Dies Tormentum

I returned to the game in 2020, after about ten years away, solely because I saw that my favorite card of all time, The Winged Dragon of Ra, had received a ton of excellent support in the form of Rage of Ra. After months and months of delightedly playing The Winged Dragon of Ra the way I had always wanted to, now possessed of all the powers it had in the anime, I started thinking about the other two God cards.

Around that same time, Slifer and Obelisk received their own support cards, especially Slifer, in the King's Court deck. I immediately built a Slifer deck around the Joker's Straight/Thunderspeed Summon combo, and that deck works very well, and is a lot of fun to play. 

So then I turned my attention to Obelisk, but I was slightly at a loss. Ra had the slime monsters, Slifer had the King's Knight crowd, but Obelisk the Tormentor didn't have anything specific to him. His support cards at the time included Fist of Fate, Soul Crossing... and that was it. Still, I had the other two, and I wanted to do something with Obelisk. Slime would have worked for him, and Egyptian God Slime is made in his image, but I was already doing that with Ra, and I wanted each God deck to be distinct from the other, with as little overlap as possible.

I threw Obelisk into a Monarchs build, which kind of-sort of works, but... not like the other two. Monarchs wants to be its own deck, not have to clumsily work alongside an unrelated boss monster and his support cards.

Then two monsters named Zolga the Prophet and Millennium Seeker were announced. I was intrigued by their Egyptian design, and by Zolga's connection to Obelisk in particular—being one of the three monsters depicted in the art for the spell Soul Crossing. Like the Monarchs, Zolga has a tribute-specific effect, albeit a thoroughly underwelming one. Still, he wanted to be sacrificed for something, and he wanted there to be other Fairy monsters in play... maybe there was a way to fit Obelisk into some kind of Egyptian-themed Fairy deck? I thought that would be pretty perfect.

But after constructing and discarding a number of unquestionably terrible decks that looked like the old swarm-and-stall builds I used to try with the Egyptian Gods, I had to give up on that idea. The pieces just weren't there. I went back to the Monarchs build, imperfect though it was.

THEN something called the Tin of the Pharaoh's Gods came out, and unleashed upon the world two new Obelisk cards: The Breaking Ruin God and Soul Energy MAX!!! (three exclamation points, that's right.) These two cards were clearly designed to be used together to warp Obelisk onto the battlefield, feed him two tributes, and then deliver a downright nuclear payload of field-clearing, graveyard-obliterating, player-burning damage for game.

I added them to the Monarchs deck, and when that combo worked, it was glorious. Absolutely glorious. The deck was already running Foolish Burial Goods, which worked nicely enough with the fact that both cards have in-graveyard effects, but it wasn't reliable. In fact, the deck was performing worse than ever. Having cut six cards to make room for two new three-ofs, the deck was now a mangled build of two different strategies that barely overlapped and mostly just got in each other's way.

So I started looking around for a new home for the big blue smashy God, and I remembered Zolga the Prophet. He had some new company: his old friends Agido and Kelbek now had retrains of their own—the whole Soul Crossing trio, together again. I took a look at the new Ishizu cards, and I started to get this feeling. I didn't really believe it would work at first, but the more I read and reread this bizarre set of cards that depended completely on one of the most laughably pointless cards in the game, the more I started to think this could be an Obelisk deck.

So, I put it together. I playtested it on duelingnexus.com, and... it works. It works perfectly. At this point, I have no doubt that these cards were designed with each other in mind. I mean, when I first saw The Breaking Ruin God, I thought it was awesome, but I also thought, "Since when has Obelisk cared about what's in the opponent's graveyard? Oh well..." It was for this, I tell you. These Ishizu-themed cards. Obelisk is pictured on two of them. They fill the graveyard that The Breaking Ruin God is looking to punish. Kelbek can return trap cards from your graveyard to the field, which funtionally lets you search the Soul Energy MAX!!! trap. Exchange of Despair and Hope searches a trap and lets you activate it in the same turn. It's so easy to mill both players to the point where you have all the resources you need in your graveyard, and your opponent has enough monsters in their graveyard that Soul Energy MAX!!! and The Breaking Ruin God will deal 8000 damage all at once. Sometimes The Breaking Ruin God does it on its own. With Gravekeeper's Trap, you don't have to worry about your opponent getting any value out of their graveyard. Gravekeeper's Trap can be searched and activated directly by Mudora the Sword Oracle. Mudora can be searched by Keldo the Possessed Statue... it all just works. Finally, Obelisk has a deck that is worthy of him.

This is the Day of Torment.