Dark Magician After Battle of Chaos

Finding the Diamond in the Rough

With a wave of new support coming out every once in a while, mainly aimed at casual players and fans of the anime, some of the cards are bound to be better than others. The latest set, Battle of Chaos, features no less than four cards to support the theme, with one clear outlier among them.

Let's first make an honorable mention of and . Conjurer searches out , a card that was commonly played in the anime to bring out . Unfortunately, this would be less impressive to do in real life. Skilled Brown Magician is a very interesting card for a dedicated deck. If you open it alongside , it represents a total of six materials to link summon with due to searching .

As for the actual Dark Magician-themed cards, there is a new fusion monster, . Visually, this card looks exactly like you summon it, by fusing together Dark Magician and a or ritual monster. When Master of Chaos is summoned, he revives any light or dark monster from your graveyard, and he is able to tribute two monsters of those attributes to banish all the opponent's monsters. This might look impressive on paper as there are a few good options for light monsters you could play, such as or . In reality, bringing this card out seems a bit clunky, since you'll be heavily relying on . If I were allowed to have this card in my extra deck as the 16th card, it would probably come up once in a blue moon, especially with the new ritual monster that we'll be discussing a bit later on. Master of Chaos's second effect, which lets you return a spell card from the graveyard, doesn't feel like it saves the card. I'll have to admit that I'm aware I could be entirely wrong about this card and that it might prove itself worthy of a spot in my extra deck, but I will just be picking up a copy for the collection for now.

is a monster form of , a card that might seem okay for newcomers to the deck, but is inherently flawed due to not being searchable. The new Timaeus is searchable; in its text, Dark Magician is mentioned within its summoning conditions. You can send any spellcaster monster or a spell or trap that mentions the ultimate wizard in its text to summon Timaeus from your hand. When it does hit the field, you can perform a fusion summon as long as the other materials include a spellcaster. There are some pretty cool monsters you could summon using this effect, such as , but the obvious candidates are or . If you have enough extenders, you could even use the Dragon Knight as link material for and revive it with later on. Unfortunately, I'm currently a bit wary about whether Timaeus should be included in the deck, due to it being a bit heavy on card economy.

is straight up adorable. Just look at the little guy. I almost feel bad about not intending to play him. Like most Kuriboh monsters, his effect depends on the opponent inflicting damage to you, and when that happens, you can send him from the hand to the graveyard to bring out Dark Magician or from your deck. If he made the damage zero, there would be cases for siding him in for certain situations. Whenever a spellcaster is destroyed by your opponent, you get to add him from the graveyard to the hand. While this recursion could be a neat little loop in a very casual setting, I'm not sure how competitively viable this cute little fluffball will be. He might not have a place in my decklist, but he sure does have a place in my heart.

The Main Guest

The absolute juggernaut of the set in terms of Dark Magician support is the new ritual monster, . Let's start of by going over its least relevant effect, namely the one he has on the field. Whenever the opponent activates a monster effect, he will return himself to the hand and bring out a Dark Magician from the graveyard, and if that happened, the activated effect is negated. Great on paper, but the downside to consider is that Illusion of Chaos needs to be properly ritual summoned first.

There are three main ways of achieving this. The first one is , the all-purpose ritual spell for any and all blue cards you can expect to see in Yugi or Kaiba cosplayers' duel disk. (I'm so sorry, .) It mentions Dark Magician in its text, making it searchable by or stackable with . It even has a form of built-in card advantage preservation, allowing you to banish Dark Magician from the graveyard, but since you need Dark Magician there to apply Illusion of Chaos' effect, that trick is a no-go in most magic shows. The second candidate is using or , which lets you ritual summon using either the material or the ritual monster itself from your deck. The fact that these two effects are printed on two separate cards makes is a bit awkward to run; if both these effects were two possible options printed on one ritual spell, we'd obviously include it. All three cards mentioned so far do have the advantage that could grab them back from the graveyard, which is not something that can be said of . Still, I believe this card to be the best way to bring out Illusion of Chaos. It is on-theme and thus searchable, and has the benefit of letting you fusion summon as well, should you need to. It's a card that was dropped from most Dark Magician decks in order to streamline it, but the fact that it has an extra application makes it more appealing once again. I'm looking forward to including in my extra deck as a cheeky way to get bricks out of my hand.

