Yu-Gi-Oh! Deck Debut: Tistina - Post Age of Overlord
The day has finally arrived, with the release of Age of Overlord, for Tistina to get its next wave of support. As background, Tistina is perhaps the most shrugged-at TCG Exclusive archetype to be released in a long time; while strategies like Beetrooper got regional tops following their debut, and War Rock became an inside joke to many, Tistina was simply…not spoken of. This is due in part to its perceived blandness, which I can understand, but I feel it mostly came down to the mis-evaluation of the archetype as a go-second face-down control deck, rather than a potent swarming engine. I’ve had demonstrable success with Tistina myself, doing quite well into the meta of last format and enjoying the strategy, but I was especially excited for the next wave. We knew more were coming, and all that could be hoped-for was a few more good names, and maybe an Extra Deck boss. So, where did Tistina end up?
The answer is…underwhelming. Wave 1 of Tistina, debuting in Duelist Nexus, was a coherent swarming strategy with a clear line, and obvious cycles of searching. You had Sentinel of the Tistina, Demigod of the Tistina, and Breath of the Tistina to search one another, then capstones of Divine Domain Baatistina and Hound of the Tistina to increase your ceiling while playing uninterrupted. Very readily, you could turn Sentinel and any single set card, or Breath & Kashtira Fenrir, into a full endboard of Apollousa, Reichphobia, Tri-Heart, and Twinsaw.
All the deck was missing, if we’re talking about it in terms of bare-minimum, was more names that resembled Hound & Sentinel. Unfortunately, not even that was delivered. To summarize, most optimized Tistina builds are going to be playing 1-2 copies of ~2 cards in the new wave, out of 7, and even then those cards only exist as things to search when you already have your core names.
The good news is, as far as random extension goes, both Returned of the Tistina and Play of the Tistina are very good for the strategy. Returned is another free body from hand (and unfortunately not from Graveyard) that turns either Sentinel or Hound into a Rank 3 or 4 play, respectively, and Play allows you to better execute the main combo line through removal, by bringing back a stray Demigod when it’s destroyed, or setting up the Demigod-Crystal God field to flip everything down. Each of these cards is a massive upside for decks doing what Tistina was already doing best: Swarming the field, and occasionally flipping the opponent’s cards down.
Also worth noting is Fallen of the Tistina, which while not good is another 3 copies of Baatistina, if you felt your list required that. Most lists only ran 1-2 to begin with, but the fact that Fallen also insulates your Baatistina isn’t nothing, and has prompted some players to experiment with Artifact Durendal by way of Tellarknight Ptolemaeus, although these largely rest in the realm of win-more.
It is deeply disappointing, then, that the rest of the wave is essentially empty cardstock. As one might be able to glean from Returned’s effect, Tistina has branched out into Xyz Monsters, and sadly is all the worse for it. Our wave 1 Trap, Signs of the Tistina was a puzzling card to begin with, but this only further confuses me, given both of these Traps do little to contextualize it. Discordance of the Tistina is close to being good, if it could banish things from field, but as a slow way to deal with the GY only, it likely won’t make the cut in the maindeck. Embrace of the Tistina reads as an immensely powerful card as well, until you get to the last line — “You can only use each effect of "Embrace of the Tistina" once per turn, and can only activate them while you control a "Tistina" monster with 3000 or more DEF.” As a slight spoiler, there’s no Tistina monster worth keeping onboard that nears that number.
Lastly for this section, there’s Tainted of the Tistina, a profoundly strange card that does nothing this archetype wants. It eats the Normal Summon, becomes Level 10 when we have far more accessible means of putting a Level 10 body on the field, and grants a double attack. It has all the right potential tags, in the ability to Tribute over Set cards, trigger when sent (aka by Baatistina) but all of the wrong effects attached.
The culmination of this clunky, peculiar design is Tistina, the Divinity that Defies Darkness. This is a Rank 10 that removes all face-downs, gains ATK, and floats…when nothing the Tistina strategy does has remotely any synergy with those effects. We could already attack over face-down monsters via Hound’s effect, OTK via out-of-engine cards or simple swarming, and float via Crystal God Tistina itself. This card does everything worse than simply keeping a Crystal God & Hound on your field, not to mention turning off the incredible Quick Effect on Demigod. To say this is baffling would be an understatement.
Luckily, through the tools provided in wave 1, and the sparingly decent cards in wave 2, Tistina is certainly better-off than it was before AGOV. While wave 2 killed any hype most people had for the strategy, there’s tools here that didn’t exist prior, beyond even just Tistina.
New to AGOV are the Xyz Armor cards, a line of Extra Deck monsters that rank up and equip one another, provided you play some soft garnets in the maindeck, in the form of Full Armored Xyz and eventually Armored Xyz. Coupled with these payoffs is the debut of Gen the Diamond Tiger and his ‘brother’, Ken the Warrior Dragon, who summon to opposite sides, providing hand sculpting and more crucially, automatic activation of your Triple Tactics cards. Between these tools, and the remarkably synergistic Kashtira cards, I’ve been working on a new brew that plays for the long game, using the Extra Deck as a potent toolbox. Included here is the Side Deck, as well (which I normally don’t do) because of how important a few choice cards are to your strategies for games 2 & 3.
As you can see, we’re running a pretty striped-down Tistina package, with only the bare essentials alongside a plethora of flexible one-ofs, which can be accessed during the search chain. We’re using these cards to port into either a Rank 3 or 4 monster, then going into Xyz Armor Fortress and performing that line, as well as swarming for the purposes of a small S:P Little Night package. Alongside this, we’re flexing the Kashtira cards, with Fenrir being an incredible card in almost every scenario, as well as both Kashtira Riseheart and Tearlaments Kashtira being free bodies for Xyz plays. Crucially, these cards both banish a monster on resolution of their effects, which enables the spiciest part of this list: Nemeses Flag.
Brand-new in AGOV is Infernal Flame Banshee, which searches Pyros, however one seemingly-innocuous card in her search pool is Nemeses Flag, who can search Archnemeses Eschatos. With Protos banned, Eschatos represents one of only a few total locks in the game currently, locking a type of your choice, and with the help of Reproducus (not joking) we can essentially VFD an opponent if they rely on a single type for their strategy. Not only that, we can also board into Change of Heart for Gen/Ken to play effectively 3 copies of a steal (including Talents). This means a resolved Gen/Ken with Thrust is two Level 3s, enabling the Armor Xyz line as an exceptionally high-floor gameplan. The one kicker of this list, which I’m still working to circumvent, is that for some reason Armored Xyz isn’t coming out until Maze of Millenia, meaning there’s a few months until this strategy hits complete legality.
In truth, I’m unsure whether this or a more traditional Scarekash version of Tistina is better, although this one certainly has quite a bit more going on post-AGOV. There’s a wealth of tools from the set, and it’s extremely unfortunate that amidst a sea of playables, Tistina pulled the short straw. All told, however, I wouldn’t lose hope. This archetype has received essentially no love from the community, so the expectations were already low — now it’s simply our job to raise them above 0.
With that, we’re done covering Tistina for a long while, I think! It’s been my favorite deck since Duelist Nexus, but I’d be lying if I said this new wave wasn’t a bit soul-crushing. What do you think might be able to fix Tistina now? Is there a better deck to play the Nemeses engine in? Let me know in the comments below!
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