Hits and misses of Return of the Duelist

Return of the Duelist came out (officially) in stores!

Reviewing the whole set is kind of ridiculous. So instead of doing that, I’ll give you my picks and drops from this set.

I tried to avoid archetype-specific cards, unless the cards can be used outside of their mentioned archetype.

Hits of the set

• Heroic Challenger – War Hammer: I kind of underestimated this card, but it’s good. If this card destroys your opponent’s monster and sends it to the grave, this guy can steal it and use its power for its own. If it wasn’t for Effect Veiler and three MSTs, this card would’ve been amazing.
• Temperance of Prophecy: If you’re trying to make a good spellcaster deck, from now on this card should be in it, whether or not its main focus is Prophecy monsters. When activating a Spellbook card, you can tribute this card for a high-level LIGHT or DARK spellcaster from your deck! And because most spellbooks affect spellcasters in general (not just the Prophecy monsters), these cards can be mashed into many decks.
• Madolche Magileine: Like the Gadget effect of re-filling your hand? Then check this card. When normal or flip summoned, this card searches another Madolche card, INCLUDING another copy of itself. With the usual Madolche effect that it’s automatically shuffled back in the deck, this card by itself can instantly make sure your hand is never empty (unless the summon is negated, of course).
• Uniflora, Mystical Beast of the forest: Anybody call for some Beast support? This guy is one of the best beasts I’ve seen in a while. Tribute this card to special summon ANY kind of beast from your grave or hand.
• Silver Sentinel: If your opponent has a fetish to destroy your back row, this card will surprise him. If your opponent destroys this card, it can special summon itself and destroy a card your opponent controls. A surprise about this card: they didn’t alter his sniper rifle! This probably is because the barrel isn’t that visible, but still, an unedited gun in Yu-Gi-Oh!? That’s a first one.
• Illusory Snatcher: Read this card as: Easy XYZ. I’ve looked around on the internet and somehow, this card does NOT miss timing. So, yes, it can be used in monarch (stated by the art), Hieratics, Steelswarm and any other deck that uses tributes.
• Gear Gigant X: a.k.a. the money card from the set! This card supports Geargia’s the most, but is also a generic card searcher in any machine type deck.
• Soul of Silvermountain: One of the more interesting cards. It blocks an opponent’s spell or trap card and when it destroys a monster, you can special summon ANY earth attribute monster from the grave. Granted, its 1800 attack is low, but otherwise this card would be dead broken (similar as how Leviair’s attack is only 1800). Bringing back Naturia Beast, Barkion, Iron Chain Dragon or other high-level earth monster is no joke.
• Sword Breaker: Ally of Justice Catastor for types instead of attributes. Nuff said. This is potentially the only (non-dark) monster that can commit suicide with Catastor.
• Galaxy Queen’s Light: Easy Lv. 7 and higher xyz summoning. Helps to summon monsters like Dyson Sphere, Super Robo Galaxy Destroyer and Gustav Max.
• Impenetrable attack: Remember how you can only use 3 Waboku’s in a deck? Hurray, Konami just re-made the card. Now you can chose whether or not you choose to prevent battle damage or prevent your monsters from being destroyed. But unlike Waboku, this card also prevents your monster being destroyed by card effect! Final Countdown decks will rejoice. Haters will hate, though.

Misses of the set

• Photon Caesar: In the anime, we’ve been introduced with several monsters which are treated as 2 XYZ materials. Those effects are translated in real-life as "special summon another copy of itself when normal summoned". A good example of this effect is Heroic Challenger – Double Lance. The less good example of this effect is Photon Caesar. Caesar was created to easily overlay into Neo-Galaxy-Eyes. But believe me, you will find more use in cards like Lightray Gearfried and Guardian of Order.
• Cold Feet: Every set has its cards that are weird or just simply suck donkey balls. This set has Cold Feet… literally. The card Cold Feet is a watered down version of Cold Wave and affects ONLY yourself. So unless you can combo it with Mystical Refpanel (who the hell would do that), you basically are just skrewing yourself.
• Blue Dragon Ninja: Ninja support FTW… or not? A potentially great card, if they would’ve switched the AND with an OR. Sorry, but discarding 2 cards to negate an effect is just not an option in real life.
• Spellbook Library of the Crescent: Possibly the worst of all spellbook cards I’ve seen. This card has a potential of more than 50% of being a dead card.
• Chew-bone: Of all OCG imports that could’ve made this set good (or better), we get possibly one of the worst OCG promo’s out there. This card represents the support zombies have been getting in the past few years. It’s not just any miss. This is a “three-strikes-you’re-out” kind of miss.
• The absence of Thunder Seahorse: The introduction of the Hunder (why no T?) archetype would’ve been a good deal, but Konami somehow forgot the key monster, Thunder Seahorse. The card has a similar effect like Thunder Dragon (of which the archetype is based upon), but isn’t limited to another copy of itself. I do wonder if they have plans of releasing it in the near future (the special edition or so?)
• The card rarity in general: Name any decent archetype card you want from this set, it will have a high rarity. We noticed it during the sneak. Only a handful of people got a few of the good cards and they were all super, ultra or secret rare.

Next time, I'll give you some test results of DN of the past week