Grand Spiritual Art – Ichirin – Yu-Gi-Oh! Review

King of
Lullaby

Hello Pojo Fans,

Grand Spiritual Art – Ichirin starts us off on our Spiritual Arts/Possessed week.

The archetypes Field Spell is primarily a good way of controlling your opponents moves in regards to their monster effects. You need that 1500DEF monster to benefit from this, so keeping one of the Familiar monsters, or any monster with DEF of 1500 on the field will achieve this. Having to play around this makes going for big plays tougher for your opponent, so many big plays can start with a simple Normal Summon, and with GSA-I it isn’t the case. The search ability each turn is an even swap to get you to what you need for that specific turn. Spiritual Art never had great search capabilities so this addresses a need of their while keeping it balanced. Combining two needed parts of the archetype into one card eliminates the need to make two different cards to take up slots the archetype could use for other resources.

Grand Spiritual Art – Ichirin does things Spiritual Arts needed, so it is a must in the archetype.

Advanced-3.5/5     Art-4/5

Until Next Time
KingofLullaby

Crunch$G

Time to look at some new Charmer support that we’ve received over the last few years leading up to the Structure Deck that got 3rd place in last year’s Structure Deck poll in the OCG. We start with a new Field Spell meant to support Charmers, Grand Spiritual Art – Ichirin.

Ichirin is a Field Spell that negates the first Monster Effect that resolves each turn while you control a Spellcaster with 1500 DEF. Would of easily preferred if the negation was optional for when you wanted to negate an effect, this way your opponent has to play more around this. Here your opponent can use a bait effect to get the mandatory negation out of the way. Still makes your opponent strategically plan out their plays, but it would of been more detrimental to the opponent if you negated at your wish, but then you could see the opponent run over your Monster since Charmers and Familiar-Possessed aren’t too strong without boosts. The second effect during the Main Phase lets you reveal a Spellcaster in your hand to search for a Monster with the same Attribute and a statline of 1500/200 and then you shuffle the revealed Monster into the Deck. This is meant to get to the Familiars that Special Summon themselves like Inari Fire, Jigobyte, Nefarious Archfiend Eater of Nefariousness, or Ranryu, so having specific searchers for those are nice. We’re still missing the Familiar forms of the LIGHT and DARK Charmer and Familiar-Possessed cards, but I’d hope we get those soon. For now you work with EARTH, WIND, FIRE, and WATER. Putting the Monster back doesn’t feel necessary since what you’re searching likely isn’t too powerful, but I get the balancing potentially considering we got stronger Familiars that are easy to summon now. The second effect is a hard once per turn, cause Konami will limit you on searching when they can now. We’ve seen how infinite searching can be now. Ichirin is an okay card to support the Charmer strategy overall, the card has downsides, but enough upside to try and play.

Advanced Rating: 3.25/5

Art: 4/5 Not overly interesting, but pretty at least.

Alex
Searcy

Grand Spritual Art-Ichirin is a fun Theme Magic card for a Theme.  So you get to negate the resolution of your opponent’s first Monster effect each turn so long as you control a Spellcaster with 1500 defense.  As you may or may not recall, that is a stamp of the Monsters in this Theme, so if you control a Monster, you should be able to accomplish this, and negation is always a welcome thing.  The second effect is a selective Magical Mallet effect of sorts letting you reveal a Spellcaster from your Hand (any, not just one in the Theme, but likely to be) to swap for another one, so long as it has 1500 attack and 200 defense.  Still playing incredibly well in the Theme letting you instantly trade each turn one Monster you don’t need presently for one you do is lovely.  The revealed card goes back to your Deck and then is shuffled.  Which is the best Deck return effect, as by not putting back on top, you’re not Drawing a card you didn’t want already again the next turn.  The latter effect is once per turn, as it should be, or you’re thinning too fast, and getting too many resources too quickly.  This card provides negation and resources at least once a turn each, so long as you meet criteria.  Very solid.

Rating:  3.75/5

Art:  4/5  I like the colors in this picture, kinda kaleidoscopic to me, but Inchirin means flower in Japanese, and I’m not getting that here.