You’re all in for a special treat! All this week, the Night Threads are dedicated to some of my favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! decks from my heyday!

…I mean, at least it’s not rotting Jar-Jar candy?

Anyway, we kick things off with my very first[footnote]Not counting what I had as a child; children’s card games are for adults only.[/footnote] deck: Machina Gadget. Yu-Gi-Oh! decks tend to have uncreative names, so this is a deck that revolves around both the Machina and Gadget monster engines. Gadgets all let you grab another Gadget from your deck whenever they’re summoned, meaning you’ll often have at least one in your hand at any given time. This is helpful for the Machina half of the deck, which revolves around the boss monster Machina Fortress. Machina Fortress can be special summoned by discarding it and one other machine from your hand, meaning it has great synergy with Gadgets.

But the best part of the deck for me was how inexpensive it was. YGO decks have an unfortunate tendency to be bonkers pricy. It was common for decks to cost hundreds of dollars, and a select few even managed to break $1,000. But Machina Gadget came from a structure deck, a $10 pre-built deck. Buy three of them, and you have the shell of the deck. You’d want to make a few extra additions, but it was really easy to build a perfectly functional version of this deck for under $50, which is great for a college student who doesn’t have unlimited disposable income.

You could even lean into it if you wanted; my first version of the deck ran Solidarity, a card that gives all your monsters 800 extra ATK, but only if there’s exactly one type of monster in your graveyard. The “good” versions of this deck had stopped running it, because running an Extra Deck full of all the latest and greatest Synchro Monsters was considered too important to give up. But since I considered it too “a good Extra Deck costs $300” to run, I was able to stick to the cheapo strategy and catch some people off-guard.

Anyway there’s a lot more detail I could get into (I ran this deck somewhat regularly for 4 years, meaning it went through a lot of different versions to stay at least semi-relevant[footnote]At one time or another this deck has featured Solidarity, Magical Hats/Geartown/Ancient Gear Gadjiltron Dragon, Ultimate Offering, Redox, Dragon Ruler of Boulders, Silver Sentinel, Tin Goldfish, Gear Gigant X…like I said, I could go for hours on this.[/footnote]) but I’ve got four more of these coming up and I’ve got to keep you all tolerating me. So enjoy the night thread!