Notes & Combos

Modern chain beat: A deck I've been working on for a bit now in the background

Chain Beat is one of my favorite decks it has a very cool playstyle but it cant just keep up in current times

My thoughts:

For modern chain beat I do see the kash stuff and the primite stuff and luna as mandatory I cant imagine a chain beat list without them.

I think chain beat is more of a theory than a deck these days. The original goal was to gain advantage by having monsters that guaranteed you never lost board presence. This meant that protection elements could be cut and board wipes became one sided. Your goal was to make your opponent play inefficiently. Culturally, the odd mechanics of the deck encouraged bad/niche techs. The core identity has always been control + stun.

Temp banishing was the best option in 2013, but we've come a long way since then. As games got faster, board wipes became more one sided. 1 for 1 removal became negates and got tied to monster effects instead of spell/trap techs. Just surviving isn't good enough these days, every card needs to build advantage because this deck fundamentally does not have an engine. A spiritual successor would be something like Eldlich, which has the same recursion philosophy. The only classic floaters that's viable in the modern sense is Luna, even the Mekks don't contribute enough.

Honestly primite and kash I feel is the closest to a modern version of the floaters, as they dont dodge but they just always comes back, meaning it’s kinda useless for them to kill it and you can just slowly dismantle their board and run them out of resources with drillbeam/fenrir/unicorn.

Same reason on why wind up rabbit had to go.The tricky bit is that floaters don't do things anymore. They used to semi passively generate advantage by forcing the opponent to waste removal resources, but as the game has sped up with most decks having spell speed 2 removal or monster effect negates it's made killing floaters much more trivial.

That's why I considered Eldlich and primite and kash to be a chain beat successor, as dying and rebuilding was functionally the same as floating. The trap to avoid is getting involved with an engine that does too much, requires protecting a castle, or is functionally just stall.

luna and the kash monsters synergize very well with the deck with them you can keep getting counters on powersink functionally only giving yout opponent 1 monster effect activation each turn