Beating Thunder Dragon Chaos
This article discusses how to counter the Thunder Dragon Chaos deck, focusing on strategies for Goat Control to disrupt its card advantage and board presence.
Good day to everyone – new week, new short articles. Today I want to talk about the Thunder Dragon Chaos deck which is gaining in popularity and also proving itself with 1 some strong results – namely Lukaz occupating #1 ranked spot and also achieving highest ELO of all time. It's time for you all to stop letting him get away with all this free ELO.Thunder Dragon Chaos' gameplan is simple and linear – snowball the card advantage provided by tons of flips and combos with Card Destruction/Graceful Charity to overwhelm the opponent. Thunder Dragon Chaos digs trough its deck quickly, thus seeing these powerful one-ofs more often, which is the entire point of the deck.
How can a slow Goat Control deal with this? Where does it have an advantage? There are some key points I want to address.Making the Chaos monsters dead. Making their Chaos monsters dead draws is not that hard, especially when running standard version of Goat Control, which doesn't play Abyss Soldier (if you're lucky enough to always draw Serpent together with your Abyss, then bounce the Abyss back to your hand in Main Phase 2). Make sure to set your D.D. Warrior Lady and Sangan while keeping an eye to their Graveyard. Use D.D. Warrior Lady to crash and banish their treats, but never attack their sets with D.D. Warrior Lady if there is a danger of her getting banished by Chaos. Airknight Parsath and Thousand Eyes Restrict will naturally pay for themselves, so when they get banished it is in 1-for-1 trade, you now have a clear target and once you're done with it, you have one less Chaos to worry about. Hiding behind Scapegoats Scapegoats might just be one of the best cards against the deck. Chaos Turbo is completely unable to press for damage trough Scapegoats (with the exception of Tribe Infection Virus, who is not always played). Hold your Scapegoats for as long as possible in this matchup and ALWAYS side in the 3rd copy. Chaos Turbo has no late game and you do – Scapegoats help you get there. Early Airknight Parsath One of the only ways for GC to quickly finish the game vs Chaos Turbo is finding and getting a quick Airknight poke in. If not immeditelly answered, the Airknight Parsath will (as always) quickly snowball the game into your favour. Of course, plan your Dust Tornados and revivals around Airknights if possible (as you always should). Usage of Dust Tornado / Mystical Space Typhoon One thing to know about Chaos Turbo is the fact that pretty much all backrow is chainable, with the exception of Mirror Fore / Torrential Tribute that some players might choose to play. This means you can never hit their backrow, unless they just set it OR if your Dust Tornado / Mystical Space Typhoon is the only card you control. Hitting their cards should be done prior to Thousand Eyes Restrcit / Airknight Parsath play to help them resolve. I would also advise to set Mystical Space Typhoon / Dust Tornado even if they currently have zero backrow – it's probably not worth playing around Breaker in this matchup because the award of you having your turn vs 0 backrow (because you End Phase Dusted theirs) is higher than the risk (most common examples will be getting Tsuk-loop or Airknight Parsath hit in) Exploiting deck building problems (bonus) I'm only including this section because it happened to me yesterday, playing against the man, the myth, the Lukaz himself. He goes and activates Scapegoats, I think he chained them to Mobius (I was playing some yolo Monarch build, you will see more of that in the future) and I noticed he had all 3 of his Thunder Dragons in graveyard as well as his Torrential Tribute. He had 25 cards left in deck but I decided in that moment that I'll deck him out. He couldn't develop his field with only 1 zone free, nor could he get rid of his tokens and I wouldn't attack them. I win because of this. Most decks will not play Scapegoats, though. Honestly, all that was said to this point is just cherry on a cake and it might help you win some games, but most of the time when you lose to Chaos Turbo you lose by getting completely and brutally stomped on. Still, it is your job to grind every game and do your best every time. Goat Control can work miracles. But, it is our side deck's job to actually make Chaos Turbo matchup consistently lose. There are two main approaches for this, and I have only tried one of them. This is the »fatigue / control« approach, as Nicey called it. You will side in cards such as Mind Control and Creature Swaps, obviously a third Scapegoat (NO EXCEPTIONS!), maybe even Exiled Force. The whole point of these cards is to help you out their Chaos (most of the times you do not want to use Mind Control on their sets, unless you know it is MoF). Your deck essentially becomes immune to their card advantage, because you have the tools to consistently out their threats, and the rest is just 1400 attack Dekos and discard traps. The second approach would be the »aggro« approach, packing cards such as Trap Dustshoot, Mind Crush and KYCOO, THE GHOST DESTROYERS. I believe in the theory that states that Trap Dusthoot / Mind Crush is not effective if you can't emphasize on it (similar to the Heavy Storm theory), this is why for this side approach you will also want additional pressure, and Kycoo is the best pick for it. Downside of this approach is that these cards do not overlap to the Aggro match up, like Creature Swap does, so you might not be able to cover all of Metagame very well, but if your goal is to defeat Chaos Turbo, you might want to try it out. Thunder Dragon Chaos is Thunder Dragon Chaos, and in the end, some games vs it are just unwinnable. On a good day, Chaos Turbo will win tournaments. Your job is to maximaze your % of winning, no matter the actual outcome. I hope that these guidelines help you to do so. Thank you for reading, see you next time.
Siwski is a player from Slovenia who prefers setting Magical Merchant and Book of Moon than playing current format Yu-Gi-Oh! His current format career lasted from 2015's Nekroz format to the introduction of link monsters. He was frequently topping regionals at that time but also enjoyed playing Goat Format with his friends. He joined the online Goat Format community with the launch of GoatFormat.com's discord server and has been an active player since. Other than setting Merchants, he enjoys reading a good book, watching cat videos, and lifting weights.
