Name: Drill Synchron

Level: 3

Attribute: Earth

Type: Machine/Tuner

ATK: 800

DEF: 300

 

Today is a special day.  First and foremost, it’s George Washington’s birthday!  He was quite a guy, and if you’re unfamiliar with him you owe it to yourself to study up on him (especially U.S.A. citizens).  It is also my younger sister’s birthday!  Happy birthday, Jennie!

 

And… this has absolutely nothing to do with today’s CotD.  Well, I guess Washington was famous for having false teeth and my sister did have braces when she was younger, so I guess reviewing a drill based monster makes an odd kind of sense.   Regardless, today’s CotD is Drill Synchron!  It has a specific Synchro Monster it can make, but I’ll come back to that later.  Note that it joins the Synchron family of Tuners which gives it… one additional card of support, Quickdraw Synchron.  Oh well, at least there is potential for more to come based on the fiction.

 

Drill Synchron is a Level 3 Tuner, letting it tune with any other low level non-Tuner Monster for something.  It is still small enough to fit under cards like Level Limit – Area B and Gravity Bind, which is also a useful trait.  It is an Earth/Machine; this is not the most potent or numerous pairing, but it still has a lot of potential support behind it.  The ATK and DEF are pretty pathetic; if you aren’t using this to Synchro Summon right away, you’ll have to protect it.

 

The reason you might not want to use it for a Synchro Summon right away is that it has an effect that has some potential: while you control your Drill Synchron, your Warrior-Type monsters gain piercing a.k.a. trample a.k.a. that thing where ATK points in excess of the defending monster’s DEF points get converted to Battle Damage instead of being wasted.  This is an extremely useful effect, especially against a “turtling” (extremely defensive) opponent.  While it requires running multiple Monster-Types, Warriors are still one of the best supported monster types in the game.  Just as important as the trampling effect is that you get to draw a card when you inflict damage via Drill Synchron’s effect.  Sadly, it only works once.  Since it requires you do damage via trampling to trigger, this was probably overkill: this isn’t Airknight Parshath.  His effects may only have applied to himself, but he allowed you to draw whenever he inflicted Battle Damage.  So a direct attack still netted you a card if it went through and did at least one point of damage.  Perhaps more important, if you tricked your opponent into crashing something into him (like by activating Shrink in the Damage Step), you also got the draw.

 

I said I’d come back to it, so let me add that Drill Synchron (or Quickdraw Synchron) is needed to bring out Drill Warrior.  Drill Warrior does not impress me.  It isn’t worthless, since it can be used to make a direct attack… but this Level 6 Monster has to permanently drop its ATK by half in order to get a single direct attack in.  While its ATK remains halved it will have to use the effect again (and again and again) each turn it wants to attack directly.  It also has an effect to remove itself from play and return during your next Stand-By Phase, at the cost of discarding a card from your hand.  When it returns, two good things will occur: its ATK will be back to normal (since it counts as being Summoned all over again) and you get to add a Monster from your discard pile back to your hand.  There are some interesting combos this opens up, but it seems like a lot of work for very little gain.

 

Uses and Combinations: Here is where I’d love to tell you some killer combo that breaks this card wide open.  Actually, that is incorrect: this game has too many combos (and even individual cards) that are too powerful.  Still, I’d like to tell you at least some little trick that makes it worth running this card in its own deck or even a pre-established one.  I just don’t see anything spectacular.  Sure, it’s nice to drop this bad boy, gore something (yet another term for piercing/trampling/etc.) and draw a card, thus replacing what you spent in playing it, and finish it off by Synchro Summoning something useful.  You can fetch it from your deck and Special Summon it via Giant Rat or Special Summon it from hand with Marauding Captain to bring out a Level 6 Synchro Monster with ease… but these are all pretty generic tricks, as far as Earth Tuner Monsters go.

 

Ratings

 

Traditional: 1/5

 

Advanced: 2/5

 

Summary

I can’t help but feel like I missed something, and I was quite excited when I first saw this card because I had missed something: I though it basically gave all Warriors Airknight’s effect.  It doesn’t, though.  Warrior Monsters are used in enough decks that you could actually consider adding this guy in to them without him being a horrible drag, and in a deck that he honestly works in (Warrior or Earth/Warrior derived themes) he can allow for some nice plays… but I can’t help but think several other Tuners would offer you more.