There are few type & attribute combinations in recent memory that inspire such fear as ‘LIGHT Fiend’. Giving you easy access to one of the most powerful engines of all time, Fiendsmith, this dip into luminescent devils makes one consider even the worst decks as part of a pile including Fiendsmith Engraver. That being said, not even I expected my first deck out of Duelist’s Advance, out now, to include the Nouvelles.
Nouvelles is one of the most fun rogue decks I’ve had a chance to play, and while it certainly hasn’t ever been good, the tools exist within it to enable some potential as a secondary engine. Debuting in DUAD however is Chef de Nouvelles, with the signature flavor of LIGHT Fiend immediately bringing it into contention as part of the best Fiendsmith pile. Let’s see what the rock is cooking, and dive into Nouvelles Fiendsmith Primite.
Chef is the reason this list exists, and boy does he have a lot of text! Starting off in the Pendulum Zone, Chef searches a Nouvelles (here, Baelgrille de Nouvelle), and then Special Summons himself when the opponent Specials. From there, he’s able to increase his Level to 6, and use the effect of Recette de Viande (Meat Recipe) to Ritual Summon the Baelgrille, and put himself back in the Pendulum Zone.
From there, Baelgrille can negate and Tribute the opponent’s board, which is absolutely wild, and then pivot into Angry Burger via another targeted removal, which pivots into Hungry Burger with—get this—yet another targeted removal effect. Chef alone represents a negate+board wipe, and 2 individual pieces of layered monster removal, all while resetting himself. He does this while being a LIGHT Fiend that can become Level 6 (For D/D/D Wave High King Caesar set-ups alongside Engraver) that is entirely card-advantage neutral. The only real downside? 3 garnets, none of which are hard garnets.
3 garnets is a lot, as even popular engines like Brilliant Fusion or Predaplant only necessitates 1, maybe 2 max. A ‘garnet’ here refers to a card you don’t want to draw, with the difference between soft & hard being whether you can or can’t combo off with them in hand vs in deck. Here, they don’t impede any combos, but still functionally act as dead cards in the grip, meaning we’d be working with fewer starting tools than our opponents. The way we offset this is twofold: By making use of supplementary engines with a significant number of 1-card starters, being both Primite and Fiendsmith, as well as going far beyond 40 cards. Each of these choices, in their own way, can get us to the Nouvelles third of the deck while reducing the likelihood of opening 1 or more garnets. Historically the reason to play above the minimum number of cards, which always reduces the consistency of seeing a specific single card in your hand, is exactly to dodge the chance of drawing garnets.
With the discussion of garnets out of the way, let’s talk about our other engines, Primite and Fiendsmith. These were popularized together by Joshua Schmidt, one of TCG’s best current players, and we borrow his ratios for the baseline of our list. Beryl finds our way to Dipity or the OG Summoned Skull, the former a Level 4 LIGHT Fiend and the latter a Level 6 DARK Fiend. Dipity is there to enable Fiendsmith combos, as a Normal Monster with the relevant type/attribute combo, but as a Level 4 it also can be half of a Chaos Angel, something we expect to make a lot. Combining any of our 4s and 6s (and recognizing Chef de Nouvelles can be either, increasing his Level to either 4 or 6) gets an oft-unaffected boss that’s hard to out. Summoned Skull meanwhile helps us play under Nibiru, making an early Caesar against opponents playing a lot of non-engine.
The Fiendsmith package meanwhile is truly bog-standard, with the extra copies of Fiendsmith’s Desirae, for if the games go long.
