Very Frequently Asked Question: Can I add Imperial Tombs of Necrovalley to my hand with Gravekeeper’s Commandant?
Since the launch of Legacy of the Valiant, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about Gravekeeper’s new and old, but the most common question we receive about them is “Can I add Imperial Tombs of Necrovalley to my hand with Gravekeeper’s Commandant?” The answer is simple enough, but learning what it is about the text that makes it work that way can help you to understand many other cards and plan new combos and strategies with them. Read on to learn more!
Why is this so frequently asked?
Whenever we start receiving a single question en masse, we always look for the underlying reason behind it. In the case of Commandant v. Imperial Tombs, the question arises because there’s a card similar to Commandant in Legacy of the Valiant combined with some good old fashioned wishful thinking. I mean, who wouldn’t want to use their extra Commandants to pull Counter Traps out of their Deck? The Legacy card in question is Gravekeeper’s Ambusher, and it’s easy to see why it’s causing some confusion – at a glance it seems almost identical to Commandant, except it adds from the Graveyard instead of the Deck!
What’s in a word?
Here are the relevant effects from both cards.
Commandant: “You can discard this card to the Graveyard; add 1 “Necrovalley” from your Deck to your hand.
Ambusher: “If this card is sent from the field to the Graveyard after being flipped face-up: You can target 1 “Necrovalley” card in your Graveyard; add that target to your hand.
Can you add Imperial Tombs of Necrovalley to your hand with Gravekeeper’s Commandant? No, you cannot. But you can with Gravekeeper’s Ambusher, and it’s all because of one word: card.
Gravekeeper’s Commandant tells you to add “Necrovalley” to your hand. Ambusher tells you to target “1 ‘Necrovalley’ card” and add that target to your hand. When a card tells you to add “X” to your hand, it means, very specifically, the card “X” and no other card, in this case Necrovalley. When a card tells you to add an “X” card to your hand, it means any card with “X” in its name. There is only one Necrovalley, but there are three “Necrovalley” cards, the original Necrovalley and now Hidden Temples of Necrovalley and Imperial Tombs of Necrovalley.
Where else does this come up?
Most recently, it comes up in the Cyber Dragon Revolution Structure Deck. Most of the cards in the Deck specifically look for Cyber Dragon or Cyber Dragons, plural, for cards that can affect more than 1 Cyber Dragon, like Cyber Dragon Drei. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so important that many of the cards change their own names to Cyber Dragon! Watch out though, because not all of those cards are considered to be Cyber Dragon all the time. Each Cyber Dragon Revoultion includes a Dueling Guide with an entire page dedicated to helping you learn which monsters become Cyber Dragon, and where, so you can plan out your strategies.
You can learn more about the way your cards are written by reading these articles about Problem-Solving Card Text.