Thunder Order

A lot of Thunder payoffs are very poorly positioned in the current metagame. Thunderbeetle Storm is a boardwipe that has gotten additional low level Thunders to work with as opposed to the literal 800 ATK vanillas it was forced to use in the past, however it cannot kill Normal Monsters and the format is filled with them. Makiu, the Magical Mist is another boardwipe that can theoretically kill any non-maximum monster, but it skips your Battle Phase in an explosive format like this one, making it too slow for competitive play. They have a cool Fusion Monster Showering Infergyo... that is designed to counter a currently underrepresented Level in the meta. The rest of the Thunder boss monsters have very simple effects ranging from field swarming to ATK gain and piercing, a very mediocre set of effects that for sure isn't enough. Thunder's best shot at being remotely competitive is to be played as a small package and leech off an actually good deck's win condition, one such example is Thunder Sea Serpent, which uses powerful Sea Serpent tools alongside a Thunder package, which most importantly contains Sensor Duckbuill, a Phoenix Dragon clone for Thunders, and Electrical Discharge, a surprisingly potent battle trick. This deck will be operating in a similar fashion, but instead of playing with Sea Serpents we will be playing it in a Gate Order core.

Firstly, the Gate Order pieces. 3 Galactica Oblivion and 3 Ultimate Flag Mech Tough Striker are our Secret Order targets of choice. Oblivion is the best target in a vacuum, having the highest stats, while Tough Striker is the 2nd best in terms of stats and its typing has niche benefits if you are playing against something like Apocalypse - Beast Gear World. There are other order targets you can choose from here, most notably Milky Wave Neo as a tech against Follow Wing World decks and as additional Galaxy monsters should you choose to play Meteor Charge or another Galaxy payoff. We are also running 3 Secret Order and 3 Parallel Birth Gate, the namesakes of Gate Order that help cheat out your vanilla beatsticks, alongside 3 Magical Stone Excavation to reuse these powerful spells. For our draw spells, 3 copies of Ship of Seven Treasures and 2 Heavenly Gift, helps cycle through the deck. These can also be used as emergency discard outlets for when you need to trigger Parallel Birth Gate's full effect. Speaking of discard outlets, 1 Hammer Crush doubles as exactly that as well as backrow removal, and 3 Card Devastation which singlehandedly completes Gate's requirements and also has additional synergies with the Thunder boss monster of choice.

Now for the fun part of the deck: the Thunders. 3 copies of Blitzkrieg Cavalry Triggerdrago, this is the Thunder 2 tribute with the highest base ATK, and that's very relevant for Electrical Discharge. Triggerdrago's effect allows it to beat over the common threats in the format with ease (Opposing Oblivions, Shock Dragon, e.t.c) and in the right scenario can inflict piercing damage. This requires your opponent to have no cards in hand, which isn't guranteed to happen every turn, though not out of the realm of possibility. For the turns where the piercing effect is not live, Card Devastation can make it live for you and net you additional damage along the way. Electrical Discharge is one of our traps of choice, reducing ATK by 800 is exactly enough to survive an opponent's Secret Order, 2.5k ATK + 800 = 3.3k ATK which is greater than 2.5k+700=3.2k ATK, allowing you to win combat that way and also deal a smidge of burn damage as well. This is why Triggerdrago's ATK stat is important, if it was 100 lower it would crash and your monster would be destroyed as well and even lower means that Discharge wouldn't do anything combat wise. We do need some Thunder monsters to play alongside Discharge so, on top of the 3 Triggerdrago, we are running 3 Sensor Duckbuill to retrieve Triggerdrago should you need it, is also useful alongside Ship of Seven Treasures as you can discard the Triggerdrago and add it back later. 3 Surge Bolt Lizard and 1 Anglercoil as normal beatsticks that you can special summon off of Parallel Birth Gate if you have no better options, and 3 Thunder the Thunder, mainly here as a discard outlet but the debuff does come in handy occassionally especially if you didn't find something like Secret Order. As the last card of the deck we are playing Mirror Force as the legend card, very strong piece of interaction overall.

In short, this build of Thunder Order aims to emulate the strategy of Gate Order, but is also built to trade the speed of Gate Order as well as the consistency at which the deck can special summon normal Level 7s in favour of becoming more well-rounded with a defensive tech against Secret Order specifically. While Megaroad Pack will provide players with another Secret Order counter in the form of Imptailing Crisis, Electrical Discharge still can shuffle back good Thunder monsters into the deck and is not retricted by the level of monsters your opponent is playing. If you like the Thunder monster type, this is perhaps the best way to play a Thunder axis deck.