Performance of Sword - Yu-Gi-Oh!

Dancing queen...

Ritual Monsters are one of my favorite monster types in Yu-Gi-Oh! The flavor of the cards is wonderful, special monsters that you need to perform a certain ritual, meeting certain requirements, in order to summon. Ritual monsters have gotten the shaft though in the game, the one attempt to save them being the Evigishki archetype. What's the problem with them in the game? You summon them from your hand.

Ritual Monsters are put in your main deck, along with their corresponding Ritual Magic (Spells in the US). If you want to increase your chances of summoning them, you put it a full set of each. And now six cards in your deck are dead draws. The cards do nothing except Ritual Summon. Without their matching pair, the card is a complete blank. My idea for solving this issue is have Ritual Monsters summon from the Extra Deck. That takes care of three of the six possible dead draws, and the Magic cards are now even better, you being able to use them the minute you meet the requirements, and not sitting there waiting to draw the other monster. This would effect some cards, but not too many, so I don't see it causing too many problems. In fact, if you play the game, I want to try it this way, and let me know if it works.

Anyway, I'm looking at Ritual Monsters. There aren't too many, the archetype being nowhere near as popular or competitive as Fusions, Synchros, or Exceeds. (I refuse to call it Xyz. It looks to me like it's pronounced "ziz". When you need to tell your players how to pronounce a word, because it looks nothing like what people think the word sounds like, just get a new word. Yes, I know the Japanese word doesn't translate into any English word, but could you try to make the word look like what you're supposed to say.) I'm starting with the ones from Magic Ruler (changed to Spell Ruler for the reprint for no good reason), since in the US at least this was the introduction of Ritual Monsters.

So, Performance of Sword. What the hell does that mean? The original Japanese name translates to Dancing Soldier, which at least explains the Warrior-typing. Why did we change it for the US? I have no clue. The word "soldier" is fine, having been used in the TCG several times. That leaves "dancing", again one used before. Maybe they thought it just sounded silly, despite the fact that this is the game where you can literally summon a killer tomato. Still, I like the art, and the positioning of her one arm probably saved her cleavage size from the devious censors. Yeah, women in Yu-Gi-Oh with extra endowment get their bra size changed for the TCG, since we can't sully young minds with pictures of busty women.

The Ritual card, Commencement Dance, is the same girl in a different position. Now she's sitting.

Nobody puts Dancing Soldier in the corner...