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Hey everyone! The McShake Alchemist here, bringing you another article for this week (I'm trying to be more dedicated to having an article each week for Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh!, but, between working 50-60 hours a week and actually keeping in practice enough to write it can be hard sometimes). Today I'm going to start another series that I can revisit preiodically about my favorite decks from over the course of Yu-Gi-Oh!. In this article, I'll be outlining what might be my two favorite decks of all time, Cookie Jar, and Infernity Randomizer.
 
Firstly, I'll outline the decklist from cookie jar when Cyber Jar was still legal
 
 
Monsters
2 Mystic Tomato
1 Morphing Jar
1 Sangan
1 Cyber Jar
3 Thunder Dragon
1 Sinister Serpent
Spells
3 Book of Taiyou
3 Book of Moon
3 The Shallow Grave
2 Upstart Goblin
1 Card Destruction
2 Serial Spell
2 Spell Reproduction
3 Feather of the Phoenix
3 Dragged Down Into the Grave
1 Pot of Greed
1 Graceful Charity
1 Mystical Space Typhoon
1 Heavy Storm
1 Premature Burial
1 Monster Reborn
1 Sword of Revealing Light
2 Creature Swap
 
By today's standards, this deck may seem like a less consistent empty jar, but, for it's time, this deck was a menace to be reckoned with, thwarted only by Royal command (this card never saw play). For those who don't know here's how the combo worked.
 
Set Cyber Jar
Flip Jar via Book of Taiyou/Creature Swap tricks, etc.
Draw 5 cards (essentially)
Shallow Grave to get back Cyber Jar
Use Feather of the PHoenix/Spell Reproduction/etc. to recur book of Taiyou and Shallow Grave to repeat process
Card Destruction
Chain Serial Spell
 
Your opponent has roughly 15-20 cards in hand, while, due to Serial spell, you have 0. This causes your opponent to discard their hand and draw that many cards twice, thus decking them out on the first turn.
The deck had several little synergies that a lot of people never noticed
 
Creature Swap
This card was in the deck in order to easily flip your Cyber Jar via other means than book of Taiyou through two main means
1. If your opponent had an attack position monster, you could just set Cyber Jar, swap, and attack
2. If you had Swords of Revealing Light, you could set Jar, swamp it, then activate Swords to start the chain.
 
Dragged Down Into the Grave
For those who don't know the ruling, you cannot active the Shallow Grave if your opponent doesn't have a monster in their graveyard. This card was a great enabler, as well as having synergy with Feather of the Phoenix.
 
Feather of the Phoenix
You only have 3 Shallow Grave, and 3 Book of Taiyou, you have to get them back somehow. This card was essential spell reproduction that you could discard Thunder Dragon to, due to the high amount of card draw in the deck.
 
Premature Burial/Monster Reborn
There are 3 Book of Moon in the deck after all.....
 
Mystic Tomator
This guy grabs Cyber Jar. I would like to reiterate that there are 3 Book of Moons in the deck. There are so many times where after grabbing Jar, they attack it, and you book of moon in response to get the chain started.
 
Morphing Jar
This guy was mostly in the deck to try and get Cyber Jar, there aren't enough book of moon effects to make this an Empty Jar* deck all of a sudden
 
Sinister Serpent
Recurrable for Feather of the Phoenix if you fizzled for some reason. Also something that could block over and over and over.
A lot of people wrote the deck off as an auto-pilot deck (people still do this with Empty Jar), but, realistically, the deck takes a lot of precision to pilot correctly. There are several plays that will be auto-pilots, but, at the same time, there is a lot of order to be recognized with the plays you make, as playing one card out of place, could result in you fizzling.
 
The next deck I'm going to outline is Infernity Randomizer, so, firstly, for the decklist
 
Monsters (8)
2 Infernity Archfiend
2 Infernity Randomizer*
2 Infernity Necromancer
1 Infernity Avenger
1 X-Saber Pashuul
 
Spells (13)
1 Reinforcements of the Army
2 Mystical Space Typhoon
1 Infernity Launcher
1 Monster Reborn
1 Dark Hole
3 Pot of Duality
3 Offerings to the Doomed
1 Book of Moon
 
Traps (21)
2 Solemn Warning
1 Solemn Judgment
1 Mirror Force
2 Dimensional Prison
2 Infernity Break
3 Infernity Barrier
1 Call of the Haunted
3 Reckless Greed
1 Reinforce Truth
1 Phoenix Wing Wind Blast
1 Torrential Tribute
1 Seven Tools of the Bandit
2 Bottomless Trap Hole
 
This deck is one that I wanted to feature in this article, though I have featured it before, is beause it ties in well with my previous article about card advantage. The whole strategy of the deck is to use Infernity Randomizer's effect to grind out your opponent and try to out card-advantage them. I had been working on a deck that used randomizer as a centerpiece, it was just a bit too cute, as it only had randomizer in the deck in the way of monsters. About a week later, there was an Infernity Randomizer deck that was tearing up YCS Anaheim in feature matches (but ended up not topping to breakers....) and I wanted to try to perfect their list.
 
