“I am gladiator! You would dare enter my Colosseum, you small thing, and challenge me? Do you not know that I am lord here!?”

—Alexander

When I first read the Gladiator Beast support cards, I was impressed with how well they reflected the wishes and goals of the Gladiator Beasts. It seemed like extra care was taken to ensure that they would perform as the Gladiators expected. This week, we examine these support cards and also take a look at the Gladiator Beasts that differ from their brethren.

The Other Gladiators

Gladiator Beast Octavius and Gladiator Beast Torax give the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG something to call its own. While these two are unable to special summon other Gladiator Beasts, they still have an effect that returns them to their owner’s deck for their own reasons. Gladiator Beast Torax returns to your deck so you can draw a card. It can serve a useful purpose when combined with Gladiator Beast Secutor, or it can keep your opponent’s Cyber Dragon off the field. Gladiator Beast Octavius, on the other hand, doesn’t really want to return.

Gladiator Beast Octavius has a variation on the standard Gladiator Beast ability, specifying that its effect only activates during its controller’s battle phase. This effect threatens to return Octavius to your deck unless you discard a card. The effect was written this way so that you would only have to discard during your own battle phase and not during your opponent’s battle phase. Nobody likes being forced to discard just because an opponent rammed a Mystic Tomato into his or her Octavius.

Sometimes you may actually want to return Octavius to your deck. You do get to destroy a face-down spell or trap card whenever it is special summoned by another Gladiator Beast, after all. This method can become costly as you lose Gladiator Beasts, but that’s what Secutor is made for.

Gladiator Beast Secutor isn’t very strong, but it puts forth a mighty effort in support of its team. After it has been special summoned from the deck by another Gladiator Beast, it begins to call forth its brethren en masse. If you can keep Secutor alive and active in battle, it will continue to bring Gladiator Beasts forth from your deck with their effects primed and ready for combat. Secutor can boost your field from one Gladiator Beast to five in just a few turns, and once this happens, you will want to have some kind of plan for them.

When you play with Gladiator Beast Torax, you can use Gladiator Beast Secutor to bring one out and later return it to your deck to draw a card. If you manage to keep battling, you can pop Torax on and off of the field while also bringing another Gladiator Beast into play that will remain to continue fighting. Naturally, this plan relies heavily upon these monsters actually surviving battle, and your opponent certainly isn’t going to aid you in this endeavor.

Why go to all this effort? Once you start to run out of space, Gladiator Beast Secutor’s effect runs into problems. When you have two or more open spaces, Secutor has nothing to worry about, but when you get down to one space, you have a problem. You are still allowed to activate Secutor’s effect in this situation, but you will only get one Gladiator Beast onto the field. You might think you only get to select one Gladiator Beast. Secutor demands two Gladiator Beasts, so even in this case, you must select two. One of them is special summoned and the other is sent to the graveyard. This is still a valid plan of action if that one Gladiator Beast you bring into play will help to win the duel.

Whenever players speak about the Gladiator Beasts, they seem to ignore or completely disregard their Fusion monster brethren. Gladiator Beast Gaiodiaz and Gladiator Beast Heraklinos combine well with the other Gladiators because they do not use Polymerization and don’t ask you to alter the structure of your deck in any specific way. Instead they wait in the Fusion deck like Kaiba’s XYZ Dragon Fusion monsters, and when the time is right, they combine together to form a more powerful Gladiator. You perform this Gladiator Fusion during your main phase by returning the required Gladiators to your deck and then special summoning the appropriate Gladiator Beast Fusion from your Fusion deck. This is not an ignition effect, so it won’t be possible for your opponent to chain an effect and disrupt this process. He or she will have to wait and respond to whatever Fusion monster you bring into play.

We Battle!

The Gladiator Beast support cards have been built around the effects of the Gladiators, with the intent to directly or indirectly support their basic strategy. We know Gladiator Beasts typically want to return to the deck and then bring someone else out to take their place. This requires alternatives in the deck, because the cards in your hand won’t be of much help.

Gladiator Beast’s Respite and Gladiator’s Return accomplish this task by returning Gladiator Beasts to your deck, while also allowing you to draw cards that offset the investment paid by activating the card. For each card, returning the Gladiator Beasts to your deck is performed when resolving the effect and is not a cost, although Gladiator’s Return must declare its targets in the graveyard when it is activated. Disarm and Parry, the counter trap cards made for spell and trap negation, use the Gladiator Beast returned to the deck as a cost. Like Respite and Return, this cost essentially supports what the Gladiator Beasts would have wanted anyway.

The Gladiator Beast field spell card, Colosseum - Cage of the Gladiator Beasts, combined a mixture of effects that supports what the Gladiator Beasts do and supports itself when it is threatened with destruction. Its first effect is a trigger effect that activates whenever a monster is special summoned from a player’s deck, placing a counter upon the Colosseum. You will notice that it does not specify Gladiator Beasts, so those recruiter monsters that are fond of replacing themselves will unintentionally boost the Gladiator Beasts as well. The Gladiator Beasts already have Test Ape for this purpose, but they can just as easily use recruiters like Giant Rat and Flying Kamakiri #1.

The second effect of Colosseum - Cage of the Gladiator Beasts is a continuous effect that increases the ATK and DEF of every Gladiator Beast monster based on the number of counters that have accumulated on the Colosseum. This effect rewards you for the “tag-out/tag-in” cycle you’ve applied throughout the duel by making your Gladiator Beasts progressively stronger. Your opponent isn’t going to like this and will be looking for a way to eliminate the Colosseum to bring the Gladiator Beasts back down to some manageable level. This is where the third effect becomes useful.

Usually extra copies of a field spell card are worthless when they are in your hand. Colosseum - Cage of the Gladiator Beasts has an effect that takes advantage of this. Whenever the Colosseum is going to be destroyed by a card effect, you can discard one of those extraneous copies you have in your hand to prevent the destruction of the copy you already have in play. It is a useful effect from which other field cards could certainly benefit.

Next week, we open up the mail bags and close out the year answering rules questions. Until then, send all comments and questions to Curtis@metagame.com!