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Pojo's Yu-Gi-Oh Card of the Day

Silent Swordsman LV 3
Ultra Rare

Negate the effects of your opponent's Spell Cards that designate this card. During your Standby Phase, send this face-up card to the Graveyard to Special Summon 1 "Silent Swordsman LV5" from your hand or Deck. (You can not activate this effect the turn this card is Normal Summoned, Special Summoned, or flipped face-up.)

Type - WARRIOR/EFFECT
Card Number - RDS-EN009

Card Ratings
Traditional:
Advanced:

Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale 1 being the worst.
3 ... average. 5 is the highest rating.

Date Reviewed - 02.23.05

JAELOVE	Silent Swordsman LV 3 Rated For: Silent Swordsman Deck There are sinister forces out there (not serpents, but forces mind you) that wish to hold back the rest of the LV monsters due to the sexy allure of the sturdy Horus collection. Those naysayers are actually mistakenly lollygagging on the rest of the LV monsters; though Mystic Swordsman and even Ultimate Insect have gotten some renown, Silent Swordsman seems to be carrying on rather silently. The silence surrounding the Silent Swordsmen group has been eerily silent. The first one, obviously, is Silent Swordsman LV 3, a monster that is searchable by Reinforcements of the Army, Shining Angel, and serves rather righteously as a LIGHT type monster. And while the effects of the advanced versions (LV 5 and 7) are inferior to the Horus line of monsters, they’re still not getting any respect. It’s almost like Chaos Sorcerer, a good card in its own right that was completely overshadowed by BLS and CED in Invasion of Chaos. You see, Silent Swordsman 3 in his own self is not the problem; the problem in the chain is Swordsman LV 5, something we’ll get to tomorrow. Silent Swordsman 3 is actually an awesome monster FOR ITS purpose because the savvy player will try to abuse the relatively painless nature of his transformability. Keep him on the field for one turn, alive, and you’ll be able to swap him into a 2300 attack monster for no resource cost. See, Swordsman 3 + Waboku, or Enemy Controller, or Book of Moon, or anything to basically protect him, equals 2 cards for a 2300 attack monster that’ll destroy your opponent’s monster next turn, basically turning Swordsman 3 into a pretty sweet deal. The problem, once again, lies with Swordsman 5’s mediocre effect. If you insist on running the full complement of Swordsmen, having a searchable 1000/1000 monster that can basically then “search”, at the cost of one defensive card, for the next one in your arsenal isn’t such a bad starting point. Advantage F/H: Yes yes, 1000/1000 is nearly worthless. If you can transform it into a 2300 attack monster, great! It basically cost one card (since LV 5 comes from deck). If you use it under any other circumstance, it’s generally garbage. Traditional Format: 5/10 Advanced Format: 5/10 Best Draw for the Situation: This card is rather decent in conjunction with almost any decent stall mechanism. It starts to lose effectiveness in the end game, and also if you have a Swordsman LV 5 in your hand, or the allotted amount in the graveyard (not a good thing). The Best Draw of this is correlated to the effect of Silent Swordsman LV 5, since (if that card had a better effect) this card would be valued more. Traditional Format: 4/10 Advanced Format: 4/10 Attributes/Effect: Being LIGHT is good and having nice, searchable stats is also a bonus. Of course the stats can’t be too weak, but that’s clearly the problem here. However, the mechanism for summoning (at the standby phase) is clearly the best one possible. One for one to get him out by his effect, and two for one to tribute summon LV 5 otherwise. Traditional: 8/10 A: 8/10 Dependability: The effect depends on whether you can get out a Swords, Book, Enemy Controller, Waboku, or whatnot. More often than not, you’ll likely be able to use this guy’s effect in the duel, whether it be through Shining Angel, or Call of the Haunted, or whatnot. Traditional: 5/10 A: 5/10 The Bottom Line: The system bears out what the card truly is; it’s a nice touch, but not really needed in the Silent Swordsman Build. A BAD Score-- Traditional: 2.75/5 Advanced: 2.75/5 ++ Contributes to Resource Management. -- Detracts from Field Control, On-Field Presence.
ExMinion OfDarkness	Silent Swordsman Lv. 3 For a first link in a Level Up series, he's not that bad. His attack is low (1000/1000), but he doesn't have to attack to get his next stage. He can't be targeted by Spells, which is always nice. Protect him for a turn, and you get the more powerful Lv. 5. He also has those nice bonuses of being a Warrior (searchable by the soon-to-be-restricted-to-one Reinforcements of the Army) and 1000/1000 (searchable by the soon-to-be-unbanned-and-restricted-to-one Witch and Sangan.) Let's not forget the Call of the Haunted combo -- bring it back at the end of your opponent's turn, before they can do anything to it, it's your Standby Phase, and out comes Lv. 5. 2/5 Traditional 3/5 Advanced
Coin Flip	Silent Swordsman LV3 is only the second most useless card this week. The entire effect of LV3 is based around protecting itself while getting LV5 out. Basically, fuse Ultimate Insect LV1 and Armed Dragon LV3 along with dabbling in Horus for art.... And you get this. I can't rate this. It's garbage outside of a Silent Swordsman deck and slightly less garbage inside. We just got Lightning Vortex along with a meta that focuses on traps and a run of decks that is saturated with Smashing Ground. Sorry, but the effect isn't that great.
