  Our previous work introduced a category of extended queer crystals, whose
connected normal objects have unique highest weight elements and characters
that are Schur $Q$-polynomials. The initial models for such crystals were based
on semistandard shifted tableaux. Here, we introduce a simpler construction
using certain "primed" decomposition tableaux, which slightly generalize the
decomposition tableaux used in work of Grantcharov et al. This leads to a new,
shorter proof of the highest weight properties of the normal subcategory of
extended queer crystals. Along the way, we analyze a primed extension of
Grantcharov et al.'s insertion scheme for decomposition tableaux.
