The Dark Creator is everything that The Creator always wanted to be and then some. Like The Creator, it can’t be special summoned from the graveyard. Actually, this version can’t be special summoned from anywhere but your hand, and it also can’t be normal summoned. Basically, we trade the normal summon capability of The Creator for making the eventual summon totally costless . . . provided you meet a couple of easy conditions. First, you need no monsters on your side of the field. It’s an even easier condition than what you need to summon Cyber Dragon. Then you need five or more Dark monsters in your graveyard. That’s where things can get tricky. It may seem that The Dark Creator is strictly a late-game card due to its heavy graveyard dependency, but thanks to Phantom Darkness, getting five Dark monsters to the graveyard is now a relatively easy task. Once you have The Dark Creator in play, your goal becomes simple: summon as many powerful monsters for free from wherever you can find them! Check this out:

Monsters: 22

3 The Dark Creator

2 Darknight Parshath

1 Dark Magician of Chaos

3 Doomsday Horror

3 Armageddon Knight

1 Snipe Hunter

1 Sangan

2 Magical Merchant

1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

2 Phantom Skyblaster

3 Shadowpriestess of Ohm

Spells: 10

3 Allure of Darkness

3 Dark Eruption

1 Heavy Storm

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

1 Premature Burial

1 Dimension Fusion

Traps: 8

1 Torrential Tribute

1 Mirror Force

3 Solemn Judgment

3 Escape from the Dark Dimension

Phantom Darkness is the most powerful set to grace our shores in years, if not ever. That said, it’s easy to see why so much of the deck is pulled from the new set. These cards are game changing, and you’d better believe I’m going to use them. Back when Common Charity came out, not many people were particularly excited. A trap card that draws two cards and then sends your hand to the graveyard if you don’t remove a normal monster in your hand from play? It’s not exactly main deck material, especially when cards like Dark Factory of Mass Production and Trade-In are there to serve your real needs (i.e. fetching the pieces of the Demise combo). Allure of Darkness on the other hand is quite possibly the best card in the entire set, fueling the card-drawing and cycling needs of a number of upstart decks in addition to setting up any number of incredible combos. In this deck, it serves to help you draw into your Dark Creators as quickly as possible while getting monsters to the removed-from-play area to be summoned by Escape from the Dark Dimension. It’s really amazing how good Allure of Darkness is, and if I were you, I’d be looking to pick up as many of them as I can before everyone else figures it out.

This deck shares a similar goal to that of the newly revived Zombie deck. Specifically, you want to special summon as many potentially huge and powerful monsters as you can in a short amount of time. The Dark Creator is pretty insane in and of itself, and once it starts pulling back Shadowpriestess of Ohm or Dark Magician of Chaos or even Darknight Parshath, things just get crazier. Actually, Darknight Parshath is probably going to be the first monster you put into play when you drop The Dark Creator. The most probable scenario involves Magical Merchant being attacked, allowing it to drop some number of Dark monsters into your graveyard before getting you a spell or trap. Then, you’ll drop The Dark Creator and have it revive Darknight Parshath. At this point, wiping the opponent’s field and drawing a card is the most likely outcome, and if you have Escape from the Dark Dimension ready and waiting, you may even end the game that turn depending on what monster you removed to summon Darknight. Then, each time you destroy a monster with Darknight, you can give up 100 of its ATK to draw a card. It’s almost like a negative cost considering that what you get for removing that Dark monster is a free card along with some setup for the rest of your deck. No matter what Dark monster you remove, you’re going to give your Doomsday Horror cards more ATK and DEF and you’re going to bump up the number of cards your copies of Escape from the Dark Dimension have access to. In the end, you’re going to want as many Dark monsters removed from play as you possibly can so that Doomsday Horror has plenty of fuel to work with when it wreaks havoc on your opponent. In essence, Horror is the actual win condition of the strategy while everything else whittles down the opponent’s options and builds your own until you can drop Horror with a clear path to victory.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “What happens if they still manage to stop Doomsday Horror?” That’s the grand thing about this deck. Let’s say you go through the motions and set up what should be a winning scenario, but it doesn’t work out. In this case, you aren’t down and out. Not by a long shot. There’s so much draw power in this deck between Allure of Darkness and Darknight Parshath that you should have another copy of The Dark Creator in hand soon after (if not before) you get a chance to drop the first one. That means that if Doomsday Horror were to be destroyed—triggering its second effect—then your graveyard is totally refilled with all the Dark monsters you need to do it all again. In fact, Darknight Parshath will be at its strongest at this point. Just remember that it can’t pierce through defenses like its Light counterpart.

At this point, I’m beginning to realize that there’s another win condition in the deck that I totally forgot to explain. Shadowpriestess of Ohm acts like a sort of super-Cannon Soldier for face-up Dark monsters. Basically, you’re able to do fun things like attack with all your monsters and then tribute them off for 800 damage each to end the game. The extra 300 damage makes a huge difference, as does the extra ATK strength of Ohm. She’s got 1700 ATK compared to Cannon Soldier’s 1400, making her a far better combatant, and the fact that she’s also Dark allows her to both benefit from the deck’s support structure and use herself as the final shot at your opponent’s life points for game. It should be noted that this deck is really good at building field presence, and between The Dark Creator and Phantom Skyblaster, the kind of shenanigans you can pull should be readily obvious.

I’ll ask you to remember what people were doing when Card Trooper was at three per deck. They were playing a single Trooper, and then using Machine Duplication to get the rest out of their deck and do silly, painful things to each other. You can do something very similar with this deck, especially if your opponent has a clear field. Imagine summoning Dark Creator, using it to pull back Ohm, and then normal summoning Phantom Skyblaster. You win the game when that happens, and it’s not at all dependent on drawing more than one copy of a particular card. In fact, it isn’t even dependent on otherwise dead cards like Machine Duplication. Heck, drawing multiple Skyblasters might not be a bad thing at all, especially if you somehow don’t win that turn. Just blow away all the tokens anyway: as long as you still have The Dark Creator, you can just try again next turn. Phantom Darkness offers a plethora of amazing cards, and even though the sneak preview is over, I’m going to keep on looking at them to see just how much crazy stuff I can come up with over the next few weeks. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

NEXT WEEK: More PTDN wackiness!