Forum:Deck Guide/Quick Burn/1

original by Trivi-AM

edited and updated by Gadjiltron

Intro
The traditional Burn Deck focuses around clamping hard on the opponent's ability to act, rendering them almost unable to do anything while it chips away at the opponent's Life Points via damage-over-time effects, with each effect doing roughly 500 damage per turn. Quick Burn, on the other hand, is not so patient, preferring to take out huge chunks of LP at one shot, nearly guaranteeing victory within one turn.

Mechanics
Generally, Konami doesn't like the idea of ending games by Effect Damage, as the number of cards that are capable of inflicting instantaneous massive damage without tedious summoning or activation requirements is minimal. Still, Quick Burn attempts to make the most out of these remaining choices using combinations of effects to OTK the opponent with minimal supplies.

Analysis

 * Speed - The Speed of the deck(s) can vary from build to build, but if made correctly the deck can have a Speed just below that of a Gladiator Beast Deck, in terms of how fast your opponent loses Life Points; not in terms in draw power. However, some decks are almost nothing but draw power as they focus on using the cards they have to get their burn strategies working and to get the most out of them.


 * Power - The ATK Power of most monsters in any build of a Quick Burn deck is generally very low (mostly below the 1500 mark), however, in the right situation, you should be able to defeat your opponent fast enough that, this shouldn't be too much of a problem.


 * Consistency - The Decks consistency can vary a lot from game-to-game but on average you should be able to reduce your opponent's Life Points down a little bit at the very least on your first turn.


 * Risk - There isn't much risk involved in the deck, the main problem is just drawing into a bad hand and not being able to create any sort of set up and get run over by your opponent in a couple of turns. Careful if your opponent uses LP regeneration, though, because most Quick Burn Decks are not designed to compete with a consistently increasing LP bar.


 * Meta Ranking - Unfortunately despite the speed, in terms of damage, of the deck, this deck isn't considered to have a high meta status, mostly down to the basic fact that most of Quick Burn decks have little to no extensive draw engine (except the Magical Explosion OTK deck and its variants). A few of them have managed to make their way into the tournaments, only to take an arrow to the knee a banlist to their key cards, limiting their performance today.

'' Please be aware that the purpose of the following decks are to help readers build the deck, and not to provide an exact list to be net-decked. Please use this as an example to base your own deck off of, and not to use as your own deck.''

Anti-Heal/Bad Reaction Burn
The Anti-Heal Deck falls into a little gray area between slow or fast burn, because it has the capability of burning at either speed. With the right setup, Reverse Burn can perform an OTK with its gimmicks, yet on the other hand it can "chip" the opponent to death. And by "chip", I mean "slash away at the opponent's LP 1000 at a time", since healing numbers tend to be greater than burn numbers. Fast variants usually combine the reverse burn with other means of inflicting big damage numbers as an alternative.

The main OTK idea of the Deck is to set up Reficule/Simochi along with 3 Gift Cards. Each Gift Card will give burn the opponent a hefty 3000 LP, resulting in the opponent's LP bar practically disappearing with a snap of a finger. When Gift Cards are not available, The Paths of Destiny works just as fine, since it can do guaranteed 2000 damage to the opponent if Reficule/Simochi is present.

The Deck still can fend for itself while not trying to destroy the opponent's LP in one shot. Dark Cure goes hand in hand with the heal-reversal effects to make the opponent hesitant in spamming monster Summons. Upstart Goblin and Soul Taker take chunks off the opponent's LP while giving draw opportunities and destroying cards respectively. Snipe Hunter can discard copies of Necro Gardna to protect Reficule, or discard Burning Algae to give free shots at the opponent. Kuribon works with anti-heal effects to deter attacks from big monsters, while Magic Cylinder can also do the same without any assistance.

Chain Burn
Let's face it, Cyberdark Impact is possibly one of the worst packs ever, bringing nigh-unusable cards and some generally useless archetypes. A few gems exist amidst its Common library, though, one of them being Chain Strike. The result is one of the most well-known Quick Burn variants.

The Chain Strike Deck is a Trap-centric Deck, utilizing several Chainable damage traps to build up a large chain that usually ends with its key card. Chain Strike inflicts 400 x its current Chain Link, resulting in anywhere between 800 to 2000 damage from a single card alone, discounting the rest of the damage Trap chain. As it uses a few cards that gain extra effects or have requirements based on Chain Links, it gains an extra edge over being able to use the opponent's card effects as a springboard to victory.

Typically, an ideal Chain coming from a Chain Strike Deck would consist of something like Just Desserts → Secret Barrel → Ojama Trio → Accumulated Fortune → Chain Strike. Resolving backwards, it results in Chain Strike doing 2000 damage, Fortune giving the player 2 cards, Ojama Trio spawning 3 Tokens, Secret Barrel doing around 1800 to 2000 damage, and Just Desserts doing at least 2000 damage. This totals an impressive 6000 damage at one shot, while also replenishing the player's hand that's most likely heavily exhausted to make the play. Even better is that the whole setup can be used in a response to an opponent's attempt to destroy S/Ts, like a Heavy Storm, and this will simply throw on another Chain link for Chain Strike to benefit off.

Other cards included in many builds include Battle Fader and Zero Gardna to buy extra turns by blocking off Battle Phases. Zero Gardna's effect is a Quick Effect, allowing for the player to add more links to his Chain with it as he sees fit. Magic Cylinder and Dimension Wall are used to counter direct attacks since this Deck doesn't tend to play a lot of monsters. In fact, the new Card Car D becomes very useful in this Deck since the player mostly defends himself with S/Ts, giving an extra opportunity to replenish his hand. Legacy of Yata-Garasu and Jar of Greed are simple draw Traps that build Chains without infringing too heavily on Chain Strike's and Accumulated Fortune's "no duplicates" rule.

Problems arise when cards designed on negating burn or Traps appear. Even the occasional Royal Decree will neutralize the Deck's main strategy. Hence Lava Golem is used as an unstoppable means of monster removal, and Fairy Wind can chain to a Decree activation to ensure it fizzles harmlessly while also doing damage.

Tempest Magician Burn
The Tempest Magician FTK makes use of Tempest Magician's burn effect, which depends on the number of Spell Counters you've acquired over time. Hence the main goal of this Deck is to find Magical Citadel of Endymion, which collects Spell Counters as you play Spells, and has no limit to the number of Counters you can acquire. After that, the Royal Magical Library draw loop comes into play to stack as many Counters as possible, before Synchro Summoning Tempest Magician and removing over 16 Counters for an instant win.

Magical Exemplar is a key player in this Deck, not just because it can combo with Foolish Burial and Night's End Sorcerer for an instant LV6 Synchro, but because it is unparalleled in Spell Counter generation. No other card produces 2 Counters per Spell Card! The ideal opening play for this Deck is to summon Summoner Monk, and Special Summon Exemplar by its effect. Then, Foolish Burial is used to mill Night's End and generate 2 counters on Exemplar. Exemplar then can fish out Night's End, setting the stage for Tempest Magician using Night's End and Monk as its material. With 2 more Spells (ideally Terraforming and Endymion), RML can be summoned from the hand to start the Spell spam draw loop, ending in a spectacular FTK.

The Destiny HEROes look rather anomalous here, but they are there simply to work with Allure of Darkness, Destiny Draw, and Trade-In. You can swap them and the related cards for Blue-Eyes Toon Dragon and Toon Table of Contents as you see fit.

Bubbleman Burn
What, you thought Elemental HERO Bubbleman was useless? Actually, in most situations, he is, what with his horrendous stats and restrictive effect activation requirement. However, in this Deck, this looks like a job for Bubbleman!

The Bubble Burn Deck revolves around spamming a crapton of damage-inflicting Spells that don't lurk around on the field. This quickly empties away the hand while keeping the field empty, allowing Bubbleman to easily Special Summon himself to rake in his draw 2 effect. Once the Spell stock runs low or runs out, it polishes off the long chain of damage with Magical Explosion.

Unlike Magical Explosion or Exodia FTKs which don't mind keeping things like Royal Magical Library or Broken Bamboo Sword on the field, this Deck gets picky over stuff that tends to stick around. Hence it's less likely to use such draw engines and resorts to other sources. Most notably, this Deck is more or less the only Deck to effectively use Card of Sanctity - since one of the most likely eventual scenarios is for a used Bubbleman to be the only other card around, Card of Sanctity can be used safely without wasting any resources, practically giving the player a free draw 2 and clearing the field for the next Bubbleman to appear.

Fire Trooper also makes an unexpected appearance in this Deck because normally the Deck doesn't find itself using its Normal Summon. Thus, it can be used on Fire Trooper who can blow himself up to inflict 1000 damage to the opponent, making the Deck's job easier. Reinforcement of the Army can search him and Bubbleman, whichever is needed.

Traps are not strongly recommended for the Deck, since they get in the way for Bubbleman's effect. However, things like Threatening Roar and Magical Explosion work pretty well, with the former being used to buy time for the Deck to continue setting up, and the latter as a finishing move.

