Master Duel N/R Festival Format - Exodialess Exodia

EDIT: YGOProDeck claims Tune Warrior is a UR, but I guarantee you it's an N card on MD. Please also be aware this is exclusively for the N/R Festival and there's no point to playing this outside of it. Thanks!

I'm a jank deck player by heart, and while examining the N/R Master Duel event I noticed that it has a lot of the Exodia support cards and even every Forbidden One piece... except Exodia's head, which is SR. So there goes the whole strategy, right? ...Right?

This deck aims to take advantage of 3 cards, Treasure Panda, The Legendary Exodia Incarnate, and amusingly enough, "Obliterate!". Your main goal is to get Treasure Panda on the field through either summoning it or Giant Rat activation after you've put a few spell/traps in the GY, so you can then spam out either Exodia pieces or other Normal Monsters as tuners and whatnot to summon a variety of Extra Deck monsters. Treasure Panda also unlocks L.Ex.Inc.s in hand, who can otherwise be pretty nasty bricks, and lets you get a weird unaffected monster that can get reasonably large with support OR just loop Forbidden One cards back to hand every turn.

So why do you want to loop Forbidden One cards anyway? The answer is Obliterate!, which is actually really crazy in this format. See, people play Compulse in N/R format because it can end someone's turn in a flash and trades 1 for 1 with really big monsters your opponent minused to go into, or otherwise just disrupts people's turns at Quick-Play speed. So what if I told you that Exodia decks get to just play a card which Compulses the opponent EVERY TURN while Foolish Burialing at the same time? Obliterate! is the main way you can survive more proactive opponents' aggression, bouncing key cards like Heart-Earth Dragon or Megaliths halfway through their summon chains, and it doesn't set off destruction protections like a lot of other removal has to in this format. Even if your opponent blows it up, you can use the second effect to get back a Legendary Exodia Incarnate or something and then start going ham.

The rest of the deck is more or less designed to assist this plan. Exodius is a weird card that normally won't be doing a lot, but its biggest advantage is recycling your graveyard - he's a free special summon for Link Plays (or even Xyz summoning Ravenous Tarantula -> The Seven Sins), and he gives you a full reload of Obliterate!, increases the length of your Giant Rat chains, turns Treasure Panda back on, and so forth. Hand Destruction is just one of the few ways to bin a lot of stuff so you have cards to banish to Panda, White Elephant's Gift combos nicely with Panda or Normal Monster decks in general, Tri-Wight gives you extension in the late game for last minute Extra Deck plays, and Gizmek Makami gives you a very late game option if you want to try to shuffle your banished Exodiuses back to start all over again.

The Normal Monster lineup looks a bit weird, but serves specific purposes. Flamvell Guardian is a level 1 tuner, so you can make a level 5 or 2 synchro with it fairly easily. Tune Warrior is one of the biggest options available to you and also a Tuner for going into PSY-Framelord Zeta, a very powerful piece of interaction. It also gives you an option for if you want to get 3 cards out of the GY to summon the Gizmek later. I've experimented with other stuff like Galaxy Serpent, but I think the nature of the available cards in the format makes this a reliable engine. Bunilla probably looks pretty strange, but it's an Earth you can summon off of Giant Rat in an emergency.

The trap lineup is a bit standard, although I think it could be better. Paleozoic Dinomischus is a mandatory staple for many decks in the format and given our lack of Spell/Trap removal it's even more important here as a multifaceted card that can make use of useless LEIs in the hand. Jelly Cannon was added as a means to get 1 for 1 trades that beat common protection in a deck that needs stuff to do its job and then be banishable by Panda. Torrential Tribute can win a game on its own and is particularly notable for not killing LEI due to its card effect protection, it also has interesting potential with a card in the Extra Deck. Compulsory is just another card that both acts as a Jelly Cannon effect and can reuse a Treasure Panda target that you have sitting around uselessly on the field.

The Extra Deck is by no means perfect and probably shouldn't be so varied, but it features a variety of options I enjoy. Let's start with the smallest set, the Xyzes. These are fairly self explanatory - Slacker Magician is a tolerable stall play, Lion Heart occasionally wins games through "Burn BS" and is not too hard to make with Treasure Panda, and Ravenous Tarantula + Seven Sins is a decent enough combo in a deck that occasionally gets both Exodius and LEI on the board with low attack stats or ends up with much lower LP than the opponent.

