Cards for Black Feathers is draw power.  Since Yu-Gi-Oh still has a much smaller than average deck size and little in the way of actual resources to manage to pay for using cards, this could be really potent.  The cost of using Cards for Black Feathers is removing a Blackwing monster from your hand.  So you aren’t ahead any, you’ve just thinned your deck and possibly improved the quality of your hand.  Blackwing decks are already pretty potent so they added in a few other catches to keep from speeding the deck up.  You cannot Special Summon the turn you activate this.  You also can only use one per turn.

 

Excuse me?  Why bother playing this card then?  You hopefully improve the quality of your hand but not the quantity, lose the ability to pull off the “big thing” for Blackwing decks, and you can’t even hope to stack them to minimize the cost!  Sure it sets up for cards like Return from the Different Dimension but there are so many other ways to do that I don’t see this being very helpful.  I guess if you’re trying more of a “control” variant (that I didn’t know existed until reading it right before submitting this review)… it might be okay.  I still think I’d rather chance Hand Collapse over this, though.

 

Yes, this means it looks like pretty balanced draw power, something I say I want for this game, right?  Except its ignoring all the things that unbalances so much of what we already have (like minimum deck size and all the cards I think are too powerful for everyone’s own good).  I’ll bring up something I’ve mentioned in the past: I think Yu-Gi-Oh needs to learn from Pokémon.  In a similar situation Pokémon came up with an elegant solution: a new class of “Trainer” (Pokémon equivalent of a Spell Card) that could be used once per turn after set rotation effectively “banned” the major problem cards.  The new class of “Trainer” was called a “Supporter”.  You could have the super-potent effects Pokémon players loved but not all at once.  You could have massive Discard Pile (Pokémon’s version of the Graveyard) recursion, healing (a bit more useful in that game), draw, and search cards all in the same deck.  Variations in effects as well as actual themes created diversity: the best draw card for deck A wasn’t always the best for Deck B.

 

Oh well.

 

Ratings (Blackwing decks only)

 

Traditional: 1/5

 

Advanced: 2/5

 

I’d also like to add I’ll be selling quite a bit of my soon-to-be-former possessions on eBay.  You can take a look here at my second auction if you’re interested in a Nintendo GameCube with some accessories and 17 games!  Just a reminder, Pojo is in no way responsible for this and was merely kind enough to let me mention the auction here. ;)