Welcome back to another deck profile. With set 4, Become the Hero!, just over a month away at this point we have a couple more archetypes to cover, in order to complete our set 3 archive. Today, we will be addressing the second tier 1 deck of the format and that is, as the title suggests, Lucy-Aras Control. Conceived very early on into the set release, the archetype has hung in there and has gone from strength to strength demonstrating a highly consistent winrate in both the 1k Tournament and the ongoing Gate Ruler World Team Circuit.
The Decklist
In this instance, for the purposes of this article, I am using the decklist played by the UK player Tamamo during the Gate Ruler World Team Circuit. Specifically, this particular build focuses on consistency, opting to use the Genesis Summoning Package to its fullest potential, in order to set up for a Lucifer the Lightbringer and Aras Guardian of Divine Winds combo board wipe as soon as possible.
Of course, this is not the only viable build. Again, during the Gate Ruler World Team Circuit, a Japanese player has demonstrated a remarkable winrate with his own version of the archetype. Essentially, instead of relying on Genesis Summoning, he opted to include further cycling cards for the purpose of drawing into his combo pieces quickly, while also including a number of events that further refresh his energy, in addition to the Wizard Ruler’s innate skill, for even more combo plays.
Playstyle
Well, there might be some temptation to just label this archetype as another iteration of Genesis Summoning, nothing could be further from the truth; for a variety of reasons.
As demonstrated in the section above, unlike Dragon Knight Genesis, this archetype utilises the Genesis Summoning mechanic as simply ‘a means to an end’ i.e. to complete its principle 2 unit combo. Furthermore, it does not even require the aforementioned special-summoning mechanic to complete this feat. This serves as yet another example of its strength, as the versatility in builds does allow for quite a tailored approach to any local metagame.
That being said, the playstyle is also significantly different. Due to the lower health total and STK available to the Wizard Ruler, it is forced to engage in much more defensive strategies. Whereas Knight seeks to push damage and overwhelm the opponent with significant tempo swings and prominent searchable effects, the former seeks to utilise the ‘Resource Channelling‘ ability, native to its existence, in order to mitigate damage dealt with cards like Eons, Vabelcion the Battle-Forged, and A7 “Cheshire” the Cat. Playing the long game and true to its control playstyle, victory is ultimately achieved by either exhausting your opponent’s resources or placing them at such a tempo disadvantage they cannot hope to recover from.
Final Thoughts
It is genuinely difficult to assess whether or not this particular archetype will retain its competitive prowess heading into Set 4. Normally, I would be reluctant to pass judgement on an untested metagame. However, knowing the full card list quite a bit in advance, allows for some theory-crafting and proxy testing to take place. As a result, there is a strong possibility that the archetype will fall off competitively to a certain extent. It will be by no means obsolete but as Set 4 contains quite a few high health units, that also confer effect damage immunity onto others, the 5 damage threshold, currently set in place by Lucifer and Embrace of Eons, suddenly becomes less relevant.
It might be the case that in order to survive, these decks potentially will have to fall-back onto the use of G&G Armament Factory which proved quite critical in the early dominance of a variety of effect damage control decks. Effectively, this combo should allow users to clear off much higher health units efficiently, in addition to completely sniping off the ‘conferring damage immunity’ units, with a well-placed Eons, that are set to place this strategy on the backfoot.
Overall, while things may not look too promising at the present time, we will need to wait for actual tournaments to take place, to verify just how much dominance Lucy-Aras Control will have ceded to new contenders.
I do sincerely hope you enjoyed this write-up. Now that I am somewhat recovered from my illness I do look forward to creating even more content. If you are curious to see more, do not forget to give me a follow on Twitter and if you would like to be a part of the creative process that goes into doing these write-ups, you can also check out my Patreon.
Special shout-out and kind thanks to C. Sweeney & Kenny as my first ‘GateRuler’ related Patrons.
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