D/D Savant Kepler – #DOCS-EN092
Pendulum Effect
You cannot Pendulum Summon monsters, except “D/D” monsters. This effect cannot be negated. Once per turn, during your Standby Phase: Reduce this card’s Pendulum Scale by 2 (min. 1), then destroy all monsters you control with a Level greater than or equal to this card’s Pendulum Scale, except “D/D” monsters.
Monster Effect
If this card is Normal or Special Summoned: You can activate 1 of these effects. You can only use this effect of “D/D Savant Kepler” once per turn.
● Target 1 other “D/D” card you control; return it to the hand.
● Add 1 “Dark Contract” card from your Deck to your hand.
Date Reviewed: September 25th, 2025
Rating: 4.0
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is awful. 3 is average. 5 is excellent.
Reviews Below:
King of
Lullaby
Hello Pojo Fans,
D/D Savant Kepler is a great Throwback Thursday choice as he was mentioned a few times when speaking about D/D and D/D/D.
As a Pendulum, Kepler keeps you to just Pendulum Summoning D/D monsters and nothing else. It’s scale is at 10, but it won’t stay that way, as it has the drawback of reducing its own scale by two during your Standby Phase, then destroying anything non-D/D related. If you are using nothing but D/D monsters, this isn’t something you have to worry about, though not being able to Pendulum Summon anything higher than a Level 6 could cause some concerns. You have ways of destroying it light Wavering Eyes or D/D Orthros, as well as D/D Savant Thomas, and independent spot removal that can target anything on the field. This effect may be a negative, but you still have two turns to summon Level 7 and 8 monsters and spam out anything lower than that. And once again, playing only D/D? Then this effect means nothing to you.
As a monster, Kepler can pop the Pendulum Spell version of itself back to the hand and reset the scale if need be. Bouncing a D/D card you control and returning it to the hand enables you to free up your Pendulum Zones or re-use Spells/Traps that aren’t a hard once per turn. However, you’ll likely choose the Spell/Trap Dark Contract search instead, as those cards can help offensively in the case of the Spells immediately. Dark Contract with the Swamp King and Dark Contract with the Gates can both add to your advantage by prompting a Fusion Summon or searching any D/D monster from your hand respectively. Losing 1000LP at your Standby Phase is hardly a bad thing. Dark Contract with the Yamimakai helps to to place stuff in your Pendulum Zone that you’ve already used that’s either in your grave or face-up in the Extra Deck. Dark Contract with the Eternal Darkness alongside Skill Drain will create a state where your D/D monsters don’t have to worry about targeting Spell/Trap effects or monster effects at all (Skill Drain) and it only costs you 1000LP each Standby Phase of yours. The RoTA Dark Contract (DCwtG) is likely your best choice, getting you to whatever D/D monster you need to start your combos. We’ve mentioned it and it is a know starter play to get Kepler or start with it and get to Scale Surveyor, though any D/D that can Special Summon itself will do.
D/D Savant Kepler is a starter card you want in the opening hand. If you have the Gates contract, get to Kepler, because it starts everything for you. The Pendulum Effect can be a drawback but only if you are using non-D/D monsters, and you’ve got two turns before that starts hurting you from Pendulum Summoning. It is an anchor of a card for the archetype.
Advanced- 4/5 Art- 3/5
Until Next Time,
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
Throwback Thursday this week goes back to D/D to look at the main card in the Deck ever since the archetype released: D/D Savant Kepler.
Savant Kepler as a Pendulum Scale is a Scale 10 that locks your Pendulum Summons to D/D monsters, which is fine for a D/D Deck since that’s exclusively what you play in terms of cards you can Pendulum Summon, and it has to be fine since this effect cannot be negated. Also once per turn, during your Standby Phase, you reduce this card’s Pendulum Scale by 2, down until you reach the minimum of 1 since we were not ready for Scale 0s when this released, then you destroy all monsters with a Level greater than this card’s Pendulum Scale, unless they are D/D monsters, which used to be relevant when D/D ran generic Extra Deck cards, but now focuses exclusively on using archetypal monsters from their Extra Deck. It’s something you don’t really want to keep in the Scale for long, though with its monster effect you kind of don’t want this to be your Pendulum Scale at all and would rather use a different option that accomplishes the same goals you have.
