Soar on Wings of Courage, Talons Ready for the Rebellion! Rank-Up, XYZ Evolution!

Raidraptor is an XYZ based, highly aggressive OTK style Winged-Beast archetype piloted by Shay Obsidian in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V series that relies on both destruction effects and burn damage to lead into lethal damage. We accomplish this by using our arsenal of Rank-Up Magic spells (which I'll refer to as RUMs from here on) to flock the field with ferocious falcons.

The first wave of releases came with 2023's Raider's Requiem, and was updated a year later with Scream of Resistance. Initial hype for the newly improved Raidraptors died down quickly as the deck of Shay's very own friend and fellow XYZian, Yuto's Phantom Knights, stole the spotlight and the top spot of the tier list for a brief while. That said, the deck strong enough hold its own against a lot of the currently tiered threats right now.

There are two versions, pure Raidraptors, and the non-pure variant. I'll get into the differences as we go along

Main Deck Core

The frontlines, and lifeblood of our strategy. These guys are absolutely mandatory to run regardless of your build.

Raidraptor - Tribute Lanius

Our starter of choice. It can send any Raidraptor monster from main deck to the graveyard. Which leads to easy extension. It also has an another effect that lets you get a RUM quickplay spell from the deck that will certainly never come up in most situations. Always max out on this one

Raidraptor - Mimicry Lanius

Our main target to drop in the graveyard with Tribute Lanius. It can banish itself to search any Raidraptor card. This is important because it's the only card we have that can fetch our backrow on top of any extender. It's important to have at least two of these since you wouldn't want to open your single copy with your Tribute Lanius. Especially not in non-versions of the deck where this is your only good target. It's second effect to change levels isn't really needed but can come up if you run into someone using Loading... . I'm not joking about that, that exact scenario won me a game once.

Raidraptor - Strangle Lanius

The third most important card amongst all variants of Raidraptors. It can summon itself so long as you control a dark monster and has an additional effect to revive one of your main deck monsters if a dark XYZ monster is a attached as material to a XYZ monster. Unlike the the previous two, this second effect will matter, in particular if you get interrupted at some point and need a way to generate more bodies to XYZ summon with.

Raidraptor - Fuzzy Lanius

This one is a bit different. Whether or not you run this depends entirely on whether or not you want play the deck pure or not. Fuzzy Lanius can both summon itself if a different Raidraptor is on the field, and if it is sent to the graveyard (such as, through being detached as material or by the effect of Loading... ), it will add another copy of itself to your hand. This is good for either follow-up or as a discard outlet for your skill. The catch? You can't use either effect the turn you special summon a non-Raidraptor, so this card is a luxury for pure builds. For other variants, you can try any of the following extenders.