Jun 27, 2010
Blackwings battle on with new cards from The Shining Darkness! Lots of Decks got new cards from The Shining Darkness, and while X-Sabers and Infernities have made the biggest splash so far at the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series tournaments, Blackwings sneaking higher and higher into the rankings. Check out all the new cards you have to choose from for your Blackwing Deck!
First up are the monsters. Blackwing – Breeze the Zephyr is the latest in a long line of useful Blackwing Tuners. It can be Special Summoned from your hand when you search it out with Black Whirlwind. Next up is Blackwing – Ghibli the Searing Wind. At 0 ATK, any Blackwing monster can add it from your Deck to your hand with the effect of Black Whirlwind.Whenever you’re about to take a direct attack from one of your opponent’s monsters, you can Special Summon Ghibli from your hand to block the attack. If it survives the turn though, you can either set it up for a Synchro Summon, or use its effect to switch its ATK and DEF to make the most of the 1600 DEF it starts out with.
Finally, we have Blackwing - Gust the Backblast, a Level 2 monster that can be Special Summoned if you’ve got no cards on the field. It can also weaken your opponent’s monsters, making them lose 300 ATK if they attack one of your Blackwings. Like all Blackwing monsters, these 3 are DARK, Winged Beast-Type monsters, so they’ll work well with the Allure of Darkness and Icarus Attacks you use in your Deck already.
Next up are the Spell Cards. Cards for Black Feathers lets you draw 2 cards after you remove a Blackwing monster in your hand from play. Such a powerful effect comes at a cost though, as you can’t Special Summon during the turn you activate Cards for Black Feathers, and you can’t activate another copy until your next turn. Despite this, Cards for Black Feathers is being added to lots of Blackwing Decks right now, as drawing Black Whirlwind early has become more important than ever before.
The other new Blackwing Spell Card in The Shining Darkness is Black-Winged Strafe, which lets you send a Blackwing monster in your hand to the Graveyard and send one of your opponent’s Defence Position monsters to the Graveyard.
With this, you can send Blackwing – Vayu the Emblem of Honor directly to the Graveyard instead of Setting it, or any other Level 4 or lower Blackwing monster to set up a combo withBlackwing – Blizzard the Far North. Lots of Duelists are still Setting Gravekeeper’s Spy, Super-Nimble Mega Hamster and Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter as well, and getting rid of them without flipping them up in battle will prevent their effects from activating.
Lastly, the Trap Cards. Black Thunder can be activated whenever your opponent destroys one of your Blackwings in battle and sends it to the Graveyard. When this happens, you hit them back with 400 points of damage for every card they control. The more cards they’ve got, the more damage they take! Blackwing – Backlash can destroy all of your opponent’s monsters at once as soon as one of them tries to attack you directly. You just have to have at least 5 Blackwing monsters in your Graveyard, but since you’re making lots of Synchro Summons and getting more and more free cards with Black Whirlwind, getting 5 in there is easy. Finally, there’s Blackwing – Bombardment. When you tribute a Blackwing monster, one of your Synchro Monsters gains all the ATK of the monster you just tributed.
- Some old favorites may be making a comeback!
Blackwing Duelists are still experimenting with the new cards from The Shining Darkness to see which work best for them, but the Deck has changed in other ways too. Lots of Decks are relying on the Graveyard again for their big combos, and Blackwing Duelists are adding D.D. Crow to their Main Decks again. In addition to stopping the Graveyard-based combos of Infernities, X-Sabers, Quickdraw Dandywarrior and opposing Blackwing Decks in their tracks,D.D. Crow is also a DARK, Winged Beast-type, just like the Blackwing monsters. Delta Crow – Anti Reverse is also gaining some popularity as Duelists try to get rid of cards like Saber Holeand Infernity Barrier before they can cause problems.
The Shining Darkness has opened up a whole new set of options for Blackwing Duelists, both in terms of what new Blackwing cards to add, and what cards are needed to stop the other top Decks. It’ll be a while before everything settles down and Duelists agree on what works best, so feel free to try anything that you think might work right now.
