Cardinal Virtue (LIGHT Dragons and Warriors archetype)

[not naze]

So I designed this little archetype like half a year ago and never posted it because i struggled a lot and lacked time to make the artwork for it. As usual, I generate and edit the artworks with free AI tools (Canva and Pixlr this time) and end up by reworking them a bit with Photofiltre 7. I'm not an artist, and I'm not even good with AI tools so please don't judge them too severely.

I designed 8 cards in total for it, but I only finished the 4 main ones yet. The other 4 are some kind of supports that I'm not yet proud of, so I'll add them later in the topic when I made the artworks for them and reworked their effects. Justice don't look anything like the other 3 knights too and it makes me really unconfortable too, I might change his picture too.

Usually, I like to comment each cards and how the archetype play, along with their strength and weakness, and their design philosophy, but Im too exhausted to write it now, and I think it would be better to make it when all the cards are done. So I'll just give a general description for the idea behind it. 

The cards are obviously based off the ancient greek's "cardinal virtues", and ethics in general. As such, they're all LIGHT attributes to represent the Good and their effects revolves around banishing or disrupting DARK attributes cards (representing Evil). The cards in themselves are pretty strong imo, but are obviously balanced by the fact that they're limited against non-dark decks. 

Most philosophers have their takes on which of the cardinal virtue is the most important, but I value Justice the most. This is why I made it into the boss extra-deck monster of the archetype. I could say a lot more about the symbolics and reasoning behind each cards, their artwork and effects, but I'll stop here for now, I might expand on it later when I add the 4 other cards.

For now, I would like you to appreciate and judge the effects for what they are, and their relevance in the game.

 

If you read everything, I thank you a lot. I hope you appreciate these, and I would love some comments on them (even negative ones). See you soon for the rest of the cards and more comments on them !

Edited Monday at 05:40 AM by not naze

[Ultimagamer]

Feels a bit odd having 3 level 6 monsters as the main deck... followed by a fusion monster. If the fusion had its effects toned down a bit it could be made into a rank 6 monster with a summoning requirement like "2 Level 6 LIGHT monsters". That'd work a lot better with the main deck since they're focused on swarming the field. They also don't search out fusion spells or enable fusion summons, making the fusion boss feel out of place.

As for the monsters themselves...

 

Prudence: The colons on this effect make it virtually impossible to respond to, since the semi-colon is placed *after* the special summon. That means the cost to activate the ability of banishing itself if you fail to find a dark monster is 1) looking at your opponent's hand, 2) banishing a dark monster from it, and 3) special summoning itself. You'd want to word the effect more like the following

• (Quick Effect): You can reveal this card in your hand; You can look at your opponent's hand and choose 1 monster. If the chosen monster is a DARK monster, banish that monster and Special Summon this card. Otherwise, banish this card.

It's a good thing the summoning restriction is there. I could lowkey see people playing that just to see their opponent's hand and potentially rip a hand trap out.

 

Courage: Since the archetype doesn't have any dark monsters, it makes the effect entirely reliant on outside engines or the opponent having dark monsters. Something like Bystials does this idea in a way that works with itself. They're all dark monsters that can banish a light/dark monster from either GY to summon themselves, while getting better if the opponent controls a monster. They work by themselves while also being able to hate on light/dark decks. It might be the way you want to work the deck around. Having a good baseline effect with a bonus for going against dark monsters instead of only working against dark monsters. Funnily enough, this effect (and the archetype) gets completely shut down by Ally of Justice Quarantine (since you can't activate Courage in hand to banish the Quarantine since you can't special summon light monsters).

 

Temperance: Same thing from Courage applies here, but even moreso. Since the effect is limited to the opponent's GY you can't even put a dark monster in the GY to turn this effect on. If your opponent has no dark monsters, this is just a vanilla.

