Dark Element – #PHNI-EN063
If you have a “Gate Guardian” monster in your GY: Pay half your LP; Special Summon 1 Level 11 or higher “Gate Guardian” monster from your hand, Deck, or Extra Deck, ignoring its Summoning conditions. You can banish this card from your GY; add 1 of your “Sanga of the Thunder”, “Kazejin”, or “Suijin” from your Deck or banishment to your hand. You can only use each effect of “Dark Element” once per turn.
Dark Guardian – #PHNI-EN013
(This card is always treated as a “Gate Guardian” card.)
Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must be either Special Summoned by “Dark Element”, or Special Summoned (from your hand or GY) by shuffling into the Deck, 1 each of your “Sanga of the Thunder”, “Kazejin”, and “Suijin” that is in your hand, face-up field, GY, and/or banished. Cannot be destroyed by battle. If this card is Special Summoned by the effect of “Dark Element”, it is unaffected by other monsters’ effects or your opponent’s activated Spell Cards or effects.
Date Reviewed: March 8th, 2024
Ratings: See Below
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is awful. 3 is average. 5 is excellent.
Reviews Below:
King of
Lullaby
Hello Pojo Fans,
Dark Element and Dark Guardian wrap up our week with an anime GX card.
Dark Element is a great way to cheat out Dark Guardian or any Level 11 or higher “Gate Guardian” monster. Not sure you’d be playing the original Gate Guardian, even if you ran this to summon something like that, when you have multiple new Fusion Gate Guardian monsters this card can summon by ignoring the requirements. Paying half your LP to get a negation monster up to thrice per turn is an easy trade in my opinion, heck, even getting out Wind & Water as a Spell/Trap negation up to twice per turn is great. You need a Gate Guardian monster in the grave to activate this card, so chances are you have already gotten something to get back from your Gate Guardian Fusion Monster if it were to leave the field.
Banishing this gets you to one of the original pieces of the Gate Guardian from your Deck or banished, which is what the Gate Guardian archetype does a lot of now with how it can spam multiple pieces onto the field as Spell/Trap cards and then banish them to Special Summon their Fusion Monsters. This is another way to get to those Fusion Monsters when you get halted by your opponent or you just don’t have the pieces. Being able to search out a piece furthers your other Special Summons and this second ability on the card ensures you won’t lose out if it were negated.
Dark Guardian can be summoned easily with Dark Element, or you can cycle back one of each of your original Gate Guardian pieces to summon it. Retrieving your pieces does allow for you to refuel your deck for further Special Summons after you get to those monsters once more, or even play less if you were to use Dark Guardian and Dark Element in your Gate Guardian build. Battle destruction is nice, but at 3800ATK there isn’t much that can take down Dark Guardian without help. The level of protection it gains from being summoned via Dark Element though makes it even more of a force on the field, despite it not having negation power. Protection against other monsters’ effect or your opponent’s activated Spell Cards or effects prevents outs like Lightning Storm or having it used against you via Snatch Steal or Change of Heart. Monster effects are everything in the game now, and protection against any monsters’ effects, combined with its insanely high ATK, AND Spell protection forces your opponent to depend on Trap destruction of Dark Guardian.
Dark Guardian can summon itself perfectly well within the Gate Guardian archetype without Dark Element, however, that Spell adds protection to Dark Guardian when it only had battle protection, and with its 3800ATK it can be argued that it didn’t need that. Dark Element makes Dark Guardian a much harder out than Dark Guardian alone. The Gate Guardian archetype runs pretty smooth and quite speedy without these two cards in the build. It will be interesting if anyone can utilize them without losing any advantage.
Advanced- 3/5 for both. Dark Element getting a piece of Gate Guardian is good, while Dark Guardian being capable of summoning itself is good, but needs Dark Element to be better
Art- 4/5 for Dark Element, 2.5/5 for Dark Guardian
Until Next Time,
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
The week ends off with a double as we look at Dark Guardian and the card that summons it, Dark Element.
Dark Element is a Normal Spell where if you have a Gate Guardian monster in your graveyard, you can pay half your LP to summon a Level 11 or higher Gate Guardian monster from your hand, Deck, or Extra Deck while ignoring summoning conitions. This leaves you to Gate Guardian, Gate Guardians Combined, and Dark Guardian. You still won’t play the original Gate Guardian and Gate Guardians Combined is easy enough to summon without this, so that leaves Dark Guardian, which of course we’ll get to. The other effect lets you banish this card from the graveyard to add a Sanga of the Thunder, Kazejin, or Suijin from your Deck or banishment (the banished pile) to your hand. Recovering your pieces to summon your Fusions is good, though in the hand means you can only summon Combined, which is fine. Hard once per turn on each effect, so you don’t get multiple big monsters on board and pieces back in your hand for Combined. It’s still a fine card to run. At worst, you can send it off Magicians’ Souls to get to your pieces while drawing cards if it isn’t live, but if it is, you get Dark Guardian.
Advanced Rating: 3.5/5
Art: 4/5 Looks cool, though I don’t know how this related to the original Gate Guardian stuff.
