Name: Just Desserts

Type: Normal Trap

 

Effect               : When you activate this card, you get to inflict damage to your opponent’s Life Points equal to the amount of Monsters they have on their side of the field.  This means a single card can get upwards of 2500 damage, or do zero.  Usually, if you know what you are doing, you can get a solid 1000 out of it.  This is a solid effect in my opinion.

 

Stats                : Just Desserts is a Trap card.  Since your opponent will usually be Summoning Monsters on their turn, it’s almost always worth waiting a turn to get another 500 points of damage.  As such, only a Quick-Play Spell would come close to the versatility.  Watch out for Trap negation.  Thankfully most efficient Trap negation comes from Jinzo (one-per deck Tribute Monster) or Royal Decree (very pricey Trap card).

 

Uses and

Combinations  : Stall/Burn loves this card.  Well, you’d think it would.  I don’t see it that much, but it’s a great card if you know how to use it.  It is a great counter to Scapegoat: they probably bought themselves only two turns without any successful attacks going through… but you just hit them for 2000 in burn damage, what you’d expect to accumulate over those turns had they used other defenses.  As mentioned when it was covered Monday, this goes great with Ojama Trio.  Two cards for 1500 burn, cutting your opponent down to two usable Monster Zones, and the potential of another 900 points of burn. As I discovered the other day, it’s even better if they have to “early game” monsters out already (like searchers meant to die).  Another useful card to combine it with is Morphing Jar #2: they hit, hopefully have to toss a few good Spells of Traps, and then set as many Monsters as they had (barring them drawing Tributes or the like).  So… they loose momentum, and still have a field full of monsters to feed your burn damage.

 

Given that, other than burn, Swarm (via Warrior Chaos) seems to rule duel in Advanced, it’s a simple, sweet burn card that is unrestricted.  In your normal Stall/Burn deck, your opponent is going to be more or less locked down by things like Messenger of Peace and Level Limit-Area B, so they should have quite a few Monsters.  Given that it is a Trap, you actually have some options to get it out quickly: Painful Choice plus Mask of Darkness, or A Cat of Ill Omen.  Such cards are actually quite useful to a Trap oriented Burner.

 

Ratings

 

Traditional       :1.5/5-Given all the field clearing cards, it seems doubtful you’ll get any real damage out of Just Desserts in this format.

 

Advanced        : 3.75/5-Here, with most mass removal gone, you can easily lull your opponent into a false sense of security by allowing them to amass three to five Monsters, then stopping them in their tracks with Level Limit-Area B and company… at which point its just you waiting to draw those fat 1500-2500 damage burn bombs.

 

Limited            : 4/5-Burn damage is great here: its unexpected most of the time.  Being Monster based is okay; just make sure you’re hitting them for the kill if you let them fill up their Monster Zones on purpose.

 

Summary

Just Desserts: an oldie but a goodie.  It’s just so deliciously ironic when you defeat your opponent by turning their own formidable attack force against them.  Probably the only Trap that does this better is Ceasefire.

 

It’s nice that this fits into Burn week; as some have noticed and commented, we’ve had some seemingly random cards in previous theme weeks.  For example, the second Harpie week ended with Coldwave.  In that particular case, it was a fan request, and we had room for it then.  Not every theme will fill an even amount of weeks, and as you remember from the rather dreary third week of Gravekeepers, we probably shouldn’t try.