Unfortunately, it’s another busy week for me (coming off of a busy weekend no less), so I’ll be brief.

 

I love this card.  Why?  Simple: because it looks like Predaking.  Who/what is a Predaking?  Travel with me back to the mid 1980’s.  One of the most popular toy lines is… Transformers.  One of the “gestalts”, that is group of Transformers who merge to form a larger Transformers is the Predacons.  Some of you are probably lost right now, because they re-used the name “Predacon” in a later Transformers series.  The original Predacons, consisting of blatantly red and yellow, blatantly robotic versions of a lion, an eagle, a wolf, a rhino, and a bull merged to form Predaking.  Long story short I (and a few others) feel that the cartoon version (as was often the case, the cartoon versions of characters were better looking than the toy).

 

So, what about the actual card?

 

Light is good since it matches up to all the other V-Z bits.  You’d be surprised how useful a Luminous Spark can be: it screams “nuke me and ignore all the important Sets!” but if they leave it alone all the puny components get beefy.  Being a Machine is great: may be down to one Limiter Removal, but its there, and you can use Heavy Mech Support Platform to keep your huge, precious Fusion alive!  Note, I mean period, though if you can pull of the Limiter Removal/Heavy Mech Support Platform trick, more power to you.  It has a huge ATK that is about as big as you see on anything playable… likewise with the DEF.  Plus it has two great effects.  First, when you attack something, you can change its battle position and at least in this case, that means a Set Monster is changed to Face-Up ATK position plus it won’t trigger flip effects.  The next effect is perhaps more breathtaking: once during your turn, you must remove an opponent’s Monster from play.  Note that both effects are Trigger Effects and can be chained to.  Still pretty fantastic.

 

“Otaku, you fool, it’s a Fusion of two Fusions; do you know how hard that is to pull off?”

 

First, this is not really a “Fusion” in my book: the V-Z series basically demonstrate how the Fusion deck, irregardless of Fusions, was a brilliant idea for Yu-Gi-Oh (that should have been applied to rituals as well but that’s a topic for another day).  When you’ve got two Monsters in play which are compatible, you remove them and bring in their Fusion.  About half way though the game, you activate either Dimension Fusion or Return from the Different Dimension (I’d favor the latter since you may want to do this multiple times and you’d be removing some of their own creatures).  Grab the pieces you need to, then keep Fusing until you get to VWXYZ Dragon Catapult Cannon!

 

“But that will take too long!  And what if it gets killed after you bring it out!”

 

First, XYZ-Dragon Cannon is already a great Monster.  Sure it’s not as sick as it was when Night Assailant could give “infinite” destructive capabilities, but it’s still great.  Plus, you can always discard spare “pieces” then use a card like Skull Lair to remove them from play and destroy an opponent’s Monster… setting up for that Return from the Different Dimension.  Also, this Fusion can be actually be Special Summoned by revival cards if it was Fused via its effect!  And there’s still Heavy Mech Support Platform to make it hard to kill off in the first place.

 

Ratings

 

Traditional       : 1.5/5-Like my peers, I feel awkward rating a Fusion since at worst it takes up space… but here I am really rating how strong I feel a deck built around the V-Z series would be.  Anyway, way to fragile for this format.

 

Advanced        : 3.75/5-I feel a deck built around this could be pretty strong.

 

Limited            : 1/5-To bluff, since I didn’t think they re-released the XYZ series in this set. ;)