The Misfortune of Fortune Ladies in Edison

Written By: Jeix
Hello and welcome to my article about Fortune Ladies. I go by the username Jeix on Discord and Dueling Book and as you can see this Fortune Lady list is very unusual, so allow me to help you better understand it.

"Fortune Ladies are a Terrible Deck"

What a great way to start an article about the deck, isn’t it? Well, I wouldn’t know another one.
Fortune Ladies are terrible not only because they don’t win but because all the cards are almost good enough but fall short in some way or another, and for extremely dumb reasons, adding to the frustration of leaving you gues what this deck could have been had it received some sensible support cards.
The first flaw of the deck is your engine, Fortune Lady Light. She misses timing all the time. 
If her effect were mandatory you’d be able to make incredibly powerful plays with a lot of different cards available in Edison format. Sadly, it isn’t, so you have to rely on subpar cards to make her work.
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The second flaw is how useless the rest of your Fortune Ladies are unless you are bringing them out with Light. 
Drawing them ensures a brick as Dark requires a Tribute and a successful Battle Phase to work, even a Ryko stops her.
Water only works on a Special Summon, and she has terrible stats too. At least she’s good when she does work, unlike Earth, which you shouldn’t even be running.
The same applies to Fire, which has even worse stats.
To round things out, Wind is the only one that works on a Normal Summon, making her the only Lady you want to draw but at the same time just a bad version of Breaker by herself, meaning that it’s going to usually be bad to run multiples, which is what you’d want to do to draw her more often. She’s useless when Special Summoned by either Light or Dark.
Whether you choose to run 3, 1 or 0, she’s always going to disappoint you.
Yes, even running 0 copies will cause disappointment.

As you can see the main Ladies are full of contradictions and could have been designed a lot better to work together in more ways than just Light into Dark into Water.

Support Cards

You know an archetype is bad when its own support sucks and they have to rely on obscure cards to do what they should have been designed to do in the first place.
Here’s some “support”:

• Catoblepas and the Witch of Fate sounds good on paper but never really works, usually dying to a Card Trooper, a Caius or failing to get past a Ryko. It also requires grave setup in order to even be useful. Avoid.​
• Solitaire Magician is an Exiled Force that doesn’t hit face down monsters and requires a level 4 or higher Lady to work. Avoid.​​
  

• Time Passage burn this card.
• Bending Destiny is a Solemn Judgment! Meh, it’s more of a Dark Bribe given that your opponent gets the card back and it’s got quite a strict activation requirement of controlling Ladies and only Ladies. Avoid.
• ​Inherited Fortune is yet another “almost good enough” card that just isn’t good enough. Losing the trap and the Lady that had to be destroyed in order to use it is a -2 that not even Water can help you recover from.
• Future Visions is, in my opinion, the closest we get to an “almost good enough” card that isn’t quite good enough. The only real synergy with it is Fortune Lady Light, everything else is bad and leaves you vulnerable to removal. You could use it with Barbaros but if your opponent pops the field spell, your Barbaros stays banished forever. Simply put, the downside of the card affects you just as much as it affects your opponent and there’s no way to abuse it sufficiently with the available card pool. It’s literally only Fortune Lady Light, everything else is not impressive and not worth trying. It never works. Avoid.
• Fortune’s Future is the only support card worth running, and still it’s very subpar by itself. The Ladies themselves have no synergy with this aside from Future Visions, but then again the only synergy with Visions was Light anyway, so that further narrows it down. This card is amazing but you’ll have to heavily build your deck around it in order to make it work as the archetype fails to support it properly.​
  

"I scrounged around in the dumps so you wouldn't have to"

If you scour old forums online you’ll find threads dating back to 2010 with some Fortune Lady lists. I’ve done all the hard work for you and already extensively tested every single idea I could find. Feel free to start over if you hate yourself but the long story short is that nothing works.
Most lists rely on bad cards that are even worse if you don’t have access to Light or that are just too slow in general.
Let’s see some examples:

• Slow cards that only serve as a way to trigger Light, such as Compulsory Evacuation Device or Kinka-Byo are bad. There is nothing to be gained from summoning Dark during our End Phase and you gotta look beyond turn 1 going first and opening Light + Compulsory in order to realize how easily disruptable this combo is. If your opponent chains anything to your Compulsory, you’ll lose it and your Light, which will miss timing, and gain absolutely nothing.

