"The Monster Mash"
By Matthew D. Woolley
The Monster Mash is a dueling deck that combines jank, resilience and lightning counter attacks in one unpredictably successful package.
The Monster Mash (50 cards)
4 Cave Networks
4 Proving Grounds
Whirlpool of Blood
Fox Pass
Kinoshita House
2 Bandit Hideouts
5 Ogres
4 Little Grasshoppers
4 Rebel Consumers
3 Abysmal Deceivers
3 Redeemed Pirates
3 The Iron Monkey
3 Lui Yu Min
4 Shaolin Hoedowns
2 Mysterious Return
2 Tortured Memories
2 Secrets of Shaolin
2 Violet Meditation
At its core is the combination of Shaolin Hoedown and the Abysmal Deceiver. When played effectively, this combination allows you to attack with a Character and then sacrifice it for more than double its power value.
While it was tempting to add lots of high cost, high resource hand characters, it’s too slow if you are planning to either give up or toast your resources. It became increasingly clear that Wing of the Crane might be a resource too far, and that conversely, Redeemed Pirate fitted astonishingly well in the deck, allowing it to be played even after you have given up and toasted one of the characters that allowed you to play Hoedown. While the pirates ability might be risky in a deck containing only 50 cards, the low resource conditions and value of the ability to clear your hand and find that vital Shaolin Hoedown more than compensated.
The low resource conditions were similar drivers for both The Iron Monkey and Lui Yu Min. Traditionally it makes little sense to have multiple unique characters in a deck, but in this deck it makes little difference as you are often giving these characters away. Sometimes it even becomes a canny play to attack, then give away the character, play a Character with the same title, win the auction and then attack again.
That both of these Characters have superleap as evasion is also useful as Shaolin Hoedown tends to give other players power to play bigger characters too. The Iron Monkeys ability is very useful against an opponent who has just chosen to benefit from Shaolin Hoedowns ability, allowing you to steal back the power an opponent has just gained for giving you their character!
The rest of the deck slowly builds itself. To gain the lotus resources, Ogres work tremendously well. Each time a Hoedown is played you can play any Ogres in your hand for free. It also makes sense to be playing high cost foundations if possible as you will be able to benefit by giving them away with the Hoedowns. As 3 cost foundations Ogres work well with Cave Networks and Proving Grounds and deal well with any Whirlpools of Blood capable of countering these cards as they do +2 damage to Netherworld sites.
With 3 cost foundations clearly making sense in this deck Rebel Consumers worked well too leaping out of Cave Networks and doing a surprisingly large amount of damage (+3 when further from victory). It is these foundation characters as well as the Hoedowns that give the deck much of its durability.
As much as makes sense to focus on getting the high cost foundations out for free with cave network, its not something that you can rely on your opponent to fall for (at least, not after the first time). Having a focus is good, but being one-dimensional isn’t. You want to have the flexibility to make an early attack, or play that cheap second hand resource. It’s easy to forget that a lot of the time you will be giving away or toasting your own resources, and so it makes sense to have some cheap hand foundations in the form of Little Grasshoppers. They also get a small bonus from Lui Yu Min.
This goes some way to offsetting the reactive nature of cave network, as does your other main choice of feng shui site. Proving Ground. This lets you play those three cost foundations early, but you can get stuck in a position where you are unable to generate any power. Both Violet Meditation and Bandit Hideout are good cards to counteract this effect, as well as being decent cards in their own right. Bandit Hideout also complements Lui Yu Min.
In terms of some surprises and Character removal, both Tortured Memories and Mysterious Return are both excellent cards in their own right, as well as combining well with Shaolin Hoedown. These cards are better played late game though, and make for sensible early discards. Critically, they are both light on the resource requirements.
Secrets of Shaolin is largely interchangeable with Confucian Stability, but for the purposes of dueling it was mainly in there to counter the ubiquitous Dangerous Experiments, Final Brawls or Operation Kildeers.
So that’s how it was built, but how do you play it?
Well, your priority is always to get hand foundations down first. You’ll need those to play your key events and key hitters. If its possible to give away Ogres rather than Rebel Consumers do so. The ideal start is to have an opponent attack your first turn Cave network. If that happens you can usually start playing Ogres for free and giving away 3 cost foundations to gain 7 power as soon as the second turn. At this point you start playing your deck like a beatdown deck, with constant aggression, taking sites while you can, and keeping any Hoedowns you draw in reserve to protect your characters.
Being able to attack this early won’t happen often, although more often than you’d expect. Make sure you don’t make the mistake of trying to wait to play the Ogres for free. It’s a bonus, rather than essential. More cagey players will likely wait you out, forcing you to either play a 3 cost foundation or sit a lone grasshopper down. This can be tricky, but at this point you need to build up to 2 feng shui and start using a proving ground to at least get 2 Hand foundations on the table. At this point, you can think about a few probing attacks. Use any Hoedowns you draw defensively to play some surprise Ogre interceptors, give away a character that your opponents are attacking, or targeting.
Eventually there will either be a gap that you may be able to exploit, or it may simply be that you think you can play most of the cards in your hand to pick up a fresh batch. In a long drawn out game, make the most of all the little advantages you can. Benefit from the Rebel Consumers damage bonus before playing another site. Protect a character that an opponent has given you, until you are absolutely sure that he doesn’t need the resource. Attack before playing Hoedown to either deprive your opponent of Characters to give you, or at the very least give them a heavily damaged Character.
It’s not an easy deck to play, as it can be too easy to either play too reactively or too aggressively. Knowing when to play Shaolin Hoedown is vital, and protecting your Abysmal Deceivers is also important - though to a much lesser extent.
The bottom line is that it was a really fun deck for a dueller and a surprisingly successful one at that, winning 75% of its games in a Gatling dueling tournament. If I can curb my overly aggressive instincts, it’d be great to try and get this up and running with real cards as I liked the fact that it often surprised me as much as my opponents.
Cheers,
Matthew Woolley