Link Merfaes or Perish!

♪ Let's play hide-and-seek with the friendly Märfaes! ♪

Merfaes (or Märfaes, depending on your translation), are a new archetype in Rise of the Duelist.
Right now they serve well as a beast advantage engine, but still need a few more cards to have a chance of being meta-viable.

That isn't going to stop us.
I'll level with you in advance; this is not a meta deck. It can't beat full-power Adamancipator or Eldlich.
However, I've done my best to test and refine it and compare it to other Märfae deck variants, so this might just be the most meta-ready Märfae deck build you'll find on here, at least at the present moment. So let's get into the choices!

- Playing Around With Märfaes: A Basic Primer -

The essential idea of this deck is being able to make plays on both your own and your opponent's turn to keep a hold of the game. You'll be using effects like Obedience Schooled and Ties of the Brethren early game to establish a board, then using the recursion of your Märfae children to keep the advantage and disruption up later. You can go first or second; you'd rather go first, but you can adjust based on whether your opponent's playing OTKs or not.

The core gameplay options of this deck revolve around a triple threat of Extra Deck summoning mechanisms: using Naturia Beast as your premier Synchro, Märfaes of the Forest as your main Xyz play, and I:P Masquerena as the core Link of the deck. These let you stun spells, disrupt monsters while obtaining advantage, and go into powerful game-ending plays respectively.

Each of the main Märfae monsters summons themselves from your hand during your End Phase, and can bounce themselves back to the hand when attacked or when your opponent summons, in order to activate a unique effect; Puppie summons a lv2 Beast from deck, Cathy gets any decked Beast to hand (notably, it can get Rescue Cat(!)), Fennie summons a Beast from your hand, and Ponie recycles a Beast from the Graveyard. We play an assortment of all of these - I originally ran only 1 each of Fennie and Ponie as their effects are mediocre, but quickly found that having multiple Märfae names accessible is useful as their effects are all hard once per turn.

Your main disruption options during the opponent's turn are as follows:

• Märfaes of the Forest Fiendish Chains an opponent whenever a Märfae returns to your hand, letting you freeze your opponent at critical moments as long as the foe's effect isn't an on-summon one.


• Naturia Beast locks any deck that relies on Spells out of the game altogether, and lets you get monsters in your grave for later.


• Kalantosa, Mystical Beast of the Forest will often be your Puppie/Fennie target of choice, popping any card the moment it hits the field.


• Hop-Ear Squadron is a powerful Cathy target, as you can instantly Synchro Summon into a Herald or Hastorr the moment you add it.


• I:P Masquerena is the ultimate culmination of your "play on the foe's turn" stratagem; it lets you utilise those Märfae self-bounce resource getters and their summon-at-end-phase to toolbox into Zeroboros, Borrelsword, or whatever other Link helps you solve the present problems.


• ...and you've got plenty more convenient backrow support, such as old staples Called by the Grave and Ash Blossom, Märfae Tag for summoning, Super Rush Recklessly to yeet opposing threats right back to the deck, and even odd picks like Peropero Cerperus!

- Disowned by Märfae Mommie herself! -

I'll address the elephant in the room while I can. This deck does not run Märfae Mommie, the second Xyz. It also does not run Märfae Time, the Trap. Why?
First of all, I'm sorry, but Mommie is... not good. You have to expend 5 material to make her the best she can be, and that best is... a weaker Yubel with no effect protection. If I were playing Heroic Champion I could have solved world hunger by making a five material Xyz, so needless to say Mommie is not worth the investment.

This also means that Märfae Time isn't worth it - at best you're getting 1-2 bounces by expending materials from your Märfaes of the Forest, which isn't much advantage for a slow trap. Märfaes simply have better ways to interact on their opponent's turn, as the above proves!

Cutting both of these has given us much more room to focus on cards that do matter, as this deck is pretty short on both main and extra deck room. Pragmatism never hurt anybody!

- Interactions and choices to keep in mind -

First of all: Search stoppers like Ash Blossom are a pretty big threat to this deck. Most of your ways to go off on your own turn such as Ties/Rescue/Obedience are blocked out by it, and though it's not uncommon that you'll draw into two or more of those, it's still something to keep in mind. You've got three Called to help cover yourself on that regard, but if that ever feels like it's not enough for a particular matchup, feel free to splurge on those Three Tactical Talents in the side deck!

Related to that; you don't have too many cards that lock you into specific conditions, but Obedience and Ties lock you into only Beasts and no more Special Summoning respectively. Obedience, therefore, is best when you don't want to go for I:P, and instead want to make an opening board of something like Forest + Puppie + Natbeast with a bunch of backrow and card advantage ready. Ties's limitation is less of a problem; you're not doing it to gain material, you're using it to get two more Märfaes from deck to field so you can proceed to pop off with Masqs and Kalantosas and Hopears and the like on your foe's turn! Use them wisely and you can't go wrong!

On another note, what you should search with Märfaes of the Forest depends on the situation. Hide-And-Seek is a powerful one; giving a single effect protection per turn is surprisingly useful and lets you do amusing actions like keep the material you got from Rescue Cat, while it also lets you constantly recycling all the monsters you're going to be getting time and time again to get free hand advantage. I can't count the number of times in practice I shuffled back the exact three cards of Mine Mole, Valerifawn, and Naturia Beast, or thereabouts, to proc it... Märfae Tag is also a powerful option that lets you do stuff like surprise proc'ing an I:P-made Zeroboros to clear your opponent's field, but if you don't need any of them, Puppie (or whatever best Märfae you don't have on hand at the time) is always a safe bet.

Finally, just remember that the Extra Deck and Side Deck for this deck are by no means locked in stone. There's a lot of different picks you can take, from different rank 2 Xyz, different Link toolboxing, et cetera. The side deck right now just reflects a few tools that might be useful - Barkion helps a lot in trap-centric matchups but is hard to make, Cerburrel works well with cards like Valerifawn and Twin Twisters (if you feel lucky, you can even run a Danger! variant of the deck with Bigfoot and Jackalope) and lets you make Unicore for a very unique stun option, and so forth. Definitely experiment to make the deck suit your own tastes!

- Final Thoughts -

Ultimately, the Märfae archetype is a very unique and thematic deck lineup that has a surprising amount of depth and flexibility to their play and has potential to become all the more powerful if more support is released from them in the future. From churning out advantage to going for unexpected kills with link 4s, there's a lot they can show off, and I hope this has convinced you to take a stroll in the forest yourself and try them out!