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Photon Hypernova is the first core set for YuGiOh! this year and the penultimate set of the current season. It brings with it a continuation of the current Albaz and Visa Starfrost story lines as well as bringing back a handful of previous archetypes from the later anime seasons who haven’t seen support for a while. Lastly, it has introduced the all-new Gold Pride archetype.
What Is The New Archetype?
This newest core set is mostly building on previous archetypes so Gold Pride is the only wholly new deck within the set. Thematically it is comprised of racers and their vehicles with the Gold Pride being one such team within the races. It elicits a certain familiarity with its design similarity between it and the speed duels from the 5Ds anime in terms of the races aesthetics and crisp white tracks. The similarities are helped by the fact that Gold Pride is a Synchro-focussed deck just like how 5Ds was a Synchro-focussed series.
The Gold Pride monsters work by allowing you to special summon them if your life points are lower than your opponents, which gets facilitated by having other card effects that have effects that must be paid for with life points. This makes Gold Pride a riskier strategy than some others since it requires you to dance with death in some games by risking lowering your life points by too much, especially if your opponent is also paying for their own cards with their own life points or with effects that give you more life such as Upstart Goblin. On top of that, not a single Gold Pride card is more common than Super Rare, meaning at best you can get one Gold Pride card per pack you open. On top of THAT, as if Konami wanted these cards to live up to their name of “Gold”, two of the archetype’s cards are secret rares and pretty much every card in the archetype, except perhaps it’s trap card, is something you’ll be wanting to run at 3 copies if you want a consistent Gold Pride deck.
Completing Old Archetypes
On a more positive note, the love that has been given to previous archetypes is brilliant, with one exception. I won’t detail absolutely every card, but here are some collated notes on all the cards bringing the biggest immediate changes to the game.
First off, Kashtira, the most recent page in the Visa Starfrost saga, has been given the love it needed to jump up and take its sisters place on the top tables, replacing Tearlaments and proving that the Visa Starfrost story will likely be in the meta in some form for quite a while still. As well as just getting some new support Kashtira now has cards that bridge between the archetypes within the Visa Starfrost story in the form of Kashtira Tearlaments and Kashtira Scarleclaw. Just like the previous (and possibly soon to be ending) Albaz story line printed cards in the Albaz Strike structure deck that contained two archetype names from its lore within its text to help bridge the strategies these two Kashtira cards seek to the same, utilizing two archetypal names and having effects that borrow from both archetypes’ strategies.
Next, we have Albaz in which every sub-archetype except for Despia, Sprights and Therions has received at least one new card. Starting with Bystials we have the new Bystial, Baldrake. With this we now have a Bystial that is only common, making the cards a little more accessible, although he is possibly the weakest Bystial in compensation. Albaz also has two new fusion boss monsters, one of which, Granguignol, the Dusk Dragon, is seeing a sizable amount of competitive play since it, combined with Fusion Deployment can search for Blazing Cartesia, the Virtuous which has allowed Albaz players to cut down to a single copy of Cartesia in their decks instead of the previous 3.
Given that the other fusion is not a dragon, unlike almost all the others, it is seeing far less use and value which Konami appears to have predicted since, whilst both the fusions have been printed as Ultra Rare cards, Granguignol also has a Starlight Rare printing whilst the later, Rindbrumm, the Striking Dragon, only has the one rarity. Photon Hypernova has also brought along the first Icejade Extra Deck monster, the Synchro monster Icejade Gymir Aegrine. If this card had come earlier it might have had a better reception, but as it stands Icejade has become more of a casual deck and whilst it could be elevated to a championship deck it doesn’t seem to be going that way any time soon. Dogmatika, Tri-Brigade and Springan also got new boss monsters and Swordsoul got a new main deck monster, but, like Icejade, these now-casual strategies are yet to make big come backs.
Thirdly we have the Chaos archetype. I personally feel that the revival of this archetype is a bit of a nostalgia dig what with the 25th anniversary and Chaos having been such a popular and famous early archetype. However, Photon Hypernova has brought new Chaos cards that highlight how Chaos and Bystials synergise together. In addition, with the two rarest cards being Ultra Rares you would most likely run at just 1 each, those being the Synchro boss monster Chaos Archfiend and the main deck monster Orphebull the Harmonious Bullfighter Bard it is possibly the most whole archetype at the lowest rarity across the set, as long as you don’t mind having to go back to hunt for some previous sets, like Battle of Legends: Crystal Revenge, Chaos cards to fill a deck.
Lastly, we have the titular Photon cards that gave the set its name, which unfortunately I find to be underwhelming. Whilst there is a decent amount of new Photon and Galaxy-Eyes cards, including the new Number C62: Neo Galaxy-Eyes Prime Photon Dragon (which is only an Ultra Rare) and the new Secret Rare support monster Galaxy Photon Dragon, the one card you need most for a Galaxy-Eyes deck, Galaxy-Eyes Photon Dragon, is no where to be seen, not even as a Starlight Rare reprint. It was last reprinted back in 2021 and is integral to a Galaxy-Eyes deck.
In YuGiOh! a 2-3 year old set is, for those that don’t know, as good as out of print. Anything older than 6 months to a year, depending on product, is as good as out of print making the only option to get the integral card for the deck the second hand market. In defence of Photon Hypernova, I didn’t expect a Galaxy-Eyes Photon Dragon reprint outside the Starlight rarity, but I did expect a monster that had the effect of being treated as Galaxy-Eyes Photon Dragon for the sake of XYZ material or something such that the Galaxy-Eyes and Photon deck gained accessibility, which it has not done.
Quickfire Archetype Support! And Final Thoughts
In my opinion the best element of Photon Hypernova is all the miscellaneous archetype support cards for more minor archetypes. The set has support for Ninjas, Ritual decks, Insects, Evigishiki, Vaylantz, Abyss Actors, Mermaid, continuous traps/Uriel, Generaider and even Evil Eye, not to mention the last attribute of Plunder Patrollship that Plunder Patrol was missing. Photon Hypernova is weirdly at it’s best plugging the holes left by previous core sets that had come before it.
