Talk about a curveball! For those of you who didn’t make it to your local Sneak Preview this weekend, you missed out on a few major surprises. This card, a world-debut ultra rare, may be the biggest . . .

As important as skill is, a good part of dueling has to do with luck—what you draw (or don’t draw) is sometimes just as important as how you use the cards you get. The more consistent you can make any given strategy, and the more you can reduce the luck factor, the better your overall performance will be. The best duelists work to mitigate the impact luck has on their games.

That makes any effect that lets you cycle through your deck immensely powerful, because it means you’ll get to see more cards over the course of the game. While you may not actually get to use a higher number of them, you’ll get to choose from a wider list of options, and that level of control makes a big difference. Remember Graceful Charity? This card’s impact is similar in that playing a copy instantly gives you an advantage over your opponent who has not had the benefit of seeing additional cards.

Flat out, Allure of Darkness makes any deck that can use it better. Consistency, speed, and a couple of great combos are what this pleasant surprise is all about.

I guarantee that even as you read this, somewhere, somebody is comparing this card to Destiny Draw. You yourself had probably considered it. And why not? Both are extremely powerful spells that let you see two additional cards. At first glance, they have a lot in common.

With further investigation though, there are some drastic differences. The first is a bit of a negative—while Destiny Draw lets you get Destiny Hero - Malicious, Destiny Hero - Disk Commander, or Destiny Hero - Dasher into your graveyard where you can use their effects, Allure of Darkness seems to have been carefully designed to avoid that type of abuse. Dumping cards into the graveyard has proven to be exceptionally helpful over the years, and it’s probably what got Graceful Charity a nice reliable seat on the Forbidden list. You won’t generally cause that kind of combo-laden craziness with Allure of Darkness.

On the flip side, the advantages Allure of Darkness holds over Destiny Draw are plentiful. The most obvious one? While there are about fifteen Destiny Hero monsters that can be used with Destiny Draw, there are hundreds upon hundreds of Dark monsters that you can use with Allure. Allure of Darkness slips very neatly into many existing strategies, and will no doubt go on to spawn new decks as duelists search for ways to use it. With so many monsters to complement Allure, the possibilities will take duelists weeks, maybe months to fully catalogue.

In addition, Allure’s removal of a monster from play comes with some unique combos. Remove D.D. Scout Plane from your hand and you’ll get to special summon it at the end of the turn, creating a decent attacker and a free bit of tribute fodder much the same way Malicious does. Granted, the Scout Plane has to survive until your next turn to be tributed, but it has more utility on its own. Beyond that, if I had to choose between opening a duel with two copies of Scout Plane in my hand or two copies of Malicious, the choice is clear.

Allure of Darkness is also an exceptionally easy way to remove monsters from play, and right now that’s a more competitive move than ever before. Sure, old tricks like Return from the Different Dimension and Dimension Fusion benefit from Allure of Darkness—pitching a select Dark monster straight from your hand to the removed-from-play pile is just easier than dropping it to the graveyard and removing it with Bazoo. However, for me, the really big deal is this card’s synergy with the new Phantom Darkness trap, Escape from the Dark Dimension. It lets you special summon the best Dark monster you’ve removed, and it does it for zero cost—no life points and no discard. It would be really easy to pitch Jinzo or D.D. Survivor for Allure of Darkness, then bring that monster back with Escape. Jinzo will negate Escape’s effect much like it would protect itself from Call of the Haunted, and D.D. Survivor is practically immune as well. If Escape is removed from the field while it’s attached to D.D. Survivor, it kicks the Survivor out of play, and he’ll come back at the end of the turn.

The biggest difference between this card and Destiny Draw is the order of its effects. While Destiny Draw demanded its discard at the point of activation, Allure of Darkness doesn’t ask you to remove a card from your hand until it resolves. It’s a lot like Common Charity, and the result is a card with much more utility than Destiny Draw could ever have. The Destiny Hero hallmark is a useless topdeck, and it will never be playable unless you have a Destiny Hero in hand to match it.

Allure of Darkness is different. You can activate it even if it’s the only card in your hand: so long as one of the cards you draw is a Dark monster, you’ll get to keep the other. A well-constructed Dark deck with even draws over the course of a duel should never need to wait to activate this card, and if you’ve played any deck running Destiny Heroes, you’ll know how much of a difference that makes. One of the worst feelings playing Perfect Circle or Destiny Hero Light and Darkness is sitting there with one or more dead copies of Destiny Draw, and you probably won’t find yourself in that situation with Allure of Darkness.

Like I said before, there are probably dozens of decks that this card can improve or even inspire. But a few existing and emerging decks warrant discussion, because they’ll see significant boosts in play as a result of Allure.

The first is Dark World. Though Dark World decks have a reputation for being explosive but unreliable, the addition of three Allure of Darkness cards gives the deck a far better shot at getting to its key cards. Card Destruction and Morphing Jar become easier to find, while at the same time Allure of Darkness gives the deck something to do with its frequent dead draws. Goldd, Sillva, Gren, and Kahkki all require a discard effect to be useful, but Allure can let you pitch such a card aside when it isn’t doing anything in order to equalize your draws. I expect Dark World players to be clamoring for three copies of Allure. It’s exactly what the deck needed.

Strike Ninja received a big boost from Phantom Darkness thanks to Armageddon Knight and Dark Grepher. Both monsters are Dark Warriors that can help bring additional Darks to the graveyard, and along with monsters like D.D. Survivor, Don Zaloog, and Greenkappa, there’s a powerful Dark variant of the Warrior Toolbox deck that will be competitively viable. The ability to search out specific monsters with Reinforcement of the Army, while also drawing through two cards with one thanks to Allure of Darkness, will make this deck exceptionally quick and reliable.

Tomato control and other Dark-themed decks are obvious beneficiaries too. Virtually all of the new Dark decks from Phantom Darkness revolve around specific monsters, and Allure of Darkness can get you to them faster. That’s good news, since stuff like Dark Armed Dragon, Dark Creator, and Darknight Parshath aren’t exactly easy to search from your deck. Anyone who’s looking to build a strategy using one of the new theme-worthy monsters—from Yubel to Rainbow Dark Dragon—may find him- or herself interested in Allure.

Finally, a wealth of Dark-themed combo decks become much better with the ability to draw more cards in each game. Diamond Dude Turbo variants are making a comeback, Magical Explosion is seeing more attention, and the addition of three more draw cards to decks like these makes a huge difference. This might be where Allure of Darkness ends up having the biggest impact on competitive play.

There’s not much more to say beyond that. Allure of Darkness is amazingly good, adds speed and consistency to decks that wouldn’t normally have it, and works in a ton of different strategies. This is a metagame-shaping card if there ever was one, and it’s going to see a ton of play in the big tournaments of 2008.

—Jason Grabher-Meyer