Pot of Stupidity

…and why you should run it every deck.

Coming up in the next set, The Dark Illusion, we have a new card currently translated to “Pot of Cupidity”. I’ve made passing mention in some of my articles up until this point, and now it’s time to give a short little blerb on this card and why I think it should be practically a staple in the future format.

First, basic overview:

Pot of Cupidity

Normal Spell

Banish 10 cards from the top of your Deck, face-down; draw 2 cards. You can only activate 1 “Pot of Cupidity” per turn.

The Basics:

Quite the simple card. Banishing the 10 cards is a cost, noted by the semicolon, so you banish 10 upon activation even if this card is negated by a card such as Dark Bribe. Unlike most draw spells we get nowadays there are no special summon or battle damage restrictions on this card, which makes it a very flexible card, capable of being put in just about any deck. The only real restriction on the card is that you can only activate 1 a turn. I’m not sure how often you’ll even want to activate 2 Pot of Cupidity in a duel considering, in a scenario where you went first with 2 in your opening 5, you would have 11 cards left in your deck after activating them both.

I also think that a little rules refresher or learning about banished cards is also in order. Firstly, while you may banish cards face-down with Pot of Cupidity it’s important to note that the owner of these banished cards can verify them, but the opponent cannot. This can give you a lot of knowledge of what you’re more likely to draw into in the future by simple process of elimination. Also, you may banish a key card and know it’s there, but the opponent will not know that because they are not allowed to verify your face-down banished cards.

You also cannot utilize any card that deals with banished cards that requires a specific facet of a card. So, fo example you cannot activate Burial From the Different Dimension on face-down banished cards because you cannot legally verify that they are monsters (whether or not you the player know they are monsters). Similarly, you cannot use Leviair the Sea Dragon to special summon a face-down banished monster for the same reason. You would then think that there are no applications that can use face-down banished cards but that’s actually not true. For  another example, you can use Necroface to return all face-down banished cards to the deck because Necroface only requires the banished cards to be cards, which is verifiable. You can also surprisingly use some weird cards like Primal Seed or, more relevantly, PSY-Framelord Omega to recycle banished cards because both don’t have any specifications for the type of banished card to use the effect on. On the whole though, there’s not a whole lot to do with those cards, especially things that are beneficial for a majority of decks. That to say that the banished cards are mostly there to stay.

Why Should I Run This?

The immediate thought is that banishing 10 cards is massively detrimental. That’s what I first thought when I was first introduced to the card. I didn’t really give it much more thought after that because it was so far into the future that I really had no reason to care about the card. I started seeing it all over the OCG in lots of different decklist over time so it got back on my radar. Additionally, I’ve taken to the the habit of testing decks from farther out into the future than I normally would do in order to make more informed purchases, since I literally only buy singles now, so I want to know exactly what cards I value right when new packs come out and what I’ll want to use them for. After barely any thought and testing it was immediately apparent that Pot of Cupidity was a card worth running in a lot of decks.

The first important proof is the debunking of the 10 card “down-side” of Pot of Cupidity. I offer up that in actuality the cost of this card is completely irrelevant and you might as well treat it as if it doesn’t exist. You may say that it will banish a card you only run 1 of and then ruin your deck, but the real thing to be asking is this: is it worth changing how I build my deck to run this card? I of course think the answer is yes. The simple way to avoid any problems with Cupidity is to simply run playsets of cards in your deck and to not run a deck that significantly punished by the ban list. This already plays into a typical winning strategy to begin with because typically decks even minorly on the banlist are more punishing of misplays and typically underpowered, so if your main goal is winning you should probably already be playing by that rule. The second rule is practically already happening too. Running 3-ofs is something Konami designs decks to do. They make really good cards and you run three of them. If all of that is true, then this card seamlessly adds itself to decks that are already good and only makes them more consistent by offering the deck literally more options via more cards. How can that possibly be bad? The answer is that it is not bad, it is in fact too good.

What For?

What decks do you run Pot of Cupidity in and what decks do you not? Inherently you cannot run this card in decks that require the use of limited cards or prefer to run small quantities of cards. For example, running the Plant engine of old doesn’t make all too much sense with Cupidity because you run 3 integral cards as 1-ofs: Dandylion, Glow-Up Bulb and Spore. Randomly banishing 1 severely hampers your strategy. So in instances like that you shouldn’t run Pot of Cupidity.

Then, literally everything else can run this card. Any old deck full of 3-ofs, any new deck with 3-of, or any deck you weren’t running 3-ofs in that you could can and probably should be running 3 Pot of Cupidity once it comes out.

Cute Things:

• Destiny HERO – Diamond Dude
  • You can use the effect of Diamond Dude to activate a Pot of Cupidity from the top of your deck. You don’t have to pay the cost to activate cards you hit off Diamond Dude’s effect, so it if you hit Cupidity you don’t have to banish the 10 cards to activate it and simply draw 2 cards. Cupidity is already functional with Destiny HEROs and we’ll be getting some more Destiny HEROs in the future, so maybe this deserves some future thought.
• Golden Homunculus
  • You can use cards like Golden Homunculus or Gren Maju Da Eiza to much greater effect in combination with Cupidity. After banishing the 10 cards with one Cupidity Golden Homunculus will have 4500/4500 and Da Eiza will have 4000/4000, which is pretty dang significant for practically no setup.
• Deck out
  • With the potential of a lot of people running this card in the future, deck out becomes a more viable strategy because a lot of people will be down an extra 10 cards making decking out a player more easy. This can be a practical gimme for some game 1s for a mill deck.

Written by: Kyle Oliver