It’s been about 3 weeks since the release of Return of the Duelist, and I hope everyone has been having fun with all the new cards! The last few weeks of Dueling have been pretty interesting. At YCS Toronto, we saw two extremely successful Decks in the Top 4 that were built by combining new Return of the Duelist cards with older cards. There was a Geargia Deck that used Geargiarmor, Geargiaccelerator, Geargiarsenal, and Gear Gigant X along with Machina Gearframe, Machina Peacekeeper, and Machina Fortress. And the very cool second place Deck combined Grandsoil the Elemental Lord with EARTH Psychic monsters from Extreme Victory, Crossroads of Chaos, and The Duelist Genesis.

I mentioned way back in August that the Prophecy monsters and Spellbook cards can work with all Spellcaster-based strategies, and in light of the recent success of Duelists who are combining Return of the Duelist cards with their old favorites, I thought I’d share some cool combos you can do by combining Return of the Duelist cards with some of my old favorites! Read more…

Warrior-Type monsters are some of the most powerful and popular around, from Elemental HERO cards to Six Samurai. Their Xyz monsters are quite strong as well, and thanks to Return of the Duelist it’ll be easier than ever to Summon them courtesy of Heroic Challenger – Double Lance!

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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. Read more…

If you checked out any of the coverage from this past weekend’s YCS in Toronto, then you know the secret is out: The Geargia monsters from Return of the Duelist are really good.  4 Duelists made it to the playoff rounds with straight-up Geargia Decks, one of whom made it all the way to the Semi-finals! That’s pretty crazy for a Deck that had only been legal for 5 days.

While they’re perfectly good on their own, as evidenced by YCS Toronto, the Geargia monsters can also be used to bolster a variety of older Machine-based strategies. Gear Gigant X isn’t picky about the Machines it fetches out of your Deck, making it a perfect fit in lots of Decks. For example…

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With all the great new cards to help EARTH monsters out in Return of the Duelist, it’d be a crime not to take a look at the monsters made from the Earth itself – Rocks! Rock-Type monsters are about to blast their way to new heights with a whole quarry’s worth of new cards and combos! Read more…