Card Review: Card Trooper

PhotobucketCard Trooper is a really good card in the current unease of the format. It provides quite the consistency boost to almost any deck that wants even minimal graveyard support. Card Trooper has been popping up in a lot of decks lately, floating around the same miniature engine of cards, and I just thought it’d be an interesting idea to bring up.

This article isn’t so much about Card Trooper as the small engine that surrounds him, but the main idea is the Card Trooper himself. The mini Card Trooper engine may be even more simple than you where expecting, in fact it’s only Card Trooper and 1 other card, but that’s enough to make a really solid boost to a deck that can handle it. The engine is this: 2 Card Troopers and 3 Call of the Haunted. Although small, the engine remedies a lot of the current difficulties of the developing format.

The first thing that’s good about the engine is it in general can help make a deck more consistent. Card Trooper thins the deck and also draws cards. With a first turn Card Trooper that gets his draw effect you’re allowed to see 4 extra cards than normal into the deck, while also being provided with a 1900 ATK beater. The Call of the Haunted’s work in tandem with it quite well. You mill off the good monsters you need with Trooper to later be revived with Call, not to mention Trooper works as one of the best Call of the Haunted targets himself! (I’ll go more in depth on that in a bit) Call of the Haunted is also a generally good card when you run hefty boss monsters so you can re-use those monsters your opponent only thought they’d have to see once, like Master Hyperion, who’s honestly just a real dick of a monster in the first place.

A lot of quite common monsters are thwarted by this engine, or at least Card Trooper in general. Thunder King Rai-oh has been put in just about every deck lately, and Card Trooper is probably one of the best monsters to deal with him. He firstly mills to start off the deck and then can crash with T-King and on top of that gets to draw a card. There’s also not a whole lot of optimal answers to you doing this either. Using a Solemn Warning or Judgement on a Card Trooper is a horrible waste. He can’t be Bottomless Trap Holed. Compulsory is rather pointless if not beneficial to the player running the Card Trooper. Torrential Tribute and Mirror Force make you go plus 1. The best possible answer is Dimensional Prison, and even though it’s an answer, at the very worst all you do is go 1 for 1 with a D-Prison saving one of your more important monsters from it later.

It also can similarly waste the increasingly common Snowman Eater. While you don’t get to kill the Snowman, it puts the opponent in practically the same position. You force them to waste the Snowman Eater’s effect or use a not so effective card to deal with Card Trooper.

Another huge part of the current format is Mystical Space Typhoon and Heavy Storm. This mini engine allows you to much more easily play against the opponent maxing out on those cards, MST in particular. With Call of the Haunted having the opportunity to bring back Trooper, you can punish your opponent’s MSTs and Heavy Storm plays by reviving Card Trooper to draw a card. If you load up on other similar cards, ones that seem to be prevalent already, it further increases the utility of Call, especially when you’re milling those cards to revive them pretty quickly. Cards like Sangan and Thunder King Rai-oh are of particular note. Sangan takes a plus when MST’d on Call of the Haunted as well. T-King can negate search cards as well as pose a pseudo Solemn if you revive him preemptively. (ex. opponent summons Wind-Up Rat and uses its effect targeting Wind-Up Shark. You chain Call of the Haunted reviving Thunder King Rai-oh and they might give you a sour look)

Using some of the cards like Thunder King, it’s possible to expand the engine more to say: 2 T-King, 2 Trooper, 1 Sangan, 3 Call of the Haunted. Other cards like Tragoedia are also really good with Card Trooper so he deserves some thought as well. You could almost expand from this engine to create an entire deck!

To utilize this engine to the maximum potential, here’s a couple of criteria to try to meet. One, run floaters in the deck like Sangan and Card Trooper, that gain advantage when destroyed off Call of the Haunted. Or, in a similar fashion run cards that plus when they’re Special Summoned, like Stratos or Volcanic Rocket. This makes Call of the Haunted always advantageous for the user since it’ll never get effectively blind MST’d. Two, have some big boss monsters in the deck you can mill off, or even better, some in the deck and the extra deck as well. These monsters will give you really strong power pushes when your opponent doesn’t expect it. Three, run cards that are reactive to the graveyard. This can mean a lot of things, but mostly that the cards themselves revolve around the graveyard. Some examples include: Chaos Sorcerer/BLS, Necro Gardna, Dark Armed Dragon, Gishki Aquamirror. With the milling of Trooper, this will maximize the potential of you making good mills.

None of this is really new to most people I’m sure, but I felt like it was a really good idea to bring it up again, that and I’ve been really liking this a lot lately, and even more, it’s been popping up some topping builds at the YCS level.

Here’s a couple decks to think about that can utilize this to the maximum potential: Inzektors, Agents, Chaos Dragons, Lightsworns, Gishkis, Volcanics, Blackwings, Plants, Frogs (a little weird, but they meet the criteria), Gladiator Beasts, and I’m sure even more decks that I can’t think of at the moment. As always though, comment and such and I’ll gladly respond. Thanks for reading again, whoever you are.

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