Nostalgy Time - An Extensive Guide on How to Play Toons

Nostalgy Time - An extensive guide on how to play Toons - June 2020

Introduction:

The Toon Archetype got a huge boost recently, with the release of the Toon Chaos Booster Box. New additions to the Toon Series would certainly have made Pegasus proud, and might also have reconciliated the fans with Konami. Long neglected by the firm, the archetype was withering away, filled with cards that were far too old, and therefore full of constraints that no longer make sense in today’s metagame. Fortunately, Konami brought out the heavy artillery to the delight of the early fans, offering us some crazy search engines and one boss monster to fuel the deck!

Warning: Don’t get me wrong, the deck may be very fun to play at locals, it is far from being able to compete against any real Tier 1 meta deck. Some would say it could fall in the Rogue category, at most. That being said, let’s dig in!



In-Depth Analysis:

Strengths:

• Amazing consistency thanks to the addition of Toon Bookmark and Toon Page-Flip. Toon Table of Contents remains one of the best searchers of the entire game, basically enabling you to pick any Toon card from your deck, while not even being limited to one activation per turn.


• Ability to easily summon ignoring the summoning conditions, which is abused by the deck’s strategy.


• The powerful field spell Toon Kingdom acts like a protection for all your creatures.


• Dealing Direct Damage: your Toons can pass through any threatening body, as they can attack your opponent directly (as long as Toon World / Kingdom is on the field).

Weaknesses:

• Lack of Explosiveness: there is no such thing as huge combos involving tons of summons with the Toon archetype. You won’t be able to set up any kind of lockdown or establish a powerful end board with multiple negations. That is the main reason why I find the “Going 2nd" approach for the deck way more effective.


• Toon Kingdom being one the greatest strengths of the deck, it also appears to be a double-edged sword! Indeed, the deck relies heavily on this sole card: all the strategy depends on your capacity to put it on the field. Should this card be countered (destroyed / banished / negated), you will have a hard time trying to recover.


• Draw Power: there is no real Toon draw engine worth playing in the deck. That is why Pot of Extravagance comes in handy.


• Bricks: to a lesser extent, some Toons can end up being dead draws in hand as most of of them have a high level. One notable example is Red-Eyes Toon Dragon that we often do not want to draw (not always the case though).

Strategy:

Going 1st:

Do not overcommit on the board, try to protect your Kingdom, and set up Toon Terror (search it). Ideally, you would end up with one big toon on board (Red-Eyes, Toon Black Luster Soldier (BLS) or Toon Dark Magician (DM)), Toon Kingdom, Toon Terror, and one Bookmark in grave. If you get lucky, you will also end up with a hand trap for some more negates. This end board might not look that impressive, but with one negation and one Kingdom protection (Bookmark), you can still manage to survive your opponent’s next offensive. Keep in mind this deck is built to go 2nd. If you go first, you just want to slow down your opponent in order to get a chance to break his board and overwhelm him on your 2nd turn.

Going 2nd:

This is where the fun begins!

Try to interrupt their combos with hand traps. Linkross, Mecha Phantom Beast Auroradon & Crystron Halqifibrax are obviously good targets to consider by the time I am writing this. Get rid of your opponent’s board with Evenly Match (EM) if you open it. Based on the state of the board, it is up to you to decide whether you need to bait your opponent with EM or another card instead. Choose wisely which card you want to resolve the most. Remember that you do not really care if your rival has big bodies on board as your toons can attack directly and are indestructible thanks to the field spell. On the other hand, you would rather want to get rid of backrows or sneaky Effect monsters that could potentially endanger your Kingdom.

Then, you must set up your Castle at all costs because without this cartoon-like fortress, your monsters are weak and powerless.

Main Strategy / “Combo”: Extend on board. The Black Stone of Legend + DM and any other Toon card in hand --> Normal Summon Black Stone, Special Summon (SS) Red-Eyes --> SS DM with Red-Eyes Effect --> SS BLS with DM effect sending the Toon card to the grave. You can overlay DM + Red-Eyes for a Rank 7 play. For instance, Xyz Red-Eyes Flare Metal Dragon in order to revive Red-Eyes with its effect, or Mecha Phantom Beast Dracossack to destroy a card on the field. Use BLS to push for damage or banish another card.

Strategy 2 / Emergency plan: Effective against backrows deck. If you did not draw EM, and have to face a board full of set cards / or annoying creatures, you will want to play as much BLS as possible, one after the other. Let’s say you summoned the first one through Page-Flip, use its effect (banish), then SS another one from hand, tributing the BLS on the field, banish another card, and repeat this operation one last time. You end up with only one BLS on field, but you banished 3 cards. The BLS banishing effect is a soft “once per turn”, take advantage of it!

