Okay, I shouldn’t be taking time for this, but I
actually may have found one more deck that can
use this card, so I’m going to.
As we all know, Upstart Goblin is useless
in most decks that already have at least 40
worthwhile cards to run. In decks that can get
by with less than 40 cards, it makes “okay”
filler. Of course, one could also run
Reckless Greed or Jar of Greed in
such decks, which are “slower” since they are
Traps and thus must be set, but can be chained
to S/T removal which is handy and they don’t
give your opponent as much of an advantage.
Now, 1000 LP isn’t much, but it’s pretty bad for
the normal Beatdown or Burn based deck. Running
two copies of Upstart Goblin may thin
your deck by two cards but that’s also giving
your opponent a 25% LP boost. Not happy.
So, aside from the decks that don’t worry about
raising your opponent’s LP (Depletion,
Reaction to Bad Simochi, and the alternate
win conditions based on specific card effects),
where else can this be used?
A deck that has been in existence since Metal
Raiders: Suicide Beatdown. For those unfamiliar
with the deck, Suicide Beatdown works by
depleting one’s own LP in order to ultimately
defeat the opponent through overwhelming power.
So it encompasses the basic Beatdown principals
of hitting hard and fast, but adds to them
burning copious amounts of LP in order to do
things like negate almost anything the opponent
throws at them (via Solemn Judgment) and
utilize even bigger beatsticks than normal (Injection
Fairy Lily and Jirai Gumo).
Immediately the following set, another staple of
Suicide Beatdown was released: Megamorph.
You probably have seen it: if your LP is higher
than the opponents, it cuts the equipped
Monsters base ATK score in half. If you and
your opponent have equal LP scores, it does
nothing, and if your LP is lower than you’re
opponent’s, it doubles the base ATK of the
equipped Monster.
How does that tie into Suicide Beatdown? Well,
a specific variation of Suicide Beatdown is
Velocity. Same deal, only it gets rid of almost
all defensive options and is intensely
aggressive. Now, here’s a happy thought.
Instead of blowing up your own LP, why not use a
card that speeds up your deck (which has room
for one or two more cards before hitting the
minimum 40) and will give your opponent just
enough extra LP that you can easily take it
away… and then some. After all, with Velocity,
you’ll usually be attacking with a 3000-4000 ATK
Monster if Megamorph is doubling ATK
scores.
Traditional :
1.25/5-Plenty of other draw options, and decks
that can do something clever with it are either
too weak or already chock full of other cards.
Advanced :
3/5-This is a composite score: in general, it
gets a 2/5 since it can be a little useful in
filling out your deck, but usually it won’t be
worth it. However, it has many wonderful,
specific uses, where it’s usually worth about a
4/5 in such decks. I decided to average the
two, though that might be a little high or low:
I didn’t bother “weighting” the groups since I
don’t have exact estimates on how frequently
they are all played.
Limited :
3.5/5-It’s nice to have options, and while LP
gain is annoying, it beats having to add a Set’s
Skull Servant (figuratively speaking) to
fill out your deck.
