Activate only when a face-up Vennominon the King of Poisonous Snakes you control is destroyed. Special Summon 1 Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes from your hand or Deck.

Well, this is simple enough. Last week, I told you about all the cool things you could do with Damage = Reptile to get Vennominon the King of Poisonous Snakes into play. Now I’m going to show you why it’s worth it to wait sometimes. If you can guarantee that your Snake King will be destroyed shortly after it hits play and you have this card set, you’ll get to activate this trap to summon something bigger. Just how big are we talking? Ironically, this guy is also a monster with 0 ATK and 0 DEF. You already know her name if you read the effect text of Rise of the Snake Deity, so I’ll just show you the text of Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes: a level-10 Dark Reptile that offers a toxic alternate win condition to the game.

This card cannot be Normal Summoned or Set. This card cannot be Special Summoned except with its own effect or with Rise of the Snake Deity. This card gains 500 ATK for each Reptile-Type monster in your Graveyard. This card cannot be targeted and is unaffected by the effects of other Monsters, Spells, and Traps. When this card is destroyed by battle and sent to the Graveyard, you can remove from play 1 other Reptile-Type monster from your Graveyard to Special Summon this card. When this card inflicts Battle Damage to your opponent, place 1 Hyper-Venom Counter on it. When 3 Hyper-Venom Counters are on this card, you win the Duel.

That’s quite a bit to absorb. This thing is huge, as you’d expect from the result of a behemoth like Vennominon undergoing the process of deification. Naturally, she makes herself big by looking at your graveyard and seeing a bunch of fallen Reptiles inside—an effect borrowed from her prior incarnation. Her main selling points, in my opinion, are two new effects. The first makes her pretty scary: your opponent plays Sakuretsu Armor when you attack with her? She shakes it off. Torrential Tribute? Cry me a river (of poison). She has 0 DEF, but it won’t matter much because none of your opponent’s cards can switch her to defense position—Enemy Controller and Book of Moon, eat your hearts out! The only way to destroy this monster is by battle, and she has a built-in recursion effect. There is no list of cards I can make to get the point across, because Vennominaga is unaffected by any list of cards you can think of. Corner cases like D. D. Warrior Lady won’t work either, since Vennominaga is literally impossible to destroy except by battle, and she has two separate effects which prevent such an occurrence.

Her second new effect will have your opponent playing on the defensive and considering the merits of trying to deck you out. If she damages your opponent three times, that’s three times only—then you win the game. This effect almost seems like overkill: I figure you’d win the game in fewer than three attacks when you have a 4000 ATK mountain of death on your side of the field. Besides the seemingly extraneous quality, any effect which says you win the duel is powerful. I’d beat around the bush with my fancy words and elaboration, but it’s pretty hard to be more wordy and still show you how good this card is when it’s kind of unnecessary. So I’ll just come out and say it.

If you get this thing out with 4000 ATK, you will win the game.

Ignoring her game-winning effect, she has two other effects that can also translate into victory. When you think about it, the Hyper Venom Counters are just a sort of insurance added on to make the card cooler. 4000 ATK—virtually impossible to disrupt by any card effect—and the fact that this card has a built-in protection system are both pretty unbelievable. Even if your opponent shows off some shenanigans with Limiter Removal and Cyber Dragon, you still have something called a graveyard . . . probably with Reptiles in it. You’ll just hit your opponent for 3500 damage instead of 4000 on the next turn, and something like Card Trooper can pump that up even more. Spirit Reaper or other pesky defense-position monsters getting in your way? No concerns are warranted. If you build your deck right, you’ll draw removal for anything that won’t crumble before your giant snake god.

Does she have weaknesses? Sure. Are they enough to stop you from playing this deck? Not at all. You may need to pay attention to Lava Golem, and you will have some difficulty against decks packing Macro Cosmos, but so many archetypes don’t have any answer at all to this monster: Gravekeepers, Monarchs, Machines, Gadgets, and many others are simply not prepared to fight something as incredible as Vennominaga.

I feel kind of silly trying to talk about exactly how powerful this card’s effect is. For one, you have already read its effect (I hope), so you have a pretty good idea already. Cards like Horus the Black Flame Dragon LV8, Skull Archfiend of Lightning, Chaos Command Magician, and Sorcerer of Dark Magic are valuable additions because they beat face and protect themselves from certain threats. Vennominaga is simply unbeatable by conventional means, taking the self-protection step a bit further by including not only the greatest shield from enemy effects but also a self-reanimation ability, making her a far more impressive threat by herself than other, more vulnerable cards that are only protected from a limited set of threats. It’s kind of hard to elaborate on: this card is nigh unstoppable.

So I’ll cut it short, instead of making my own attempt at guiding you through the vast amounts of potential coursing through this card, and while I won’t say it is the most powerful card ever (especially considering what Jason Grabher-Meyer is previewing tomorrow), I feel safe saying that it is one of them. While you might not be able to play it in your sealed deck, you can get your copy a mere two days from now in participating locations at the Tactical Evolution Sneak Preview. There you’ll see a number of other cards previewed—including our slithery friend Damage = Reptile, and tomorrow’s preview card, which is quite insane. (Coming off of today’s preview, that means something.)