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of-some-variety · 10 months

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Yugioh And The Heat Death Of The Universe: Mourning The Best Deck I've Ever Played

Chapter 1: What The Fuck Is This

Hi, hello. This was originally supposed to be a video, but my mic exploded before I could even start recording, so, I’m just posting this here. This is an edited version of the script, removing mentions of visual gags and the sorts and reformatted to better match a text post.

Let me explain a few things.

This past year, I’ve gotten back into yugioh. Like really, really back into yugioh. I liked it as a kid but never wanted to put money into it, and basically fell out of interest with it once the game hit series 5. But, last fall I decided to give it a try again. There’s the official online client, Master Duel, and I spent a lot of time with it, before eventually falling off and moving on to play the game elsewhere. But before I did I got to witness the rise and fall of the best deck in Yugioh’s history: Tearlaments

We’ll get into the specifics of what they do and why that’s good later. For now, just understand that these are some of the strongest cards ever printed. And that didn’t click for me until I actually got my hands on them. I want to talk about what I’ve realized about these cards because, for all the discussion I’ve heard about them from people in the community, I don’t think I’ve really heard people actually talk about the specific aspects I’ve noticed that I feel really pushes them over the edge. I want to try to make it as accessible as possible considering this is mostly going to be seen by my friends (hiiiiii ^_^), so lets hit some keywords, specifically about monsters:

Extra deck: a set of 15 special monsters that can always be accessed and summoned, provided you meet their conditions. The following monsters are all extra deck monsters

Fusion: A type of monster that must be summoned by a fusion effect, using specific material (ex. 1 specifically named monster + 1 type of monster)

Synchro: a type of monster that is summoned using 2 or more monsters, 1 of which is a “tuner” type monster, who’s levels all add up to the level of the monster you’re trying to summon (ex level 3 tuner+ 2 level 3 non-tuners= level 9 Synchro)

XYZ: Slapping two monsters of the same level to make a monster with Rank, with the monsters used to summon it resting under the monster to be used as fuel for their effects (ex. 2 lvl 4 monsters= a rank 4 xyz monster)

Link: Monsters that can be summoned using 2 or more pieces of non-specific material (ex. “2+ effect monsters”)

Oh and, last thing, Tearlaments, as its described here, no longer exists. The deck has been nuked into oblivion. This is a retrospective, and a memorial.

So uh, strap in, we got a trip to go on.

Chapter 2: Okay, But Who The Fuck Are These People, For Real Though?

The Tearlaments are a people of mermaids that reside on the Primeval Planet Perlereino, living under their tyrannical leader Reinoheart until the arrival of Visas Starfrost, a man scouring the universe for the lost shards of himself. As it turns out, Reinoheart is one of these shards, and he takes on a monstrous form when Visas arrives to try and defeat him. But with the help of the other Tearlaments and their leader, he’s able to defeat Reino and absorb him… then a bunch of bad shit happens that isn’t important to what we’re talking about.

In the real world, they are jpegs printed onto cardboard.

In my hands, they are tools of destruction. The guardians you find barring you from the next horizon, when you had sworn that the last was truly, the last.

In game, they’re a deck focused around two things: milling and fusion summoning. Each of the three main deck mermaids, Havnis, Scheiren and Merrli, share an effect that says that when they’re sent to the graveyard by a card effect you can perform a fusion summon using monsters in your monsters in your hand, graveyard and field, placing the cards used in this way to the bottom of the deck. Each of the mermaids also have a unique effect. Upon fulfilling certain conditions you can summon them, and then send the top three cards of your deck to the graveyard.

Merrli is the simplest to activate, all you have to do is summon her by any means and she mills 3.

If your opponent activates a monster effect on the field, Havnis can summon herself from your hand (represented by this phrase, quick effect for my friends), and then mill 3.

And lastly, if you have Scheiren and another monster in hand, you can summon Scheiren and then send the monster in hand to the graveyard to mill 3.

Reinohart, as a weird not-a-mermaid-living-with-mermaids, has neither of these effects. Rather, if he’s summoned in any way he can send any Tearlaments monster straight from your deck to the graveyard, triggering triggering the mermaid’s fusion effects. Oh, and if he’s sent to the graveyard by card effect while you have a tearlaments card in your hand you can summon him and send that card to the graveyard. Each of these effects are, thankfully, once per turn, and so are basically all the rest of the cards we’ll be talking about in this video.. So, even if you haven’t played yugioh Since Fusion was originally cool, the Tearlaments game plan should be obvious. Send as many cards from your deck to the graveyard as possible, and use our mermaids to go into powerful fusion monsters. Speaking of, the deck has three extremely powerful fusion monsters that they specifically can go into, but any fusion monster that has generic components are also fair game. We can talk about those later though. For now, lets focus on Tear.

Chapter 2.2: Mermaids+

We should open this discussion with Tearlaments Kitkallos, one of the single strongest monsters ever printed. I’m not joking. It can be fusion summoned with any Tearlaments monster and an aqua monster (which, every tear but Reinoheart is). Once per turn if this card is special summoned you can add one tearlaments card from your deck to your hand, or send it to the graveyard. So by default it’s a better Reinoheart, giving you flexibility where you otherwise wouldn’t have it. But it gets better. Kitallos lets you target one monster you control, special summon a Tear monster from hand or grave, then send that card to the graveyard. And lastly if it’s sent to the graveyard you mill 5.

