I have decided to eventually cover as many of possible Goat Control tech choices as I can – i already did Blade Knight and Chaos Sorcerer, so here's a new one about a train.
I don't know if this is a new player thing that happens to everyone or is it just a coincidence that me and some of my friends, when first starting at Goat Format, thought that Dekoichi would be a great addition to the deck (looking at standard Detox Goat Control lineup right of course). So let's talk about Dekoichi.
My (my team's) first Goat Control build was built around Dekoichi, which we sincerely believed that it gives us the edge in the control mirror. We played 2 copies of Dekoichi instead of 2 copies of Magical Merchant, and we compensated the LIGHT count with 2nd Asura and level 1 count with 3rd Scapegoat mained. The theoretical advantages of Dekoichi were the recognition of his high attack stats, which – in theory – would give a really strong advantage if he managed to resolve and then attack (you can read all about that deck here: https://slogoatsss.github.io/blog/2019/01/12/colosseum-report)
On the other hand, there are disadvantages to Dekoichis, and there is more to it than just the obvious »he is not level 1« thing. The LIGHT count is an actual problem on post-siding configurations, where, in many matchups, Goat Contol main wants to remove Airknights for something else. Without Merchant, that leaves us with only 2x MoF and 1x DDWL (and Asura, if you even run it – most people don't!) – which is way too little for BLS. And mind you – the matchups where we side out AKPs are usually the one where we really can't afford dead BLS, for most common example: Aggro.
If you can somehow figure out how to deal with this kind of post sideboard problems, then you are one step closer to making main-decked Dekoichi a reasonable pick, but you still have the level 1 problem.
When you run Goat Control long enough, you notice that using Metamorphosis on MoF or Merchant comes up noticably often – you'll be »bricked« 50% more of those times where you wanted to do that play if you hold Deko in hand instead of a Merch. You might want to run 3rd Goat instead of 2nd Saku for this reason, to help a bit with this problem, like I desribed in the beginning, but there's a funny contradiction that I haven't noticed back then.
The advantage that we are hoping to get from Deko is that when and if it survives, we will start attacking with him. Then, if we cut a Saku for a Scapeogat just to make Deko viable, we actually decrease the chances of him SURVIVING, which is contradicting the entire premise of running him instead of Merch!
This all, in my opinion, concludes the fact that Dekoichi leads to too many COHERENCY problems in the deck and AWKWARD side decking problems, that it just outweighs his advantages.
I hope that you enjoyed reading,
Sikwisk.