[No] Bad Cards: Theban Nightmare (Part 1 of 2)

Welcome to [No] Bad Cards, a new series that seeks to challenge, or confirm, the assumptions around cards seen as difficult to use profitably in Goat Format. Each article will consist of three sections: a background section explaining the reason the card was chosen, a section dedicated to the theory driving a proposed optimal utilization of the card and the deck formed from it, then, finally, a section detailing the results of testing in competitive environments and deckbuild changes that followed with explanations of those as well. Submissions welcome!

​Episode One: The Theban Menace 

BACKGROUND

Some cards stay with you. Theban Nightmare is a card I’ve been trying to build around ever since I saw it in the Ancient Sanctuary bulk back in the day. LIGHT? Fiend? Sangan target? What? It’s a Level 4 Blue-Eyes White Dragon, in the right conditions! How could you not get excited about a card like that? The drawback of having to keep an empty hand and clear Spell and Trap card zones is intended to deter its use outside of rare circumstances, but just as obviously, as a card game nerd, the rarity of circumstances is something we have influence over, at least starting from the Deckbuilder. But how do you build a deck that wins without a hand or backrow? How do you adjust your play style to make that kind of thing work? How can the opportunity cost lost from not using Snatch Steal, Premature Burial, or Call of the Haunted be made up for?Well, I did pretty decently with a deck not too dissimilar from that in a Regional tournament in like 2004 or 5, I forget exactly, but my buddy and I threw it together the night before. Important to note that events were much smaller back then, I think this one had around 125 people. My Zombie Warrior deck started crumbling in practice with my teammates the night before the event, so I looked at what else was in our cardpool with a frantic eye all while one of the strongest players of any game I’ve ever known guided me in its construction. We all know that one player, that if they still played Goat, they’d be *the* GOAT–that caliber of player. We came out with Blade Knights, Flash Assailants, Swift Gaia The Fierce Knight, and lots of one-for-one cards like Bottomless Trap Hole, which technically isn’t but functionally is. It was a simpler time. In principle this should sound familiar, as a modern competitive deck with vaguely this vibe exists now in Goat Format, innovated relatively recently in the game’s long history but well-refined and a far cry from my old shoebox pile. That pile burned itself into my brain however, and we live in a post-Jirai Gumo world, thus we must seek to go even further beyond the 2200 ATK challenge issued by Ez2Slayu.

THEORYIOH! AND DECK

The real deckbuilding challenge concerning Theban Nightmare is deciding how to both support it and win without it. Cards that sit in your hand or on your field for more than a turn are actively hurting your secret weapon, so everything must be as “live” as possible, to steal more wisdom from those generous enough to share it in Discord regarding the secret to the effectiveness of the unrelated but also tempo-focused Chaos Warrior deck. Cards that go negative in terms of card advantage are actually beneficial to an extent, over any card that can spend a significant amount of time dead for certain, and since those same cards will be amplifying the ATK points of my monsters one way or another, we are encouraged to select very uptempo cards in those slots. Back to Square One is theoretically easier to use than Nobleman of Crossout, for example, since it is removal totally apathetic to the battle position of the monster it targets and BTS1 reduces our hand size by an additional card further.Blade Knight was an obvious anchor point for the low-resource game rewards we were seeking, and so this was always going to be some kind of Warrior deck, a Blade Knight deck more than anything. Critically, players in the Discord had discussed the value of Jar of Greed in Warrior decks, as a method of storing in-hand resources on the field temporarily with low risk so as to play into Blade Knight’s hand limit for a necessary battle phase. This framing caused me to examine another piece of technology differently.