This card should not exist. Its only the first of the three Tearlaments fusions, but while our other two serve as big boss monsters, Kit is a pivotal part of the deck’s comboline. Here, let me walk you through the most basic combo Tear can do, by just using Reinoheart.

So, we summon the Reinoheart, sending Merrli (you can send any of them in a pinch but Merrli’s preferable.) Activate Merli’s effect to return her and Reino to the deck and summon Kitkallos. We then activate Kit’s on summon effect to add Merrli to our hand, and follow up with Kit’s second effect to target herself, summon Merrli, then send herself to the graveyard. We can then activate Merrli and Kitkallos’ effects in sequence to mill eight cards. Eight, nearly a quarter of your deck. This combo is known by many names. That’s a lie I’ve only seen one name for it, The Yoinky Sploinky. That’s funny so we’ll be referring to it as such. In masterduel, all the mermaids are limited to 2 copies per deck instead of the standard 3, but you’re still almost guaranteed to get something good into the grave to continue your combo plays with the sheer quantity of cards Kit can send.

Tearlaments Kaleido-Heart is Reinoheart’s fucked up monster form, and serves as the deck’s first boss. He can be fusion summoned with a Reinoheart and two aqua monsters, and has two powerful effects. First, if its special summoned or an aqua monster is sent to your graveyard by card effect, you can target one card your opponent controls and shuffle it back into the deck. This is a powerful form of card removal, most things in the game aren’t resistant to getting returned to the deck, and not only can you use this to get rid of your opponent’s big boss monsters, but also to get rid of some particularly annoying floodgates they might have on field. Which is just wonderful, cuz I love fun interactive yugioh where both players are allowed to play the game.

His second effect is basically just an upgraded version of Reino’s effet; if he’s sent to the graveyard by a card effect, he can revive himself and then send a Tearlaments card from deck to grave. So he’s an incredibly sticky monster to try and contend with, who’s effect is can be activated by his revival or just doing our combos normally, and any monster his effect can’t deal with can usually just be punched over with his massive 3000 attack. He does have one downside though this little stipulation that he can’t be used as fusion material. So if your opponent can actually deal with him, its really hard to get him back into the extra deck to be summoned again.

Lastly, in terms of our bosses, we have Rulkalos, Kitkallos’ stronger form she takes on after defeating Reinoheart (or… while fighting him? Its confusing). She can be made by a Kitkallos and a second Tear monster, and has 3 effects. First, she protects her fellow aqua monsters from being destroyed by battle, which, while useful on paper, really only comes up when you’ve begun engaging in truly monkey unga bunga yugioh. Her second effect allows her to respond to your opponent activating a card that special summons a monster; you can negate the card, destroy it, then send one Tear card from your hand or field to the graveyard. Lastly, like Kaleido if she’s sent to the graveyard by a card effect she can revive herself. But she has her own little stipulation: “If this fusion summoned card”; to simplify, once a card is revived from the graveyard, it “forgets” how it was originally summoned. So, basically, her revival can only happen once, but at worst it means that you can activate her negate effect for no cost by sending herself, then reviving her for the next turn. Whew that’s all the monsters done… don’t look at the run time.

We’re not done. Not even close. The Tearlaments monsters on their own already represents an incredibly powerful gameplan, but they also have a bunch of spells and traps dedicated to supporting them, that are essential to cover

Chapter 2.5: Reverse Card Open!

So, listen. There are a good handful of Tear spell/traps I won’t be talking about. This is because while not bad, the benefits they have for the deck just aren’t better than other cards. This will mostly be based on what I play in my deck, what I’ve most commonly seen in others, and importantly off the decks people were playing when Tear was viable in the tcg. That said, we’ll kick this section off with a card that is a little nontraditional, but I think is essential in specifically master duel. All these cards will mention Visas Starfrost, because like, lore reasons, but we’ll be basically ignoring those parts of the effect. Also, each of them have two effects: an on field effect, and an effect that activates when they’re sent to the graveyard by card effect, like our mermaids. Anyway

Tearlaments Heartbeat is a quick play spellcard, which, for my friends, means it can be activated like a trap card by setting it face down on the field.. It lets you target a spell/trap on field, shuffle it back into the deck, then send a card from your hand to the graveyard. And if it’s sent by a card effect, it lets you add a tearlaments trap card from your graveyard to your hand. This card, in my opinion, is essential for Tear decks in master duel for a very particular reason. See, its, strange, uh spoiler, but I think Tearlaments is actually a pretty fun deck. But, some people don’t play yugioh to have fun. They play it to make everyone miserable, including for themself, and so suddenly they feel really threatened when a good deck comes along and dedicate their lives to devising the perfect deck list that ensures no one, nowhere gets to actually play yugioh.

They accomplish this with cards like skill drain, that negates monster effects, or maybe something more targetted at Tear like soul drain, which negates effects in the graveyard and banished zone. For these monsters, I like to play one or two copies of Heartbeat so that I don’t try to choke my opponent through the screen. Plus its pretty good to be able to add back your trap cards that you accidentally milled.

