So I was planning on posting articles more regularly, but then I came up with this deck and wanted to keep quiet about it until I had the chance to play it in 1 tournament. I say 1 because it won't only get 1 before it saw some errata. I had been planning on playing it today, but the tournament got cancelled, so I've decided to just put it up here so it can get taken care of now. In the words of famous hollywood producer Bob Ryan, what if I was to tell you I had a deck that took almost no skill to play and could not lose unless it was playing the mirror, is that, something you might be interested in? What if I was to tell you that Wishing Lamp would be the first card in the game to need power level errata, would you believe me? Skeptical? Read on.
A little background:
So after gencon I thought I would gauge interest in seeing if I could get people to come to my town for tournaments. Pretty quick I got a reply that they already run tournaments up in Rockford and that I'd be welcome to come up there. So I started brainstorming a deck. I was working on an aggro deck I really wanted to run but when I found out I didn't have the cards I needed, so it was back to the drawing board. The gut response would be to just run my improved Roxas deck, but as I said in my last article I thought the deck was poorly positioned if people were expecting it. I thought the deck with the best chance of winning would the teh Fairbanks deck, but that would not be fun to play and I would look like a jerk taking it to this small tournament. Problem was if I wasn't gonna run that I didn't want to be a WR because it just wouldn't be as good, so what's the point. I asked Fairbanks for his opinion and said (sort of jokingly) I was probably either going to run the Roxas deck or my broken dark deck (NOTE: I did not actually have a broken dark deck). While waiting for his response I decided to start making a dark deck as I had been planning on writing an article about it anyway.
The Dark Deck:
So the first thing to consider when making a dark deck is Riku or Ansem. Not a huge difference there, but definitely enough to matter. The biggest thing that jumped out at me was that Riku could use equipment and attack cards. Not such a big deal because as I said in a past article, I'm not that impressed with the current crop of equipment cards. I needed to do due diligence by this though so I went through and read all of them. "Wishing lamp" I said (note, this was before Troth came up with his deck, otherwise I would have totally just ripped it off "this could be power, I mean, I can have allll my dark cards in play and if there's enough Agrabah dark cards, I could just always have soul eater, or something else thats not that exciting." So I started building, by and large the deck builds itself:
Player cards:
1x Dark Riku
Obviously, it's why I'm building the deck
Attack cards:
1x Oblivion
1x Ultima weapon
3x Soul eater
These 5 should probably be in any Riku deck, light or dark.
Dark cards (I don't remember the set for all of these, but it's probably BoD for almost all of them):
3x bouncy wild
3x pot spider
3x bandit
3x angel star
3x fat bandit
3x pot centipede
3x bit sniper
1x genie jafar
3x black fungus
3x Cave of wonders guardian
Again, this is pretty obvious, it's 3 of every dark card that naturally draws along with 3 of every agrabah card (well only 1 jafar). And then 3 bit snipers and 3 black fungus just to get the cards in play
Magic:
3x Cura
These almost certainly would have been cut if I'd kept with this deck, but as you'll see I stopped playtesting it pretty quick.
Events:
1x Event 1
it has a home in every agro deck
Equipment
3x wishing lamp
The heart and soul of the deck, makes it all work.
So I playtested a quick 10 game set, and if they didn't have monstro out I usually had every dark card in play by the end of turn 4. This seemed really solid to me, but it did have that big condition. If they didn't have monstro out. That stuck with me. See the way I looked at it was that made pretty much any game against a good light agro deck with monstro out would be an auto loss, or at least really tough. I figured odds were that on average their 3 friends would be better than my 3. I, as a general rule, don't run decks I feel have auto-loses. So once again while waiting for feedback from Fairbanks, I started brainstorming again.
When I had first started to realize the power of Wishing Lamp I looked at the light cards available to see if it was possible to do the same sort of thing there. My gut reaction was no as all the agrabah friends were terrible and trying to do the same thing would mean running 9 copies of alladin. Seemed terrible to me so I had written it off. The next day at work however it popped into my mind. The thought I had was, I wonder if there's enough agrabah cards that if I added in the Light side draw already available I would be able to loop my deck infinitely in 1 turn. Turns out I could. Now there's obvious a number of degenerate things you can do with infinite deck cycles. You could gain infinite life. You could simba away all their friends. You could pinnochio away their hand. Or...you could always just Event 1 them to death. So here it is, the best deck that's ever been made in this game, I'll give it a more solid explanation after the list.
