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Pojo's Yu-Gi-Oh Card of the Day

Vampire Lord
Ultra Rare

Each time this card inflicts Battle Damage to your opponent's Life Points declare 1 card type (Monster, Spell, or Trap). Your opponent selects 1 card of that type from their Deck and sends it to the Graveyard. Also, if this card is destroyed and sent to your Graveyard by your opponent's card effect, it is Special Summoned to the field during your next Standby Phase.

Type - Zombie/Effect
Card Number - DBZ-EN116

Card Ratings
Traditional: 3.65
Advanced: 4.7

Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale 1 being the worst.
3 ... average. 5 is the highest rating.


Date Reviewed - 10.20.05

 

Lord
Tranorix
Vampire Lord

This is now the THIRD time I’m reviewing Vampire Lord. The first time, he was at one per deck. The next, he was at two. And now he’s at three.

2000 ATK, Turtleable, Book of Lifeable, decent deck destruction effect that may actually end up helping your opponent, rentsy recursion effect that’ll help you, blah, blah, blah.

So now you can run three Vampire Lords. Well, that’s great for Zombie Decks…unless they go up against a deck with Cyber Dragon. Because Cyber Dragon is not Vampire Lord’s friend.

Reviewing this card is getting redundant…

Control: 2.5/5
Zombie Deck: 5/5
OVERALL RATING: 3.8/5
 

ExMinion OfDarkness
Vampire Lord

This guy's also unrestricted for a reason.

He has a lot of pros with the new format and a lot of cons. It's suddenly much trickier to play a decent V-Lord deck.

Pros:
Sakuretsu Armor, Dark Hole, Smashing Ground, Torrential Tribute...there's more 1:1 monster removal in addition to the mass removal that's getting played now. This gives you more ways to get back V-Lord against a player with no big beatstick.

Cons:
CYBER DRAGON. So many people are going to be playing it in threes, plain and simple. It trumps your V-Lord by 100. Zombie decks are going to be shifting away from V-Lord and more towards Ryu Kokki as their Turtle search because of this.

So this puts both players into unusual territory. The V-Lord player has to hope for targeted removal and avoid Cyber Dragons, and play Kokki when they know Cyber's coming but there isn't any targeted removal. The opponent of such a player has to try and not lead out with Cyber until V-Lord's on the field, and have some removal down if the opponent knows they have Cyber so that they'll bring out Kokki and it'll get destroyed.

Zombie isn't as cookie-cutter as it used to be.

2/5 Traditional (even more mass removal here)
3.5/5 Advanced (as it competes with Kokki for a Tribute slot)
 

Coin Flip
Vampire Lord, eh?

I said yesterday that the unrestriction of a card was a bad herald for its playability. I'll mention that again.

It seems as though Goblin Elite Attack Force and its cadre of "hangover" monsters have earned more and more play in many decks. That's one reason not to run this. The others are fairly simple. Many decks play at least 2 each of Cyber Dragon, D. D. Assailant, and Spirit Reaper. All of them use Vampire Lord's cape as toilet paper. D. D. Warrior Lady is still in full swing, and you had better bet that Mobius and Enemy Controller are piquing our interest (and in the case of the latter, emptying our wallets).

Vampire Lord would have been insane many years ago in threes, since the most common tactic would have been to play two to three Torrential Tributes, a Mirror Force, Raigeki, Dark Hole, and Ring of Destruction. But now we have two of those cards. Granted, we've replaced them with up to 3 Smashing Ground and up to 4 Sakuretsu Armor (I include Widespread Ruin in that count) plus potential Bottomless Trap Hole… But we've also replaced our Gemini Elves and Airknight Parshaths with D. D. Assailants and Cyber Dragon. The growth of monster effect strength and monster statistic strength has made this monster a mere shadow of its former glory.

Does that make it bad? No. Does that make it a bad card to draw? Survey says yes.

Vampire Lord is not a bad card and shouldn't be treated as such. However, it's not stellar enough to break through the supposedly "cookie cutter" grouping of cards; Cyber Dragon, Enemy Controller, Spirit Reaper, D. D. Assailant, and quite a few other less ubiquitously played cards.

