Blue-Eyed Orichalcos

This deck is meant to shift and breathe, giving you a wide breadth of tools to adapt to your opponents on the fly like some sort of terrible Blue-Eyes swiss army knife or a particularly draconic hydra. As soon as they think they have you figured out, you can pivot on a dime and hit 'em with something completely different before they have time to react.

The goal is to let you get creative; it draws consistently well but rarely plays the same way twice—that's the joy of it, in my opinion. Even when I lose with this deck I pretty much always feel good about the duel, and it's versatile enough to hold its own against just about everything I've thrown it at in MR4* casual play. I'm told it's fun to play against, too. It's a puzzle box for everyone on the field, not the sort of deck just out to curb stomp without mercy.

And, as a bonus, it's super cheap.

 

So! Let's break this puppy down:

The extra deck is minimal, because if you pull Orichalcos, it'll lock you out of summoning from it. As a result, getting an Azure-Eyes out early is helpful to keep grabbing Blue-Eyes from your graveyard, and once it's initially summoned you can revive it again after Orichalcos is played. Plus, its effect-immunity is triggered by any special summon of it, not just the initial synchro, which can be handy if you find yourself backed into a corner. There aren't many link monsters released as of early 2020 that work well with this deck, but Defender and Decode Talker are nice to have around if you've got the materials to keep making more Azure-Eyes or want the attack bump, and Decode Talker can be handy to tribute opponent's monsters who are causing you trouble.

This deck basically has three kinds of monsters: Blue-Eyes, things that can get you Blue-Eyes, and ritual summons that will just absolutely ruin your opponent's day.

You've got lots of options both for searching your deck for Blue-Eyes, and retrieving it from the graveyard. As a bonus, Melody of Awakening Dragon also lets you snag BE Chaos MAX out of your deck if you want.

The ritual summons are the powerhouse of this deck. If you're playing Master Rule 4, they dance right around the restrictions on summon location, and they come with some extremely solid effects to hamstring whatever nonsense your opponent thinks they're up to on the other side of the table. Pre-Prep can net you the materials for Lord of the Red in one shot, and any Blue-Eyes card is enough to pay the cost—then just rebound it from the graveyard again with whatever retrieval method is easiest at the moment, and chances are that in doing so you'll give yourself a chance to activate one of his effects right out of the gate. Chaos Form takes a little more work, but if you pull it and don't have a matching ritual, chances are high you've got the materials to either pull BE Chaos MAX from your deck or strip it to the GY, and from there just bounce it into your hand with a relevant effect.

BEWD variants tend to be pretty chunky as a baseline, but if you can add extra ATK onto them they become scary fast. You won't want to bulk up your baseline normal-summon BEWDs, since those are the pistons in your engine, but the effect, synchro, and rituals are all fair game. BE Chaos MAX makes god cards look like chumps if you can get her out and boost her effectively, because card effects don't kill her and she does double piercing to defense-position monsters. Power of the Guardians is a reliable way to start stacking ATK, and if you can get Black Dragon Sword out mid- to late-game, she'll just walk right over your opponents for fun. If you're really lucky, you'll have gotten Orichalcos out before her; that'll boost her by another 500 just for giggles, and also protect the weakest card on your field. You see where this is going. BE Chaos MAX in attack position, boosted, is a nightmare to take on in a battle of sheer ATK and card effects don't touch her.

Claw of Hermos into Black Dragon Sword is a great way to give an ATK/DEF boost to just about anything. It can make Maiden even more annoying of a wall, or like we've already touched on, skyrocket BE Chaos MAX's double piercing damage to outright rude proportions once you've gotten a few dragons into your GY.

Obelisk is... just a fun guy. Look at his big ol' arms. Who wouldn't love him?

Maiden is a great stall if you're having trouble getting something you need, since looking at her wrong will grab a Blue-Eyes from pretty much wherever you may have misplaced it. And you can bounce quite a few other cards in the deck off her with a targeted effect if you want to trigger that yourself, too. Both she and your other tuners are there to get BEWD wherever you need it at a given point in time, but can also help recall BE Chaos MAX if it gets offed, or another Blue-Eyes variant with useful effects for the given game state.

You've also got a handful of cards to drop your tribute requirements for BEWD and Obelisk. If you don't want to run Obelisk, swap your two Kaiser Sea Horses out for Keeper of the Shrines for some more GY versatility.

The rest of your deck is dedicated to spell cards, largely ones that help you shuffle around your various dragons to where you need them. Depending on your opponents, and what sorts of decks they're running, you'll want to swap these around a little bit. Most of your control over your opponents should be coming from your monster effects rather than your spells and traps, but this is a good place to cover any gaps you find in your deck (my default build will go down fast and hard to banishings, for instance, because my local crew hasn't been running much offensive banishment lately). Just watch out for adding too much and disrupting the overall balance, because this deck's ability to keep shifting its loadout on the fly is its main strength and if you bog it down you'll find yourself in trouble with no way to keep monsters on the field. The BEWD effect cards are also a good place to swap things in and out to balance as you need.

Beyond that... enjoy!**

 

*I built this because I'm a hopeless nostalgic and thought it'd be fun to craft a BEWD deck for Master Rule 4, which could weasel its way around the lack of link monsters that sync well with the archetype. I've yet to take it into MR5 duels, so I can't speak to its efficacy against the less-restricted special summons.

**afterimage claims no responsibility for soul forfeiture that may occur as a result of activating the Seal of Orichalcos; please barter your mortality responsibly.