Hidden Armory – Yu-Gi-Oh! Throwback Thursday

WarlockBlitz

Throwing back to the den of forgotten mechanics is Hidden Armory. While it makes sense this week, if Evil Eye of Selene had been a Continuous Spell Card, it would function the same way. Anyway, you have to give up your Normal Summon/Set for the turn just to activate Hidden Armory. Then you have to send a card from the top of your deck to the grave as cost. Finally, you can add 1 Equip Spell from your deck or grave to your hand. The versatility is crucial here. Equip Spells are run so infrequently, Hidden Armory will always be live since the desired Equip Spell will only be in the deck or grave. I hate that you can’t loophole around the Normal Summon with Brilliant Fusion or something. There are decks that can use this, and it has a lot of future potential. However, there are usually better search options for the decks that use their own theme specific Equip Cards. Hidden Armory is certainly a very budget friendly card to help thin the deck. 

Score: 3/5     Art: 2/5 Kinda boring

Crunch$G

Throwback Thursday takes us to a card useful to grab many different Equip Spells, Hidden Armory.

Hidden Armory is a Normal Spell that sends the top card of your deck to the graveyard and then searches for any Equip Spell in your deck or graveyard, but you cannot Normal Summon or Set the turn you activate this card. Having a generic searcher for Equip Spells can go wrong without flaw, just like how Terraforming proves that searching for Field Spells so easy without a flaw is so good, so the downside of taking away your Normal Summon/Set really helps prevent this from being completely overpowered. Still, after you have monsters set up or if you know you can perform a lot of Special Summons without the Normal Summon, getting to an Equip Spell that might be useful to you is great, though niche since not many archetypes make use of Equip Spells. The last time I remember this being relevant was when Snatch Steal was legal for a format in 2015 since that card was and still is insanely powerful, so having a search for it was worth the Normal Summon. Now, I don’t know if many decks want to search an Equip Spell that bad. Noble Knights can get to them just fine and Evil Eyes have a searcher for Selene where said searcher has a Field Spell to search for it, and Terraforming/Metaverse searches for said Field Spell. Hidden Armory can maybe find a niche again one day, it isn’t a terrible card at all, just it doesn’t have a good home.

Advanced Rating: 3.5/5

Art: 3/5 There’s a lot of cool weapons and armor to choose from in here and you want the standard sword?

Alex
Searcy

Hidden Armory is our Throwback Thursday, which has one prior review:

Missed by Dark Paladin, but I’m here this time.  It was scored favorably then, and is a great card for the theme, if only to continue to talk about Evil Eye of Selene.  Using this lets you mill the top card of your Deck to add and Equip Magic card from your Deck to your Hand.  You’re then prevented from Normal Summoning or performing a Set in the same turn.

First, using this to fetch Selene is brilliant, because it is a legal loophole around the 1000 Lifepoints you have to pay to fetch Selene via its own effect.  Secondly, the card returns to your Hand, so you don’t have to Set it on the Field, again, via its own effect, and can equip it the turn you get it back.  This would work beautifully with Noble Knights, perhaps Six Samurai as well, and Ben Kai Decks would really like this too, I think.

But if your Deck is Equip heavy (something like Power Tool Dragon builds too maybe?) this is a wonderful addition for you.  The Normal Summon/Set loss is no big deal, so long as you have enough on the Field to Special Summon, (Link, XYZ, Synchro, whatever you happen to choose and/or run) and if you gain advantage from what you pull out and/or Equip, you’re ahead of the game after anyway.

Rating:  4/5

Art:  3.5/5  Rather bland, there are a few weapons in there, and this guy is going for a plain, boring sword?  Who knows what else is in there, but why go boring?  Maybe the chooser can’t see in that hole, I don’t know.  Benefit of the doubt.