WATER Executie

Foreword:
On another day of "I haven't finished a video but I want to talk about something", here's a deck that I've been tinkering with for a fair bit. This is WATER Executie, an Executie Good Stuff variant utilising strong WATER attribute support cards.

Key Concept:
The main support card we want to use is Dolphin's Treasure Chest. A large portion of the metagame utilises Level 7 monsters, so the requirement isn't that difficult to achieve. While there are a couple weaknesses compared to Ship of Seven Treasures, you're not restricted to play one or the other, this deck aims to use both for a great boost to consistency. You could consider running this pair in a Sea Serpent shell, that deck has plenty of Water monsters to play with already, I've decided to run it in an Executie Up! shell instead, partially due to its resistance against Barrier Statue of the Inferno and I really enjoy making Executie variants personally.  While there are a plethora of generic low level Water monsters to choose from, the 2 tributes leave much to be desired. We've singled out Ice Age Catapult as the best individual Water 2 tribute monster you can play in a vacuum, and while it isn't perfect I'm definitely not going to play Clean Beret - Colonel Mop in my deck anytime soon. Ice Age Catapult is going to be the deck's main way ot dealing with backrow, being able to bounce one back to the opponent's hand on the turn you normal summon it. While it doesn't permanently remove the potential threat since they're able to set it the next turn, setting them back a turn in tempo is still fairly good. It also comes with a debuff of 600 attack and defence as well, so it's able to beat over most tribute monsters, assuming they are face-up. Combining all of this gives us a consistent tempo strategy aiming to outpace our opponents with hard damage and light disruption. 

Important Packages:
Executie Up! requires 2 things to work well, firstly multiple types of monsters as per the requirement, needing at least 2 monsters of differing types forces us to diversify our monster lineup, which is not really a downside given the strength of the available generic tools. Secondly, you need to have at least 2 boss monsters in hand to maximise value. While using Executie Up to get out a single 2 tribute monster is completely fine in certain circumstances, the point of the card is to be able to cheat out 2 of them. Generally you want to have ways to have more boss monsters in hand consistently for this, and by running ways to fetch your tributes to hand from grave you can achieve that more often. A common way to do this is using a Phoenix Dragon package, which we will be using here. On top of having a very easy to activate condition, it also has some very good options to retrieve, which we'll go over later on. One more important thing that influences our deckbuilding decisions is the usage of Abyss Soldier and Splitter Slime. This isn't necessary to run but Abyss Soldier is a pretty impactful card, and while it does take up your legend slot (until 2 months from writing) the strength of Abyss Soldier is not to be understated. It can act as both monster removal and backrow removal, and the cost of discarding a WATER monster isn't really steep when we're already aiming to build around water monsters (and it certainly helps that the low level water monsters are very strong). Occassionally you also bounce your own cards, either to make room or to reuse certain effects. The other card that makes Abyss Soldier even better, however, is Splitter Slime, which can debuff for a sizeable amount of 1000 attack but also fetch Abyss Soldier from grave. At this point you can even bounce the Splitter Slime back to hand with Abyss Soldier, normal the Slime again, debuff for another 1000 and get another potential Abyss Soldier activation, depending on your hand. However, the cost of sending a 1500 attack or more monster from field to grave means that we'll be sacrificing some of our potential utility slots for 1500 vanillas to more consistently have access to it, but that isn't that big of a deckbuilding investment. 

Boss Monsters:
Now that we've gone over the deckbuilding context, time to look at the rest of the cards. Starting off with the rest of our 2 tribute monsters with 3 Ice Age Catapult. You could play less copies of it but the potential tempo advantage you can get with this card in this deck is high enough for me to want to play 3 copies. As for Phoenix Dragon targets, 3 copies of Multistrike Dragon Dragias, the premiere poster boy of "What generic boss monster can I put in here?" Outside of being a Dragon, the double attack allows for huge damage and tempo swings, and while it does have the weakness of not being able to beat over bigger monsters on it's own, Ice Age Catapult and Splitter Slime can help topple bigger threats. 1 Shock Dragon is a mainstay of Executie variants, while some lists run 2 copies, not only does Shock Dragon not do particularly well into Thunderbold, it also is better used when you have many ways to cheat out big monsters, and while we do have Executie Up, we're not playing something like Secret Order, which would make it even more trivial to get value out of it. 1 copy is a sweet spot for me personally, but you could run more depending on what decks you expect to play against. Finally, 2 copies of Ancient Arise Dragon. This is arguably quite suspect in the list but it's important as it's a WATER Dragon, which lets it be used with the Water attribute support in the deck while also being fetchable off of Phoenix Dragon, allowing you to have Water discard fodder more often. On it's own, while it is underwhelming, it is still a 3000 beatstick, which helps beat over defensive walls like Wicked Shadow Dark Lurker and opposing Shock Dragons.

1500 beatsticks:
Not much to talk about here since they're all vanillas, the only thing that matters is their defence stats and typing. Since we're running Executie Up, we want a variant selection of types, so we're running 3 Anglercoil as the only Thunders in the deck. We're also running 1 Takriminos and 1 Aqua Sorcerer, which looking at the full decklist balances out the creature types to be relatively even. 

Utility Low Levels:
Outside of the 3 Phoenix Dragon and 3 Splitter Slime, we've got 3 Amazing Dealer for additional consistency and 3 Sea Dragon Knight to check backrow and shuffle some cards back into your deck. These cards are generally already quite good, but they happen to also be WATER attribute, so that's an additional bonus. For non-waters we have 2 Galactica Jamais Vu, which has great synergy with the consistency spells as they're easy to use while not filling up your board, making the requirement almost a non-problem, and the additional draw power is welcome.

Spell/Traps:
3 Ship of Seven Treasures and 3 Dolphin's Treasure Chest alongside 3 Executie Up! is the main concept of the deck, so it should come as no surprise that we're playing 3 of each of these (outside of them being powerful cards). You could cut a copy of Executie Up for something else, personally I didn't have anything in particular that I wanted in that slot so I just ran the 3rd copy but there's a lot of things you could consider there. For traps we've got 2 Crisis at the Sacred Tower. This deck is a tempo deck so having more means to disrupt your opponent comes in handy, and the on-summon interaction allows you to interact with Thunderbold more. 

Final Thoughts:
Overall, the deck is quite solid. Consistency is probably its best trait, having 6 draw spells and 3 Amazing Dealer churns through the deck quite quickly. And it also has its own fair share of explosive turns with Ice Age Catapult, Dragias and Abyss Soldier. Not special summoning much while still keeping up in tempo is also a great advantage to have while Barrier Statue of the Infernos is in the format too, and even into the new maximum from Over Rush Pack. While I didn't build this deck with the 2023 rules revision in mind, once those rules go into effect it also becomes very easy to slot in your spell/trap legends into the deck as well while still keeping the Abyss Soldier package. This deck has a good amount of potential, which makes sense as an offshoot of a tier 2 deck, but it is definitely not something to sleep on.