Melodious Darklord

Following the release of Battles of Legend: Glorious Gallery, many archtypes got legacy support that brought new avenues to older strategies, including a single but powerful card for Darklords in Fallen Angel in Darkness. This, combined with the other legacy support released for the Deck in Burst Protocol, helped bring the archtype into the modern era. Unfortunately, this hasn't yet translated into much success beyond the local and regional level. Because of this, I've combined them with another group of Fairy monsters that also haven't been able to break past the regional level: the Melodious. As it is, both archtypes are able to synergize fairly well together. Much like the Darklords, the Melodious archtype focuses primarily around Fusion Summoning with a bit of Link Summoning added for good measure, though I've opted not to include the Melodious Link in this build because its lock makes it too difficult to use alongside the Darklords. What's more, because both archtypes consist of all Fairy monsters, it means the Deck can utilize the Herald monsters as handtraps, which can be some of the best handtraps in the game if they're available.

Because combos for this Deck are highly dependent on what cards you see in your opening hand, I'd rather take a moment to discuss some of my ratio/tech choices instead of laying out the overall gameplan of the Deck.

• Indulged Darklord and Darklord Ukoback
  • In most of the Deck lists I've seen for Darklords, the vast majority of people seem to play 3 copies of Indulged and either 1 or no copies of Ukoback, so you might be curious as to why I've chosen to go 2 of each. My reasoning is fairly simple. To my way of thinking, the two accomplish more or less the same objective, but Indulged requires more setup to be useful. I'll explain:
    • The idea behind Indulged Darklord is that you Special Summon one of your higher level Darklords to your opponent's field, likely Nasten since it's the most expendable, and add either Ixchel to use its draw effect or Gulgolet to get its search effect, and then, through the course of the standard Darklord combo, you'll then use the monster you summon to your opponent's field as one of the materials to summon Evenstar through the effect of Darklord Dance. The issue is that both Ixchel and Gulgolet require you to have other cards in hand to make their effects live. In an ideal world, you'd have one and then use Indulged to get the other into your hand, but with this build, between the Melodious cards and your non-engine, it's far from a guarantee that you'll see both in your opening hand.
    • Ukoback, on the other hand, simply allows you to bypass this conundrum by directly sending Gulgolet to the GY, proccing its effect to search any Darklord card that you might be missing from your opening hand. That said, because of the situation described above, I don't think Ukoback can completely replace Indulged, since when you do have the proper setup it can push the combo that much farther, which is why I've elected to play 2 of each.
• Shadow's Light
  • Much like the Darklords and Melodious cards themselves, Shadow's Light is a card that has seen minor experimentation but hasn't really broken into the top tables of many major events. Despite this, this Deck is uniquely situated to take full advantage of this card. I'll explain:
    • For the card's first effect, there are several viable targets that you can Summon, depending on which Darklords you've managed to bring out prior to this card's activation, but I'd like to highlight 2, those being the ones in the Extra Deck:
      • Schuberta can be Summoned if you have Gulgolet or one of its tokens on the field and can disrupt your opponent's GY by banishing up to 3 cards from it; plus, if you've opened Ostinato and therefore have access to Flowering Etoile, this will give you a second target you can banish with its effect to bounce another card to your opponent's hand, further hindering their plays.
      • Masterflare Hyperion can be Summoned if you have Ixchel on the field, which can banish any card your opponent controls just by banishing a Fairy from your hand or GY, which is exceedingly easy to pull off with this build.
    • While its first effect is undoubtedly strong, it's Shadow's Light's second effect to give yourself another Normal Summon that really puts it over the edge in this Deck. 
      • Beyond simply granting you access to the plethora of effects that several of the Darklord and Melodious monsters have when they're Summoned, the main utility of this extra Normal Summon comes into play in situations where your opponent has disrupted your plays in one way or another. Here's an example:
        • Let's say you have Indulged, Ukoback, and Shadow's Light in your opening hand. You Normal Summon Indulged Darkord and activate its effect, but your opponent uses Ash Blossom to stop its effect from going through. In this situation, you could then activate Shadow's Light to Summon Refrain from the Deck, adding any of your other Melodious monsters to hand. From there, you can use the 2 bodies you have on field for Link plays to further your combos, but even if they too get stopped, you'll still have Shadow's Light in the GY, ready to Summon Ukoback to continue playing on regardless of what your opponent has thrown at you...granted, this is a hightly idealized scenario, but I believe it does illustrate the benefits that the card brings to the Deck.
• Forbidden Chalice
  • This is here mainly because I don't own any copies of Forbidden Crown and is the next best option after maxing out the number of copies of Droplet. If I had any Forbidden Crowns, I would 100% slot them in over Chalice.
• Chaos Angel
  • There's not too much to say about this one, other than since this is a Light and Dark Deck there's not really a reason NOT to play it. The only real downside is that, being a Fiend instead of a Fairy, there are situations where you can't Summon it because you'll be Fairy-locked, but even so, using it as a Turn 3 "board breaker" is far from a terrible thing.
• Diviner of the Herald and Archlord Kristya
  • Although I've relegated these to the Side Deck, it's probably not hard to see how these both synergize with the Deck. Between Diviner being able to send basically any monster you need from the Deck to the GY, Kristya being easily summonable since it's a simple thing to manipulate the number of Faries in the GY through the various banish and reborn effects the Deck has, and both being Light monsters that you could theoretically Pendulum Summon under Couplet's restriction, both cards can slot into the Deck easily enough. That said, there are a few reasons that I've not opted to play them in the Main Deck:
    • Although Diviner functions in a similar way to Ukoback and in fact has more viable targets it can send, the fact that it itself isn't a Darklord or Melodious means that, should its effect get negated, it's essentially a dead card on the field, unlike Ukoback that can still be sent as cost for any of the Darklord Traps if need be. Despite this, I think it's worth an inclusion in the Side Deck as, as I said, I can basically send any monster you need to the GY.
    • Kristya, on the other hand, has a different issue. Namely, because it locks BOTH players from Special Summoning, it directly impedes several of the strategies, from using Evenstar to banish Darklord Dance to Summon The First Darklord on your opponent's turn to using Etoile's banish effect to bounce cards your opponet controls back to hand (you CAN still use this effect, of course, but you won't get the Melodious monsters you banished back during the End Phase, which is a definite downside). Even so, this floodgate effect is too powerful not to consider, which is why it's in the Side Deck.