At their core, every combo builds together separate functional effects from a pair or a small group of cards and causes them to interact on a deeper level. The mechanics of this can sometimes be complex and difficult to understand.

This week, our class will cover a variety of card combos. We’ll take a look at the cards involved in the combo and then detail how their effects function together.

This combo will seem rather odd when your opponent first views it. He or she will probably think about Sakuretsu Armor or Widespread Ruin, not expecting you to have Spirit Barrier laying in wait.

The effect of The Unhappy Girl functions only while it’s in face-up attack position on your side of the field. This creates an obvious vulnerability that your opponent can take advantage of for the remainder of the time during which The Unhappy Girl stays on the field.

However, this is where Spirit Barrier steps in. Spirit Barrier protects your life points from battle damage, as long as you have a monster on your side of the field. It doesn’t offer any protection to your monsters, so by using Spirit Barrier, you run the risk of depleting your monsters and thus losing your protection.

With this combo, each card’s weakness is negated by the other card’s strength. The Unhappy Girl’s vulnerability is overcome with Spirit Barrier’s protection, and Spirit Barrier no longer fears running out of monsters. At this point, attacking becomes futile for your opponent. In fact, attacking would be a rather bad idea—due to The Unhappy Girl’s other effect that punishes the monster that attacked it, preventing that monster from attacking again as long as The Unhappy Girl remains in face-up attack position.

Spirit Barrier has some other allies that can work just as well. The ever-popular Spirit Reaper shares The Unhappy Girl’s protection from being destroyed in battle, allowing Spirit Barrier to maintain its protection. If you take things further with one quick fusion summon, you could have Reaper on the Nightmare, allowing you to attack your opponent directly while also being protected by Spirit Barrier.

Spatial Collapse is a trap card that creates a limitation upon both players, allowing them to each control a maximum of five cards on their respective sides of the field. On its own, this condition is of minimal impact to both players.

Then Ojama Trio comes along. By using this trap card, you can give your opponent those dreaded Ojama tokens, three monsters that devote themselves entirely to getting in the way. Combined with Spatial Collapse, those three Ojama tokens use up three cards of your opponent’s five-card limit imposed by Spatial Collapse. This means your opponent only has room for two more cards, and if he or she chooses the wrong two cards, he or she could easily be stuck with them for the remainder of the duel.

Forced Requisition is notoriously difficult to activate. It has very strict activation requirements that often limit how effective it could be in any given player’s deck. In order to activate Forced Requisition, a chain needs to end with you discarding a card from your hand.

Most cards in the game will not help you accomplish this—hence the difficulty in activating Forced Requisition. However, with the release of Elemental Energy, a quick and useful tool has arrived.

Your last act when resolving Dark World Lightning is to discard a card from your hand, and this is just the thing that Forced Requisition has been looking for. After resolving Dark World Lightning, you can begin a new chain by activating Forced Requisition, allowing you to establish its hold over the duel.

Archfiend of Gilfer is another card with restricted timing requirements that can be helped by Dark World Lightning. If Archfiend of Gilfer is sent to the graveyard during the middle of a chain’s resolution, its effect won’t be activated. But just like in our combo with Forced Requisition, Archfiend of Gilfer’s activation restrictions are met perfectly by the use of Dark World Lightning. Perhaps it was inevitable that the Dark World monsters and the Archfiends would unite.

Obnoxious Celtic Guard has an effect that prevents it from being destroyed by monsters with ATK values of 1900 or more. This is great, but your opponent is likely to be running a series of monsters that go above the Obnoxious Celtic Guard’s 1400 ATK while also not exceeding the 1900 ATK threshold for the Guard’s effect, like D. D. Warrior Lady and D. D. Assailant.

This is where Fusion Sword Murasame Blade steps in to raise the bar. Sure you could use many equip cards to make Obnoxious Celtic Guard’s ATK climb above 1900, but why not use a card that shares the Obnoxious Celtic Guard’s protective ability? With Fusion Sword Murasame Blade equipped to Obnoxious Celtic Guard, you’ll have a 2200 ATK monster that’s nearly indestructible in battle with an equip card that cannot be destroyed by card effects.

Lava Golem may have just removed two of your opponent’s monsters from the field, but now it’s looking at you with that 3000 ATK . . . and its loyalties lie firmly with your opponent. If you don’t do something to protect your life points, that Lava Golem will put a hurt on you.

That’s where A Rival Appears! steps in. Normally when playing A Rival Appears!, you’re limited by the monsters that your opponent has in his or her deck and those monster’s respective levels. Since the majority of monsters in any player’s deck are level 4, you won’t have a whole lot of incentive to activate A Rival Appears!

But with Lava Golem standing tall at level 8, A Rival Appears! will allow you to special summon a level 8 monster from your hand to the field without having to offer any tributes.

But let’s not limit A Rival Appears! to just this combo. Just by using your opponent’s deck for inspiration, your A Rival Appears! is capable of special summoning one very strong level 4 monster: Rare Metal Dragon. With 2400 ATK, Rare Metal Dragon will easily stand up to most of the single-tribute monsters that are played in the current game environment.

This combo begins rather innocently. You summon Elemental Hero Bubbleman, and with its 800 ATK, your opponent has little reason to stop it. Things change when Bubble Shuffle is played. Bubble Shuffle takes Elemental Hero Bubbleman and changes it and an opponent’s monster of your choice into defense position. Next, Elemental Hero Bubbleman is tributed and replaced by another Elemental Hero monster—Elemental Hero Bladedge. With 2600 ATK and the piercing damage effect, your opponent’s defense position monster is in trouble.

We’ve seen Jaden do this very thing on Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, and now we know your Elemental Hero deck can use the very same combo!

Our final combo uses the highest number of cards, but it also dishes out quite a bit of damage.

We begin with Jinzo #7, a Machine-type monster with 500 ATK. On its own it isn’t very impressive, but with the right cards, its ability to attack your opponent directly will make it a serious threat.

Next, we’ll use Machine Duplication from Rise of Destiny. This allows us to search our deck for the other two copies of Jinzo #7 and special summon them to our side of the field. Now that we have three copies of Jinzo #7 on the field, we’re ready to go into battle.

Together the two cards give you more field presence, but without a clear plan, that field presence will be quickly stripped away. The ATK value of each Jinzo #7 is still 500, and that won’t be enough to do any serious harm to our opponent. We need to help those Jinzo #7s grow more powerful. We need a combo.

With United We Stand, we can increase the ATK value of one of the Jinzo #7s to 2900. Combined with the other two Jinzo #7s, you’ll inflict a total of 3900 damage directly to your opponent. Add in Limiter Removal, and that equipped Jinzo #7 jumps to 5800 ATK. The other two Jinzo #7s each double to 1000 ATK, for a combined total of 7800 damage directly to your opponent.

Until next time, send all comments, suggestions, and questions to Curtis@metagame.com.