Temple of the Kings – #MZTM-EN097
You can activate 1 Trap Card the turn it was Set. You can send 1 “Mystical Beast of Serket” in your Monster Zone and this card you control to the GY; Special Summon 1 monster from your hand or Deck, or 1 Fusion Monster from your Extra Deck. You can only use each effect of “Temple of the Kings” once per turn.
Date Reviewed: May 1st, 2025
Rating: xx
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,
Temple of the Kings is the Throwback Thursday choice and was once on the ban list in some form, but is not now because of the state of the game versus when it originally hit the TCG.
Continuous Spell versus Treasures being your Field Spell, Temple is now highly searchable in the archetype through Anubis searching The Man with the Mark and then he searches this card. Activating one Trap Card the turn it it is set drives the Continuous Trap Monster strategy this archetype centers around. Searching this out to play it and then activating something like Apophis the Serpent will get you another Apophis monster, which Apophis the Serpent allows you to activate the turn you set it.
No real reason to talk about its Special Summon ability, as we didn’t get a retrain of Mystical Beast of Serket that considers itself that name. If we had, Temple of the Kings may be heading back to the ban list, but since we didn’t, it will stay at three. If you do (for whatever reason) run the Mystical Beast of Serket, you can pop Temple and this card to Special Summon from your hand or Deck any applicable monster, or, a Fusion Monster from the Extra Deck. Niche at best, and if you were really trying to get a big bad Fusion Monster that doesn’t fit entirely into this archetype, there’s likely better ways.
More ways to search it, more cards to back it up, and more cards that function because it exists, Temple of the Kings is rejuvenated because of this support. A Continuous Spell that now has protection, a better version of itself in Field Spell form, and a load of monsters (or Trap Monsters) that need it on-field to function at their max power. Should only be in its own archetype obviously, even with the effect to activate one Trap the turn it is set.
Advanced- 3/5
Art- 4/5
Until Next Time,
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
There were a few potential choices for Throwback Thursday this week, but the most obvious choice was Temple of the Kings.
Temple of the Kings is a Continuous Spell that lets you actviate a single Trap Card the turn it was set, which seems extremely niche, but it’s nice for Odion’s Deck to make your plays with Apophis the Serpent. Other Decks might have tried this to get immediate use of a Trap, and it wasn’t all that bad, but you don’t see this that often. You can also send this and a Mystical Beast of Serket from your field to the graveyard to summon any monster from your hand or Deck, or summon any Fusion from your Extra Deck. This can be fun to pull off to cheat out Naturia Exterio or The Last Warrior from Another Planet, but I don’t know if even that makes running Mystical Beast of Serket worth playing since it’s a brick and you need to Tribute Summon it, plus it doesn’t do anything unless Temple of the Kings is on the field. Each effect is a HOPT, so no using multiple Temple of the Kings to try and use more than 1 Trap. Back in the day, the HOPT wasn’t there for either effect and you could activate any number of Traps the turn they were set, getting this card banned in the OCG in 2006 after being legal since 2001 and the TCG just had this banned on release when we got it in 2010. Without the 2015 errata, we likely would have never had a chance to play with this card in the TCG and it would just be to complete the Duel Monsters collection. I don’t know if other niche uses will come from this card outside the Odion Deck, but it’s a fine 1-of in the Odion Deck just to do your combos, whether you want to actually play Mythical Beast of Serket or not.
Advanced Rating: 3/5 (5/5 pre-errata)
Art: 4.5/5 I dunno, the original Temple of the Kings just looks better than the new one. I like the lighting in the artwork better.
Mighty
Vee
Throwback Thursday this week brings us, naturally, Temple of the Kings, a Continuous Spell popularized by Odion from the anime and has perhaps one of the most colorful banlist histories in the TCG. The Man with the Mark and Merciless Scorpion of Serket will both be able to search it directly. Temple of the Kings has 2 hard once per turn effects– the first, and more important to Odion decks proper, will let you activate 1 Trap the same turn it was Set. This is crucial for getting Apophis the Serpent live on your first turn and extending your combos, often resulting in the summon of Divine Serpent Apophis after searching it with Merciless Scorpion of Serket. This was also experimented with as a tech in Argostars since you want to summon Argostars – Lightning Tydeu as soon as possible, though it ended up being pretty mediocre. Temple’s other effect, while considerably stronger on paper, is actually pretty useless in Odion because you’d be forced to play the original Mystical Beast of Serket. By sending both itself and a Mystical Beast of Serket from your field to the Graveyard, you can Special Summon any monster from your hand or deck or any Fusion monster from your Extra Deck. Again, the fact that you have to run the original Serket means this will almost never come up despite its completely absurd potential. Temple was a 2-pronged terror in ancient times, to the point it was the first and currently only card to be banned…before it even came to the TCG! Yes, that meant the Marik structure deck that came with it effectively had a useless card, but this was when they were still trying to push Traditional as a format. It would eventually be Limited before ultimately being Unlimited in 2015 in both regions. Before its errata, you could activate as many Traps as you wanted, effectively making it a poor man’s Makyura the Destructor– which was still an incredibly potent effect, by the way. You could run the various Trap draw cards to facilitate draw turbo strategies like Exchange of the Spirit (in the OCG), play the infamous Chain Burn deck with greater efficiency, or abuse Traps that would otherwise be useless without waiting a turn, like Chain Material. That’s not even considering the other effect; as duels were generally slower in ancient times, you had more than enough opportunity to stall before fielding both Temple and Serket, allowing you to cheat out game-changing monsters like Jinzo or even just a beatstick like Cyber End Dragon or Dragon Master Knight, almost like Cyber Stein without the Megamorph combo (Odion himself, hilariously, used it to cheat out a fake version of Winged Dragon of Ra). For its time, it’s not unreasonable to see why it was banned, but with its errata it became yet another bad card only useful for niche FTKs and gimmicks. That is, until now! In Odion decks proper, you’ll want to run 1 to 2 copies, because being able to activate Apophis the Serpent immediately is amazing. If you’re extremely confident in your Trap ratios, you could justify running 3, but meta builds don’t seem to go beyond 2.
+Great combo piece that enables Apophis the Serpent
+Niche applications for cheating out certain monsters in combo-heavy FTKs
-Can be awkward to fit into combo lines without Merciless Scorpion of Serket
-Special Summon requires you to summon Divine Beast of Serket
Advanced: 3/5
Art: 2.75/5 Only a slight step up from Treasures of the Kings since it’s the original. Not that it makes it particularly more exciting.
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