 

Justice: Having all effects be once per turn if a bit odd since it has a continuous floodgate effect. If you keep that effect in you'll want to put it first while putting the other effects below it, and using a restriction like

• You can only use each of the following effects of "Cardinal Dragon - Justice" once per turn.

This card is one where I think having it be more flexible could really help it shine. Imagine if instead of having a single anti-dark effect it had a choice between the following effects when summoned:

• Target 1 monster your opponent controls; banish it
• Banish all DARK monsters your opponent controls

You could even turn the protection effect into one that detached a material instead of banishing a dark monster (Also, why does it banish a dark monster from your hand or GY when the archetype has no dark monsters and locks you out of dark monsters?)

 

If you choose to keep it a fusion monster, you need to give the deck some ways to fuse. Either searching out polymerization or giving the monsters themselves ways to fuse with effects or both. Right now you'd have to run outside engines to grab a poly which won't work well with the light restrictions of the maindeck monsters. I think you'd have a much more synergistic boss as an xyz monster instead of a fusion one.

[not naze]

Thank you a lot for your comments ! 

A lot of your critiques are actually fixed by the 4 missing cards that i've not finished yet, so I will talk about them a bit here !

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Prudence: The colons on this effect make it virtually impossible to respond to, since the semi-colon is placed *after* the special summon.

I have a hard time with the colon and semi-colon things tbh (like a lot of ygh player I suppose), thank you for rewriting the effect, I'll make sure to correct that. Also I want to mention that I'm not a native english speaker, so if my wording is weird or bad it's probably because of that ! But I hope the intent behind each effects are still understandable !

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Courage: Since the archetype doesn't have any dark monsters, it makes the effect entirely reliant on outside engines or the opponent having dark monsters.

That's one of the issue addressed by one of the missing card. I planned on including one (or two ?) DARK monster, that would be pendulum monsters (so you can put them on the field even with the restriction of only summoning LIGHT monsters) and could discard themselves, so you can actually banish it/them both from the hand, field or GY ! But to be fair, I also had in mind that the archetype would be played in some kind of weird LIGHT-versed "chaos" decks, and not only on its own.

But I do agree with you about the fact that the archetype would be better if it worked in every case but was boosted against DARK decks, instead of only working against them. I may be a little bit shy when creating cards, I'm too scared to do something too overpowered.

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Justice: Having all effects be once per turn if a bit odd since it has a continuous floodgate effect. If you keep that effect in you'll want to put it first while putting the other effects below it, and using a restriction

100% true. I will correct that. 

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This card is one where I think having it be more flexible could really help it shine. Imagine if instead of having a single anti-dark effect it had a choice between the following effects when summoned...

Once again very true. That's another case of me being scared to make the card too OP. But I like your Idea it seems balanced.

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You could even turn the protection effect into one that detached a material instead of banishing a dark monster [...] If you choose to keep it a fusion monster, you need to give the deck some ways to fuse.

This is resolved by the other missing cards. One of them is a fusing card, and the other is an actual XYZ rank 6 monster. Although it works more as an extender that a boss monster, since one of his effects is to search the fusing card.

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You could even turn the protection effect into one that detached a material instead of banishing a dark monster (Also, why does it banish a dark monster from your hand or GY when the archetype has no dark monsters and locks you out of dark monsters?)

The protecting effect of Justice is assured both by the DARK pendulum monster I mentioned earlier, and by the chaos-like deckbuilding I intended for the deck. Maybe should I create another engine of DARK monsters that actually profits off being banished to go along with it ? But it might be abused in a lot of other decks I think.

 

I hope I answered all your concerns about the cards, thank you again for your critique and ideas ! I'll try to finish the last cards as soon as possible so the archetype finally feels complete and coherent !

[LazerSwordKirbo]

An anti DARK deck is an interesting idea, especially with how much of the card pool is DARK monsters, but the summoning restriction for courage does not work. The restriction is an effect independent of the summoning effect, and because of that the once per turn restriction only applies to the lights only effect. To fix it you could replace the period after hand with ", then".