Introduction to Pendulum Magician

Introduction

About the Author

Hello, my name is Brent and today I'll be writing you the guide for Pendulum Magicians in Master Duel. Quick information about me before writing is that I’ve been playing Pendulum Magicians since they were first released as a structure deck back in 2015. When Performapal Pendulum Sorcerer was released shortly after that to make Pepe a tier 0 deck in the tcg, I still continued playing magicians because I just found them to be a more fun playstyle. One of my fondest moments with the deck was getting 7th place in a 250 person regional with this deck in the middle of Sky Striker and Thunder Dragon format. So with my introduction out of the way let me introduce you to the deck.

Overview

Pendulum Magicians are a pendulum archetype based around 2 separate waves of magician support. Wave 1 was the initial structure deck with cards that still see play in modern lists like Wisdom-Eye Magician and Oafdragon Magician. Wave 2 of the magician support in tcg came in the version of a mini set named Pendulum Evolution that contained the all new pendulum magician cards that you might recognize such as Harmonizing Magician and Double Iris Magician. After this second wave the deck was much better than it was before, but since it was released in the middle of a tier 0 Zoodiac format, it didn’t quite make much of a splash in the meta. A few months later after links were released in the tcg, pendulum magicians would receive the support they needed to become a tier 1 deck through Heavymetalfoes Electrumite. For a long time the deck was on top until constant hits on every subsequent banlist finally took this deck out of commission in the tcg. Today, we have both Electrumite and Astrograph at 1 in master duel, cards that were formerly banned in the tcg, and because of this the deck is very playable right now. This deck is playable in a wide variety of different ways and I will touch over the different variants you can play in this guide, but for purpose of this guide I will be focusing on what I consider to be a good all around balanced list rather than going too in depth into things like the ftk builds and whatnot.

Core Cards

Monsters

Wisdom Eye-Magician x3

This card is your bread and butter for consistency, it’s main effect in the pendulum zone allows you to destroy it and place a different magician scale in its place from the deck so long as you have another magician or performapal card in the other pendulum zone. We want to play 3 so that we can consistently see it in order to have the correct scales we need while filling the extra deck with a body that we can summon.

Oafdragon Magician x2-3

This card is by far your best low scale. When there is a magician card in the other pendulum zone you can use Oafdragon to add a magician or odd-eyes monster from your extra deck face up to your hand. This is very important if you need to grab back a body to help circumvent the limit of monsters you can summon, grab a card for follow up next turn, or if you had to do something like normal summon a Harmonizing Magician that turn in order to make electrumite and you now want to add it back to your hand so you can use its effect with your pendulum summon. As a monster, when it is normal or special summoned it can target a magician or odd-eyes monster in your graveyard and add it to your hand. This effect doesn’t come up as often since your cards only end up in the graveyard when detached from an xyz, discarded off of Pendulum Call or their summon is negated by something like Solemn Strike. This card also has an awkward level of 6 which means it can’t be normal summoned without tribute, or used very easily to make a rank 4 or a level 8 synchro, however with links it doesn’t matter and because of that we can comfortably play many copies of these without worrying about it clogging up our field.

Double Iris Magician x1

We only play one copy because the game only allows us to play one. When this card is destroyed it will search for a Pendulumgraph card from the deck. Star and time pendulumgraph are some of our more powerful cards that we play and this card lets us consistently see them. It also has a scale effect that allows you to target a dark spellcaster monster you control to then make that monster inflict double battle damage to a monster this turn and then destroy iris in the scale after this effect is applied. The new wave of magician cards typically have a pendulum effect you can activate in the scale that will then destroy themselves, and they will have a monster effect that triggers upon being destroyed. Primarily we want to focus on the monster effect and it’s important to note that none of these are a hard once per turn. So if you are capable of destroying any of the new magicians twice in a turn, it will trigger their effects twice.

Black Fang Magician x1-2