Must Have: Magnificent Mavens

Welcome back to It's Time to Duel!

With today's post we will talk about some of the best cards to get after the release of Magnificent Mavens.

Konami continues with this beautiful wave of reprints of very strong cards and we players can only be happy about it!

Let's hope Konami will continue like this for a while longer because it was really needed. It is a really good time to start playing competitively thanks to the easy availability of the main cards of each deck that characterizes this period.

TRIPLE TACTICS TALENT

This is the first card to consider as a “must have”.

This card has been present on alternate periods within the meta. Some players use it in the main deck and others use it in the side deck, but in this moment it is back perhaps stronger than ever thanks to its ability to play well against decks that play the so-called "Turn 0". 

By “Turn 0” we mean all those monsters that activate their effects from the hand and they can cause interruptions to the player's play.

HISTORY LESSON: Gorz the Emissary of Darkness was the first monster whose effect is activated by the hand, to represent the so-called Hand Traps.

Within the sub-archetype "Turn 0" we have the new Bystial monsters, released a few days ago within the Darkwing Blast expansion and which I cover in depth in this post and the new Ishizu cards that use the Turn 0 to mill cards from the deck and activate the effects of the Tearlaments monsters sent to the graveyard.

The effect of Triple Tactics Talent is very strong as it allows you to draw 2 cards, steal an opponent's monster or have a random card discarded from the opponent's hand, but mainly you will activate the first and second effects.

It is evident that it is a very strong card both in the first and second turn and in fact it is possible to play it in the main deck without problems and it rarely turns out to be a useless card.

Let's analyze a possible game situation that you will very often see playing against today's Tearlament meta and that makes Triple Tactics Talent really useful:

The opponent activates the effect of Tearlaments Havnis, mill of cards from his deck and manages to perform a fusion summon by summoning Tearlaments Kitkallos.

We, thanks to Triple Tactics Talent, could steal the opponent's fusion monster or if the opponent does not have extenders that allow him to make other combos, we could draw 2 cards.

CHANGE OF HEART

This is one of those cards that everyone should have in their binder for just the beautiful artwork.

Change of Heart was one of the cards that could be easily retrieved from Joey Wheeler's very first starter deck.

In the very first season of the anime, this card was the favorite of the beautiful villain Bakura who represented his double personality as a good and kind boy alternating with the cold and calculating spirit of the Millennium Ring.

It is clear that this card belongs to the prehistory of our favorite card game.

Already at the time, Change of Heart was a card that could change the fate of any duel by itself and a friend of mine immediately ran to a local store to buy Joey's starter deck to get it. Change of Heart was banned a few days after my friend bought it and we still laugh about that event today. But a few Forbidden and Limited List ago, it has been released and it is possible to reuse it and many of us have taken it from the binders to remove the dust from many years of inactivity. If you don't have it yet, well, Konami reissued it and released it within Magnificent Mavens with its simple and effective effect that allows us to take control of an opponent's monster until the end phase.

The card has no activation costs and there are no restrictions on the use of the monster that we take from the opponent. Before the end phase we will have already done our combo and the opponent monster will have already been used as xyz material, synchro material, fusion material, material link, etc.

It is an excellent board breaker.

In the worst case, Change of Heart will be denied by an opponent's hand trap who will waste one of their precious resources to negate a card that is absolutely free for us.

EVENLY MATCHED

This is one of those cards that absolutely must be present in every side deck.

This trap card, considered the strongest board breaker in existence, can be activated from the hand if you do not control any other cards on the field and if a player is at the end of the battle phase.

Evenly Matched forces the opponent to banish the cards he controls on his field until the number of cards we control is evened out. So if we activate this card from the hand while we have nothing else on our field, our opponent will be forced to be left with only one card he controls.

In today's meta, Spright and Tearlaments are used to create a board full of cards, making you understand this card's strength. In addition, the cards that our opponent decides to banish will be banished face-down and can no longer be used and their effects cannot be activated.

In today's meta composed almost exclusively of Tearlament, Evenly Matched can be safely played on the main deck.

LIGHTNING STORM

Imagine having the effects of Raigeki and Harpie's Feather Duster combined in one card. Here, this is the strength and versatility of Lightning Storm.

This is also a fantastic reissue for the side deck that also works great on the main deck.

This card allows us to activate one of the two effects that characterize it:

If we don't control any cards on the field we can

destroy all spell and trap cards on the opponent's field or destroy all monsters controlled by the opponent in attack position.

We experienced players have learned to avoid this card in the first turn simply by playing the monsters in defense position.

So imagine the strength of this card that pushes players to change their mentality.

If you manage to resolve the effect of this card you are in a position of clear advantage over the opponent who could lose an entire board, if instead this card is denied, not bad because it was an excellent bait to make waste a negate card of the opponent.

In the side deck this card is really essential to face decks full of backrows such as the new archetype Labrynth, the Eldlich deck and the terrible and hated Mystic Myne.

APOLLOUSA, BOW OF THE GODDESS

This link 4 allows you to gain 800 points of ATK for each link material used to summon it and, by making it lose 800 points of attack, it allows you to cancel an effect of a monster on the opponent's terrain.

Usually you will be able to summon it using between 3 and 4 materials with an attack of 2400 or 3200 and it will be able to negate the opponent's effects 3 or 4 times.

Fundamental for those rogue or for fun decks that cannot count on many negate cards due to the archetypes they play.

Unfortunately, this card has some weaknesses that consist in the opponent's ability to cancel its effect and make it lose entirely all the ATK points and the negate effect.

See you next time!