Scapegoat – #OP08-EN003
Special Summon 4 “Sheep Tokens” (Beast/EARTH/Level 1/ATK 0/DEF 0) in Defense Position. They cannot be Tributed for a Tribute Summon. You cannot Summon other monsters the turn you activate this card (but you can Normal Set).
Date Reviewed: March 17th, 2022
Rating: 4.00
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,
Scapegoat is an appropriate Throwback Thursday choice for this week considering the archetype revolving around a single token, this card was the original game-changing token producer.
Quick-Play Spell to Special Summon 4 cute little sheep to help you. Locks you out of Special Summoning the turn you play it, and you can’t use them for a Tribute Summon, but those negatives have hardly kept it from being one of the most used cards throughout its entirety. Defend with the tokens on your opponent’s turn, or chain in their End Phase to set yourself up for your turn. When you’ve got those four goats on your turn the world is your oyster: Synchro and Link Summons become easier, Special Summons like Plasma are a breeze, fuel cards that need tributes, or use something old school like Creature Swap or Enemy Controller to get an opponent’s monster. Scapegoat back then with United We Stand made any monster a formidable attacker, even the goats themselves with United We Stand could become ridiculous.
Much like Waboku, some cards will always find play from Tier 1-Tier 3. Scapegoat I think will always see play. It won’t likely ever be 3 again though, too big of a card pool at this point.
Advanced-4.5/5 Art-5/5- love those iconic goats.
Until Next Time
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
Can’t really talk about Tokens without the original Token generator on Throwback Thursday, so here’s Scapegoat.
Scapegoat is a Quick-Play Spell that Special Summons 4 Sheep Tokens (Beast/EARTH/Level 1/ATK 0/DEF 0) in Defense Position, but they cannot be tributed for a Tribute Summon and you also cannot summon monsters the turn you activate this card. So you do lose your summoning abilities by using this, but we almost always got around this by using it on the opponent’s turn, mainly during the End Phase to get all 4 Tokens on your turn. Back in the day, this was a great defensive tool alongside being able to tribute the Tokens with Metamorphosis for Thousand-Eyes Restrict before that got banned. Eventually, the card came back to 3, but the advent of Links sent it back to Limited status due to the ease this allowed you to get a Link-4 back a few years ago when the game was a bit slower. Now the game is speeding up more, so we’re starting to see this peel off the list. It’s at 2 right now and I can imagine it coming back to 3 whenever the next list drops. With that said, Scapegoat is still a solid card for getting 4 free bodies on board and will always have a place in this game’s history with a format named after it, one of the most beloved past formats for that matter, which we all know as Goat Format.
Advanced Rating: 4/5
Art: 4/5 The goats are still cute, glad Konami made them into their own separate Tokens as well.
Alex
Searcy
Wow…Scapegoat I know I’ve reviewed many times at various places in the Ban List through probably even more Formats (remember Goat control or Morph Decks and Relinquished/TER control?) Anyway…as far as Tokens go, this is one of the OG Token cards. Sometimes better, and sometimes worse than one Joey Wheeler made the card look, the uses I listed above are all but relics of this card from plays that just don’t happen or can’t happen in the game anymore. But Scapegoat is hardly without a place. This Theme alone loves it Tokens, as do many others, in fact more so these days, and as long as you’re not stuck with ‘no Token clauses’ for your Link or Extra Deck Summons, Tokens can be even more useful than ever. Whatever you do with the Tokens (offensively, defensively, or beyond-it is a Quickplay after all) it’s 4 free Tokens at once for the player, and it’s hard to be upset about that. It can be Main, Side, or even just for Niche or Tech plays. Versatility in a card is always welcome too.
Rating: 4/5
Art: 2/5 They’re cute little fuzz balls, and clearly content with their naps (or maybe they just can’t open their eyes, I’m honestly not sure) but the picture is a bit bland.
Mighty
Vee
Perhaps best known as the namesake of the GOAT format and as tribute fodder for Joey Wheeler’s Panther Warrior in the anime, Scapegoat is this week’s Throwback Thursday, a quick play spell that’s been around in the TCG since 2003. Scapegoat’s had quite a rocky history in the card game, currently being semi-limited in the TCG though it’s been limited twice in the past.
Scapegoat’s effect is fairly simple; it summons 4 Sheep tokens in defense mode, all of them being level 1 EARTH beasts with 0 attack and defense, so it’s not like they’ll be attacking anything. They can’t be tributed for a tribute summon and you can’t summon at all the same turn you activate Scapegoat, though you can still tribute them for other effects, like Metamorphosis (banned) for Thousand-Eyes Restrict or the aforementioned Panther Warrior. In the old days, they were clearly meant to form a wall and slow down the game state to buy yourself some time. During the Link era, however, you could simply set Scapegoat and activate it during your opponent’s end phase (quick play spells, huzzah!) for 4 free link bodies. With some link climbing (namely with Linkuriboh, Missus Radiant, and Link Spider) you could break your opponent’s board with Knightmare monsters then finish with a link 4 monster like Borreload Dragon or Borrelsword Dragon, making Scapegoat a powerful, if rather slow and predictable, tool. Nowadays, having almost instant access to a link 4 isn’t too crazy, plus Scapegoat combos in general require quite a lot of extra deck space to convert the tokens into effect monsters. A lot of slower decks would appreciate being able to pull out Accesscode Talker or Mekk-Knight Crusadia Avramax to mount a counterattack. I think Scapegoat would be just fine if it came back to 3 in the future.
Advanced: 3.5/5
Art: 3.5/5 The goats (sheep???) are really cute, I even went out of my way to buy their individual tokens.
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