Tranorix	Silent Swordsman LV3 For the rest of the week, we’ll be reviewing the Silent Swordsman family, starting with LV3. LV3 is, of course, the most useless of the bunch, boasting only 1000 ATK and an effect that probably won’t help it stay alive, because the stats are just too poor. It’s a Warrior, which is nice; and Level 3, which is nice. Being LIGHT is also good, and immunity to targeting Spells is good, but not great. It’ll stop Tribute to the Doomed, Change of Heart, Snatch Steal – probably some more, too, but those are probably the big ones. Keep in mind that this won’t stop Fissure or Smashing Ground, as those don’t designate targets. So, keep Swordsman alive for a turn and then you get to bring out LV5. And the rentsy adventure continues. Traditional – CCCC: 2/5 Traditional – Silent Swordsman Deck: 3.5/5 Advanced – CCWC: 2.5/5 Advanced – Silent Swordsman Deck: 3.5/5 OVERALL RATING: 2.9/5
Snapper	Silent Swordsman LV3 Today, and for the remainder of the week, we’ll be reviewing the Silent Swordsman monsters, a LV family that negates Spells. Silent Swordsman LV3 has unspectacular stats; 1000 ATK and DEF greatly limits the monsters it can destroy and the monsters it can defend against. It is also a Warrior however, giving it all sorts of power boosts and searching capabilities. LV3’s primary effect causes to negate any Spell Card the opponent uses on it, assuming it targets LV3. This gives LV3 immunity from the likes of Snatch Steal, Change of Heart, Book of Moon, and a few other cards. For the most part though this effect saves LV3 from being taken control of since most Spell cards your opponent would use on LV3 would do just that. Needless to say it isn’t a fantastic ability; maybe once in a great while your opponent will find themselves unable to use a Spell on it, but usually LV3’s effect will go unnoticed. The main use LV3 will ever receive is the main reason that each of the first stage of every LV evolution is used, and that is to summon the next. If LV3 is face-up on the field during your Standby Phase you can send LV3 to the Graveyard to Special Summon LV5 from your hand or Deck. This is one of the two different methods of summoning the next LV monster, and it is at times the worst of the two. The problem with this form is that you can’t use the effect during the turn LV3 was summoned, meaning it must survive one of your opponent’s turns, and be face-up by the end of it. Given LV3’s low ATK and DEF, it won’t put up much of a fight. This setback forces you to be a little clever; a Call of the Haunted or a Shining Angel during the opponent’s turn will allow LV3 to possibly escape the unfortunate promises of battle and make it capable of moving on to the next level during your Standby Phase. If you’d prefer sparing LV3 from battle by other means, Waboku and stalling cards like Swords of Revealing Light could do a world of good to LV3. And then there’s the obvious yet rarely used Level Up!, an easy way to not bother with having LV3 available during your Standby Phase. With all that said, LV3 is best reserved for Silent Swordsman Decks. Even then however it may be better if you just ignored LV3 and started at LV5. Advanced (SS Deck): 3/5. The main effect won’t be needed very often. Traditional (SS Deck): 3/5. The main effect won’t be needed very often. Overall (SS Deck): 3/5. Art: 2/5. Why is it green? Is it supposed to be Frankenstein?
Otaku	Another “quickie” article, I am afraid. At least it appears to be a simple card, so hopefully nothing will get lost. Silent Swordsman LV3 exists to get Silent Swordsman LV5 into play. I tried to come up with some good cards for this week so that the Silent Swordsman-line could be reviewed as a lump sum (like you’d expect to seem them played), but by the time I had some ideas, it was too late. As for this card itself, it has the following good points: Level 3 Light Warrior Negates the effects of opponent’s Spell Cards that designate this card. However, it lacks a good ATK/DEF: both are just 1000. It was doubtful that this card could be useful on its own without a lot higher, broken scores there, but 1500ATK would have been great, as it could be a decent attacker under cards like Level Limit-Area B. As is, it is still small enough to be fetched out via Shining Angel, which is great since its effect states that it must be sent to the Graveyard during your Standby phase to Special Summon Silent Swordsman LV5 from your hand or deck. As such, scoring this is pretty trivial. But since we have a system, I have to. Ratings Traditional: 1.25/5-In general, at least it can be Chaos Food. Obviously, it’s very useful for Silent Swordsman decks to get Silent Swordsman LV5 out faster (3/5 there). Advanced: 1.75/5-Ever so slightly more useful here, due to its low Level and ability to still be Chaos Food. Again, in an actual Silent Swordsman deck, it’s a lot better: 4/5. You can make do without it, but it’s pretty hard to understand why. Oh, the score is better since the deck itself is better here. Limited: 2.5/5-Decent fodder I suppose. Note that the other Silent Swordsman cards aren’t in the same set. Hmm… starting to sound a tad like Coin Flip: see his comments about cards that only belong in one deck from the Kaibaman CotD.