From the upcoming pack Raging Tempest, the new SPYRAL support has been revealed!
I’ll just do like I normally do and show the effect of each card, then I’ll give my take on what it brings to the table for the archetype as a whole, or maybe the game as a whole (unlikely for the ladder). I’ll go through them the order they appear in the set list:
SPYGAL Misty
DARK / Spellcaster / Level 4
1500 ATK / 1600 DEF
If this card is Normal or Special Summoned: You can declare 1 card type (Monster, Spell, or Trap); reveal the top card of your opponent’s Deck, and if you do, draw 1 card if it is a card of that type. Once per turn, during either player’s turn: You can target 1 “SPYRAL Super Agent” you control and 1 monster your opponent controls; return both monsters to the hand.
I would say that this card is much better than it reads, but also massively flawed for the one reason that everyone and there mom pointed out: this card doesn’t have “SPYRAL” in its name, making it completely unreliable. If you could search this card with SPYRAL Resort it would be miles ahead of its current self, but because of a stupid design decision this card is only alright, and potentially not even worth running. Setting aside the fact that this card isn’t actually a SPYRAL monster let’s look at what else she’s good for.
In a way, Misty acts as a pseudo replacement for Drone, albeit not nearly as strong in many respects but better in others. In all the standard plays in which you would use SPYRAL GEAR – Drone and SPYRAL Super Agent you can usually replace Drone with Misty because in effect Misty looks at the top card of the opponent’s deck when summoned. Unlike Drone through, you don’t get to manipulate the opponent’s draws, which is unfortunate, but that is traded for the ability to draw a card if you can call the opponent’s top card of the deck, which is potentially a lot better. So, for example you can normal summon Misty, call something, if you’re right, great you draw a card, if you’re wrong, it doesn’t really matter because you saw the top card and it still gets put back on top of the opponent’s deck. You can now call correctly for any future calls you would make the rest of the turn, for example if you wished to summon a Super Agent from the hand you could.
Naturally, this combo sets up for Misty’s second effect that makes her a Pleiades or Majespecter Unicorn of sorts, which is actually ridiculously good. She can bounce your Super Agent to hand during either player’s turn to bounce an opponent’s monster, that’s fantastic. The application should be pretty self-explanatory here, you get to control the opponent’s turn by being able to bounce any monster they control whenever you want. I also think I should mention the awesome synergy this effect has with Kaijus, which I already think have a good place in this deck. You can tribute an opponent’s monster for a Kaiju, then use Misty to bounce that Kaiju and then summon it to the opponent’s side again.
Other notable things, Misty is not once per turn, meaning if for whatever reason you summon more than one a turn, you essentially get free draws on the ladder ones because you saw the top card of the opponent’s deck. The unfortunate downside though is that there are almost no ways to be special summoning this card to allow yourself additional uses. You can special summon Misty using Summoner Monk, which can pitch cards like SPYRAL Mission – Assault for the graveyard effect, or any other spell you might have. This gives you effectively 5 copies of Misty making it potentially more reliable, but I don’t recommend it. Unfortunately for Misty, since she doesn’t have SPYRAL in her name you cannot revive her with SPYRAL GEAR – Big Red, so this point is mostly moot.
Misty adds yet another DARK monster to SPYRALs, this opens the possibility of using Allure of Darkness. I’m currently testing some builds using Allure of Darkness along side D.D.R. – Different Dimension Reincarnation in order to turbo through the deck and more reliably summon SPYRAL Master Plan. So far I would say it’s bad.
Misty also gives you a lot more level 4 monsters opening up the deck for Rank 4 XYZ plays. The problem is most Rank 4 XYZ monsters provide almost no value to this deck. Misty’s bouncing effect is almost always better than an XYZ monster you could summon, and combining your monsters in SPYRALs makes you lose out on the protection of SPYRAL Resort, so unless you’re doing the wombo combos for Naturia Beast and what not, Rank 4 XYZ are still very out of place despite now being much easier.