3/5 General
 

Dark Paladin
Vampire Lord is our card for today, one that like yesterday, we can now use three of. Let's do a little Vampire Lord timeline, shall we?

Dark Crisis is released and Vampire Lord is the 000 Secret Rare.
Vampire Lord is almost immediately restricted, and with good reason.
Then, he was an Ultra Rare variant in the Rise of Destiny boxes, and then he became Semi-Limited. Finally, he became a COMMON in the Vampire Structure and now he is unrestricted completely.

*note--I am writing this as though you, the reader IS intelligent*

Don't get me wrong at all, Vampire Lord is still quite good. Not as good as Phoenix, but still good. I'll start by discussing whether or not to use three or if you Zombie players SHOULD use three. You all should already know the effects of Vampire Lord.

In my opinion, there is absolutely NO reason to run more than two Vampire Lord's, even in the Zombie deck? For one, there are so many other Zombie tribute choices.

a) Vampire Genesis (stretchy, I know)
b) Ryu Kokki
c) Despair From the Dark

Besides, you can't have too many tribute monsters in your deck, you know that already, don't you? Vampire Lord's recursion is obviously the reason to use him, especially now that Dark Hole is back. VL laughs in the face of pretty much everything short of an attack or a Bottomless Trap Hole.

However, anything with 2100 attack destroys Vampire Lord. Beserk Gorilla HAS to suicide with him. Kycoo, DD Warrior Lady, and DD Assailant remove him. So, stick with two, you do not, nor will you ever, need anymore.

Ratings:

Traditional: 4.85/5 Dark Hole, Raigeki, and so many others just wow.
Phoenix is better though.

Advanced: 4.45/5 Still solid, especially with Dark Hole back.

Art: 5/5 Wonderful, simply wonderful!

You stay classy, Planet Earth :)
 

Otaku

I am starting to look like a liar.  I keep telling people I don’t have time to review any cards… and I don’t, at least not consistently.  I just have a weird “gap” and I’d rather use that morning energy (coffee=good) for something rather than nothing.  So here’s my take on Vampire Lord, or rather on the changes that have occurred since we last looked at him (click here, here, and here for our last, next to last, and first review of Vampire Lord.

 

My last review of the Vampire Lord (that would be the first link above) was pretty thorough, so this time I will merely comment on how the current metagame seems to match up to it.  Unfortunately, that is something of a hard call, as said environment is still pretty “new”, so I’ll tackle the obvious question: will the option of running a third Vampire Lord matter?  Yes.  Zombies are amazingly well supported.  Warriors are still the true favorites of this game, and once their structure deck is released, they will likely be even easier to build with than Zombies.  For now, at least, I can definitely see a third Vampire Lord working its way into pure Zombie decks, especially ones that want to focus on Control/Depletion.  Why?  All though it of course entails a risk, Zombies have this fantastic ability to bend the rules and run more than even three Tribute Monsters efficiently.  This is due to the combination of Book of Life, Call of the Mummy, and Pyramid Turtle.  I am not saying it will be a must, but especially if you can keep your opponent’s bigger Monsters under control, there is little hope any Monster Removal will be that effective.  Imagine Dark Hole practically being a waste!

 

One thing I feel has changed is the risk of discarding a card via Vampire Lord’s depletion effect.  You see, while Chaos Monsters and Magician of Faith are less of a problem, and you’re free of Sinister Serpent, thinning the deck just got a whole lot more useful with the loss of both Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity.  Still, you can always just side in a few Soul Release or Fiend Comedian (remember, you have up to five recursion cards for a Zombie deck) and you should be fine.

 

Traditional       : 4/5-As I said last time, he can be a solid addition even here, though much less likely and only at one.

 

Advanced        : 4/5-No, being unrestricted won’t boost his rating.  He is more vicious in dedicated Zombie decks now, and has lost one of his principal foes, but he won’t be seen a whole lot outside such themes now.

 

Limited            : 4/5-So long as it hits the field before the opponent can mount a serious offense/defense, you likely just took control of the game.
 


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