Pendulum! Pendulum! Pendulum!

 What is a Pendulum card?

Let the madness begin.

      This is honestly one of those few moments in YGO that I don't inherently like per say and that is because whenever pendulums are brought up in the discussion of YGO I remember a dark era of YGO that was overruled or overshadowed by a single new summoning mechanics. Pendulum cards are probably the single most problematic cards out there in YGO even Konami themselves don't have a solid idea of what to do with these cards. Should they gain more support or should they stop the production of these cards and leave them with what they have. I personally feel that they should keep getting support since recently their play ability has gone down in numbers recently since the majority of the decks rely too much on a single link.

So what is a Pendulum card? For an example look below.

As you can see the card is pretty much a half monster and half spell and instead of just having one effect text box it has a pendulum effect as well. The effect that is in smaller font is the pendulum effect and on both sides of the text box there is a number. That number represents the pendulum scale from one end of the spectrum. If you think this is weird then wait till I show you what a pendulum summon is, this one is a doozy. With that said there is such a thing as a pendulum summon... and it's really weird.

In order to better understand how to pendulum summon I need you to look at the field below real quick.

Here we see that there are five monster zones and five spell and trap zones. On the ends of the spell and trap zone there is a blue and red diamond shape this is where you place you pendulum scales. Scales are the number from which you are limiting yourself to be able to pendulum summon. So lets say I want to pendulum summon. I'd have to place two cards in the pendulum zone to be able to do that so I am going to place these two cards in the pendulum zones.

                                                                       

The scales set are 1 and 8 based off what the scales say on the card. Now we are allowed to pendulum summon any monsters that have levels between 1 and 8 so any monsters who are levels 2-7. This is a very broken method of summoning, you can summon any number of numbers whose levels fall 2 through 7. There is a limit however to this, in the past there was the rule that you could summon any number of pendulum monsters from your hand or face up in your extra deck. The new rule states that now you can now only pendulum as many from your hand but the extra deck summons is limited to the extra monster zone or any open link zones which is something that will be covered in the next blog.

BUT SYNCHROACE, you said that there face up pendulums in the extra deck, what is that all about? Well I'm glad you noticed because there is one more special trait about these here pendulum cards.

Should pendulum cards be destroyed either by battle or card effect, instead of being sent to the graveyard they are sent to the extra deck on the very top face up. That's pretty cool considering it can dodge being banished from the graveyard. However there are exceptions to this rule, like being detached from an xyz monster, then pendulum cards are sent to the graveyard, or if a card specifically says to send cards to the graveyard then pendulums once again are sent to the graveyard.

There are variants to these pendulum cards because Konami decided to throw away al logic when creating these cards

There are Pendulum synchros

There are also pendulum fusions

And what a surprise there are also pendulum xyz

Each one these monsters first must be summoned through the regular summoning method before than can be re-summoned using the pendulum summon method. Needless to say these cards are each very powerful in their own way.

This pretty much sums up pendulum summoning in a nutshell it's not very easy per say but it's a good tech card. Sometimes we just need cards to balance the more obscure cards out there and that is exactly what Link monsters were made for.