After a short hiatus, Welcome back to the Comprehensive Companion to Cardians - A long form guide and introduction to the flower cardians as an archetype, from what the cards themselves do down to decklists and tech options available for the strategy.
I'm Brexx, an individual crazy enough to take this deck to regionals in zoodiac format, and I'll continue as your guide on this journey into the Hanafuda archetype. Today I'll be introducing and covering the Flower Cardian Spell and trap lineup and their applications within the theme.
The Spells
Flower cardian supporting spells come in a strange form, being that none of the cards are part of the archetype by name. Instead, the spell lineup generally features "flower" or "Super" in the name barring a few exceptions. This largely renders these cards nearly unsearchable (barring outlandish forms of searching via tech cards such as Triple Tactics Thrust) due to a lack of effects in the archetype that search the deck for spell and trap cards. Flower cardians as an archetype largely try to make up for this flaw through tremendous levels of in-archetype draw power, and other non traditional ways to access power spells which we'll discuss later. 
We open with one of the contenders for "most broken card in a middling deck" with Flower Gathering. Simply put, this card special summons four flower cardian monsters with 100 ATK and different names from your deck, but negates their effects. Aside from this, the rest of the text stipulates the standard archetypal summoning lock and an additional clause preventing them from being used as tribute fodder for a tribute summon.
A baffling restriction to say the least, as you'd have to run four hard garnets in order to use this card to generate tribute fodder in any other deck - And in-archetype this restriction doesn't prevent you from using them as tribute fodder for the summoning conditions for your tuners such as Flower Cardian Willow with Calligrapher or Flower Cardian Peony with Butterfly.
This card is by and large your most powerful starter card, typically summoning Flower Cardian Pine, Flower Cardian Willow, Flower Cardian Cherry Blossom and your choice of either Flower Cardian Paulownia or Flower Cardian Zebra Grass, depending on your ratios. Combining this card with any of your tuners will quickly set off a combo line of rapid drawing and synchro summoning. Most lists will run three copies of this card, but some could argue that you may want to run less due to being one of the few flower cardian cards with a hard once per turn clause attached. Normally this wouldn't be a massive concern, but in a deck where you're potentially drawing your entire deck, drawing dead spells can end your combo lines earlier than intended. 
A particularly unfortunate historical note about Flower Gathering: When the archetype first debuted with this card in the initial support wave, the "Invoked" strategy was relatively popular, leading to the inclusion of Chain Disappearance in some side decks at the time. As you can likely imagine, this card was an absolute death sentence when resolved upon resolution of Flower Gathering, removing not only the four monsters initially summoned, but also every other copy of all four of them in your deck, leaving you with no remaining monster playstarters, and rendering the rest of your deck functionally dead in the water.
Flower Stacking is next up on the Flower Cardian support spell docket. This card debuted in the deck's second wave of support, and functions as a peculiar form of consistency boosting through stacking your own deck. This sets up to guarantee for otherwise risky endeavours such as the effects of Flower Cardian monsters such as Flower Cardian Cherry Blossom with Curtain which have large drawbacks when failing to draw a flower cardian.
Typically you'll stack a copy of Flower Cardian Cherry Blossom with Curtain, a flower cardian tuner (typically Flower Cardian Peony with Butterfly), and Flower Cardian Willow in that order, though permutations of this may change depending on your hand and board states. Given a card with draw capability exists in tandem with this card in an opening hand, this card guarantees you at least get to access one of your level 6 synchros at minimum, while also stacking the opponent's deck in the process via Flower Cardian Peony with Butterfly due to guaranteeing the draw and reveal of a flower cardian monster.
This card excels going first, as being able to draw into the stacked cards is far more reliable when not playing into established boards, and as such this card can be a relatively easy card to side out going second if your opponent is playing a deck that is likely to negate your playstarters. The second effect is also a nice bonus, but isn't particularly important aside from compensating for you likely losing your draw the turn after it's played due to the effects of Flower Cardian Moonflowerviewing and Flower Cardian Lightshower. You'll typically run three unless you particularly want a higher monster count in a list. 
Our next spell in the cardian lineup is Super Koi Koi, a rather risky but interesting card. You reveal the top three cards of your deck and special summon any flower cardians revealed, but their levels become 2 and their effects are negated. Everything else? Banished, bye. You lose 1000LP for each as well.
