Banlist Talk: Sinister Serpent

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The next card is a bit more controversial. Initially I was pretty skeptical of anybody who told me Sinister Serpent should come back, but in all honesty when I look intently at the card it’s not all that great.

What makes Sinister Serpent good enough to get banned? Well, it seems pretty obvious from the get go; every turn you’ll just get a free plus 1 from it that you can “abuse” some how. Back in the day with such a slow game this would likely happen over a course of many turns. You could use cards like Lightning Vortex and any other discarding cards essentially for free.

Nowadays that isn’t the case as much as before. While yes, it does allow seemingly “cost-less” use of cards that require discarding, it’s at the expense of moving at an incredibly slow pace. I doubt any high teir deck has the time on there hands to be waiting around for a card that in the end actually does nothing, it doesn’t OTK it doesn’t aggress at all. Not to mention the metagame has gotten to a rather incredible speed as compared to when Serpent was banned, duels taking only a couple turns to complete.

If you look at Sinister Serpent by the numbers, you wont be able to make advantage with it for almost 3 turns, and by that time you might as well be dead today. First, you discard it on the turn you have it, that’s one turn. (It’s also worth mentioning that with only 1 you wont always have it, so getting to it might even take an extra turn) You haven’t made any advantage yet, you’re still going negative most likely, this assume we use a discarding card like Raigeki Break that goes neg 1.  So next turn you wait and get Serpent back again, at this point you’ve now gone even. Then, you can discard it again and keep you’re even spread and then just next turn you’ll get your plus 1, after 3 turns. While that is good, it’s not broken. Lots of slow decks will love it, and slow decks are honestly what the format needs anyways and slow decks aren’t really topping all that often, so it only really helps decks that aren’t the highest caliber.

The other reason that this card isn’t that great is because all it would do is bring some rather mediocre cards to light. These cards include the likes of Lightning Vortex, Raigeki Break and Phoenix Wing Wind Blast. These cards aren’t really overpowered in any way to begin with, so bringing them to the competitive scene would more likely be good than bad. On one hand though, bringing back Sinister Serpent probably wont bring this cards into the light since it would make your deck inconsistent. Those cards are really only logical with decks that can use them to begin with, in which case adding a Sinister Serpent to the deck really doesn’t change much at all since it acts similarly in decks that can abuse the discarding; cards like Volcanic Shell or Fableds already can use it well enough, Serpent wouldn’t be any better than those cards to begin with, so in that regard it’s not broken at all.

That’s all there really is to it! Unfortunately for Mr. Serpent he didn’t come back on this list, but maybe and hopefully he’ll be back in the future. Also, sorry for not getting this up on Monday, I wasn’t home all Monday and I forgot to post this up until now! As for how the Podcast is coming along, we currently have 2 episodes recorded waiting to be edited: The Watt Cast and the Banlist Cast. As for when they will be up, I’m unsure, since as I have stated before that is out of my control. Hopefully we will have them up shortly, sorry for the inconvenience. As always, happy dueling everybody.

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