Pointed Discussion

This is a seriously a *** card.

He's a Legend? Add the fact that he caries a beyond hideous drawback and become a freaking lightning rod?

How about Plague Sliver, whose ability happens more often to be positive than negative?

Don't understand how this set had so many terrible cards.

Those must've been 99 terrible monks if they couldn't contain a 5/5 that did nothing but kill it's own army when it died.

Play him with an Ogre decks. He's usually my grunt. make opponents waste destroy spells on him.

Now that's a side effect!

I suppose all you have to do to make this card work is to use only ogre type creatures and changeling type creatures (which are all creature types).

Why the hate? This is clearly a "Build around me" card, or at least a cheap finisher in a Mono-Black control deck, which usually runs little to no creature.

creature. light. decks. apparently somebody had to say it.

Juzam Djinn makes this card look fantastic.
unless you like to play other creatures

Like Snaxme said, this card was probably designed to be a center piece. Believe it or not R&D sometimes puts out cards that aren't Baneslayers (and subsequently are affordable enough to actually enjoy).

To contribute, I use this guy in my Bazaar Trader deck. If I don't have the mana to kill him off right away, I can still trade him on the stack if my opponent tries to kill him. Either way I get a 1-sided wrath of god for somewhere between 4 and 6 mana (heck, it's better than Wrath since my opponent has to sacrifice: no regen and no indestructibility).

uh... why does he also kill other oni? Shouldn't it be "non-ogre, non-demon creatures"?

I play a casual demon/ogre deck with him, utilizing some of the newer ogres, like Viscera Dragger and Ogre Sentry, and honestly, he's great. In a deck like that, he's basically a better Juzam Djinn.

Of course, in general, he's a pretty crappy rare, but I actually like him a lot.

5/5 for the simple thrill of playing a cheap, mean lightning rod FTW. Much more versatile too, than say Grinning Demon.

If you want to do something flavorly lulzy but functionally rather weak, try this:
Cast him. Now let Bazaar Trader impose that enchained monstrosity (troll-physics style with twirly hands) on your opponent.
Flicker the demon, which will cause him to go RAEG-mode and annihilate most life on your opponent'side.
Then watch it return about half a second later (with a kitty face) on your side.

Combos people. As other's have mentioned works very well with Bazaar Trader. Alternatively, run cards that you want to sacrifice. Things like Kokusho, The Evening Star. Lastly, if you're running a very heavy control deck, with no other creatures in it, this guy is a 5/5 for {2}{B}{B} without a drawback.

Stop complaining about cards that aren't overpowered, there are plenty of us out there still willing to use them!

@tcollins - Players nowadays want the cards to do the thinking for them, it seems. They're too impatient to figure out a use for something that doesn't have to do with flat-out winning the game if they cast it.

all he needed was flying to make him great. but I also like how no Kamigawa demons (or almost none) have flying. It makes them distinct and interesting :)


if you're wondering about the flavor, it's because he is so powerful he can slay an army of ogres. that's why he's considered dangerous to the point of needing 99 monks to contain.

yes, when you overanalyze it as a card in a game, then you can prove everything is crap and you can prove the game is stupid and all sort of other things I care not to hear about.

He's a Demon Spirit from the Other World. Instead of imagining any of the Kamigawa cards being represented by their mechanics, imagine stripping them of everything except Name, Art, and Flavor Text and then designing a videogame character after them. In this way, Kamigawa is a lot like the set Legends. To do justice to the awesome, you have to think outside the box of being a Magic Player.

This guy would have been a tremendous BAMF on the Jackie Chan Adventures show! :D

He's not particularly devastating on his own, but as a low curve creature, I kind of like the idea of putting him in Kaalia. I am redoing my Kaalia from Scratch, starting from flavor. All 3 Myojins are cool, because they have 'divinity counters'. Kaalia seems like a blasphemous individual who would yoink That Which Was Taken for funses.

I mean I'm also going to put more traditional choices like Bloodgift Demon in it, but think about it like this: Commander has so much recursion from things like Living Death and Liliana Vess and whatnot that even Wrathing yourself with your first creature probably isn't the end of the world. Kaalia seems to have a huge problem finding any creatures strong enough to want to include that you can play before you have your Commander ability active.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you have certain cards that make all creatures you can use them on ridiculous, like Gisela or Sword of War and Peace and if you still put in your copy of Akroma, then...well...I don't see that EVERY creature has to be the biggest and best. getting the curve to work right is important too and I, for one, welcome the fact that he's a low-costing Demon.

Say what you like about Yukora, but in three games so far with my ogre-demon deck he single-handedly saved the day. Oddly, he always seemed to turn up as my only creature, and I just drop an enchantment or two on him whilst swinging like a nutter.
I'm talking about multiplayer here by the way, which explains where all the removal's going, but for some reason he never gets targeted until he's killed a player or ripped way too much of their health off. Then he dies, and my other creatures finally start turning up.

