Unchained has one of the most nuanced competitive histories of any deck in Yugioh, because while it’s reasonably popular, and has in the past been reasonably powerful, several formats went by where it was a top 3 deck...and nobody discovered it until the moment had passed. The release of Unchained Soul of Sharvara in Duelist Nexus led to the quiet dominance of the strategy until that very card was Limited, and it took 2+ years for the dog to slowly be let out of the pound. At full power, modern Unchained is perhaps the most resilient strategy of the decade, but the current TCG meta isn’t about resilience in the face of something like ROLAD, or Kewl Tune. As a counterpoint, Genesys’ meta is. Sure, you lose access to your admittedly-powerful Link Monsters, but we’d be kidding ourselves to say that the Extra Deck is the main event for these bound Fiends. Fully unpointed in Genesys, Unchained are once again topping, and show no signs of stopping until their next release in November. Let’s talk about how to play them in the interim.
While Unchained have managed several tops in online tournaments within Genesys, their most recent in-person success came at YCS Montreal, in the hands of Austin Estey. There’s a rare few strategies that remain fully unpointed in Genesys—yet had tops in the TCG, within the past couple years—but that luxury is most-often doled out to Link strategies. For those fans of Unchained unaware, Genesys lacks Pendulums & Links in their entirety, which means a couple things for our dogs & dogwalkers: We can avoid playing Unchained Soul of Disaster, one of the deck’s classic garnets, but lack the capacity to flex our swarmed bodies into meaningful interaction in-archetype. This means we’ve got to find ways of funneling the Level 3s, 6s, & 8s in our deck into generic Extra Deck options, which isn’t the easiest given you’ll be locked to Fiend Special Summons most of the time. At 6, you have likely the greatest wealth of options, with Caesar and multiple Goblin Biker Xyz, but things dry up for your other pools quite fast; this drives us to look towards other ways of using Fiend bodies, and that means one thing in Genesys: Mutiny in the Sky.
The Mutiny in the Sky engine is composed of Buio, the Dawn’s Light, the aforementioned Mutiny, and their associated Fusion Monster, Luce, the Dusk’s Dark—all of which were originally TCG-Exclusives. Luce is most notable because it allows you to generically pitch any Fairy or Fiend, and here we’re using that for either Unchained Soul of Shyama, or means of lining towards Skull Archfiend of Chaos, which in turn allows us to access the ROLAD line. Unchained has run a few different engines in the past, but here it’s actually something presently powerful in Advanced Format, albeit in a reduced capacity. Beyond Archfiend, we can only spare the points for a single Ritual of Light and Darkness, and the unpointed Magician of Dark Chaos – Black Chaos, but given that loop is self-sustaining it’s a nice little tool to have if there’s an errant Fiend dump in our combo line. It was that, or the also-Linkless Fiendsmith, and frankly I think ROLAD’s the place to be. Magician protecting our backrow genuinely matters, because one of the worst things to see in response to our Unchained effects targeting a Set Trap is something like Cosmic Cyclone.
Back on our engine though, some folks might not know what Unchained does, itself, without access to Links. The main gameplay loop surrounds the fact that your core Unchained cards float when destroyed, usually via porting into another name from the Deck, but on occasion back into itself, such as with Abominable Unchained Soul. Unchained is decidedly non-linear, and instead tries to simply resolve as many of its strategy’s hard once-per-turns as possible, given so many become further links in the chain, until you’ve amassed the necessary advantage to play through basically anything your opponent can throw at you. There’s not really a starter, per-say, but instead over a dozen permutations of 2-card combos which step on the gas and get things moving. Funny enough, you’re actually looking primarily to open your extenders, being Unchained Twins - Aruha & Unchained Soul of Sharvara, each of which helps you play through interaction better than any other facet of the strategy. Abomination’s Prison raises their effective copies to a total of 9, and opening 1/9 in 40 leaves you with a cool ~74% chance to open at minimum 1. That’s ~80%, going second.
