Number 373: Salamence, the enraged dragon

[ems97]

I gave the effect of this Salamence card Double Edge. Image is from glitter-graphics.com

 

Edit: Rank up Salamence to a 6

 

 

2 Level 6 monsters

When this card inflicts damage: You can detach 1 Xyz Material from this card; double that damage, and if you do, this card loses 400 ATK/DEF.

[Flash Flyer - Sakura]

Correlating this to what Salamence actually does in game; Double Edge just inflicts recoil damage when it attacks; not doubles any damage [unless you refer to Aerilate Double Edge when it Mega Evolves].

 

Granted, this card does power down when you activate the effect, but it's essentially an even stronger version of Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon. Considering you can, hypothetically, attack your opponent directly for 5600 LP [not factoring in other power bonuses], it is more often than not enough to sweep for game in conjunction with other monsters OR on its own with prior damage.

 

Either you raise its Rank to 6 to compensate for its 2800 ATK (as that's on the higher end of ATK for Rank 5s; 2600 is the general upper limit for them; yes ZW - Leo Arms has 3k but that can't strike directly; whereas this can) OR you lower its ATK to 2500 or something.

 

Hopefully you know there are several Decks that can produce Rank 5s quite easily, and would love nothing more than to have a sweeper monster to end games with (though R6 does have its fair share of Decks to spam the necessary monsters to get this, should you raise its Rank).

[~British Soul~]

Image is from glitter-graphics.com

You may have found it there, but the image actually originates from the pokemon TCG, just saying

 

OT: If I was doing a card whose effect is based on Double-Edge, I'd have done something along the lines of you take X damage when it attacks.

Also this is just my opinion, but I'd have also given it an effect to reduce the attack of a monster when its summoned by detaching a material ala its Intimidate ability if I included my idea for a Double-Edge effect on a card.

[Darj]

The card doesn't look good.

 

It may have the highest ATK of all available official 2-material Rank 6s (tying with Force Focus), but some of those Rank 6s come with removal (e.g. Ptolemy, Gauntlet Launcher) or negation effects (e.g. Strike Bouncer) while having respectable 2400~2700 ATK, or if the low ATK is an issue they can Xyz-evolve into Gaia Dragon after using their effects. And this card's effect doesn't help: it doesn't generate card advantage, it needs to inflict battle damage first and without any sort of protection or negation effect it might not even get the chance in this aggressive metagame, and on top of that it drops its original ATK, which is currently the card's main selling point.

 

In other words, there are better Rank 6 choices than this.

 

As for suggestions, British already gave really good ones: damaging yourself instead of lowering damage, and an additional Intimate-like effect.

For the Intimidate effect, I suggest something like this:

 

When this card is Special Summoned: All face-up monsters your opponent currently controls lose X00 ATK, also negate their effects (including in the Graveyard) until the end of the opponent's turn.

 

That way, it mimics the Intimidate ability by reducing the opposing monster's ATK when Salamence is Summoned (switched in), with the added bonus of locking their effects temporarily, because sometimes dropping the opponent's monsters ATK is not enough. Just to clarify, the ATK drop lingers but the effect lock wears off, and the "including in the Graveyard" PSCT should stop the floating effects of Hands, El-Shaddolls, etc. I will leave to you the amount of ATK reduced, but I suggest 500~700 (personally I would go for 500).