This list was the last time that I played the deck and it was the week before the release of Hidden Arsenal 4 (I know because there was a regional in Piedmont, SC, on Sat, and a reg in Atlanta, GA on Sun, the week before the release). There aren't many players who think that this deck is moderately difficult to pilot, a majority of players think that the deck is auto-pilot and you just summon Randomizer and proceed to win, and, on the other side of the spectrum, there are players who think that grinding out your opponents with the deck using a 900 ATK beater will be incredibly difficult.
 
Generally, the amount of searching in the deck, as well as the fact that most of the 1-for-1's in the deck stalled the game longer, the deck itself was almost hyper-consistent as far as always doing what it wanted to do, all the time. In the vein of Infernity decks, I think that this is the closest thing there was to a 'perfect' infernity deck. I am not saying that my list is, particularly, but, the Randomizer deck itself was generally more consistent than the combo deck, and didn't straight up lose to a D. D. Crow or Necrovalley (Though I will concede Valley could be difficult to deal with).
 
What was easily my favorite part of the deck was how often the deck was completely ok with going second (anyone who knows me in real life knows that I absolutely suck at dice rolls). The Reckless Greeds and Offerings to the Doomed's effects work well together, for example, if one were to activate two Reckless Greeds and one Offerings in the same turn, that player would only skip two draw phases. With a Randomizer in play, this loss was martginal, and it turned Reckless Greed into a trap card version of Pot of Greed. Like most decks of the time, Giant Trunade could be a problem, unlike most decks at the time, there were four cards in the deck that negated it (barrier x3, judgment).
 
The biggest drawback of the deck, was that you HAD to know what to do, almost instantly, every game, because it can take a great deal of time to win with a 900 atk monster if you don't draw an archfiend. 9 Turns of direct attacks, to be exact. I would also like to point out, for that clock to be the correct one, they also have to not have a monster, or a way to stop the randomizer. There were several times in tournaments that I would go to time, andthe deck would have a +8 on my opponent, including more than one "counterspell" (warning, judgment, barrier, etc.) and they would be in topdeck mode, but, they would have 7000 lifepoints, and I would have 2200 from all the life the deck played.
 
Generally speaking, anyone who understands card advantage well could play the deck somewhat successfully, but, in a strictly timed event such as a YCS or a Regional, one has to know all the plays they are going to make the instant they know what cards they have. This is obviously not always the case, and there are variations on almost every situation out there, but, if the pilot of this deck didn't have a general idea of what it is they are trying to accomplish before they actually sit down to play, they will most surely go to time, and, it is rare that you have higher lifepoints when going to time.
 
There are some times when one would play this deck, and it would just so happen that they would have the ability to combo like an infernity deck, while their opponent watched helplessly. This would cause opponents to board incorrectly, bringing in cards such as dimensional fissure, and D. D. Crow. While neither or these are 100% dead in the matchup, neither of them are incredibly relevant either. If my opponent opens up with a D. D. Crow in their opening 6 cards, the odds of that crow actually helping them before that are essentially already locked out of the game, are slim to none.
Many people reading may ask or think: "Sean, if this is such a great deck with so few flaws, why aren't you playing it now, and why shouldn't I play it?" Simply put: The format isn't right for it.
 
Since the printing of Reborn Tengu, Control styled decks (that don't spam Prehistoric beasts from Jurrasic Park) have fallen out of favor, due to a few reasons
 
1. This deck had an incredibly hard time against a reborn tengu, since the entire plan of the deck was thrown off by a monster that was bigger than everything that wasn't archfiend (if it had horn you were truely screwed). The Tengu couldn't simply be Dimensional Prisoned, Doomed, or Mirror Forced. You had to use 3 removal spells to deal with one card, and the deck had an incredibly hard time coming back from that. Especially if you didn't have a Randomizer yet
 
2. Currently, if the deck doesn't go first, it loses. This is the case with a lot of other decks that are out right now, the biggest difference being that this deck's lock may be better (assuming you get a randomizer), unfortunately, though, the clock you present them is so slow that you almost cannot kill them by the time they can pull out of it. Simply put, the other threats and soft-locks that decks can present as early as turn one are better than the one that this one can present, especially against anything with a Toy or a Rabbit.
I hope that a deck like this will be viable one day, as it is a great deck to hone your skills with, all the while gaining a better understanding of card advantage.
 
Feel free to contact me on any of the social networking sites that I use, I also will hopefully start using Dueling Network soon to test some ocg cards before they come out. Feel free to add me on any of these, if anything just to chat and talk strategy, or, try to meet up at a big event, I'd love to meet any of my readers!
 
facebook: facebook.com/shakezilluh
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email: andro_sphinx@yahoo.com
youtube: Themcshakealchemist
 
Never Stop Learning
Sean Handy
"The McShake Alchemist"
 
*Empty Jar is a similiarly stlyed mill deck that is legal today and uses Morphing Jar as the centerpiece of the deck.