Sorry to say that it appears this is another one of those CotDs where I have to spend a lot of time explaining why I disagree with everyone and barely seem to discuss the card being reviewed.

 

Bottomless Trap Hole is a solid card and I guess some expect its playability to go back up.  If Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys sees more play, it would make more sense.  I would still worry about most decks running Return From the Different Dimension.  Why am I still worried about Return?  Chaos Sorcerer is gone from the format, so Return isn’t broken anymore, right?

 

Wrong.  Chaos Sorcerer didn’t break return.  If anything, Return made Chaos Sorcerer more broken (most of the apparent “brokenness” of Chaos Sorcerer was owed to condition and card pool… but that I something for an article, not this CotD).

 

Those who read regularly what I write should remember I am not some World Championship player.  Nor am I a player who regularly T8s in Regional Championships.  I used to do well in local events, but college took up most of my time and money and I had to stop… and then I realized how bad the Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments were and stopped participating.  So while I still play, I just play with my friends, mostly on-line, testing what decks we fancy.  Oh, we still test ourselves against CC decks.  We don’t like playing a CC deck or particularly facing them since so often it ends up being one-sided, but the results of our play-testing would be invalid if we never faced the established, dominant decks.

 

This is why I find the demise of Return to be greatly exaggerated.  While experimenting with lesser played cards I realized how very, very broken Return was.  I started to regularly pull off OTKs with a Dinosaur deck built around Tyranno Infinity, and that is when I started to see how many useful cards can be used that have “remove X Monsters from your Graveyard” costs.  Long ago, Bazoo the Soul-Eater and Skull Lair were common deck sites, before they received an errata that let them only remove Monsters.  Well, we are in a format where more Monsters are seeing play: we’ve been it for quite some time now.  Just about any deck can abuse Return by simply adding Bazoo or Skull Lair.  Of course, so many decks don’t need to use them, they have their own handy tricks.  Insects have Skull Dozer, Fiends have long had Dark Necrofear, and most Attributes have at least one good, solid, Monster that can only be initially Special Summoned by removing a Monster or two from the Graveyard of the same Attribute.  There are a few really handy Monsters like Strike Ninja and Freed the Brave Wanderer who can remove Monsters as part of their effect.  Finally, you have D.D. Warrior Lady and D.D. Assailant: expect the latter to see play again soon.  Bringing them back against for a go, plus the one or two Monsters that probably were removed by your opponent’s copy of them, are often worth a Return.  Combining all of this together, you can see why I was stunned that some players, skilled players who are clearly my betters when it comes to most aspects of the game, have made it seem like Return was played largely because of all the Monsters your opponent’s Chaos Sorcerer removed… forgetting that most players dealt with Chaos Sorcerer a turn or two after it hit the field, given the opponent only time to remove a Monster or two at most per Chaos Sorcerer.  I don’t think Return would be thought of as that good if you had to wait that long to abuse it.

 

So, Bottomless Trap Hole might be bad if it helps set up for Return.  That might not matter.  It might be quite good because it might be needed to counter Phoenix.  That might not matter either, because that might not happen.  Oh, and it can counter Return, except since Return is often used as a OTK, just like against a Stein player, you shouldn’t expect to have a Trap down when the opponent uses Return.

 

In the end, it’s just like yesterday: there are many valid reasons to run Bottomless Trap Hole.  Just make sure they apply to you and that its not because a few people are convinced the metagame has to turn out a certain way.

 

Ratings

 

Traditional: 1.5/5 – Too much S/T removal.

 

Advanced: 3.75/5 – That’s a usage based score: I think the actual card is a bit too good, since you’re trading an easily replaced Trap for a not so easily replaced Monster.