Cyber Dragon

[玄魔の王]

This card may be more significant than some people realise.

 

 

It's Cyber Dragon. You know what it does.

 

Now, while this obviously isn't a card that sees a ton of play today, this thing may be one of the most influential cards in the history of this game.

 

Before this guy, Airknight Parshath and Vampire Lord were popular one-Tribute monsters for their ability to gain/retain advantage. Monarchs either required a turn to set up or Soul Exchange skipping their Battle Phase. Doomcalibur was legitimately a hassle to deal with.

 

As soon as Cyber Dragon landed, all that changed. One-Tribute monsters that weren't Monarchs suddenly became far less useful, Monarchs themselves got much faster, and this served as either an easy out to Doomcalibur or another large body to stick beside it. We talk a lot about power creep these days, but this guy is living proof it's not a new phenomenon.

 

So, let's discuss the ways this guy has impacted the game since he came out in 2004.

[Sleepy]

I personally was not a fan.

 

For its time it was a pretty quick and easy beater that seemed to only have upsides to it. It was bigger than 1900 ATK beaters and didn't even require the Normal Summon, had Machine support, had Beckoning Light, and it was expensive money-wise.

 

Combined with a banlist that shot half the common staples of the day this card's arrival usually marks the end of Goat format.

 

IMO I would have rather seen Konami make one of its clones back in the day instead of CyDra: Tefnuit. Same stats, same effect, but without being able to attack right away if it gets dropped the cheap way. It'd serve as Tribute fodder and give the old vanilla dragons some nice boost. Back then it would have been so great to use that to bring out an easy and more accessible Red-Eyes Darkness Dragon or even the Metalmorph one, or to dump Blue-Eyes. It is generic, supportive, and more tame for its time.

 

Outside of generic speed, Cydra only really had overkill combos.

-Limiter Removal for an easy 4200 ATK beater + whatever machine you used?
-Fuse into giant double attacker

-Fuse into even more giant piercer

-Have a Poly that further doubles those stats

-Fuse to kill everything that's Machine-Type focused

-Use Future Fusion to selectively mill your Deck in mass and go for the 16000 ATK monster that can attack like 20 times per turn.

 

Nowadays it's not really a big deal though.... We have had plenty of clones like this, which were initially consciously weaker by halving their ATK or having low ATK to begin with. Then at some point they started being more or less equal but for different niches, nowadays Cyber Dragon is just a clause for monsters that can have extra effects on newer cards, which is fine.

[notcleverusername]

-Use Future Fusion to selectively mill your Deck in mass and go for the 16000 ATK monster that can attack like 20 times per turn.

Just for the record, while milling all the Machines in your deck was useful for things like JinzOTK, the Chimeratech itself nukes your cards (including Future Fusion) upon summon so you'd never actually get to attack with it

 

IIRC Cyber Twin contributed to creep in some form or other as well. I forget.

[Sleepy]

Just for the record, while milling all the Machines in your deck was useful for things like JinzOTK, the Chimeratech itself nukes your cards (including Future Fusion) upon summon so you'd never actually get to attack with it

 

IIRC Cyber Twin contributed to creep in some form or other as well. I forget.

 

Hmm no, you see. The Future Fusion combo never was used to wait 2 turns for it. It was used in conjunction with Overload Fusion for the OTK, and I gotta admit the Chimeratech rarely made more than 2 or 3 attacks (if even) because as much as it could attack 200000 times, it runs out of monsters to attack so unless you forced an opponent's Marshmallon into Attack Position, it was mostly a huge beater xD

 

Yeah, I remember back in the day I liked using Metamorphosis to go into Cyber Twin Dragon. I think the deck used The Creator.

Back then double attackers weren't much of a thing. We basically had Hayabusa outdated by Mataza (300 extra ATK and immunte to Brain Control/Creature Swap/Enemy Controller) or if your deck could tech in Tyrant Dragon, which could be Summoned via King Dragoon.... Damn... this sounds old. I can't recall how much of this was actually "meta" and how much of this was just people locally doing stuff.....

[Fu Manchu]

Ah, how I miss the days of Tributing Spirit Reaper for Vampire Lord... Indeed, Cyber Dragon is the card that marks the beginning of the Special Summoning era.