With the core of our engine established, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the non-engine at play here, because it’s pretty fantastic for how few handtraps we’re running. First, there’s one of the best unpointed cards in the format: Final Bringer of the End Times. This is functionally copies 4-6 of Unchained Soul of Sharvara, allowing us to dodge targeted removal and proc our Unchained effects, all while resolving issues on the board. It’s not flashy by any means, but approaches Called by the Grave-lite in a deck like this. The shift in points also allowed us to pivot from D.D. Crows to Ghost Ogre & Snow Rabbits, which have the added bonus of...being able to be used on our own Monsters. Yes, you may indeed Ogre your own Unchained monsters to get their destruction effects, on top of it being a pretty fantastic answer to problematic Continuous/Field Spells in the format. We’ve run fairly point-light so far, so where is the majority of our budget going? 60 points are spent on 3 copies of Droll. Yes, 60, nearly 2/3rds of our total, on three copies of an unsearchable handtrap. Droll is profoundly powerful, and we play very well beneath it, so oftentimes opening the card just wins the game on the spot. That aside, our last real non-engine is 2 Maindeck copies of Dark Hole, an unsearchable field wipe that can also proc our Unchained. It’s a nice card to have, and very cool to see in 2026.
As far as the Extra goes, there’s the expected pieces you can play with the Fiend lock, such as Caesar, but as mentioned we’re very often going into the two appropriate Goblin Biker Xyz: Goblin’s Crazy Beast & Goblin Bikers Gone Bonkers. This deck arguably makes these two better than actual Goblins, even if it can’t really use them unless both are on the field at the same time. Crazy Beast is the more generically potent, serving as essentially the deck’s Tornado Dragon, and grabbing a Spell/Trap at Spell Speed 2. If you already control it, suddenly Bonkers becomes appealing, being able to send potentially 2 monsters the opponent controls to the yard, on top of swallowing another as material. Stone King Darius & Melomelody are our two Rank 3 Fiends, existing primarily as mechanisms to fuel our Fusion plays, but the real interest lies in our Rank 8s. We’re spending points to play Garunix Eternity, Hyang of the Fire Kings, because ROLAD gives us one final blessing—Magician’s also an 8, to go along with our Abominable Unchained Soul. We can and absolutely will make our Garunix over the course of a long game, and its capacity to destroy cards is excellent as synergy with Unchained’s gameplan, just usually the turn after we start our plays. Sadly, the big bird isn’t a Fiend.
Onto the Side, because Austin Estey did have a recorded version we can base ours off of, for the previous meta. Simplifying away a spare Dark Hole, we’re up to 5x3 copies of relevant pieces, being 3 Skull Meister for going second, 3 Torrential Tribute for going first, 6 pieces of Spell/Trap removal in the form of Cosmic Cyclone and—of all things—Blizzard, and finally The Eye of Truth for exactly Blitzclique. The Meister and Eye are fairly standardized at this point, being considerations for the best deck in the format, and even Cosmic is a card commonly seen as an answer to the format’s powerful in-engine Spell/Traps which sit on the field. Where things get weird are in the form of Torrential, and Blizzard. Torrential Tribute is a classic card, and here serves as essentially just a Dark Hole we can activate at Spell Speed 2, Blizzard meanwhile is…I guess the best means of interacting with board breakers available to us? I’d personally sooner play Mystical Space Typhoon to proc our Unchained Traps, but that’s up to you.
This is a list designed to freestyle, and steer its combos towards a common endgoal depending on the starting hand. You’re trying to get to Magician, you’re trying to access that via Air Eater, and you’re trying to access *that* via the Mutiny package. The one problem you face in doing so is the truth that generic Fiend searches without your Link are hard to come by, and to pivot through Mutiny you need to open Buio or a means to find them, such as Tour Guide or Fiendish Rhino Warrior. That means in around a third of your games, you can expect to solely play the Unchained part of your deck. The good news is that Unchained is still plenty good, and looping through your Level 6s will just win games on their own a lot of the time, on top of playing a list wholly unaffected by targeted negation & removal. There’s no better deck to try and force through the resolution of a Tour Guide from the Underworld, because we’ll throw her into the woodchipper of a Sharvara or Final Bringer if we have to, 100% of the time.
While Advanced can be a ton of fun to evaluate and build for, Genesys is really the home for brewers and pet-deckers, of which I am surely one. Unchained are just one of many options that have gone underexplored due to their reputation as a Link deck, and making those kinds of strategies work in spite of the limited cardpool is a great way to get a leg up on the competition! Moreover, we’re expecting a brand-new wave of Unchained support this November, and so long as Toons are hit on release, things are looking good for the strategy.
What are your thoughts on Unchained as an archetype? Are you looking forward to it in Genesys come November, or is it good enough now? What other Link-based decks might be able to succeed in spite of lacking Links? Let me know in the comments below!