Next up is Tearlaments Scream, a continuous spell card that has two on field effects. First, if a card is summoned to either player’s field and you control a Tear monster, you get to mill 3. For free, yeah. Afterwards every monster your opponent summons loses 500 attack, just to fuck with em. And if it's sent to the graveyard you can add a Tear trap to the hand from the deck. This card is, uh, insane. If you add a scream to the kitkallos combo I mentioned earlier, suddenly you’re milling 11 cards, over a quarter of your deck. I know, three cards may not seem like a lot but trust me, you want to increase your chances of milling the mermaids as much as possible, otherwise you can’t do anything.You play 3 of this if you can (I played 2 because I don’t spend money on this game), since you also want to mill it over the course of the combo in order to add one of our trap cards to the hand.

Tearlaments Sulliek is a continuous trap card, that so long as you control a tearlaments monster you can activate. Its on field effect allows you to target an effect monster your opponent controls, permanently negate its effects then send a monster you control to the graveyard. And if its milled it’ll add a tearlaments monster to your hand from the deck. Ideally, you’ll always have the card set at the end of your turn one combo, its insane. Permanent negation isn’t something you see often, and the fact you can use it once every turn means if you can keep feeding it bodies your opponent will be forced to find an answer to it. And, its grave effect lets you either extend your combo by adding a Merrli, Schieren or Reinohart, or set you up for your opponent’s turn by adding Havnis. Now, all that said, you play one of this. Heartbeat lets you get it back if something goes wrong, and we really would rather search this through cards like scream and kitkallos than hard draw it or open with it. Also they ended up limiting this card white I was making this video which, is funny cuz this isn’t the card that breaks the deck, like its good really good well get into that later but, really funny.

Tearlaments Cryme is a counter trap card, a trap card that can only be responded to by other counter trap cards. While you control a monster, you can just, negate any card effect, and shuffle that card back into the deck. Any card in the game,, besides stuff like super polymerization that specifies that it cannot be responded to. Then you send a monster from your hand to the graveyard. And if it's milled you can add a banished tear monster back to your hand. Thiiiis is the a weird one. Objectively, its really good; its an omni negate thats really easy to get to in our hand. On the other, its graveyard effect is just mid. We don’t banish anything as a part of our strategy, so its only useful if our opponent’s banished our monsters (and we have other ways to make sure they can’t). You play a copy of this to search, and generally I would pick sulliek over it if you can only grab one. Unless, unless, you think your opponent is on board breakers, like evenly matched that can banish your whole field. Then you add cryme to protect your board.

And lastly, we have our the Tearlament Field Spell: The Primeval Planet Perlereino. When you activate this card it lets you add a tear monster from your deck to your hand. It gives every Tear and Fusion monster you control a 500 attack boost, and if a tear monster is shuffled back into the deck (aka when the mermaids fuse) you can target and destroy a card on field. I know I keep saying this, but this card is insane. It gets you whatever you’re missing. It fucks with your opponent’s board, or if you’re feeling cheeky (read: want to lose) you can pop any mermaids you have on field to get their effects off. And also, I realize that 500 attack boost may not seem like much, but that boost pushes Kaleido-Heart and Rukallos to 3500. Most deck’s strongest monster caps at 3000 flat. I would say play 30 of this if you could but, from release it was limited to 1 copy. So play this and pray.

Whew. And that’s all the Tear cards we gotta talk about! I know we haven’t even really gotten into the “why” of these cards yet, but I felt it was really important to make sure we’re all on the same page for these cards, and also to help us focus in on a more “pure” tearlament’s strategy. You see, some people are seeing success combining Tearlaments with another fusion based deck, Branded. And While I’m no stranger combining decks with Branded, I don’t really see the appeal, for a couple reasons. Still, these are builds people are encountering, so its worth mentioning. But by really just talking about the Tear cards here, I think we’ll just get an overall better look at What makes the deck so powerful. And man, just look at what we can do. Our mainline combo is super accessible, the Merrli/Kit play is unbelievably strong for us, and Rukallos and Kaleido-Heart provide powerful forms of interruption and negation, along with our spell/traps backing them up. Of course, all of that in a vacuum means absolutely nothing. In order to grasp Tearlaments’ power we need something to compare them against, and for that, I’ve chosen a very special deck

Chapter 2.78/3 Days: Funny Birdies

Floowandereeze is a deck full of funny birds. That’s it. Where Tearlaments is a deck focused on milling and fusion summoning, Floo is based on banishing and normal summoning. I’m talking about Floo for a few reasons: 1. Before Tear, it was my favorite deck in the game. Floowandereeze is a very interesting deck that has a lot of gameplay I find lacking in other decks I’ve played, which we’ll expand on later. 2. While Floo is a unique deck in its own right, it has more in common with other decks in the game than Tearlaments does, and I want to use it as a reference point that I’m personally familiar with. And 3. The deck was competitive in the same format as Tearlaments when that deck was at its strongest, tenuously holding the position of third best deck at that time, is just meant to show I’m not comparing Tear to like, garbage that has never seen play, but to another competitive meta deck (at the time of release). We’re not spending too much time here, I just want to give a basic rundown of its gameplay. Basically, the deck is divided into its level 1 winged beast combo pieces and its high level winged beast boss monsters. Each of the level 1 birds has 3 effects, two archetypal and one unique to them that activates on normal summon. They all banish themselves when they leave the field face up, and can return themselves from the banish zone to the hand if a winged beast is summoned. For their individual effects each of them has something unique, like Robina who searches level 1 winged beasts. If they’re able to successfully do the first half of their unique effect, they can then immediately normal summon another winged beast monster. This gives the deck an interesting playstyle: its combo pieces recur themselves every turn, it has access to powerful bosses like Riza the Megamonarch that returns cards to the deck and hand, and with its field spell and trap card it can normal summon, and therefore combo off, on their opponent’s turns. And look I realize that normal summons may not sound that different than special summoning, especially the way Floo does them but its big. It means Floo can fly under (ha) the radar of power cards that are meant to limit special summoning, like any of the barrier statues that lock special summons to a specific attribute, or Vanity’s Fiend that just straight bars special summoning entirely, or, y’know, Rukallos, who’s basically useless against Floo considering her effect is based on negating special summoning.