Ah, for the crazy days of beginner's magic....

Then there's the obvious two ways to null the drawback--Conspiracy and Xenograft.

I kinda wish he felt more epic. Rakdos is a demon with a huge drawback and huge reward while feeling powerful, epic, flavorful, and being generally avoided by most decks. This guy is missing that nice *HOLY CRAP* feeling.

They should've really upped the ante with something; say.. the Phage ability tacked onto a 5/3 body. Then it just walks up and owns the game or it owns you! To me that's good design because it adds a lot of tension. A 5/5 at a good cost adds a tiny bit of tension, but it's lacking that feeling that makes many Demons so loveable; yet most of the Kamigawa demons unlovable. Where's the epic?

I collect and play demons in so so many decks because of that feeling, the awesome art, etc, but this guy misses all of those marks.. and yet I still have to go buy a couple and stick them somewhere..

Either run him with some kind of Donate combo, or use him as one of your only creatures. 5/5 for 4 mana is not bad.

Although....if it took 99 monks to imprison 1 Yukora, I suppose 4 Phyrexian Obliterators would just flat depopulate the entire plane of Kamigawa? lol

Blightsteel Colossus might even be able to compleat O-Kagachi o.O

EDIT: By the way, there is a SERIOUSLY over-looked comparison I cannot believe I missed: the best way to evaluate a MAGIC card is to try to think of another card with a similar mana cost that could have HIGHLY influenced R&D's thoughts on it-- regardless of if RnD is thinking like Modern Players or not.


Juzam Djinn. BAM. Yukora is the first Demon to be easily castable in any given casual game of Magic since Juzam. Instead of costing a Boatload of mana, He costs a simple Handful.

He costs 4 Mana. 4 mana, it turns out, tends to be the space where a large percent of amazing Creatures, Planeswalkers, and Enchantments come from. In the days of Lorwyn, it was still conventional wisdom that ''5 mana spells ought to win you the game'', meaning that what you do on Turn 4 matters A LOT. A card that costs more, still has to be produced by your deck between Turn 3-5, with ramp, or you have to be stocking extremely powered hateful Control elements.

a 4 mana Rare fatty compares to cards like Juzam Djinn (good), Serra Angel (great but +1 mana), and Hill Giant (bad). I would never play Hill Giant, but I've decided that I love how his existence does end up serving as part of a metric for me. :)

I think comparing Magic Sets from Ice Age to Xth Edition is where to get the best inspiration for 'realistic expectations' from.

I like how Lorwyn pushed its Rares, but those Rares need to be acknowledged as Pushed. I like how the Shards' Ultimatums, and in general its Rares and Mythics are Fantastic because they give you Legends-type casting costs for Legendary Power. Shards cards suffer greatly in power level unless your mana is deliciously smooth, like Ravnica-smooth.
Ravnica itself, both Ravnica blocks, to me show about the limits of how far you can PUSH things before they break (they broke in Shadowmoor, with too many filter lands busting the 5cc deck wide open and making Cruel Ultimatum and Progenitus really normal cards to see in Standard)

Start with Tempest-Xth as your evaluation "Base Point". I slightly dislike the New Core Sets because I no longer feel they actually serve as appropriate "Base Points", and I think I'm forced to conclude that philosophically I don't want CORE sets to HAVE Mythic Rares-- BUT I enjoy them in Blocks! :)

(Exception: if Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker had been the one and only Mythic Rare in M13, that would have actually been even more Fantastic)

Compared to Core Sets 8, 9, and Xth, Yukora, the Prisoner is quite undercosted and I'm tempted to just let him hurt me when he hurts me in exchange for having a 4-mana 5/5. When a 4-mana 5/5 was considered interestingly good, maybe not ''WOWZERS, *THAT* will see Legacy Play :P o.o " but, you know, something I'd like to shuffle up and experiment with? Then the card is very nicely made :D

Time Spiral, Lorwyn, and Shards Blocks were all a period of Power Creeping-- and comparing them back to Xth and before, they don't seem egregious, they just seem "Powerful", without obsoleting a Metric Ton of cards.

Zendikar and Scars Block pretty much destroyed the playability of anything pre-Ravnica that wasn't Degenerate; and/or it made what was previously considered "Pushed" to be "Base Level" for playability.

I've noticed that not too many people seem to mention the obvious combo with this card: use it with ogres! There are actually quite a few good ogres nowadays. I'd be happy with casting Yukora on turn 4, and then bloodrushing Wrecking Ogre onto it on turn 5 and bonking the opponent for sixteen. Yukora's main advantage over Phyrexian Obliterator is that it is more splashable, which means that Yukora can be used in black-red decks (which can use all the good red ogres).