Card Review: Cloudian – Poison Cloud

This card is pretty random, but at the same time really awesome. Who doesn’t want to run a Cloudian monster legitimately? I’ve spoken briefly on him before but he’s got a couple specific tricks up his sleeve that may give him an edge. I thought it’d be a rather interesting venture to look a little further into this card, even though it may be a fairly short venture.

First, the effect:

When this card is destroyed by battle and sent to the Graveyard, if it was face-up at the start of the Damage Step: Destroy the monster that destroyed it, and if you do, inflict 800 damage to your opponent.

Basically, his purpose is to ram into monsters bigger than him and take them down with him. He does a nice 800 burn damage in the process. His biggest downfall is he has zero attack, which is a little scary when thinking you’ll be whacking him into bigger monsters, meaning you’ll be eating a good 1900 plus a lot of the time. You can have him in face-up defense mode to get his effect off, but that’s a little harder to setup, but definitley possible and infinitely more productive.

Let’s get the obvious out the of the way first! Tour Guide is now at two and a lot of decks are looking for that extra 2nd target for her effect. Many are drawn to Night Assailant and Tour Bus, but I would hope you take a look at Poison Cloud a little closer before making any decision because it has some very specific advantages and niches to fill, plus he looks really cool and you’ll get a bunch of awesome funny looks for running him.

Like all monsters you run in your Tour Guide engines, Poison Cloud is also not dead when drawn, while he’s not the greatest thing you’ve ever seen he’s no less helpful than the aforementioned Night Assailant. Both of which have a monster destruction effect. Night Assailant is less vulnerable to spells and traps, but is extremely passive in nature, so when you need a threat gone immediately Poison Cloud is a hair better.  Poison Cloud serves as a better monster after it’s been summoned by Tour Guide as well. Say you have a face-up Snowman Eater from a previous turn, you summon Tour Guide bring out Poison Cloud in defense and then you can XYZ the Snowman and Tour Guide for a Rank 3 and have a live Poison Cloud threatening the opponent. (this is of course, not as great as Sangan, but it cuts a nice middle in that regard between Sangan and Night Assailant) Lastly, Poison Cloud also has the nice ability to get under Skill Drain, which can be a valuable asset against many decks.

Another specific niche Poison Cloud can fill I find rather cool. Since Poison Cloud is a Water monster with 0 ATK, it makes it a prime target for Debris Dragon. So essentially once you’ve gotten a Tour Guide off all your Debris Dragons are live and on top of that, can summon the elusive Gungnir Dragon of the Ice Barrier giving a powerful removal option akin to the now banned Brionac. (poor little guy) Debris, if by some twist of fate, leaves its target on the field that it revives without Synchroing, then lucky enough for you it’s a Poison Cloud, which is still has his effect live and ready to destroy a monster.

That last benefit is derived from something that has been irking me since the banlist. Although I know any type of classical Destiny HERO build is probably bad, I still am trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to D-HEROs. The biggest problem I keep running into is this: there’s no good Water monsters that are splash-able to make Miracle Fusion live. All that the deck needs is 1 Water monster, since once you get out the first Elemental HERO Absolute Zero with Miracle Fusion, the Absolute Zero himself will provide the Water Fusion Material for the next one. I didn’t want to run huge archetypes like frogs with Destiny HEROs (although that’s not a bad idea), so I eventually came to this card as a great idea. With Tour Guide, Poison Cloud becomes easily accessible meaning it will be in the graveyard on a fairly reliable basis. (especially considering Destiny HEROs new immense draw power) That means by just running Tour Guide, D-HEROs now reliably have a Water monster for Miracle Fusion by only running about 3 cards, (this is not counting Sangan since they would already run him in most cases) all of which are multipurpose and effective, rather than say Deep Sea Diva who’s a little inconsistent and relies on your running Destiny HERO Malicious, which is a little iffy of a card in my opinion, at least on a competitive side. Tour Guide can also summon Number 17: Leviath Dragon, who is also Water, which stacks up the grave pretty nicely and give you options in case they banish either Leviath Dragon or an Absolute Zero.

In an even more roundabout way this makes Debris Dragon amazing in Destiny HEROs since it gives you the level 3 Poison Cloud for level 7 Synchros, one of which being Gungnir who is also a water monster, as well as the ability to revive a Destiny HERO Defender with Debris Dragon to make a 1 card Rank 4. Pretty sweet right? I’ve been looking a lot into this lately, so maybe you’ll be seeing a very obscure Destiny HERO decklist form me in the future.

Well, I hope that was interesting and stuff. As always, happy dueling everyone! Please respond with any comments or questions you may have. I’ll be sure to answer you.