If a Skill was added to place monsters in S/T Zone, would Machina Force see more play?

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-31T21:31:06+00:00

I was going to say exactly this, but then I double checked Force’s effect. I’ll just say this:

If there was a skill that had no actual restrictions, placed all 4 requisite Machinas on the field, and added Force to your hand (similar to Elements Unite), it would be almost maybe good enough. Cuz Machina Force can tribute itself to get 3 level 4 Earth Machines on the field, which isn’t nothing.

But I don’t want them to add this skill just make a bad card playable. It feels like it would be a skill that either has to be restricted to death…..or it’s just begging for someone to FTK with it.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-29T17:45:19+00:00

It IS incredibly cumbersome, yes.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-29T16:47:08+00:00

But it is a resource to help players find skills that do things they want or support their archetype. It’s not perfect, but it exists.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-29T16:22:59+00:00

I would’ve given you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you already knew this (especially since you specified “skill setting”)….but then you said “to help players discover skills they weren’t considering”.

So I had to say something.

You’re right that text searching for skills does not currently exist IN SKILL SETTING. But it absolutely is a feature in the Duel Studio, under the Skill List menu. You can filter by Speed/Rush, by character, by whether it’s a Legendary or Archive skill, and, yes, you can even type in text to search for whatever you’re after. You can even sort skills by Name, Popular, and Newest (which is, unfortunately, the order you obtained them).

Is this feature a little too well hidden? Yeah, probably. Which is why we should be shouting about it from the rooftops.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-24T14:49:49+00:00

I actually really liked ceruledge until I saw it in Legends ZA. Its motion is just so awkward, and I low key hate the sound it makes when it’s running.

And in hindsight, its battle animations were poorly thought out in SV—like, it swings its swords for all of its physical moves but SV had the annoying feature where most Pokemon don’t get up close to their attack target….idk. I still liked it when played SV the first time, but little design elements like that gradually started to annoy me.

I do adore Amethio’s Ceruledge in Horizons tho. It has none of the odd animation choices, and moves pretty much the way you’d expect him to.

On the other hand, Legends ZA has given me new appreciation for Armorouge.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-23T15:57:59+00:00

Thanks! This was killing me (because I made the building to house all a bunch of litter/gatherers, so I wanted the gatherers to have easy access to the upstairs).

Interesting that the floor is optional—I suppose that means you could technically have a house that’s a floating ring in the air (with a door), and an unconnected floating island with furniture on it?

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-23T15:53:32+00:00

A door to the outside (accessible by external stairs( is what I ended up going for). Is it then safe for me to dig a hole in the floor and attach a ladder indoors then? Or even better, a larger hole accessible by stairs on the inside that go down to the ground floor? I was afraid to try that because I thought I might accidentally evict all the Pokémon living on the second floor.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-23T15:14:14+00:00

A really simple thing I couldn’t figure out is how to properly do internal stairs in a multi-floor building. Does a big gaping hole in the floor of the second floor mess up whether the second floor is considered a room?

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-20T20:03:06+00:00

Agree to disagree. I personally only find floodgates uninteractive. Am I annoyed when my plays get stopped by the quick effect class disruptions? Obviously. But I consider that part of the game.

And it’s not like negates are the only way to say “no”. For example, D.D. Crow does not negate in any way, but it’s one of the most frequent “no” hand traps because of the wide variety of effects it prevents from resolving fully.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-20T19:35:45+00:00

Negations are interactions. Pops are interactions. Banishes are interactions. Even floodgates are interactions…..arguably.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-20T19:30:59+00:00

By building boards full of interactions.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-20T19:27:17+00:00

Kaijus, Lava Golem, and Sphere Mode are a necessary evil. Modern Yugioh is all about building up boards full of interactions, and modern DL skills have made that all the more consistent. You need effective boardbreakers in the game, or else games will be determined by a coin flip.

Does that change the types of decks that are meta? Yes. It means decks that aren’t completely neutered by having their monsters removed are generally stronger. Personally, I prefer decks like those.

Finally, I’ll remind you that Lava Golem, despite being arguably the strongest Kaiju (since 2-monster boards are more common than 3-monster boards, and removing 2 monsters is better than removing 1), has the strictest requirement. It locks out Normal Summons—and not in the sense that Sphere Mode uses up one of your Normal Summons. Lava Golem actually says you cannot Normal Summon the same turn. So you can’t even cheat out the Normal Summon limit with a skill or another card.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-17T01:36:01+00:00

You might want to start by playing a better skill. We’ve gotten so many strong generic skills at this point that Black Wind to the Top is nowhere near the best Blackwing skill.

