Belphemon

Introduction: Belphemon is a one-trick poney. You either do the thing or you do not. With this said, it is super important that you can turbo through pieces and get everything set up, not only for your first Belphemon, but to keep Sleep Mode up. While the limit to the eyesmon engine apparently killed the deck's viability, with the introduction of the Ukkomons, this deck has found new speed!

Ukkomons: This deck is probably the one up until BT16 that can make better use of Ukkomon (P-123) and Ukkomon (BT16-082). These cards allow us to really develop our gameplan faster, especially due to hatching an egg for free. This drastically boosts the strength of the Gizmon engine. In particular, Ukkomon (BT16-082) is really just a crazy card all around for us, given it may search for Digimons, which may include any of the Belphemons, and Tamers, which means Akihiro Kurata (BT13-103) and Analog Youth (EX1-066) are both searchable. Do note, this greatly raises your hand size, meaning it might be important to tech in options to reduce it, such as Ogremon (BT6-072). I can not stress enough how much the extra egg hatches helps this deck.

Gizmon Engine: Thanks to the newfound ability to hatch eggs faster, the Gizmon engine helps a ton, both in accelerating draws and trashes, and reducing the hand size at that, since they are usually -1 in card advantage. Paired up with any of the Ukkomons, it is common to find lethal turns where a Ukkomon leaves breeding and, with the newly hatched egg, a ProtoGizmon (BT13-080) is played. Gizmon: AT (BT13-083) is our strongest piece in regards to draw power, and, by killing a Rookie, it allows us to accelerate even further, depending on our egg choices. Gizmon: XT (BT13-086) serves as a small wall we can use to set up Akihiro Kurata (BT13-103), which is really important for our gameplan. It also allows us to delete a Dobermon (EX2-041) or even Eyesmon: Scatter Mode (BT7-069) without the need to swing into security.

Techs: We need blockers or other ways to prevent attacks in order to not instantly lose the match-up vs WarGreymon (BT12-070). For this, the use of Stingmon (BT16-041) is quite an effective choice, as its suspend can be used both defensively and offensively, to suspend a blocker, for instance. Porcupamon (ST14-05) could have been chosen based off the premiss we will have a harder time controlling what we discard, thus by milling more we can take a better use out of Dobermon (EX2-041). Vilemon (BT2-072) has the upside of being able to survive a blanket from ShineGreymon: Ruin Mode (EX4-074). Ogremon (BT6-072) is an option to consider in to help reduce the hand size with Astamon's inheritable. It comes up very often in match-ups vs Blue decks. Psychemon (BT8-071) could be ran as DigiXros decks are really fast and this deck can hardly interact without turbo'ing into the goat. Gazimon (BT3-077) is a really strong option to prevent Numemon decks from gaining too much memory. Analog Youth (EX1-066) is in as a way to accelerate our way into the deck, as purple decks, due to the color's mechanics, often lack proper searching.

My Build: My build mostly attempts to accelerate our way into Belphemon as fast as possible, all the while attempting to setup a Kurata and a Ukkomon in the back, to gurantee some lethal turns. Alternatively, depending on the matchup, you can shift your focus to keeping a great hand size and focus on control. During the BT16 meta, I believe we have a really strong niche, being able to deal with the TyrantKabuterimon deck and being able to stop Magnamon (X Antibody) (BT16-102) from being constantly immune to effects. The DemiMeramon (BT15-006) egg choice makes the deck a bit difficult to pilot, due to how hard the hand size has to be managed, however it may be even more rewarding as you can dig deeper and helps you recover hand size without needing Dobermon. Due to this egg, I found it is extremely valuable to add as many copies as possible of Nidhoggmon (BT7-077). We always need memory to attempt to both dig and reduce the hand size, and this is a perfect way to have the best of both worlds. It is also a very valuable tool in defense, to steal memory from the opponent! When playing, take in mind that you do not need to reduce your hand size to kill. For most decks to interact, attacks need to happen, and we just need to control them properly. It does not matter how many cards you got in hand if you can be constantly wiping their board.