Barrel Dragon – #MRD-126
Once per turn: You can target 1 monster your opponent controls; toss a coin 3 times and destroy it if at least 2 of the results are heads.
Date Reviewed: January 16th, 2022
Rating: 2.25
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is awful. 3 is average. 5 is excellent.
Reviews Below:
Crunch$G
From the Paradox Brothers’ ace to the ace of one Bandit Keith, we now look at Barrel Dragon.
Barrel Dragon is a Level 7 DARK Machine with 2600 ATK and 2200 DEF. Fine stats overall, DARK is great, and Machine is a good type. We got a once per turn effect, but a soft once per turn since this is a 2002 card that didn’t need an errata. Once per turn, you toss a coin three times and target a monster the opponent controls, said monster is destroyed if you hit at least 2 heads. So you’re relying on probability just to destroy a single monster and not just with a single coin toss, but with three. You already had 50/50 odds to hit heads a single time, but then you got to do it at least once more to get the effect, and you get no real bonus if you somehow hit 3 heads. The effect is still decent at least, since you do get to destroy a potential threat and it isn’t a very unlikely occurrence to hit 2 heads, but gambling cards rarely work to where I can only think of 2 cards off the top of my head to do with gambling to hit the banlist: Snipe Hunter and Sixth Sense, and those two use dice instead of coins. It’s rare to see decent coin toss cards, though the Barrel Dragon retrain we got in 2018 was actually somewhat decent. Barrel Dragon isn’t the worst card I’ve seen from years gone by, since it has an effect compared to most the other old anime ace monsters, it’s just the other anime aces got support to make them viable while Barrel Dragon was straight up retrained.
Advanced Rating: 2/5
Art: 3.5/5 for the nerf guns and 5/5 for the actual barrels.
Alex
Searcy
Barrel Dragon, slightly more practical than Gate Guardian, is up for Sunday review. Level 7, Dark/Dragon make sweet love to each other, and a solid attack at 2600. Optional equipped destruction destroying an opponent’s Monster you Target so long as 2 of your 3 coins come up Heads isn’t a terrible Effect, even now. There’s quicker and easier, and more guaranteed ways to go about this, but at the time, this was a big deal. Barrel Dragon has been outclassed over time, even in it’s own ‘family’ of Dragons, but I wouldn’t fault anyone who plays either/or/both for using one of these for fun. There’s certainly worse cards fitting the bill here you could play. It definitely suffers from a lack of any real central card specific support, but who knows what the future could bring.
Rating: 2.5/5
Art: Edited art gets a 3/5 but the one with actual barrel guns gets a 5/5
Pojo Bill
I know I don’t chime in very often. But as a collector of vintage / graded cards, maybe I can contribute some thoughts on recent sales on these throwback cards.
I’ve always like Barrel Dragon as a collectible. Bandit Keith was a fun early nemesis in the manga and anime. Barrel Dragon is a very memorable card from the anime. And the card art is very appealing. The art reminds of me some of the early Duel Masters cards.
In December 2021, a PSA 10 of a 1st Edition sold $1,491.66. This was a standard auction with 26 bids.
1st Edition PSA 9’s sell on eBay in the $650 range (based on 3 recent fourth quarter 2021 sales). And raw copies of 1st edition cards sell for about $50-$200 depending on condition.
1st Edition cards might be worthy of investment if you can pick them up cheap.
There are not too many sales of non 1st edition Barrel Dragon cards right now. I don’t think folks are getting them graded at present. It’s not cost effective to grade with PSA, and CGC is not grading them yet. But hopefully that will change in 2022.
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