It came as a surprise to many, but the biggest winner at YCS Providence was Master Hyperion! Placing 5 Duelists into the Top 16 after having next to no representation at all for the past few months (even after The Agent of Mystery – Earth was moved up to Semi-Limited), Hyperion and friends were crushing people left and right and doing it in a lot of different ways.

Your basic Hyperion Deck is going to win in one of two ways. The first strategy is to force your opponent to waste cards trying to get past an early game Gachi Gachi Gantetsu courtesy of The Agent of Creation – Venus and Mystical Shine Ball. Sometimes Tour Guide of the Underworld shows up with her pal Wind-Up Zenmaines as well. Then, once they’ve finally gotten rid of your pesky Xyz Monster, you clean up with the massive Master Hyperion and its destruction effect.

The second way to win is by exploiting the reliance on Special Summoning of Decks like Wind-Ups and Geargia. Archlord Kristya is huge and puts a stop to all Special Summons, so if you can Summon it early enough and keep it safe (or just replay it constantly) there’s not much that can be done about it. There are two ways to get Kristya into play early on: 1. Drop it into the Graveyard with Card Trooper or Herald of Orange Light and then bring it back with Call of the Haunted. 2. Quickly put 4 Fairy-Type monsters into the Graveyard with The Agent of Creation – Venus/Mystical Shine Ball and a Tuner like The Agent of Mystery – Earth or Genex Ally Birdman.

For the longest time, Duelists played this strategy with few to no Traps at all. Out of the 5 Duelists who made it to the playoff rounds with Master Hyperion, 4 of them threw off the shackles of the Deck’s past success and ran anywhere from 8 to 12 Traps, including multiple copies of the defining card of this Deck’s new look: Call of the Haunted.

It stands to reason that a well prepared opponent can deal with Master Hyperion or Archlord Kristya once or twice in a given Duel and that they probably have ways of dealing with early roadblocks like Gachi Gachi Gantetsu and Card Trooper. But can they deal with Master Hyperion three times? Can they plow though Gachi, Krystia, and Hyperion twice? Let’s say they’ve got a great Deck and that they’ve played well and drawn well and that they manage to get back in the driver’s seat after all that. Can they then beat Master Hyperion again? Can they even get to that point if their Mystical Space Typhoons and Heavy Storm just let you draw extra cards with Card Trooper or search out Effect Veiler and Herald of Orange Light with Sangan? It doesn’t seem likely, and using 2 or 3 copies of Call of the Haunted is what makes this possibility all too real, especially when you consider that Kristya is going back to your Deck every time it gets blown up and Call of the Haunted can also help you adjust the number of Fairies in your Graveyard so you can Summon it again.

For Kevin Rubio, that was good, but not quite good enough. He took it a step further by adding Evolzar Laggia and Evolzar Dolkka to his Extra Deck along with Jurrac Guaiba in his Main Deck. Guaiba has fallen out of favor lately in Dino-Rabbit Decks, but the fact that there’s no reasonable way to expect to see it in a non-Dino-Rabbit Deck greatly increases its effectiveness. Rubio also dropped the pair Pot of Duality usually seen in these Decks and added in Forbidden Lance to both protect his big monsters and soften up enemy monsters so that Guaiba could eat them. Whether or not it will work again now that the element of surprise has been lost is yet to be seen, but it’s hard to argue against being able to Summon 2 of the best Xyz Monsters available in a Deck that normally wouldn’t be able to do so without destabilizing the Deck. And you can always side the Guaibas out after Duel 1 if you don’t think lightning can strike twice in a single Match.

Even if you don’t want to run Guaiba, Forbidden Lance is still worth a look. The greatest weakness of many of today’s popular Decks is Archlord Kristya, and the greatest weakness of Archlord Kristya in a Deck that thrives on keeping it on the field or re-Summoning it every time it recycles itself is banishment. Out of the 32 Duelists who made it to the playoff rounds, there were 41 copies of Bottomless Trap Hole being played, 39 copies of Dimensional Prison, 41 copies of Torrential Tribute, and only 13 copies of Mirror Force. That’s 80 potential cards that could banish a Kristya versus 54 potential cards that put it back on top of your Deck where you’ll likely be able to re-Summon it next turn. You have to be able to answer those banishing cards even if it weakens Kristya to the point where it’ll lose a battle, because most of the time you’re just going to Summon it again if you re-draw it next turn. And in the meantime, you can drop Hyperion to make your opponent think about what they’ve done.

One card that can get you in trouble with this Deck is Fiendish Chain, which the winner, Chris LeBlanc had the foresight to be using. It’s a pretty good way to make Hyperion and/or Kristya irrelevant for a while, and most of the Duelists playing this Deck weren’t playing the Hieratic Sun Dragon Overlord of Heliopolis that lets you make use of negated Krystias, get around Chain/Veiler combinations, and put Kristya in the Graveyard where Call can pick it up while stranding your opponent with a Fiendish Chain they can’t get rid of.

All in all, this is one of those Decks that has no excuse for not being successful. The real shocker is that it took almost 2 months after the F&L List change-over in September 1^st for it to show up in force at the top.