Join our Discord to discuss this article with fellow Duelists

Become a Patron to support us for 12 years of all-volunteer work

The old guard returns to claim their throne.

With Battles of Legend: Glorious Gallery officially releasing this past week, players have noticed a few cards rising up on the market due to the lack of reprints for very specific cards. From Tellarknights to Shaddolls, even Subterror cards are showing interest as potential techs. Let’s dive into this week’s Market Watch and see what players are picking up.

Techs and Ideas for the Future Formats

As of recently, players from the Enneacraft Group and others have been talking about a Subterror-type engine for their Deck, and it was noticed that Subterror Behemoth Umastryx has spiked in price over the past months. This card can be Special Summoned from your hand when a monster you control is flipped face-down and you control no face-up monsters. The best thing with Enneacraft is that you can use their effects in hand to Special Summon 1 monster from your hand face-down, so you can skip around this Special Summon effect to keep things secret. When this card is flipped face-up, it can target and banish 1 monster your opponent controls, which is great if you can flip it face-up on the opponent’s turn.

Even though it hasn’t done that much, the new X-Cross Cannon from last year’s Maze of the Master has been steadily going up in price due to the probable lack of a reprint for it. But there has been some interest in this card over the past weeks in the Genesys Format and it helps that Union Hangar has recently been dropped to 5 points per copy. This card is extremely useful, as if you control a LIGHT Machine Fusion or a Union monster, you can Special Summon this card from your hand. Then during the Main Phase, you can equip 1 appropriate LIGHT Machine Union monster from your Deck to this card as an Equip Spell, with the only downside of locking you out from Special Summoning monsters from the Extra Deck, except LIGHT monsters, which isn’t a downside at all. Being able to get Assault Core, Buster Drake, Crush Wyvern, or the newer Yare Head or Zillion Tank out of your Deck is great for other Contact Fusion Summons, which is good to have for the AtoZ theme.

The new Tellarknight support has arrived… but once again, Stellarnova Alpha was not reprinted, hitting over $15 a copy because of it. As one of the most important end board pieces for the Tellarknight Deck, this card can negate any Spell/Trap or monster effect just by sending 1 face-up Tellarknight monster you control to the GY, and if you do, you destroy that card, and then you draw 1 card. Being their “Solemn Judgment” of the Deck is huge, but it’s crazier that this card didn’t see a reprint at all, as it has a lot of demand still from 2015. Hopefully the new OTS Ultimate Tournament Pack 1 will have a reprint for this highly sought-after and demanded card, and if not, it’ll keep going higher, since players suspect this will be one of the best contenders now for the Genesys Format.

Clown Crew is a hot commodity right now as players have been enjoying the Deck and playing it over the past month, and this has caused everyone’s favorite Fish Wife to rise in price. Poissonniere de Nouvelles is an extremely important card to the Nouvelles engine that the Deck runs, since if you Normal Summon her from your hand, you can add a Level 1 Ritual Monster or a Recipe card from your Deck to your hand, which grabs you Clown Crew Flair to use later for the Clown Crew Rehearsal‘s banish effect, which performs a Ritual Summon. This card is also great, as you can run copies of Concours de Cuisine (Culinary Confrontation) to Special Summon it to your side of the field and Special Summon a copy of Patissciel Couverture to your opponent’s field, which can cut off Evenly Matched, Infinite Impermanence, and other cards that need no cards on their field to be activated from the hand. This also gives you an additional card for the Ritual Summon of Clown Crew Flair or the Tribute Summon of your Clown Crew Biancaviso.

As more Decks are being printed that don’t use the Extra Deck much, Gordian Slicer has been a really useful Tech for the OCG over the past month. Blitzclique, Ritual of Light and Darkness, Sacred Beasts, and even Toons don’t really need to use it, as this card, during the start of Main Phase 1 or 2, can target any number of face-up cards on the field, and for each target, you either banish 1 card from your hand or 6 cards from your Extra Deck face-down to return those targets to the hand. This card’s activation can’t even be negated, which is great, and it is free removal for plenty of Decks in the future.

Maybe soon, some of these cards will see a heavily needed reprint to drive their prices down again, but only time will show what Konami has planned with future sets that hold reprints in them.

Old Cards from the Past Haunt the Present

Machina Gadget has always been a popular Deck in past formats with how much OTK power it has and how it can appear out of nowhere, especially with one of their best starters, Machina Gearframe. If it is Normal Summoned, this card adds any Machina monster from your Deck to your hand, and you can, once per turn, either equip this card to a Machine monster you control or unequip this card to Special Summon it. If the monster equipped with this card would be destroyed by battle or card effect, you can destroy this card instead. It was paired with the Gadget monsters in older formats to help fuel Machina Fortress, but in today’s game, it can be used with Trains, R.B., and Earth Machine Piles as additional ways to get to Machina Fortress, which can discard unneeded Infinitrack or R.B. monsters from your hand to Special Summon itself.

Frightfur haunts the game like a ghost, as it always has appeared over the past years whenever new support arrives, but this time, it’s being used in Genesys. Frightfur Reborn is one of the few cards that have yet to be reprinted from the archetype, as it can target and Special Summon 1 Frightfur monster from your GY. It can also banish itself from your GY, except for the turn it was sent there, in order to target and return 1 banished Fluffal or Frightfur monster to your GY. This allows you to reset Fluffal Wings for another use or a card that was banished from Frightfur Fusion to use again later.

Following Frightfur Reborn, Frightfur Kraken hasn’t seen a reprint since its release from Fusion Enforcers years ago. It requires an Edge Imp and a Fluffal monster for its Fusion Summon, and once per turn, you can target and send 1 monster your opponent controls to the GY, but you cannot attack directly with this card the turn you activate the effect. It can attack twice during the Battle Phase, and at the end of the Battle Phase, this card is changed to Defense Position. This card helps Fluffal perform OTKs and is useful for removal. Frightfur has always been a fan-favorite Deck from ARC-V, and hopefully in the future, there will be new support so these older cards could see a new reprint.

Finally, as the speculation dust settles, players have been considering The Winged Dragon of Ra as the possible cover theme for the new Immortal Phoenix booster set that is releasing in the future. With this, players have bought up copies of Blaze Cannon just in case the new support references the original burning chicken. Blaze Cannon is also considered a Blaze Accelerator card, so you can search it up with Volcanic Rocket. When you control The Winged Dragon of Ra, it gains the following effects, and its effects cannot be negated. For one thing, it makes The Winged Dragon of Ra unaffected by your opponent’s card effects. When an attack is declared involving Ra, you Tribute any number of other monsters that didn’t declare an attack that turn to make Ra gain the combined original ATK of the Tributed monsters until the end of that turn. And finally, after damage calculation, if Ra had attacked, it would send all monsters from your opponent’s field to the GY. This card gives light to the manga/anime version of The Winged Dragon of Ra, and many players would love to see a new version of the card that represents it more.

This week has been interesting to watch from shifts in Genesys and with players thinking of new techs for their Decks. There are plenty of cards in the game that deserve a reprint that cannot be covered in one article, but many in the future we will explore later. There are more national events going on this weekend along with tons of regionals, so I wish everyone the best of luck at their events.

Edited and co-written by Angryjon