Nirvana High Paladin – Yu-Gi-Oh! Review: Alex’s 15th Anniversary on Pojo

Alex
Searcy

I mentioned earlier this week how it’d been a while since we looked at a Pendulum Monster.  Well here’s quite the rarity in a Synchro/Pendulum Monster.  Nirvana High Paladin is a Level 10, Dark, Spellcaster Synchro Monster, with a very great 3300 attack (and 2500 defense) who is also an 8 on the Pendulum Scale.  Synchro Summon is performed here by 1 Tuner and one or more non-Tuner Synchro Monsters.  

So you have to go through a bit of work to bring this guy out, but we all ready went through ages ago in the game bringing out Synchros using other Synchros as Material.  As for the Synchro side of things here, you’re allowed to use a Pendulum Summoned Pendulum Monster you control as a Tuner.  Which makes sense given the combination here, and can be helpful.

If Synchro Summoned in that manner, you get to add a card (any card) from your Graveyard to your Hand.  A free recycled resource is never a bad thing, so I’m liking that.  Next, when this card destroys a Monster in Battle, you can (having an option is always fun) halve your opponent’s Lifepoints.  WOW, that’s phenomenal.  Finally, if destroyed by Battle or Effect, place it in the Pendulum Zone.

Battle OR Effect, by either player, keeps it on the Field.  So in the Pendulum Zone, what does it do?  If a Pendulum you control attacks, it can’t be destroyed and you take no Damage.  Also, worth noting, that effect is NOT once per turn.  At the end of the Damage Step, if a Pendulum of your attacked, all your opponent’s Monsters lose attack equal to said attacking Monster’s attack until the End of the Turn.

That’s rather awesome as well.  Making things easier to destroy, and remembering your Pendulum(s) won’t take Damage or be destroyed as is.  This card is certainly strong enough to do things, and dangerous enough on the Monster side to be a force to be reckoned with.  The Pendulum side only adds strength in a constructed build using Pendulums, of course, but it still works.  

Rating:  5/5

Art:  5/5 also, I love EVERYTHING about this.  The background, the colors, the outfit, this is just amazing.

King of
Lullaby

Hello Pojo Fans,

Nirvana High Paladin has a great deal of text on it, thank goodness it’s the end of the week.

As a Pendulum Scale, 8 isn’t a bad scale to have. The protection it offers Pendulum Monsters when they attack is a great blanket effect for them to have. The added ability to drop your opponents monsters ATK by that Pendulum Monsters ATK after it attacked gives your other monsters an easier road to travel to field advantage.

As a Monster it can be summoned by any deck that plays Tuner monsters. As a Pendulum support card it makes sense that you can use a Pendulum Summoned Pendulum Monster as a Tuner, giving you more options for this cards summon. For your trouble you get any card from your grave to your hand. That is game-breaker/finisher effect. I’ll take my Raigeki back with a 3300ATK monster on the field. If you have Nirvana in the Pendulum Zone and on the field you can use a different Pendulum Monster to lower the ATK of monsters on your opponents side for even more damage, or ensure all monsters have 0ATK by using Nirvana to attack. “You can halve your opponent’s LP”, nothing about that effect is bad. For merely destroying a monster with Nirvana by battle you can drop your opponent by half each time. This effect isn’t a hard once per turn, so if you were bold and say, used Diffusion Wave-Motion, your opponent could be down to less than 1000LP by the end of your turn. Going back into the Pendulum Zone when destroyed as a monster ensures you will have a high scale to use for a Pendulum Summon later (unless you’d filled your scales already).

This card has to be used in Pendulums. It protects and can help lower opponents ATK to give your lower Pendulum ATK monsters better odds at staying on the field as you set up your summons. Pendulums can swarm the field and being able to turn a non-Tuner into a Tuner off a Pendulum Summon means you won’t have to find a Tuner. Yes, other decks can make this card, some easier than others. Heck, two “Ghost Girl” hand traps and any Level 4 make this card, but no one would commit resources like that for a summon, this was just an example that it is possible outside Pendulums.

