by Daimax
I play Blackwing and Raidraptor, and if you have even cursory knowledge of those decks you probably know exactly why I’m leading with this information. I have seen countless people try to create the most efficient “turn skip” combo they can with both those engines and the help of a very obnoxious rank 8 xyz, and quite frankly I’m so tired of watching people throw away the greatest competitive advantage rogue decks have to win harder going first that I’m writing this article to explain that
Skipping your opponent’s turn is bad, actually.
To get the newer people up to speed first, we aren’t actually skipping our opponent’s turn the same way Arcana Force XXI — The World or Tellarknight Ptolemaeus do. When I refer to a “turn skip” for the rest of this article, it will be referencing effects that negate every card or effect the opponent activates or prevent them from activating cards for the remainder of the turn after it resolves.
This is obviously a really good effect — cards have been banned for doing this in the past — and now more than ever it is trivially easy to cram a turn skip into whatever your rogue pet deck is by navigating your way to two 12 star synchro monsters, two 6 star bodies or a rank 7 and our good friend Rusty.
Especially worth looking at is the Crimson Dragon, as it’s far more economical than whatever Kali Yuga setup you’ve MacGyver’d your way into making with a copy of Predplant Ophrys Scorpio, Ostinato and 2 copies of Genex Ally Birdman.
It is trivially easy not only to summon a Crimson Dragon along with your pick of 12, but also to put up some form of omni-negate to ensure that nothing happens to your dragon before it can tag into Hot Red Dragon Archfiend King Calamity and functionally skipping your opponent’s turn. You can do this in bad decks like Laval, you can do this in mid decks like Superheavy Samurai, you can even do this in meta threats like Mannadium. Again, it is not hard to set up in any semi-competent synchro spam deck or even incompetent synchro spam decks with a good enough hand, but despite that when was the last time you saw King Calamity resolve?
If I was a betting man I’d put money on the last King Calamity you saw coming from a Centur-Ion pilot. It’s funny, despite basically every top deck right now being fully capable of turn skipping under negation — especially Mannadium — the only tiered deck seeing success with the idea is Centur-Ion. To understand why this is, we should first examine
Why Centur-Ion is good at all
This is the entire Centur-Ion core. It’s so small it fits into a SIDE DECK. Every main deck card here except Emeth and Phalanx are 1 card combos so consistency isn’t an issue at all and you’re still left with a staggering 26 non-engine slots. Even with a supplementary engine like Horus you still have vastly more room for tech cards and handtraps than the competition. Anyone who’s played Pure Airpods will tell you a grip full of handtraps isn’t going to get you a win but backing that up with the consistency and resource loop of the Centur-Ion combo and a low-investment calamity lock creates a meta threat.
This is just a small part of why this deck is strong, there’s more depth than a single paragraph can convey and it changes from sub-engine to sub-engine, but this is the general gist. Lots of Non-Engine space, Consistent and steals games.
Now let’s see Paul Allen’s turn skip.
This deck list is… really something. There’s a lot going on but comparing this to Centur-Ion the difference is night and day. Obviously it’s an extreme example but Centur-Ion has a far more streamlined setup, is more consistent and can play a much higher density of “good cards” because of the non-engine space the tiny core engine allows. While this list may have a bit more going on in terms of possible Plan Bs in essence it’s just less efficient Centur-Ion.
This is the problem with turn skips right now. Unless you somehow managed to create a combo that’s smaller and more consistent than Centur-Ion, you need to justify not playing Centur-Ion over whatever shell you’ve found for the turn skip. It doesn’t matter if you’re summoning King Calamity with Crimson Dragon, Kali Yuga in an xyz deck or even making Beatrice to send Ghost Meets Girl and Transaction Rollback, you are playing a less efficient version of Centur-Ion.
This loss in efficiency is largely the reason why Mannadium gave up on calamity locking in favor of a wide, near unbreakable negate board. After all, why bother going the extra few feet to fully lock the opponent out when you can save a bit of effort and functionally do the same thing but with a more resilient setup and payoff?
