Today we feature cards from Phantom Darkness with minor mechanics issues.

Serious Burn Damage

Axel decided he was done fooling around.

"When you take Battle Damage while this card is in your Graveyard, remove it from play. Then, if there is a FIRE monster other than ‘Volcanic Counter’ in your Graveyard, inflict damage to your opponent equal to the amount of Battle Damage you took."

Volcanic Counter’s effect activates at the time you receive battle damage to your life points. You don’t even have a choice in the matter. When the conditions are met, the effect is going to activate. Also, because this effect activates at the time you receive the battle damage to your life points, any monster destroyed in battle will still be on the field. This means that you cannot attack your opponent’s stronger monster with Volcanic Counter and also activate its effect. Volcanic Counter needs to be resting in your graveyard when the battle damage occurs.

Every Volcanic Counter in your graveyard will activate its effect when you receive the battle damage. They begin by removing themselves from play as a cost, adding their effect to the chain.

When two or three of them activate at the same time, they will all be removed from play and place their effects onto the chain. This means you will need to have another Fire monster in your graveyard that isn’t a Volcanic Counter, because the effect won’t inflict damage otherwise.

Blue Thunder T-45 accumulates "options" by destroying monsters in battle, called Thunder Option Tokens. These "options" are more versatile than those created by other ships in the fleet and can exist independently of the ship that spawned them. The Thunder Options have a specific ATK and DEF value that can be manipulated using card effects and they will remain on the field when Blue Thunder T-45 is destroyed or flipped face down. You just can’t use them as tributes for a tribute summon, which is really a small price to pay for something you can boost up with Limiter Removal or tribute to pay costs for cards like Monster Gate.

Blue Thunder T-45 has two advantages when gaining Thunder Options. First, the opponent’s monster it destroys in battle doesn’t need to be sent to the graveyard. When Blue Thunder T-45 destroys a monster token in battle or destroys a monster while Dimensional Fissure is being applied, its effect will still activate. Second, it doesn’t need to survive the battle to gain Thunder Options. This advantage is a bit odd, and likely results from not having to send the monster it destroyed to the graveyard.

Whether Blue Thunder survives or is destroyed, its effect activates at the end of the damage step, when the monster it destroyed in battle would be sent to the graveyard. As mentioned before, it doesn’t actually matter if the monster reaches the graveyard. This rule just helps us to identify when we should activate the effect during the damage step. The damage step is intricate and contains several sub-steps, so we’d be a bit lost if we didn’t know when to apply the effect.

If you attack with Blue Thunder T-45 and destroy one of your opponent’s monsters, the Thunder Option Token you special summon can attack during the very same battle phase, as long as you place it in attack position. It’s a nice little one-two punch that helped get Blue Thunder attention when it was released. Having some extra bodies on the field is nice too.

The Card that Took My Ojamas Away

How I wept . . .

All-Out Attacks is a continuous trap card that "berserks" any monster special summoned to the field. Whenever a monster is special summoned, All-Out Attacks’s effect starts a chain. When its effect resolves, the special summoned monster is shifted into face-up attack and becomes "berserk," forcing it to attack during the battle phase. Naturally this is only possible when the monster is special summoned during its controller’s turn, because your monsters cannot attack during your opponent’s turn. Still, the shift into face-up attack mode is always applied.

All-Out Attacks will still activate its effect when a monster is special summoned in attack mode. The monster won’t shift, because it’s already in attack mode, but it will be forced to attack. The impact of this really depends on the monster that is special summoned and whether or not the person who special summoned it had any intention of attacking with it. If your opponent special summons a powerful monster, there’s a pretty good chance he or she was already planning on smacking your monsters around.

In order to apply its effect, All-Out Attacks must be face up on the field at the time a monster is special summoned. If your opponent special summons a monster and you activate (flip face up) All-Out Attacks, its effect won’t do anything. You want All-Out Attacks face up before the monster is special summoned. Sometimes you can accomplish this by chaining it to the effect that will special summon a monster, like when your opponent activates Scapegoat. Otherwise, you need to activate All-Out Attacks during the draw phase or standby phase, so it is active before monsters are commonly special summoned.

Some players (they know who they are) wanted to just "skip" their battle phase so they could avoid the punishment of All-Out Attacks. This just isn’t possible. Like Berserk Gorilla, the "berserk" special summoned monsters must attack, and they will force the matter by making you proceed to your battle phase. You can use card effects like Soul Exchange to skip the battle phase, or you can use cards that make it impossible for the special summoned monster to attack, but you can’t just "skip" the battle phase. No man escapes the Ojama hunters . . .