Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon – #SDAZ-EN007
You can Special Summon this card (from your hand) by banishing 1 face-up Dragon monster you control. You can only Special Summon “Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon” once per turn this way. During your Main Phase: You can Special Summon 1 Dragon monster from your hand or GY, except “Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon”. You can only use this effect of “Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon” once per turn.
Date Reviewed: May 26th, 2022
Rating: 3.96
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,
Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon is our Throwback Thursday choice and a Dragon monster I could see in a Branded deck.
Unlimited now, REDMD you Special Summon via a banish of a face-up Dragon on your side of the field. The Branded/Albaz Fusion monsters are Dragon-Type and would benefit from being Special Summoned from the grave after having been properly summoned. Special Summoning any of them won’t get their best effect because they weren’t Fusion Summoned through REDMD, but it will get you a strong beatstick and once they hit the grave their End Phase effect will activate, which you can trigger by conducting a Fusion Summon using the Dragon from REDMD’s Special Summon effect or use that monster as link/xyz material.
It is a good monster that can be a power move for you if used correctly. The consistency depends on how many Dragon-Type monsters you are playing along with the copies of REDMD.
Advanced-3.5/5 Art-4/5
Until Next Time
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
In this week’s Throwback Thursday, we got another card we’ve looked at several times before, but never with the new errata it got to balance it out, so here’s the updated Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon.
REDMD is a Level 10 DARK Dragon with 2800 ATK and 2400 DEF. Great stats to always have, DARK and Dragon is probably the best combo to have in the game as well. First effect lets you Special Summon this card from the hand by banishing a face-up Dragon you control, making it very easy to get this on the board vs just Tribute Summoning it. You can only Special Summon this card once per turn this way, a clause that used to not be there and a downer now that it is there, but still this is very easy to summon. Second effect lets you Special Summon any Dragon not named Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon from your hand or graveyard, which is very nice to get a big body on board or another way to extend your plays. Another update with the errata is that this Special Summon effect is now a hard once per turn, which is another downer, but still makes for a powerful effect even if you can only use it once now. The card certainly isn’t what it once was now with both effects being only able to be used once a turn each, but honestly we were at a point where we were Special Summoning this more through other means than by its own effect anyways, so the first one isn’t as relevant as the second. Probably more of a brick now that its effects do have a once per turn on them, but it’s still a powerhouse and at least an errataed card that’s still playable.
Advanced Rating: 4/5
Art: 4/5 for the original art and 5/5 for the alternate art.
Alex
Searcy
Changing things up again this week, Throwback Thursday gives us Red Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon. A card that’s still quite powerful, has seen itself on various places on the Ban List over time as well. Dark/Dragon make sweet love to each other, Level 10 is great for big Extra Deck plays (usually Rank 10 Monsters, often Trains) and 2800 attack is solid enough as well. Insanely easy to drop via Special Summon from your Hand at the simple removal of a face-up Dragon you control, and appropriately limited to once per Turn how it can be brought out that way. Also, a free Dragon drop from your Hand OR Grave every Turn during your Main Phase, makes this guy a powerhouse about anywhere that can have a Dragon on the Field. He’s got a place in all kinds of Dragon builds, as well as niche and tech plays in others, REDMD still remains a force to be reckoned with.
Rating: 4/5
Art: 5/5 To appropriately quote Joey Wheeler ‘Man, I’d hate to run into THAT thing in a dark alley’.
Mighty
Vee
Throwback Thursday takes a break from the Albaz lore to bring us Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon, which was recently unlimited after being limited for many years, thanks to an erratum balancing its formerly nasty effects. As you might expect, it’s a level 10 DARK dragon monster (pretty much the only similarities to Albaz I suppose) and can be searched by a variety of cards, most notably by Black Metal Dragon. Despite being a more elite version of the hilariously terrible Red-Eyes Black Metal Dragon, it still has the same stat spread of 2800 attack and 2400 defense, which isn’t too bad, letting it serve as a beater in a pinch.
You can special summon Darkness Metal from your hand by banishing a dragon from your side of the field once per turn, though you could special summon it multiple times by other means (before the erratum, the summon was NOT once per turn; yikes!). This makes fielding Darkness Metal fairly simple, though it can potentially brick you if you don’t have any ways of getting dragons on the field. Darkness Metal’s other effect is also a hard once per turn (it used to be a soft once per turn, which didn’t matter if you could summon it multiple times…hmmm), allowing you to special summon any dragon monster from your hand or graveyard during the main phase. It’s not hard to see why Darkness Metal was so potent with the wide menagerie of generic dragon support; it’s a combo extender for most, if not all dragon decks, especially in Dragon Link decks since they can utilize their banished dragons and search Darkness Metal with Black Metal Dragon. Being a level 10 DARK dragon also gives it some synergy with Rokket and Dragonmaid decks. Overall a versatile card that, while not as strong as it was, still has some applications in combo-heavy dragon decks.