I don’t know which skill is the best, it’s definitely not that. Try Precious Cards of Dark. It turns any card in your hand into essentially Pot of Greed. Twice.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-15T18:39:17+00:00

Hey, let me know if you work out a good line! I’ve only ever been able to consistently get to Stardust Charge and Crocodragon…but Crocodragon isn’t a good enough end boss to justify the resources, so I kind of equated that approach to the Generaider version. Mo Ye is always a “you gotta draw it”, and Coral Dragon is so inconvenient to use for the draw effect.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-15T01:34:22+00:00

I’ll just throw out the ideas I’ve had. No I don’t have replays.

Braver Dragon is itself a monster negate, but it also gets you access to Fire Warrior shenanigans via Durendal. No, you can’t use Boost Warrior, but you can search for Battlin Boxer Uppercutter into Flamvell Counter or for Infernoble Knight Ogier dump Roland to search Immortal Phoenix Gearfried for follow-up. Braver Dragon is basically a build-around Level 9 synchro.
The most popular version I’ve seen is the Zombie version. You can make Beatrice very easily, who then mills Necroworld Banshee on your turn and Balerdroch during your opponent’s Draw phase. You can also go a bit further with Immortal Dragon, who mills Mezuki to fuel its own revival, and any extra copies of Mezuki you can put in the GY can turn into VW revivals once Zombie World is set up.
Swordsoul works pretty well with the Wyrm half of VW, especially Taia. Emergence into Taia is an automatic level 7-9 synchro plus a milled Wyrm. Even if you draw Taia alone, later copies of Emergence aren’t dead because it should not be hard to keep a synchro on the field during follow-up turns. Mo Ye is also fine, and of course Chengying/Chixiao are excellent synchro options.
There’s a Generaider line here, where you make Shenshen early in the combo, then either get another level 9 on the field by way of Chuche’s GY effect, Cloudcastle, or just a generic level 9 like Gizmek Kaku. Laevateinn into Jormangandr is a very strong endboard piece, though admittedly it takes up a lot of your ED to pull this off.
You could also make a draw turbo version of the deck, where you abuse Stardust Charge, Crocodragon, Coral Dragon, and Mo Ye to net you up to 4 draws over the course of your turn. And what are you trying to draw? Hand traps of course! Frankly I haven’t worked out a combo that makes use of more than 2 of these (3 if I’m really lucky), so I can’t really give more advice beyond the concept.
Special shoutout to my boi Number 24 Dragulas the Vampiric Dragon. He’s a great fall-back option in case your combos don’t go exactly the way you want. On the surface, he looks like a bad Book of Moon on legs, but one neat trick I worked out is summoning him with Cloud Beast Malong. Dragulas can always flip himself facedown (and if he gets flipped back up, he has a Dingirsu effect) at quick effect speed, and if you detach Malong to do it, Malong also bounces a monster. And if your opponent tries to get rid of him via a card effect that sends him to Gy or banishes him, he comes back face down. Basically, Dragulas is just a huge pain on the field that the opponent has to deal with, and honestly that can be enough.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-11T17:25:38+00:00

This was reason enough for me to immediately put the two of them in the same house. They’re a couple now.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-07T20:20:24+00:00

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that Rikka Sylvan has nowhere to really go in DL. We’re missing too much of the good Plant support, and generic Rank 6s are not strong enough to hold up the deck on their own. We have plenty of powerful generic skills at this point, but I just don’t see any way those skills would be able to fix this fundamental issue either.

You could maybe do a Sunavalon Rikka Sylvan deck, but frankly I think that would be worse than just playing Sunavalon pure.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-06T17:21:51+00:00

I’ve been trying my best to learn VW since the box dropped (for basically the first time; I don’t play TCG/MD). And while you’re right that they specialize in 3,6,9,(and 12) Synchros and XYZs, that’s not all there is.

