What is an XYZ summon?

  A New Beginning: What's an XYZ summon?

As we all know Yu-Gi-Oh has had the most change in the last 10 years than it has in it's first 10 years. That said since I've already posted what the meta and competitive looks like in modern yugioh, I thought that it is time to start over and give you all a pop quiz on all the new summoning mechanics. Since 2012 there have only been 3 new summoning mechanics and I I want to start from least difficult to understand to most difficult to understand. Synchro's will not be on the list since technically they came out in 2008 and do not fit in the 10 year window since their debut.

Up first we have the XYZ monsters

These cards are most well recognized by the black color in their background the way you summon one of these xyz monsters is by stacking monsters with right levels(you can tell by the amount of black stars on the xyz card itself.) For the card above you require two level four monsters in order to summon it, when you have the required cards on your field you are allowed to perform an xyz summon in which you stack the monsters you are using to summon the xyz below the xyz on the field. For a visual on what that looks like please look below.

As you the three kuri volts have been stacked below the xyz monster, this is a little hard to understand but the kurivolts in this example would be considered to no longer be on the field but are now considered as xyz material. XYZ material are used as the xyz's monster main source of power, they are essentially required in order to use the effects of most xyz monsters(there are exceptions out there.) In order to use these effects you must detach a xyz material of your choice and send them to the graveyard.

Utopias effect as seen above would be to stop a monsters incoming attack from happening and in order to do that the player would need to detach a xyz material and send it to the graveyard. This is basically the jist of  what a xyz summoning is there are many more xyz monsters out there nowadays that it's hard to keep count of which are the most powerful. If there is anything else you'd like to know about xyz monsters go ahead and leave a comment and I'll cover it at soon as I can. Next up we will be covering link monsters in the next summoning mechanic blog.