Break it down for me. What is Pendulum Summon and how does it work? I've seen the cards on various wikis but I don't know anything about the mechanics.
I will!
Pendulum monsters are basically 2 in 1 cards
They can be summoned like regular monsters, and when they're in the Monsters zones their effects are the ones in the bottom effect box, like all other monsters.
But, they can also be activated as continuous spell cards in the "Pendulum/Spell/Trap Zones" of the field
(Pendulum zones used to be separated from the S/T zone but it got nerfed)
When they are in the Pendulum Zone, they are always treated as continuous spell cards and their "Spell" effect (called "Pendulum Effect") in the top box is the one in play.
So far so good? Cool because now it gets crazy.
When a Pendulum would be sent to the graveyard, regardless of which zone it was on, it will go to your Extra Deck instead, placed face up and it won't count towards your 15 facedown Extra Deck card limit.
This is because Pendulum cards in your extra Deck can be Summoned back through Pendulum Summon.
When you have 2 Pendulum Monsters in your 2 Pendulum/Spell/Trap Zones you are able to Pendulum Summon Once per turn.
The red/blue arrows in the top box of your Pendulums are called "Scales"
In a pendulum summon you used to be able to special summon ANY NUMBER of monsters in your hand or Pendulums in your extra Deck as long as their levels are in between those 2 scale values.
This was nerfed. And now you can only dump any number monsters in your hand that meet the level requirement. but Pendulums that come from the extra Deck must go into a single specific "Extra Monsters Zone" located at the top of the board when they're Pendulum summoned.
You can have more Monster zones treated as "Extra Monster Zones" through the Link mechanic, but there's no need to explain that one for now.
TL;DR:
Overall, Pendulums are powerful but require quite a bit of set-up, and it's easy to exploit their dependency on the back row, which made them very lackluster competitively besides 2 major Decks. But for casual players, they were considered broken and invincible and got a pretty bad rep, resulting on several nerfs.
Unlike the other mechanics like synchro and Xyz, Pendulums are very rarely used outside of Pendulum focused decks.
duellinks.gamea.co
