GUSTO FIELD SPELL

[zazaramatra]

Gusto Paradise

When a "Gusto" monster is summoned, sent to the Graveyard or sent from the Graveyard to the Main Deck, place 1 Gusto Counter on this card (max. 7). When this card would leave the field, remove 1 Gusto Counter on it instead. Once per turn, you can remove 1 Gusto Counter on this card to Normal Summon 1 "Gusto" monster from your hand. During either player's Main Phase, you can remove any number of Gusto Counter to activate these effects:
- Remove 1: You can negate the effect of a card on the field (except this card) until the next End Phase.
- Remove 2: You can increase (or decrease) the ATK of a face-up monster on the field by 600.
- Remove 3: Target 1 "Gusto" monster on your field, that monster can attack one more time during your next Battle Phase.
- Remove 4: Add 1 "Gusto" monster from your Deck to your hand.

(Is it OK?)

[Yui]

Hello there, YCM's leading and probably only expert on Gusto here. Tonight you're gonna learn a thing or two about Gusto and why this is kinda subpar support for them for some effects but with some other effects that are actually amazing for them. All of the below will assume that the text was meant to be adhered to as displayed above.

 

The first thing that stands out is that this field spell will gather counters absurdly fast in many Gusto builds, due to it saying "monster" instead of "monster(s)". Or so you'd think! The counter-gaining effect uses "when" instead of "if", meaning if one were to, say, activate Blessings For Gusto, you wouldn't get two counters for shuffling two monsters into the deck then a third one for summoning another monster. You'd just get the one for the summon. Or I think that's how it works anyway? I'm not too familiar with counter mechanics, so don't rule out the possibility that I'm completely wrong here.

 

The effect that returns banished cards to your hand, meanwhile, is completely pointless unless you happen to be using Daigusto Eguls or Gusto Thunbolt. And if you're using those, I think you need to reconsider your deck options. Gustos aren't an archetype that banish themselves for the most part, since it's directly counterintuitive to their defining trait of shuffling their monsters from the graveyard into the deck. And while I'm talking about effects that don't really seem necessary in Gusto support, these days giving a monster in Gusto an additional attack isn't really that helpful, and I'll come back to that in a bit. Their highest-ATK monster - Daigusto Eguls - has 2600ATK, which is pretty neat and all, but not worth the three counters you'd spend if you just want it to attack again. Additionally, the discard effect is iffy at best. Barring a situation where you have both Pilica (or even better, Griffin) and Gulldo in your hand, there's... not really any monsters you want to discard. Paying six counters just to lose what little card advantage Gustos can muster for some life points that probably won't help in the long run is honestly pretty bad.

 

The rest of the effects range from neat to actually really funking good. The second normal summon and the search effect in particular have my attention here, and are by far the biggest help to Gusto. Presently, the only way to really play Gusto is by going for SphreezTKs, which involves using Daigusto Sphreez's battle damage effect to attack high-ATK monsters (normally 2800 or more ATK; I've done the math) using your low-ATK monsters, namely Gulldo, Egul, Kamui, and then Sphreez herself. The problem with this is that you need to either summon Sphreez without using your normal summon (on Pilica, who can then revive Gulldo) or have a means of summoning a Gulldo from your graveyard ready. The second normal summon from this field spell resolves that issue entirely, allowing the player to summon Pilica to revive Gulldo and make Sphreez, then use the extra normal summon on the Gulldo you just got then proceeding to SphreezTK. Which brings me to the ATK-modifying effect on this card. Don't worry, I'll come back to the search effect in a second.

 

The ATK-modifying effect on this field spell is great, but probably not for the reasons you were thinking when making this card. As I mentioned just earlier, the SphreezTK typically requires a monster with at least 2800ATK to go live. The field spell giving any monster on the field a 600ATK boost for the rest of the turn comes into play here, lowering the threshold to 2200, which is a number many monsters these days will go past. This combined with the search effect will make SphreezTKs much easier to accomplish. On which note, I'd like to go over the search real quick. It's funking great, and may well be the best effect on this card besides the extra normal summon. You just grab a Gusto from the deck. It's a shame that it can only search monsters though; being able to search any Gusto card would be wonderful, since the deck has some pretty decent backrow just without any ability to search it.

 

For the sake of my mental health and because this review's already pretty long, I'm going to pretend the "draw 2" effect on this card doesn't exist (a +2 for you that is also potentially a -4 for your opponent is not okay). Which leaves the negation effect. It's... decent. With how easily this spell might be able to round up counters depending on how the mechanics for those work (again, I'm not 100% on that stuff), this effect could potentially be pretty nuts since in Gusto, you'll be summoning lots of monsters and more or less all of them that aren't named Daigusto Sphreez will be sent to the graveyard for one reason or another. I'll leave that effect to be reviewed by someone who knows how counters would work with this card.

 

Bottom-line: Like half the effects of this card could or should be cut out. Solid card once you get past those, and the effects that help Gusto help them really well. I dig it.

 

Oh, and welcome to YCM by the way. Hoping to see you stick around (^_~)/