The Grand Strategist

[tayfga15]

 

Lore: When this monster is Summoned: change it to defence position. When this monster is Normal Summoned you can select 5 cards with different names from your deck and reveal them to your opponent. Your opponent selects 1 card among them. Add the selected card to your hand and shuffle the other cards into your deck.

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Relatively basic card designed to be the fair version of Painful Choice. Designed to primarily be used in Frognarchs deck or anything else that favours tribute summons.

[Flash Flyer - Sakura]

The difference between this card and the original Painful is that the cards must have different names and the other cards get sent back to the Deck instead of milling, which prevents stuff like LS setting up the graveyard for Judgment and a bunch of other things In Traditional (Exchange of Spirit FTK is one of them).

 

It's still powerful, given that it still adds a card to the hand but you now have a 1/5 chance of pulling the card instead of the other chance of getting a copy of "insert banned card here" and no grave setup. In short, you made a 2300 DEF wall that can search any card but requires a Tribute (or just to be Normal Summoned if you somehow lower his Level in hand; straying a bit from the card).

 

It is more balanced than the card it was inspired from; that much is certain.

 

 

To close up, a short OCG fix (using PSCT to the best of ability):

 

When this monster is Summoned: Change it to Defense Position (TCG uses the American spelling of "defense" and D/P are capitalized). When this monster is Normal Summoned: Select 5 cards with different names in your Deck and reveal them to your opponent. Your opponent selects 1 card among them: Add that card to your hand, and when you do, shuffle the other cards into the Deck.

[tayfga15]

You don't actually have a 1 in 5 chance of pulling the card you need; as your opponent will generally select what they judge to be the least helpful card for you. Although the immediate temptation is to simply whip out Solemn Warning, Bottomless Trap Hole, Compulsory Evacuation Device, Dark Hole and Torrential Tribute; the best way to use this card is probably to think more tactically.

That being said the "5 Limited wombo combo" probably is still a potent option; but with cards like Silent Honor ARK running around I don't think it would seriously damage the metagame. Most of the most prominent decks these days need their normal summon to get going. The exception to this is GAM (Genex-Atlantean-Mermail) which could probably tribute summon this card with next to no issues and then throw out a Limited Card of your opponent's choosing and Geargia; which does the same thing with their glorius powerful trap card as well as Geargiaccelerator.
 

I wonder what impact adding the clause (You must select at least 1 monster card, 1 spell card and 1 trap card) to this card to make it more strategy encouraging. Or the blatant anti-limited card clause (Send 1 copy of that card to your graveyard and add another copy to your hand).

[Zeaux]

When Konami made Painful Choice, I am pretty sure they never thought that the metagame nowdays wouldnt use the Graveyard so much, hence the name of the card, making you dish the other choices. This card, while doest seem powerful as painful choise, doesnt dish the cards, just return them to the Deck, giving you a big plus with no drawback at all. It is a cool design card, not creative, but a good way of balancing painful choice, but should have been more nerfed yet. Simply because, IMO here, adding generic cards from deck to hand is just too powerful for any card. I am not giving Gold Sarc as an example because it is limited to 1 because of Dragon Rulers, but I still think it is a pretty damn god card. My opinion on the balance would be just to change the last sentence to: Add the selected card to your hand and banish the other cards face-down.