Card Of The Month! - Ancient Forest

Effect:
When you activate this card, change any Defense Position monster(s) to face-up Attack Position. Flip Effects are not activated at this time. If a monster attacks, destroy it at the end of that turn's Battle Phase.


Ancient Forest, now this is a good and cool card. I can go on and on about this card. There are 3 decks that benefit from this card something fierce. The most popular being Gladiator Beasts. Since the controller of Ancient Forest choses what resolves first in the chain from each Gladiator Beast that tries to tag out, Gladiator Beast monsters can tag freely without being destroyed. That makes things complicated for the opponent. The second popular deck is Aliens. With Cosmic Fortress Gol'gar, Alien players have the ability to not only use Gol'gar's effect to return as many face up spell or traps on the field to their owners hands, but they can get by Ancient Forest and place more A-Counters on the field. Being able to do such a thing in a deck based on A-Counters and field control, Ancient Forest is very abusive in Aliens. The last deck is one not so well known but few have thought of. Ido the Supreme Magical Force is a strategy that some have thought of trying from seeing it in the Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds anime when Luna had Ancient Forest on the field and the professor had Ido on the field. When Ido is destroyed by a card effect it ressurects during your standby phase. Some players have tried ideas and honestly the best is Skill Drain. Skill Drain or at least the Ido version I call IdoDrain, is based around Beast King Barbaros and Ido with Skill Drain on the field. However Ancient Forest is teched in but only 2 of them. Without Skill Drain on the field, Ido would destroy all other monsters you have when its brought back and you cannot summon any other monsters to your field. With Skill Drain out, those effects are cancelled. So as you can see Ancient Forest can be abused in different ways and there are probably even more ways to abuse it. In fact yesterday we brought up Skull Servants. Technically Skull Servants are protected by The Lady in Wight so I guess you can put Ancient Forest up there with the list of decks that can use this card more so than other decks.

Traditional: 5/5
Advanced: 5/5

-Kyle