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I always felt that the release of a new structure deck calls for a bit of a celebration. New players have a chance to get into the game smoothly using a well-balanced deck and experienced players could either try something new or access some new cards or rare reprints. Among those recently released, one that definitely deserves a bit of attention is the Cyber Strike structure deck, released in October 2021.
This deck is largely based on the one played by Zane Truesdale in the manga/anime series and focus on Cyber Dragon and Cyberdark monsters. For those who do not know the story, Zane began the series using only Cyber Dragon in his deck. Later in the story, he progressively evolved his deck by adding Cyberdark monster after experiencing a transformation of mind and moving to a more brutal approach to the game.
Considering the background, the new structure deck seems to tick all the boxes to be a very competitive deck and to provide a lot of fun to all players.
What Do You Get? Structure Deck Composition & Overview
The new Cyber Strike structure deck contains 48 cards, 40 commons, 3 Super Rares and 5 Ultra Rares. 5 of these cards are Fusion monsters and therefore they will go into your extra deck so that the active deck will be composed of only 43 cards.
With respect to other sets released in the same period, this deck has a good fraction of new cards (7 out of 48, 14%) while the most interesting aspect is that 3 out of the 7 new cards are considered common.
The 7 new card included in this structure deck are: Cyberdark Chimera (Ultra Rare,Effect Monster lv4), Cyberdark Realm (Ultra Rare, Continuous Spell), Cyberdark End Dragon (Ultra Rare, Effect Fusion Monster, lv10), Cybernetic Horizon (Ultra Rare, Normal Spell), Attachment Cybern (Common, Effect Monster lv3), Cyber Eternal (Common, Quick-Play Spell), Cyberdark Invasion (Common, Continuous Trap).
How To Use It? Strategy & Key Cards Overview
As mentioned, the engine of Cyber Strike deck focuses on combining Dragon and Machine Monsters to summon powerful Fusion monsters. However there are two viable paths to follow in this deck as players could chose to focus on Zane's original Cyber Dragon strategy or to use the Dragon-based Cyberdark Monsters.
When focusing on Cyber Dragons, players will be able to use the wide range of special abilities of each different Dragon. The focus of this strategy is to fill the field with them and then use all the Dragons to create the powerful Cyber End Dragon (4000 ATK, 2800 DEF). Alternatively, a Cyber Dragon and any number of Machine Monsters can be used to summon Chimeratech Overdragon. This terrifying beast will enter the field with ATK/DEF and number of attack per turn proportional to the amount of fusion materials used to summon it. With a bit of strategy, this monster can lay waste on your opponent monsters and win the game for you.
When focusing on Cyberdark Monsters, players will need to fill the Graveyard with Dragons. This should be easy enough if, for example, you fail to pursue the strategy above. The Dragons in your GY could then be equipped to your “Cyberdark” monsters to power them up. Your final goal will be to use 3 specific Cyberdark monsters to summon Cyberdark Dragon (1000 ATK/DEF) or to use 5 generic ones to summon Cyberdarkness Dragon (2000 ATK/DEF). Both monsters will first gain additional ATK/DEF by equipping a monster from your GY as soon as they enter the field, and they will also have some additional powerful abilities to ease your way to victory.
Having two different strategies to pursue is already great enough but Cyber strike deck goes a step further as you can also combine the two strategies together and aim to fuse Cyberdark Dragon and Cyber End Dragon into the Cyberdark End Dragon (5000 ATK/DEF).
Although all the strategies above seems complex, the deck includes a lot of tricks to help the players achieve their goals easily. A few examples:
· Cyberdark Chimera (Machine Effect Monster, ATK 800, DEF 2100, lv4): This card has a number of effects but the very key one is to allow players to get a Power Bond by discarding a spell or trap card.
· Cybernetic Horizon (Spell card): This card will allow you to send to your Graveyard a Fusion monster from your extra deck assuming you also send to the graveyard one Machine/Dragon monster from your deck and field and you summon a Cyber monster from your deck to your hand. This effect is not only easy to achieve with this deck but can allow you to summon directly the Fusion monster using other spell cards (for example Cyber Eternal).
· Cyberdark Invasion (Trap Card): This is a continuous card with two effects: the first one allow to equip one of your monster with a monster from the Graveyard to increase its stats; the second one allows you to discard an equip card and destroy a card your opponent controls.
Is This Structure Deck Worth It? Final Thoughts
After playing a few games with Cyber Strike against other Structure decks, I must say that I personally like this deck. I will not consider it one of the easiest to master but it is also not too complex. Overall, I think it could suit perfectly any player with a bit of experience or it could provide a good learning curve for new players that are looking for a bit more than just learn the basics of the game.
In terms of product value, the composition of this deck and the rarity of the cards included is reasonable. There are a few good cards here that players could use to booster their decks disregarding if they have decks based on Cyber Dragon or Cyberdark deck.
In addition, this deck is a very good source of some very strategic cards that are not always easy to find. “Infinite Impermanence”, in particular, has been a hard to find but must-to-have card for a lot of players and it still sells for £6-8 at the time of this review. Considering you get one in each Cyber Strike deck for almost the same price as this single card, this deck is definitely a very good investment.
