Phantom Knight (50 card variant)

A (Somewhat) Brief History of Phantom Knights

The Phantom Knights (commonly abbreviated as PK) archetype is a Dark-Warrior, rank 3 and 4 toolbox based archetype, that likes to banish it's monsters from the graveyard to activate their effects. originally introduced in 2016 in the set Wing Raiders. From the time the archetype was originally released up to 2019, the deck was, quite lacking to say the least. The archetype in more pure builds had not much going for it, and required a bunch of generic extenders to get plays going. Then 2019 came along, releasing the Legendary Hero Decks. So far the most recent installment in the Legendary Decks series of products, came with a blessing for the PK players (or at least the people who like PK), but a curse to practically everyone else, The Phantom Knights of Rusty Bardiche. This card was and still is an absolutely insane card that boosted the PK deck immensely to the point that in pure builds the best way to play it was Bardiche turbo. Being able to cover a majority of the PK's major weaknesses as an archetype were fixed, being able to both send a PK monster to the graveyard, and set a PK S/T afterwards. This is where the card gets more insane when you remember the PK's best S/T is a trap card that negates, and being able to send The Phantom Knights of Silent Boots to fetch another one from the deck. If Bardiche doesn't get negated, you have one free negate on the board just by summoning the damn thing. The craziest thing about The Phantom Knights of Rusty Bardiche is that the card only requires Dark monsters for its summon, being able to be abused by predominantly Dark decks. This is where the best deck at the time, Orcust, comes in. Orcust was a powerful beast of a deck in 2019 with major consistency and Dingirsu, being able to stack the PK's newfound power on top of it, along with another insanely powerful card at the time, Outer Entity Azathot (basically the VFD of 2019, when being summoned by Phantom Knights' Rank-Up-Magic Launch, also settable through Bardiche btw), It became too much of a trouble where Konami pulled a Firewall Dragon FTK format and didn't hit the actual enablers of these plays until January 2020, Banning Orcust Harp Horror, the main consistency booster of Orcust, Bardiche, for being an insane splashable tool, and Azathot, to let people play the game again. (Oh and the rest of the 2019 meta, everything got banned), Fast forward to September 2020, Konami decided to bring back The Phantom Knights of Rusty Bardiche, to help hype up the upcoming set in November 2020, Phantom Rage, which came with some new Phantom Knights support, which has not only made the purer builds of PK more menacing, but also boosted the power enough to make the deck a rouge competitor in the meta today!

Deck List:

The Phantom Knights

3 The Phantom Knights of Torn Scales: This is the best piece of support the Phantom Knights archetype got in Phantom Rage and for good reason, It's both a starter card, and an extender card. This is a card that you want to play 3 of as much as you can in any PK deck, its insane versatility and reliability as a card in the deck makes it a permanent 3 of in every form of PK.

3 The Phantom Knights of Ancient Cloak:

3 The Phantom Knights of Silent Boots:

2 The Phantom Knights of Ragged Gloves:

1 The Phantom Knights of Stained Greaves:

The Other Monsters

3 Marauding Captain: This is the second of your 3 normal summons in the deck, being able to turbo out another monster on summon making easy cherubini plays is really, really nice to have. Not every build must play this, but it's one that's used in a lot of builds for it's generi use. A classic card,.remembering the days of GOAT format when this thing was at 2 to make the battle lock less consistent, now that effect of Marauding Captain doesn't come up often nowadays, it's still something to take note of.

3 Tour Guide from The Underworld: The 3rd main normal summon of the deck, has the same first effect as marauding captain but it's type specific but allows you to not need the target you want in hand, it's a duality that is nice to remember, Marauding summons in from hand with only lv restriction, Tour Guide summons from hand or deck with both a type and lv restriction.

2 Graff, Malebranche of The Burning Abyss: This is the main target you want to summon off of Tour Guide, not drawing into Tour Guide is still not much of an issue if you can still make Cherubini to send this card to get it's effect off. Playing 2 of it is ideal because if you draw into it as a 1 of, your combos will require more resources, and playing it at 3 is not ideal in this build since you don't necessarily want to draw into it outside of PK Fire.

2 Cir, Malebranche of The Burning Abyss: This is the target you want to summon off of Graff. Also playing 2 for the same reasons and it's also a harder garnet than Graff if you play it at 1.

1 Farfa, Malebranche of The Burning Abyss: The card you want to summon off of Graff if you go second instead of Cir to help clear up your opponent's board of a troublesome card during your combo. Don't need to run 2 as you aren't always going second, and that it's not entirely dead in hand.

,3 Kagemucha Knight: The best extender in the deck, if you draw this with any other monster, you practically just have a free Cherubini to start off your combos. (It can also chain block your Tour Guide against ash which is really helpful but not insane as imperm is still a card, but even then you still have the materials to go into Cherubini so it wouldn't matter too much.)

1 Psychic Traker & Psychic Wheeleder: You can definitely play more of these if you want but I prefer the Danger!? package because of it's draw power.

1 Danger!? Jackelope? & Danger!? Tsuchinoko?: This little Danger!? package is really nice to play in the deck as they are dark lv 3 monsters that special summon themselves while also setting up the graveyard, albeit randomly, that also draw a card on their summon, play 3 of these if they ever go back to 3.

1 Dark Magician & Red-Eyes Black Dragon: Garnets in every sense of the word, only played in here for the Dragoon engine, an engine that is really helpful in PK as PK can't play through negation as easily as decks like VW or Infernobles.

1 Psy-Frame Driver: Gamma fodder and that's it.

Spells

1 Reinforcement of The Army: One of the most famous cards in the game and for good reason, generic searching fro any warrior monster you need is really helpful.

1 Foolish Burial:

1 Emergency Teleport:

1 Phantom Knights' Rank-Up-Magic Force:

1 Red-Eyes Fusion:

Traps

3 Phantom Knights' Fog Blade:

, Hand Traps

3 Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring:

3 Infinite Impermanence:

3 Psy-Framegear Gamma:

(Im going to finish writing this i swear =-=)