When I wrote on Mark of the Rose during our preview weeks in October I did so from the perspective of the Plant player. It made perfect sense: Crossroads of Chaos is all about Plant monsters, and Mark of the Rose is designed to support them. It requires a Plant monster in your graveyard for every copy you want to activate: pretty heavy theming. It’s a fair trade, too: play Plants and get three copies of Snatch Steal as an added bonus! It’s the best deal going since that guy on late-night cable promised to throw in a whole extra set of ShamWows with the first set I ordered!
Think about that. That’s like . . . twelve ShamWows for the price of six. Nothing in your house would ever be damp, ever again.
So yeah, Mark of the Rose was and continues to be a strong incentive to play a dedicated Plant deck. But it’s 3:00 AM and it suddenly strikes me that it could be a lot more than that. Just as Paladin of the Cursed Dragon was designed as support for Zombie World but actually functions as potent anti-Zombie tech, there may be an unintended dimension to Mark of the Rose that most players hadn’t considered yet. It could actually go in decks that aren’t dedicated to Plants. In fact, thanks to some basic math, it could go in pretty much anything.
I Guess the Seed Was Planted . . .
. . . by George Saveedra at the San Diego Sneak Preview a few weeks ago. There, Saveedra and other players joked that George was determined to splash Mark of the Rose into TeleDAD. I think the general line was that Botanical Lion’s status as a 1900 ATK beater made it flexible enough to jam into a slimmed-down TeleDAD lineup, and once it hit the graveyard it could then be used for Mark of the Rose. Mark would fuel big attacks and provide Synchro materials.
I’m sketchy on the details, because I’m relatively certain the whole thing was a joke at George’s expense. The idea of dedicating so many card slots to unsearchable cards in TeleDAD is certainly jest-worthy: the idea isn’t a very good one, and like everybody else I laughed it off and went about my business of shaking people down for copies of Plaguespreader Zombie.
Many days later, it’s 3:00 AM (hence the ShamWow fixation) and for some reason my wandering mind has meandered its way back to this idea. And it’s even funnier now, because I think it’s actually viable. The trick lies in the monsters you choose to pay for Mark of the Rose’s activation cost.
The Lion Is Not the Way to Go
No surprises there: anyone can look at that idea and see the problems with it. The Lion isn’t searchable, so you’d be just as likely to draw one as you would a dead copy of Mark of the Rose. Even when you would draw it, you’d need to discard it for something like Phoenix Wing Wind Blast or wait for it to fall in battle before even your first copy of Mark would go live. Once it did, successive copies of Mark would each require another Lion since the first one would have been removed by your first activation of Mark. The Lions themselves don’t really fit with the deck’s pace of play to begin with, and unlike other potential normal summons like Dark Grepher or Krebons, they don’t help you achieve your Synchro-based win condition.
The ideal Plant monster to take center stage in a splashable Mark of the Rose engine would be searchable, and it would hopefully load your graveyard for multiple Mark activations off a single drawn copy. These two requisites actually make the search extremely easy: there’s only one Plant I can think of that can send multiple Plant cards to the graveyard on its own, and that’s Lonefire Blossom. Summon one, tribute it to dig another from your deck, tribute that one, dig for your third, and tribute it for a fourth Plant monster. From there you have three Plants in your graveyard locked and loaded: exactly what you need for your three copies of Mark.
It’s a perfect fit, and it’s spectacularly counter-intuitive. A dedicated Plant deck would virtually never want to burn through all three of its Lonefires at once just to get to a single monster. It’s been done in the past to fuel Symbol of Heritage, but that strategy was questionable at best since a single D.D. Crow left the Symbol player with no Lonefires in deck and three dead copies of Symbol. It was a bad idea then, and it’s inferior to Miracle Fertilizer now. It just happens to work perfectly in a totally different strategy.
That Fourth Plant Is No Joke, Either
Conservative players could run Botanical Lion as their fourth Plant-type in this engine. That way, if they drew the Lion they’d at least be drawing a playable card, even if future copies of Lonefire wouldn’t summon anything worthwhile. However, basic math should give us the confidence to be far more ambitious.
If you run three copies of Lonefire Blossom in a 40-card deck, you’ll have a 39% chance of opening with at least one copy in your first six cards. Those odds get better by 6% with every card you draw from that point onward. Your chances of drawing the fourth Plant card are significantly worse: a measly 15% in your opening six cards, improving by just 3% with each successive draw. In short, you have a really excellent chance of drawing Lonefire before you draw whatever you select as your fourth Plant card, so you might as well run something cool: you have way better odds of special summoning your selection than getting stuck drawing it.
