Welcome to the second preview article for Speed Duel: Arena of Lost Souls! Today we are going to take the first look at the newest character to join Speed Duel: Bonz!

In the original series, Bonz Dueled against Joey with his patented Zombie Deck. After baiting Joey into destroying many of his monsters, Bonz suddenly turned the tables! He Summoned all of his Zombies back with Call of the Haunted and powered them up with Pumpking the King of Ghosts and its Ectoplasmic Fortification!.

Once per turn, if you control a Zombie monster, you can place 1 counter on this card. All Zombie monsters you control gain 100 ATK and lose 100 DEF for each counter on this card. Any battle damage you take from battles involving your Zombie monster is doubled. 

Ectoplasmic Fortification! is a lot like a Field Spell, boosting your monsters ATK, but scales even bigger as the game progresses. What makes it much better than a Field Spell is your opponent can’t destroy it, so after the third activation or so, each of your Zombies is going to be a big threat.

To accommodate for the downside of Ectoplasmic Fortification!, you’ll need to make sure you have enough defensive tricks up your sleeve to last a few turns. If you can manage to survive that long without taking too much damage, your horde of Zombies can outclass nearly everything your opponent will Normal Summon. Like all Zombie hordes, eventually they will break through the opponent’s barricades and run over any survivors.

The best cards to take advantage of Ectoplasmic Fortification! are Zombies you can simply Normal Summon, like The Snake Hair and Dragon Zombie.

With the first counter on Ectoplasmic Fortification!, Dragon Zombie will match up to any Amazoness monster powered up by Amazoness Village. After the second counter, your Dragon Zombie becomes much harder to deal with; and by the third activation, your opponent is going to need to invest removal or multiple cards to deal with it. 

Because you have an abundance of Normal Zombies that might not be too great in the early game, White Elephant’s Gift is a good way to make use of them and dig deeper for defensive cards. You can place the counter on Ectoplasmic Fortification! first, then tribute it away for some extra cards.

If you want to make even better use out of your Normal Zombies, you could also include Great Mammoth of Goldfine in your Extra Deck. The Fusion Materials required are Dragon Zombie and Snake Hair, so all you’d need is a couple copies of Polymerization and you’re good to go. At 2200 ATK, Great Mammoth of Goldfine is pretty strong on its own. It alongside a Dragon Zombie both boosted by Ectoplasmic Fortification! will have a combined ATK of 4000, enough to end the Speed Duel in a single Battle Phase.

Another direction you can take the Zombie strategy in is with Decayed Commander and Zombie Tiger. Decayed Commander is great for ripping cards out of your opponent’s hand, running them out of resources when they already don’t start with that many cards. Accelerating a Zombie Tiger into play is a great bonus, and if you use the effect of Zombie Tiger to equip itself onto Decayed Commander, you can discard even more of your opponent’s cards. Combine this with Ectoplasmic Fortification! and your Decayed Commander can have enough ATK to clear over monsters and discard cards for free!

That’s all we have time for today, join us again for another preview article for Speed Duel Booster: Arena of Lost Souls!