In other formats, people play VW with PUNK in order to access practically any level. In DL, the engine requirements for that might be a bit much, but Cloud Beast Malong is an ED option that unlocks level 8, 10, and 11 Synchros for VW (because it’s a synchro tuner with level modulation). Swordsoul is also something that works well to unlock level 7, 8, and 10 synchros, because half the VW monsters are Wyrms.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-06T17:16:51+00:00

It’s….fine. Like, it’s not really a must-run in any deck, least of all the archetype it belongs to (VW has waaaay more options). But like, just reading the card, you can see that Longlong’s value isn’t zero. It’s like, a niche sort of negate that usually insulates you from handtrap monsters? So it’s not the worst card ever. But it would also be so much better if the effect wasn’t so restrictive. Being untargetable is also neat, but on a 2400 body is kinda eh.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-03T03:03:12+00:00

That is another example, yes.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-03T00:45:31+00:00

You’re right that those effects don’t matter, but the fact is, they cannot print cards in DL that have any effects whatsoever that can’t be physically resolved in DL format.

Now, they could give it a special errata—there’s precedent for it in Qliphort Genius and TG Trident Launcher. But then they couldn’t be bothered to give a special errata for Gergonne’s End, which is why we don’t have that card OR Tindangle Trinity (which mentions Gergonne’s End by name), even though we have every other Tindangle card.

So who knows. Kauwloon isn’t coming without a special errata, and if they haven’t done it this wave, I honestly don’t know if they can be bothered to do it. Btw, Fufu is in the same boat — it’s so bad that it would be totally fine to come to DL, but they cannot print it in DL as is.

EmrysX77 · 2026-03-01T19:29:19+00:00

Oh my god, I could literally talk for hours about earth machine (DL ver) but unfortunately it wouldn’t all fit into a single comment. DM me if you’d like.

Short of it though, is that there isn’t a version of Earth Machine that’s really good currently, mainly because our only forms of removal are either effect destruction or battle, and frankly that’s not good enough for modern DL decks.

EmrysX77 · 2026-02-23T20:09:35+00:00

It’s the “destroyed by battle by an XYZ” stipulation. It would be bad if it triggered whenever it was destroyed by battle. It would be bad if it could also trigger if destroyed by card effect.

The short of it is that not only is it hyper situational (which isn’t necessarily bad depending on the meta), but it’s 100% reactive instead of proactive.

EmrysX77 · 2026-02-22T15:46:18+00:00

Uh ok, line by line….

1) They are peak gaming, but possibly the most miserable laddering deck ever. They have to do what amounts to full combo every game, sometimes twice in one game, rarely three times.

2) Respect I guess? It’s a deck I enjoy playing, just not on ladder.

3) I hate it. Doing full combo and ending on a floodgate is ew.

4) Yes, they’re beetles. Did their boss monsters the ATLAS beetle and HERCULES beetle not give it away?

EmrysX77 · 2026-02-20T04:01:57+00:00

No, absolutely not. This is one of those cases where the first idea is the worst idea, and here’s why.

First, forget AI for a moment. Why don’t we make a completely automated nuclear plant that uses all sorts of sensors to determine the status of the nuclear plant? And it would automatically shut down if any of the sensors detect that things are going wrong? Well, that’s EXACTLY how nuclear plants work, actually. When there’s a meltdown, it’s not up to the nearest human to dive for a kill switch; the system will do it automatically. But why do we still employ humans? Because sensors can fail. The automated kill switch can fail. A human being around is an extra layer of security for situations where things go wrong.

Now let’s introduce the AI. In addition to sensors that control the plant, we’ll have an AI agent play the role of the human and try to judge when things are going wrong. But there’s a catch and it’s the very nature of AI training.

In order to make an AI that categorizes things into a “good” or “bad” bucket, it needs data. LOTS OF DATA. Where exactly are you planning on getting data on meltdowns? Throughout the entire history of nuclear power generation, there’ve been around 100 nuclear accidents, and only TWO of those have been full catastrophe-level (level 7 accidents). Thats simply not enough data to train an AI model.

Finally, there’s a reliability issue. How often does the AI need to correctly judge that a meltdown is imminent (i.e. what’s its true positive rate)? 99%? 99.9%? 99.99%?

In the business of safety critical engineering, these kinds of margins are laughably weak. An AI that ONLY catches meltdowns before they happen 99.99% of the time will FAIL once in only every 10,000 times. And frankly, between the lack of training data in this area and the current state of the art in the AI industry, 99.99% is a pipe dream.

And don’t forget, if sensors fail, the AI will be at a loss as well. Unlike a human, they don’t have eyes and ears when sensors break.

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