Ordeal of Traveler
is a defensive Trap that I have a strange
fondness for. It is Continuous Trap, making it
of course vulnerable to S/T removal. On the
bright side it has no cost to keep it in play,
and the Activation requirement is readily met.
Ordeal of Traveler’s actual effect is
that when an opponent declares an attack, you
may choose to let them attempt to guess whether
one random card from your hand is a Monster, a
Spell, or a Trap; if they guess wrong, it
returns the attacking Monster to the owner’s
hand. It can’t be activated if you have no
cards in hand. I don’t know what would happen
if somehow your hand were emptied before it
resolved. Obviously if your hand has any card
type in majority, the odds of the opponent
guessing the right type go up. Ideally your
hand would be six cards, consisting of all easy
to burn cards so that if your opponent uses
Confiscation or another discarding effect
you can shift down to the appropriate three
cards with ease the next turn. Realistically,
three will be what you’ll strive for, one of
each of the types.
A two thirds chance of not only negating an
attack but bouncing the attacker is very
potent. Not unlike Fairy Box, even
though the opponent can succeed in attacking,
the possibility of their attack not only being
ruined but of utterly backfiring will lead many
to try to wait it out. There is an exception:
Breaker the Magical Warrior and similar
Monsters who like being bounced will obviously
charge ahead recklessly, since either the attack
goes through or they get bounced and can try to
re-use their effect. If the opponent does
attack, they are risking a Monster, and as we
all know Monsters in play are very valuable
since normally they are the hardest cards to get
into play and rarely can be utilized until after
they are Summoned.
The card requires a fairly “balanced” deck in
terms of card count. Not limited to running
even amounts of each kind of card, but rather
having a deck where cards can sit in your hand
when you need them too, or be played when you
need them to be. You want enough Monsters that
you can keep one in hand, but also just like in
any other deck you want to be Summoning at least
once a turn. The same goes for Spells and
Traps: thankfully if you’re running three of
these, you’re apt to get two at once and
hopefully the “spare” can become your default
“hand” Trap. Then again, you can activate
multiple copies of Ordeal of Traveler
when the opponent declares their attack, so if
Heavy Storm has already been used and
unlikely to be recycled, you might want to have
multiples in play.
All in all this appears to be a good, balanced
card even if it is luck dependant. You can
easily get it from Structure Deck 7 (Invincible
Fortress, the Earth/Rock one)
Ratings
Traditional:
1/5 – No, too much S/T removal.
Advanced:
3.25/5 – Nice, but hurt by the overabundance of
removal and negation. This might be useful with
all the Special Summons in the game right now,
though: not all of them are easy to redo like
Cyber Dragon.