• Compulsory is also extra bad because it will strand the Dark you bring out, since your Light will be in your hand, not in your graveyard.
• Rai-Mei is a bad version of Apprentice Magician.
• Magical Exemplar does nothing for the deck and is often a bad version of Kinka-Byo.
• Magical Dimension requires you to give up half of its effect to trigger Light, meaning it will never be a +1, not even when chained to another card as that card will cause Light to miss timing regardless. And, no, it’s not a Gemini Spark, which is always a +0 by itself and pairs well with monsters that are hard to run over by battle. Both of these are not true for Magical Dimension and Fortune Ladies.
• Dimensionhole and Different Dimension Gate are bad versions of Ruthless Denial, especially going first.

Trap cards in general are not optimal for Fortune Ladies, as the deck draws a lot and is looking for something to do with the cards they draw right away, rather than setting and passing back. Setting in Edison is never truly safe, as many top tier decks pack many ways of destroying cards on the field, especially after a Cold Wave.

The Environment

Edison Format, it’s not pretty for the Ladies.

• ​​Ryko runs rampant through the format, it causes Light to miss timing and stops Dark from resolving. There is no opening play that Fortune Ladies can take to play around Ryko effectively.
• Royal Oppression is a popular choice in many decks and completely destroys Fortune Ladies.
• If the strength of Fortune Ladies is a Pot of Greed in Fortune’s Future, almost every deck in the format already runs that, and it’s called Pot of Avarice.
  

• The banlist doesn’t help the Ladies either.
  Dark Hole is still banned, it would have worked wonders with Light.
  Allure of Darkness is the perfect set up for Fortune’s Future with Dark and it’s at 1.
  Chaos Sorcerer is a great power play that sets up Fortune’s Future, and it’s at 1.
  Dark Armed Dragon is at 1 for many reasons. In this deck not only does it blow up your opponent’s cards, but it can trigger your Light multiple times a turn.
  Necroface is at 1, making Gold Sarcophagus plays hard to pull off. Sarco itself is at 2. Torrential is at 1.
  One for One is limited. It was one of the very few cards able to fetch Light from the deck, and possibly the only one in Edison able to do so without using your normal summon. 
• There is no other engine that pairs well with Fortune Ladies.
  Other powerful contenders can rely on other engines when their own isn’t enough. A Flamvell deck can pair their Dogs with Spy, providing spot removal to force the Dog through and useful lv4 non-tuners. Decks that use the graveyard in some way can make use of Ryko, Hamster and Caius, a simple but powerful engine that easily fuels Pot of Avarice.
  Fortune Ladies on the other hand struggle with finding their place.
  They have that ? ATK and DEF, making them near impossible to search. The Spellcaster type is a mess in Edison and lacks strong cards to build around like Icarus Attack is for Winged Beasts. No, I don’t believe Secret Village is good enough in Edison, especially when your biggest monster dies to a Cyber Dragon and we are already struggling with Ryko enough as it is.
  The Attributes are all over the place and the good cards that work with them (Sorcerer and Dark Armed) are limited.
  Good luck with Dark Simorgh and Desert Twister, although I admittedly haven’t tested either.

The finicky nature of Fortune Lady cards leave them vulnerable to any sort of disruption, which top tier decks run a large amount of. Bottomless and Prison destroy Dark, as does Book of Moon, and any simple chain could cause your Light to miss timing.
Icarus Attack and Gladiator Beast’s War Chariot can ruin your day and force your turn to end prematurely.
Royal Oppression is often a straight game over.
Before you ask, Dust Tornado deals with it better than Fortune Lady Wind, as you don’t have to give up one special summon and then risk Wind getting book’d, stopping her from popping Oppression.​

The Deck List

Now that you’ve been properly warned about the absolute nightmare that playing Fortune Ladies in a semi-competitive Edison format environment is, allow me to introduce to you the only decklist that I was able to garner moderate success with:

This list has been put together with the idea of resolving our Lights and Darks as many times as possible every single turn, and hopefully drowning the opponent in card advantage.

The Game Plan

If we are looking to compete in Edison Format, we can’t just resolve Water once.
We need to resolve Water EVERY TURN.
We are looking to do broken stuff or we won’t be able to keep up.

So allow me to introduce to you the best Fortune Lady support card: Skull Lair!
​
Honestly, who would have thought that this common from Labyrinth of Nightmare would turn out to be this deck’s strongest support? 
​
​Skull Lair happens to pair extremely well with Apprentice Magician​

but relies on your opponent attacking it. If they do, you’ll be able to flip Light up on your turn, then banish Apprentice to pop Light, bringing out another Light and repeat until you have Dark in play, 2 Lights banished and 1 in the graveyard. If you have another Lady to Normal Summon that isn’t Water, you’ll also draw 2 cards with this simple setup.
This sequence allows you to bring out Dark without losing anything and setting up all the Fortune’s Future you'll ever need.
During the midgame, Skull Lair can serve as a pseudo Teleport, popping Light to bring out either Fire for a Ring of Destruction effect or Water for a Pot of Greed.
You can’t do any of this in chain to anything or Light will miss timing.
​If, however, your opponent sets a Ryko without attacking your Apprentice, you are screwed.

