Card Review: Fiendish Chain

Fiendish Chain is one of those older cards that went under the radar for a long time, and still is relative to some far bigger cards. But, by no means is that a reason to excuse it. Today we look at a sleeper hit from Absolute Powerforce: Fiendish Chain.

Select 1 face-up Effect Monster on the field. Its effect(s) is negated, and it cannot attack. If it is destroyed, destroy this card.

Very simple, but multifaceted and that’s where it gains its advantages. This card’s versatility is in its ability to Negate Attacks and negate effects (which is hard to come by nowadays), as well as some other fun stuff. Also, the fact that it does all these things at once, rather than choosing one or the other like Enemy Controller (or something similar), is a definite plus.

This format, there’s a lot of important monster effects going off. People have opted for Effect Veiler since it can be activated from the hand, but Fiendish Chain gains distinct advantages over it since it acts more as protection on your monsters, instead of stopping the opponents progression. Fiendish Chain can be a huge deterrent on the opponent when set behind a problem monster. By problem monster, I mean a monster that is a problem for your opponent to deal with. They usually lock out your opponent’s options with their effects like Stardust Dragon, True Six Samurai Shi’En, and Naturia Beast. Those, for example, really lock out spells and traps very well, meaning the opponent will need to use monster effects or attacking to remove your monster. Fiendish Chain nearly perfectly deals with both problems. The monsters lock out spells and traps making it hard for them to remove Fiendish Chain before you activate it, as well as making a very difficult simple lockdown on the opponent.

There’s a lot of big Boss Monsters floating around this format: Master Hyperion, Archlord Kristya, Black Luster Solider, Chaos Sorcerer, Dark Armed Dragon, and Judgement Dragon to name a few. Sometimes just stopping their effects isn’t going to stop them in there tracks. If you were to just use Effect Veiler on Hyperion, there’s still the fact that it’s a 2700 ATK point monster. Fiendish Chain helps you deal with that by also negating attacks. A lot of the time, an opponent summons a Boss Monster intending to use it to kill a big monster you control. With Fiendish Chain, you not only stop them from killing your Boss Monsters, you use your Boss Monsters to clear out the opponent after theirs fail to even attack over yours.( e.g. You have a Chaos Sorcerer and the opponent attempts to kill it with Hyperion. You use Fiendish Chain, allowing you to use Chaos Sorcerer‘s effect on Hyperion next turn, unless they waste a couple extra cards to kill Sorcerer – which is also good too.

There’s also one last interesting way to use Fiendish Chain. Fiendish Chain is only destroyed when the monster it targets is also destroyed. That means that if the monster it’s targeting is removed in any other fashion, it remains on the field. Say they Synchro with it and you remove that monster from play with Caius the Shadow Monarch or Chaos Sorcerer – it’s still there. You can use it as fodder for other cards effects, things like Scrap Dragon work especially well with this, making it a hit in Scrap Decks. You can also use if for Magic Planter, which sends a face-up Continuous Trap you control to the Graveyard to draw 2 cards, or even recur it to use again with Blackwing Zephyros the Elite or Mist Valley Falcon. With these last two it works especially well since you can return Fiendish Chain to your hand before you destroy a monster it’s targeting to save it from its destroying effect on itself, making for nearly constant effect and attack negation.

Overall, everyone should really think about this card when making their decks since it’s so versatile and effect negation is always a necessity.  After looking at this card for a short time, I’m already falling in love with it, it’s quite the fantastic card that most people don’t think about and most people don’t anticipate either.

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