There were a lot of really cool Decks being played up in Toronto this past weekend. The field was incredibly diverse, as were the playoff rounds on Sunday which featured an insane 10 different Decks in contention for the championship win. Among them, our pick for the absolute coolest was the Psychic Deck with Grandsoil the Elemental Lord that made it to the finals. While it may have come up short in the end, the Psychic strategy itself is sound. It’s also not one that many people are familiar with, so here’s a primer on how it works, and the key cards to the Deck.

This Psychic strategy is based on using EARTH Attribute Psychic monsters and other useful EARTH monsters like Card Trooper, Neo-Spacian Grand Mole and Maxx “C” to draw cards, Summon powerful Synchro and Xyz Monsters, and load up the Graveyard with EARTH monsters. Once you have exactly 5 EARTH monsters, you can finish things up with Return of the Duelist’s Grandsoil the Elemental Lord!

Serene Psychic Witch, Silent Psychic Wizard, and Esper Girl from Extreme Victory all have important roles to play in the Deck, especially Serene Psychic Witch. When she’s destroyed and sent to the Gravyeard from the field, she banishes a Psychic-Type monster with 2000 or less ATK from your Deck, and then Summons it during the next Standby Phase.  All of these monsters are EARTH, and so are Psychic Tuners Psychic Commander and Psychic Jumper. Additionally the Naturia Synchros and many Psychic Synchros are EARTH as well, making Grandsoil a perfect fit for the Deck!

Some opponents of Grandsoil have tried to claim that he’s useless if you draw more than one because he takes an EARTH monster out of your own Graveyard making it impossible to play the second. These people have not read Grandsoil. It doesn’t just Summon EARTH monsters from your Graveyard. It Summons any monster from either Graveyard, just like a card you might have heard of called Monster Reborn. Take a non-EARTH monster from your Graveyard or any monster from the opposing Graveyard, and you’re free to drop another Grandsoil!

In fact, grabbing your opponent’s monsters is one of this strategy’s greatest strengths. Between Grandsoil, Creature Swap, and Psychic Jumper, nothing your opponent throws out on the field or in the Graveyard is safe from being pilfered. Psychic Jumper is a Level 2 Psychic-Tuner that lets you pay 1000 Life Points to swap one of your other Psychics with any monster your opponent controls – you choose which, like with TG1-EM1. You can even Special Summon Jumper or a monster to swap straight from your Deck with the newly unlimited Emergency Teleport!

Emergency Teleport has always been a good card, and it’s even better now that it sets up swap combos, Synchro Summons, and Xyz Summons. You’ve got all of these Level 3 EARTH monsters, so in addition to the Naturia Synchros , you also get to use Soul of Silvermountain from Return of the Duelist that can lock down Traps and revive monsters from your Graveyard.

All in all, it’s a very viable, very cool strategy, and it can be modified to make it even better. For example, the multiple copies of Miracle Synchro Fusion and the 2 Ultimate Axon Kickers used in the Deck from Toronto can be dropped for more useful cards. Swapping out the 2 Kickers for Naturia Landoise and Hieratic Sun Dragon Overlord of Heliopolis and replacing the Spells with Book of Moon and a third Mystical Space Typhoon or second Creature Swap increases the number of different things the Deck can do without making it do them any less consistently.

The Sun Dragon Overlord is especially important to have in your Extra Deck if you’re planning on using multiple Grandsoils. Grandsoil has that nasty ability that skips your next turn’s Battle Phase if it leaves the field, but by using 2 Grandsoils to Xyz Summon your Sun Dragon Overlord you can bypass that negative ability (Page 45 of the rulebook makes this possible). If you don’t have an Overlord yet, now is a great time to fix that. In fact, if Jeff Jones had the Sun Dragon Overlord in his Extra Deck, he likely would have won YCS Toronto.

Making that change to the Deck and changing the illegal Summon of Naturia Beast in the Duel 1 of the Finals to the perfectly legal Ally of Justice Catastor would have left Joshua Graham with 600 Life Points and without the ability to make Jones skip his next two Battle Phases. Jones still would have lost his entire field of Naturia Barkion and in this scenario, Catastor and Heliopolis to the exact same play that Graham used to wipe his monsters out in real life. But in this case, Jones could have used his Wizard and Emergency Teleport on the next turn to throw down Psychic Nightmare and turn it into a 3400 ATK monster, letting him attack Tiras or Maestroke to win the Duel.

Will Psychics and Grandsoil continue to tear up the tournaments over the next few months? There’s no reason they can’t. Even without the element of surprise, running 4 Monster Reborns, 3 of which have 2800 ATK, and packing all sorts of ways to brainwash enemy monsters and get extra draws and Summons is inherently awesome, and it would be a shock to see the strategy simply drop off the map.