Deck Profile – Taylor Raflowitz’s Chaos Beatdown Deck
With “Chaos Sorcerer” Semi-Limited and back to two copies per Deck as of September 1, there’s been a lot of buzz about the potential for a simple, focused LIGHT and DARK build.
The Deck’s goal? Nothing fancy or over-complicated. Just a variety of easy-to-use monsters with good effects – ones that can be Normal Summoned to run over your opponent’s monsters or take big chunks out of their Life Points through direct attacks.
Playing a lot of monster removal cards like “Fissure” and “Bottomless Trap Hole” means Duels can come down to very few cards on each side of the table. That lets big monsters with 1800 or 1900 ATK really shine, and sets up easy Summons of “Chaos Sorcerer” to dominate. This is exactly the kind of Deck that Taylor Raflowitz is running this weekend.
Monsters | Spells | Traps | Side Deck | Extra Deck |
1 Cyber Dragon 3 D. D. Warrior Lady 3 Doomcaliber Knight 2 Chaos Sorcerer 1 Breaker the Magical Warrior 3 Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer 3 Thunder King Rai-Oh 1 Blackwing – Gale the Whirlwind 1 Card Trooper 1 Dark Armed Dragon |
2 Fissure 1 Mystical Space Typhoon 3 Book of Moon 2 Allure of Darkness 1 Smashing Ground 2 My Body As A Shield 1 Heavy Storm |
3 Royal Oppression 1 Torrential Tribute 2 Bottomless Trap Hole 1 Solemn Judgment 1 Mirror Force 1 Dimensional Prison |
The strategy’s a simple one: throw down big monsters, attack whenever you can, and keep simplifying the game with removal cards to keep your opponent from putting together combos or fighting back. Once each Duelist is down to their last card or two, a monster like “Thunder King Rai-Oh” or “Doomcaliber Knight” can be really tough to fight back against.
Raflowitz holds those “Chaos Sorcerers” until they can be most effective, looking for situations where a Sorcerer can survive for a turn or two to remove multiple cards over time, or wait until the opponent is low enough to be destroyed by a pair of monsters like Sorcerer and “Breaker the Magical Warrior” making direct attacks.
The trick to doing that is to quickly grind away at his opponent’s cards, eliminating his opponent’s options one by one faster than they can recover. Raflowitz’s Deck is Main Decking 2 copies each of two cards seeing a lot of play today: “Fissure” and “Bottomless Trap Hole.” The ability to run multiple copies of “Fissure” means plenty of fast monster removal for a Deck like this one, while “Bottomless Trap Hole” is being treated as a must-run by almost every competitor I’ve spoken with today. In this Deck, both cards serve to eliminate threats and defenses, while also simplifying the game by removing cards from the field – making it tougher for the opponent to defeat Raflowitz’s strong Level 4 monsters.
If we were to divide this Deck into “fast, strong monsters” and “removal cards that simplify the Duel,” “D. D. Warrior Lady” would fit into both categories! She’s another card that was just removed from the Limited List, and now that Raflowitz can run three copies of her he’s maxing out. “D. D. Warrior Lady’s” 1500 ATK is big enough to destroy smaller monsters like “Armageddon Knight,” “Lumina, Lightsworn Summoner,” or “Blackwing – Gale the Whirlwind” in battle, while her effect lets her eliminate big Synchro Monsters and other high-ATK threats. She renders the opponent’s copies of “Honest” and “Blackwing – Kalut the Moon Shadow” almost irrelevant, since her effect will get rid of whatever she attacks, no matter what.
This Deck is another one that’s really easy to play, and because of its basic playstyle it doesn’t tend to get bad hands with a lot of unusable cards. It’s a simple, clean Deck, and that lack of complications could carry it to Day 2.