Red-Eyes Black Dragon – #LOB-070
A ferocious dragon with a deadly attack.
Date Reviewed: March 29th, 2022
Rating: 3.06
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,
Red-Eyes Black Dragon is Joey’s signature card and was about on the same level as Dark Magician in terms of usefulness when first released.
Unlike Dark Magician who had to deal with Summon Skull being better in the Starter Deck, in Joey’s Starter Deck Scapegoat and 7 Tools were better cards that REBD. Just like Dark Magician, Red-Eyes has gotten a plethora support cards to make it better. A 2400 Normal Level 7 is worse on its own than Dark Magician yesterday. The Black Stone of Legend and Red-Eyes Wyvern are top cards for summoning REBD, while Black Dragon’s Chick and Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon further the summoning potential of this card. Joey’s main card has every monster in its “Red-Eyes” family under the sun. As is, the support that REBD has isn’t as good as Dark Magician in terms of dealing with opponent’s monsters or countering their plays, however, like Blue-Eyes White Dragon, they are meant to be more aggro-based than control, hence the many ways of Special Summoning a “Red-Eyes” monster like REBD.
Cards of The Red Stone, The Black Stone of Legend, Red-Eyes Wyvern, and Black Dragon’s Chick are just some of the support REBD has gotten to pump itself up over the years. It has its own archetype, decent monsters and support within it, and, like DM before it, has seen a few Tier 1 appearances. It needs that support to make it good, and with it this Normal Dragon becomes a decent boss monster.
Advanced-3.5/5
Art-5/5 LOB art, I’m all about the retro as an old man of Yu-Gi-Oh
Until Next Time
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
From Yugi to Joey we see the classic Red-Eyes Black Dragon.
Red-Eyes Black Dragon is a Level 7 DARK Dragon Normal with 2400 ATK and 2000 DEF. Kinda meh stats, but it’s always great to be a DARK Dragon. So again, we got a vanilla monster, but Red-Eyes has a ton of support as well. We got cards like Red-Eyes Baby Dragon and The Black Stone of Legend to summon this thing from the Deck, Red-Eyes Fusion to use it as Fusion Material from Deck, Red-Eyes Spirit, Return of the Red-Eyes, and Red-Eyes Flare Metal Dragon to keep reviving this, Inferno Fire Blast for burn, and more. Now Red-Eyes isn’t as strong of a strategy as Dark Magician or Blue-Eyes, it’s either the burn way with cards like Inferno Fire Blast, Archfiend Black Skull Dragon, or Meteor Black Comet Dragon or you got the equip variant with Red-Eyes Slash Dragon, Gearfried the Red-Eyes Iron Knight, and Red-Eyes Fang with Chain. The archetype does at least let you use Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon, which was nice when that wasn’t errataed. Red-Eyes overall is still decent, just doesn’t have as much versatility as the other DM aces.
Advanced Rating: 3.5/5
Art: 5/5 for LOB art, 4.5/5 for Asia Championship 2001 art, 3/5 for the Joey the Passion art, 4/5 for that same art with a black background from the Jump, 4.5/5 for Anniversary Pack art, 5/5 for the recent art from Maximum Gold, and 3.5/5 for the new History Archive Collection art.
Alex
Searcy
Mighty
Vee
Also known as Rex Raptor’s “dinosaur that’s not really a dinosaur and more of a dragon”, today’s retro card for anniversary week is Red-Eyes Black Dragon, a level 7 DARK dragon monster. Even for a normal monster, its stat spread of 2400 attack and 2000 defense is very mediocre, which means it’ll have to rely on its menagerie of support cards to be of any use.
In Konami’s own words, Red-Eyes represents “potential”, which means Red-Eyes support attempts to do everything while accomplishing almost nothing. Red-Eyes decks do have a healthy amount of support between being dragon-based and having access to strong cards like Red-Eyes Insight, and is fairly competent as far as burn decks go at least. Tragically, Red-Eyes Black Dragon itself is both a terrible normal monster as well as being quite bad as a deck, due to the archetype’s focus being spread between fusion, gemini, equip, warrior, and burn gimmicks. While the deck does have access to the incredibly powerful boss monster Red-Eyes Dark Dragoon, almost every deck can access it as well, sometimes even more easily than Red-Eyes decks. That said, Red-Eyes Flare Metal Dragon is a semi-competent choice against combo decks, and the archetype does provide excellent generic dragon support in the form of Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon and Black Metal Dragon. However, neither of these strategies really need the vanilla monster Red-Eyes Black Dragon itself, causing it to lag significantly behind other nostalgic legacy support. Perhaps someday it will amount to more than an inconsistent FTK outside of the casual sector.
Advanced: 2/5
Art: 4.25/5 The pictured one, featured in the anime, is certainly the most iconic, though I prefer the classic art depicting it about to launch a breath beam.
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