Unchained Soul Lord of Yama – #DUNE-EN049
2 Fiend monsters
If this card is Special Summoned: You can add 1 “Unchained” monster from your Deck or GY to your hand. If a card(s) you control is destroyed by battle or card effect, while this card is in your GY: You can banish this card; Special Summon 1 Fiend monster from your hand or GY, then you can destroy 1 card you control. You can only use each effect of “Unchained Soul Lord of Yama” once per turn.
Date Reviewed: September 4th, 2023
Rating: 4.08
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,
Welcome to the first full week of September. We’ll start things off with Unchained Soul Lord of Yama.
Two Fiend monsters needed to Link Summon this strong Link 2 from the Unchained archetype narrows his play to the archetype and stuff like Dark World. Whenever you see “2 Fiend Monsters” needed, immediately thing Tour Guide. Doens’t matter the archetype, Tour Guide comes to mind. If this were years ago, this Link Monster may have seen play in far more decks because everyone was running Tour Guide and Sangan in their decks.
Unchained RoTA upon Special Summoning, Yama also can be a facilitator for a Special Summon while in the grave. The RoTA for any Unchained monster in the Deck or graveyard is obviously great, especially when you consider that all Unchained monsters can be Special Summoned through various effect(s) of their own. Given you need to usually destroy something of your own to do so, it is still a RoTA that includes the graveyard and we players appreciate that.
As for the Special Summon, banishing itself in the grave to facilitate this is only the first part. As expected of the Unchained archetype, destruction also occurs within the effect(s) somehow. Banishing Yama to Special Summon any Fiend from the hand or grave is followed by an optional destruction of a card you control. If you want to blow something up, your best bet is any of your Unchained Spell/Trap cards that is set on the field, which will then Special Summon an Unchained from your Deck.
Yama isn’t the only Link 2 in the Unchained archetype and I don’t think it’s the best one. Unchained Soul of Rage may require an Unchained monster be included in its Link Summon, but it can be an I.P. Masquerena for one of your DARK Link Monsters, but uses itself and an opponent’s monster instead, as well as adding back a Fiend monster when destroyed by battle or card effect. It is a good Link 2 just not with the responsiveness that Soul of Rage offers. Yama offers more resource management that plays alongside the destruction that Unchained monsters tend to do/need to accomplish through their effect(s).
Advanced- 3.5/5
Art- 3.5/5
Until Next Time,
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
A bunch of support cards this week and we start off with a Link-2 that helped bring its archetype back into major meta relevance as of late: Unchained Soul Lord of Yama.
Lord of Yama is a Link-2 DARK Fiend with 2000 ATK and arrows pointing Bottom-Left and Bottom-Right. ATK is pretty good on a Link-2, DARK and Fiend is a great combination, and the arrows are great for a Link archetype. Materials are any 2 Fiend monsters, which Unchained can do easily with their 2 new Unchained Soul monsters, alongside running Tour Guide From the Underworld and a Fiendish Rhino Warrior. Upon being Special Summoned, you can add any Unchained monster from your Deck or graveyard to your hand, which is great for consistency and continuning with your plays. If a card(s) you control is destroyed in battle or via a card effect, you can banish this card from the graveyard to summon a Fiend from your hand or graveyard, then you can destroy a card you control. Unchained is almost always destroying their own cards, so the effect is super simple to trigger. It’s pretty great to get a way to revive Unchained Soul of Rage to Link Summon using an opponent’s monster on their turn, and destroying your own cards can destroy any other Unchained card you got to float into another Unchained monster. Hard once per turn on each effect is traditional. Lord of Yama is pretty strong support for the Unchained archetype. The search and easy revival effect it has are both strong for the archetype its a part of, it’s honestly perfect as a 2-3 of in modern Unchained builds.
Advanced Rating: 4.5/5
Art: 5/5 It’s different from the other Links in the archetype, and its certainly for the better.
Mighty
Vee
This week continues our Duelist Nexus coverage with one-off legacy support. Unchained Soul Lord of Yama is our first card, a much-anticipated Link 2 DARK Fiend Link monster for the Unchained archetype, with fitting properties for an Unchained monster. Yama has down left and down right arrows, which are about perfect for a Link 2, and has simple requirements of any two Fiend monsters, so your bread and butter combos of destroying an Unchained Trap will bring it out easily (and giving it synergy with the Evil Twin and Labrynth archetypes!), as well as simply summoning Tour Guide of the Underworld. With only 2000 attack, Yama isn’t much of a fighter, but it can do decent damage in a pinch.
Yama has two hard once per turn effects, the first searching any Unchained card or recycling one from your Graveyard if it’s Special Summoned. As history tells us, any Link 2 ROTA has excellent combo potential, and Yama is no exception. There’s no particular target to search other than any Unchained monster you haven’t used yet, though Unchained Twins – Aruha is the most versatile if you didn’t start with Unchained Soul of Sharvara. Yama’s other effect triggers if any of your cards are destroyed by battle or card effect (most likely card effect, since it’s Unchained we’re talking about) while it’s in the Graveyard, letting you banish it to Special Summon any Fiend monster from your hand or Graveyard then destroy a card you control. This effect is an easy way to get more bodies on the board after Linking Yama off for Unchained Soul of Rage, and Unchained’s highly aggressive combos will put ample bodies on the board to withstand the destruction “costs” (if you can even call it that). Yama is a superb extender for the archetype and has single-handedly propelled Unchained to tiered status, with Unchained becoming the top deck of YCS Brazil. It’ll be interesting to see if the deck can keep up this performance going forward.
Advanced: 4.25/5
Art: 4/5 Just like almost every other Unchained card, he feels like he’s about to destroy something.
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