“For 5,000 years, I have protected my Pharaoh. Our bond is beyond any spell and can never be broken. As long as I can still raise my staff in battle, no harm shall come to him.” —The Dark Magician

Spellcasters are some of the most famous monsters in the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG. Dark Magician of Chaos, Magical Scientist, Breaker the Magical Warrior, Thousand Eyes Restrict, and Magician of Faith are just a small sample of the several Spellcaster monsters that have had an impact on the game.

It should not be surprising that the Spellcasters assemble to become a formidable team. They often have effects that work together or allow you more control over your spell cards—the one type of card with which they align themselves above all others.

Spellcaster-based decks can use different strategies to achieve different goals. Spellcasters can protect and destroy spell counters, fully utilize your Fusion monsters, reclaim expended spells, and be used for general field control.

This week’s deck focuses on Dark Magician, one of the best known Spellcasters. More than any other Spellcaster, Dark Magician has been given support for being brought into play and being utilized once in play. Skilled Dark Magician, Miracle Restoring, Sage’s Stone, Thousand Knives, Title of a Knight, and numerous other cards revolve around Dark Magician. While they may not appeal to every player, each card has its benefits, and all of them come together to bring Dark Magician to its fullest potential.

I’ve created a Dark Magician deck to serve as an introduction to this theme. It focuses on Spellcaster-type monsters in conjunction with spell counters to bring Dark Magician into play. Once Dark Magician is in play, it can use several tech cards.


Deck: Hairclips and Cufflinks

Monsters
2 Dark Magician
2 Dark Magician Girl
3 Skilled Dark Magician
1 Gemini Elf
1 Breaker the Magical Warrior
2 Old Vindictive Magician
1 Magical Scientist
2 Royal Magical Library
2 Apprentice Magician
1 Witch of the Black Forest
1 Magician of Faith

Spells
1 Sage’s Stone
1 Thousand Knives
2 Dark Magic Attack
1 Smashing Ground
1 Book of Moon
1 Double Spell
1 Swords of Revealing Light
1 Dark Hole
1 Monster Reborn
1 Premature Burial
1 Pot of Greed
1 Graceful Charity
1 Mirage of Nightmare
1 Snatch Steal
3 Mystical Space Typhoon

Traps
3 Pitch-Black Power Stone
1 Miracle Restoring
2 Anti-Spell
1 Mirror Force

Fusions
3 Thousand Eyes Restrict
3 Musician King


Coins, Pretzels, Gold Pieces-of-Eight . . .

Spell counters reward you for playing spell cards, something you would have done anyway. Depending on the cards involved, you can use spell counters for a multitude of purposes. The spell counters used in this deck are applied to the following strategies.

Skilled Dark Magician can bring out Dark Magician once it has accumulated three spell counters.

Breaker the Magical Warrior becomes stronger when it has a spell counter and can remove it to destroy a spell or trap card.

Royal Magical Library collects spell counters which can be spent to draw additional cards from its controller’s deck.

Apprentice Magician generates a spell counter when it is normal summoned or special summoned, and when it’s destroyed in battle, it can replace itself with another Spellcaster of level 2 or less.

Anti-Spell uses spell counters to negate a spell card.

Miracle Restoring spends spell counters to revive Dark Magician.

Pitch-Black Power Stone generates spell counters that can be either spent for card effects or transferred to other cards capable of holding spell counters.

Generating spell counters leaves you open to various risks you wouldn’t normally take. Normally, if you were to summon a monster like Skilled Dark Magician, you would use spell- and trap-removing cards like Mystical Space Typhoon before actually summoning the monster. Doing so in a deck with spell counters causes you to lose out on a potential spell counter, so you have to make a choice between guaranteeing the monster’s safety or taking a chance to get that monster one step closer to its goal.

You can help to speed the process along with Pitch-Black Power Stone, which lets you move a spell counter onto one of your appropriate cards once during your turn. This works well with cards like Breaker the Magical Warrior, allowing you to reuse its effect or reclaim a spell counter to increase its ATK.


Pulling Out the Rabbit

Apprentice Magician’s first role in the deck is its ability to add a spell counter to another card. This will be used in combination with Skilled Dark Magician, Royal Magical Library, and Breaker the Magical Warrior. It also serves another purpose when destroyed in battle, offering you a chance to special summon a level 2 or lower Spellcaster from your deck. Among the choices are Old Vindictive Magician, Magician of Faith, and Magical Scientist.

Pitch-Black Power Stone can cough up two of the spell counters needed to fuel Anti-Spell. Try to save Anti-Spell for a spell card you really need to stop.

Magical Scientist and Thousand Eyes Restrict combine for an oddball form of monster removal popular among players using the Scientist. Thousand Eyes Restrict will absorb a threat you want gone, and when your Fusion monster returns to your Fusion deck in the end phase, the equipped monster goes to the graveyard.

Dark Magician Girl and Sage’s Stone will allow you to control both a Dark Magician Girl and a Dark Magician at the same time. They make quite a team.

Book of Moon can be used against your opponent’s monsters, or you can use it with your flip-effect monsters to get additional uses out of their flip effects.


De-Spelled

Despite their many strengths, the Spellcasters also have some inherent weaknesses.

A deck that uses this many spell cards is bound to run afoul of Imperial Order. This will hurt, but it doesn’t stop the gain of spell counters. If you can’t stop Imperial Order when it is initially activated, try to get Breaker the Magical Warrior to take it out for you.

Any deck with lots of spell cards is not going to like Curse of Darkness very much. While it may not stop what the spell cards do, it will make you think twice about using them.

Losing your monster to monster removal when it just reached that third spell counter will be very irritating. Anti-Spell will help against some of the spell card forms of removal, but trap- and monster-based removal cards will still be a problem. The most notable of the monster removal cards to watch out for is Tribe-Infecting Virus, which can easily devastate any deck relying on one type of monster.



Send all comments to curtis@metagame.com.