In the next section of the video, I’m gonna be talking about just what I’ve noticed that makes Tearlaments a powerhouse in a way few decks have ever been. I’ll obviously be using Floowandereeze as a comparison point, but because yugioh is a game with like, a billion cards in it and you would have to kill me before I stop going on tangents, expect me to mention a bunch more along the way. That said, lets start with.

Chapter 3.1: Cost/Effect Analysis

So a very basic idea in yugioh is separating a card’s effect from its cost. Basically if a card has a phrase like, “discard 1 card” followed by a semicolon, the discard is the cost of activating the effect, which is whatever text follows after the comma or colon. This has, historically, caused confusion, because yugioh is a bad card game. The darkworld archetype of monsters have special effects that trigger if they are discarded as a part of a card effect, but since a lot of cards discard as a part of an activation cost, they don’t get to do shit. Now some decks can utilize a card’s cost to their benefit, and it should be noted that if a card says that it just has to be sent to the graveyard its effects can be activated regardless of whether it's sent for cost of effect, but it's something you have to plan and build around. Floo can actually make pretty good use of the costs on some of their cards, particularly with “advent of adventure”, which banishes a floo monster from your hand or field to activate its effect. Paying this cost can actually help the deck in a very particular way that I’ll get into later, but I just want to establish that costs, usually, aren’t massive penalties on cards, and by playing with them in mind you can get some pretty interesting combos as a result. Tear doesn’t have to do that though, because everything in this deck sends cards to the graveyard as a part of its effect. Schieren, Cryme? Effect. Sulliek, Kitkallos? Effect. Kaleido’s send from deck? Oh baby, there’s not a cost in sight. Tearlaments is maybe the only deck I’ve seen who’s every interaction is, in some way, beneficial to them. Your opponent attempts to activate a monster effect? Well just send the Kaleido you have on field to negate it with Sulliek, then use Kaleido’s effect to return itself and send a tear monster to the graveyard, then activate his shuffle effect, and the fusion effect of whatever you sent to the graveyard. So, over the course of limiting your opponent’s gameplan, you’ve strengthened your own board, with whatever new boss monster you can fusion summon with what you’ve sent. This is not how a normal yugioh deck functions… at least, not to this extent.

Chapter 3.2: Playing on Your Opponent’s Turn:

See when you get down to it, nearly every competitive deck can manage something resembling this, it's kind of a necessity for the modern game. You have to be able to interact with your opponent on their turn, otherwise they can set up their board and kill you instantly.. Let’s look at some examples. The Branded archetype allows you to play Branded in Red, a quick play fusion spell that allows you to perform a fusion summon on your opponent’s turn, something the deck uses to summon either archetypal or generically powerful fusion monsters that act as card removal on your opponent’s board. The Mathmech combo exists practically just to facilitate plays on your opponent’s turn: the deck reliably makes monsters like i;p masquerna that lets you summon on your opponent’s turn, and the deck’s trap card, superfactorial, lets you summon a powerful boss that lets you send 3 of your opponent’s cards to the graveyard.These are powerful plays from both these decks, allowing them to summon singular, high impact boss monsters to interrupt their plays. This is what most decks are capable of… but then there’s Floo. Floo’s spells and trap cards facilitate a single normal summon on your opponent’s turn. So you summon your little bird, activate their effect… and then normal summon again. This single summon allows you to perform a full combo in the middle of your opponent’s turn, potentialy allowing you to end on any number of the big bosses the deck has at its disposal. Of course, interruption at a pivotal point in the combo could end it immediately, which would mean you couldn’t get nearly as much on board as you’d like, meaning that Floo’s plays aren’t ironclad… So Tear.

Let’s look at an example here. Let’s say you got unlucky. Your mills didn’t work out, and the only thing you have on board is a schieren, a set sulliek, and a Havnis in hand. Your opponent start’s their turn and normal summons a monster to begin their combo, activating its effect. First, you respond with Havnis, then respond to the havnis with sulliek, which lets you target and negate your opponent’s monster, and would you look at that you send schieren to the graveyard. You can use her effect to fusion summon Kit, get its search and mill 3 from Havnis’ summon, and suddenly your whole game plan is online!

It's kind of impossible to prevent Tear from getting to play on your turn if they have anything resembling a board up when they pass it back to you. Even in worst case scenarios for the deck they can usually find their way to a Rukhallos, and her negation isn’t anything to sneeze at by itself. Plus, the sheer existence of Havnis allows the deck to access the incredibly rare, incredibly silly tactics known as the turn 0 combo. If you’re going second and you happen to have Havnis in your opening hand, you can activate her the moment your opponent activates something to summon and mill 3, and if you do, congrats, if you’re lucky enough to hit a mermaid then you could have a Rukhallos on your field before your first draw. Of course, its only 3 cards, with every mermaid being at 2 there’s a decent chance you won’t hit much. Still I consider it good, since it helps thin out the deck. Oh and I really do think that Havnis specifically just gets exponentially better your first turn onward. You mill so much random shit over the course of your combos that by the end of the game you’re hitting the good cards pretty consistently, provided your opponent can’t stop you.

Chapter 3.3 Literally Unstoppable Combo:

Modern yugioh as the concept of the Handtrap, a card you activate straight from your hand to fuck with your opponent’s plan. They’re very powerful cards, and often a necessity given what a deck can do if its allowed to go uninterrupted. Let's look at, by far, the most ubiquitous handtrap in the game, Ash Blossom and Joyous Spring.

This card can be activated from your hand, discarding it to negate any effect from your opponent that moves a card from the deck to anywhere else, like adding it to hand or sending it to the graveyard. This is, how you say, a very good card. Almost every deck does something this card negates, and some decks can even lose to just a single ash blossom if they open a bad hand. Floo fucking loathes this card. Since ashing your starting monster instantly ends your combo… usually. So, if you would have multiple effects activate at the same time, you get to choose the order they actually activate in, and your opponent can only respond to the most recent activation. This is why banishing a bird for advent actually can help the deck: if you summon a bird and have its effects activate first, then activate a banished bird second, then your opponent can only respond to the banished bird. This helps the deck insulate against your opponent’s interactions. Tearlaments can do this too. But better! Lets look at the yoinky sploinky again, you have kitkallos on field and a merrli in hand, and your opponent has ash blossom. You activate Kit’s effect to send herself and summon merrli, activate kitkallos’ effect first, and Merrli’s second. This means that your opponent now has to make a choice: do they use the ash to negate the mill 3, instead of kitkallos’ mill 5 like they wanted to, or do they save it for another point in the combos. This applies to a shit ton of effects: if you hit multiple of the mermaids in the same mill then, you can decide the order the activate in order to protect the ones you really want to resolve. Okay, okay, lets say your opponent is smarter. Instead of even letting you get to the point in the combo where you can mill 8, they use ash blossom to stop you from adding merrli to hand with Kit’s first effect, preventing you from sploinking your yoink at all. Well shit, goddammit, son of a bitch that’s it! My combo’s over!... except I can just use the Havnis I have in hand, or this second Reinoheart that’s basically dead weight, and would you look at that, I can still mill 5. The result is almost identical! Tearlaments just isn’t weak to handtraps, save for incredibly targeted ones, or the new bystial monsters that banish dark monsters, and like we discussed cards like “cryme” help protect it from board breaking cards, so it's really hard to deal with a tearlaments player. It’s a deck that if you let it have an inch, it’ll take the whole game, unless you’re playing something that can appropriately counter it.

…

I don’t have a good transition to the next section.

Chapter 3.4: Restrictions:

This is gonna be a bit of a doozy, so bear with me. But if you ask me, I would absolutely call this one of the most compelling reasons as to why Tearlaments is such a dominant deck. See uh, the developers of yugioh usually, with mixed results, actually try to stop decks from being insanely powerful. Let's look at Floo, one last time. Every monster in the deck has this little text stapled onto their effects: “cannot special summon during the turn you activate either effect.” Since the deck is focused on normal summons, it cuts you off from special summoning entirely. And I realize that it may not seem like a lot, considering how many summons the deck has, but that’s missing the point. Without access to special summoning, that makes the extra deck, where all the strongest cards in the game are, completely inaccessible. And its good! The floowandereeze cards would be way too powerful if you could use the extra deck, as well as its maindeck combo pieces and boss monsters. Plus, considering at the time the deck came out, one of the other best decks in the game was also entirely based on level 1 winged beasts, it was a good call to not let the two decks mix much. The devs just don’t like it when certain cards become too ubiquitous or generically useful, and to prevent that they place certain restrictions on powerful cards. Branded fusion, the staple card of its archetype, locks you into just using fusion monsters the turn you activate it. Several key cards in the mathmech deck lock you into just summoning cyberse type monsters for the rest of the turn, stopping you from accessing generically strong link monsters the deck would otherwise utilize. HERO, a deck I'm normal about, has all of its strongest cards enforce a strict, “HEROES only” limit on the deck, or hell even more restrictive in the case of Fusion Destiny, which also slaps a Dark attribute restrictiong. They’re, usually, very careful with this!...

Usually.

So, I could just say “Tearlaments has no limitations, and can thus access generic boss monsters” but, but that wouldn’t get the point across. We’d get to the top of the mountain, but you wouldn’t see the horizon. You wouldn’t understand. So, lets so do this. Here’s my extra deck. We’re going to talk about every card here that isn’t a Tearlaments, plus a few others. Strap in, we’re going to hell.

