Trap
NormalDefense Draw
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5112
During your opponent's turn, at damage calculation: Make the battle damage you take from this battle 0, and if you do, draw 1 card.
Defense Draw — Power Evaluation
Final Score: 50 ± 6 · Confidence: Medium
- Intrinsic: 48.7 · Deck: 50.2 · Meta: provisional
- Primary role: Removal / Negation · Secondary: Utility
Why it scores here
Defense Draw reliably turns one incoming battle into a cantrip: it blanks the battle damage from one attack and draws a card, so it converts a set backrow slot into a small, repeatable defensive trade. Its interaction is narrow (battle damage only, no removal or effect negation) and its material value is zero because it is a Trap, so it earns little on the board-conversion or material axes. The score is held up by the 90-deck sample (38 distinct archetypes, 1.44 average copies), which shows it is a consistently run, low-cost staple, not a strong card in its own right; the high view count and generic deck presence were not used to raise the score.
Axis scores
| Axis | Score | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Accessibility | 55 | Needs to be drawn and set in a backrow slot before it can be used, but it is run in 90 of 90 sampled decks across 38 archetypes, so it is usually live when needed (observed; deck counts). |
| Combo & Conversion | 15 | Text-only: it neither builds a board nor creates a follow-up body; there are no recorded combo boards to confirm otherwise (inferred; no combo evidence). |
| Resource Economy | 45 | Spends itself to draw one card, a neutral card-for-card trade with a small upside whenever it is triggered by a real attack (inferred from text). |
| Effect & Interaction | 35 | Stops only the battle damage from one battle during the opponent's damage step; it does not stop the attack, the monster, or any effect (verified from card text). |
| Material Utility | 0 | A Trap card cannot be used as material, so this axis is zero regardless of the effect (verified from card type). |
| Resilience & Flexibility | 35 | Single-use, reactive, and only as live as the backrow it sits in; redundancy comes from running multiple copies rather than from the card itself (inferred; decks observed at 1.44 average copies). |
| Deck-Building Efficiency | 80 | One copy in most decks (58 of 90), no garnet or lock restriction, and no archetype requirement, so it is a clean, cheap slot to run (observed; deck copy distribution). |
Calculation
Weight profile: 0.7 Removal/Negation + 0.3 Utility (generic fallback), blended. Intrinsic ≈ 48.7, Deck ≈ 50.2, Meta = provisional. Modifiers: none. Final formula: 0.40*Intrinsic + 0.60*Deck
Strengths
- Cantrips on a real attack, so it does not cost net card advantage
- Cheap, clean, and widely run across 38 archetypes with no restriction
- Blanks one battle's damage cleanly during the damage step
Weaknesses
- Battle damage only: no protection against effects, removal, or board-breaking
- Dead if no attack comes, and it must be set in advance
- Zero material value and no board conversion
Counters / choke points
- Backrow removal or Trap-destruction effects that remove it before the attack
- Effect-based damage or direct attacks that avoid the battle damage step
- Opponents who simply don't attack into a set backrow
Best use
Cheap backrow defense that cantrips when the opponent attacks into it. Decks: Blue-Eyes, Greed, Crimson Dragon, Trickstar, Exodia, Numeron. Suggested copies: 1.
Evidence & gaps
- Verified: Battle damage from one battle becomes 0 during the opponent's damage calculation, and the card draws 1 if this happens (card text); Trap card type, so material value is zero (card type); Run in 90 of 90 sampled decks across 38 archetypes; 58 of 90 run one copy (deck evidence)
- Observed: Inclusion is consistent across gameplay types 4, 7, and 6 (deck evidence); Co-appears with Monster Reborn, Raigeki, and Mirror Force in many decks (deck evidence)
- Inferred: Defensive value is reactive and depends on the opponent attacking into a set backrow; Net card advantage is roughly neutral because it replaces itself on trigger
- Data gaps: no combos supplied — combo conversion is text-only inference no guides supplied no usage statistics (StatisticsCard) — archetype inclusion % inferred from deck sample only no banlist token — assumed 3 copies (unlimited)