Pot of Greed
is a “staple” in all but the most bizarre (and
often least successful) themes… like a no Spell
deck and such silliness. It is by no means a
perfect card: when your opponent actually
bothers negating it, instead of getting a card
of advantage, you missed out on maybe getting a
good Monster or Trap instead (if it was a Spell…
it would have been negated anyway).
Fortunately, most of the time someone will save
any Spell negation that isn’t free/always on for
whatever you manage to draw with Pot of Greed,
but that, and when you don’t get it until you
have less than two cards left in your deck, are
the few times it won’t be useful.
Now, the power of Pot of Greed is
overstated. It’s not that powerful. Rather, so
many other “broken” (over-powered) cards exist
in the game that the stopgap method for fixing
them is to restrict draw power to the point it
is near non-existent, and cap hand size (though
the hand size is large enough that, given the
lack of draw power, it rarely activates).
Personally, I would favor getting rid of [even
more] over-powered cards and/or bumping up the
minimum deck size to 50 or even 60 cards,
while at the same time increasing the amount of
draw power in the game. Preferably the
extra draw power would be in the form of “deck
specific” cards, which only work with specific
Attributes, Types, or effects.
Why am I allowing myself to get so far off
topic? This is Pot of Greed. If you
have a copy, you play it. Even if your deck
were already at 40 cards, you’d ad this because
the games it works (and as stated above, that
will be most of them) it will make your deck
effectively 39, and give you the option of
keeping it at 41 cards (in case of depletion).
It always technically “lowers” deck size (with
the assumption it isn’t negated). This entire
review was just done for the tenuous “Potter”
connection, so I felt I could editorialize a
bit.
If you don’t have a copy of Pot of Greed,
just start asking around: it’s available in a
variety or rarities, including being multiple
common versions (some from promo packs, some
from Starter Decks).
Ratings
Traditional :
4.75/5-I gave it its highest score here. Why?
So many broken cards here,
that you’ll probably get at least one if not two
from Pot of Greed. No, it still
doesn’t deserve a 5/5 here. It is only as good
as the cards it draws, and I don’t find there to
be a lot of cards that deserve “perfect”
scores. Even broken cards usually have some
sort of downside.
Advanced :
4.5/5-There is no reason not to run it, and
circumstances turn what should at best be a
commonly seen card into probably the closest
thing to a “true” staple.
Again, I still don’t consider it
Limited :
5/5-In almost every game, draw powers value sky
rockets in value for the Limited format. Yu-Gi-Oh
is no exception. Use it if you get it.
Summary
We get this silly review because some people
refer to Harry Potter fans as “Potheads”. Of
course, most I know use the term “Potterhead”
instead, so that the allusion to pot is there,
but the obvious intent is to link to Harry
Potter.
This is a card made artificially good. “Draw 2
cards” is the basic draw card effect for so many
TCGs, and in Yu-Gi-Oh, it’s limited to
one-per-deck. Crazy.
