next turn, which is nice but not as great as it looks.

Still, all of that seems pretty great. Not just that, this is not the only way to combo, assuming you can get a grave Lunalight Tiger and Perfume work pretty nice with Triangle or with Marmorat for some pretty nice conversions, so what's my problem?


Now hang on, it's not as amazing as it looks. Your defense here is really dictated by Leo Dancer which you would have either way. While you do have extra targets with your other on board Xyz, in most cases should Leo Dancer fall over, control should switch back to the opponent. I'm not saying board clears come that easily, surely making sure every Zoodiac Xyz leaves, playing around Drancia, killing FF - Tiger then removing Lunalight Tiger and Elemental Triangle then making sure that the Blue Cat you got from Tiger's effect does not turn into a Black Sheep, isn't all that easy.
But it's not that hard either and it does not pose that much of a threat, because you are still depending on the dancers, even if your other stuff stay on the board all you get for it are main deck Lunalights, which suck, and your last Zoodiac main deck monster, doing the last cycle of Xyz monsters since even by generous builds you should be at about 1 Broadbull and 1 Drancia in the extra deck. At the same time the combo itself is stopped by every single reactive fast effect in the metagame, even s/t destruction and weak on board negations.

What Marmorat basically does here is frontload your game, you get extra power on your first play but starve your smaller plays in the process. More combo, but less control.

Let's take the example of a top TCG deck, a Burning Abyss variant. In that matchup you would certainly want Viper over Marmorat as Viper would allow you to control defense position monsters without overcommiting into a response. Marmorat plays on the other hand would get hard countered by Utopic Future (steals Leo Dancer and double attacks your face) for ignoring the opponent too much.
On the other hand, in a matchup like mermails where you are trying to get to your big plays fast, a Marmorat build could prove better at killing the opponent before they kill you.

I should note though here that Marmorat can become any Zoodiac material, here is how: Normal summon Marmorat sending the material of your choice to the graveyard with its effect, then summon Zoodiac Tigress and use her effect to swap out the Marmorat material for the other Zoodiac material you sent to the graveyard. Now you have your Viper. Because of that, on a low Zoodiac count the choice becomes a much more precise point of minimaxing.

That's a bit of my view on the matter, let's post a deck and finally close this out.





mediafire.com/file/4jqs9jpb3psxrnd/

MAIN

19 Monster

3 Lunalight Blue Cat
3 Lunalight Kaleido Chick
1 Zoodiac Viper
3 Zoodiac Marmorat
3 Lunalight Tiger
3 Lunalight White Rabbit
3 Lunalight Black Sheep

18 Spell

2 Allure of Darkness
2 Polymerization
2 Pot_of_Desires
3 Luna Light Perfume
1 Upstart Goblin
2 Twin Twisters
3 Elemental Triangle of the Zoodiac
3 Fire Formation - Tenki

3 Traps

2 Solemn Strike
1 Solemn Warning

EXTRA

5 Fusion

2 Lunalight Leo Dancer
2 Lunalight Panther Dancer
1 Lunalight Cat Dancer

10 Xyz

1 Brotherhood of the Fire Fist - Tiger
1 Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer
1 Zoodiac Tigress
2 Zoodiac Drancia
1 Zoodiac Boarbow
3 Zoodiac Broadbull
1 Number F0: Utopic Future

SIDE
You could fit some Vipers here

Update #2: Alternatively you could take a middle of the road approach by swapping out in the above deck the 3rd Broadbull for a 2nd Tigress, that way you could switch the plays that matter to Viper on the go, depending on the situation. Since Marmorat can send it to the graveyard, you could also fit somewhere a Seasonal Direction to the Zoodiac to refresh some resources and deal with that issue a bit. It is a little more vulnerable to responses, and you could run out of search stream a bit faster (though Direction helps), but that may be negligible. May update further with a finalized build after fine tuning.

a bit too tld r but uh

did ygo get fun again?

Eh, I'd personally come back to it occasionally, this was one of those times and I just found a deck I wanted to talk about.

Update: So I thought I was pretty close to getting this deck right, hence the topic, but I saw a whole new world again today with a card addition, so it seems I'm not really that close to optimizing. I want to have the better deck out but I don't want to spam a forum that does not care about ygo, so I'll put a latest build at the bottom of the OP occasionally. Currently updated with today's build. Changes are small but important. It's at a state where I still feel I need to test.