Yu-Gi-Oh! Dimension Force – Booster Box

Dimension Force is the 8th Core Booster set in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Official Card Game (OCG) and Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, following Battle of Chaos released in May 2022, this collection provides a good amount of support to Pendulum including the very first Pendulum Ritual Monster. Although the collection includes support for just below 30 archetypes, the main ones receiving new members or support are Libromancer, Predaplant, Heroic and Zombie. The collection also provides the first ever support for the “Battleguard” archetype and it introduces two new archetypes: “Therion” and “Scareclaw”.

“Therion” is an archetype that revolves around special summoning high-level monsters of various types from the hand by equipping them with monsters from the GY. Each Therion monster, except for “Therion Irregular”, also has a second special effect aimed to gain an advantage, and a third one that grants a special effect and additional 700 ATK to the monster they are equipped to. Unfortunately, most of these effects require a card to be sent to the graveyard from the player’s hand or field to avoid a negative effect applied at resolution. If properly used this aspect can also help fuelling the engine by re-stocking the graveyard.

The second new archetype, “Scareclaw” is mainly composed of Lv3 earth Beast-Type monsters, and is focused on gaining control of the board using Defense Position monsters. The strategy starts with special summoning quickly a lot of monsters directly from player’s hand. Most of these monsters will support each other by providing special effects to other monsters, including those in the Extra Monster Zone. The next step of the strategy is to bring to the field the boss monster of this archetype: “Scareclaw Tri-Heart”. This Link-3 monster not only has 3000 ATK but it can force all other monsters on the field into Defence Position and then attack multiple times with piercing battle damage exploiting the effects granted by the other monsters on the field.

Right Out Of The Booster Pack

Each booster pack of dimension Force contains 9 cards while each booster box comes with 24 packs per box for a total of 216 cards. Overall this collection includes 100 cards: 10 Secret Rare, 14 Ultra Rare, 26 Super Rare and 50 Commons.

5 cards of the set are also available as Starlight Rare as usual: “Exosisters Magnifica”, “Patissciel Couverture””, “Therion “King” Regulus”, “Alba-Lenatus the Abyss Dragon” and “Ghost Belle & Haunted Mansion”. The starlight rare for the newly release Therion archetype is not a great surprise as the Pendulum-related Starlight, Patissciel Couverture. Ghost Belle & Haunted Mansion coming in Starlight Rare is quite a nice addition and a really good one to look forward in this set.

Pull rates of this set are very standard with 1 Starlight rare expected every two boxes (0.2%).

Rare Cards To Look After

There are a lot of good cards in Dimension Force packs. The two new archetypes are interesting and a good portion of the supports for the other archetypes can definitely benefit a few decks. With this in mind, it is quite difficult to pull a few examples of the cards in this collection but I feel the three below are suggestive enough of what you can find:

Ghost Belle & Haunted Mansion (Lv3 Zombie Effect Monster; ATK 0, DEF 1800) is not a new card from dimension Force but is the Starlight Rare I really wanted to pull from this set. As a monster, this card is not very powerful but its special effect allows a player to discard it from their hand to negate an effect. Although this seems close to Ash Blossom, Ghost Belle specializes in negating effects centred on the Graveyard and as such it can be a very powerful ally against a lot of meta decks.

Odd-Eyes Pendulumgraph Dragon (Lv7 Dragon Pendulum Ritual Effect Monster; ATK 2700, DEF 2500) is a very unique monster. If ritual summoned using “Odd-Eyes Advent”, it can inflict 300 damage to your opponent every time they special summons a monster(s) from the extra deck. In addition, it has a quick effect that is triggered when the opponent activates a spell card or effect and that allows the player to place this card in their Pendulum Zone. If they do it, the triggering effect is negated and the player can special Summon 1 “Odd-Eyes” monster from the extra deck.

If pendulum summoned or once Pendulumgraph Dragon is in the pendulum zone, the player can also add a Ritual Spell from hand or graveyard during the End Phase and return this monster to their hand. As clearly visible, this second effect combined with the ritual summoning allows to create a continuous circle of summoning/negating spell effect but it can also open the door to more Odd-Eyes summoning.

Red-Eyes Zombie Dragon Lord (Lv10 Zombie Synchro Effect Monster;ATK 2800, DEF 2400) offers the opportunity to special summon a Zombie monster from the graveyard during the opponent turn. Players can also bring it back to the field by banishing another Zombie monster they control and the overall mechanic fits nicely a deck of monsters that never die…

Is This Set Worth Buying?

In a nutshell: yes, this is actually a very decent set to buy. It does not have any high competitive cards or any support for the most popular meta decks but it is a very solid collection of good cards that can easily find their space in your decks. Among the two new archetypes, Therion is definitely flexible enough to support other monster types and, with time, it could grow into a nice new engine by itself.

I think the only real draw back of this set is the reduced amount of widely usable generic support cards. If you are not looking to collect any of the archetypes supported here, I would recommend to read the card list to see if the general support ones can really be of interest for you. There are for sure some that are quite interesting but they may just not suit your deck. Among the ones you may really look forward to pull, “Beyond the Pendulum” is a very good ones as it can boost any pendulum-based deck.