So first we obviously have to talk about generic fusions. Big daddy of them all in terms of our deck is Predaplant Dragostepellia, made using a fusion monster and a dark attribute monster. You may notice. Its extremely easy to get those types of cards on field. So if you already have a Ruk and Kaleido and you have two mermaid activations to spare, just make kit, then make this asshole. What’s he do? He’s a monster negate… that’s it.

Next we have the synchro monsters. But, you may have noticed, we don’t fucking play tuners to make them. To which I say, yes we fucking do.

Every Tear deck I’ve ever seen plays at least one diviner of the herald, which can send a fairy type monster to the graveyard to increase its level by that amount. Why do we play fairies? Don’t ask! Because once diviner is summoned, if we can get any level four monster on the field we can make one of the strongest Synchro monsters ever printed, Baronne De Fleur! What’s it do? It’s an omni negate!... once. Oh also it can destroy cards on field. Oh also it can return itself to the extra deck to special summon just, any monster from the graveyard, for some reason! But wait, there’s more! If we can get a level two monster on field, which we do SO FUCKING EASILY you can make Draco Berserker of the Tenyi, which can banish a monster that activates its effects and also- I’m, I’m kidding no one, fucking else plays that card in their deck.

. Our deck plays like, a million level 4 monsters. Ignore the fact I’ve only discussed two level four monsters. So we get access to one of the most powerful generic toolboxes in the game, the cavalcade of randomly incredibly powerful rank 4 xyz monsters, and it’s fucking annoying! If you do, somehow, get interrupted enough that you can’t end on a full board, don’t worry! Just get two fours on field and you can make Bagooska, which, in defense position, is just a massive fucking floodgate that prevents you and your opponent from activating monster effects. This guy sucks, I hate him! But hey, at least his floodgate is two sided. Unlike This Asshole, Abyss Dweller. You may have picked up on the fact, by y’know the premise of the essay and your massive fucking brain that Tearlaments is a good deck. Mirror matches are not rare. And I really, really like the Tear mirror, but any time someone gets this asshole on board they can use its effect to immediately shut their opponent out of the game. Oh, and its a quick effect! Why, why is it a quick effect! So yeah this does the same thing as bagooska in the tear mirror, except if you’re too broke and don’t want to go through the effort of getting this guy (like me) you get hit by some weird non games in the middle of stuff. At least you can just punch over it though. CAN’T SAY THE SAME FOR THIS GUY.

Time Thief Redoer is unique among xyz monsters. Uh, I promised myself I wouldn’t get super super basic in this, but let me explain something. When a xyz monster is summoned, the monsters used to make it don’t go to the graveyard. They stay under the card as material, which the xyz monster can send to the grave as costs for their effects. Time Thief Redoer, is one of the very, very rare xyz monsters, that detach for effect. So, y’know, if you had a schieren attached to him, that's another way to randomly start a combo in the middle of your opponent’s turn. Is this just me complaining about a bunch of very expensive cards I will never have because I’m broke, and don’t want to craft them? Yes, that’s like half the reason I made this video.

G! You cry out! This is already the longest part of the essay! Surely, we’re done! But no, no we have to talk about the worst, most powerful summoning mechanic in the game, link monsters! So what do we have? Donner, dagger fur hire is just a generic monster that can destroy anything, so there’s no reason not to play it. The primary link monster we use is Spright Elf, a generic link that just requires one of the monsters used to make it is a level 2 monster. You may notice, again, we sure do have an easy time getting exactly the level 2 Merrli on field. It has two effects, one of which protects monsters it points to from targeting effects, and the second, as a quick effect, lets you summon a level 2 monster from the graveyard. So, one more way to play on our opponent’s turn by summoning Merrli back, lol, maybe, just maybe, even lmao. Oh but we got some more. There’s one that’s uh, really, really funny in the Tearlament’s mirror match, Dharc the Dark Charmer, guess what the fuck she needs a as material to be summoned, and uh she just lets you summon a dark monster from your opponent’s graveyard. So you can do this really funny thing, where you can steal your opponent’s Merrli and activate her effect if you wanna, or really any of the tear monsters sans Reinoheart exactly. Uuhh it doesn’t actually come up too much but like, what if you destroy your Opponent’s Kaleido Heart twice and wanna fuck with them?

OH I LIED BY THE WAY WE’RE NOT DONE WITH FUSION MONSTERS. Because, BECAUSE, halfway through writing this they released an update to the game that added a stupid as hell card. Garura, Wings of Resonant Life, is a silly fucking card. It only requires two cards who share a type and attribute, which describes most archetypal cards in the game. It deals double damage for, some fucking reason, and if it’s sent to the graveyard for like anything you just draw 1, draw 1 card for no reason yeah that’s not busted even a little, Christ what do you even say to a card like this?

Sigh, well, that’s it! We’ve talked about basically every reason Tear is powerful. We’re done. We, we don’t have to look, any further.

Chapter 3.??:

… What? This, was supposed to be the conclusion. I, I talked about every card, shit I talked about a bunch of stupid cards I don’t even play there’s no way I missed something. Surely, surely, I haven’t been blindly ignoring the problem, the final missing piece, the key that will open Pandora’s Box. Surely, I’m not afraid of what’s beyond it. The realization of the inevitable; that this game will ascend and ascend, creep it’s way up this mountain until it can see it, finally, its next horizon. No, no, surely not! There’d be no going back! No way to return to the world I knew before. To before I realized, that it will find its way across, to that next horizon, again, forever, until time is a forgotten dream and all that remains is dying stardust and smoldering cardboard… Before I realized that you can’t forget what you saw beyond the horizon. No matter how awful.

