Last time we covered Vayu Turbo, a deck that takes the DARK and GY engines and pairs them with a few selected Blackwing cards to make an efficient and explosive deck. However, pure Blackwings themselves are also one of the best decks in Edison format, trading out the GY engine for the rest of the Blackwing crew. So let’s meet them!

The signature spell of the archetype, semi-limited1Restricted to 2 copies per deck, as opposed to Yu-Gi-Oh’s usual 3. If you open Black Whirlwind and your opponent doesn’t immediately answer it you’ll usually snowball too hard for them to keep up with and bury them in card advantage. You play a lot of different Blackwings with various ATKs, so if you start with a Sirocco (2000 ATK) you could theoretically get up to 6 searches over 6 turns in a standard list. And of course that rate doubles if you open both copies. The rest of the deck is quite good, but this spell is THE reason to run pure Blackwings imo.

Shura is our best party starter. Shura + Whirlwind is the opening hand all Blackwing players pray for. 1800 ATK hits over a lot of common openings in the metagame (and Shura can easily have even more ATK, see below) and can let Shura pull out a Gale or Vayu from deck for a quick Synchro Summon. (Since Shura negates the effects of what it summons, it negates Vayu’s effect which prevents it from being used in a normal Synchro Summon. Synergy!)

Bora is one of those cards that’s kinda mid, except for when its bonkers. Being able to special summon itself gives you a lot of burst, and having piercing2Like MTG’s “Trample”. In YGO it lets you deal lifepoint damage when attacking Defense Position monsters, which ordinarily stop you from taking damage. combines nicely with Sirocco and Kalut (again, see below) to deal lethal damage out of nowhere. Dealing damage past a Defense Position monster also helps set up game shots that bypass Gorz (we’ll get to him in another article). Bora doesn’t create his own shot like Shura, but he’s a very useful tool for the experienced Blackwing duelist.

Kalut is what we in the biz3or “business” call a hand trap. Those are monsters you can discard from your hand at Quick Effect speed4Instant speed, for the Magic players. You can use it on your opponent’s turn, basically. Oh also as good a time as any to point out, in Yu-Gi-Oh activated monster effects are usually Spell Speed 1, the equivalent to sorcery speed. That can trip up MTG players coming over for the first time. in order to interact with the board in much the same manner as a traditional trap. Kalut gives 1400 ATK, a pretty big amount that can help Shura get over basically everything in the format or let Bora hit for the opponent’s last few lifepoints. Because it affects ATK, Kalut is allowed to activate in the Damage Step, a bizarre part of the battle phase where the normal rules of YGO get all screwy. I could do a whole article about Damage Step shenanigans5I feel like I might have already in the past? I vaguely remember using the metaphor of that samurai movie trope, where the warrior crosses blades with their foe, who at first brags about how the samurai missed them before realizing that they are in fact dead as their body splits in two. Anyway that’s the Damage Step in a nutshell but the upshot is most effects aren’t allowed to activate in the Damage Step, and if you wait until Damage Calculation (a specific moment during the Damage Step) you can restrict your opponent’s options even further, as only one chain6“Stack” in MTG, basically sequence of effects/activated cards. In YGO once both players pass on adding to the chain the entire thing resolves in sequence, rather than most other games where you resolve effects one at a time and have a window to respond and add new effects before resolving the next one is allowed to be formed during damage calc. All this to say, Kalut is hard to respond to, and will likely resolve and let its brother win the day.

Blizzard isn’t much of anything turn 1, but it’s an excellent follow-up play as soon as you have a Shura, Bora, or Kalut in your Graveyard. Blizzard is a common type of card, a normal summon Tuner that pulls something out of the Graveyard for an immediate synchro. Junk Synchron and Debris Dragon are two more examples we’ll be getting to in this series, and I’m sure there are plenty more I’m forgetting. Blizzard is a great topdeck7A card that helps you a lot when you draw it late game, after both players are otherwise low on (if not fully out of) other cards in play/hand. and a key component to the Blackwing deck’s whole “it does everything” vibe.

This is a late-breaking addition, a recent metagame development. This card isn’t good, strictly speaking, and as a result it might not stick around in future builds. But it’s seeing play because it fills a very specific niche. It’s a level 2 Blackwing Tuner that you can special summon, allowing Shura to go into a level 6 Synchro Summon using its own effect. Having just 100 ATK means you can search it with Whirlwind when you normal summon Vayu (which, that’s not a super amazing play or anything, but you can do it!) and the 1800 butt means something every so often. VERY rarely its effect will even come up. Mistral is borderline, signed from the practice squad8Or called up from the minors, or on a 10-day contract, or whatever sports metaphor you wanna go with., but it’s a classic case of a bad Yu-Gi-Oh card seeing play in a good deck because its raw stats fulfill a niche.

Finally, we have a trap that’s not strictly speaking a Blackwing card, but basically exclusively sees play in Blackwing decks, since there aren’t any other good Winged Beast archetypes in Edison9Sorry Harpy Ladies. Your day will come in 2013. and not many standalone Winged Beasts that see play (except for Blackwing – Gale the Whirlwind, funny enough). It’s a really useful piece of removal, a 2-2 trade at base that becomes a de facto 2-1 when you tribute a monster that was already doomed (say, it’s about to be destroyed by battle, or it’s about to eat a Bottomless Trap Hole or Dimensional Prison trap card). This level of targeted destruction is generically good, and especially useful for Blackwings, which can play well in a simplified gamestate thanks to cards like Whilrwind, Shura, Vayu, and Blizzard.

We’ve mentioned Synchro Monsters many times so far; they’re a key component of Edison format. So next time, we finally explain what the hell a Synchro Summon even is.