Notes & Combos

Early M1 - Dinomorphia Labrynth

With some new, nice pieces of interaction joining a group of well-positioned answers in the meta, I’m back behind Dinomorphia Labrynth for this season’s run, and I'm happy to report its use of control fundamentals are still firing smooth enough to dependably steer itself into satisfying places - even if its game plan is still relatively linear.

This deck's biggest strength at the moment is easily its physical functionality: Lab and Morph have particularly useful tools right now, and their marriage gives a lot of fuel for shutting doors on a wide chunk of the field - all while patching up some of the individual shortcomings each theme currently faces in the process. A lot of steeper control decks end up having to make harder concessions in their choice of interaction, dealing with various in-house limitations that end up bleeding into their matchup spread, but here, that's not really an issue. The interaction suite is powerful but still textured enough to the extent where you're often not shorthanded or struggling to find an antidote from what's across from you - and that's always a more useful positive when you're just trying to climb quickly to get your gems and to get ranked done with.

Notes

• It wouldn't be right not to list Dominus Impulse in the notes, so here it is. The card is fantastic and a big reason to pick up this variant of Lab again. It buffs your probability of being able to play going second and is meaningful in doing so - this is certainly not a weaker, topical interaction like an Imperm - but it's also very solid as a normal trap as well when going first. Impulse is a clean answer to a lot of the more common lines in the environment that can quickly snowball, and with that, at times you can be more proactive with how you sequence the rest of your options around it - perhaps not holding that Daruma for a beat or two longer knowing you can Impulse the extension if they have it, and reaping the reward of skipping them early if they don't. That shift in play perspective is on the quieter side than not, but can often cement turns you’re defending and the way the bottom line of the game tilts when used appropriately, nonetheless.

• Lilith’s praises have been sung by me in the past, but evidently, she only keeps getting better, finding herself worthy to write about yet again. For the unaware, Lilith is the deck’s best starter: She's both engines so you can grab what you don't already have access to, but she's also representative of interaction if you were comfortable with your engine situation, and that flexibility is rather strong. Furthermore, the counterplay to her when you're going first is surprisingly narrow: Where Arianna and Therizia lose to things like Imperm, Veiler, etc, Lilith does not - with the only way to deal with her being squarely Gamma, so her reliability to get you up and running is unusually high for a monster oriented starter.

• Those positives aside, she picks up even more value as control decks have gained notable popularity since the back half of March, and a variety of them are on Simultaneous Equation Cannon (SEC) - even seeing use outside of its traditional home in Lab. Lilith’s level is not only low enough to avoid being a cannon risk on her own, but her effect allows you to manage vulnerable monsters to further side-step SEC, even when negated, letting you approach those matchups much more aggressively - a quality that I really appreciated during this climb.

• Lastly, the hand trap lineup is worth a bit of attention. Distinctly, there's a 2/2 split in Droll and Retaliating, reducing some of their relative risk while maintaining the grittier pieces of math and theory that the deck wants to play with in this category. For Droll, you're not exactly in love with it vs Millennium SE, but it's still serviceable in that MU and solid enough as a pseudo-turn skip in the bigger scope of the meta where it's reasonable to be on without too much pushback. Retaliating is more interesting. With Beatrice getting banned and Millennium’s future in question, SE players have flirted with Azamina more often, and some have fully drifted back to Fire Kings too. Coupled with this, Branded has seen a good uptick in play since last DC as well, and on that note, it's clear that this choice is primarily respecting those trends and slanting those MUs. It worked out well for me all in all, especially when I got deeper into Master.