Summoned Skull – #MRD-003
A fiend with dark powers for confusing the enemy. Among the Fiend-Type monsters, this monster boasts considerable force.
(This card is always treated as an “Archfiend” card.)
Date Reviewed: March 26th, 2022
Rating: 1.75
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is awful. 3 is average. 5 is excellent.
Reviews Below:
Crunch$G
Here’s an iconic monster with one of the classic localization issues the TCG has a ton of: Suummoned Skull.
Summoned Skull is a Level 6 DARK Fiend Normal with 2500 ATK and 1200 DEF. 2500 was basically the peak for Level 6s you could Normal Summon for a long time until we got Frostasaurus with 2600 ATK, but by then just pure stats were outdated. This also has the great combo of DARK and Fiend. So he’s a vanilla monster, but he’s always treated as an Archfiend card because Konami messed up in 2002 and didn’t put Archfiend in the name, despite later getting other Archfiend cards that would support this. Of course Konami wasn’t gonna change an iconic name like Summoned Skull, so that’s why the line of text was added instead. Like I said already, 2500 ATK was the peak for Level 6s for a while and that was all this card needed in the earliest stages of the game to be a meta force. Getting Dark Magician’s ATK with 1 less tribute was pretty good since your opponent would have to go for Blue-Eyes White Dragon or several of the 2-tribute Effect Monsters they could potentially play if they wanted to get over this with pure stats. Now, this doesn’t truly age well, but with Archfiend Black Skull Dragon in the Red-Eyes Deck, this is still your best Fusion Material to summon that.
Advanced Rating: 2/5
Art: 5/5 for the original art, 4.5/5 for the Anniversary art, 4/5 for the Duelist Pack Yugi art, and 4.5/5 for the Asia Championship 2001 art that 2nd place chose
Alex
Searcy
Sometimes between and among names and translations, things change…and for a long time, they don’t matter. (Ask Frog the Jam, for another instance). For a LONG time, it didn’t matter for Summoned Skull, who does benefit from some Archfiend support as he’s technically considered an Archfiend card. Just something to note. Summoned Skull, as he likes to be called stateside, was one of the OG boss Monsters in the game. 2500 off 1-tribute (people played BEWD just for 3000 attack, despite no Effect in the LoB days friends) and just as often these cards got dumped just to be revived via Reborn the Monster…erm…Monster Reborn. But then we started getting 1-tribute Monsters, although weaker, with Effects. Sometimes amazing Effects (E.G. Airknight, Jinzo, Vampire Lord) and despite Skull being more powerful, and even Dark, he was slowly losing his place, as he was just a 2500 body. Skull also benefits from being Dark, of course, as well as Fiend. The 1200 defense is troublesome. He does have some random, oddly specific support of his own, nothing on a DM level or anything, but it exists. Without an Effect, it’s hard to really justify using him even at 2500 in much of anything outside casual.
Rating: 1.5/5
Art: 4/5 It’s iconic, more from all the anime use, but still cool.
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