The “Icy Tail” Effect

One could consider “Icy Tail” to be a sort of whiplash effect where the tail end is whipped at your opponent with the resulting damage as an icy reminder. Jokes aside, the reference for the effect has nothing to do with its actual functionality.

Icy Tail is named for the above combo which debuted in the first Saekano set back in 2018. The effect is a conditional mill that checks for climaxes and deals damage equal to the amount of climaxes revealed. The catch is that Icy Tail checks the bottom of your opponent’s deck. Icy Tail is an interesting ability simply due to the inability of most decks to interact with it. Because it hits from the bottom, normal surveil-type abilities don’t help too much with the only option to reduce the effectivity of this effect being to scry non-climaxes to the bottom of your deck. Furthermore, subsequent Icy Tail effects are more likely to hit if the first were fail. You can even force your opponent to refresh with enough instances.

Newer Icy Tail profiles tend to deal the same damage based on the same conditional mill; however, the check can be for other conditions such as that of level 0 cards or soul triggers. Generally speaking, its damage is rather random due to the milling condition, further constrained by the fact that it targets your opponent. However, keep in mind that given how well modern decks tend to compress their decks, it won’t be surprising if you can use Icy Tail to chip in a bit of damage or two.