Dark Simorgh – #OP17-EN016
While face-up on the field, this card is also WIND-Attribute. If this card is in your hand: You can banish 1 DARK and 1 WIND monster from your GY; Special Summon this card. If this card is in your GY: You can banish 1 DARK and 1 WIND monster from your hand; Special Summon this card. Your opponent cannot Set cards.
Date Reviewed: June 27th, 2024
Rating: 3.13
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 Simorgh is our Throwback Thursday choice and a card Floowandereeze were using in their Side Deck.
Big DARK Winged-Best from a good bit ago, Dark Simorgh was also a WIND Attribute because of its Special Summon ability. While in the graveyard or hand, Dark Simorgh only needed a WIND and a DARK to be banished to Special Summon itself to the field, which in 2009 was incredible. While there weren’t many good archetypes that were WIND, there were plenty of DARK archetypes that could find some WIND monsters to tech in to make this work. Floowandereeze don’t run any DARK monsters naturally in their archetype, and while you could see some being tech cards, its is a good thing Dark Simorgh can also be Tribute Summoned, which is how Floowandereeze have benefited from its use.
Once on the field, Dark Simorgh locks down setting of any cards. Again, when debuting in 2009, the card pool and mechanics were not as advanced as they are today. If you got hit with Dark Simorgh you could be in real trouble depending on your deck and the game state. Not being able to set Spell/Trap cards meant your battle traps were useless if in your hand, and there weren’t any hand traps either, so no Nibiru, heck, even the Kaiju monsters were years away. With Anti-Spell Fragrance it locked your opponent out of Spells and Traps entirely.
Now though, battle traps are all-but a thing of the past, the card pool is vastly bigger, and while the expansion has given Dark Simorgh far-greater availability to be useful, players aren’t playing defensive or setting as much as they used to. There are still decks that can play this card as we’ve seen and have success with it as a tech card. Paired with tomorrow’s card though, Dark Simorgh and it would take Spell/Trap cards away from the opponent entirely until they left the field. Kinda tough to make headway when two-thirds of the cards available are suddenly made unplayable for you.
Advanced- 3/5 Art- 3/5
Until Next Time,
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
Not a real good obvious choice for Throwback Thursday this week, so instead just go with a card to use with tomorrow’s card (if you could make that work): Dark Simorgh.
Dark Simorgh is a Level 7 DARK Winged Beast with 2700 ATK and 1000 DEF. ATK is pretty good, DARK is strong, and Winged Beast has nice support. While face-up on the field, it is also treated as a WIND monster, for any extra value that might add. If this card is in your hand, you can banish a WIND and a DARK from your graveyard to Special Summon this card, and same goes if it’s in the graveyard, just banishing from the hand instead. You’ll more likely be summoning this from the hand. You don’t see WIND and DARK monsters together often enough to where Dark Simorgh becomes commonplace, but it’s at least nice to have a Special Summon condition, as interesting as it is. The final effect just prevents the opponent from setting cards. Basically, this means the opponent can’t use most Traps, Quick-Play Spells can’t be set to use on your turn, and monsters must be Normal Summoned into Attack Position (though the latter isn’t as relevant in modern Yu-Gi-Oh as it was in the past). This could be lethal with Anti-Spell Fragrance, but now that’s at 1, so very inconsistent to rely on. This is best used against Trap Decks in 2024 really, which is why you might see Floowandereeze run this in the side, as a searchable counter to those strategies. In that regard, it’s a fine card. Simorgh was modernized into an archetype not long ago, and while they can use this card, it might not even be best there. It’ll be nice for Dark Simorgh to pop up again and be relevant, but for now it’s a fine card.
Advanced Rating: 3.5/5
Art: 4.5/5 Basically took the original Simorgh and swapped the green for black, which honestly makes for a better look.
Mighty
Vee
Throwback Thursday is a card that made blips on the radar after the reveal of tomorrow’s card– and a card that once again tested the reading comprehension of the Yugioh community. Dark Simorgh is a level 7 DARK Winged Beast monster, part of the Simorgh archetype and thus searchable with Simorgh, Bird of Bringing, Simorgh Onslaught, and, most importantly, Floowandereeze & Eglen, but a bunch of other random cards can search it, like various Ninja cards and Animadorned Archosaur. Dark Simorgh has fairly typical stats for a Simorgh monster, with a decent 2700 attack but a paltry 1000 defense. Lame!
One of the few of its kind, Dark Simorgh gains the WIND attribute while it’s on the field; Dark Simorgh being DARK is only really relevant for Simorgh Onslaught, though being WIND is nice since Harpie’s Feather Storm will be live, and it’ll actually have synergy with a lot of WIND Winged Beast support cards. Dark Simorgh can Special Summon itself from your hand as long as you banish a WIND and DARK monster from your Graveyard; conversely, it can also Special Summon itself from the Graveyard by banishing a WIND and DARK monster from, where else, you hand. It’s not once per turn, which sounds crazy on paper, but you’ll bleed advantage very quickly if you keep trying to do it, and you still have to set it up in the first place (Dragon Ruler fans still trying to make it work know how horrendous this can be). Dark Simorgh’s bread and butter effect is, of course, its soft floodgate, which simply prevents your opponent from setting cards. It’ll effectively shut down most Traps and reduce the effectiveness of some Quick-Play Spells, but for full effect you’ll need to pair it with something else. In ancient times, Ninja decks could turbo out Dark Simorgh and if you managed to hard open Anti-Spell Fragrance, that would completely lock down your opponent’s Spell and Trap cards since they need to set their backrow first (which can also be accomplished if you use tomorrow’s card!). While stopping backrow has aged quite well, going out of your way to specifically use Dark Simorgh hasn’t; the few decks that can bring out Dark Simorgh, like Floowandereeze and the aforementioned Ninja, have much better things to do than a floodgate that might not even be effective.
+Floodgate can still potentially cheese certain decks
+Reasonably accessible in Simorgh and Floowandereeze
-Not high-impact without help from Anti-Spell Fragrance or Diabellze the Original Sinkeeper
-Summoning condition is very heavy
Advanced: 3/5
Art: 3.25/5 I mean, he’s Simorgh and he’s dark, need I say more?
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