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Anteaus'
History of Yu-Gi-Oh!
I want to preface this by saying that Goat Format is over a
decade old, and it doesn’t have any formal support from
Konami. There are no sanctioned tournaments for the format,
there is no massive campaign to have every local card shop
support it, and as such the format has a lot of information
in a lot of different places - and a lot of different
opinions, particularly when it comes to certain cards to
play or not to play. In a way it’s a bit like how it was
back when Goat Format was live, at least in the sense that
everyone had a different prevailing theory about how to go
about playing the game. While most will agree that the core
of the Goat Deck is around 30 cards, there are a lot of
different tech choices that different players play. As such,
people have differing opinions on specific cards, and some
will argue their points vehemently, especially on the
internet.
That said, the things I say in my articles are opinions,
nothing more and nothing less. You can agree or disagree,
but the point of writing these articles is to get people to
think about modern Goat Format and to increase its
popularity and spark discussions. It has quite a following
online, and many people opt to play online through systems
like Dueling Network. But online games do not define the
metagame - in fact, Goat Format, for all intents and
purposes, really doesn’t have one specific metagame, simply
because there are no in-person tournaments or strategy
discussions pertaining to winning a specific event. While we
may see some reports of local tournaments, those always have
turnouts of hardgore and casual Goat players alike, which
can often skew the local metagame and result in cards that
may seem illogical to play at a larger event.
Just like today, back in 2005 people tailored their decks to
beat the meta, which for high-profile players meant looking
at prior events to figure out patterns. Most players saw the
metagame and were looking at different ways of combating it,
and one of the mainstays of the format back then was D.D.
Assailant, the focus of
D.D. Assailant
A simple exchange, a one-for-one, that’s all it is. D.D.
Assailant doesn’t draw cards for you or get a Spell Card
back, but what it does do is wipe out a big beater on the
board and help skew the initiative back into your favor.
D.D. Assailant packs decent stats - nothing to make your
eyes bug out of your skull, of course, but 1700 ATK puts a
decent beater on board that can both attack over smaller
monsters such as Magician of Faith and Tsukuyomi,
but also a good defense against cards like D.D. Warrior
Lady, and it’s absolutely hilarious to watch your
opponent run an Exarion Universe into a face-down Assailant
and drop Exarion’s attack only to have it backfire.
Today, I think that many duelists are replacing D.D.
Assailant with other cards because it doesn’t trample,
doesn’t generate any immediate numerical advantage, and can
pretty much be summed up as a monster version of Smashing
Ground in terms of what it brings to the table. Of
course, it does banish the monster, a utility I think that
has really become underrated as Goat Format continues to
age. D.D. Assailant was a great out to cards such as Jinzo,
Airknight Parshath and even something like Black Luster
Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning simply because it can
banish. Back when Goat Format was live, D.D. Assailant was a
staple - everyone ran at least one copy, with most decks
running two. As the format has changed and evolved, though,
many people are starting to look more at advantage
generators such as Dekoichi, the Battlechanted Locomotive
and multiple copies of Magical Merchant instead of
the usual Assailants.
This isn’t all that surprising - as the format has been
streamlined quite a bit over the past decade, new strategies
and tactics were bound to come to light. With so much time
having passed, players who have stayed dedicated to the
format have formulated new concepts on how to approach a
duel or a match, which really isn’t all that surprising.
Today, it seems that there has been a paradigm shift in how
players look at specific cards in decks; it seems today that
many players are focusing more on dealing damage through
defense position Goat tokens with cards like Exarion
Universe and Airknight Parshath as opposed to
high-utility cards like D.D. Assailant. Even cards like D.D.
Warrior Lady are seeing less play because players are
starting to think that it’s better to cycle through
resources and dig for power spells in order to widen the
advantage gap over their opponent. Why banish a Jinzo when
you could flip a Magician of Faith to grab back a Snatch
Steal and simply take it, or excavate a Metamorphosis
with Magical Merchant and then morph that Merchant into
Thousand-Eyes Restrict?
Personally, I feel that this is reductive thinking. D.D.
Assailant may not be the buster that he once was, but he
still has just as high utility as it did ten years ago, and
for the same reason it was used so extensively back then -
it can clear the field of a powerful monster or help swing
the initiative in your favor. Everyone talks about Goat
Format like the only cards worth playing are the power
spells and Thousand-Eyes Restrict, when in reality there
were decks that topped back then that didn’t even run an
Extra Deck. Metamorphosis wasn’t the end-all-be-all of the
format because it simply could not be - there were too many
cards out there that you might run into. How useful is that
Thousand-Eyes Restrict when you have nothing to suck up,
nothing to flip it face-down, and you’re low on card
advantage?
