We’ve covered a lot of monsters, and last time went over a bunch of traps. Now we turn to spells, the third and final main card type in Yu-Gi-Oh. There aren’t quite as many staple spells as there are traps, but the ones that exist are some of the most important cards in the format. Such as!
Heavy Storm is one of those cards that define any format it’s legal in. This is the main check against trap cards, by far the biggest reason to not windmill slam every purple card onto the field the second they hit your hand. If you’ve got 3+ backrow and your opponent gets them all for a single card, they will be quite ahead of you in terms of card advantage, and in Edison card advantage means quite a lot.
It’s also the reason Starlight Road is a staple trap. Maybe 85-90% of the time, Road exists solely as a counter to Heavy Storm. If you want to run a lot of backrow, you probably want a Road to protect them. This creates mind games of its own; if your opponent slams down 4 backrow turn 1 without a second thought, do you really wanna use your Heavy Storm into a probable Starlight Road? Common sense says no…which means that crafty players will sometimes slam down a bunch of cards without protection, relying solely on the idea that they might have Road to protect them. Which of course leads players to sometimes throwing their Heavies into massive backrows anyway, to keep their opponent honest. It’s all a delicate dance.
Like Heavy Storm, this is another limited powerhouse you find in almost every deck. Unlike Heavy, it doesn’t create many interesting dynamics. This is a card that just sometimes you’ll draw and get to do nutso shit with. You can take advantage of strong monsters to get in some damage, you can use powerful effects for yourself. More often than not you’re just looking for tribute and/or synchro material. Brain Control is swingy, it’s unfair, it would get banned on the very next list and stay there until a much worse nerfed version was errata-ed over it. But honestly every format needs a card like this. Monster Reborn, Snatch Steal, Graceful Charity. Every format throughout the ages has had cards like this, that feel incredible when you draw them and awful when they’re drawn on you. It’s the circle of life. If you wanted deterministic fair play you’d be playing chess.
MST is a powerful and versatile little tool. You can use it on some problematic continuous spell or trap, or you can blast it into your opponent’s last backrow to make sure your next play goes off, you can set it and then snipe whatever your opponent sets on their turn during the End Phase1. But despite this utility, MST feels wrong on the limited list. It had been limited since 2004, but the game was changing in the 2010s, and MST was no longer oppressive. It would get semi-limited the very next list, and unlimited a year after that, where it remains to this day. So Edison is something of a last hurrah for MST as a card with Status, even though it is very much not the last hurrah for it being good.
Mind Control is like a balanced Brain Control. You can’t tribute or attack with the monster you take, the two “no duh” options you always go for with Brain Control. Or at least, that was the intent back in 20052 when Mind Control was printed. Once Synchro Monsters became a thing, Mind Control got a lot more busted, since its restrictions are not future-proofed and you can absolutely use your stolen goods as synchro material. Even without that it still has a niche over Brain Control in some situations, since it can target face-down monsters and Brain can’t. It’s a great way to waste an opponent’s Ryko, or use their Hamster to search your own.
Our final spell for today is Pot of Avarice. A Pot of Greed with a restriction, only certain decks run this one, and only some of those will run it at 3 copies. Needing to return 5 monsters can sometimes be getting to return 5 monsters, so when this card’s good it’s even better than one of the most famously powerful spells ever. But it can also be dead, and also countered more easily than Greed. If even one of its 5 targets is no longer legal when it would resolve (say, because your opponent used D.D. Crow to banish one of them from the GY) then it resolves without effect. All remaining targets stay in the grave, and you don’t get to draw. Avarice can be a bit of a gamble; do you feel lucky?
Next time, it’s back to engines. We look at Frogs, one of the most versatile and powerful groups in the game.
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