A short guide to Froggy FTK

I’ve always had a fondness for FTK decks, because in general a good FTK deck will have your opponent sitting there for 5-10 minutes as you continue to make plays, they lose and end up sitting their with a baffled face as they didn’t get to make a play. Although of course, FTK’s in general aren’t that healthy for the metagame, since they usually aren’t stable enough to consistently win events, but they are good enough to rob good players of their records while losing to worse players and thus tampering with the outcome of many a tournament. That’s why FTK’s are rightly banned at the earliest opportunity. So pay attention, because you’ll only be able to use this deck for 3 more months. And it plays frogs. And apart from 4 rares, the deck is made entirely of commons. It’s the cheapest deck you’ll ever play and I mean that in ever sense of the word.

Your win condition is simple. Mass driver needs to sack a monster 20 times to deal 8000 damage. And to do that we are going to use a common from TSHD. Ronintoadin can remove a “frog” monster from the graveyard to special summon himself. So we can just bring him back 20 times.

Apart from that we will need about 20 frogs, to be discussed later, and a means to get them all in our graveyard. The means to do that is Substitoad

Substitoad will let us tribute any monster and summon a frog from our deck, then let us tribute that frog to get another. So basically all we need is to get substitoad and another monster on the field and mass driver in our hand. It goes without saying when you’ve sent half your deck to the grave it becomes considerably easier to draw one of your 3 copies of mass driver.

One card that greatly helps us in this pursuit is One for One. Drawing one for one in this deck almost instantly means your engine is set up, because with 26 monsters in the deck that can all be normal summoned, you are bound to have one to dump for One for One and another to summon. And since it can be used to summon substitoad or another monster, you have the engine set up straight away. Another card that will enhance your chances when you have substitoad is swap frog, who will let you special summon him by discarding a water monster. You will also needs two of your swap frogs to use their ability to send ronintoadin to the graveyard, since substitoad can only special summon frogs and ronintoadin is not treated as a Frog in your deck. He will also let you return a monster on the field to your hand to normal summon another frog. Although we will rarely be summoning another frog, returning swap frog from the hand and special summoning him again serves two benefits. First it clears the final frogs from your hand, and secondly it lets you send another LV2 or lower aqua type monster from your deck to your grave, allowing you to dump your extra substitoads , thinning the deck even further.

Now it becomes key to getting all the needed cards in our hand and for that we run the following suite of cards :

Moray of greed lets you send two water monsters back to your deck in order to draw three cards. Any frog that isn’t swap frog can easily be sent back for this purpose, yielding three fresh cards. Hand destruction makes both players discard 2 cards and then draw 2 cards, digging two deeper in your deck and closer to what you need. Card destruction makes you dump your whole hand and draw as many cards as you discarded. Both Hand and Card destruction lead you to lose a card from your hand. Salvage fulfils many roles in this deck, and the first is obviously to offset the -1 created by card and hand destruction. But salvage can also turn swap frog into your win condition, by using swap frogs special summon ability, discarding one water monster from the hand, then using its ability to dump substitoad in the grave, and retrieving both monsters with salvage, normal summon substitoad and get your engine going. Salvage also makes sure you have two to discard for hand destruction, or an extra card to discard for card destruction in a pinch. It goes without saying you want to use moray before dumping as you’ll have monsters to send back and you will get them back out of the deck. However saving hand and card destruction can be more useful until after you dump your frogs, within the realm of possibility, since it implies you will want to dump more cards to grab mass driver and chances of that are greater with deck size cut in half. That just leaves us to fill in the rest of the frogs.

Mostly these are just frogs for the sake of being frogs. But some come in handy when you don’t have the needed set up turn one. Every turn reduces your chance of OTK’ing with the deck, but you can certainly stall out. Setting a 2000 DEF monster like Dupe frog or a treeborn frog that will come back are likely to produce a tribute for substitoad next turn if that was the problem. Your last frog away for dupe frog, and then keeping substitoad, or sacking substitoad for a second dupe frog will create what we call a Dupe Lock, that doesn’t let the opponent attack your monsters. That can give you time. My preferred way of getting closer to my goal however, is actually to make the before last monster swap frog, not using his effect (I’ll have used the previous two to send my two copies of ronintoadin) and then sacrificing substitoad to grab poison draw frog last. When I use Swap frog to send that poison draw to the graveyard, I draw an additional card. If its not mass driver, there’s a good chance its hand or card destruction, or moray of greed may even do as well, although its not my preferred way of doing things. Unifrog can attack directly for 400 damage and get rid of a spell or trap in the process when brought out last by sacrificing substitoad himself. That saves you one sacrifice (needing only 17 frogs in the grave (considering you’ll have dealt 400 damage with unifrog and sacked Unifrog and your other face-up frog before even using Ronintoadin), but can also clear pesky traps that stall or threaten you. Beelze an Des frog are in here solely because of their level. And that’s because lastly, we’ll be adding :

Alternatively when you can’t FTK with mass Driver you can do a bit of a baby infernity play with this deck. With various LV1, 2, 3 (Beelze) and 5 (Des) frogs left in the deck, substitoad on the field, and several frogs, ronintoadin and Fishborg in the graveyard, you can throw down several synchro monsters. Trick is to bring back ronintoadin, sacrifice him for the level you need, and repeating it, then ditching a monster to bring back Fishborg, you can synchro for practically any level (Beelze + Des + Fishborg = Mist Wurm for instance). Fishborg is also the logical target for One for One when you already have Substitoad in your hand. The last card we add for safety is Giant trunade, just in case you don’t win the dice role, it can be good to send the backrow away before playing mass driver, since dust tornado is a popular turn one play. That gives us a deck of 41 cards.

I really want to run this now...The guys at my local will kill me. :)

I'm disgusted by this deck's existence.

What's worse is, imagine how they have to slaughter froggy decks and definitely froggy monarchs to even make a dent in this. At the very least substitoad will have to be limited. The alternative is to ban ronintoadin.

Wouldn't banning Mass Driver suffice? Obviously there are still things like Cannon Soldier (which should arguably be banned too), but I doubt the deck could spare a normal summon.

I know some people that are using double summon and amazon archer because it requires less tributes and in the end it can tribute itself as well. never underestimate the ingenuity of FTK duellists :p If it can work, they will make it work :p Of course I'm not opposed to seeing mass driver, cannon soldier and amazon archer banned Cards like that generally only serve OTK/FTK decks.

Well, someone at my hangout uses this deck, and it's pretty nasty if the combo is pulled off. The version I've seen doesn't bother with Synchros--although there may have been, but I didn't see any played--and uses Magical Merchant to easily mill the Frogs and Ronintoadins and get the necessary Spells like Mass Driver. OTK-FTK decks: Good when you're playing them, bad when you're getting owned by them, and worse for the game. Sure, it's cool to win, and I did run a version of the Rescue Cat OTK many moons ago, but it's hard to have fun when you can get burned before you can even have a turn.

I'm biased when it comes to banning Cannon Soldier--it is a Machine, after all--but I wouldn't be surprised if parts of this deck get limited or banned if it catches on and starts topping tournies. This game is supposed to be fun for everyone, right?

It has topped tournies. But that's not the issue, the problem is that consistency of the deck depends entirely on luck of the draw, and if you get lucky against good players and draw poorly against bad players, your little OTK/FTK deck upsets the whole skill balance of the tournament, causing bad players to place better, and the whole point of having rules and changes in this game is to maximize the skill and minimize the luck.

I'm all for nuking FTK/OTKs so it will be interesting to see what Konami does to knock down this deck.