Other bad news, Misty really contradicts SPYRAL Resort a lot because she practically prevents you from sending monsters to your own graveyard so you cannot pay Resort’s maintenance cost when trying to use her, which is kind of crumby. Given the fact that you cannot reliably get her to your hand, it’s hard to make the argument to run a deck based around her effect and run the pieces needed to facilitate her optimal use. I really like her effect, but in the end I think that it’s probably better to just run Drone in the end, so I don’t expect to be running this card in the future except in fun builds.
SPYRAL Tough
WIND / Warrior / Level 4
1900 ATK / 1600 DEF
This card’s name becomes “SPYRAL Super Agent” while it is on the field or in the Graveyard. Once per turn: You can declare 1 card type(Monster, Spell, or Trap) and target 1 card your opponent controls; reveal the top card of your opponent’s Deck, and if you do, destroy the targeted card if the revealed card is the declared type.
I really liked this card at first, but as I tested and tested yet some more I kept wanting this card less and less. I cannot deny that it has a pretty exceptional effect. What’s more interesting to me even is that this card is generic, meaning you can run it in anything. In the end it has really low synergy with SPYRALs on the whole but is a very solid stand alone card.
Being treated as a SPYRAL Super Agent really only adds one benefit, and that’s that you can revive SPYRAL Quik-Fix while you control it. Quik-Fix being possibly the most important card for the deck makes this very important. This is effectively pointless though because it’s simply outclassed by regular Super Agent because you don’t have to Normal Summon Super Agent meaning you’re allowed to build much more complex plays with regular Super Agent.
The one thing this card does add though is the ability to out almost any card. For example, if the opponent plays Vanity’s Emptiness this deck typically gets rocked because it has no choice but to draw slowly into spell and trap removal to out it. Now by running just one SPYRAL Tough you can search it with Resort and out a card. You can also keep outing cards because it’s once per turn. Ideally, I like to revive Tough with Big Red and sit on it while i continuously destroy cards.
Ruling-wise, something interesting, you can use Tough’s effect (whether you fail or not is irrelevant) crash it into a monster so it goes to the graveyard, then revive and use his effect again to pop a card 100% of the time because like Misty the top card of the opponent’s deck gets retained.
Much like Misty, Tough can also be used as a Pseudo replacement for Drone, the bad news though is that it requires the opponent to have cards in order for you to look at the top of the opponent’s deck, making it less reliable in a way again, but less so given it’s a SPYRAL monster, and in worse case scenario his effect fails and somehow you Super Agent is prevented you still have plays because Tough counts as Super Agent.
In the end I’d say this is a nice 1-of for control variants and an easy scratch for combo variants.
SPYRAL GEAR – Utility Wire
Normal Trap
If you control a “SPYRAL Super Agent”: target 1 face-up card your opponent controls; return it to the top of the owner’s Deck. You can only activate 1 “SPYRAL GEAR – Utility Wire” per turn.
This card is easily the best of the new support, simple providing something new and good for the deck, while also supporting the theme’s goals.
First, you can search this card with Quik-Fix. This is vitally important because this gives you access to this card at almost all times. I could relate this card to cards like Infernity Barrier, I feel it’s similar kin, it’s searchable quite easily and you can make a powerful board and get it for free in the middle of your combo and then end your turn with a “come at me bro” type way.
The applications of this card are exceedingly simple. It’s almost exactly the same as Phoenix Wing Wind Blast, in fact, after this card was revealed I noticed its similarity to Wing Blast and realized Wing Blast would actually be really good in SPYRALs, but now that this exists there’s no reason to run Win Blast. Utility Wire is a pretty basic control card, use it to disrupt the opponent’s plays, use it as a one card answer to any Extra Deck monster, all pretty simple. The one main bonus this card has is that it places the card back on the top of the opponent’s deck which gives SPYRAL decks the special ability to call that card with perfect accuracy for there multitude of effects that require it. Ex. for Super Agent, Tough and Misty. You can also bury the card you spin 2 cards deeper with Drone’s effect if you don’t want the opponent to re-draw it.
I would say that Utility Wire requires running at least 1 copy in every SPYRAL deck because of how easy it is to access and utilize (hence the name “Utility” I suppose). In most decks I would probably run 2 copies and I would probably shy away from 3 because it isn’t really a combo piece in opening hands and SPYRALs don’t really like playing slow control, at least at the moment.
