Machina Starter [Trinity Format January '23]

Historically, Machina have been a pretty consistent supplementary component to the EARTH Machine strategies of Trinity. Often times they are combined with Ancient Gear, Gadgets, Orcust, and even Cyber Dragons; however, today I present to you a strategy meant to cater to putting on full display the capabilities of the Machina force without the assistance of others (barring... some Infinitrack cards because we just need to fill the deck space okay...?) Got it? Good, let me brief you on the deck here:

Pros:

• Resistance: Formerly used to have a problem against banishing, up until we got Ruinforce to remedy that problem entirely. Now, even if your Machinas are removed from play, you can rely on Ruinforce to put them back in circulation AND trigger any on-summon effects in the process. It's quite potent and makes them a deck that works well regarding both the GY and banished pile. And should your Ruinforce ever be banished, you can just resolve the GY effect of Overdrive to shuffle it back in.

• Arsenal: The Infinitracks allow the Machinas to manipulate their levels to access a plethora of toolboxed options in the Extra Deck. Though those options aren't always needed as the Machina cards themselves function very well together to establish a fortification between hand, field, and GY that can be rather annoying to deal with if managed properly.

• Easy to Pick Up: Once you get used to the lines and how the cards talk to one another, you'll find that the deck is pretty straightforward to pilot, especially since almost everything in here is an Effect Monster anyway. You'll mostly be rewarded for your usage tactical trades with Fortress or navigating complex gamestates with Air Raider, Irradiator, Resavenger, and the Machina Spell/Trap combo. It sounds like a lot on paper, but it's not too bad... maybe. Look, just find Limiter Removal and use it with Ruinforce to instantly win the duel.

Cons:

• Infinitracks: The Infinitrack Monsters, while great for adding diversity and options to the deck, unfortunately eat up a LOT of summons to get going. It's best to use them as a backup or to establish a River Stormer. If you've got Drill or Harvester, consider just using them to cheat out Xyzs rather than for standard Infinitrack lines. This isn't an Infinitrack-focused deck after all.

• Little Protection: The only real searchable protection we have in this deck is through Defense Perimeter's continous benefits and that is more like a lightning rod than a diffuser. You'll want to think with less of a mindset of protecting the castle and more about how to breach the opponent's. Trade well and you'll be rewarded for it. Don't and... it'll be pretty challenging to deal with some backrows and board breaking monsters.

• Inconsistent Interaction: All of this deck's ways of dealing with the opponent primarily deal with board-breaking already established boards or hard drawing specific forms of removal. We are playing Harmonizer Gradielle and Tornado Dragon but calling those cards reliable disruption across the board is a little generous.

Now that the briefing's over, let's get you sortied.

OPENERS

Machina's playstyle is pretty different from its TCG Advance counterpart since we don't have access to Citadel and the crazy setups that card can get up to. Instead, we'll just have to settle for board breaking and mid-range with a pretty decent top end if we happen to go wide with our various Emergency Teleport-like effects. Let's start with the basics.

• Machina Redeployment: This card's absurdly potent and enables so many various lines of play that it's honestly baffling that this card is allowed at three copies. Now, the two modes this card offers you are very different in what lines of play you get access to. Starting with the first mode of discarding any card, you'll want to grab Machina Gearframe and any other Machina Monster of your choosing that is not Unclaspare. I recommend going for a level 4 like Possesstorage so you have a follow-up play or Resavenger so you can opt to just stop on two monsters, or potentially three if you opened one that can Special Summon itself. Use Gearframe to grab Unclaspare then use its effect to summon itself from the hand. Bin either Fortress or Ruinforce and decide if you'll go into Gear Gigant X or not. If you do, you'll want to use Gear to pick up Ancient Gear Box and usually Anchor Drill to have a guaranteed Rank 4 or 8 follow-up play with no restrictions. The other targets for Gigant X are also valid, but this option's definitely the safest one to go with in most scenarios. Regarding the second mode will depend a lot on the Machina card that is discarded, but for simplicity's sake, let's just assume it's a card that is a Monster not named Ruinforce. You'll want to pick up Possesstorage and Machina Overdrive. You'll just toss down Possesstorage and loop the monster back then set Overdrive and you're good to go in the simplest of cases. Use Overdrive to pivot into either Fortress, Air Raider, or Metalcruncher as necessary. If you're looking for something more aggresive, feel free to go for an early Fortress play with Redeployment and pick up Defense Perimeter. This will make it so that Fortress is always the attack target for your little guys and will draw all monster targeting effects, helping to resolve its handloop effect at resolution. That a lot to take in? Well it shouldn't be, it's the first card we've talked about thus far!

• Machina Overdive: Sometimes you don't open too well or just need a way to catch up quickly because you've bricked on a high level Machina. You'll use Overdrive to tag into Metalcruncher then pick up Gearframe, Ancient Gear Box, or Flying Pegasus. If you have a Machina in hand you'll also want to consider Air Raider and Irradiator as they enable some pretty fantastic pivots when playing from behind to quickly get back into the game. Pegasus can be used with Metalcruncher to Earthslice the board apart or explore a number of other Xyz options to deal with the opponent's armada. Box's virtually the same way, picking up Anchor Drill, but if you're really far behind consider going for Gigant X and finding Gearframe to get your Machinas continuing to cycle.