Advanced-3.5/5     Art-5/5

Until Next Time
KingofLullaby

Crunch$G

I did say sometimes I appreciated Pendulums not being monstrous walls of text (we had enough of that before PSCT came around), but I don’t hate them and they’re fine in small doses, especially on boss monsters or if the text at least feels like everything offers something for you. Today we got a lot to look at with the first Pendulum Synchro in Nirvana High Paladin, and in the case of Extra Deck Pendulums I’ll look at the monster qualities first since they typically have to be summoned first before getting to the Pendulum Scale.

Nirvana High Paladin as a monster is a Level 10 DARK Spellcaster Synchro with 3300 ATK and 2500 DEF. Those are two numbers that will never be considered low really, DARK and Spellcaster always go well together, and Level 10 is something I typically don’t want to see on Pendulums since Scales higher than 10 are hard to come by without restrictions. The summoning requirements are any Tuner and any non-Tuner Synchro(s), and if Crystal Wing can still be good with that requirement, no reason for it to prevent this from being playable. For this card’s Synchro Summon, you can also use a Pendulum Summoned Pendulum Monster as the Tuner, so that’s a good replacement when you’re short in the Tuner department. If summoned using said Pendulum Summoned Pendulum Monster Tuner, you can target any card in your graveyard and add it to your hand. Enlightenment Paladin was similar, but only with Spells. This lets you get back literally anything in the graveyard, which won’t be too full since Pendulums go to the Extra Deck more often, but I’m sure there are still cards in the grave you’d want back. In Pendulums you’d probably get back something you used for an Xyz Material, or a powerful Spell like Pendulum Call or Duelist Alliance. When this monster destroys an opponent’s monster by battle, you can halve the opponent’s LP. I know you might want to avoid a Solemn with this, but I’m sure that won’t stop you from activating this unless you know the Solemn is there and you don’t want to use this to bait it, so it kinda feels like the “you can” is unnecessary. You would probably love to lower the opponent’s LP every chance you get, unless they play a Deck that needs low LP which are few and far between. It’s a very powerful effect the more LP the opponent has, and it’s easy to pull off. The final effect is where if this card is destroyed by battle or card effect in the Monster Zone, you can place this card in the Pendulum Zone, so that means it’s a good transition to get into the Pendulum aspects of this card.

Nirvana High Paladin is a Scale 8, which is good on the high side. For the Pendulum Effect, if a Pendulum Monster you control attacks, you can make that monster unable to be destroyed in that battle and you take no damage in that battle, which is a nice quality to have even if it is from you attacking. You can at least use it before the opponent uses an ATK modifier, so no reason to not use it since there isn’t a downside for using it and you simply destroy the opponent’s monster. The second part is probably useful for the first effect, but you don’t have to use the first one to get the second. It allows you to debuff all your opponent’s monster’s ATK by the ATK of the attacking monster at the end of the Damage Step. So the first effect in combination with this helps you get over bigger monsters, which is great. Overall these effects don’t sound so powerful for what you put into summoning it and needing to have an empty Pendulum Zone to get this there when it was destroyed, but that’s until you realize neither effect has a once per turn clause. You can easily get a monster to 0 ATK with this, which allows for big damage with Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon. It is a handy effect, even if you need to rely on it being destroyed while you don’t have 2 cards in the Scales, but at least it can be you destroying it. Nirvana High Paladin overall does have a bunch of good effects, even if it does take a fair amount of effort to get into and especially to use the best effect, but it’s far from terrible and a card that could be fun to have a Deck built around it. I wish it could be a staple for Pendulum Decks, but for now those Pendulum Decks kinda have to go out of their way to summon this if they aren’t built for it, but maybe a good Pendulum Deck can summon it without going through hoops and feeling like they’re going out of their way to make what can be a suboptimal play. It’s a really cool card.

Advanced Rating: 3.5/5

Art: 5/5 I’m completely sold on the artwork, stings it was only used once in the anime. It was worthy of being a cover card for The Dark Illusion.