SPYRAL Mission – Recapture
Continuous Trap
Destroy this card during your 3rd End Phase after activation. Once per turn, if a “SPYRAL” monster is Special Summoned to your field (except during the Damage Step): You can target 1 monster your opponent controls; take control of it until the End Phase, but it cannot attack directly this turn. If a “SPYRAL” monster(s) you control would be destroyed by battle or card effect, you can banish this card from your Graveyard instead of destroying 1 of those “SPYRAL” monsters.
I’m not going to lie, I think this card is trash. It provides almost nothing of value to SPYRALs, makes opening hands worse and is unbelievably slow.
I tested this card a multitude of ways, and there’s just no way to make this card work well in my opinion. Being able to steal monsters is great, but this kind of begs the question, what do you do with the monster you steal? The problem is that the answer is you don’t do anything with the monster because SPYRALs have no good options for using opponent’s monsters. At best I could say tribute summon a Master Plan using the opponent’s monster, and honestly that’s not even a good strategy. You might as well be running the multitude of faster cards that achieve the same purpose, like The Monarchs Stormforth, which effectively would be the same but not require a combo to setup.
Which brings me to the second reason why this card is bad, it’s a combo trap. In order for a trap card to be effective as a combo piece, the pay-off has to be enormous because not only does it require multiple cards to pull off, but it also requires a pre-requisite 2 turns to perform. Time is easily the most important Yugioh resource and combo Traps use it up like no-one’s business. So in the end, a combo trap has to make up for a 2 card 2 turn investment, meaning you need to end with at least 3 cards total that where better than the original parts, and then some to make up for the lost turn. SPYRAL Mission – Recapture doesn’t even come close. Not only do you only gain 1 card, being the opponent’s monster, that advantage gained from the combo isn’t even permanent. So you perform this bloated 2 card combo in order to gain a phantom plus 1? What a joke. This card might as well take every monster the opponent controls when you special summon a SPYRAL monster, that might be more reasonable. This would require opponent’s to destroy it immediately and then it would facilitate its graveyard effect.
The graveyard effect though I do like. The prevention of destruction completes the soft lock provided by SPYRAL Resort. So, if I was to use this card, I would probably find a way to spam dump it into the graveyard, because the opponent becomes hard pressed to stop a Big Red equipped Super Agent under Resort if it cannot be destroyed. To that end, you can most easily get this to the graveyard with Quik-Fix, adding some natural synergy to the deck, but that just brings the deck back full circle to one of its main problems, which is that there are no effective ways to get Quik-Fix into the graveyard. Once there is though, I’ll wager this deck becomes teir 1.
Some other things to do and about this card. It’s searchable with Master Plan, which is better than nothing. This brings some more credence to the D.D.R. idea because that provides easier access to discarding for Recapture and Quik-Fix, but I still think I would rather search the other SPYRAL Mission.
You can make a mini-engine using Magic Planter if you really wanted, I don’t know what other Continuous Spell would be worth running though.
You can send Recapture directly to the graveyard using Foolish Burial with Belongings or Paleozoic Marrella. Perhaps Paleo-SPYRAL is an idea worth noting since SPYRALs now have 2 trap cards to help facilitate the Paleo agenda.
Last thing, this card actually does have one great upside and that’s that it makes Super Agent and Quik-Fix avoid Solemn Strike. Similar to Return of the Monarchs in Monarchs, Recapture creates a chain that prevents the opponent from chaining Strike to a Super Agent’s effect. This means you can use it to destroy Strikes without the opponent being able to respond. This is because Super Agent’s effect to destroy a Spell or Trap when Special Summon will be chain link 1, followed by Recapture’s effect on chain link 2. Because the last thing in the chain isn’t a monster effect the opponent cannot chain with Solemn Strike allowing you to freely pop said Strike with Super Agents effect.
Overall, I would say don’t run this card unless something unique is unearthed in the future or if future support causes this cards value to be rethought.
That’s all I’ve got for yet another SPYRAL review, tell me if you have any thoughts of your own down below!
Written by: Kyle Oliver