Surely, no one, would be cruel enough to inflict another with that kind of curse. Condemned to the climb, forever, ‘till even the black holes burn out. Just for a chance to see something as beautiful as that first horizon again.

…

Fuck.

Chapter 3.5: Yugioh and the Heat Death of The Universe:

Ishizu Ishtar is a character from the Yugioh Duel Monsters anime. She’s the older sister to one of the show’s antagonists, Marik, and tries to involve Yugi and his friend into a scheme to save her brother from the darkness within him. She duels at multiple points, playing a deck focused around earth fairies. This leads to the creation of Mudora, Agido, Keldo and Kelbek.

These are four cards that do nothing and are very bad. But, in the year 2022, a demon came to the konami dev team, and foretold to them the inevitable death of the universe. They realized all was lost, that the horizon would never, truly, be crossed, and lamenting their woes they vowed to try, anyway.

So they made the cards again.

This is how we got Mudora the Sword Oracle, Agido the Ancient Sentinel, Keldo the Sacred Protector, and Kelbek the Ancient Vanguard. These are the last cards we're really gonna talk about in this. So let's get started.

Two things, one, all of these cards mention a card called exchange of the spirits, a trap card that I do not play. The trap modifies their effects slightly, but I’ll just be talking about the effects I actually resolve in a duel.

Second, these cards are split into two unique groups: the millers, and the shufflers. Let’s talk about the millers first.

Agido and Kelbek have similar effects, but not quite the same. If your opponent sends a card to their graveyard from the hand of deck, you can summon one of them and activate a unique effect: agido summons an earth fairy from the graveyard, Kelbek returns a monster on field to the hand. Alright, but that’s not why we play them. If these cards are sent to the graveyard from the hand or deck, you and your opponent just mill 5. Yup. Yup. these cards are, uh, insane! If you can hit both of them over the course of a standard Tearlaments combo, congrats, you get to mill at least half your deck, maybe more. Near guaranteed access to everything you could ever need.

Mudora and Keldo also share a summon effect. They can both discard an earth fairy to summon themselves, Mudora also sets a gravekeepers trap (a trap card I don’t play) onto the field, and Keldo adds another earth fairy to your hand. These effects are, also, good, but we play them for the one they share. As a quick effect, while they’re on the field or in the graveyard, you can banish either of these monsters to shuffle 3 cards from the graveyard into the deck… which is really good to have, when everyone is trying to fusion summon with monsters in their graveyard.

Chapter 5: Tear 0

When talking about a deck’s viability, its ranked into tiers . Most of the time in any given format of the game, there’s a couple tier 1 decks that stand as the “best decks”, as the decks most worth playing. Very rarely, a deck with be tier 0. So represented, so definitively “the best deck” that, there’s no arguing it. Tier 0 means that if you want to take competitive yugioh seriously, you have to play that deck. With the release of the Ishizu monsters, Ishizu Tearlaments was born, the first tier 0 deck in years, really to my understanding. It’s kind of funny, the rise of Ishtear was happening just when I was getting back into yugioh. I was watching creators in the scene talk about the deck, complain about the deck, complain about it a lot, really. People don’t like tier 0 formats, and reasonably so. People don’t like it when there really is a “best deck” with no variation between what people are playing, people don’t like it when they can’t play their favorite decks competitively anymore. People don’t like staring down the fact, that we are looking at a new horizon. People just didn’t like the deck for all the reasons I’ve just spent, who knows how long talking about. They complained about how powerful it was, about its ability to play on both turns, about, well, everything it did. In the tcg, it got hit into oblivion, and in master duel the deck was slowly torn apart. Shit in the middle of making this they limited each of Ishizu’s monsters to 1 copy per deck, making it a lot harder to get chains of their effects going. Earlier this Fall they just straight up banned Merrli, severely weakening the deck’s game plan. But even before it was full torn asunder, I didn’t really see people playing Tear much, at least, not as much in comparison to other decks. Do people just not like the deck? Did they get frustrated by the asshole stun players making decks to just counter Tear? I dunno, I dunno. Though, I’ve run into like, 5 different people playing that branded tearlament pile deck, maybe, maybe I should take a look at it at some point…

Sigh

Y’know, I played against a tier 0 deck before.

So, Spyral, was an insanely powerful deck back in 2017. Don’t worry I’m not explaining what the cards do, just, know they were good. So good that they dominated the game for months, it was really the only thing worth playing for a while, and people hated it too. The deck got eaten by the banlist hard, but in Master Duel it’s at full power. Not only that, but cards have been released that are just stronger than what were available at the time. So, a person playing Spyral in master duel today is actually playing a stronger version of that tier 0 deck…

And that’s what I went up against.

