Six Samurai post ROTA theory craft

Looking for suggestions for the deck to make it more competitively viable. While this version does not run either of the mulcharmy’s, there is flexibility to change out cards. After reviewing and testing, I find there are some key takeaways with the new cards coming.

• There should be no tuners besides the new ones.
  • All of the other tuners from the Shien/Six Samurai archetypes have had the issue where they need to be summoned through the use of something else going right to work. I.E. Kageki, Asceticism, Dojo, etc. These all hinge on the condition these effects resolve without interruption. This has been fixed with both of the new tuners only requiring 1 other six samurai monster. Even if the monster is negated, which at times can be bated with Kageki, you still have the monster on board making your lvl 5/6 synchros still very accessible. As a bonus, even if you don’t synchro with them, you are able to search for one of the followup spells or extenders when sent to the GY.
  • I do believe there can be a case made for Shien’s Squire as it is a lvl 1 tuner that can be revived through gateway, but does cost you a few things.
    • If you ever draw it, it is a garnet and should immediately be used as fodder for battle shogun.
    • It requires a significant amount of resources to use, which could be used for more synchro plays which can be significantly stronger.
    • With it coming at the cost of a garnet, it is also really only useful for the Naturia Synchros, specifically Beast. It is significantly easier to make Shi En since you have a lot of ways to manipulate who is on board, when, and at what level.
• There are no 1 card starters, but there are several 1.5 card starts.
  • With the introduction of the tuners and the new six strike card, there are several ways to start with just any 2 different named six samurai monsters.There are some setups that are terrible, but they can work.
  • This limitation prevents the deck from ever being a tier 1 strategy in today’s metagame, but that is fine for a local or even regional level strategy.
  • Because of this limitation you are susceptible to being hand trapped. My build attempts to limit how impactful 1-2 hand traps are to the overall strategy, which I will review further.
• There are tech choices that can be made for the deck that limits the impact of hand traps to a degree.
  • One of the first choices that many I have seen go to is Fire Flint lady which prevents targeting 1 warrior monster it summons from the hand. This is good in theory, but has some of the same issues I have mentioned above.
    • It can be a garnet if you don’t have the right setup for it, namely Kizaru or Hatsume.
    • This increases the volatility of your hand since you are using 1 card to protect a 2nd very specific card. You now effectively are looking at a 2.5-3 card start which is not viable in a realistic setting, of which, you are only running 1 FFL at most.
    • Since this is a lvl 1 monster, and is only searchable with ROTA, you either add in “durendal” or use rota to search. And in a 40 card deck, you are rarely seeing this if ever.
  • With the new tuners, namely anarchist, we are able to add a card that I have never seen used, even in the early days when it was the original 6. Cunning of the Six Samurai. With Cunning of the Six Samurai we are able to do several things to help elevate the deck.
    • With Cunning being a searchable card, we can use at 1 to protect, extend, and reset interactions. This is not as impactful on its own which is why I run just 1 compared to 3 Asceticism. Asceticism turns any of our weaker monsters, 500 atk. or less, into either a Klesha or a link play. Whereas Cunning is after our initial setup is completed.
    • A standard setup will have us go into Klesha before or at 5th summon, protecting from Nibiru as well as all handtraps EXCEPT, Imperm and the new dominus trap cards. Cunning allows us to dodge Imperm as the only remaining hand trap that 99% of players would have to stop us that Klesha would not be able to stop. If they have either Dominus card, they are just a better gamer.
    • If we did not have to use Cunning, we can use it for either of the following.
      • If we used a Synchro Six Samurai to link play, we can use a Kizan to revive the monster.
      • Reset an interaction of either Shi En synchro to negate a s/t or monster negation on either our turn or our opponents.
      • Extend to make a better end board.
  • For other tech choices, it would most likely be in the extra deck and how you build it.
    • If you want to build with the Naturia monsters, you can/must run the Shien’s Squire. In addition to that, it wouldn’t be terrible either to run Proxy F Magician and Naturia Exterio since you would be able to make it fairly easily with all the material you would have. If you do this, you would need to make significantly more counters or remove other cards such as some link or XYZ I have in my build for example.
    • You could run a more XYZ heavy build and go into Utopic Future/Utopic Draco Future for another monster to negate and gain control of your opp monster.
    • In the main deck, for generating counters, you could run 2 Shinai and 2 Mizuho. With this, you will need to have at least 1 Saryuja in extra or use one of your extending spells to summon the first out. This will increase deck size and potentially reduce consistency. But that is a trade off for a better end board. Reminder though, you will need to generate at least 2n+1 counters where n is the summons, otherwise there is no purpose for this loop.
• The flexibility I feel truly lies in the non-engine, which for me is about ~10 in the main deck give or take based on the ratios. As well as the extra and side deck. All of which can be determined by the individual. My philosophy when building this was I will go first and blow them out with a large setup. And if I go 2nd I will rip apart their setup and then build mine up. I use the hand traps I do as they are the most effective and efficient to all decks in the game.

I do think the deck has potential, but in the current state of the game, there are simply better decks, but this is a favorite and I believe it has at least tier 2 potential. There are a few different builds for the deck, this is just the one I have landed on currently, but am not wholly decided on this as the end. I do not like this being reduced to an FTK deck with cannon soldier/amazoness archer or the like, so please no. I am not THAT degenerate.

Let me know what your thoughts are, and any suggestions. I did put my opinions on certain choices of why I do not do them, but would still like to hear the opinions of others and if there are other schools of thought on them. I have been playing the deck off and on since Storm of Ragnarok was released back in 2011.