Post #2 by Christen57 » Sun Apr 19, 2020 5:17 pm
When it comes to customs, I'm very lenient in what I let people use. I've dueled players before, and sometimes even won, despite them using crazy powerful customs such as a spell that lets them draw 8-10 cards for free even though pot of greed's banned, a level 4 monster that could be normal/special summoned for free that had the combined effects of both apoqliphort towers and borrelsword dragon, a field spell that allows them to extra link using synchro monsters instead of link monsters, a level 4 with a continuous effect that reduces the atk and def of all my monsters to 0 for free, a level 3 vanilla with 5000 atk and def, a monster that is basically aurora wing but without the once per turn restriction, and so on.
What I usually don't allow, is custom cards that prevent healthy interaction between players with no cost. Most floodgates and auto-win cards fall into this category, as well as cards that let you negate a bunch of the opponent's cards for free. It's bad enough that floodgates like fossil dyna pachycephalo, and ftk cards/enablers like exodia, already exist, and now people wanna make more of those? That feels like too much.
When I see someone play a custom that I think is broken, instead of immediately leaving the game and saying they're stupid or something for making and playing that custom, I stick around to see what their actual end board is, and whether or not they ftk or do some other crazy degenerate thing. Sometimes they might play a broken custom, but then it turns out all of the other cards in their deck are terrible, and that the one broken card they just played was simply their "ace" card that they find makes their awful deck "decently viable". I'm okay with that, as it teaches you that sometimes it helps to save your strongest cards for when the enemy uses their strongest cards. On top of that, if they don't draw said broken card or any way to search it or access it easily, they're a pushover.
Sometime's I myself will make "broken" customs but restrict them to specific archetypes that are terrible. For example, I've got both Ally of Justice and Dark Scorpion customs that generate huge advantage for little cost, but they are restricted only to their respective archetypes, and they're still balanced since they only exist to help terrible archetypes be decent, but not powerful enough that they so easily abusable or splashable in other more powerful strategies.
With that said, just because some broken card exists in the current meta, doesn't automatically mean that it's going to fair or okay to make another broken card in customs.
En ' Phanatic - Trap Hole
If a monster(s) is Summoned to your opponent's field: Change that monster(s) to face-down Defense Position. Monsters changed to face-down Defense Position by this effect cannot change their battle positions. If you control no cards, you can activate this card from your hand.
Changing monsters to face-down defense position, and permanently locking them into face-down defense position, is an incredibly powerful effect, probably even more powerful than destroying/banishing the monsters, because when you destroy or banish them, at least then they will leave the field and free up the opponent's zones so they can summon more monsters, and also some monsters can have effects that trigger when destroyed (yang zings) or banished (thunder dragons), so a destruction/banish effect can be taken advantage of in some cases. When you lock them face-down, they can never be flipped back face-up, even with a card effect, they can never be used for synchro, xyz, or link summons, and must be gotten rid of through other means such as tributing them.
Stall decks such as Mystic Mine can take advantage of a card like this, leading to even more degenerate strategies that hinder healthy interaction between players, especially since it can be activated from the hand, so it doesn't even have the downside of having to be set first, like Quaking Mirror Force does.
Lastly, it's splashable, and even if you don't draw it, it can be accessed with Traprix Rafflesia and Trap Trick, with the former being a rank 4 that can be made with any 2 level 4 non-token monsters, so any deck that can make rank 4's will be able to have access to this.
It needs to either have it's effect to prevent the monsters from changing their battle positions again removed, or have more restrictions on top of it, like you have to have a specific monster like a traptrix monster in your hand or graveyard to use it.