One of the fundamentally strongest aspects of the Fiendsmith-Primite deck piloted by Josh was its wildly consistent but low ceiling. Across a turn cycle, being both yours and an opponent’s, it was practically impossible not to end on Fiendsmith’s Desirae, doing so through 3 pieces of non-engine in its most recent tournament finals. What Nouvelles provides for the deck is a way to heighten its ceiling for an extremely low opportunity cost. Just opening and resolving Chef leads you to 3 more interruptions, the first being a field wipe+negate, and the next two being targeted Tributes. These are strong effects! Moreover, you never feel terrible opening extra copies of Chef, as it’s a Normal Summonable LIGHT Fiend, with a Level from 3-6. This enables Fiendsmith lines, Caesar, Chaos Angel, etc as its floor. Between the searchable Fiendsmith’s Tract, and Voici la Carte (Today's Menu), you have tons of ways of finding 1 or more Chefs, and even Angry Burger is another search Spell if you squint. Voici looks as though it doesn’t always get Chef, but by revealing it and Angry Burger, you can always find Chef (and sometimes a spare Meat Recipe if your opponent misplays, although that’s ancillary). If they do choose Chef, that plays through Droll & Lock Bird, but if they don’t, you get Meat Recipe for an extra discard.
In terms of matchup specifics, did you know Chef lets you turn Ryzeals into Level 5s? Yes, if it comes down to it, Chef can be a form of disruption against opposing decks that care about Levels, as you can use non-Chef monsters as part of the Ritual Summon so long as you have at least 6 Levels of Tribute fodder in your hand or on the board. Removing the first Link Monster vs Maliss can also be backbreaking if you do so prior to them making White Binder, but if either sends a Mereologic Aggregator, that fully deals with Chef for the turn…ouch. Still, it’s much harder to deal with a card in the Pendulum Zone lying around than a monster, as neither Effect Veiler nor Infinite Impermanence really handle Chef due to how his effect is layered. Going second, you can make Constellar Ptolemy M7 using a Chef, swing in, detach and add back Chef, and then make and resolve a Zeus to clear the board with a Chef able to hit the Pendulum Zone. On turn 3, an opponent clearing something like a Zeus without playing directly into Chef is something of a kitchen nightmare, pun very much intended. All that said, you only have the one Recipe Ritual Spell, so Chef isn’t ever resolving twice in one game, especially with a single copy of Baelgrill.
For our non-engine, we’ve got a lot. Beyond the obvious, we’re playing a couple Bystials, as Bystial Magnamhut can search our Primite Ether Beryl to access that part of our deck. Crossout also makes an appearance, as while we aren’t on the targeted negation of Infinite Impermanence and Effect Veiler, which I believe to be at all-time lows in terms of playability, every other major stopgap is accounted-for when it comes to negating with Crossout Designator.
The Extra Deck is fairly tight, and there are a few suspects that could be weeded out, namely Moon of the Closed Heaven, but turning errant Burgers into the Fiendsmith line is just good enough that I can let it slide. In a similar vein, it also means we can use Ether Beryl and a body to go into Moon, into Requiem, and get a live usage of Primite Roar in response to Requiem’s Tribute, when our field is clear.
In spite of being 52 cards, the actual list is fairly tight. There’s a world where we go to 60, and play some more extenders or even a greater density of Bystials, but I think that might be losing the point. In adding 12 cards, each of our garnets beyond the first has a buffer of 5 playables, being an additional 25% density of good pieces across a 40 card deck. Calculating the respective densities, if 1 garnet in 40 is 2.5% of the total deck, 3 out of 52 is 5%, still a very respectable ratio. If these were hard garnets, 5% would be a deck I’d not touch with a steel rod, but with soft garnets it’s quite palatable, especially with Tract’s discard for spares.
Doomed Dragon was a last-minute inclusion, but it’s been growing in popularity within Fiendsmith circles, and I can see why. Just turning your core line with Agnumday into an extra body is sweet, and means we can actually go into A Bao A Qu, the Lightless Shadow with startling frequency.
This is shocking, but not too shocking, to see Nouvelles probably be in the best version of an already competent deck. After all, VS is currently the best deck in the OCG, and as soon as K9 comes out the same will be true here—the bad deckbuild set archetypes are finally coming into their own in terms of power. With that in mind, setting up a Chef in the Pendulum Zone and daring them to Summon on your turn is a worthy contest, and I actually think this gets better in terms of matchups, as a Rank 5-reliant deck that summons on both players’ turns grows in strength!
So, have you been convinced of this strategy’s power? To me this is a sleeper hit, and makes great use of some tools the OCG may have missed! What other versions of Fiendsmith should I cover? Let me know in the comments below!