In theory this card sets up nicely with Flower Stacking, guaranteeing a level 6 synchro, usually in the form of Flower Cardian Moonflowerviewing for play extension. Playing this card without stacking first becomes rather odd however, as the card wants you to build the deck with as many flower cardian monsters as possible, while minimising on spells and non archetypal cards to truly maximise its effectiveness. The deck is already quite xenophobic, but there's a debate to be had as to whether this card is worth not running power spells in order to run this optimally.
Lastly Super Koi Koi can banish itself from the graveyard to tribute a monster in order to special summon any flower cardian from your hand, ignoring its summoning conditions. This sounds good in theory, until you realise that this isn't useful for the best of the flower cardians that require tributes (such as Flower Cardian Peony with Butterfly, Flower Cardian Maple with Deer or Flower Cardian Clover with Boar). This effect has some niche use cases in that it can allow you to play through effects that flip monsters face down by virtue of being able to tribute any monster, so there is some meta consideration as to whether this would be worth the space in your deck in those formats. If you're running this card, you're likely playing three and building your deck list with it in mind, but if not you're likely not running it. The same arguments for hard once per turn clauses exist for this as do for Flower Gathering, so tampering with a list running a low number of each can be a valid consideration to pursue.
Next up, we have Super All In! and true to its name, it truly is a gamble of a card - Though elements of this can be circumvented. Super All In! returns a synchro you control to the extra deck to special summon back four flower cardian monsters from your graveyard. The card then performs the typical flower cardian draw-reveal-check, and upon failing your board is destroyed and you lose half your life points.
In many ways, this card functions as a higher risk, higher reward variant of De-Synchro in the deck. The benefit of this being you draw a card, and the ability to revive an additional monster from the graveyard, provided the monster returned to the extra deck as an activation requirement was a level six synchro monster. To set this card up safely, you should either be stacking your deck with one of the other spell effects, or reviving Flower Cardian Lightshower with the effect. By doing so, Flower Cardian Lightshower renders your flower cardians unable to be destroyed by card effects, thus nullifying the drawbacks of this card.
In an ideal scenario, you would be returning a copy of Flower Cardian Moonflowerviewing to the extra deck (functionally recycling it for later) and reviving a tuner alongside two to three copies of Flower Cardian Willow. The effect of the tuner revived will trigger to draw a card, and the copies of Flower Cardian Willow will allow you to draw further extenders while recycling used synchro material or synchros. Assuming no cards are discarded in the process, this line of play will typically net you five cards drawn, and the ability to synchro into another copy of Flower Cardian Moonflowerviewing, for a total of six cards.
Lastly, Super All In! when sent to the graveyard allows you to add back any one spell card to your hand during the end phase if it is sent to the graveyard by the effect of a flower cardian monster. Typically this will allow you to add back generic power spells you may be running for recycling or extending on following turns. You'll usually run some number of this card, regardless of build - Unless you prefer De-Synchro.
Last, but certainly not least we have Recardination rounding out the Flower Cardian support spells. This card functions as a strange adjacent equivalent to Monster Reborn for the theme, adding a flower cardian from your graveyard to hand, then special summoning one from your hand ignoring its summoning conditions. This is a powerful effect, allowing you to recycle easily summonable copies of Flower Cardian Willow, while summoning Flower Cardians that would normally require tribute fodder for free.
While the first effect of this card is nothing to scoff at, its graveyard effect is where it truly shines. when sent to the graveyard by a Flower Cardian monster effect, this card allows you to reveal the top five cards of your deck, Adamancipator style (but we were here first) and add any revealed spell to your hand, before returning the remaining cards to the top of your deck in any order. As you can imagine, this is an incredibly potent effect, being able to functionally psuedo-search generic spell cards massively ups your consistency for finding powerful extension cards such as the other Flower Cardian spells and traps like Flower Gathering or generic haymakers such as the now banned Soul Charge in the deck's prime.
Notably neither of these effects have any once per turn clause. Run three of this, always. I'd run four if I could. The only downside here being that I wish the archetype had more ways to consistently trigger the second effect.
The Trap
Oh, you thought we were done? Not quite. The deck has an estranged middle child in the form of Fraud Freeze. Sometimes Konami designs cards that truly date themselves - and this one clearly places itself in the Arc V era, due to clearly being designed specifically to target pendulum strategies. Essentially this card functions as a continuous Compulsory Evacuation Device which triggers in response to a special summon of a monster(s). Against singulat threats, this card is too weak to consider running, but if a meta should ever arrive where multiple monsters are being summoned from the hand at the same time, this card's your guy. I don't see it seeing play any time soon, though.
Next time - We'll be covering the a swathe of tech cards frequently used in the Flower Cardian Strategy. Stay tuned, and Enjoy.
