Hello, I am Stella aka EfzPlayer. I am a brazilian player and I have been playing the digimon card game for about 4 years now… Starting back in BT9, with Justimon as my deck. I quickly fell in love with the game and started getting decks of my favorites from every series and Koichi was my favorite from Digimon Frontier, so I quickly got his BT7 cards because they were easily avaible back then, and also rather cheap… I got Nidhoggmon for 50 cents (USD) and alt Koichis for a low price as well. Back in the day, Digimon was released first in Japan and later on in the rest of the world, and they unified in BT20 with the set World Convergence. Because of that, BT17 through 19 were unified in two boxes, called Special Booster 2.0 and 2.5 respectively, similar to how BT1-3 worked, with Special Booster 1.0 and 1.5. Because of that, I didn’t pay much attention especially because I was too busy malding because of Melga and Apocaly, that was a truly dire time for the game. EX5 is a set that caused permanent damage and I believe we still haven’t recovered. All that aside, a friend of mine (who’s also a big fan of Koichi), an Alphamon player, got the deck and told me these exact words: “I felt disgusted while playing this”, this was after the (deserved) ban on Matt and limits on general purple tools (Calling from the Darkness, Jack Raid, Gabumon X, Garurumon X, etc).
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So, I bought the deck from him, it was a Purple Hybrid Apocalymon build and I was really curious about it because Digimon is a very archetype heavy game, and this was a time where you had to have a very good reason for including cards that “didn’t fit”, the most we had back then were adding some specific cards like the BT6 blockers or one or two hybrids for game. That list really left me puzzled, I also knew about people running Ravemon Hybrid (I dabbled in this list a lot, because Keenan is my favorite from Data Squad/Savers), BT6 Beelstarmon, Apocalymon, Mervamon, and of course, pure Hybrid strategies. It was wild to me how this same engine could add so many pieces, you always could find a PH list with slightly different silver bullets, some people runned EX8 MedievalGallantmon (which was as expensive as a whole EX8 box), some people runned BT13 Gallantmon, BT9 DeathXmon, BT17 Argomon, EX4 Guilmon, BT6 Ginkakumon promote; It really felt like “whatever you want that is purple or cares about the trash, goes”… Rather quickly, I started falling in love with Purple Hybrid and have been playing it almost exclusively since then, because of how much flexibility this list allows. I honestly feel like that if Matt was still legal this deck would still be topping with the game in it’s current state, more than 8 formats later. That’s how resilient this deck is. I honestly believe it can top a tournament right now (As of writing, we’re in BT26-EX13 format) with good deckbuilding because this deck has an interesting particularity…
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It cares about colours on the field, and no other deck does that (Some specific cards like BT7 Kimeramon care about this, but it’s nowhere near as close as PH does, and nowadays it’s used as a niche tech option) Ever since BT10 more and more decks have begun using a “colour salad” gameplay, at first it was just Xros Heart (BT10) and Hunters (BT11) that were real “salad” decks, everyone kept to one colour or two in very specific cases (Imperial, Mastemon, Alter S was black back then). During BT13 we got Royal Knights, and that was a very multicoloured deck… That barely had field presence. By now many more decks are becoming dual-coloured, every Seekers deck uses multiple colours, looking at you, Fenriloogamon. I still hate you. During EX5 we got Deva and later on during BT15, Dark Masters/Apocalymon, those also were heavily multicoloured decks, but they didn’t really keep a field either. Deva played one guy by paying a lot of memory and then tucked another Deva in raising, to which it evo’d through counter blast evolve… It really wasn’t the best strategy… Dark Masters, very much like nowadays, you played them with reduced costs and then you deleted them later on. (Yes, I know during the early sets there also was a deck similar to this but it’s way too early in the game to consider for this topic). Fast forward a bit, HERO decks released and had a nice catch, though they were overwhelmingly red… BT21 Arresterdramon SM is an awesome piece for Purple Hybrid, but it wasn’t until BT22 that salad started becoming the norm, this also matches the new director for the game. BT22 Cyber Eden saw the release of the CS (Cyber Sleuth - Great game by the way) strategy, and the return of colour salad!! BT23 continues with this, and then TS gives us more, after this, TB, SW, Shambala gives us even more salad!
Purple Hybrid has the exact field condition it needs to shine, and on the same vein it could cherrypick cards from different decks, nowadays we have the Assembly mechanic, which fits so nicely you might think they made it on purpose. This is not to say we’re out of trouble, any mono coloured deck will give us a hard time for instance: Galactimon, Medusamon, Ulforce; Medusamon being a harder time because she returns cards from our trash to bottom deck, therefore, no Velgr, no loop. Every other deck though has at least 3-4 colours on the field at a time, or has enough field presence we can work around it.
Without further ado, I am now going to note down basic Purple Hybrid concepts, build, matchup and style notes, with a section for retired decks and a section for active lists.
4x BT8 Koichi 2x BT18 Koichi* 4x BT18 Duskmon 4x BT18 Velgrmon Without these, your deck can’t be called Purple Hyrbid.
3-4x Rivals Barrage 4x BT16 Ukkomon 2x BT3 Gazimon 2x BT8 Psychemon 1x Calling from the Darkness* 1x Jack Raid*