Name: Witch of the Black Rose

Level: Four

Attribute: Dark

Types: Spellcaster/Tuner

ATK: 1700

DEF: 1200

 

Stats: Witch of the Black Rose is Level 4, so she’s easy enough to drop into play.  She’s Dark, allowing her to feed some of the nastiest Monsters in the game.  She’s a Spellcaster, opening up a few extra opportunities (like getting over halfway to Arcanite Magician).  1700 ATK is great for a Tuner and 1200 DEF is decent: at least you won’t die to some random tiny effect Monster.  As long as the effect isn’t detrimental, this card should easily be finding its way into a few competitive decks.

 

Effects: This card cannot be Special Summoned.  That hurts, especially for a Spellcaster of this side that has access to Magician’s Circle, let alone if this happens to be the only card and you need to use Magical Dimension.  It also has been ruled not to count as an actual effect, so you can’t creatively negate it in order to get around it.  Still, we can work with this.  The next line of the effect stats that “When this card is Normal Summoned and while you control no cards, draw 1 card and reveal it.”  Well, that’s handy: opening turn, any turn your opponent has cleared out your field, and especially if you’re top decking, you get an extra card.  Let’s read that last line… “If the card you drew is not a Monster card, send it to the Graveyard and destroy this card.”  The loud you just heard sound was this card’s playability crashing and burning.  Even though Monsters are probably being played in the highest deck ratio they’ve ever probably had, you’re still probably talking a 50-50 chance of this card blowing itself up and sending a card to the Graveyard that isn’t a Monster (probably bad).  Maybe it isn’t as bad as I am making it out?

 

It isn’t.  This second part of the effect is only a problem if you let it trigger.  Just make sure you control at least one other card in play, and the effect is void.  Still, it probably would have been better if it were just a Normal Monster: there’d be some interesting combos available to it then.

 

Uses and

Combinations: If you are determined, you can exploit the effect, probably a card that let’s you top deck a Monster of your choice.  The best such card would probably be Plaguespreader Zombie: Special Summon it by top decking a Monster, find a way to use it up, and then use your Normal Summon on Witch of the Black Rose.  Of course, while I just used a commonly played card, it’s also a Limited card so not that practical after all.  You could use A Feather of the Phoenix could let you top deck a Monster you want to draw but that card itself requires a discard.  In the end, you have to be recycling something you wanted to anyway for it to be worthwhile; even if you discard what you want to recycle from your hand, in the end you’ve merely burned a Spell to “negate” the negative effect you just need another card in play to avoid.  On the unlikely chance you discard something like Night Assailant and retrieve a Flip Effect, you… still have gone to a lot of trouble for minimal gain.  Better to just make sure you have another card in play to prevent the effect from triggering.

 

Ratings

 

Traditional: 1/5 – All the negative effects built into the card offset the token bump I’d have given it for being Chaos food.

 

Advanced: 2/5 – I hate stat inflation/ATK creep/whatever you want to call it and even I think this was overkill to balance out the Tuner.

 

Summary

Unless they’ve got something interesting in the works to combo with this card, it seems like something they over thought.  Use it if you rarely have an empty field or don’t fear top decking it in a pinch.