Introduction
Hello! This is a guide to the Crusadia archetype. The main purpose of this deck is to go second and defeat your opponent in one turn. There are variants of the deck that can facilitate going first, but this guide will be discussing the basic going second variant. This deck is particularly notable for its incredibly low cost - you can build this deck pretty effectively with only 4 SRs and 1 UR, and you could even create a totally viable deck with a measly 2 SRs! It's more than sufficient to get you to plat 1, so let’s get into how it works.
This guide was made with the help of a number of people. My name is Nozo, and I’m the main writer of this guide. I’m a long time fan of the yugioh anime but I’m relatively new to the actual game. Despite that, Crusadia is a really newbie friendly deck that I feel like I have a strong understanding of. Massive thanks to Sindie, Unmei, and Crusadia Enjoyer from the Master Duel Meta discord. Their assistance with this guide made it much better than it otherwise would have been.
Core Cards
The following cards absolutely should be run in any and all Crusadia decks. They’re your essential pieces. First, let’s start off with…
Main Deck Monsters
This is the most important of all the main deck Crusadia monsters. It allows you to double the damage your link monster deals with attacks and makes OTKs much more feasible.
Another very important main deck Crusadia. Draco allows you to search any Crusadia monster from your graveyard and add it to your hand. The most common use for this effect is to return the Crusadia you used to start your combo back to your hand. Since you normal summoned that Crusadia, you’ll be able to special summon it again to extend your combo.
A valuable source of protection. When in your graveyard, you can banish Arboria to prevent the destruction of a Crusadia monster. It’s also a tuner which can help with synchro plays, or just going into Loading... as a combo extension.
Leonis is less useful than the others. Its effect allows your link monster to beat over defense position monsters, which is situationally useful. A lot of the time it won’t matter though.
Reclusia is another less useful Crusadia. It allows you to tribute one Crusadia monster on the field to pop a card on the opponent’s field. It can be situationally useful, but more often than not the tribute cost is just too harsh.
This isn’t a Crusadia but I consider it just as important as one. Parallel eXceed can’t start combos, but when you summon a link monster you can summon it from your hand to a zone a link monster points to, while halving its attack and level. When you do that, you can also summon another one from the deck to the field with the same halved attack and level. This is incredibly useful both for giving you link materials and giving you materials to go into an XYZ summon since we do run some rank 4 XYZ monsters in the deck.