Chocolate Is Still Better Than Vanilla

There is no doubt in my mind that after releasing the overpowered chaos monsters in Invasion of Chaos the designers realized they had to cool things off otherwise the gameplay would only snowball to more OTKs and turbo mechanics. It would also still revolve around independent power cards if they kept printing them and every deck sharing 20 of the same cards all the time. I actually appreciate them realizing this and taking a step back because spoiler alert, Ancient Sanctuary and the rest of the 2004 booster sets are all weaker than Invasion of Chaos. Truthfully, all of them have their share of good cards but because of how incredibly overpowered the chaos quartet was from Invasion of Chaos it pushes that set of out their league. Only because of 4 cards. In fact, this would continue into the GX era too, you just wouldn’t see many power cards on the level of BLS, Imperial Order, Pot of Greed etc.

I say I appreciate that because I realize that if they kept trying to 1-Up each set from Invasion of Chaos afterwards we would have ended up in Arc-V territory of brokeness A LOT sooner. I suppose they had more faith in the fun gameplay of yugioh back then or maybe it wasn’t fully about the money. Who knows. Released on June 1st Ancient Sanctuary has a nice variety of cards for lots of strategies but its biggest theme is fairy type monsters centred around The Sanctuary in the Sky and cards working only with normal monsters. Low level ones at that. They also must have realized just how irrelevant most, if not all normal monsters already were and the cards here were meant to convince us otherwise.

Unfortunately these new cards didn’t do enough to make them compete with the best effect monsters; particularly because many of those cards only worked on low level normal monsters only. I think if many of those cards gave benefits to strong normal monsters such as Gemini Elf and Archfiend Soldier the story of Ancient Sanctuary would have been much different. In the end though needing multiple cards for wacky combos wouldn’t be reliable compared to having a bunch of effect monsters that provided something automatically. Most of them had better stats than these low level normal monsters too anyway! The way the cards were designed here though wasn’t just to make normal monsters good again. They wanted us to build decks using various cards that worked well together but on their own would not be power cards like Pot of Greed or Ring of Destruction. By using many of those cards together the deck would gain a certain individuality and would be vastly different than another deck.

Archetypes were already established with Gravekeeper’s in Pharaonic Guardian but it wasn’t exclusively about archetypes; rather they wanted to encourage us in using more “creative” strategies which usually ended up as gimmicks. Anything to make players try to run more new cards, gimmicks or non-gimmicks. Of course, we’ll be looking at the best cards in this set and indeed a lot of them are awesome:

AST Key Cards:

Ancient Sanctuary didn’t have any power monsters on the level of Invasion of Chaos but its release still marked a historic moment for Yugioh. The original and first monarch card to be released; Zaborg the Thunder Monarch. These days involved players know Monarchs as an archetype but for the longest time these cards were just stand-alone high level monster cards, living up to their royal title. I believe that remained the case all along until the Zexal era. Zaborg is also unique being a level 5 monster, with all the other classic ones being level 6, just after this set. Was it a mistake on their part? I’ve always been curious. Regardless, this is easily the most significant card from this set as a way to kill any other monster and the light attribute also made it a compatible fit in chaos decks.

A few minor drawbacks though need to be addressed. Jinzo and Summoned Skull didn’t have the greatest defence but it was just enough to defend against Tsukuyomi. Zaborg though and all the future Monarchs will fall prey to a Tsukuyomi summon; flipping you to defence and easily running over your Monarch. Zaborg’s mandatory destruction can also make plays awkward; if your opponent doesn’t have any monster on their field and you tribute summon this card you will have to destroy one of your cards, even Zaborg if you don’t have anything else on the field. Despite these minor aspects to consider, this is a fantastic tribute summon monster and a great addition to many decks.

This card is most similar to Gravity Bind but it’s a spell card. Because of this and because it changes monsters to defence position you get a few benefits that you otherwise wouldn’t get with Gravity Bind, such as changing a Monarch to defence position and killing him with Marauding Captain for example. However, for the most part, it will act as another stall card just like Gravity Bind and Messenger of Peace.

An incredible asset for anyone that wants to fusion summon; King of the Swamp doesn’t only work as a substitute for 1 fusion material, it is also a Fusion Sage in monster form. It’s funny how I mention that card when it was still only available in Japan at this time. Even when we would get that card, King of the Swamp would almost always be the better card to run because of its dual-purpose effect and because if everything else fails you can still use it as a monster for defence or other plays.

This is only a small excerpt from my book "The Original Yugioh Era Vol. 2".

If you're interested in the 2004, the third and final year of the original yugioh era; especially the over the top Invasion of Chaos format then this book is your ultimate one-stop shop. This book is my sequel to The Original Yugioh Era covering the 2004 sets in detail as well as all the other numerous video games and other special card releases from 2004.

Check out my book on this link and thanks for reading this article! https://www.amazon.com/dp/9925752442