If you’ve checked out the website for the Force of the Breaker Sneak Preview (and you really should, considering that the event is taking place tomorrow and Sunday), you already know that the special Sneak Preview card you’ll receive for playing in the event is called Volcanic Rocket. Similar to Grandmaster of the Six Samurai, Volcanic Rocket exists specifically to enhance the powers of one of the new monster groups from the set. It is designed to be played as a method of summoning the fourth and final ultra rare of the set, Volcanic Doomfire. No, we haven’t previewed that card yet, but I suspect that by the end of this article, you’ll have a much better understanding of why it’s a really good thing that Volcanic Rocket exists. Here’s what it does:

Volcanic Rocket

Level 4

FIRE/Pyro/Effect

When this card is Normal Summoned, Flip Summoned, or Special Summoned, you can add 1 “Blaze Accelerator” card from your Deck or your Graveyard to your hand.

1900 ATK/1400 DEF

I guess the first question would be, “What is a Blaze Accelerator card anyway?” As per the new wording conventions put into place back at Power of the Duelist, a “Blaze Accelerator” card is any card with “Blaze Accelerator” anywhere in its name. Right now, there are only two cards that fit the description: Blaze Accelerator and Tri-Blaze Accelerator. Both of those cards are continuous spells, and right there you can begin to see how useful Volcanic Rocket can be. Remember, just because the Blaze Accelerator cards are made to work within the Volcanic theme doesn’t mean that it’s the only way they can be used. Free spells are great to have if you’re playing Chiron the Mage or Double Spell, and sometimes you just need an extra card in hand for another effect you plan on using. Volcanic Rocket can get that card for you from either your deck or your graveyard, so you would only ever need one copy of one spell that you can re-use again and again.

Let’s say that you plan on using the Blaze Accelerators for what they’re actually meant for: blowing up monsters, dealing damage, and allowing you to summon Volcanic Doomfire. Both Accelerators require the discard of a Pyro monster in order to activate their effects. The basic Blaze Accelerator uses Pyro monsters with 500 ATK or less to destroy a monster on the field, but the Tri-Blaze Accelerator lets you use any Pyro monster and it deals some damage in addition to destroying a monster. You have to give up your battle phase to use either, but a quick look at various Top 8 decks from the past couple of SJCs reveals that skipping battle phases for effects that remove your opponent’s monsters isn’t so bad after all. The fact that you can repeatedly do so instead of having just a one-shot effect like Soul Exchange is icing on the cake. In fact, this is a pretty excellent cake with multiple layers and frosting in between, because in addition to being able to use the Blaze Accelerators once every turn, the Volcanic cards grant you access to a more or less constant source of discards. If you have a Volcanic Shell in your graveyard, you can pay a measly 500 life points once per turn to fetch another one from your deck. Shell is compatible with both Accelerators, and thanks to cards like Pot of Avarice and The Transmigration Prophecy, you can recycle the Shells along with your Volcanic Rockets. I’d really like to emphasize the plural form “Rockets” from above, because Volcanic Rocket seems to be designed in the image of Elemental Hero Stratos, and we all know how good Stratos is.

At this point, I’d imagine that a lot of you are getting fairly restless waiting for me to talk about what Volcanic Rocket does for decks based around the summon of Volcanic Doomfire. One of the really interesting things about many of the strategies that we see come and go is that they usually just need one more card to make the leap between possible and viable. For the Cyberdarks, Exploder Dragon was that card. For the Six Samurai, it was Grandmaster of the Six Samurai. For Volcanic Doomfire decks, Volcanic Rocket is that card. When the set released in Japan, players could never seem to get Doomfire onto the field, because it requires a particular sequence of cards to be played before you can use it. Specifically, you have to send a Tri-Blaze Accelerator from your side of the field to the graveyard in order to summon Doomfire, but in order to play Tri-Blaze Accelerator you have to send a Blaze Accelerator from your side of the field to the graveyard. It’s no small task, and in Japan, players essentially gave up due to the fact that you would have to draw first into Blaze Accelerator, and then into Tri-Blaze while Accelerator was on the field. With Volcanic Rocket, that’s no longer the case. Now you only have to draw one or the other, and Volcanic Rocket does the rest. If you can summon Volcanic Rocket and then re-summon it somehow, you don’t need to draw either of the Accelerators. Is Volcanic Doomfire worth summoning? Oh yes. It bears a striking resemblance to an explosive Amazoness Archers/Mirror Force hybrid attached to the body of a Blue-Eyes White Dragon, burning away your opponent’s monsters as well as his or her life points: a mental image which begs to be captioned, “This duel is now completely awesome!”

Volcanic Rocket is also going to make a huge impact during your games at the Sneak Preview. Whether you’re playing in Open Dueling or one of the various flights, the Volcanic Rocket you receive for playing can be (and should be) used in your deck. Huge level 4 monsters are a big deal in Sealed Pack, especially when they can fetch monster removal. I can’t even count the number of sealed games that are won by one player getting a huge monster out while the opponent has no way to deal with it. And in the unlikely event that you do get Volcanic Doomfire and all the cards required to summon it in your packs, you will be able to summon the behemoth. In fact, I’ll be really surprised if I don’t see someone pull it off out of the many, many people I expect to see playing in Pittsburgh’s Sneak Preview. Volcanic Rocket does exactly what I think a good Sneak Preview card should: help you make the most out of the cards you come home with. It’s a great trend that I’d love to see continue in the future. If you haven’t planned on attending a Sneak Preview near you, do yourself a favor and rectify that issue right now, and until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale