Card Review: Onslaught of the Fire Kings

So, I don’t like giving anybody boring ideas we’ve all heard before, and today’s no different. We all know the obvious stuff this card is for, but let me turn you away from those drab ideas for a moment and entice you with some more obscure things to be doing with the card Onslaught of the Fire Kings.

Onslaught came out in the most recent Fire Structure Deck with the same name as the card “Onslaught of the Fire Kings”. It’s a Normal Spell that has the following effect:

If your opponent controls a monster and you control no monsters: Special Summon 1 FIRE Beast, Beast-Warrior, or Winged Beast-Type monster from your Deck. Its effects are negated and it is destroyed during the End Phase. You can only activate 1 “Onslaught of the Fire Kings” per turn.

The card had some obvious intended purposes within the Fire King archetype, things like special summoning Garunix, the monster pictured on the card, and having it get destroyed for his effect or similar things using Barong, Kirin, Sacred Phoenix and Manticore of Darkness. I’d like to leave that aside for the most part, since Onslaught is actually quite the general card able to fit in a lot of other decks as well in many different ways, but keep the Fire King monsters in mind though because even though they may not be the focus of the article, they still have synergy with most of the ideas I’ll say.

Rulings first: monster summoned by this effect has on field effects negated, so if the monster has an effect that resolves in the graveyard (ex Fire King Avatar Garunix) the effect is not negated. On field effects resolve an effect on the field. Obvious negated effects are ignition effects, like the effect to destroy monsters of Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Bear. Also continuous effects like Little Chimera and Trigger effects like Red Dragon Ninja. It also negates effects that resolve on the field even if that monster is sent to graveyard, which is the most confusing instance, but is important to note. Similar to Junk Synchron using its effect to revive Hand of Nephtys, even if you tribute both Hand and Junk, Hand’s effect will be negated since it resolves with an on field effect. As of now, this only really applies to Gladiator Beast Laquari, meaning you can summon it with Onslaught attack, return it to the deck as a cast, and even though it’s not on the field at resolution, its effect is still negated because its effect resolves on the field. There’s also the card  Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Panther that comes out in Lord of the Tachyon Galaxy, you can’t resolve its effect if you summon it with Onslaught either. (although that’d be really awesome)

Idea number one! This is the first idea I had, essentially the idea that caused me to start thinking about the card more in depth. It involves Onslaught and using Fire King Avatar Kirin as the target. The idea was to “engine-ize” the card into a way to continually put Volcanic Shells into the graveyard for a Volcanic deck as well as provide an interesting alternative to a Volcanic deck. I altered the way I thought about the card and thought about it like this, in Volcanics I would most certainly be running more copies of Foolish Burial if where legally allowed. Fire King Avatar Kirin is a level 3 monster that when it’s destroyed it sends a FIRE monster from the deck to the graveyard, obviously in this case you send Volcanic Shell. If I treat Onslaught of the Fire Kings as Foolish Burial then it becomes a very logical card to add to the deck. Simply slap in 3 Onslaught and 2 Kirin and you’re pretty much good. Extra Onslaughts can be pitched with Summoner Monk or you could simply add an extra target like 1 Barong to make Rank 4 XYZ with.

This also adds a very interesting layer to any deck that wishes to run Onslaught, Kirin and Volcanic Shell because Kirin has an interesting facet to it that I quite like, and that’s that it is one of the few monster we have that is revivable by Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Spirit. When Spirit is Normal Summon you can Special Summon a Level 3, 200 or less Def, FIRE monster from your graveyard. Kirin so happens to be Level 3 and have exactly 200 Def. This means while simultaneously setting up shells with Onslaught you can setup Rank 3’s or some particular level 6 Synchros, since Spirit has some limiting effects on what it can Synchro into. In particular, this gives access to Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Lion Emperor, a Rank 3 requiring 2 FIRE Monsters who can once per turn detach to add a FIRE monster from your graveyard to your hand. In a Volcanic deck this allows you to recycle Rocket so much more easily as well as get a quick Shell from the graveyard to pop a monster with Blaze Accelerator, making it have the artificial effect of Smashing Ground. You can also summon Leviair to do some of those fun plays I mentioned in the previous article using Inferno and Spirit of Flames to banish a Rocket from grave and then revive it, get Rocket’s effect and then make Infernal Flame Vixen.