The entire deck is very searchable and reminds me a bit of the Nekroz search engine. Thanks to Bookmark and Toon Table, you will be able to consistently select which tactic to use in order to adapt to your opponent, as you will have access to any specific Toon card. Hence, depending on the situation you are dealing with, there is plenty of options available, which I describe below:

Toon Toolbox:

• Facing a powerful Link Monster? Use Toon Cyber Dragon to Megafleet your opponent’s extra monster zone.


• Search for Toon Harpie Lady if you want to quickly get rid of a Spell or Trap card.


• Any useful card in your opponent’s grave? Search for Mimicat and steal it.


• Any annoying monster on your opponent’s field? Go for Comic Hand instead … and steal it!


• Want to set up an omni negate? Search for Toon Terror.


• Need to summon a big boy? Activate Toon Page-Flip --> always choose BLS + Red-Eyes + DM. Then, depending on which one is randomly picked, adapt your following play / strategy.


• Need an Extender ? Search for Toon Cyber Dragon or Toon Harpie Lady.

Rational behind Ratios:

3x BLS: Best Toon so far, nothing to add, great stats, great effect, relatively easy to summon.

2x Red-Eyes: you do not want to open it, it is a brick. You only want to SS it through Black Stone.

3x Black Stones: combo starter. You want to open it. This is your only normal summon. It gets you Red-Eyes which gets you another Toon from hand in return.

3x DM: you want to open it in order to SS it through Red-Eyes effect. If you need some space for a specific tech, you may remove one. I am still debating on the right ratio.

1x Comic Hand / Harpie Lady / Mimicat / Cyber Dragon / Toon Terror --> you do not want to open them, you want to search one if needed for a very specific purpose.

3x Evenly Matched: very strong going 2nd card + you usually do not set up big board going first, so you can still get good value from it in case your defense gets wiped out.

3x Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring / Infinite Impermanence: really depends on the meta, any hand trap will do. Main objective is to disrupt your opponent's play to contain their board.

Tips:

• Always use Extravagance first 😉


• If you do not have another Bookmark in hand, always Toon Table into Bookmark into another Toon card in order to set up your Kingdom’s protection in grave ! Very important!


• DM and Red-Eyes cannot attack directly the turn they are summoned. BLS CAN.


• Toon Table cannot search Mimicat & Comic Hand, Bookmark CAN.


• If Page-Flip or Bookmark gets negated, please re-read this again and again: "If you negate the activation of a card that can only be activated once per turn then you may activate another copy of said card again in that same turn."


• What do you want to see in your opening hand going 2nd? Bookmark / Page-Flip / Kingdom & Field searchers (Terraforming / Set Rotation) / Table / Black Stone & DM / Evenly Matched / Hand Traps


• Do not forget to use Black Stone Effect in Grave !


• You can swap the Evenly Matched playset for 3 Nibiru, The Primal Being if you face too many spam / combo decks --> You can steal the token with comic hand and swing with it for ... maybe game ?!

Other Toon cards to consider:

• Toon Gemini Elf is tempting because of the discard effect, but too slow as they cannot attack the turn they are summoned.


• Similarly, Toon Masked Sorcerer drawing effect looks nice at first sight, but it also requires one turn to be activated + 900 ATK is really bad.


• Toon Ancient Gear Golem if you wish to increase chances to be able to summon BLS.


• Potentially Toon Mermaid x3 if you add Bahamut Shark and Toadally Awesome to your Extra deck, but then, you would change the whole deck structure. You would need to switch to an Xyz Rank 4 focused deck and adapt your extra deck accordingly. It is not optimal at all in my opinion. And Mermaid alone is full garbage, the card being too old.


• Toon Briefcase if you want to improve your Going First plays.


• Toon Mask is too slow, not worth the effect.

Extra Deck:

Multiple copies because we play Extravagance --> C-O-N-S-I-S-T-E-N-C-Y !!!!

• 2 Starving Venom Fusion Dragon and 2 Mudragon of the Swamp for the Super Poly Engine. You might also consider Predaplant Dragostapelia instead if you face lots of fusion-based decks such as Heroes.


• 2 Red Eyes Flare and 2 Dracossack for the Xyz 7 plays. No Number 11: Big Eye because Comic Hand does the job already.


• 3 Chimeratech Megafleet Dragon because I really do not want all copies to get banished faced down by Extravagance!! Megafleet is really strong going 2nd against most decks, and your opponent will never play around on game one if he does not know your deck.


• 1 Relinquished Anima because sometimes, you have an extra copy of Black Stone in hand, and also because Pegasus / Relinquished you know? More serioulsy, people are not used to it yet and somet players forget to play around. You could replace it for any powerfull link 3 monster such as Black Luster Soldier - Soldier of Chaos, or another Link 1 Salamangreat Almiraj for extra-protection.


• Combo Accesscode Talker + Eria the Water Charmer, Gentle = revive back opponent's Halqifibrax with Eria, link into Accesscode. As simple as that.

Hope you learnt one or two things with this guide ! Should you have any question, or remark to improve the list, please feel free to ask in the comment section below!

Thanks for your attention!



Yuuuuuuugi Boy!