Dark Dragon Magic (DDM)

It's like if dracotail, branded, and RoLaD had a baby. I think this decks biggest strength is it's ability to develop onto the same board regardless of what starter you open with while retaining cards in hand to allow you to follow up should you have your board addressed. Shining sarc and dragonmaid lines don't conflict, they can be done independently of one another but their end boards converge and synergize extremely well. Dragonmaid offers shining sarc OTK potential and the ability to shuffle used materials back into the deck. Shining sarc offers dragonmaids access to more powerful and diverse extra deck monsters and means of interaction. Both archetypes are extremely consistent and have a ton of 1 card starters. Dark End offers a metric ton in this deck, but be careful because special summoning it locks you into only dragons so before playing any of those try to establish your shining sarc board first. You'll spend most of your turn searching and shuffling, while invalidating most means of interaction so the salt factor is extremely high. Kitchen, Chamber, and Parlor typically result in a board of lady's and a stray dragonmaid and tacks on sheou during the next standby, whereas Gadget Trio, shining sarc, DMG apprentice, and future silence typically end in dark paladin/master of chaos depending on whether you go first or second and your choice of Dark Magician the Magician of Black Magic, Gandora, DMG Apprentice, or future silence with a spare shining sarc in hand. Dark End is basically dragonmaid changeover that loads up a level 8 dragon into banishment for lady's to use as material or an efficient pop that can be fused away. Gadget trio is the only card that we don't have a way to special summon so he's the biggest perpetrator of eating our normal summon for the turn. Any hand with a little maid, hospitality, and a shining sarc starter is prime real estate. The decks power peaks the first turn it gets to play and can stay there. In hypothetical playtesting, one can maintain their boardstate and cycle and recycle cards for over 40 turns so thats cool. I've played through entire boardwipes, tons of negates, and always managed to establish a board that keeps reestablishing itself. Truly, try this deck out it's a ton of fun. The more you pilot it the more lines you see and the more efficient you become. The extra deck is essentially a toolbox of dragon based dark magician cards, some of which become named "dark magician" so that's very nice, a couple spellcaster based ones we seek to use gaze to cheat out, and mysterion and secreterion which offer narrow but powrful floodgates and utility even outside of that. Soul servant is one of the only ways we have to get gaze back while also being a good burst draw option or topdeck fixer, and it's spell speed 2 so that's extremely nice. Now to address the side deck... that Slifer package must have raised some eyebrows. Originally slifer x2 and the revived sky god x3 and monster reborn were originally integrated into a standard format version of the shining sarcophagus side as a sort of rogue contender along with lots of hand traps to fill the gaps. Silent Swordsman Zero, Silent Magician Zero, and Ties That Bind are also included as a sort of supplementary package to our shining sarc lines to allow us to have a little more interaction against decks that keep wanting to touch our cards. Lava golem is just your standard 0 point board breaker, felt necessary to have 2-3 of. And I opted to put our super poly targets (fata, mudragon, starving venom) into our side deck because while we are a control deck of sorts I feel like it's a healthier use of superpoly to simply guarantee the landing of a fusion monster on our side. Super poly also unrestricts us from just dragon fusions and wont banish whatever we summon at the end of the next turn. But, as is ritual, one does not run superpoly without targets that you can use both or more of your opponent's monsters for so they're in there. But starving venom is a level 8 dragon and fata gives all our fusions (not just dragons) targeting protection so alongside dark magician the dragon knight that can make interacting with us miserable. The deck also very much appreciates the incidental discard effect, for example discarding a chamber to revive it with hospitality. Chamber becomes a bit of a liability due to the lack of an ability to link it away and be a one card combo but I haven't played a game where chamber was just straight up useless with the other 4-5 in hand. The deck doesn't brick, I ran it through that deck calculator website and out of 100,000 games one would only brick 0.3% of the time, so if you do I suggest shuffling your deck better for game 2. I'll update the primer when i think of more to add but I think as far as the list itself goes i've landed on something worth keeping the way it is. I'm also open to suggestions, feedback, opinions and thoughts about the list so please feel free to comment!