Yugi's Battle City Magic Cards: Double Trouble! The Mighty Magic Surge
Today we're covering two Magic Cards that debuted in the last Dark Yugi vs. Kaiba duel from the finals of the Battle City tournament. Both of these cards are closely tied to the triumphant finale to this fight!
Let's face it: during a duel, sometimes your opponent is just able to play better Magic Cards than you. No need to be envious or curse your luck, though: with a little "Double Magic" you can use your opponent's Magic Cards as if they were your own!
This is a very strong, very freeform card. Getting to use all of your opponent's Magic Cards, and without any cost to boot? It's no wonder Konami nerfed their version pretty hard.
This card is also interesting because its text only says that you get to 'use'/'play' all Magic Cards used by your opponent on the turn you play this card. The simplest interpretation here is that you get to physically take your opponent's cards, no matter where they are now, and use them yourself. For regular, one-use Magic Cards, you can take them and then put them back when you're done, as Dark Yugi does in chapter 261. But what about cases not accounted for in the manga? What if some of the Magic Cards your opponent played were Permanent (Continuous) Magic Cards, or Field Magic Cards, or anything else with staying power? As written, this would basically allow you to simply take permanent control of those cards!
About the only limitation here seems to be that you need to have on-field slots open and available to physically play the cards you take. But even that's not so clear in the manga, since we never fully see specifically where the pulled cards go when this card is used. An absolutely fascinating effect through and through!
It's because of this card that Dark Yugi is able to take Kaiba's copies of "Resurrection of the Dead" and "Fusion" and use them to call out his own ultimate monster, "Mighty Magical Swordsman: Black Paladin" (also known as "Dark Paladin")!
Of course, I can't mention "Black Paladin" without talking about its big move, brought about all thanks to this next card.
Here it is- the card that enables your magician to strike down all of your foes in one overwhelming burst of magical power! "Diffusing Surge" is the only card worthy of being the finisher for Dark Yugi's ultimate fusion monster!
(As with my other Magician-related cards, this one has a revision that puts quotation marks around the word "Magician" in its text.)
Yes, this is "Black Paladin"'s signature move, the incredible blast that annihilates all three of Kaiba's "Blue-Eyes White Dragon"s at once and finally settles an age-old rivalry once and for all.
As I've said before, I had two goals with the cards in my project. I wanted them to be as manga-accurate as possible. I also wanted them to be functional game pieces that someone could feasibly use in an actual game of real-life 'Magic & Wizards', if they so chose.
Most of the time, I can balance that pretty well. On this one, though, I had to make a compromise with function in mind. The manga card allows you to 'spread'/'diffuse' a "Magician"'s attack to all your opponent's monsters, i.e. it allows you to attack all of them at once with one attack. In an actual game, this would make for some very confusing interactions, particularly with how a Battle Phase is structured and how players would handle responses and chain-reaction abilities/effects to all parties involved in a group attack like that. So here I took a page out of Konami's book and made it so this card just allows you to attack all of your opponent's monsters once each, one at a time. The same end result is reached; the steps to get there are just slightly different.
Side note: since Dark Yugi can legally play this card with "Mighty Magical Swordsman: Black Paladin" in the manga, this indicates that "Black Paladin" counts as a "Magician" for the purposes of game effects, even though it technically doesn't have the specific word "Magician" in its name.
Also, I decided to adjust the translation of this card's name. "Diffusion Wave-Motion" is, technically, an accurate rendering of 「拡散する波動」, but I had a feeling that an aspect of the name got a little lost in translation here. Something about the phrase 'wave-motion' in reference to a magic attack didn't sit right with me.
Turns out that another meaning for 波動 is 'surge'! To me, that works with this card's illustration imagery a little better; the intent seems to be that it causes a surge of magical power that spreads outwards from the caster, hitting everything all at once! It's a more elegant solution for this name than 'wave-motion', I think.
"Beyond Magic! Fierce Slashing Wave!!" Two-page spread from chapter 262, "As a Friend!!".
Okay! Enough magic for now. Tomorrow, the second of the Three Mythical God Cards returns to the mortal realm...
“Discard 1 Spell Card, then target 1 Spell Card in your opponent’s Graveyard; place that target in the appropriate Zone on your side of the field, and as this card’s effect resolution, follow its card text as if you had used it yourself.”
