Playing style[edit]
"Thunder Dragon" revolves around Thunder monsters with discard, floating, and banish-activated effects, in order to set up resource recursion and summon conditions for boss monsters.
The archetype has 5 (relatively low-Level) Main Deck monsters with Levels under 6, who serve as combo pieces to bring out the archetype's boss monsters. Almost all of them have two effects: an Ignition Effect activated by discarding them, and a Trigger Effect that can be activated when they are banished or sent from the field to the Graveyard. These effects provide search power and field setup, and also sets up the GY with monsters for the archetype's other effects.
Of these monsters, "Thunder Dragonmatrix" is the only one under Level 4, making it the only one that can be Normal Summoned without Tributes.
"Thunder Dragon" boss monsters consist of both Main Deck Special Summon-only monsters ("Dragonduo" and "Dragonlord") and Extra Deck Fusion Monsters ("Colossus" and "Titan"). The former are summoned from the hand by banishing friendly cards in the hand/GY, while the latter are summoned with Fusion Summoning or pseudo-Contact Fusion.
On the field, the Main Deck bosses provide protection ("Thunder Dragonlord") or card resource cycling ("Thunder Dragonduo"), while the Fusion bosses provide removal/interruption ("Thunder Dragon Titan") or floodgating ("Thunder Dragon Colossus"). Each has one effect that banishes cards from the player's GY, possibly even in the opponent's turn, providing more triggers for "Thunder Dragon" banish effects.
"Thunder Dragon Fusion", the archetype's Fusion Spell, works with the archetype's discard and banish effects by Fusion Summoning through shuffling materials from the field, GY, or banished cards into the Deck. It can also banish itself from the GY (except on the turn it was sent there) to search out 1 Thunder monster, providing additional follow-up.
Because almost all "Thunder Dragon" non-boss monsters require setup/external combos to be summoned, their Trigger Effects are more easily triggered by banishing them. This can be achieved with:
Generally, the Deck aims to turbo out one or more of its boss monsters, primarily (in formats where it's available) the high-power and easy-to-summon "Thunder Dragon Colossus", and back them up with other generic field presence and searchable follow-up. The Deck's main searchers are the banish/floating effects of "Thunder Dragondark" and "Thunder Dragonroar", while its main source of swarming are the effects of "Dragonroar" and "Thunder Dragonhawk".
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