Another monster I’ve been interested in for a while now is the card Flame Tiger. It’s a Short Print common from Galactic Overlord and was also in the Onslaught of the Fire Kings Structure Deck as well. If you control no monsters you can skip your Draw Phase to summon it from your graveyard. My initial draw to this card comes from a card both me and Matt have been waiting to master: Chain Dog. Chain Dog is a Level 4 Beast monster that you can special summon from your graveyard if you control 2 Beast monsters. The card has been slowly picking up steam for a while now and it might have reached a point that it needed now with Onslaught coming out. Flame Tiger is a Beast, if you couldn’t have guess meaning you can make 1 Beast monster on the field for free for Chain Dog’s effect. Then you just need to normal summon any Beast monster and you can perpetuate a lot of looping by reviving a lot of Chain Dogs from your graveyard every turn. Unfortunately  as of now there’s still no effective way to search Chain Dog, just Foolish Burial really and the soon to be Lavalval Chain, but still the idea itself I find very cool.

The engine for the deck would be pretty simple. 2-3 Onslaught to search Flame Tiger, 2-3 Flamvell Firedog (yet another Beast type monsters) to also search Flame Tiger as well as present 2 Beasts on the field for Chain Dog’s effect, 3 Chain Dogs (cause we need ‘um all) and the 1 Foolish Burial. With Flamvell Firedog you can make a quick XYZ summon for Lavalval Chain as well and setup both Flame Tiger and Chain Dog, which is very nice. Also, don’t forget that Diamond Dire Wolf is a Beast monster himself, further adding to the crazy synergy.

This next idea is seemingly more obvious, but I’m going to take it in a strange direction. Probably the next most obvious place to look after Fire Kings is Fire Fists, all of which are Beast-Warrior and FIRE, meaning they’re all targets for Onslaught. On the other hand though, none of the Fire Fist monsters that are run in any of the standard builds do anything particularly helpful when summoned by Onslaught, so we gotta do something weird instead. For this idea, Onslaught will summon the card Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Raven. He’s a Level 3, FIRE, Beast-Warrior. He has 200 Atk and 1800 Def. If Raven is sent to the graveyard you can set a Fire Formation Spell from the deck. Raven has an “If” Trigger effect meaning that it wont miss the timing, this means we can do some pretty wild stuff with it now that we’ve plopped it out for free.

Keeping in mind that it cannot miss the timing is very important since most other monsters can’t apply there effects when tributed for a Tribute Summon or used for a Synchro Summon, but this card can. The most simple application of Raven in this instance would be to tribute it for a Tribute summon. Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Swallow is a level 5 monster that can be tribute summon, and when it’s summoned you can set a Fire Formation Trap from your deck, he also makes it so Beast-Warriors cannot be targeted by your opponent’s cards. So if you have a Swallow and an Onslaught in hand you can Special Summon Raven, tribute it for Swallow and then set a Fire Formation Spell and a Trap from your deck, a technical Plus 1, although neither of the Fire Formation Trap amount to a whole lot of advantage in my opinion. Either way, you obtain a beefy monster that cannot be targeted as well as a trap to protect it and a free Beast-Warrior search with Tenki.

There’s also Synchro Summoning with Raven, which is quite interesting. There aren’t any particular Tuners I can think of off the top of my head to make immediate use of Raven after it’s been summoned, but once it goes to the graveyard it becomes more useful because it is a target for Debris Dragon, which I find pretty crazy. You can revive Raven with Debris, Synchro for a Level 7 Dragon (Ancient Fairy Dragon or Black Rose Dragon) and then set a Fire Formation Spell. Don’t worry about Synchroing for Black Rose either because this is how the chain will resolve: Synchro for Black Rose with Raven. Black Rose is summoned Chain Link 1 Raven’s effect, Chain Link 2 Black Rose effect. The chain resolves backwards, first you destroy everything, then after that you set a Fire Formation Spell card. You can potentially search Tensu to use an extra Normal Summon to take a chop at your opponent’s field with a card like Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Bear. If you summon Ancient Fairy Dragon you can make a Tiger King very easily since you can Special Summon a Fire Fist monster from hand and use the Tensu you got with Raven to Normal Summon another and XYZ for Tiger King to get Tenki or another Fire Formation.

This also opens up a weird idea I’ve been trying to figure out where you use Tenki and Raven in an Assault Mode Activate deck since Tenki can search Assault Beast, a Level 4 Beast-Warrior that you can discard to add Assault Mode Activate to your hand. The basic combo would be a Raven in grave and a Debris and Veiler in hand. Debris using Raven into Ancient Fairy Dragon, set Tenki with Raven and use it to search Assault Beast. Use Assault Beast to search Assault Mode Activate. Use Ancient Fairy’s effect to special summon Veiler and Synchro for Stardust Dragon. Then set Assault Mode Activate and use it in your opponent’s Standby Phase.

Of course, this isn’t simply everything you can do with the card. You can summon Gladiator Beast Laquari for a strange HERO Live esque build. You could use Hazy Flame Cerberus to search your deck. You can do some shenanigans with Manticore of Darkness. Who knows? Either way, keep those creative juices flowing everybody!