day-may

[day-may]

Card Thoughts of the Day #2 (08/30/2023) Another metagame destroying entry already? SPYRAL Double Helix, released in the set Circuit Break (CIBR) in 2017, is a Link-2 monster belonging to the World Premiere SPYRAL theme. It allows the user to Special Summon any SPYRAL monster from their deck by successfully calling the type of card on top of your opponent's deck, a gimmick shared by many other SPYRAL monsters, while also being treated as "SPYRAL Super Agent" on the field. Before the release of Double Helix, SPYRAL was considered to be a weak theme. This was primarily because many SPYRAL cards (But mainly SPYRAL Quik-Fix) needed the user to control SPYRAL Super Agent on the field to use their effects, but because the basic Super Agent was limited to either a Normal Summon or a gamble reliant Special Summon, it was difficult to reliably get him on the field. Other monsters were able to take SPYRAL Super Agent as their name, such as "SPYRAL Tough" but they were equally difficult to get on the field. Ironically, many of the most powerful SPYRAL cards later on were released in the first wave of cards (SPYRAL GEAR - Big Red, SPYRAL Quik-Fix, SPYRAL GEAR - Drone), and were seen as having a lot of potential.

Double Helix, by being an Extra Deck monster treated as "SPYRAL Super Agent," unlocked that potential, becoming notorious for enabling SPYRAL as a strategy that could spam Link monsters easily and quickly by Special Summoning SPYRAL Quik-Fix or SPYRAL Master Plan from your deck to begin a combo, seeing mass adoption in the OCG and TCG metagame for a time. Later on in 2020, it reappeared alongside the newly released Magicians' Souls, a consistency tool allowing the user to send SPYRAL Master Plan from their Deck to the GY, with a further refined Link spam strategy, albeit not as all-encompassing to the metagame as it's 2017 counterpart.

My thoughts on SPYRAL Double Helix and the SPYRAL theme are complicated. Like a lot of other World Premier themes, the art of SPYRAL is phenomenal. It provides a very clean modern-day aesthetic, clashing (but in a good way) to the more magical or fantastical themes in Yu-Gi-Oh, alongside a small story about a teacher turning on his student and their organization. It's gameplay, however, involves a lot of Soft Once Per Turn abuse and generic link monsters, which does put me off of the strategy as a whole. However, I do hope that with the newly revealed SPYRAL Double Agent, SPYRAL Master Plan makes it off the TCG Banlist so SPYRAL players in the TCG can enjoy their deck to the fullest.

[day-may]

Hello! This isn't particularly meant to reach anybody, but I wanted a place to record my thoughts into the void on my hobbies and daily life. For said hobbies, I mainly play the Yu-Gi-Oh card game, but I also have tried MTG Commander with some friends, and had fun with it. I also read, play video games, and hike in my spare time, so I would like to give my thoughts on those things as well, but I intend for this to be a primarily Yu-Gi-Oh focused blog. To begin with something, the card that's on my backdrop, marking Card Thoughts of the Day #1! (08/29/2023) Zoodiac Barrage, released in the set Raging Tempest (RATE) in 2016, was a powerful card in the infamous "Zoodiac" theme. It allows the user to Special Summon any Zoodiac monster from the Deck by destroying a card they control. The effect can be used to destroy one of your Zoodiac effect monsters, triggering their effects that activate when they are destroyed. However, the more common usage of Barrage was to destroy itself, summoning a Zoodiac monster from the Deck with a single card, and possibly activating it's second effect to attach it to a Zoodiac Xyz monster that you controlled. This card and the Zoodiac strategy proved to be too powerful, and the card was banned on the Yu-Gi-Oh OCG April 2017 banlist. Later on, it would return to Limited on the OCG October 2019 banlist, and would get Banned on the TCG September 2021 banlist. While I like Zoodiac mechanically, despite its problematic power level, I think what draws me to Barrage is the visible and strong emotions portrayed in the characters on the card. Bunnyblast is enjoying their battle a bit too much, with Boarbow looking on with a sigh, and Ramram with fear. Small details like these enrich Yu-Gi-Oh monsters as characters, even without the usage of flavor text commonly seen in other TCGs.