Over the past two Shonen Jump Championships, a few combo decks have seen a massive increase in play. The first one is Diamond Dude Turbo, also known as DDT. While it is very difficult to play correctly (since you have to be aware of all the cards that are in your deck at all times), DDT is one of the most powerful strategies in the format. The second combo deck is a little easier to run, but can be just as powerful. It focuses on Ritual summoning Demise, King of Armageddon, laying waste to the field with the Ritual monster’s effect, and finishing the opponent off with some variety of Metamorphosis for Cyber Twin Dragon, Megamorph, or Doom Dozer. It is also a very explosive deck, but Demise has been in the Advanced format for quite a while now. Why is this powerful Ritual monster only now seeing tournament play?

The answer is pretty easy. It is much easier to Ritual summon monsters when you are tributing monsters from your deck instead of your field or hand. Advanced Ritual Art was a huge boost to decks based on Demise, King of Armageddon, as well as many other casual and competitive strategies.

Advanced Ritual Art was one of the unique gems to come out of the powerful Strike of Neos booster set. While the attention it garnered at release was minimal, there were some players who saw its potential. Advanced Ritual Art acts like any standard Ritual spell in that it is used to properly Ritual summon a Ritual monster. Since Advanced Ritual Art performs an actual Ritual summon, you can use cards like Premature Burial and Call of the Haunted to special summon the Ritual monster from the graveyard.

However, that’s where the similarities between typical Ritual spells and Advanced Ritual Art end. Advanced Ritual Art is just that: an advanced and therefore better way to summon Ritual monsters. While most Ritual spells can only summon one specific Ritual monster, Advanced Ritual Art can summon any Ritual monster. This already makes it a solid choice over any of the other Ritual spells that have been printed. Three other Ritual spells have had the ability to summon more than just one specific Ritual monster: Contract with the Abyss, Earth Chant, and End of the World. All three were still limited in what they could bring out, and Advanced Ritual Art beats them all in terms of what it can actually summon.

The other (and more important) strength of Advanced Ritual Art is that, unlike other Ritual spells, you are tributing off monsters from a different source than your hand. Normally, Ritual spells require you to tribute monsters from your hand or field until the combined level of the monsters you have tributed meets or exceeds the level of the Ritual monster you are trying to summon. It is because of this mechanic that Ritual monsters (with the exception of Relinquished ages ago) never really saw competitive play. The demand on the number of cards you had to sink into one monster was astounding, and oftentimes the amount of work you’d put into summoning a Ritual monster would be wiped away by a simple removal effect. Advanced Ritual Art uses your deck instead, mitigating your potential losses.

This effect does have its ups and downs. On the upside, you are not losing extra cards from your hand or field to summon a Ritual monster, meaning that you are technically only losing one card (the Ritual spell) to summon the Ritual monster to the field. If you are summoning something like Demise, King of Armageddon, then there’s a good chance that you will make up for this lost card immediately. Even if your opponent chains Bottomless Trap Hole to Demise, you will most likely come out ahead in the exchange. You’ll have also thinned your deck of some monsters you won’t want to draw. That, in turn, improves the chances of drawing more Ritual-fetching monsters like Manju of the Ten Thousand Hands.

The downsides to Advanced Ritual Art aren’t too bad, but they are still something you should be aware of. Playing with the new Ritual spell requires that you run normal monsters in your deck. This can be a little tricky, but there are plenty of beefy normal monsters in the game. Neo Bug and Insect Knight both prove to be efficient attackers if you draw into them, and they’ll still serve a valuable purpose of being two of the level 4 normal monsters needed to Ritual summon Demise, King of Armageddon or other level 8 Ritual monsters such as Shinato, King of a Higher Plane. There are also level 4 monsters like Gene-Warped Warwolf, which is the strongest ATK no-drawback level 4 monster in the game. And there are plenty of normal monsters that have beefy DEF totals, including some that can survive an attack from Cyber Dragon. These could also be solid options to use in conjunction with Advanced Ritual Art.

Another complication to Advanced Ritual Art is that the monsters you send to the graveyard need to have their combined levels equal the level of the monster you are attempting to Ritual summon. This can be a little problematic if you want to Ritual summon something that’s level 7, but a lot of incredible Ritual monsters are level 8. This may limit the number of Ritual monsters you can reasonably Ritual summon with Advanced Ritual Art, but it doesn’t actually take away from how much this new Ritual spell enables.

The effect of Advanced Ritual Art is very hard to disrupt. Macro Cosmos and Dimensional Fissure look like they’d be awesome tech, but Advanced Ritual Art only sends monsters from the deck to the graveyard as part of the effect. This means that if either Dimensional Fissure or Cosmos are face up on the field, your normal monsters will simply be removed from play instead of sent to the graveyard, and you will still be able to Ritual summon your monster!

Sometimes, the use of normal monsters to enable Advanced Ritual Art isn’t even a downside. Normal monsters have a lot of powerful cards that can provide you with many options. For aggressive decks, Dark Factory of Mass Production allows you to dump 1900 ATK and 2000 ATK normal monsters and then return them to your hand after your Ritual summon. A play like this can leave you ready to mount a solid, continuous attack, since you’ll be able to Ritual summon a big threat and then follow it up with some strong monsters over the next few turns. If your strategy is more defensive and you are running monsters with higher DEF and smaller ATK values, then the old classic, Backup Soldier, may be a solid bet for you. It can get back up to three normal monsters, even more than with Dark Factory of Mass Production. This can be great in setting up a backup strategy if your Ritual monster is destroyed, or it can be used to fuel a normal Ritual spell instead of Advanced Ritual Art. There are a lot of things that can be done with those extra cards.

One of the more entertaining strategies made possible by Advanced Ritual Art is rooted in its ability to dump all four limbs of the classic Exodia the Forbidden One. This can be used as a way to get all of the pieces within reach through Dark Factory or Backup Soldier, allowing for some speedy alternate wins via Exodia. It’s pretty fragile due to Macro Cosmos, Dimensional Fissure, and Banisher of the Radiance, but it’s a real blast from the past and it can be a pretty fun surprise to pull on your opponent.

Advanced Ritual Art is one of the best tools that Ritual monsters have. Its sheer power has shown itself off at two Shonen Jump Championships now, with Demise combo decks finishing in the Top 8 at both Columbus and Montreal. There are a lot of possibilities that are available thanks to the new Ritual spell, and they make a lot of old favorites like Relinquished look enticing.