For me the choice is easy: Tytannial, Princess of Camellias is enormous and gets my vote on sheer size alone. 2800 ATK is huge: she’s the biggest Plant in the game, and once she hits the table she can run over stuff like Stardust Dragon and Thought Ruler Archfiend. Her effect will let you fend off opposing copies of targeting cards like Mystical Space Typhoon, Phoenix Wing Wind Blast, and Dimensional Prison too, making her formidable support when you press with multiple attackers.
Gigaplant is likely the next best choice: it’s not as big as Tytannial and its effect isn’t very useful in a deck that’s only splashing Plants. But it is a level 6 monster, meaning that you could pair it with any number of level 2 Tuner monsters to Synchro summon a level 8.
No matter which card you choose, you’ll essentially special summon a monster with 2400 or 2800 ATK out of nowhere, and you’ll be ready to steal up to three of your opponent’s monsters over the course of the duel. And it doesn’t take up as much space as you might think.
Since the Lonefires will thin themselves out of your deck as soon as you summon your first copy, you don’t need to stick to the 40-card minimum deck size. If you can find room for your three copies of Mark of the Rose, plus an empty monster slot for Tytannial or Gigaplant, you can just throw in three copies of Lonefire and push your deck to 43 cards. Once you draw Lonefire and summon it, the resulting string of effects will clear the three additional cards from your deck anyway, reducing it back to a standard size just as if you were only running 40 cards.
Granted, It’s Not All Roses
Splashing this engine into your deck means that you’ll have to prioritize the summoning of Lonefire Blossom as soon as you draw it: for a deck like TeleDAD that’s no simple matter, since most duelists would really like to summon Elemental Hero Stratos on turn 1 instead. Granted, delaying your Lonefire play by a single turn isn’t tremendously damaging—the odds of drawing a second Plant monster from your remaining three on your seventh draw aren’t particularly high. But you’ll have to hold off on those draw cards on turn 1, which could be a bit difficult to reconcile in some matchups. Not doing so could see you drawing multiple Plants with all those copies of Allure and Destiny Draw.
But adapting familiar play patterns to similar, but less predictable ones is never a bad thing. It keeps your opponents guessing, and making a different move than the one your opponent would expect as the "correct" one can send a variety of signals that all work in your favor: at worst, your opponent will suspect you’ve got an unexpected trick up your sleeve and won’t know what to do. At best, the opponent will write you off as a novice and get sloppy as a result. Both work to your advantage.
So Where Do You Run It?
Interesting question. In theory, anything battle-oriented short of Macro Cosmos can benefit from running three more cards that let you steal monsters. But the real answer lies in the same guiding principles behind Mark’s use in a normal Plant deck: the number of ways you have to dispose of the monster you swipe essentially determines how viable Mark will be. That makes this engine a great fit for something like Monarchs, or any other strategy packing a fair number of tribute monsters. It’s also going to be good in any strategy playing a lot of Tuners, Cyber Valley, or anything that can special summon a swarm of monsters and pull wins out of thin air.
My top picks would be TeleDAD and Six Samurai, but you can probably splash this anywhere. Six Samurai makes the cut because the right build can play as many as five or more Tuners thanks to Jutte Fighter, Junk Warrior, and Rose, Warrior of Revenge. TeleDAD gets the nod for simply having the fastest access to its Tuners, and for generally having more Tuners than ideal Synchro materials to match them. TeleDAD also has the advantage of running Mystic Tomato: a viable replacement for Tytannial or Gigaplant in your chain of special summons should you draw your big Plant early.
Little City is quite promising, as the deck has an even chance of drawing Lonefire Blossom or Royal Oppression early on, but compensates for this fact with searchability via Sangan and the fact that the deck doesn’t usually need to activate Royal Oppression as soon as it’s drawn. That leaves time to tear through your Plants before flipping Oppression face up. Since Lonefire Blossom’s effect resolves when it’s in the graveyard, it won’t conflict with Skill Drain. The only real challenge here is the fact that the deck doesn’t have many ways to ditch the monsters it takes, but Honest’s presence mixed with generally high ATK scores could mitigate that.
Zombies might be able to do interesting things with this engine simply because it’s the one deck likely to be able to play all three copies of Mark in a single game. It’s an interesting alternative to Creature Swap, but it may not fit with the deck’s use of its monster zones, and it may be the one strategy that would rather Tune to its own monsters instead of the opponent’s.
I haven’t tested this concept yet: I’m more interested in getting the idea out there as quickly as possible so that you can join me in giving it a try. It’s a pretty interesting prospect and the math really does check out, so I’m intrigued to see how it works in real life. Try it yourself—you might be surprised at just how splashable this engine is.
—Jason Grabher-Meyer