Man, the Rise of the Dragon Lords structure deck is pretty amazing. For ten or twelve bucks, you get a collection of playable deck fodder that you can use to improve your gauntlet, some classic monsters like Tyrant Dragon and Horus the Black Flame Dragon LV6 which used to be tough to get, and seven new cards. While Felgrand Dragon might not exactly see a lot of table time at your next Regional, at least four of the new cards are tournament competitive, and that’s pretty nuts considering just how cheap structure decks are.

While Foolish Burial and Trade-In have garnered a lot of attention lately, I feel like Herald of Creation has stayed under most duelists’ radar. She does some amazing things in this format that no other card really does, so I think she’s worth taking a look at. If you haven’t seen her yet, here’s what she looks like:

Herald of Creation    

Level 4

Spellcaster / Effect  

1800 ATK / 600 DEF 

Once per turn, you can discard 1 card from your hand to add 1 Level 7 or higher monster from your Graveyard to your hand.

This card can do a lot of unique things, but before I get to the actual ramifications it could have for your deck, I want to look at the issue of utility first.

Yep, I’m Talking About Utility Again!

I can’t really help it. The issue of utility (how useful a card is across the course of an entire game) is really huge when it comes to judging a card’s power level. If a card is useful at most points in a duel, then it can have an average effect or middle-of-the-road stats and still be very playable. If it’s only useful in the early or late game though, it better be amazing. If a card can increase the utility of your other cards, well, that’s a very rare asset that deserves to be lauded.

Herald of Creation has just about everything going for her in this regard. She’s a monster, so she automatically wins out over cards with similar effects like Monster Reincarnation. Reincarnation offers a similar effect that’s more flexible than the Herald, because Reincarnation can get you any monster instead of just a high-level one. But when you don’t need Reincarnation’s effect and you’re stuck with it in your hand, it’s essentially useless. Like Mei-Kou, Master of Barriers and Royal Firestorm Guards, Herald of Creation has a very high utility because she’s a beatstick monster. 1800 ATK lets her swing over a vast number of cards that see play nowadays. Even when you have no use for her effect, she’s still a very efficient attacker. That means she will virtually never be a dead card.

Moving along, like Snipe Hunter, Phoenix Wing Wind Blast, and Lightning Vortex, Herald of Creation lets you trade a card you don’t need for something that can be more useful via her discard effect. That means the cards you are using with lower utility are easier to deal with. The cool part is that unlike the cards I just listed, Herald of Creation’s effect is proactive instead of reactive. Want to use Snipe Hunter’s effect to pitch a dead copy of Cyber Dragon or Royal Decree you just don’t need? It’s a waste if your opponent doesn’t have anything worth getting rid of. The same can be said for Wind Blast and Vortex. But Herald of Creation plays less to the whim of your opponent and more into your own strategy. Your opponent doesn’t really control what’s in your graveyard—you do.

She also works great with Destiny Hero - Malicious, Treeborn Frog, and Destiny Hero - Disk Commander, giving you another way to get cards that need to be in the graveyard to where they want to be. Herald of Creation is basically a high-utility card in every sense of the word, and that makes her really playable.

So . . . Many . . . Combos!

In fact, looking back at that last example of discarding Malicious or Treeborn Frog, the two things that combo lets you do happen to line up rather well: get a big monster from your graveyard, set up your tribute fodder, and you can be summoning whatever it was you brought back as early as that turn. At the very least it should be easy to do on the following turn, as long as you keep one monster on the field. The size of the Herald herself makes that doable.

A lot of the key plays involving Herald of Creation happen to involve other cards from Rise of the Dragon Lords, too—a boon because you won’t have to go hunting through your shoebox of cards to get those combo pieces. A big advantage to running Herald is that she lets you use Trade-In without losing access to the monster you discarded. While having Dark Magician of Chaos in the graveyard is usually an asset, getting back a monster that can’t be revived is very important. It’s no secret: the number-one reason to play Herald of Creation is so that you can ditch copies of Light and Darkness Dragon with Trade-In during the early game when the Dragon is useless, but still have easy access to the Dragon once you have two tributes. The Herald makes that easy, giving you another combo to help you speed through your deck without costing you your key card.

In addition, even when the monster could be special summoned from the graveyard like Dark Magician of Chaos, sometimes you find yourself in a situation where tributing for it is an immediate and competitive option. Herald of Creation lets you capitalize on those opportunities.

