We’re taking a break from Feature Matches here in Round 4 to get caught up, grab some

lunch, and get you the breakdown of every Deck played in this tournament!

After late registrations into the World Championship Qualifier we ended up with 591

Duelists competing for the Championship. What were they playing? That’s what we

wanted to know, so we found out what the WCQ metagame looks like here in Day 1.

Here’s the number of competitors running each Deck in today’s competition.

Monarchs: 171

Kozmos: 153

Performapals: 103

Burning Abyss/The Phantom Knights: 72

Qliphorts: 19

Mermails: 15

Anti-Meta: 8

Yosenju: 6

Majespecters: 6

Kaiju: 5

PSY-Frames: 5

Fluffals: 4

HERO: 3

Deskbots: 3

‘Tellarknights: 2

Infernoid: 2

Counter Fairy: 2

Cyber Dragon: 2

Speedroids: 2

Madolches: 1

Igknights: 1

Chaos Dragons: 1

Volcanics: 1

Nekroz: 1

Blackwings: 1

Gravekeepers: 1

Blue-Eyes: 1

On the surface it appears that Monarchs are beating out Kozmos by a slim margin, and

outpacing everything else by a mile. But if you break those Monarch Decks down into

Extra Deck Monarchs and Domain Monarchs, the numbers are actually kind of

surprising: only 93 of those Monarch Duelists are running an Extra Deck build, leaving a

whopping 78 piloting Domain variants.

The Domain version of Monarchs is much easier to build than any of the Extra Deck

builds. But this is a World Championship Qualifier, and mixed Pendulum Decks have

been doing a ton of big things in notable tournaments. It’s no surprise that Performapal

variants were the third most-represented strategy in the Day 1 field, and a whole lotta

Monarch players came ready for the match-up.

Beneath those three leading Decks, various builds of Burning Abyss and Phantom

Knights chalked up 72 seats in the Day 1 metagame, solidifying the Big Four for this

tournament.

Beneath those four leading strategies, Qliphorts are the standout with nearly twenty

players. Mermails landing just beneath them are a much bigger surprise with fifteen

players in the tournament – a Deck that’s done next to nothing in the past three months of

Dueling. There are eight Anti-Meta players amongst the field of 591 competitors, one of

whom is Galileo Mauricio De Obaldia Soza, and the next four Decks all have anti-meta

elements: Yosenjus, Majespecters, Kaijus, and PSY-Frames.

Beneath those familiar strategies are a smattering of Decks ranging from Fluffals and

Igknights, to Counter Fairies and Chaos Dragons. Some of those Decks, like Nekroz and

Infernoids, have actually seen some impressive finishes in bigger tournaments over the

past few weeks, so we could easily see some upsets on our way to the Top 32 tomorrow.