You Need a Niche
Before a tournament even begins you have the chance to tailor your deck to fit the expected metagame and be prepared for whatever people playing to win will throw at you. Centur-Ion is in fact part of the expected metagame, so you will find players who are ready for you if you decide to turn skip.
Players cannot prepare for everything in any metagame that’s even remotely wide. This is the greatest advantage a player could possibly hope for against an opponent of equal skill. At times this doesn’t matter because engines can match favorably against other engines, but if you are doing something your opponent is unprepared to answer you can pretty easily ride that to victory.
To illustrate my point, I’d like to talk about Raidraptor. Raidraptor post Phantom Nightmare currently has 2 competing builds, Pure and Kali Yuga Turbo.
The aim of Kali Yuga Turbo should be pretty obvious, you Turbo out Kali Yuga on your opponent’s turn and skip it to win. It has a relatively resilient setup but next to no followup plays, which doesn’t matter much unless the game goes long.
Pure Raidraptor eschews the turn skip in favor of an equally resilient setup that puts up a staggering 3 towers alongside all the pieces to grind any opponent into dust over the course of a longer game even if they can handle the pressure your skyline applies. The main advantages of Pure over Kali Yuga Turbo is a higher quality of individual cards and a less rigid combo structure. Obviously you lose the auto win button that is Kali Yuga but if you’re building an unbreakable board anyway, does that matter?
Both builds are similar in power level, and while they have their advantages over the other what pushes a player to one or the other is usually personal preference but there’s a key difference that makes me believe Pure is the correct pick for the foreseeable future.
Only one deck here makes a tower. Pure makes 3. You could make the argument that Pure Raidraptor occupies the same space as Purrely because they both make a huge tower and then grind the opponent out of the game but there’s one critical difference between Kali Yuga Turbo being compared to Centur-Ion and Pure being compared to Purrely: The outs to Centur-Ion also out Kali Yuga Turbo, but the outs to Purrely are only able to handle one tower.
Unlike Kali Yuga Turbo, Pure has a niche. It’s doing something no deck better than it right now is and because of that it gets a massive advantage because nobody is going to be ready for the game plan of Pure Raidraptor.
Realistically speaking the only outs people are packing for towers (if they have any at all) are cards like Kaijus, Herald of the Abyss and the Transphobic OTK in fire decks. While these can all beat a single tower, the opponent still has to find some way to chew through 2 more AND find lethal before the turn comes back and the Raidraptor player gets to flex it’s comical amount of recursion.
This isn’t set in stone though. If King Calamity ever gets the axe suddenly people will stop preparing for a turn skip, and then Kali Yuga stocks will be far higher. These trends change from meta to meta, and as a deck builder you need to be able to identify when your deck has a niche you can take advantage of.
But sometimes turn skips are just plain bad.
I think my favorite example of turn skips being shockingly low value plays sometimes is definitely Transaction Rollback target Ghost Meets Girl to lock both players out of summoning from anywhere but the graveyard for the turn at the cost of half your lifepoints and any 2 level 6 monsters.
As strong as this effect is, turns out it’s not great right now, especially if it turns off one of your engines like it does in the deck list above. Copying Ghost Meets Girl prevents you from using your Gold Pride monsters to interrupt opponents that can keep playing, so you fold at the mere sight of Imsety. Nothing made me lose faith in rollback targeting anything but Big Welcome faster than playing out a full turn under the Ghost Meets Girl lock because of the Horus engine.
As a player it’s your job to identify when a metagame is hostile to an end board piece, and turn skips are no different from other pieces in that regard. Should you be summoning King Calamity when your opponent can still break big parts of your board with the grave effect of High Avatar Kirin and other Fire Kings? Is Ghost Meets Girl worth half your life points when your opponent is going to set 3 traps with a Lady Labrynth in hand? Should you really rely on a main phase-locked RUM in a format where playing Cosmic Cyclone in the main deck is a justifiable choice?