And since Herald of Creation is a Spellcaster, she works with all of that monster type’s unique support. You can search her from your deck with Magician’s Circle to immediately crash through your opponent’s Magician of Faith or Breaker the Magical Warrior. You can use Herald of Creation as the requisite on-field Spellcaster for Magical Dimension, or even special summon her with the Dimension’s effect. Spellcasters have two of the best type-stamped cards in the game, and Herald of Creation works really well with both.

But The Best Part . . .

. . . is that the Herald also combos with Foolish Burial to search your deck for any high-level monster. Just activate Foolish, send whatever monster you want to your graveyard, and then discard to get it to your hand. A bit costly, but searching for the cards you need, when you need them is a winning strategy as proven by everything from Sangan to Reinforcement of the Army. There’s no other tournament-viable way to search for a high-level monster in your deck, barring Gold Sarcophagus.

Considering the fact that the number-one decks using Foolish Burial at the moment also want to see Light and Darkness Dragon in-hand as fast as possible, this technique makes Herald of Creation a definite option for any LADD variant. She functions best in a Destiny Hero build, because you’ll be able to pitch Malicious or Disk Commander for Herald’s cost, but even in a Beast or Apprentice variant the move is viable and attractive. Since each variant has its own ways of maintaining or generating field presence tributing early on is relatively simple. Just one copy of Herald splashed into any Light and Darkness Dragon strategy makes the deck faster and more flexible. Add two or three and you can build your strategy completely around her. The same technique also works with [Destiny Hero - Plasma].

The Decks She Works In

While Light and Darkness Dragon is an obvious top choice for the Herald alongside Spellcaster strategies, other decks can use the Herald as well. Pretty much anything that needs to search out a big tribute monster but wasn’t viable for competition gets a huge boost.

Take Mazera DeVille. Yes, that old secret rare nobody’s ever played. Mazera’s text requires you to special summon it from your hand by tributing Warrior of Zera while you have Pandemonium on the field. When you do, Mazera forces your opponent to discard three cards, costing you two in the process: you tribute Warrior of Zera and you get to keep Pandemonium, but realistically it probably won’t do anything. Two cards to your opponent’s three. That’s a big blow to your opponent’s card presence, it makes for massive simplification, and it leaves you with a 2800 ATK beatstick that’ll probably claim another card in battle. Plus your opponent will now have to topdeck for answers to it. Harsh.

The problem? While Terraforming or Archfiend General could seek out Pandemonium, and Reinforcement of the Army could get you Warrior of Zera, there was no way to fish Mazera DeVille from your deck in a timely fashion. When you run a strategy built around Mazera, you need to go off early or else your opponent might not even have three cards in his or her hand. Herald of Creation fixes that in conjunction with Foolish Burial, giving you about six draws for Mazera, precisely five for Warrior of Zera, and nine cards that let you get Pandemonium. That works out to a one in four chance of opening with the combo, increasing by ten percent each time you see another card. There are a ton of obscure strategies like this one that become a lot easier with Herald.

Going from one extreme to another, it also helps the competitive standby known as Demise OTK. The use of Trade-In lets you discard Demise, King of Armageddon to see more cards, and Herald of Creation will let you retrieve it later. You can also use the Foolish Burial combo to free up Manju of the Ten Thousand Hands, letting him focus on retrieving copies of Advanced Ritual Art. Extra copies of cards searched out by Manju, Senju, and Sonic Bird are actually the perfect discard fodder for the Herald’s effect, too.

Tried a Mausoleum of the Emperor deck lately? Decks relying on Mausoleum and Destiny Hero - Dasher get a big boost from the new Rise of the Dragon Lords cards, but Herald is especially useful. She gives you a way to get copies of Dasher into your graveyard while retrieving monsters that are useless there, like Hino-Kagu-Tsuchi. The searching trick with Foolish Burial will also keep you from waiting around for Kagu-Tsuchi, while letting you tech single copies of monsters to search out at the appropriate time like Mechanical Hound.

Herald of Creation is yet another monster in the recent line of high-utility beaters with great effects: a template that’s gotten a lot of attention over the past few months, and with good reason. A great effect on its own just can’t match up to a great effect on legs. Expect this trend to continue, and expect upcoming monsters that follow this pattern to always be worthy of play.

—Jason Grabher-Meyer