Magical Explosion Burn
Alright, based on how often it appears on this page, we know Royal Magical Library is an awesome card. I could even nickname it "Rock My Life". We've seen Exodia FTKs using it as a loop-tastic draw engine. There exists another FTK which is central to the card but causes a massive game-ending burn right before the opponent can even do anything - the Magical Explosion FTK. Of course, this Deck appeared in tournaments frequently enough that Konami decided to severely disrupt their consistency by Limiting their key card, forcing the Deck off the tournament lists.

The Magical Explosion FTK works by using RML to create a draw loop such that eventually the Graveyard is loaded with enough Spells for its titular card to do enough damage to kill off the opponent. Former versions of the Deck used multiple copies of Explosion in case one was not enough (because no Deck packs 40 Spells, after all), but with Explosion Limited, players had to find another way. One such method is using Life Equalizer to set the opponent's LP to 3000 before igniting the Explosion, thus reducing the Spells-in-Grave count to a manageable 15. To create the prerequisite 8000 LP difference, Upstart Goblin is commonly used to raise the opponent's LP, and Wall of Revealing Light to drop one's to 1000.

Junk Collector OTK
 Please be aware that the following decks below don't follow the current Restricted list and are only being used as historical references.

To put is simply this deck is a variant of the popular Magical Explosion build. The basic setup is the same, getting as many spells in the grave as quickly as possible, however this deck also discards it's copies of "Magical Explosion" to the grave as well. Why? I here you ask, well this allows the player to use the effect of "Junk Collector" to remove itself and "Magical Explosion" in your Graveyard from play to use "Magical Explosion's" effect and inflict damage equal to the number of Spells in your Graveyard ×200.

As said above this deck is a variant of the Magical Explosion OTK deck; however it has a few minor, but still important, differences. The main difference is the inclusion of "Lightsworn" cards, these can be used early in the game to help get "Magical Explosion" into the Graveyard quickly. Lightsworn also give the deck access to a few other Spell cards, namely "Solar Recharge" and "Charge of the Light Brigade", which can help thin the deck and allow different play options depending on if the correct cards are in the hand or not.

Right now onto how the deck achieves it's goal. Depending on what the opening hand is depends on how well it will preform, but if the perfect opening hand is achieved on the first turn it will probably be the end of your opponent in the next few minutes. In order to get the deck working as quickly as possible it's important that you get "Divine Sword - Phoenix Blade", "Kuraz the Light Monarch" and another Warrior-Type monster into your Graveyard and have "D.D.R. - Different Dimension Reincarnation" in your hand as this will allow you to abuse Kuraz's drawing ability and as you'll be continually bringing back Divine Sword you should always have at least one card in your hand to discard for "Magical Stone Excavation" and "Spell Reproduction" etc.

Repeat the process of destroying your Kuraz and D.D.R. and drawing 2 cards as much as you can, until you have enough Spells in your Graveyard for "Magical Explosion" to do lots of damage. To ensure the OTK comes off without any interference you may wish to add "Heavy Storm" or "Giant Trunade" to you build in case you're unable to go first and your opponent sets any Spell or Trap cards that could stop you in your tracks. Anyway, once you've set everything up that you need you can set "Return from the Different Dimension" (RftDD) face-down, along with another remaining cards in your hand if you have any, and end your turn. The during your opponent's Draw Phase activate RftDD bringing back 3 "Junk Collectors" and any other 2 monster you've got removed from play, once this has happened during your opponent's Standby Phase use the effects of the "Junk Collectors" and have each them copy "Magical Explosion" and if you've got at least 27 Spells in your Graveyard you should win.

Other Tips
Be aware of the following cards, which can ruin your day if you happen to let the opponent have a turn:
 * Prime Material Dragon - It converts all burn damage to LP gain. If it and Reficule/Simochi are present at the same time, they will cancel each other out.
 * Des Wombat/Black-Winged Dragon/Life Stream Dragon/Dragon Knight Draco-Equiste - Konami really hates burn, as evidenced by the presence of these cards. Keep those emergency removal cards in your sideboard to deal with them. That extra turn you've earned just by simply bouncing them can be put to good use.
 * Nature's Reflection - Reflects all burn damage for one turn. Very nasty when pulled in response to an attempted OTK, since that massive damage or so is on you.
 * Rainbow Life - Turns all burn damage into LP gain for one turn. Very nasty when pulled in response to an attempted OTK, since you've wasted a good amount of resources into massive LP gain, and that whatever you have left cannot wipe out the new LP bar.