Stats                : At first I wasn’t go to break this down, but for once it matters.  This is a Trap, and normally that’s a bad thing… unless the Trap is so potent as to be a deck focus (like Exchange of the Spirit is) and is restricted to one per deck.  Then being a Trap is good.  Why?  Yes, you have to wait a turn to activate it, but there is a way to search it from your deck: A Cat of Ill Omen.  It does just that then places the Trap on the top of your deck (if Necrovalley is in play, it goes to your hand, but Necrovalley prevents Exchange of the Spirit from working).  You can also get Exchange of the Spirit back from the Graveyard via Mask of Darkness.  Spells have more recursion techniques, as do Monsters, but at least there is something.

 

Effect(s)            : So, what is the game breaking effect?  Exchange of the Spirit swaps both players’ decks with their Graveyards.  So whatever is in your Graveyard becomes you new deck, and your deck becomes your new Graveyard.  Naturally, that’d be broken entirely on its own, so there are two requirements.  A Life Point cost of 1000, which is usually not a concern, and more importantly a requirement that you have at least 15 cards in your Graveyard.  So now you see the hard part.  If you can quickly get the card in hand, and get 15 cards in your Graveyard, without doing that for your opponent, you can easily make them deck out.

 

Uses and

Combinations  : As stated, the difficulty is getting cards into your graveyard, but not into your opponent’s.  The two easiest methods I can think of would be Magical Merchant and Fiend Comedian.  The former of course means only Monsters get sent to the Graveyard and it goes until you hit a Spell or Trap.  The latter might risk discarding Exchange of Spirits… but as long as you have recursion handy, it’s probably worth it: Fiend Comedian has you call a coin flip: call it right, and you remove the opponent’s Graveyard from play.  Their entire Graveyard.  Call it wrong and you discard a number of cards from the top of your deck equal to the number of cards in their Graveyard.  As you can see, both are useful.  Now, it’s pure gain if you haven’t made it past 15 and you already have Exchange of the Spirit in hand/on the field (discarding from your deck is not like drawing from your deck – if you run out of cards while discarding, you’re still alive).

 

You probably want some Kycoo and maybe some Soul Release, because every other card that combos will tends to make both players chuck large amounts of cards into their Graveyard.  Serial Spell becomes rather nice with Soul Release (you won’t turn out as well with Card Destruction/Serial Spell since it fills your opponent’s discard more than yours).

 

Ratings

 

Traditional       : 4/5-Here there are a lot more supporting cards and I believe a very fast depletion deck can be made with it: possibly a single turn win.

 

Advanced        : 3.75/5-Here it’s primarily for use in its own deck, which requires a lot of work to make it flow, but if it does, it’s hard to stop.  It can also be added to certain other decks as sort of a weakened Fiber Jar.

 

Limited            : N/A-It is a promo that was handed out, not in the set.

 

Summary

Hopefully a nice addition to the Yu-Gi-Oh game in the U.S.  Glad it finally got here.