Savant Kepler as a monster is a Level 1 DARK Fiend Pendulum with 0 ATK and DEF. Stats are important to be searchable off Count Surveyor, and yet another DARK Fiend is nice. If Normal or Special Summoned, you can use one of two effects, but you only get to choose once per turn. You can either target another D/D card you control and return it to the hand or add a Dark Contract card from your Deck to your hand. The first option is fine for Scale resetting, but you’ll exclusively be using the 2nd option. For example, summon this, search Dark Contract with the Gate, search for Zero Doom Queen Machinex off Gate, use Queen in the Pendulum Scale to place Dark Contract with the Zero King from the Deck onto the field, use Zero King to destroy Queen and summon any D/D from the Deck. You can also swap around your starters between Kepler, Queen, and Gate to get D/D plays going and that’s not to mention other Dark Contract options like Swamp King for a once per turn Fusion Summon using your hand or field as well as banishing materials from grave, Dark Contract with Patent License to slow down the opponent’s Extra Deck summons, Dark Contract with the Witch for Quick Effect removal at the cost of a discard, Dark Contract with the Eternal Darkness to lock the opponent from targeting, tributing, and doing Fusion, Synchro, or Xyz Summons while you have your Scales up, and Dark Contract with Errors for an archetypal Royal Decree. A bunch of good options you’ll run in your Main Deck (mainly Swamp King and sometimes Witch) or in the Side Deck (basically the rest). So it searches your play enablers or solid end board pieces to limit the opponent, even if most of the time it’ll be the play starters if you don’t already have them. Savant Kepler is key for D/D for its ability to search Dark Contracts to where it could be the only option and it wouldn’t matter at all. D/D always played 3 of this and I doubt that will ever change.
Advanced Rating: 4.25/5
Art: 3.5/5 Well Kepler did figure out the structure of our solar system, and this does mimic that to a degree.
Mighty
Vee
We’re diving back into D/D/D (much to my chagrin) with the combo starter D/D/D fans know and love, D/D Savant Kepler. It’s a level 1 DARK Fiend Pendulum monster with a scale of 10, which comes in handy if you get a low-scale D/D monster in your other Pendulum Zone. Kepler was your bread and butter combo starter in D/D/D, to the point where you pulled out all the stops to open in– One for One and Piri Reis Maps were serious considerations, and more recently Nightmare Throne as well since it searches Fiends with a 0/0 stat spread. Thankfully, the new support in Doom of Dimensions diversifies your combo lines significantly, so not only do you not have to strictly open Kepler, you can even search it mid-combo with D/D Count Surveyor or indirectly with the newly-renamed D/D/D Zero Doom Queen Machinex (we’ll get to it soon enough. Hopefully.). As I brought up Nightmare Throne and Piri Reis Map, you can probably guess that Kepler’s stats are jack squat– 0 attack and defense. More of a brains than brawn monster, as its name suggests.
Kepler’s Pendulum effects are completely ignorable; in old Pendulum fashion, it’ll lock you out of Pendulum Summoning anything but D/D monsters and that effect can’t be negated, thanks to Konami’s bizarre fear of generic Pendulum Scales. In proper D/D/D builds, this is meaningless since Dark Contract with the Zero King is one of your main playmakers and locks you anyway, but I guess it can be annoying for hybrids if you choose to activate Kepler in the Pendulum Zone for some reason. As if that was not enough, Kepler also has a mandatory soft once per turn effect that triggers during your Standby Phase, reducing its own scale by 2 then destroying all non-D/D monsters you control with a higher level than Kepler’s scale. Yes, this is another silly restriction that makes you think twice about playing Kepler in hybrid builds, on top of reducing its own scale to hurt follow-up potential. It goes without saying that you have much, much better high-scale monsters in D/D/D. Never use this!
On the flipside, Kepler has a single hard once per turn effect that served as the backbone of D/D/D combos for years, and still is! It triggers on Normal or Special Summon to give you a choice between 2 effects– either returning a different D/D card from your field to your hand, or, more importantly, searching any Dark Contract card. The first effect has some neat combo utility to return D/D Pendulum monsters from your scales, but obviously the effect we want is searching a Dark Contract card. This’ll get you Dark Contract with the Gate, which simply searches another D/D monster– deceptively powerful in a combo deck like D/D/D. Depending on the combo line, you’ll also want to search Dark Contract with the Zero King, which can conveniently destroy Kepler to bring out Count Surveyor or another D/D monster you need, or Dark Contract with the Eternal Darkness if you think the floodgate will come in handy. Kepler is less important now that we have an extremely powerful starter in Queen Machinex, but it’s still a fantastic card you’ll be seeing a lot in your combos. Hard to complain about a simple ROTA. Run 3!
+Amazing 1-card combo starter and combo piece
+Flexible effect for a variety of combo needs
-Pendulum effect is actively harmful and useless
-Horrendous stats if it somehow stays on the board
Advanced: 3.75/5
Art: 3.25/5 He’s supposed to be a d(a)emon but he looks more like a robot than anything, which is a recurring theme with D/D monsters.
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