Your Very Vulnerable Extender: Ruthless Denial

Ruthless Denial is kinda like an Emergency Teleport, just a really bad version of it.
You are forced to rely on this obscure card because it’s one of the very few that causes Light to leave the field by a card effect without having her miss timing and without being completely useless by itself.
This card is so much better than Compulsory because Fortune Lady is a deck that draws a lot of cards and we want to be able to play those cards right away. Denial can be used as soon as you draw it and it puts the target of Dark right in the graveyard, not into your hand, looking pretty.
In an ideal world, you’ll set up your Apprentice and Skull Lair, filter through your Lights, bring out Dark, attack and bring back Light, then use Denial to rip a card from their hand and draw 2 with Water.

"Draw Light or lose the game: the deck"

You may have noticed me mentioning Fortune Lady Light a lot. You guessed it, if you fail to find her, you cannot play the game. If your opponent disrupts her, you are likely to lose. All of your cards harness the power of Light, the only good starter this deck has, and don’t really do much without her. Your triple Apprentice, the Tomato, the Sangan (to NOT get Fortune Ladies with) and the One for One are all direct or indirect ways of getting to Light. Once you have her, you are looking to start looping through her, Dark and Water turn after turn, ​drawing​into your Fortune’s Future and your power cards like Dark Armed, Chaos Sorcerer and Return from the Different Dimension, all of which you can recycle using Cyber Valley’s third effect. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t Cyber Valley’s second effect amazing with Light? Yes. Or at least it would be if this game made any sense. Light obviously misses timing when used with Valley but that doesn’t make it useless. First off: it’s a level 1, meaning it’s an extra target for your One for One if you’re already going. The same applies for Sangan. It’s first effect stops entire Battle Phases, allowing you to survive until you can start taking the board back with a Light+Denial play. Do you see why Denial is so much better than Compulsory? You can use it aggressively and it brings out your Lady right away, not during your opponent’s turn where it won’t even resolve its effect and get hit by a Caius.
We need to talk about is Creature Swap.
Remember the game plan? We need to resolve Water EVERY TURN. Sometimes your opponent has a set Ryko. Sometimes they have Dandylion tokens. Sometimes their monsters are too big for Dark to run over. In this last scenario, Book of Moon helps her win battles where she’d otherwise lose. In all other cases, Swap gives the opponent a Water that Dark can run over and immediately summon back to draw 2. You can also swap them a Light and then pop her with Skull Lair, reaping all the benefits of Swap.
Sangan, Apprentice and Tomato are additional targets that you can give your opponent to ensure that your Dark can bring back Water every turn. If she draws into a Denial, you can toss it to trade your resources with your opponent. You’ll come out ahead if your game plan is working.
The rest of the cards in your deck are powerful finishers or good mid game tools.
Torrential and Call of the Haunted work very well with Light and Water respectively. Strangely enough, Water cannot miss timing.
Storm and MST help clear the way for your power plays.
This list doesn’t run Brain Control but thinking back I believe it should, you can use it with Dark, Creature Swap and Cyber Valley. 
Another card you can consider is Gold Sarcophagus to either get a powerful one-of or to turn your Fortune’s Future into a Destiny Draw (please stay away from Necroface though).
Gorz doesn’t work with Skull Lair but it’s a strong card when you don’t have it or they get rid of it. Tragoedia works well when your hand size is large and it can help you dump Ladies you want to banish from the graveyard to steal monsters (most of the time the levels won’t line up, though.)
The side deck you see is just an example and hasn’t been tested yet. Nobleman helps you solve the Ryko problem but it won’t let your Dark run over something. Maybe Forbidden Chalice is a better option in this deck.
Dust Tornado is your friend against Royal Oppression.​

"May the Fortunes be ever in your favor"

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading. Fortune Lady has always been a pet peeve of mine and I think I’m moderately satisfied in knowing it can at least be pushed this far into the “almost good but ultimately not good enough” tier.
The only ideas I still haven’t tried are the Desert Twister and Dark Simorgh ones, but something tells me they’ll fall apart halfway through, given that they both require Wind and Twister also requires Earth.
I hope you enjoyed this article and I hope you’ll be able to have fun with Fortune Ladies, whether it is with this list or not.
​Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been trying to achieve this with Aliens as well but all I’ve gotten so far has been wasted months and a lot of sadness, so I clearly need to put some more effort into it.
Cheers!