What can I say about Sangan?  You run it or you’re a n00b.  The rest of the CotD crew has explained the joy of Sangan fairly concisely, but for those who are extremely new players I’ll explain things in detail.  If you’re not a new player, read it anyway: there is a slight difference of opinion on the finer points of Sangan, and after you’re done, you can print off my ramblings and use it to righteously bludgeon any n00b not running Sangan.  And always remember: a newbie is just a new player, but a n00b is a new player with a major attitude problem who thinks he’s the champ already and anyone who disagrees with him is “stupid”.

 

Stats: Sangan is a Level 3 Monster.  This is handy, since it means it can attack under a Gravity Bind.  While that’s a desperate move, I’ve had to use it more than once.  Obviously, the main thing is Sangan is easy enough to drop into play.

 

Sangan is a Dark/Fiend.  There’s some support for this kind of Monster, but largely it’s unimportant at the moment.  Essentially, it just means the occasional extra use for the card in decks that focus on Fiends, Dark Monsters, or Dark/Fiends.

 

1000 ATK isn’t much, but it is a respectable number given the potency of Sangan’s effect.  Again, Sangan can attack under a common stall card, Messenger of Peace.  I won a game once due to Sangan and Witch of the Black Forest constantly attacking under Messenger of Peace: it was quite funny and I think the final match of the local weekly tournament.  My opponent was using a Weenie Rush deck, but couldn’t keep any Monsters in play.  The 600 DEF is only good since this is a Monster meant to die: it won’t live through much in DEF mode.  Theoretically, this card could still work well with a higher ATK score, say upwards of 1450, and lose only a few obscure combos that no one uses.  The DEF score could be a few hundred points higher just because Sangan itself will rarely be attacked by anything punier than… itself.

 

Effect: Sangan is the second best Monster-based search card in the game, perhaps even the second best over-all.  The best is Witch of the Black Forest, able to get an incredible amount of small effect Monsters as well as some wicked beatsticks and even some very powerful, very big Monsters once it is sent from the field to the Graveyard.  Any Monster with a DEF of 1500 or less is a significant amount of the “competitive” card pool, though less than it used to be as Witch of the Black Forest is, thankfully, Banned so that only applies in theory to Advanced.   Sangan gets all the same small Monsters, plus a few Witch of the Black Forest misses since its limitation is on an ATK of 1500 or less.  The big difference is that Sangan can’t grab all those lovely beatsticks and other larger Monsters.  Still well worth Banning, but alas it’s still here and making it far too easy to get useful, small Monsters.

 

Uses and

Combinations: Simply put, small Monsters are played for their often ground breaking effects.  So the incredibly unlikely scenario that justifies someone not running Sangan is that one has no 1500 ATK (or less) Monster in one’s deck worth searching out and bringing to one’s hand.  This unlikely condition is the one that let’s you say “Sangan isn’t for my deck”.  Since you wouldn’t run a low ATK Monster unless it was pretty good, even if you’ve got just one, Sangan is worth it to get it out of your deck faster.  The exact increase in probability of getting a copy of a card is too much for me to calculate: it requires knowing the odds of Sangan being destroyed in a manner that triggers its effect, figuring out how much each card drawn before then alters the odds, etc.  Still, we know it goes up if your deck isn’t going past the 40 card minimum.

 

When you do have multiple useful cards it can search out, it often becomes a Swiss Army Knife, letting you get exactly what you need… though usually with a turn delay, and sometimes more.  Still, a good player is planning several turns in advance, so it’s far less restrictive than it sounds.  Need your Heavy Storm from your Graveyard for the win, Sangan gets Magician of Faith gets Heavy Storm.  Is a monster causing a problem?  Sangan gets D.D. Warrior Lady or Exiled Force too.  Oh, both cards have more effective “tutors” as such search cards are often called, but not one that can get either of them.  Sangan may be a hair slower than other methods due to how it works compared with Apprentice Magician (search out and Set Magician of Faith straight from the deck) or Reinforcements of the Army (play the Spell and get the Monster to hand A.S.A.P.) but that’s at the cost of such specialization.  Sangan can get so many things, even in the average deck, it has earned the title of “staple” (I’ve not seen a good deck that has a reason to leave out Sangan or the kinds of Monster it could fetch).

 

Ratings

 

Traditional: 4.75/5 – Activate Chaos Emperor Dragon with a Sangan you revived in play to clear the field and hands, and then use Sangan’s effect to get Yata-Garusa and lock the opponent down.  Yes, Witch of the Black Forest can be used as well: this is about increasing the odds of the combo and since its game winning, why not?

 

Advanced: 4.5/5 – A fourth of a point?  Really, is that necessary to bother mentioning?  Yes: Sangan, like most of its ilk, becomes more broken when it has access to other broken cards: Sangan for Yata-Garusa, Magical Scientist, etc.  So it’s not quite as potent here.  Indeed, some of the “brokenness” of other cards comes from being able to fetch them from the deck via Sangan.

 

Summary

As you may recall, I dislike awarding a “perfect” five for Yu-Gi-Oh cards because the sad fact of the matter is you never know when Konami will kick out a card that is supposed to be more balanced but ends up being more broken than its predecessor.  Sangan is something you should all be using unless you have some joke deck where it actually wouldn’t be useful, such as a mono-Trap deck.