Looks like Konami is continuing its trail of enticing players for its newest products. Duelist’s Advance is set to officially launch this coming July, and with it comes more cards exclusive to the Trading Card Game (TCG).
Ashlan U1000
Ashlan U1000 comes off as a pretty confusing piece of Ritual support. This is mainly due to the theme this card plays with: monsters that have different types and attributes.
Most high-performing ritual archetypes, such as Mitsurugi, don’t use ritual monsters that function with Ashlan U1000.
While some archetypes like Nekroz or Libromancer can fulfill, and even play with Ashlan’s theme, it would come at the cost of a precious extra deck slot.
Not many players would be keen to give up an extra deck slot for a generic combo extender. This is especially true if the archetype already has access to something that's either easier to summon or more in-house.
To be fair to Ashlan, however, it has the capability of becoming a bridge between two ritual archetypes. If you happen to ritual summon another card while Ashlan is on the field, it comes with one of the best forms of targeted removal.
Miracle Raven
As a Pendulum scale, Miracle Raven has one of the best. Some Pendulum-focused archetypes (e.g. D/D) have some of their best engine pieces at Level 1, so having a generic option to include these Level 1 monster cards in a Pendulum summon is already a boon.
Miracle Raven also comes with the best kind of ritual summoning condition, it ritual summons itself. The biggest bane of ritual monsters is the need for a Ritual Spell card to summon said monster. This card does away with that.
Miracle Raven’s design is something Konami should look into more for future Ritual monsters support, regardless of archetype.
As for its potential in a ritual-focused deck, Miracle Raven is a very good consistency piece.
It can give you card advantage by turning any single tribute fodder into a high-level ritual monster. This is on top of searching for another ritual monster from the deck.
While Miracle Raven is being advertised as a generic ritual support, some members of the online community are already theorizing some pretty degenerate combo lines.
According to a comment in this reddit post, someone noticed that Miracle Raven’s Pendulum effect is a soft once per turn. From there, it looks like both Raven and Ashlan U1000 can turn Diviner of the Herald into a single-card combo into the Fiendsmith engine.
Leave it to the online community to take any card in the roster and make it a tool for something entirely different from its intended design.
Readying of Rites
It was nice of Konami to give Miracle Raven its own little support. As far as card design goes in this game, Readying of Rites meets the standard.
It functions as a RotA (Reinforcement of the Army) for Miracle Raven and can even give you a token to summon the little fella with. While the extra deck lock might force you to reshuffle your turn sequence, it’s pretty easy to get around.
Ready of Rites even goes beyond the call of duty. Any deck using ritual monsters to deal battle damage can later turn this card into a draw. It’s simple, it’s clean, it gives any ritual deck some form of consistency once the grind game begins.
This card is nothing groundbreaking for Yu-Gi-Oh! It’s just a nice bit of support for a gameplay feature that isn’t used very often.