Dark Magician of Chaos – #RA03-EN134
During the End Phase, if this card was Normal or Special Summoned this turn: You can target 1 Spell in your GY; add it to your hand. You can only use this effect of “Dark Magician of Chaos” once per turn. If this card destroys an opponent’s monster by battle, after damage calculation: Banish that opponent’s monster. If this face-up card would leave the field, banish it instead.
Date Reviewed: April 10th, 2025
Ratings: See Below
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is awful. 3 is average. 5 is excellent.
Reviews Below:
King of
Lullaby
Hello Pojo Fans,
Dark Magician of Chaos is a favorite in the old Yu-Gi-Oh! community and is our Throwback Thursday choice this week.
Once a powerhouse tech choice that every deck in existence was playing, after the errata it had some time where it disappeared from the meta. Now though, you could play DMoC with more ease than ever. At Level 8, DARK, Spellcaster, this wizard can be easily summoned with a host of different Special Summon effects throughout the game, ones that don’t even involve DARK or Spellcaster in their effect(s). Once summoned, you are guaranteed a Spell Card from your grave at the End Phase, but that was the whole reason DMoC saw its play drop in the first place: no more instant gratification. Adding that Spell to the hand immediately enabled it to be the key cog in the DDT OTK/FTK long LONG ago, and made it such a menace in the game. When you can use Destiny Draw, draw two, then play it again because you drew Monster Reborn and brought back DMoC, well that’s an obvious advantage for you. The monster also was 2800ATK and banished whatever he destroyed in battle rather than sending it to the grave. In the era of Invasion of Chaos, this guy was one of the terrors of the meta.
Now, there are more ways than ever to Special Summon and from anywhere, even the banished area. DMoC will be getting you a Spell in the End Phase and while that isn’t as ideal as it used to be, the fact that it can still help you avoid giving your opponent monsters in the grave, avoid triggering searchers that activate in the grave, and is still an easily summoned, highly supported monster is a testament to its great Type, Attribute, and effect(s) it was given. D.D.R him back and get a card back in the End Phase for your trouble at the worst.
Advanced- 4/5
Art- 4.5/5
Until Next Time,
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
With White Forest being known to recur cards, Throwback Thursday this week is a classic Spellcaster that can recur cards for you: Dark Magician of Chaos.
DMOC is a Level 8 DARK Spellcaster with 2800 ATK and 2600 DEF. Strong stats for a Level 8 monster, plus a DARK Spellcaster is always great. The first effect triggers during the End Phase of the turn it was Normal or Special Summoned, letting you target a Spell in your graveyard and add it back to your hand, with this effect being a HOPT. Back in the day, you got to add the card back instantly and there was no HOPT, making it much better if you could summon this, but now only a single copy can trigger and you likely won’t be able to use the Spell you grab back, though it’s at least recovering a Spell for next turn. The errata is likely due to how powerful it was with a card like Dimension Fusion and Monster Reborn, though the former is banned for 17 years now and the latter isn’t seen as often as it used to. It could have still been a solid play with Monster Reborn, though accessing this isn’t super easy. Dark Magician could through Dedication Through Light and Darkness, but they opt not to play that at the moment. The other two effects remained the same through the errata, it banishes any monster it destroys in battle and it’s banished when it leaves the field. Nice to banish the opponent’s monsters when you can instead of getting them in the graveyard, and the last part was fine when you had cards like Dimension Fusion and Return from the Different Dimension, but both of those are still banned. It’s not terrible with the errata, though I don’t know how broken it’d be without it. Maybe only the HOPT was necessary, but an End Phase recursion doesn’t kill this card dead like other erratas have in the past, it’s just finding a strategy that could use this.
Advanced Rating: 3/5 (4.25/5 without errata)
Art: 4.5/5 A more full art version of Magician of Black Chaos basically, which is cool.
Mighty
Vee
This week’s Throwback Thursday card is very embarrassing for me to talk about, because I was once humiliated for not knowing about its history when I first got back into Yugioh. It’s none other than Dark Magician of Chaos, a level 8 DARK Spellcaster monster that represents Magician of Black Chaos’s first appearance as an Effect monster. As far as reliable searchers go, there really aren’t any, but it can be weaved into Dark Magician decks with Dedication through Light and Darkness (if you’re crazy enough to play this card in 2025, anyway). As you might expect, it still shares the original Magician of Black Chaos’s stat spread of 2800 attack and 2600 defense– a little below average, but fine enough. This card was Limited way back in 2004 before being banned in 2008 for understandable reasons at the time, only fully coming back in 2016 after an errata. Don’t make my mistake!
We’ll talk about Chaos’s non-once per turn effects first for a change; after destroying an opponent’s monster by battle, Chaos will banish that monster. This was back when banishing was seen by Konami as permanently getting rid of a monster (even if evidently, that still wasn’t true thanks to cards like Dimension Fusion. Remember that card!). Stopping Graveyard floaters sounds like a good idea in the modern era, and while it is, but not when it’s attached to a battling effect! Speaking of banishing, Chaos will banish itself whenever it would leave the field. Again, in Konami’s infinite wisdom, this would’ve been considered a drawback at the time by the card designers, but thanks to Dimension Fusion, this was generally more of a benefit than a drawback. Finally, we get to Chaos’s (currently) sole hard once per turn effect, triggering during the End Phase to recycle any Spell from your Graveyard back to your hand if it was Normal or Special Sumoned that turn. It’s not anything we’ve seen before; plenty of monsters recycle during the End Phase, with varying degrees of usability. In its current form, the only real use of Chaos is to refill your hand with Spells in decks that either use them as discard fodder, like Witchcrafter, or in decks that can use them during your opponent’s turn from the hand, like Runick and Magical Musketeer. Of course, a milquetoast effect like this is not why Chaos was banned ages ago, as its pre-errata effect was not only not once per turn, but also triggered immediately on summon instead of during the End Phase. That means you could repeatedly summon it to loop almost any Spell you wanted– Monster Reborn, Painful Choice, Pot of Greed, you name it. You could also loop Dimension Fusion, which will conveniently revive Chaos from banishment and let you recycle…Dimension Fusion! The main strategies Chaos would enable were degenerate loops and FTKs by using Monster Gate and Reasoning to field it, then recycle various Spells and Dimension Fusion to get tribute fodder for Cannon Soldier or Catapult Turtle (hey, we might see those guys under scrutiny again soon…). Decks that are good at spitting out fodder without their Normal Summon, like, fittingly, Chaos Control, could also just Tribute Summon Chaos. If it magically was reverted to its pre-errata effect right now, it would almost certainly be used in meme FTKs and as a potentially vicious tech in Dark Magician, but lacking Dimension Fusion and being quite hard to access limits its applications. No points for guessing how much play this shell of a man sees in modern times (answer: zero), but thinking about its pre-errata effect is a fun reminder of the dangers of non-once per turn generic effects.
+Generic Spell recycle has niche uses
+Can help get rid of Graveyard floaters
-Delayed recycle has very few applications in most modern decks
-Difficult to access and field outside of Dark Magician
Advanced: 2/5 (Post-errata) 4/5 (Pre-errata)
Art: 3.75/5 It has a bit of the old card jank if you look too closely, but it still looks really good, especially when you could only see the top half of the old Black Chaos…
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