Luster Pendulum, the Dracoslayer – Yu-Gi-Oh! Ban List Week

Crunch$G

Oh man, I remember when Pendulums were dominant, those were the times. Now we can welcome Luster Pendulum, the Dracoslayer back to three.

Luster Pendulum as a Pendulum Scale has the scale of 5, which is good for those decks that wanted to summon Level 4 monsters back in the day off a Pendulum Summon (looking at Performage/Performapal decks, but there were certainly other options). The effect in the scale is that once per turn you can destroy the card in your other Pendulum Scale to search for a card with the same name from your deck, meaning this doesn’t work well with cards that are limited. This had insane synergy with something like Performage Plushfire to search that and then let Plushfire summon from the deck for another body, and it got better if you could bounce the Luster Pendulum back to your hand since it wasn’t a hard once per turn. This is a nice effect for consistency.

Luster Pendulum as a monster is a Level 4 LIGHT Dragon Tuner with 1850 ATK and 0 DEF. ATK is good, DEF isn’t, LIGHT Dragon is great in this age, and being a Tuner is lovely. The downside to all of this is that Luster Pendulum cannot be used as material for a Fusion, Synchro, or Xyz unless said monster is a Dracoslayer. Still, you got Dinoster Power to revive your Dracoslayers and protect your Pendulum cards, Ignister to summon Dracoslayers from the deck and put cards back in the opponent’s deck, and Magister Paladin to search for Pendulum cards and summon Dracoslayers from face-up in your Extra Deck. The options this can only be used to summon aren’t that bad, and it can be used as Link Material and being Dragon means Guardragons. Luster Pendulum is a nice card for Pendulum decks to have at three again, especially as we await Draco Face-Off to return to three, but even at three you don’t always have to max out on this.

Advanced Rating: 4.25/5

Art: 4.25/5 Not too much Dragon here, but the wings and tail pass it off as one certainly.

Alex
Searcy

Throwback Thursday treats us to Luster Pendulum, the Dracoslayer.  This card, unlike most of this week, moved back to Unlimited in the TCG (while being Limited still at present in the OCG).  Luster has seen one prior review in 2015 (missed by me).

Let’s see, this card has a lot going for it right off the bat.  Light, Dragon, Level 4 with 1850 attack.  Also the benefited bonus of being a Tuner.  Level 5 on the Pendulum Scale is meh, but not terrible, again factoring in being Level 4.  The 0 defense is troublesome, but not all too large an issue given you’d use this more as a Pendulum anyway.  So the biggest immediate downside we see is that this can’t be an Extra Deck Material outside the theme.  

The Pendulum side had the standard destroy and cycle effect.  So long as you had another card in your Pendulum Zone, you could destroy said card and add another of the same to your Hand from the Deck.  It was very easy to abuse and re-use Pendulum Effects, namely of the ‘once per turn’ variety, while cycling and thinning your Deck(s) at the same time.

Rating:  3.75/5

Art:  3.5/5  Nothing particularly special here.  Dragon wings and tail, certainly, but the horns don’t make me thing that, and I get it’s a Draco Warrior, but I’m not a fan of all that armor either.  The Dragon parts we see aren’t anything that cool either.

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