Reviewer’s Choice – Yu-Gi-Oh! Review: Alex’s 15th Anniversary on Pojo

Alex
Searcy

So, an open before this begins.  First, it’s been a minute since we’ve done a Reviewer’s Choice.  A long minute, in fact.  They were slightly more common back in the day.  This week, Austin and Bill were kind enough to indulge me with a fun week of random oddity reviews, given this is the anniversary of my 15th year here on the Yugioh team of Pojo.  For which I am very happy, honored, and privileged to have been here this long.

I figured a Reviewer’s Choice was a great way to start the week, and it’s fun to do these, so I hope our other reviewers enjoy this too.  Despite how fun this is, choosing the card I wanted to do was difficult.  My first though (I have no idea why) was Fiber Jar.  But that wasn’t realistic.  But, for fun, I did want to do something currently Banned, and I ended up with Brilliant Fusion.

Brilliant Fusion is a Continuous Magic card that helps make the Gem-Knight Deck go.  On activation, you get to Special Summon a Gem-Knight Fusion from the Extra Deck, but for a super unique twist (albeit more common) is that the Monsters chosen for said Summon here come from your Deck.  Attack and defense of the Monster go to 0 and if Brilliant Fusion goes to the Graveyard, your Fusion Monster is destroyed.

Note, for starters, nothing happens to your effect(s) if said Gem-Knight has one(or more).  And, once a turn, by discarding a Magic card, you can have your Fusion Monster gain attack and defense equal to its original attack and defense until the end of your opponent’s turn.  Lastly, you can only activate one Brilliant Fusion per turn.  This card fits the category of ‘I see why it’s Banned, but I don’t agree.’

While being able to have the Fusion so open ended by using Material only from your Deck, which is a powerful effect, I don’t feel this is so broken today that this card couldn’t be in the game.  If you don’t have the Magic card to discard, your Monster is going to be sitting at 0/0.  The destruction aspect dependent on this card I don’t see as an issue.  Likely said Fusion is going to either win a game or be used for another effect.

Rating:  Banned/5 but honestly, if it came back, I’d give it a 4.75/5 for Gem-Knights

Art:  5/5  Brilliant, pun intended.  Love the half swirls, love the gems in here, it’s a cool picture for a Fusion card.

Crunch$G

For the first time in 12 years, we have a Reviewer’s Choice for CotD. The last one done on the site would have you going all the way back to 2008. There isn’t a specific theme for this one, but seeing as Alex looked at a banned card for an archetype, I’ll do the same thing I guess, so my choice is… Spellbook of Judgment.

Spellbook of Judgment is a Quick-Play Spell with an effect you only get during the End Phase and is a hard once per turn. Now, all of those sound like downsides at first, but the effect makes it feel like overkill if you got more than one a turn and would give it a 0% chance of returning without errata if you got a more immediate pay-off that’s similar to the End Phase one this gives you. During the End Phase of the turn Spellbook of Judgment was activated, you add Spellbook Spells from your Deck to your hand up to the number of Spells activated after this card’s resolution, then you can Special Summon a Spellcaster monster from the Deck with a Level less than or equal to the number of cards you added to your hand off this effect. First off, it’s nice how it lets you search cards with the same name, even though most to all the Spellbooks have the hard once per turn clause like Judgment. The matter of the fact is though that this gives you more searches for the more Spells you use, and this is all in an archetype that’s playing tons of Spells. A typical Spellbook turn can consist of 5 or more Spells activated without hesitation, especially with all the searching and consistency of Spellbook of Power, Spellbook of Secrets, Spellbook of Eternity, Spellbook of the Master, The Grand Spellbook Tower heck even throw in Spellbook Magician of Prophecy even though it’s a monster, and you could of added Spellbook of Knowledge if it was released when Judgment was around. You can also get the massive plus for more consistency cards like Terraforming or Upstart Goblin or just for other cards to help you win like Spellbook Star Hall (most Spellbook Decks would of mostly ran low ATK monsters) or Spellbook of Life for revival. You are not short on good Spellbook Spells, and that’s not to mention the versatile powerhouse of Spellbook of Fate. For the monster to summon, it isn’t archetype locked to Prophecy, which is outstanding. In the archetype you got High Priestess of Prophecy for activating 7 Spells and later searching 7, which is once again easier than you’d think. Reaper of Prophecy can be good for 6 Spells and searching 6 cards. A good card to summon outside the archetype that needs low input to get out is Jowgen the Spiritualist to stop Special Summons, or a high input can get you Dark Magician of Chaos to get back Judgment (assuming it goes to 1 someday, highly doubtful we’d get multiples of this). Judgment is a card that allowed for so much plusses in the Spellbook Deck that it was banned the first chance Konami got in 2013, now I wonder if Spellbooks would be strong enough to have this come back. Sure it’s a lot of advantage, but it also matters with what the cards you get do for you. I think summoning Jowgen is the bigger problem, Spellbook of Fate is fine as a hard once per turn since it’s already highly searchable without Judgment and you can retrieve it every turn basically. I’d say it probably won’t come back, and it’s easy to say it shouldn’t, but I wouldn’t say no to it mostly out of curiosity. 

Advanced Rating: 5/5

Art: 5/5 It’s not a book, so that’s a plus already.