Invited Author: Jean Flores
Country: Canada
Introduction
Hello everyone! My name is Jean Flores and I am from Canada. I just recently won the CoreTCG Regional that just passed on May 13, 2023.
I have been playing Digimon since the Super-Prerelease back in 2020-21. I am an avid fan of purple decks and have played them ever since the beginning and I am finally glad I won a big tournament with the colour I play with the most.
Deck Introduction
The deck I decided to play for this event was Beelzemon X. I primarily play purple so I was ultimately deciding between this or Hunters. Hunters I did not have as much practice with as I did with Beelze so I decided to play the deck I was most comfortable with and in the end it paid off. My version of Beelze played a few techs that most builds have seemed to drop but also is lacking from techs most builds have adopted recently.
Before the regionals, I was on the ST6 Pagumon instead of the ST14 Yaamon. I was always a very cautious player and the Pagumon helped with that by giving me some forms of interactions on my opponent's turn through its’ “on deletion” inheritable. The Yaamon was a last minute change since I believed that I had to go as fast as possible to combat either Wargrey/Blackwargrey variants and the mirror. It was the best decision I made for the deck and I will be playing the egg from now on.
In terms of the LV3s, the lineup is pretty standard with maxed out copies of ST14 Impmon, EX2 Impmon and BT12 Impmon (X-Antibody). The one difference is I played one copy of the BT6 Impmon. This choice did not make much of an impact and the card has not come up for me the entire tourney but was the reason I won my last match within the tournament. For future tournaments, I would be replacing this card with something else.
For LV4s, we have 4 copies of each promo Wizardmon and BT12 Wizardmon (X-Antibody) but we also play 2 copies of ST14 Witchmon. The Witchmon helped with speeding up the trashing from my deck but the main purpose of them was the DP boost they gave with their inheritable. Witchmon combined with ST14 Baalmon helped my Beelzemons have pseudo-jamming when swinging into security which came up multiple times with how popular Hunters was and Quartzmon being 15k DP.
With the LV5s, I kept it simple with just 4 ST14 Baalmon and 2 BT10 Baalmon. I did not run the BT12 Baalmon (X-Antibody) since I did not play the X Antibody option which has been very popular with every other variant of Beelzemon. I wasn't used to playing with the option so I opted for not playing the small package. The BT10 Baalmon was mainly to allow me to build a stack in the raising area and not lose out on potential trashing.
The top end was pretty standard: 2 copies of ST14 Beelzemon, 3 copies of EX2 Beelzemon, 2 copies of BT12 Beelzemon (X-Antibody) and 2 copies of ST14 Beelzemon Blast Mode. Not much to go off of here.
Finally, 3 copies of ST14 Ai & Mako were played to increase consistency and to help stack my deck for my trashing effects. The options have maxed out copies of EX2 Death Slinger and ST14 Rival’s Barrage because I want to see those when I trash cards as much as possible. For Seventh Full Cluster, I only ran 1 copy since it was a card that I didn't really want to see in multiple copies but I see the value in playing multiple copies for the Beelze X turn.
Matchups
R1 Hunters (2-0) : This matchup showed me how favoured Beelze is against Hunter, especially if they have a slower start. A trend that most of my Hunter opponents have been doing, is just blindly playing BT12 Damemon in hopes of hitting a tamer but they usually miss. My opponent this round never had enough tamers on board to tuck my digimon under my tamers.
R2 BWGX (2-0) : This round was simply because I had a fast start in both games and my opponent could not keep up.
R3 Hunters (2-0) : Another Hunters matchup and it ended the same way as the first one with BT12 Damemon missing more often than it should.
R4 Bloom/Hydra (2-1) : This was a surprising matchup because I have never played it before and as well seeing a Bloom/Hydra deck with a 3-0 record. Game 1 I pretty much bricked and my opponent quickly flooded the board and won. Game 2 was a swift win for myself with my opponent not being able to catch up. In game 3, the game was going back and forth with my opponent going through 3 Hydramons tucking three of my digivolution stacks but ultimately went with my victory. This deck always scares me whenever I play vs them.
R5 Hunters (2-0) : This was my last Hunters matchup this tournament and pretty much went the same way as the previous two matchups. Deck needs too much setup and some games have no out to a Beelzemon stack if you don’t play the Ai & Mako tamer outside of deletion effects.
R6 Beelzemon (2-1) : This was the first Beelzemon mirror this tourney and it was an emotional rollercoaster. Game 1 ended with my opponent digivolving their Impmon all the way up to ST14 Beelzemon and trashing the following with the “When Digivolve” effect: 2 copies of EX2 Impmon and 2 copies of EX2 Beelzemon. I haven't seen such a mill before. This turn also ended with me starting my turn with 1 memory. I conceded and went straight to game 2. Game 2, I was the one with an incredibly fast start and ended up winning that game. Game 3, my opponent sadly bricked and ended up losing the game because of it.
R7 Beelzemon (2-0) : This one had game 1 going back and forth with it ending with my victory. Game 2 ended with my opponent bricking again. My opponent was a joy to play even though his luck was not there for siad match.
R8 Beelzemon (2-0) : This was my first time in the finals and this was also the first mirror match my opponent has played today. Me coming off of playing two mirrors, I feel a bit more confident than my opponent. Game 1 was nothing really interesting but in game 2, on my final turn was the first time the BT6 Impmon was actually relevant. My Beelzemon X stack was deleted by a Rival’s Barrage in security. The Beelzemon X “On Deletion” effect brought back the Impmon which ended up grabbing back a copy of ST14 Beelzemon. Along with my one lone copy of Rival’s Barrage that was set the turn prior, it gave me the exact stack to rebuild a new stack using Wizardmon (X-Antibody) that was already on the board which resulted in my victory on that turn winning me the tournament.
Special Thanks
This was a very enjoyable experience and would love to feel this experience once more with the coming regionals/Ultimate Cups within the coming months. I would like to thank everyone from my locals: Untouchables Sports Cards & Gaming.They support me with playtesting as well as helping me get the cards I need to finish any deck I want to play. I would also like to thank everyone on the Brick City discord for supporting me throughout the tournament through cheers and motivational messages being sent to me in between rounds.
I would also like to thank Digimon Meta for giving me this opportunity to write an article. I am not used to writing articles but I hope you all enjoyed reading this article and hopefully I can represent my community at Nationals next year.
Thank you very much for having me and will be seeing you at future online tournaments.
Need to see the changes of bt6 imp, love youre list
Hey there, you can just do the following:
– 1 BT6 Impmon
+ 1 BT12 Seventh Full Cluster
or if you want to play with the X-Antibody package:
– 1 BT6 Impmon
– 1 BT10 Baalmon
+ 1 BT9 X Antibody
+ 1 BT12 Baalmon (X-Antibody)
Hope this helps 🙂