Any Spell Card that draws you 2 cards is worth a look, and The Dark Illusion brings us one of the most unique “draw 2” spells ever made.

Pot of Desires will let you draw 2 cards when it resolves, but those 2 cards come at a huge price. Maybe. You have to banish the top 10 cards of your Deck face-down as a cost to activate Pot of Desires, and you can only activate one Pot of Desires per turn. There are no additional conditions like Card of Demise or Pot of Duality beyond the “once per turn” restriction, but eliminating almost 30% of your remaining Deck at random is as steep a price as you’ll ever pay. Sometimes.

Banishing cards face-down is the most permanent way of removing cards from the game since so few effects let you affect face-down banished cards. You can look at your face-down banished cards, but no one else can and effects that refer to specific types of banished cards (monsters, etc.) can’t touch them. If something is banished face-down, bar PSY-Framelord Omega or Necroface, it’s very likely not coming back. Limited power cards like Raigeki, Luster Pendulum, the Dracoslayer or Tour Guide From the Underworld might just vanish from your Duel entirely. Or they might be in the 2 cards you draw instead and lead to a massive blowout win. Pot of Desires is a high-risk high-reward card, but with careful Deckbuilding you can vastly minimize that risk.

One way to mitigate the risk is by playing a bigger Deck. If your Deck contains more than the minimum of 40 cards, you’ll definitely want to consider Pot of Desires to get some draw power. We’ve seen a 60 card Deck win a YCS before, and that was without effectively having access to 3 copies of Pot of Greed. There’s no reason it can’t happen again once Pot of Desires gets here. That said, Pot of Desires is best used in Decks that use a lot of duplicate cards and don’t rely on searching out Limited cards or playing a wide variety of 1-ofs that they intend to search for.

For example, Phantom Knights will use multiple copies of the Level 3 monsters like The Phantom Knights of Ragged Gloves, The Phantom Knights of Silent Boots, and The Phantom Knights of Ancient Cloak along with multiple copies of Phantom Knights’ Fog Blade and Phantom Knights’ Wing. Pot of Desires can also fit into Pendulum-based strategies since you only need 2 cards to complete your Pendulum Scales. If you already have a lot of Pendulum Monsters in your Extra Deck, you only need the right pair of monsters to activate as Pendulum Spells, allowing you to Pendulum Summon. It doesn’t matter if you lose 10 cards from your Main Deck if the next 2 cards win you the Duel!

In the end, whether or not you play with Pot of Desires comes down to just how badly you want 2 more cards in your hand. You can make the choice for yourself when it becomes available in The Dark Illusion, which comes out on August 5!