Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End
Dark, Level 8, [Dragon/Effect]
ATK: 3000, DEF: 2500
TLM-ENSE2, Ultra Rare (The Lost Millennium Special Edition Variant)

"This card cannot be Normal Summoned or Set. This card can only be Special Summoned by removing 1 LIGHT and 1 DARK monster in your Graveyard from play. Pay 1000 of your Life Points to send all cards in both players' hands and on the field to the Graveyard. Inflict 300 points of damage to your opponent's Life Points for each card that is sent to the Graveyard by this effect."

Chaos Emperor Dragon. Easily the single most powerful card in the game. Banned forever from Traditional format, and rivaled only by the likes of its ally, Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning. There's so much to say about this card, and yet it is so easily summarized.

This monster is the main centerpiece of any Traditional Chaos deck. Duels are won and lost through the timing of this card's appearance in hand and the success or failure of its effect. It is by far the most ridiculously-easy-to-summon card for its level of strength. Simply remove 1 Light and 1 Dark monster from your Graveyard. The primary challenge is usually getting and keeping the required monsters in your Graveyard, as anti-Chaos strategies will focus entirely on emptying them out, and you often need to resurrect your own monsters to hold the field. Keeping CED in hand can be a challenge as well, and if he goes to the Graveyard without having been properly summoned, he may be lost for good (Monster Reincarnation would be a good card to side deck against hand destruction in this case).

CED itself is Dark, and thus can serve as food to other Chaos monsters once it has fallen. To add injury to insult, it can be resurrected from the Graveyard, allowing it to dominate with both its statistics and the ever-present threat of its broken effect. Early on, CED will force the game into topdeck mode. Mid- to late-game, it will usually cause victory. Judging the timing of when to set off his effect, as I mentioned earlier, can be critical. I've lost a duel because I set off CED too early.

Dragon-Type, 3000 ATK, and 2500 DEF make this card, in effect, some kind of horrendously powerful Blue-Eyes White Dragon, and in fact, I have faced BEWD Chaos decks, which use cards like Paladin of White Dragon to both bring out BEWD and to put Light monsters in the Graveyard quickly. They are inconsistent, but can be extremely fearsome. I 0-2'd with my full-power Fiend deck against one of these at one of the last few tournaments I played with that deck.

CED is a mildly bad draw early in the game, but monsters going to the Graveyard are a natural part of almost any Duel, so the issue becomes quickly moot. Whenever they're not going fast enough, cards like Graceful Charity and Painful Choice are there to help. Aside from this, there's simply nothing negative to say about this card. Attack, explode, win.

Chaos Emperor Dragon receives a Great rating, and under my old numeric rating system it would receive a 10/10 for decks which can support Chaos monsters. It's worthy to note that CED can't be assigned staple status because it requires a deck largely built around Light and Dark monsters.

Chaos is a deck archetype which has become universally hated due to its incapacity for any originality, lack of required Dueling skill, and pervasiveness in all Traditional-format events. But, like me, once you've failed to make the Top 4 in your meta for 5 or 6 weeks in a row, you may get sick of being the only one NOT running CED. When you do, sell your soul and go buy a crate of TLM-SE boxes from Wal-Mart. Open them until you get a CED and then reseal and return the rest. Now that every kid is packing one, it's only fair :P