The End of the Heroic Journey (A Knight's Tale Pt. 3)

 "He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of The Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit hole, and in this way the battle was won, and the game of Golf invented at the same moment" 
~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Welcome to the grand finale, where I discuss my Bushi deck.  The legend of the warriors come to a close in this article, much like the end of a Heroic Journey.

So yeah, the Bushi deck that I have yet to build in real life.  Sadly, I'm only missing a few cards (I do have a hero beat deck, that will get cannibalized for it).  Without much more talking, here it is.

This is it.

The difficulty with this article is that I ran myself a bit thin.  I talked about everything that I wanted to, and now there is just space for this deck.  From what people can probably see, is that it uses some of the old ideas from the older Bushi decks.

A pair of Jains are for beaters, and milling.  The Jain's will hopefully net you a Double Lance, Bushi, or a Doppelwarrior.  Jain was used in older Bushi decks for the same reasons, being able to push itself up to 2100 ATK will let it get over basically any standard sized monster like Thunder King or normal Dinosaur monster like Sabersaurus or Kabazuls.  Jain brings a lot to the table.

Two The Immortal Bushi is pretty standard in a deck like this.  Three would lead to dead draws, two is just enough to put one into the graveyard early in the game.

Two Junk Synchron.  It gives you some basic synchro options, especially Junk Destroyer and Junk Warrior for big attacks.  Scar Warrior is decent field protection.  The other warriors just provide some basic utility.

Now, lets move onto the more obscure card choices.  A lot of these cards are recent and underrated and undervalued, but that doesn't make them bad per se.

Gagaga Gardna was just released a set ago.  Many people took notice of this card when it was released.  It lets you special summon it to the field when the opponent declares a direct attack, when it would be destroyed by battle you can discard a card to stop its destruction.  A lot of people compared it to Battle Fader, and that's true, it's effect is a lot like Battle Fader except it doesn't end the battle phase, you could even fit Fader into a Bushi deck since it doesn't go to a graveyard.  The thing is, Gagaga Gardna's discard effect has a pretty high utility in this deck, letting you dump Double Lances and Bushis into the graveyard.  Not to mention his 1500 ATK, which when coupled with Solidarity gives you a 2300 attacker.  Gardna's effect lets you summon it at inopportune times, which is a really underrated effect in this game.

The deck's goal other than to gain advantage through synchroing and Bushi shenanigans is to win with Rank 4 Xyz.  Heroic Challenger Double Lance, Goblindbergh, Gagaga Gardna, and Heroic Challenger Extra Sword are all what makes this possible.  The first Xyz a person should be going for is Heroic Champion Gandiva.  Gandiva should be able to lock down the opponent's ability to spam the field with their own monsters.  Basically, Gandiva is a huge anti-meta card, stopping things like Venus and her shiny balls, wind-ups, and Dino Rabbit.  Making this as your opening move limits your opponent's options for at least one turn if you're going first.  If the deck gets lucky, it could open with Heroic Champion Kusanagi.  Once more, using Heroic Champion Extra Sword boosts the ATK permanently by 1000, making it hard for the opponent to get over it with anything in battle.

There is an aggressive route to the deck as well.  The deck has two hard hitters.  Blade Armor Ninja and Heroic Champion Excalibur both do sort of the same job, it just depends on what the needs are.  If Extra Sword was used, these monsters both gain 1000 ATK.  Now, just for rulings sake, this means if you use Extra Sword, and then its effect it will only be 4000 ATK and then revert back to 2000.  So if you use Extra Sword, you might not want to use Excalibur's effect until you know it will hit for a lot.  Blade Armor Ninja with Extra Sword gives you a 3200 ATK double attacker, which is really dangerous.  Both of these monsters are capable of ending the game.

You should have enough fodder to do these frequently.

The spell and trap line up is pretty standard.  The only difference is Solidarity and a bigger trap line-up.  The goal is to use Solidarity to give your monsters a boost and make them huge.  The thing with Solidarity is that it needs to be played tactically.  Playing it early means your opponent will be more apt to targeting it with spell and trap destruction, which can be a good thing if that's what you want.  Playing it later in the game means having a weaker field earlier, but having it be more beneficial in probably winning the game for you.  You could also play it prior to playing out a Heroic Champion.  If it's something like Gandiva or Kusanagi, your opponent will need to invest more resources into dealing with them, if you play it before something like Excalibur or Blade Armor Ninja, then you'll have an even bigger attacker (Excalibur gains an additional 800 ATK after boosting to 4K), at that point you should be able to finish them off.

The heavier trap line-up is important because it lets you control the field easier.

So yeah, that's the end of this three part saga.  I know I said I'd post some decks from pojo I thought were interesting, but I'm just going to link the discussion threads:
http://www.pojo.biz/board/showthread.php?t=864302&highlight=Bushi
http://www.pojo.biz/board/showthread.php?t=1033613&highlight=Bushi

Also, saw the Hobbit yesterday.  Three part series, and the first movie knocked it out of the ballpark for me.  So yeah, go see it.  I'm warning you though, it's three hours long.  I didn't even notice the length when I was watching it though.  I also went to locals, 3-1 with my Dragunity deck, sadly not making the cut for store credit.  My only lost to one of my friends in the first round who was piloting my Hero Beat deck, I beat Blackwings, Agents, and another Hero Beat.

I know I didn't tag the cards for this post, it takes me a while to do it, and there were a lot of cards in this one.

Anyway, next time, more phoenix.dek (this time it's the Fire King guys, I promise), maybe Slushy.dek or something to do with the recent Yu-gi-oh Manga's that I just bought.

~ E.P.B.