My testing and preparation had made decide to start the climb with Subterrors. This was because they had solid matchups against the majority of a meta. I want to thank Cubiyo and Kaito for helping find a blueprint build for the deck and giving me confidence in the build as they both performed well with the deck in the most recent MCS. I found the early part of the event the easiest of the entire weekend quickly climbing to 26389 points which put in the Top 10 of the EU region.

The easy part of the event ended here. After reaching 30000 points I found myself stuck. I was finding my build wasn’t very strong in the Subterror mirror match so I opted to switch to Sealed Tombs Koa’ki Neos, another deck that I had tested. This proved unsuccessful and I found myself lower than when I started at 25000 after several hours. At this point I’d been playing from 7am until 1am with only two short food breaks so I was quite disillusioned. I decided I would get back to 30000 and call it a day and that I would return to Subterrors to do this. After 3 painful hours I made it back to 30000 and finally went to sleep after being awake for 19 hours.

Splitting the days up feels somewhat weird because in my head they all merged into one. Still, I did manage about four or five hours sleep, so this is where I will start Day 2. I decided that I wanted to find a new deck to climb with having struggled at the same position for a long period of time. When looking in the DLM Discord I stumbled upon a Blue-Eyes deck Vini had piloted to the Top 10 of his region Latin America. I had tested Blue Eyes a tiny bit so thought I would give it a shot. This proved a good decision as I climbed 20000 points in 81 games, which after being stuck at the same point for over 100 games beforehand, felt like a minor miracle. Unfortunately, history repeated itself as I found myself stuck in the same position again for 100 games, albeit slightly higher up the ladder. In part, I blame Snipe Hunter for this. The infamous card missing 9 times in a row causing me to lose 4 games in a row (the odds of this happening is much lower than 1%). Some people asked why I didn’t switch to Koa’ki Meiru Ice which at the cost of discarding guarantees destruction. However, this only works on special summoned monsters and I didn’t want to trade the versatility that being able to target any card had. Moreover, some of my games were won because Snipe Hunter forced backrow even when it missed. On reflection maybe using Snipe was wrong but I do not believe it is as clear cut as people sometimes suggest. Regardless, after climbing back up to 50000 with Blue-Eyes for what felt like the twentieth time I decided to call it a day and try getting some sleep.

After another 4 hours sleep I woke up with the Top 3 over 27000 points ahead of me and saw my chances of making it as slim to none. Still, after all the effort I had put in I decided I would try one final push. I decided to go back to Subterrors as they were the deck I was overall most comfortable with. I made a couple of key changes which helped my build hugely in the mirror match which I had been struggling with. These were to add two copies of both Forbidden Chalice and Treacherous Trap Hole. I quickly began climbing again at a consistent pace back into the top 10 of the EU with about 75000 points. This put me only 12000 off the worlds places with around 8 hours to go. I did progress from there but unfortunately only by a further 2000 points after an ill-timed play mistake caused me to have a mini tilt. When the event finish I had 77056 points leaving me 6th place and 7000 points off of 3rd Place. This may sound like a lot but to put it into context having converted 4 of my losses to wins in over 650 games would have increased my score by approximately 8000 points, putting me in the worlds position.