Player cards:
1x Sora Level 1
The only relevant thing here is that he's level 1, you just wanna go first. If there was a level 0 sora that had no attack or magic and started at 4 life, I would run that in a heartbeat.
Equipment:
2x wishing lamp
3x lamp
I know I know, only running 2 of what I call the most broken card seems wrong. Here's the thing though, after you get one in play, any time you draw another one it's a dead card and just awful. After starting with 3 I ended up cutting 1 and adding a will turner. It might be correct to go down to 1 and have 2 will turners, but I never bothered with that as it didn't seem necessary. The lamps were originally just in there cause they're Agrabah cards, but I came to realize if I have a lamp on aladdin, any level aladdin can cast Bambi, which is soooooo good.
Locations:
1x Monstro level 1
This might seem counter-intuitive. Originally it was an Agrabah level 1 just for the card draw. Then it became a destiny islands level 1 to pull king to help set up the combo. Then I realized it was screwing me for things like Tink, Bambi and the King to stay in play, so I needed a way to discard my own friends. Monstro was perfect. The deck can only run 1 location because it can in theory win on turn 1, but for that to be possible you need to never draw dead cards like a second location that you can't play.
Event cards:
1x Event 1
Again, this is the win condition, you will end up playing this 10 times in one turn.
Friends:
I'm gonna break this down a bit more to talk about the reasoning behind some of the friends more in depth.
3x aladdin level 1
3x aladdin level 2
3x aladdin level 3
3x iago
3x abu
3x jasmine
The heart of the deck, 3 copies of every agrabah friend. All of them are worthless except aladdin who lets you cast Bambi.
1x chip and dale
1x fairy godmother
While both their abilities can come up, they were originally only put in the deck because they remove themselves from the game, allowing you to thin your deck out more. The godmother can also be useful if you don't have an aladdin set up yet and need to cast bambi (also gets bambi, so good).
1x The King
1x Will Turner
I'd say 95% of the time the King will fetch a wishing lamp, but since he ends up getting used many many times a game, most of the time he just gets bambi. Will turner continues being useful after getting a wishing lamp because he can dig up regular lamps to draw more cards. This is why it may be correct to run 2 Will Turners.
3x bambi level 3
1x genie level 1
1x cid
The money card draw. Once you get going you'll often be able to cid for 10 at a time, at that point it's guarenteed you will win that turn.
1x Promo tink (the level 1, I'm not sure if that's a relevant distinction)
She's very key as you're dealing yourself as much damage with Event 1 as you deal them. Typically you'll only need to use her once to get ahead of them on life, but you do have the option of gaining infinite life.
1x tidus
1x simba level 1(promo, again, is that relevant?)
Originally I thought the only way the deck could lose was if they had captain pete, phil and owl in play. Then I'd lose a ton of life and wouldn't be able to heal. To this effect I originally also ran cura in case they had either phil or owl but not both. If they had both but not pete I felt I was still fine as most of the time 9 life (starting plus my 1 world) would be enough to be ahead of them. Fairbanks pointed out I could just run Tidus and the whole thing would be moot. That one card is what made the deck unbeatable. The simba probably doesn't need to be in there, but it doesn't hurt.
3x moogles
it will come up that you have a level 1 aladdin in play and you need to goto level 3, but you don't have a bridge. This makes sure that doesn't happen. It doesn't come up THAT often, but honestly I'm not even sure what they'd be replaced with.
So that's the deck, a lean 41 card fighting machine. Just to be abundantly clear, the way the deck works is you draw as normal or use your non agrabah card draw to get a wishing lamp out. At this point you've essentially just cut out 21 cards from your deck because every time you draw one it replaces itself. Add in your other card draw and you very easily keep drawing, keep playing event 1 and keep shuffling. In a quick 10 game playtest set, 70% of the time it won on its second turn, twice it one on it's 3rd turn and only once did it take till it's 4th turn(though in that game it was struck with some ludicrously bad luck). I propose Wishing Lamp is changed to: "The first time each turn you play an agrabah card, draw a card." Otherwise this deck just destroys any sense of balance. It's not fun to play, but if your goal is to win a tournament you are a fool to run any other deck. Feel free to tell me how you think this deck can lose in the comments (as I'm sure you won't take my word for it and won't take the time to playtest before posting) and I will tell you why you're wrong. Keep in mind 70% of the time, if I go first, you will get only 1 turn to do anything.