D.D. Assailant forces your opponent to immediately try to
remove it. Are there are a number of ways to do that in Goat
Format? Yes, of course, but it still forces them to do it.
Cards like Smashing Ground and Sakuretsu Armor,
though, are often played only at one copy in most modern
decks, if at all, and running too much monster destruction
can leave you vulnerable in other areas. If drawn early in
the game, Assailant can quickly establish soft control of
the field and put your opponent into an immediately
disadvantageous state. Who wants to waste an Airknight
Parshath or an Exarion Universe to get rid of a D.D.
Assailant? Zaborg the Thunder Monarch is a good out
to it, but in the early game using Zaborg to clear the board
of an Assailant can be considered a waste of a resource -
it’s almost always better to use Zaborg to clear a real
problem, and often later on in the duel when some of the
cards that could get rid of that Zaborg were already gone,
like Snatch Steal or Brain Control (another card that
no one plays in modern Goat Format, but for vastly different
reasons).
When you drop D.D. Assailant on the board, you immediately
push a bit of early initiative away from your opponent. This
in turn gives you options, and forces them to out a card
that can otherwise completely disrupt what they want to do.
If they decide to kill it by battle, it requires them to run
it over with a big beater, as mentioned, oftentimes getting
rid of something like Exarion Universe, Berserk Gorilla,
Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer or Enraged Battle Ox
within the first few turns of the duel. This is big in Goat
Format because that is one less beater that they can use to
get at your LP, and those cards all have better uses in Goat
Format than destroying a D.D. Assailant.
D.D. Assailant also has high utility in the mid-game - being
able to suicide into a bigger monster, such as a Monarch,
Jinzo, or even a Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the
Beginning, in order to clear a bigger monster off of your
opponent’s field, can help swing the initiative in your
favor, especially if you’re down in the numerical advantage
count. In the mid-game, you likely will still be hovering
around 5000-6000 LP, more than enough to absorb a 700 hit
via suiciding into a Jinzo, or the 1300 from hitting a Black
Luster Soldier.
In the late game, D.D. Assailant still offers you a
lot of utility thanks to his ATK and DEF stats. Once you and
your opponent are low on resources, the initiative tends to
be in the hands of the person with the bigger field. While
in the early game hand advantage is everything, in the late
game most of the time you and your opponent will be down to
only a few cards in hand - if the advantage disparity is
much higher, whoever’s on the losing end is likely going to
lose the duel, and the bigger the difference the faster the
end more often than not. But when things are roughly even (a
swing of 1-2 points either way), D.D. Assailant can give you
that monster that makes your opponent unable to do anything
to get over it - and if that Assailant can stay on the board
until your turn, chances are that the initiative is firmly
on your side.
On the deckbuilding side of things, D.D. Assailant serves as
an able 4-star monster that is searchable via
Reinforcement of the Army. While not able to be fetched
via Sangan, Assailant often didn’t need to be; like
Airknight Parshath or Jinzo, D.D. Assailant is a card that
does not rely on being able to be brought to hand, but
rather kept until needed or used to advance your board,
swing the initiative to your side or force your opponent to
get rid of a problem before they try to establish a dominant
field over you. It could limit your opponent while providing
a stable piece of advantage that was rarely a dead draw.
Perhaps the only time you didn’t want to see Assailant was
when you were in the midst of a Tsukuyomi-Thousand-Eyes
lock, but in that situation there are few cards other than
your own copy of Tsukuyomi or Book of Moon that can break
it.
D.D. Assailant was a powerful card then and is a powerful
card now. A lot of people are saying that the card is not
worth it, and they all have their reasons - at the end of
the day, the choice to play it is yours. This is my take on
the card in a format that I enjoy playing. I personally am
playing a single copy in my Goat Format deck, but there are
so many different ways to build the deck that some people
prefer other things. Is it a bad card, as people have said?
Not at all. In fact, it’s as powerful now as it was then,
and perhaps even more so considering how much we know about
the game and how much our views on advantage have shifted
over the years. Is it a staple in the format? I don’t think
so, not anymore, though it is a card that should be prepared
for and tested thoroughly before deciding whether or not to
include it.
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this article. One of the most
important things in the original Goat Format was the idea of
monster removal - being able to clear big beaters such as
Jinzo or Airknight Parshath was important then,
and is still important now. D.D. Assailant didn’t just take
care of a beater - it flat-out removed