22 Players · 5 Rounds · January 2026
Back to the Beginning was not designed to celebrate the past.
It was designed to confront it.
On a cold January day, 22 players still made the trip. The weather outside was harsh, but inside the store people reunited, talked, shuffled decks, and prepared for something different. This special NeoGoat event was a one-time return to the original May 2024 NeoGoat format, before later expansions, before extra card pools, and before many of the adjustments that define the format today.
Round 1 – Chaos Return vs Warrior
The opening match was Chaos Return vs Warrior, and it immediately felt familiar—almost indistinguishable from classic Goat Format. The pace, the exchanges, and the pressure points were all there. Chaos established control quickly and closed the match cleanly, reinforcing how naturally that strategy dominates in an early, unadjusted environment.
Round 2 – Warrior vs Reasoning Gate
Round two was Warrior vs Reasoning Gate, a matchup that highlighted the contrast between volatility and fundamentals. A small but telling detail shaped the early turns: the Reasoning player repeatedly switched monsters to Defense Position before attacking, playing around Mirror Force, even though Mirror Force wasn’t legal for this event. Old habits surfaced quickly in a format built to expose them.
In the deciding duel, Reasoning Gate showed its other weakness. The deck opened with a poor hand—something typical of this kind of strategy—and without an explosive start, it couldn’t recover. The Warrior deck applied steady pressure and secured the win through consistency rather than power.
Round 3 – Thousand-Eyes Control vs Zombie Aggro
Round three featured Thousand-Eyes Control—the eventual tournament winner—against Zombie Aggro. The Zombie player attempted to establish a board early, but the match quickly shifted once the Thousand-Eyes deck began resolving Fusion interactions and following up with Chaos monsters. One by one, the Zombie player’s monsters were absorbed, removed, or neutralized, until there was nothing left to build with. It was a methodical dismantling that showcased how oppressive controlled removal becomes in an unadjusted format.
Round 4 – Burn Zombies vs Warrior (Longest Match)
The fourth match was the longest and most intense of the tournament. A Burn Zombie deck, packed with Marshmallon, Spirit Reaper, and heavy stall tools like Level Limit – Area B—all unlimited in this format—faced the Warrior deck from the second round. This Burn deck would ultimately finish third overall, and this match showed exactly why.
The deciding duel came down to a dramatic sequence. A Lava Golem was summoned to the Warrior player’s field. The Warrior responded with Book of Moon to avoid burn damage. Then came a chain of Solemn Judgments—Burn player, Warrior player, and then Burn player again. Lava Golem remained face-up. With Life Points critically low and no answer left, the Warrior player eventually fell.
Slow, punishing, and exhausting, this duel highlighted exactly why unlimited stall tools were later considered undesirable.
Final – Thousand-Eyes Control vs Burn Zombies
The final match paired Thousand-Eyes Control against the Burn Zombie deck. This time, stall was not enough. The Thousand-Eyes deck had answers for nearly every defensive piece, breaking through the lock step by step and dismantling the burn strategy. Control, flexibility, and removal proved decisive, earning the Thousand-Eyes player the tournament victory.
Across all five rounds, a clear pattern emerged. Many games didn’t end through long exchanges or careful attrition. They ended suddenly, decisively, with phrases heard again and again across the tables:
“I drew Change of Heart… win.”
“I drew Black Luster Soldier – Envoy of the Beginning… win.”
Those moments weren’t rare—they were defining. Entire games flipped on a single draw, reinforcing how powerful—and how format-warping—those cards were in an unadjusted environment, where access to a single spell or monster could override several turns of careful play.
At the same time, the opposite extreme was just as visible. With excessive stall tools left unrestricted, duels could grind to a halt behind layers of Marshmallon, Spirit Reaper, and defensive locks that were never meant to exist at full power simultaneously. Instead of interaction, some games became endurance tests, highlighting how unhealthy unlimited stall options can be when left unchecked.
Between rounds, conversations turned reflective:
“Now I remember why this was limited.”
“This card was way stronger than I remembered.”
“Yeah… this couldn’t stay like this forever.”
That was the point.
Back to the Beginning wasn’t about proving the old format was better. It was about understanding why NeoGoat had to evolve. Seeing the original environment again—raw, unfiltered, and uncompromised—made the necessity of later adjustments undeniable.
For one day only, NeoGoat returned to where it began.
And by the end of five rounds, everyone understood why it could only happen once.
It was insane.
Winner Decklist – Thousand-Eyes Control (Gustavo Chapa)
Here is the decklist used by the winner of the event. A very similar build also won the online version of Back to the Beginning, which is not a coincidence. In an environment without periodic banlist adjustments, this type of decks would naturally become more and more recurrent, as its consistency, control tools, and access to unrestricted power cards give it a clear edge.
That is precisely why formats like NeoGoat must be continuously tuned—to prevent these strategies from dominating and to preserve space for other decks to compete.
https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=19362654
Main Deck:
1x Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning
1x Breaker the Magical Warrior
2x Chaos Sorcerer
3x Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive
2x Gravekeeper's Spy
2x Magician of Faith
2x Night Assailant
1x Sinister Serpent
3x Thunder Dragon
1x Tribe-Infecting Virus
2x Tsukuyomi
1x Change of Heart
1x Heavy Storm
3x Metamorphosis
1x Mystical Space Typhoon
2x Nobleman of Crossout
1x Pot of Greed
3x Scapegoat
2x Shield Crush
1x Snatch Steal
3x Raigeki Break
1x Ring of Destruction
1x Torrential Tribute
Extra Deck:
3x Dark Balter the Terrible
1x Dark Blade the Dragon Knight
1x Fiend Skull Dragon
1x Gatling Dragon
1x Giltia the D. Knight
1x Karbonala Warrior
1x Master of Oz
1x Reaper on the Nightmare
1x Ryu Senshi
1x The Last Warrior from Another Planet
3x Thousand-Eyes Restrict
Side Deck:
1x Gravekeeper's Spy
1x Jinzo
1x Mobius the Frost Monarch
2x Zombyra the Dark
2x Mind Control
1x Shield Crush
1x Dust Tornado
3x Royal Decree
3x Sakuretsu Armor
More decklists from this event will be published in a future blog entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment