OTK Deckbuilding Guide by Chapuz

OTK Deckbuilding guide, by Chapuz the Great Master of OTKism.
Don't miss Part 3 and 4, THREE Article Exclusive step-by-step builds!

Part 1: Introduction

Alright, this guide should help players to build their own powerful OTK decks. I will try to make it short and not suicidingly long.
If I use any terminology you don’t understand, try looking at it in the Elements Glossary
This tutorial assumes the reader knows the basic game mechanics. If you are new to the game, I recommend you reading Furball's tutorial before getting into this guide.

Basic Q/A for dummies

• Q: What’s a OTK / OHKO?
  

A: A OTK / OHKO is a One Turn Kill / One Hit Knock Out. It’s a general deck strategy that lets you deal 100 damage in a single turn.
Hopefully, the opponent will have enough time to see the “Bye, noob” message you send him before he sees the death screen.

• Q: What does an OTK deck need so be successful?
  

A: It needs 2 and only 2 things: stall and drawpower. Stall is the art of losing time while drawing your 100 damage combo and gaining enough quanta to play it without letting the opponent kill you in the attempt. Drawpower is the addition you insert to make your stall big enough to last the whole game.
You will need it unless you manage to mindgate 10 Dimentional shields or 20 Sundials.
In this guide, I will call just stall to the combination of both.

• Q: 100 HP is a lot, you should need tons of upgraded cards to make a OTK.
  

A: Nope.

Advantages of a OTK compared with other deck styles

1- Does the opponent have healing and CC? Lost cards, dude.
2- They are strong, very strong against simple quanta + creatures rushes.
3- Once you get the cards, you are unstoppable. No excuses.
4- Games are usually pretty fast due to drawpower. There are slow PVP OTKs, in which you enjoy the chatting with your opponent making he beleive he won.
5- You may also receive PVP messages saying you are a noob and your deck is a noob and everything except your oponent is noobish. You don’t wanna know the opponent’s face when they look their computer after 30 TV seconds and see the death screen.
6- Come on, they offer lots of fun testing and making yourself deckbuilding challenges!

Counters to OTKs

1- Chrysaora
2- Early neurotoxin (before sundial chain or shield blocking)
3- More poison poison poison with not much drawpower
4- A faster OTK
5- Black Holes use to be nasty, almost no one uses Sanctuary in OTKs (up to now)
6- Permanent control
7- SoD and Stone Skin

Part 2: Basics of making a OTK

Parts of a OTK

To make a OTK deck, you must pick a OTK combo, a stalling way and just put them together; they must be compatible though. Think about Horse (OTK combo) + Wings (stalling way) = Pegasus (OTK deck). The horse must be small enough to be able to fly –less than 9 cards- and the wings big enough to make the horse fly. Quanta generation and other personal additions are like the glue and stuff you use to stick the wings into the horse’s back and have a funny result.

Rule of Thumb: Combo

Pack 1 and only 1 of the OTK combo cards in order to use the remaining deck space for stall and drawpower.
Having repeated cards lets you draw unwanted extra cards, which you may later need to discard or waste quanta playing them in order to draw more cards.

Stalling ways (Wings)

Let's start with this and let the most interesting part for the end. This is essential to make a OTK work though.
You will find cards that haven't been used for OTK stalling yet, but I mention them because there's always room for creativity.

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6x Precognitions + 6x Sundials = 12 cards less in your deck + 6 stalling turns. There can be used only Sundials or Precogs, but less deck pictures = better.
6x Dim Shields = 18 stalling turns. Tons of PC with some hard hitters is a bitch against them though.
Wings can be more or less mighty than the Dimentional Shields, depending on the opponent's creatures. They block like 60% of the total amount of creatures, so making Wings decks may worth it.

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Anything that heals you makes you win turns. Hopefully, you may outdamage your opponent and end with 100ish HP.

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Stopping creatures is an effective way to make time, as 95%ish of the decks rely on attacking creatures. They use to be quite good with shields, but I won’t put another pic just for the shields. I don't remember any quanta denial based OTK in the forums, but they give room for creativity.

OTK Combos (Horse)

YAY, the interesting part (or almost)!
I will list most of the ones that are in the forums, which are a bit more than a few.
After this section there’s the real tutorial of how to make an effective OTK deck.

• Multidragon OTKs.

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Rainbow Dragons, the most common one. Pick 4 non dragons, a Chimera, a Sky Blitz and you are done. 100 unstoppable damage.

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Devonian + SoR. SoR lets you mitosis a dragon 2 times. It requires less quanta than the rainbow dragon OTK, but it needs a pair of rares. A good thing: is so synergyzable with Hourglass, Sundials and Precogs!

• Buffed dragon OTK

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Another Devonian OTK combo. This one can be made with some non-quantum pillars / pendulums and a couple of Novas, but requires 1 more card than the other one.

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Ruby / Sky dragon OTK. Upgraded because it needs a 13+ attack dragon. If you add a rage potion

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Ivory/Basalt/Jade/Obsidian Dragon OTK. Pick any of them, balance the quanta and voila!

• Unstable gas

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Chose between Silence and Cloak, both castable with a couple of novas, or just pick a 6th gas to avoid PC troll.

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water based, air based, it’s your choice.

• Catapult

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With 2 catapults.

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With 1 catapult. It requires tons of gravity quanta though.

• Voodoo Doll

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This combo deals 3x34 = 102 shield-bypassing damage.

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Optional momentum to make it haxx shield proof. Another very similar way to do it is with 2 Rage pots and 4 PUs. It requires more quanta, but it seems easier to get it depending on the quanta production.

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Wait, what? Yeah, I remember 3 effective decks with this. Key card: Fractal/Mitosis

• Ball Lighting:

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4 balls + 6 fractaled balls.

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Quite funny, dies against PC and a shield breaks it, but who cares? You kill him with skeletons!

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An upgraded, ostentatious way, but it only requires some and no Chimera!

• Bolts

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A classic in old times, with Dimentional shields.

• Vulture

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With Aflatoxyn or nightmare Photons (or anything you want) this combo can deal 200+ damage, being able to be used in Arena and False Gods.

Part 3: Making the deck (Pegasus): Thinking, building, testing and rebuilding

So here we are, in the most difficult part of a OTK deckbuilding. We know tons of ways to stall the opponent and OTK combos, and now what? It’s time to make a deck that can win consistently.
You may be thinking: Dude, it’s just matter of picking a combo, put in some drawpower and sundials and tl;dr your guide. You can do that if what you want is to make a deck that gets outrushed even in PVP 1 half of the times, even more competitively.
Experience says that OTKs with 6 Precogs and 6 Sundials get outrushed quite often in PVP1, Mono Life with adrenalines get damage as hell, mono aether gets damage enough to beat you by the time you missed a sundial turn, same with mono death.
How can you make an effective deck? The best way to explain it is with a pair of examples I made exclusively for this guide:

Rule of Thumb: OTK's Quanta Secret

In other decks, all the quanta movement must be fluid; You gain quanta, play cards, gain more quanta and play more cards.
In OTKs, instead, you must have a fluid quanta movement when talking about stall and drawpower, but what about the combo quanta? There is a certain amount of quanta of some elements that you may need for the last-turn combo and not in the rest of the game!
When this happens, you may ensure to have the requiered quanta by the end of the game, and not necessarily much before.
If you need a bit of quanta of many elements just run some Novas or Quantum pilars, and try to fit in some Sundials if you aren't using much Light.
And here's the real secret: If you need a bunch of quanta of 1 or 2 specific elements for the OTK combo and they don't take part of the stall, you can simply throw a pair of pilars or pendulums of that element into your deck and you ensure you will have the requiered quanta by the end of the game. Examples? Chimera, Sky Blitz, Fractal and Paralel Universe depending on each deck.

Example 1: Making a Voodoo Doll OTK

Picking combo

The one you like most; a funny one you thought about and want to try, an already built one, anything. For this example I will pick the Doll + 2x Rage Potion + 4x PU because I want to. It really can be any of them.

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Choosing stall and quanta generation

This is a difficult part, Stall and quanta generation must come together. How the hell am I supposed to get 28 ? I also need 6 ! Tons of things come to my mind, but keep in mind you will need more than just precogs and sundials to make it really effective.
The first thing that comes to my mind is getting a mark for the Dolls, some immolations for production, 6 Rage Pots (2 for use and 4 for control) and then I shall see how I manage the rest. 6 Dimentional shields and 4 Rage Pots should be enough to stall a whole game with a 30-card deck. Let's open the Trainer and see how it looks!

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There you go, a complete OTK! What do we do just after making a new deck? Test it to see how awesome you are! After losing 2 out of 3 games vs AI2 (yes, AI2) I noticed a pair of things: Immolation can screw the mulligan when you have 6 or less pillars, making you discard 1 or 2 cards in the first turns, and I have tons of unused quanta after the first 2 turns. Crap, fail attempt. Don't worry, it happens even in the best families.
Let's try another option: Some stalling turns with Dimensional shields and Nova-powered Sundials, with mark for the Rage Potions. I shall have unused quanta, but meh. Why didn't I think about this before?

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This crap actually workes... sometimes. It's pretty slow and being 35 cards you have less chances of getting another shield if one is destroyed. Also, you may get more sundials than novas and more shields than aether quanta, what should make you discard precious sundials and dims. Mass Dims + Sundials + control didn't work good enough, but I'm pretty close to what I want. What if I remove the control and just keep the stall? 6 dims + 5 Sundials may be stallish enough and mark should help getting the first shields in time.

4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 5fb 5fb 5rp 5rp 5rp 5rp 5rp 5v0 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61r 61r 61r 61r 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 8pu
Ohh that's much better! It just won 2 AI3 games in a row, but lost against the AI3’s Emerald shield... Forgot that the combo deals 100 and only 100 damage, and some of it is blockable by shields. I should add a Momentum, quanta isn't a problem due the Novas. What do I take out to put the momentum? I can't have less than 6 pillars, so I will have to sacrifice a Sundial. It's worth it, many PVP and AI3 have shields.

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There, unstoppable OTK once you get the cards. If the opponent doesn't have a shield you don't need the momentum and if you get the whole combo too early you can just play the doll. It wasn't that hard, was it?

Example 2: Making a Dragon OTK

The combo

An idea doesn't have to be complicated to be effective, so let's pick an easy combo for this deck:

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Why Devonians? Because they synergize with Hourglasses and have 10 attack (by this time I'm thinking a bit about the rest of the deck).

Stall and drawpower

Devonians seem quite easy to put with some Hourglasses and have a decent drawpower. Let's see if I can get enough quanta, just for a quick test.

5op 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rm 5rm 5rm 5rm 5rm 5rm 8pr
Excess of quanta against the devourer AI2, with constant Hourglass drawings. That’s a good start.
Of course, this isn't optimal. It doesn't beat decks with haxx shields, it needs 9 turns to charge the Sky Blitz and It needs to be able to stop a ~7 TTW unupped rush. I could replace 6 time pillars for pendulums, 3 for wings and other 2 for extra Sky Blitz to make it faster, but a PC deck would completely destroy it taking out the precious Hourglasses. Besides drawpower, stall is needed. The 2 easiest ways to stall that comes yo my mind are Sundials and Wings. Sundials would give me 90% chance of stalling till the end of the game, but I would need an extra element to take advantage of it, I have a Chimera in my mind and high-quanta Quartets are always very difficult to balance (can't make it just with some Novas). I will pick Wings, as they block around 60% of the creatures and gives me the possibility to add to the deck later. I'm not gonna make a test replacing 5-7 time pillars for pendulums because I know what the result will be: enough quanta, maybe some in excess.
Time to add the . I only need a Chimera for the last hit, so I won't need of 6 dragons because Damage Reduction shields won't have effect in the blast. As I will need it only for the last hit and I wanna spend as few cards as possible in the Chimera, I will chose to have only 2 pendulums and 1 pillar. That should be enough to generate 7 and it would also be Earthquake proof. As I will need tons of quanta, I will choose the time mark and a bit more of pendulums for the build.

55k 560 576 576 5oo 5oo 5oo 5op 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rm 5rm 5rm 5rm 5rm 8ps

Aaaand there you go, an unupped effective Dragon OTK!

You may have tons of unused quanta. There can be added some shockwaves for control in case the opponent has airborne creatures, but mono darkness is ruling PVP 1 and Earthquake decks are seen pretty often to, so I personally wanted to make it PVP1 proof.

Some comments

Could I have picked the Azure Dragon instead of the Devonian? Yes, but it has 9 attack instead of 10, so you would need an extra dragon. Could I have done it based with an Explosion to destroy the opponent's shield before the last hit? Absolutely. How about based with Armagios for extra stall? based with 6 Antimatters for stall? It's just matter of imagination.

Part 4: TTKs

Basics of a TTK

TTKs are Two Turn Kills. Like OTKs, they are stallish decks until they release their combo, which kills the opponent in 2 turns instead of one. The combo uses to include an anti-counter card, like Silence, Sundial, Quintessence and Cloak depending on the deck.

Advantages compared with OTKs

TTKs use to be easier pulling combos, with less complexity and easier to imagine.
They give also a turn to make the opponent realize he has already lost.

Disadvantages compared with OTKs

TTKs are a bit more counterable than OTKs. As you have 1 or more creatures in play, there’s a chance the opponent screw your strategy up. Of course, as mentions before, you don’t let the creatures “free to destroy”

Making a TTK

Making a TTK is much easier than a OTK, as there are much more 100 damage combos to make in 2 turns than in one. If you are familiar with OTKs or game mechanics in general, you shouldn’t have any problems making one.
Same as with the OTKs, the best way to explain how to build one is with an example:

Example: Devonian TTK

We can see that the Devonian Dragon OTK made right above has a strong weakness: Airborne rushes. So what about making a viable TTK with the already used 5x Devonian Dragons + Chimera with Dimentional shields for stalling instead of Wings? No Sky Blitz, but there can be built a simple and effective deck that deals with that problem.

Key cards

First of all, let’s open the trainer and put the basic cards and drawpower:

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6 dragons because up to now we don’t have a Chimera yet and a simple DR shield could block the 50 damage hit.

Base deck

As we have the other deck to use a a little guide, we can use it to make a similar build, based instead of . As I mentioned before, a couple of Silences wouldn’t come bad.

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As it’s mentioned at the beginning of the guide, what do we do after we have a base deck? Test it!
After a couple of games against AI2 and AI3, I noticed I always have to discard 1 or 2 Dim shields AND Hourglasses in order to pull the combo, and I don’t have much excess of quanta. Should I take out a shield and a hourglass? With 5 Hourglasses I can enjoy having a little bigger deck and use all the precious Dim shields!
I was also forgetting about the Chimera! Without it, there are 6 unupgraded shields that can block 6 Devonian dragons! Luckily, we have a good quanta balance for it in the OTK above. Let’s see how it looks now:

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Another 4 tests, and it works much better now. This is definitely an effective TTK! Well, only if the opponent doesn’t have 20 or more attack when you play the Chimera. Can it be fixed?

Inspiration and last touches

You can pick a OTK or TTK combo, put in a neat quanta balance, stall and drawpower in order to make it work quite fine, now what else? You should see the deck’s counters and weaknesses and see if they can be easily countered.
For example, as I mentioned before, this Devonian TTK has a strong weakness: Haxx shield/Hope + 20+ attack. Therefore, something must be added to the combo. But wait! I’m making a build deck, what about Fractal to have the chance of getting more dragons? With a 2 Fractals it would be safe, but in a big deck I can rely in like 1/35 chances of getting in the last card of the deck. Let’s see how the deck looks with the Fractal:

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Much better now. The only hard counter it faces, as most of the OTKs, is PC. Compared with the Devonian Dragon OTK, this TTK is more defensive due to the shield change, with no other great disadvantage.

Final comments: From a simple idea to a powerful deck

As you may notice, a OTK deck isn’t just a 100 damage combo and some drawing cards. One must test different ways to make 100 damage and to stall enough for the while game without having too few quanta or stall or too much stall. That's part of the building sequence:
Key cards -> base deck -> test -> correct and make a little addition -> test again -> correct again and make another little addition -> ... -> Final result.

That said, we also saw that sometimes making a TTK with a certain combo can make a deck safer and even many times easier to build than a OTK with a similar one, without having many extra weaknesses.

There’s much room for creativity and new ways of getting a good and funny deck. As I said before, It's just matter of imagination.