Advanced: 3.75/5
Art: 3.5/5 (Pictured) While I do like this art, I wish the pose was a tad more dynamic; the head shape is a little funny too, though I guess that’s just Red-Eyes in general.
4.75/5 (Alt Art) Now THIS is a majestic pose, so glad it got a gold reprint.
Ah, Red MD, what an incredibly powerful card you once were. This guy is one of the earliest retrains that I can remember. Back in the day, Dragons were THE deck to beat (and even in today’s game, you’ll occasionally see Dragon Link being a thing).
Poor Red MD recently got an errata that neutered him, making his effects Hard Once per Turns – which is fair, honestly. However, fair cards don’t see much play in competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! And as such, this guy hardly sees any play anymore.
For those who don’t know, Red MD is a powerful 2800 ATK monster that can easily Special Summon himself by Banishing a Dragon you control. Once per turn, you can Extend into another Dragon from Hand or Grave (no level restriction here). A free extender for Dragon strategies is really nice. I don’t really know what else to say about him. I really love this guy!
Advanced Rating – 4/5
Art – 3.5/5 (What a classic! We need more Joey support, by the way)
Therion
“Captain”
Tav
Dear Pojo Readers, for this Throwback Thursday we are reviewing a truly mighty monster and probably the most fearsome retrain of any Red-Eyes monster the game has ever seen in Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon! First released in the TCG as a Shonen Jump Promo card in 2009, this card has seen numerous reprints after that, the most recent being in the Albaz Strike structure deck, which conveniently fits our current theme week. This card has been limited before and only went unlimited a while ago, since it is truly a menace!
Let’s check the stats: Level 10, DARK-attribute, Dragon-Type (of course). 2800 Attack, 2400 Defense, as the original Red-Eyes Metal Dragon. You can normal summon REDMD (as it has been called many times) tributing two monsters or (more likely) special summon it any way you like, for example, using its inherent special summoning option. You can special summon REDMD by banishing one face-up dragon you control, but only once per turn that way. It also has an ignition effect that is a hard once-per-turn and lets you special summon one Dragon monster from your hand or graveyard during your main phase, except “Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon”. Obviously, this is best used to recur dragon monsters from your graveyard, as that offsets the card disadvantage caused by getting REDMD out.
This card has been used in the original Dragon Ruler Strategy, has been used with other super powerful cards like the now-banned Eclipse Wyvern and still sees play to this day in Dragon Links decks. It is searchable by a ton of effects and synergizes amazingly well with so many different effects like Dragon Ravine or Chaos Space.
Looking back, it seems crazy that when this came out, people didn’t even really care for it since Dragon monsters were not that supported and the Dragon Ruler insanity was not unleashed on us TCG players yet. Needless to say, this was Limited to 1 for such a long time for a very good reason.
Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon is easy to get out, has powerful stats, an amazing effect, is splashable in any strategy that heavily utilizes dragons and rewards you in quite a few ways for using it, with many monsters coming out that don’t even mind getting banished. The only thing you can hold against REDMD is probably that with the Master Rule change to ignition effects, its main phase summon cannot be immediately activated after you get it out which gives a window for spell speed 2 quick effects to destroy the dragon before it gets you anything on the board. Super Polymerization comes to mind, which, unfortunately, is quite popular right now. Still, under the right circumstances, this dragon does its thing and acts as a mighty extender with low opportunity costs in dragon decks.
I mean, you can tell a monster card is powerful if entire decks around it get hit by the banhammer and it finds its way back into decks again and again. Respect the Red!
Rating: 4,5/5
props:
strong stats, easy to summon, powerful attacker/extender monster, repeatable recursion, instant board presence, amazing synergy with banishment/graveyard effects, splashable in any dragon-based deck
slops:
ignition effect will not go off if it gets instantly removed after summoning, needs a lot of dragons
Art: 2/5
I am actually not such a huge fan of this artwork. This is a mix of the design from both the Red-Eyes Metal Dragon and the Red-Eyes Darkness Dragon, both of which I love for different reasons. The amazing glowing patterns from Darkness Dragon kinda get lost in this action shot. And I always thought it was strange that by evolving, the Red-Eyes loses its arms and claws, especially since the claws were such a prominent feature of both the original monster in season 1 of the anime as well as the metal version.
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