Yu-Gi-Oh! Genesys Guide: Diva Altergeist

For the first time in a while, I have an actual tournament schedule I hope to keep to for Yugioh.  I’ve played in-person here and there, at locals and the occasional Regional, but the vast majority of my play is online testing & Master Duel.  This is great for keeping a tight grip on my fundamentals, but Yugioh has been less exciting than in formats prior, since the recent Forbidden & Limited list.  Thank goodness the tournaments I have planned aren’t adhering to that highly questionable banlist then, because they’re actually centered on the brand-new Genesys format.  Genesys has been a roaring success in my eyes, and aside from a recent ominous announcement that cards won’t be pre-pointed on release, everything seems exciting for Konami’s latest experiment.  I mentioned offhand that one of the potentially exciting decks for Genesys was Linkless Altergeist, and I’m here to deliver on that promise.  Let’s go into my full breakdown of what I’ll be playing: Diva Altergeist.

In all my years of playing Yugioh, I’ve actually only gotten a single top 4 at a regional level, and did it with Altergeist.  This archetype of Spellcaster hackers hinge around Trap cards, both their own and the generic suite of options, and it’s the epitome of control-player-comfort-food.  This is a VRAINS archetype we’re talking about however, deeply steeped in the Link era—what on earth is it doing in Genesys?  Altergeist escaped entirely unpointed in the format, like nearly all Link strategies, but the truth is that unlike its contemporaries during the era it was playable, the Extra Deck was more of a suggestion.  In much the same vein as Eldlich in its heyday, or Labrynth, you don’t actively need to use bosses like Altergeist Hexstia to win the game, especially in a lower power format.

Still, we lose out on a host of options from the Extra Deck, on top of our best enabler in Altergeist Pookuery, so how do we bounce back from such a shift in our power ceiling?  The answer, not unlike how I jammed Gishki & Superheavy Samurai together all those years back, is to add a fish to the machine.  Deep Sea Diva is a powerful, unpointed enabler, and better still, with no worries about Link Monsters we can even access her via Synchro Overtake & Deep Sea Repetiteur.  Why focus on Diva though, given there’s seemingly no synergy at face value? Well…in a roundabouts way, she represents not only access to Altergeist Multifaker, our best card, but also Adamancipator Dragite, for the low cost of one garnet and an extra card in the opposing hand.

Diva can Summon Guitar Gurnards Duonigis, which I’d never heard of before, a monster able to double Diva’s Level to 4, and banish the top 2 cards of the opponent’s Deck.  From there, we can Synchro Summon Deep Sea Prima Donna, which then adds one of those banished cards to their hand to Summon a Level 4 or lower WATER monster from our Deck, here, Altergeist Meluseek.  Meluseek & Prima Donna make an 8, being Dragite, and Meluseek searches for an Altergeist monster, often Multifaker.

The best part about this combo is that it only gets better the deeper into the game you are, as with sufficient bodies, you can instead make Repetiteur first, and get back Dragite by Synching her off, or even turn a Malwisp+Prima Donna into Swordsoul Supreme Sovereign - Chengying, also a viable WATER reborn target for Repititeur.  Your standard value line of Malwisp into reborn Marionetter?  That’s 7 stars, and leads back into Prima Donna.

What I love even better about this deck is that, using the Diva line, you play around both Droll & D.D. Crow, two of the most common hand traps for the format.  Throughout the Diva line, if hard drawn, the only search is the final one provided by Meluseek, and while that itself is vulnerable to Skull Meister, it’s really the only core hand trap that’s backbreaking for you here.  Even an Ash on Prima Donna isn’t that bad, given we’re still fundamentally a backrow deck.

That being said, there’s one final mode we’re making use of with Prima Donna: Shuffling back a banished card. See, famously Altergeist were a deck that used Pot of Extravagance to its fullest extent, and here that’s no different.  Being the only major pot left unpointed, aside from Duality, Extrav is really just a draw 2, if you can support that via the Extra Deck.

Normally, an ‘Extravagance board’ will have only 3-ofs, usually of tech pieces or those you’re fine to lose. It’s a little different here, given we’re playing far greedier, with an assortment of specific 1-ofs to fulfill both the conditions of Dogmatika Punishment & Ultimate Slayer.  There’s Five-Headed Dragon to wipe out anything too big, Golden Cloud Beast - Malong for a bounce, and Sky Cav to break the unbreakable.  Aside from that, there’s other options which enjoy being sent to the GY, and even a Magistus Chorozo to clear our Prima Donna + Meluseek if we banish the 20-point Dragite.  Have no fear, however, as we can readily shuffle back critical 1-ofs banished with Extravagance using the final effect of Prima Donna, with her being the only ‘must have’ 3-of in the Extra.

As for the Side Deck, there are some usual suspects: Your Ultimate Slayer, D.D. Crow, and even a somehow-legal Artifact Lancea.  Beyond that it gets a bit silly, however, with 3 copies apiece of…Typhoon, and Heavy Slump.  Typhoon makes a bit more sense, given it’s a situational Trap we can activate from our hand, and if Multifaker gets to be used turn 0 the game is often over then & there.  Slump is a bit of an oddball, though, as it was originally Droll, then Mistaken Arrest.  We naturally put an extra card in the opposing hand with Prima Donna, so if they begin their turn with a Pot, that hits 8, giving us an autowin button post siding.  Better still, it lets us shrug and play directly into the Mulcharmies, which we’d otherwise have issues with as a fairly low-ceiling control strategy.  This is…somewhat questionable, but at a minimum 0 people will see it coming.

This take on Geist is something that truly warms my heart, and digs to the core of why I love Yugioh as a game.  It’s a homecoming, yes, but in a way I never imagined; when I first found the Diva line for Geist, I could scarcely believe it.  Having a truly eternal format in Genesys, with no banlist beyond points, has opened an absolute treasure trove of potential strategies, and the fact we can’t plan for all of them is certainly a victory.  It requires, instead, that you plan around broad stroke gameplans: Strong engine with unpointed handtraps, the reverse, and the occasional funny FTK.  As is apparent, I prefer living in the second category, and I’m thoroughly excited to try and see if I can make Gishki work some other week.

A huge congratulations to Thomas Rolph for his performance, and in showing the format’s wider open than many may attest!  How have you enjoyed the game in the wake of the September 2025 banlist?  Did the hits to K9’s secondary engines go too far, in comparison to its competition in Yummy?  Was it safe to unban the Snake-Eyes so soon?  Let me know in the comments below!