The Link Monsters are also fairly basic - Cross-Sheep, Geonator Transverser, and Berserker of the Tenyi are respectable format staples for just getting big man on the board or removing problem cards. You have 2 other types of monster in your deck so you can take advantage of Cross-Sheep's ATK modifying abilities. Powercode Talker is basically just a negate you can make in an emergency, but also is a good card if you can spam out enough Monsters because it can win combat by having something to tribute for once. Doublebyte Dragon I have never summoned but can think of scenarios where you'd really want it, so it's here just in case we need to beat over an annoying Xyz monster or something. Defender of the Labyrinth, finally, is pretty mediocre and probably shouldn't be here - but I love having an excuse to play it in a deck that might actually take advantage of it. You can summon Berserker of the Tenyi with this, you know!

The Synchros are where the most room for examination lies. Honestly, you could probably dump this part of the deck entirely if you wanted and just go for Link + Xyz spam, but I like several of these cards enough to keep them around. Puralis is simply a way to convert 2 Treasure Panda summons into a larger Tuner with a small effect, although we don't have a 6 to complete the combo with Panda itself, you can still Link it off or something for a coup de grace. Framelord Zeta is one of the most powerful cards in the deck and you could honestly try to make the list into Zeta turbo if you wanted by playing more copies + more Tune Warriors, I've gone ahead and stuck with one for now because I haven't made more. Crystron Anetrix is a weird option but as a generic 5 you can do much worse, it punishes opponents that play monsters with low defense and can even swing a game in certain contexts, having Summoned Skull ATK is quite appealing as well. The oddest choice in this deck is probably the twin Balmungs - many would rather run the Entity card that occasionally steals opponent's monsters. My reason for avoiding that is that I don't have any actual Spell/Trap destruction, so I don't have a good way to get rid of it and trigger its more impressive effect.

The real thing I like about Balmung, though, is that it's a non-once per turn card that doesn't rule out itself. In other words, if your opponent has some sort of aggressive destruction effect that repeats over and over, you can actually cycle through two Balmungs indefinitely so long as none of them are destroyed by Battle. Even better, Balmung on its own reborns all sorts of cards you particularly care about like Treasure Panda and Giant Rat, as well as your defensive normal monsters and tuners. Balmung doesn't even care who blew it up, so you can activate Torrential Tribute in response to your own summon to wipe the board and get a card back. Isn't that cool? I think a truly better version of the deck would probably replace Balmung with the Entity and then a summonable 6 for Puralis lines, but I don't think this version is too troublesome.

I would say that the main things this deck is looking for if you want to try to improve it are ways to get cards into the graveyard faster and ways to protect Treasure Panda. Unfortunately, there are no generic level 11 or 12 Synchros in N/R format, so it's impossible to use the Exodias and our Tuners to make Star Eaters or something. A version of this deck focused exclusively on Link spamming with a small Rank 10 package could work, but I like some of the options Synchros offer in a deck that makes Cross-Sheep regularly, so it's really up to personal taste.

The most cuttable parts of the deck right now are probably Exodius, the Gizmek, and some of the traps. Gizmek doesn't work very well because the big Exodias don't have the same ATK as DEF, so it's exclusively a way to give an already slow deck a longer grind game. Exodius is tolerable and serves an important niche but is also usually relatively useless - perhaps if there were more monsters with GY effects in the deck he'd be a better roleplayer (did you know he bins effect monsters and not just the Normals he counts? I forget lol but I guess it makes sense if he needs to send the head). Hand Destruction is ok but I can't help but feel like there's more spell/traps that cycle through the deck I'm not finding. Nevertheless, I've had a reasonably enjoyable time seeing this deck actually do something, even if it's occasionally an agonizing stallfest of sitting under Obliterate as you bounce a card every turn until you draw something relevant. Overall, I'd say play this if you think Exodialess Exodia is funny, and to make people misplay trying to stop you from assembling all 5 in hand because they don't know the head is banned!