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Expanding the Metagame:
Will Swarm Come Back with a Vengeance??? 
Bryan Camareno a.k.a. DeathJester
August 24, 2005 

Hello everyone! As you all know, I absolutely LOVE the Swarm strategy. It has been a favorite of mine since I first began playing this game. I’ve always thought that it was viable even when we had Raigeki, Dark Hole, and 3 Torrential Tributes in the format. Will Swarm come back with a vengeance in the Advanced Format? Absolutely.

What We Have Available

There are a variety of cards that will allow for overextensions and there are cards that can cover you in case anything happens. I’m going to discuss 3 of my favorites. Let’s take a look:

My Body as a Shield: My Body is perfect for insuring that your overextensions are well worth the resources spent to perform them. You’re basically paying 1500 LP to have a near-guaranteed win against your opponent. The fact that it’s a Quick-Play makes it EXTREMELY useful on your turn or your opponent’s turn. If your swarm happened to be blocked by Scapegoat, you can set it face-down to protect your monsters from your opponent’s Tribe-Infecting Virus, Torrential Tribute, and Lightning Vortex; just to name some cards that will ruin you instantly.

In addition My Body protects your Swarm-friendly Flip-Effect monsters from destruction. Do you need that Cyber Jar in play? Set My Body as a Shield; Nobleman can’t touch it. Did you opponent try to destroy your crucial Morphing Jar with Exiled Force? Flip over that My Body to negate that sucker. My Body is also doubly useful for decks that require certain cards to be on the field. The LV families are a great example. My Body will make sure your beefy monsters are safe from destruction (Except for Silent Swordsman LV7…he negates every Spell).

Last Will: Last Will is by far my FAVORITE card in the game. Battle searchers like Mystic Tomato, Pyramid Turtle, and Giant Rat work well with Last Will. If you were to activate Last Will and suicide Pyramid Turtle into your opponent’s monster, you could nab a V-Lord from your deck with Pyramid Turtle’s effect and trigger Last Will’s effect to get an Injection Fairy Lily, another Turtle, Exiled Force, a Flip-Effect, Giant Rat, Hand of Nephthys and even an Apprentice Magician for later use. Also, this card essentially turns any monster into a Battle searcher. You can suicide nearly any monster into your opponent’s larger monster to fetch the monster you want from your deck to the field. Can you say “Options”?

Last Will can open up a window of opportunities to manipulate the field. Using Exiled Force with Last Will can rid the field of a face-down monster and allow you to Special Summon another monster in his place to bring the pain. Last Will makes Tribute Summoning less brutal on your field presence. Instead of just Tribute Summoning for that Airknight, you can Tribute for that Airknight and get a monster. Tribute monster + Injection Fairy Lily, Tribute monster + Exiled Force, Tribute monster + Battle searcher, Tribute monster + Enraged Muka Muka (hilarious!); the possibilities are endless. Last Will in use with a Battle searcher can aid in thinning your deck at an alarming rate, thus improving your draws (Which is ALWAYS good). Though Last Will can drain your hand at times, the benefits you gain on the field are MORE than worth the resources you spend to overextend with Last Will. This is what the Swarm player is looking for; benefits for overextensions.

Last Will is an awesome card for playing tricks on your opponent. Last Will can prevent your opponent from activating that Sakuretsu Armor from eliminating your suicidal Pyramid Turtle because you’ll just get another one. Activating the Armor will actually net your opponent 0 advantage and let you thin your deck by 1 card and get a larger monster like V-Lord or Ryu Kokki to destroy their monster (Resulting in an overall -1 or -2 for the opponent depending on how you look at it). If you absolutely need to summon and attack for the win, activate Last Will and ensure your victory against the likes of Torrential Tribute, Mirror Force, Widespread Ruin, and Sakuretsu Armor.

Marauding Captain: Marauding Captain is another one of my all-time favorites in the Swarm category. I’ve always thought that being able to break out 2 monsters in one turn was excellent in terms of field presence and offensive advantage. Marauding Captain does just that. Although most of the “better” players from other metagames despise the Captain (Being too absorbed in their “card advantage” rants), I believe that Captain should see more play in various Aggro decks. Earth Aggro and Swiss-Army Knife Warriors LOVE this card. Last Will and My Body work well in these decks.

Marauding Captain is useful in manipulating the field and placing pressure on your opponent. The advantages to Captain come from the field presence and the psychological presence he brings. 2 monsters on the field are dangerous for any player; hence why we have mass removal. 2 monsters are not often easily dealt with by traditional means (Battle), but must be dealt with by standard removal or mass removal to eliminate the threat effectively. The opponent MUST do something about the looming threat or risk being run-over quickly. When your opponent uses some kind of removal to remedy his dilemma, that’s when you flip-over My Body and make their day worse. I come from a considerably aggressive metagame, and anything that can aid the Swarm strategy or aggressively force mistakes on the opponent is alright in our book. Try it sometime.

It’s Time to Expand Your Mind and the Metagame

Swarm strategies are not unplayable because they often result in a “foolish over-commitment of resources” (as the hardcore card advantage buffs would say); Swarm strategies and aggressive strategies are perfectly viable and are often what the janky Control-based decks and hardcore Control decks prepare for most. They win despite how many cards you may have against them. They find the small openings in your strategy and exploit them forcefully; most decks can’t do that. It’s easy to win with a Control deck in YuGiOh. With so many 1 for 2s that are extremely cheesy, Control seems like the only way to go. So what’s my response you ask? I say that you are horribly mistaken and that you should get your head out of your “you-know-what.”

Stop listening to what everyone else thinks and stick to what you like; do you want to complain about the metagame and run an average Control deck or do you want to strike back at the metagame and play something that YOU think is good? If YOU think a deck is worth playing…make it playable man. Stop being a mindless DRONE and get out there and play what you like and NOT what you think is required of you to play (CC Chaos, CC Jank Chaos, and Chaos Morph for example). Even Dark Magician is playable; ask Jae Kim; he took DM to SJC Indy and he did well with it. If you have any smidge of intelligence in your brain, build a deck and make it work! Do not be a whiny little baby or a mindless MACHINE; get up and do something!


You can email me at deathjester86@gmail.com with any questions or comments.