Creative Deck Strategy: Ancient Warriors Heritage

Debuting in Ignition Assault, the Ancient Warriors archetype is a set of WATER and WIND Beast-Warrior monsters that were designed to be a fully functional archetype without needing the Extra Deck. Unlike many other themes designed with the same goal in mind – this archetype carries no restrictions, thus you can still use your Extra Deck as much as you like, just you shouldn’t need to every duel. Each of the Ancient Warriors features two or three different effects, giving them a bit of versatility, but they all synergize well with continuous Spells and Traps. Spoiler Alert: Fire Formations exist. In case you’ve never seen this archetype or what it can do, let me give you a quick rundown of the heavy hitters.

The True Draco Emerge

Wyrms Supporting the Three Kingdoms theme? This almost seems intentional…

Since all of the Level 4 Ancient Warriors revolve around either sending cards from field to the GY or sending Continuous Spells or Traps, this is the first synergy to highlight. Summon Sun Mou, send a set Heritage to search, and you also get extra card advantage by destroying an opponent’s backrow. Summon Liu Xuan, send a set Apocalypse to summon an Ancient Warriors monster from the deck, then destroy one of their monsters to even the playing field. So in short: All of these 1-for-1 trades in card advantage that Ancient Warriors thrives on is automatically converted to extra card advantage when sending your True Draco cards. This gives the True Draco strategy an aggressive component to work with their advantage, giving you a leg up on an unsuspecting opponent thinking you just have a couple of traps to slow them down.

The last piece of synergy is the draw power that True Draco bring to the table. Many aggressive, main-deck focused strategies tend to deplete their hand resources very quickly when going for an OTK or strong-arm pressure play. A good example of this is Fur Hire – their entire playstyle is to spam their monsters and hope it is enough to overwhelm the opponent. In contrast, this type of aggro strategy gives you free draws from Heritage and Disciples, letting you turn the tide of the duel and out-grind the opponent. This is quite out of the ordinary for most aggro strategies – very few actually play the grind game well. But the endless recycling of True Draco definitely enables that option when your duel starts trending later.

Sample Decklist

Click to view the decklist in the Official Card Database

Spoiler

Monsters: 18
||| Ancient Warriors – Masterful Sun Mou
||| Ancient Warriors – Virtuous Liu Xuan
||| Ancient Warriors – Graceful Zhou Gong
| Ancient Warriors – Eccentric Lu Jing
||| Ancient Warriors – Loyal Guan Yun
|| Ancient Warriors – Valiant Zhang De
| Dinomist Knight the True Dracofighter
|| Ignis Heat, the True Dracowarrior

Spells: 18
||| Ancient Warriors Saga – Three Visits
| Ancient Warriors Saga – Sun-Liu Alliance
||| Fire Formation Tenki
||| Fire Formation Tensu
|| True Draco Heritage
|| Disciples of the True Dracophoenix
| Dragonic Diagram
| Black Garden
| Terraforming
| Double or Nothing!

Traps: 4
|| Ancient Warriors Saga – Defense of Changban
|| True Draco Apocalypse

Let’s Talk Techs:

In terms of overall composition, you’ll notice that I went with 2 copies of each of the important True Draco options. By running 6, you give yourself about a 58% chance of opening one of them, which rises even higher when you add in Diagram and Terraforming (~70%). This also gives you endless recycling with Disciples, but more importantly, it justifies the inclusion of 1 Dinomist Knight and 2 Ignis Heat. You definitely won’t run out of free advantage to pull out of the deck with either of them! The last composition component to highlight is the Extra Deck. You’ll probably notice that I chose a ton of different Utility options for the Extra deck, simply because you should just use it as a toolbox in Ancient Warriors. This isn’t necessarily your win condition (but it could be), so you can maximize the space with a bunch of monsters that may be helpful in only certain situations. Something like Link Spider to get rid of a Rose Token or Lost World Token can be great.

Alternative Tech Options:

Looking into the Future

The Ancient Warriors theme is far from complete in the TCG side of the game. With an additional 4 monsters and 1 Continuous Spell set to appear in the next core set, Eternity Code, the Ancient Warriors strategy has a bright future. They gain numerous ways to activate Ancient Warriors effects during the opponent’s turn, plus they get negation, recovery, and another floating Continuous Spell. They also introduce the FIRE kingdom into the theme, giving the Ancient Warriors yet another attribute to exploit! Be sure to check out this upcoming support in our prior news article on Eternity Code reveals HERE. I’m not going to further discuss this new support in this article, as I wanted to specifically tune it to the TCG capabilities of the Ancient Warriors as is, but I may revisit this theme in the future to discuss it then!

Conclusion and Wrap-Up:

Welcome to the Three Kingdoms and thanks for reading until the very end. As a quick recap, the Ancient Warriors archetype pairs extremely well with True Draco support, giving each a new facet to work with. Whether it is the aggro component added to True Draco or the disruption and card advantage added to the Ancient Warriors, these themes meet in the middle for an explosive OTK deck that takes no prisoners. While the Ancient Warriors archetype is far from complete, there is definitely ways to use their cards as it stands now, so get out there and duel! So see you next time when we dig into a reader-requested theme to find some life in an old archetype long thought to be dead and buried!

Reminder, I also take suggestions for future CDS articles! I really want to see some input from you! If you wish to see a CDS article about the archetype, theme, or strategy you love, feel free to private message me on the YGOrg Discord server, the YGOrganization Forums, or just post a comment in response to this article on our Facebook page with your ideas to keep under consideration! On most YGO-related communities my username is Quincymccoy, so feel free to reach out. As of now, I have a couple of outstanding requests that I am looking at: Ballpark Insect/Battlewasp, Gravekeeper, Cyberse, and Speedroid.

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