MetalEXPLOSION

Metalfoes for Everyone!

The new Metalfoes archetype is pretty sweet, and it’s good for everyone!

One of my favorite things from the new pack, The Dark Illusion, is the new archetype Metalfoes. The main three reasons are this:

  1. The archetype is good, usable on a competitive scale
  2. It’s good for deck builders, being splashable with lots of other things
  3. It’s inexpensive

These are the three best things for any archetype in Yugioh and it’s quite exciting. The two rarest cards in the archetype are Super Rares, and each of them are 1-ofs in the deck. That means the rest of the deck is rares and commons. With that you could probably buy the entire archetype for 20 dollars. There are of course some fluff cards you can add to the archetype, such as Pot of Desires or Painful Decision, which are expensive, but neither are neccessary meaning it’s easy to keep budget. This means a deck can be had by the lay-Yugioh player, the more budget player, the creative deckbuilding Yugioh player, and, being a competitive deck, it’s good for the competitive player too. The only player it really doesn’t matter to is a person who collects cards that are cool, and the art for these cards isn’t cool, and as far as I am aware there really isn’t any interesting lore for these cards. This makes it a very inclusive archetype.

My favorite part of the archetype is the fact that it’s so generic. Many of the effects of these cards are not completely concentric around the archetype, allowing for variations of use in multiple other decks. Metalfoes of course do all of their own Metalfoes things on there own without other archetypes or engines added in, much like any archetype would, but Metalfoes is special in that it has the ability to provide some very generic and desirable things to other decks using a 16 card engine. There are three things that it provides:

  1. A very wide and accessible Pendulum Scale from 1 to 8 allowing easy special summons for decks that lack a variety of ways to put their monsters on the field.
  2. Pinpoint destruction of your own cards.
  3. The ability to send just about any monster from your hand to the graveyard via Fusion Summon.

The first provision I think is self explanatory, so I won’t get into it much aside from a simple example. A deck that really lack additional ways to summon would be Ninjas, so with the addition of the Metalfoes’ wide Pendulum Scales you can add a lot of additional plays to your deck. Multiple Ninjas also benefit from being Special Summoned, such as Ninja Grandmaster Hanzo and Red Dragon Ninja. A play that would otherwise be inaccessible to the deck, Special Summoning Hanzo on turn one, is now accessible to the deck with the addition of Metalfoes.

The second provision actually came as a bit of surprise to me on further inspection. You’d be surprised to find that there are actually very few reasonable ways to destroy your own cards if you were to want to. Until Metalfoes, realistically you needed an Archetype specific card, a really slow card, or a functional use for Sky Iris in your deck to destroy your own cards. I remember this coming up in the past, but I had never really given it much thought and looked to see how few ways there actually were. For example, in the past when Chaos Dragons where relevant (I know, forever ago, right?), destroying your own Lightpulsar Dragon would’ve been beneficial, but realistically that wasn’t possible. In the end the only way I would end up doing so was through destroying my Lightpulsar Dragon with Judgment Dragon, which isn’t a reliable scenario. Another example was Fortune Ladies. Fortune Lady Light has a pretty good effect when it is destroyed, but there was almost no good way to use its effect.

All that changes now with the Metalfoes effect. All the Metalfoes monsters are Normal Monsters, but they’re also Pendulum Monsters, meaning they have a Pendulum Effect. All the Metalfoes monsters have the same Pendulum Effect as well, which makes things easier to explain:

Once per turn: You can target 1 other face-up card you control; destroy it, and if you do, Set 1 “Metalfoes” Spell/Trap Card directly from your Deck.

Extremely simple, but highly applicable. Here’s a handful of things that could potentially benefit from this effect and other benefits of Metalfoes:

  • Kozmos
    • Kozmotown and the big ships all enjoy being destroyed to allow deck searching and summoning to provide the perfect Kozmo play.
  • Yang Zings
    • All the Yang Zing monsters get effects when destroyed allowing you to summon to perfect Yang Zing combo for any situation. Yang Zings also have Pendulum monsters added to the synergy.
  • Shaddolls
    • All the Shaddoll monsters get an effect if they’re destroyed by a card effect and also benefit from being used for a Fusion Summon, even if it’s for a Metalfoes Fusion Monster. Shaddolls also have a FIRE Fusion monster (all the Metalfoes are FIRE) so that adds some more potential synergy.
  • Fluffals
    • Multiple Fluffal monsters have effects when Special Summoned from the hand. You can also make some neat searching combos destroying your own Toy Vendor with the Metalfoes effect. Also, with the new Frightfur card, you can treat all Metalfoes Fusion monsters as Frightfur Fusion Monsters, making potential wombo combos arise.
  • Graydles
    • Graydle Alligator can take control of one of your opponent’s monsters when destroyed by a spell effect, for example one of the Metalfoes Pendulum Scales.
  • Ancient Gear
    • Geartown comes to mind when I think of cards I want to destroy. You could add in some other engine that I really haven’t thought through to make things happen. I’m sure there’s something there, not sure what though.
  • Fire Kings
    • This one’s a pretty “no-duh” combination. Every Fire King monster has a fantastic effect when destroyed and this can provide for some pretty interesting combos. Perhaps there’s also synergy in them both being FIRE as well.

All that to say I’m pretty excited to test all sorts of interesting and unique ideas using Metalfoes and to say that I think it is a well designed and interesting archetype. I hope ya’ll are also excited to use Metalfoes as well.

Written by: Kyle Oliver

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