I was still new, playing a janky brew of HERO because, well, wanting to play HERO was why I got master duel in the first place. I’m not claiming to be like, superb at the game, but I’ve made it to diamond playing Floowandereeze and Tearlaments, I think that’s a far cry better than how I was when I started. Anyway, I was going second, no idea what my opponent was doing, I had a single ash blossom that they played through like it was nothing. And I sat there. For… like, 15 minutes. While my opponent did a bunch of combos that just left me sitting there lost and confused, and by the time they passed the turn over, finally, they had a board with 10 negates, and I had nothing good in my hand. I was hit by the crushing realization, that I could not win this duel. I tried in any case, and in just 3 negates they ate all the resources in my hand, and I conceded. I sat there and thought about how I had wasted 15 minutes of my finite existence, just to lose at a card game. I play this game to have fun. I did not have fun. Did my opponent have fun? Did they enjoy the time they spent, building an impossible board with their expert combos? Did they feel happy when I conceded, proud? Did they realize, that they spent 15 minutes, of their finite existence, comboing off on some jackass playing HERO? For me, it was an interesting experience. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend it like, radically altered how I viewed the game. I knew stuff like that was possible from what I saw, but its always something else to really see it up front. I had been forced to find a new horizon. And I did, time and time again, playing decks I had fun with, getting better with, and I managed what I thought was impossible: diamond, in breathing distance of the highest rank available at the time. And I was glad, because I got in just days before Tearlaments came to Master Duel, and I really wasn’t sure if I’d want to be playing before they got banned. But, I was curious, and I did…

Floowandereeze, was, my favorite deck. Despite everything I’ve said here, I want to be clear: I like Tearlaments. I think it’s a fun deck. Does it suck that its head and shoulders stronger than the other decks in the game? Yeah, obviously. But I’ll tell you what, some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing yugioh, was the Tear mirror match. It’s a thrill, it’s insane. The Ishizu cards add such an interesting dimension to the games that just wouldn’t exist without them: the fact that the millers hit both players deck means you and your opponent can easily just keep turning your card effects on, same for theirs, and the shufflers allow for really interesting games of hitting mermaids trying to fuse and forcing out shuffles from your opponent at bad times. You and your opponent interact with each other constantly, regardless of who’s turn it is. And once I had built my deck properly I rarely felt outmatched by my opponent, except in matters of pure skill. Luck obviously plays a factor with random mills, but the combos are so consistent it's nearly impossible to never have something in your back pocket to use on your opponent. This, this is what was actually waiting on the other edge of that horizon, something so fun I… really, can’t go back. I played Tearlaments until it was rendered unusable. Since then, I’ve just been bouncing around decks None of them grabbed me the way ishtear did. And I’m just left here to hope that this isn't the last time we see a deck Like Tearlaments. Konami, generally speaking, is not a company known for its good decision making, and I’m worried they’ve taken the wrong message from the responses to Tear. If you ask me, well, I don’t know if the game should have ever gotten to this level of power creep to begin with, but lord if you’re going to print a deck so obviously, blatantly busted you could at least have the decency to print other decks around its level. Then maybe people wouldn’t have complained about fuckin, merrli set sulliek pass.

Conclusion: Staring Directly Into The Sun

So, why, the fuck did I make this? Well like I said at the beginning I just wanted to talk about it, because it interested me. And then, over the course of this project, it stopped being just intellectual curiosity. See, for as much as people talked about Tear, how strong it was, its place in the meta, I never really saw anyone sit down and explain why, exactly, this set of 55 cards was the single best set you could be playing. Could it be that these were just, apparent to everyone involved, and that I’m either too stupid or too new to really understand? Maybe, probably, but I’m really not one for leaving things unsaid. Uh, learning this game from basically scratch has kind of been a nightmare. Constantly, consistently, I’ve looked at cards and strategies that I thought seemed really, really powerful, only to learn that no, actually, these cards are just bad. And while now, I’ve learned to intuit why some cards are just bad, it took a lot of frustration and confusion that just, could have been avoided if someone explained why in plain terms. So, be the change you want to see, eh? Not only that but, iunno this came to be a matter of preservation for me. I thought about reworking it to take the new banlists into account, but ultimately decided that I wanted to capture the image of the deck at the time I was first writing this. And, damn I’m gonna be pissed at myself for a while for not getting a picture of my actual decklist from back before the big limits but, what can you do? I just hope that this weird essay could actually explain what it is that makes these cards so powerful, and allow people like me to get these concepts into their head to keep in mind when considering future cards. I… really, really hope we get another deck like Tearlaments again. Yugioh will not stop its power creep, not the way it’s currently run. Deck’s will continue to get stronger, get more powerful tools, and I’m worried about eventually things getting to the point where it’s basically just not even fun to play. Until the last few months, the arguable best deck was Kashtira, which main gameplan is… sitting behind a giant fucking floodgate. That's just not the kind of yugioh I want to play. I think Tearlaments was genuinely a good example for how the game could progress in power level while also staying interactive for both players. Do I want the game to just, keep getting stronger? Not really, I’ve actually started getting into low power versions of the game. But if they’re going to drag us, kicking and screaming over that next horizon, can’t they at least make it fun?

That’s where the original essay ended. I’m mostly keeping it intact for posterity’s sake but, I do want to say, I think somehow Konami did something right. I still haven’t found a deck that’s grabbed me the way Tear did, but a lot of the decks played nowadays are allowed to be as free form and potentially insane as Tear was at the height of its power. Which, I’m happy to see, and I really hope to keep seeing this in the future.

Forgive the melodrama

Have a nice day

#yugioh #essay I've been sitting on for like half a year #figure it's time to do Something with it.

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