Now for Dark Guardian, we have a Level 12 DARK Warrior with 3800 ATK and DEF. Those are massive stats, though only 50 ATK and 400 DEF higher than the classic Gate Guardian. Being a DARK Warrior is good, though. It’s always treated as a Gate Guardian card, ensuring you can summon this off Dark Element without having to put extra text on that or any other future card. It cannot be Normal Summoned or Set and must be Special Summoned via Dark Element or summoned from the hand or graveyard by shuffling your Sanga of the Thunder, Kazejin, and Suijin that’s banished, in your hand, face-up field, and/or graveyard into the Deck. Easy to summon and revive is good. It cannot be destroyed in battle, which doesn’t matter much when you have 3800/3800 stats, but you never know when it comes up. Finally, if you summoned this off Dark Element, it is unaffected by other monster effects as well as activated Spell Cards and effects, and it’s vulnerable to Traps because they do care for anime continunity and the fact this card’s attack was negated via Hero Barrier. It’s solid protection still if you do use the Spell, which is a searchable card and should be easy to trigger by getting a Gate Guardian in the grave. It’s nothing amazing, but it’s easy to summon with both conditions and it is a decently hard to out body with its protection effects. Might as well run a copy.
Advanced Rating: 3/5
Art: 4/5 Again, cool, but how does Gate Guardian relate to this?
Mighty
Vee
The Paradox Brothers’ forgotten secret weapon makes its card game debut in a double feature to close the week; Dark Element and Dark Guardian are a pair of cards for the Gate Guardian series, featured in Yugioh GX. We’re starting with Dark Element, a Normal Spell searchable with Gate Guardian of Thunder and Wind since it mentions Sanga of the Thunder, Kazejin, and Suijin. Dark Element has two hard once per turn effects; the first simulates its anime effect, only being usable if any Gate Guardian monster is in your Graveyard. It’ll let you pay half of your Life Points to Special Summon any level 11 or higher Gate Guardian monster from your hand, deck, or Extra Deck (naturally, ignoring summoning conditions). This is a cheap way to bring out Gate Guardians Combined, though another option is Dark Guardian, which will accordingly acquire its bonus effect. Dark Element’s other effect is the same as all the other Gate Guardian backrow, letting you banish it from your Graveyard to either search a Sanga of the Thunder, Kazejin, or Suijin or recycle one from banished. If you’ve seen our Gate Guardian coverage, this effect is not nearly as good as it looks, since all of your good cards directly place them into the Spell/Trap Zone anyway. Still, even though paying half your Life Points is rather dicey, it’s a fine tech to bounce back when your Gate Guardian monster inevitably dies; this card’s main flaw is relying on having a Gate Guardian monster in the Graveyard when the deck can’t do so reliably, making Dark Element more of a follow-up card. It’s nice to have 1 copy as a panic button to search with Thunder and Wind.
+Cheats out Gate Guardians Combined or Dark Guardian for a strong beater
-Hard to have a Gate Guardian monster in the Graveyard on turn 1
-Questionable value for paying half your LP and requiring a dead Gate Guardian
Advanced: 3.25/5
Art: 2.25/5 Well, at least it’s a bit more polished than the anime version.
Of course, you can’t skip the main monster itself, Dark Guardian, a level 12 DARK Warrior monster, which is a fantastic set of traits that unfortunately isn’t applicable to any meta decks at the moment (or in the past few years, for that matter). What has aged well, is Dark Guardian’s excellent 3800/3800 stats carrying over from the anime, which is still ahead of the curve compared to many modern boss monsters.
Naturally, Dark Guardian is always treated as a Gate Guardian monster, as otherwise you couldn’t summon it with Dark Element. It can’t be Normal Summoned or Set either, requiring you to either summon it with Dark Element, or Special Summon it from your hand or Graveyard by shuffling all 3 Gate Guardian pieces from your hand, field, Graveyard, or banished into the deck. Like in the anime, it can’t be destroyed by battle (not that many monsters can overcome 3800 stats), and as a bonus, if you used Dark Element, it’s immune to other monster effects or your opponent’s activated Spell cards and effects (awfully specific, no?). It might be tempting to summon it with its own condition, since it’s effectively free once you make Gate Guardians Combined, but do note you’ll still have to search or mill Dark Guardian first to actually access it; thus, accessing it the first time is most easily done with Dark Element, then you can revive it continuously afterward (albeit without its immunities). Randomly lacking Trap protection is rather odd, but Traps are arguably the least dangerous card type due to their speed, and if you’re that concerned you can always flank it with Gate Guardian of Wind and Water, which has a twice per turn backrow negate. While Dark Guardian is fantastic as an extra body and OTK pusher, it doesn’t do anything else of value; it simply sits on the board and solos casual decks that can’t beat it. It’s generally not worth summoning turn 1 over Wind and Water, Wind and Thunder, or Combined, though again, it can be a colossal pain to some decks. Dark Guardian doesn’t improve Gate Guardian by a large margin, but at least a segment of the Yugioh anime fandom can rest in peace.
+Excellent stats
+Can cheese decks that don’t play Trap-based removal or Kaiju
-Hard to summon immediately with Dark Element
-No innate disruption
Advanced: 3/5
Art: 3.5/5 Again, looks better than the anime art, though like the original, I question how it’s supposed to be related to Gate Guardian…
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