Why Should One Use Darkness?
(the following is compiled by one known on the chats and forum as Bell - and edited by the Site Administrator)

Darkness is flat out the deadliest Civilization in Duel Masters. Nothing compares to its destructive power becuase nothing can usually fully stop it. Most of Darkness is made up of slow, calculated, nearly inevitable death. Only a handful of creatures can escape the spells, which ignore all aspects of the opponent and simply destroy them, or in the case of those that don't go to grave, at least remove them. Almost nothing survives a battle with a Slayer without some seriously rare forms of protection. This is where darkness stands. More destructive against enemy creatures than even Fire.

'Kill' effects, especially spells, are probably what this civilization is best known for. Nearly everyone who plays Duel Masters is very familiar with the shield Trigger spell card Terror Pit, famouse for removing nearly any opponent, but there are quire a few other deadly spells and effects as well, and they almost always bring doom to the enemy with no regard to its strength level. This vicious removal combines with the other abilities of Darkness to make it incredibly different for the enemy to get moving. Darkness has a way, some way, of killing anything on the field. At its greatest power, it goes beyond that, and kills everything on the field in an incredible display of pure destructiveness, an Invincible Abyss. Also, the great Demon Command Ballom, Master of Death, destroys all non-darkness creatures when it is summoned!

Darkness can get rid of things that have not even been placed on the field yet, through its other main ability. Discarding cards from the opponent's hand. Sometimes the Darkness chooses what to rob the opponent of, sometimes the victim is fortunate enough to get the choice, and most of the time it is just random. Cards like Cranium Clamp and the mighty Lost Soul discard more than one card at a time. Lost Soul, and the special ability of the Gigaclaws, go so far as to discard the opponent's entire hand at once. This can make it incredibly hard to recover, especially if the Darkness has some way to keep discarding, like the powerful Phantasmal Horror Gigazald, a creature so deadly in its discarding power that it can keep the opponent starved for resources until it is removed.

Another great ability of Darkness is returning cards to hand from grave. Darkness has lots of ways to do it, and it actually works a lot like some strange hybrid of card draw and creature search. You know what you are getting, a new card of your choice, with the limitation that it had to have been sent to grave somehow. Some cards like Zombie Carnival can return multiple cards at once, sometimes being even more useful than just drawing new cards. The number of ways to do this are actually many, and sometimes it can be one of the greatest abilities in a Darkness deck, since creatures mostly need to be destroyed somehow in order to stop the relentless onslaughts that they bring.

Another ability that most players who go up against Darkness quickly learn to fear is the vicious ability 'Slayer' possessed by quite a few Darkness creatures. Even if the enemy wins the battle, no matter how strong they are, the Slayer effect still kills them. There's nearly no escape. This adds even more wonderfully dangerous power to the Darkness, and it combines with the ability before, since after the Slayer dies, one can just bring it right back again to renew the threat. Another important thing that combines with the power of slayers like the Wailing Shadow Belbetphlo, is what I am about to mention.

Blockers. The Darkness Civilization, even after all these ways of seriously killing anything that comes its way, has a final line of defense. Darkness Blockers are usually are not as stable as Light or even Water. Some are Slayer types as well as being Blockers, not only defending from attacks, but making sure that the opponent creature really can't usually try that again. There are even one or two that act much like Light Blockers, just a bit weaker.

Some creatures of the dark are infused with extra dark power, making them stronger in a fight than one would expect, like the Bone Spider, but the terrible price of this is that the creature cannot survive its battles, dying afterward regardless of whether it wins or loses, but these creatures resist Fire's destructive powers more often, and are so strong that most things around their level that try to challenge them in battle die painfully in vicious clashes with these powerful creatures. Gregoria, the Princess of War, and her Cursed Shades, the Shadow Moons, have the ability to manipulate battlefields, granting even more power to any creatures of Darkness, or, in Gregoria's case, to any Demon Commands.

We play Darkness to get rid of the enemy. Darkness is how we make our opponents dead. Doesn't matter how strong they are. Doesn't always matter how fast they are. Sometimes, if you are lucky or good, it may not even matter how many there are. They're just not going to make it. Worse yet (for them, anyways), in the end, when all the battles are over and the battlefield is littered with the corpses of the fallen... it is the Dark ones that will unravel the bonds of death and rise up again. In the end, everything dies. Being the controller of the death, makes the Darkness the winner.