Hot Take: Chimera is not a healthy deck
I know I know, why complain about Chimera when its not even a meta strategy/better decks exist?
"Are you just mad that you lost the last 5 games you played against Chimera with 5 different decks because it went to turn 20 each game?"
Yes, but given the reason was identical each time i wanted to open a discussion about it.
With that out of the way, I do honestly believe Chimera is on the more toxic style of deck designs as its a deck that is inherently more frustrating than not to play against.
Its no Kashtira, but the recent trend of decks that punish you for daring to play with decks like Horus, Kashtira, Fire King, Yubel, and well Chimera is just not fun to play against for the vast majority of decks.
Chimera is inherently frustrating for a few reasons:
An entire deck of Illusion monsters means that its borderline impossible to out anything by battle (turning off an important form of removal) and its actually quite difficult for most rogue or off-meta decks to out them in engine, particularly if they are just setting them face down (This means even a number of generic staple cards like SP can't remove them before the battle phase as its quick effect requires face up cards, a large amount of cards are designed this way).
The deck actually gains advantage off of you removing their cards off board, often special summoning another illusion monster from the GY to stall out the game further and gain advantage from the on summon effect meaning that non engine pushes aren't particularly viable either. What makes this aspect more frustrating is that it triggers even during the damage step, making it more difficult to interrupt the effect.
The interaction the deck produces are inherently more difficult to interact with as its largely GY focused with a banish for cost and it has an incredibly powerful grind game when you factor in the stall capabilities of cards like their archetypal Mirror Force, Chimera Fusion, or Diabellze.
What tends to make the deck more frustrating is that it isn't particularly difficult to stop their combo even for most rogue decks if they didn't draw into Chimera Fusion itself, but once they do have access to the card the game effectively is over on the spot due to the immense advantage that card represents.
So for a lot of rogue decks a Chimera duel looks a lot like this:
Stop their combo -> Struggle to out the recursion of their illusion monsters which can't just be punched over -> Go until turn 20 when Chimera finally draws the out and punts you into the sun.
It just makes for an unpleasant experience for the vast majority of rogue decks to play against because it can be a borderline unwinnable matchup even with playing your interruptions correctly and thought it was worth talking about.
All in all while Chimera is the topic of this post its not just a rant post and I do think its a trend of decks being inherently designed in a more frustrating manner as of late and this is just one of many examples. I do believe that making a very combo heavy deck into a high recursion stall deck is a bit of a mistake as it just outright gets rid of the main downside to being a combo deck, but I am interested in hearing what everyone else thinks about the topic.
Anyway if you got this far you deserve to win your next coinflip.