The big advantage of Illusion of Chaos is its in-hand effect. You can use its effect to add any Dark Magician monster from your deck to your hand, then place one card from your hand on top of your deck. Not only does this get bricks out of your hand if you want to, such as or , but you could even just put Illusion itself on top of the deck if the other cards in your hand seem more viable to keep around. This card searches any monster listing Dark Magician in its text, from the brand new Magikuriboh to the ancient , pun intended. The two main monsters you'll want to add, however, are and . A combination of these two cards is something every Dark Magician player hopes to see in their opening hand, and that just became a lot more consistent.

Some Basic Combos

For those unfamiliar with the "two card combo"—Rod fetches when summoned, and by sending Dark Magician Girl from your deck to the graveyard, you can special summon Souls. Souls can then discard Servant to draw a card, before you use your monsters to bring out Predaplant Verte Anaconda. Anaconda lets you use Dark Magician from the deck to summon Red-Eyes Dark Dragoon, after which you can draw two more cards with Servant's grave effect. Two cards turned into three cards in your hand, plus your boss monster on the field.

If you want to use the new Timaeus, your combo would look a bit different. You'd need Rod and Souls in your hand, as well as Timaeus. Keep in mind that any of these three could be Illusion of Chaos, which fetches the missing piece. In that case, Rod would search out , which sets before being used as fodder to bring out Timaeus. Alternatively, you could use Soul Servant for this, but we really want Eternal Soul for the follow-up here. Magicians' Souls then brings out Dark Magician from the deck so that you can use Timaeus and Dark Magician to summon . This fusion monster and Magician's Rod are then used for Verte into Dragoon. On your opponent's turn, you can flip Eternal Soul and bring back the Dragon Knight since its name becomes Dark Magician while on the field or in the graveyard. This combination of Eternal Soul and Dark Magician the Dragon Knight can be a tough one to crack for many decks, especially with Dragoon protecting it.

A Divine Creature That Is not Osiris

One particular card I'm keeping my eyes open for is . This card currently sees play in Drytron, and we'll be using it for similar purposes. By sending from our extra deck to the graveyard, we'll be able to search Illusion of Chaos, and by extension, any monster in our deck. Summoning Magicians' Souls next to Diviner lets you go into a level seven synchro monster since Diviner is a tuner, or a link two monster like . From then onwards, you're off to the races; you could possibly even incorporate into your deck for a Noble Knight–like combo.

However, things get really sweet when considering Souls can also summon Dark Magician Girl from your deck, netting you access to a level six tuner and a level six non-tuner. is probably the funniest option from there, but consider that you can also summon . She can send a card from your deck to the graveyard, like Soul Servant or , the latter being a solid choice when siding him in for matchups including the new Adventurer Token engine, Swordsoul, or combo decks involving .

One alternative option is to use Diviner and Magician Girl to summon , which can bring out by setting a card. With one more extender like , , or , the Tzolkin can become Verte, whose effect activation will then be immune to most hand traps bar .

Dark Magical Conclusion

As you may have noticed, I'm especially looking forward to Illusion of Chaos while having my reservations about the other cards. Most of them seem to be designed for slower and more casual gameplay, being a bit hefty on card economy. The latter is a thing Dark Magician struggles with in the competitive metagame, and probably will continue to do so. Illusion of Chaos doesn't necessarily get you any card advantage, but rather break even in exchange for access to cards that do further your game plan.

I am definitely looking forward to testing out the new support cards, and there is a non-zero chance that I'm actually positively surprised by them addressing niches that I did not initially consider them doing.

For now, I won't be able to provide a decklist, but I hope this article gave you an idea of where to start. I know I'll be getting to work on scoring some good results with my favorite deck in the near future, and hopefully I'll be able to report a fully-fledged decklist in a few months.

---

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.