• Dragonlark Pairen: If you happen to find yourself in a scenario where you have Harvester but no way to benefit from it because the levels are 6 when combined, then you can go into Pairen. With the first Harvester search, ideally you'll pick up Brutal Dozer, but if you need a discard outlet for whatever reason, you'll go with Trencher instead. Then, during the opponent's Standby Phase, you'll use the detach effect to detach Harvester and pick up another search which will usually be Anchor Drill. If the other material attached to Pairen is worth summoning back as well, then by all means feel free to go for that one instead. Pairen will inherently protect itself and draw aggression while also redirecting things back to your resurrected monster, giving you some time to be in the driver's seat and fill up your hand a bit despite not actually putting up a form of disruption. Neat huh?

The openings won't always need to be the same, but they are extremely consistent which feels refreshing when it comes to limited formats where most of the cards are one-ofs so you'll often find no two openers looking the same. Once you're more comfortable with identifying your Air Raiders from your Irradiators and such you'll pick up your own openers that best suit your hand and opponent to better accomodate the Machina strategy.

MIDGAME

Most midgames with the deck will just feature you going quite wide or having game planned ahead by a couple moves and setting up Ruinforce in GY to be there when it's time to throw down. As such, the plays featured in this section will mostly just highlight some of the all-stars that could be easily missed at a glance.

• Double Headed Anger Knuckle: You'll only really go for this with Super Express Bullet Train unless you've got a cheeky Knightmare Unicorn play in mind. You'll want to keep looping the two together to get free cards back from your GY thanks to Bullet Train's EP effect. Combine this with Ancient Gear Box in the GY and you'll be turning that add back from the GY into a search from the deck!

• Dhampir Vampire Sheridan: This card breaks boards and outs things like Dark End Dragon... then can also just steal them like Goyo Guardian- huh. In any case, this card's great to go into with a mid-game Harvester for putting a dent in your opponent's defenses if you can't amass the levels to go into something like a Dingirsu who will give you a similar benefit but will provide your field with passive protection instead or Sky Dragon Overlord to protect your board and GY from being banished and bounced around.

• Machina Resavenger: Combined with your offensive, this card can really just be a nuisance and turn your Machinas into much, much stronger threats than what your opponent is comfortable with running into or being run over by. Using it to overpower something Honest-style will just add it back to hand too, re-establishing its presence and putting you further in control. If you ever happen to lose it too, you can always fetch it back with Irradiator, Possesstorage, and Defense Perimeter.

This deck doesn't really fancy a grind game, so the next section is more so dedicated to some clean finisher options to look out for.

LATEGAME & CLOSERS

• Machina Ruinforce: This card's absolutely bloated with all sorts of benefits and perks and it's all the better when actually played with Machinas because it has such a massive target on its back that demands it be answered. You'll want to plan ahead with your levels banished to summon it usually with a Possesstorage, Fortress, or Metalcruncher so that way when Ruinforce gets ruined, you can have a really strong recovery to keep up the pressure and come out on top regarding the trade. Once you enter the battle phase, do not be afraid of anything at all. Paying half your LP will hardly matter in most games, especially since it halves your opponent's LP by the same effect. With this monster being a 1 Summon 4.6k beatstick, that means once the BP is entered, you can freely clear anything you'd like to (and even use fast effects like Tornado Dragon, Overdrive, and other things) and not have to worry about the opponent responding because if they do, they probably lose immediately.

• Limiter Removal: Does this card really need any introduction?

• Liebe: This one's a little tricky to setup since we're not a Rank 10 Railway build but it's definitely an option thanks to the Infinitracks and Pegasus. This will primarily be setup from an Anger Knuckle play or Urgent Schedule on your opponent's turn, then on your turn you'll go into Gangaridai and blow something up (ideally backrow) for 1k damage, then go into Liebe and swing for game. Just remember that Liebe only gets the bonus attacks against monsters, not just in general.

The lines presented by the Machina archetype are really consistent, resilient, and flexible, sporting a variety of options and synergies that only continue to improve as the cardpool expands. Thanks to these qualities and Konami's unification of Machines in general, you can try some of the following things to switch up your approach on Machina here:

Allure of Darkess, Mekk-Knight, Orcust, Cyber Dragon & Clockwork Night, Revolving Switchyard, Fossil Fusion, Gadgets, Crystrons, Ancient Gear, and EARTH Tuners for Naturia Barkion.

And that's the end of this transmission, Cadet. Hope all of that information wasn't too much for you. Believe me when I say it's a lot easier than it reads- epsecially when it comes to scenarios after resolving Redeployment the first time in a game. I'll continue to iterate on strategies and post guides here, you should probably leave this Armored Unit now. We'll want you in Megaform if you ever want to promote from a Soldier to an Air Raider- all in the name of being a Peacekeeper of course!