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So the jesus and satan of handtraps

Dimension shifter should of been a special summon card that became a lingering effect.

Wow, im amazed. I am the dimension shifter. I belong here.

GiantSkyhawk already said it, the reason why Nibiru is "balanced" and Shifter is not, is because theres no counter to Shifter when going second except two very specific cards, one of them being non-generic and the other one being a card that is set to 1 and also requires playing a brick. As a HERO lover, I rather constantly have a Nibirutoken as my Endboard than to play against Shifter just once.

Cards like nibiru, ash and imperm are the duck tape holding the game together at all and not the problem. And obviously yes shifter should be banned.

> Games haven't felt skillful > FSSE player losing to AG at the YCS Some people are convinced that any interaction and flood gates are tautologically the same. Yea, I don't know why they want to remain involved in this game either. One can hope that the ygo community can stop whining over and learn to embrace the concept of 'our turn'.

My favourite deck that gets owned by both of these is probably PUNK and PUNK variant decks. Sometimes you can get to Gossip Shadow as a deterrence, but Shifter completely hoses PUNK. The bigger monsters have to send to GY, so you can't activate them. Pain.

Tear 0 was the ultimate crossroad for card design: Either -Card Design will be like Tear-Ishizu going foward -Tear-Ishizu was an anomaly and future card design will be NOTHING like this going foward. Anyway, special summon Fenrir, proceeds to zone locks you uwu

I can't agree with your take on Nibiru. Don't get me wrong, I think that there was a time where this was true. Hell, this was true up until the banning of Baronne, Savage, and apollousa, but now that they're gone there's 2 noteworthy ways to answer the bs card known as Nibiru the Primal being: crossout designator and the fucking terrortop engine making bamboozling gossip shadow. Another thing is that at this point, there is no "playing through nibiru." Not because certain decks can't, but rather because people have no reason to drop nibiru before someone reaches their end board in 90% of cases since very few decks can now end on a way to answer it. I feel so strongly about this because I play so many decks that suffer at the hands of Nibiru. Mannadium for example, previously the deck could force it out early by threatening baronne, now the deck either can't create an answer, or needs to extend really far into 2 level 10 synchro monsters to make Varudras. If not for Nibiru the deck would be in a fine position, maybe not a perfect one, but it'd be able to set up a good end board that would be tough to challenge.

PePe is an interesting point to bring up in context to Shifter, a deck I personally really enjoyed playing in MD's peak Tear format was Pendulum Magicians because it was a deck that was capable of dodging the Ishizu shufflers and theoretically can play into a Tear board much easier which was why I loaded up on all gas Pend Magicians, it was a rewarding experience playing that deck despite the fact that I could play Tear myself You know what wasn't rewarding? Why was I being punished FOR NOT PLAYING INTO THE GRAVEYARD WITH SHIFTER? It feels very hypocritical for the game to go "well you didn't play into the Graveyard, but you didn't just play a deck that either banishes itself or just do not care for its second hand zone", it was insulting I was punished for conceptualizing the face-up Extra Deck as a counter to Tear playing heavily into the Graveyard

Things like Shifter feel like Konami trying to offer a solution without actually applying any critical analysis to why people dislike certain types of gameplay or how that gameplay could be improved. A deck like Floow is annoying because it relies so heavily on flood gates that end the game on the spot like Shifter of Feather Storm, and if those flood gates get banned, Floow has no real identity outside of looping cards like Mega Raiza and Apex Avian, which are far more interesting forms of interaction than the floodgates. I'd argue Empen is a more fair floodgate, even, as it loses to imperm and can be played around by just choosing your battle positions more carefully. Decks like this are designed around a certain gameplay loop that aims to minimize your opponent's ability to interact rather than being able to play through interaction. Kashtira is the other big shifter deck of old, but the individual Kash cards are strong enough on their own that they don't necessarily need Shifter in the same way that Floow seems to. Their gameplay loop is still built around stopping your opponent from playing the game, but it's built around cards that are singularly strong, like Fenrir or Unicorn. Sure, they are searchers, but they're also interruptions in their own right. Banning ariseheart didn't kill the deck entirely, and it's telling that it still exists as a splashable engine in so many decks. That design space of making the individual cards work in more than one way gives Kash a longevity that Floow did not have. Kash has seen the banning of two of their boss monsters, and still sees a smattering of success, while Floow has had none of its in-engine bosses hit and sees next to zero success nowadays. When decks are built around these insta-win cards, it becomes a ban on the deck entirely to remove these cards from the game, and that's a feelsbad for anyone that likes the deck. I'd rather see more anti-graveyard decks like Kash than Floow. Ariseheart was a pain, and Diablosis was infuriating, and they both deserved to be banned for their individual reasons, but those cards weren't Kash's whole identity. It's cool to see a deck like Ritual Beast seeing success, and Tenpai is a cool attempt at an aggro deck, but if banning Shifter means either of those decks fail to see success anymore, then maybe they weren't that good to begin with. Maybe they represent a design space that Konami needs to leave in the past. Maybe they were causing more harm than good. I'd rather see a deck like Ritual Beast succeed off the back of its own in-engine answers to the meta game than its ability to activate shifter. Same for Tenpai. Snake Eyes is annoying, but I'd much rather play against a deck that has answers for my cards rather than just tell me I can't activate them to begin with.

I completely agree with your argument, shifter is so oppressive in its design compared to other banishing floodgates like banisher of the radiance or macro cosmos which have board presence and answers in deck building (Ariseheart walking that really thin line there) you can’t just play around it or deck build a line. Your opponent is playing shifter because it either hurts them a lot less (Vanquish soul or Exosister) or directly benefits them like Kashtira or the upcoming Maliss so ending your turn on a small interruption you can make through shifter means you’re just dead (same losing scenario that Maxx C represents). I play a lot of Exosister, it was my main deck during Dune and post Jan 2024 banlist and shifter feels so… bad to use in that you just win games you shouldn’t have if it was any other handtrap like ghost ogre, while actively turning off some of the skill expression the deck represents in the way you can force your opponent to move cards from gy or punish them. Shifter invalidates all, even those decks that can play it. Nibiru is a card that gatekeeps certain lower power decks that still require a lot of summons, but also feels healthy to use in a more meta environments in that you are directly punished in building your board in a way that loses to nib. Though I will say as an Exosister player it’s the bane of my existence in the way it invalidates my end board above all by turning off my trap card interruptions too. If you have that soul read maybe you do end on 4 summons and just set 3 backrow and prepare the best you can. I really wish the game leaned more into the turn 0 plays they seemed to be doing in 2022-2023 with cards like Havniss and Impulse. In archetype hand traps that can accelerate your turn 2 plays while giving your opponent some minor interrupts would be ideal, and would push deck building back towards having some choice non engine slots and 30+ engine slots instead of the current quantity over quality to stop the opponent from resolving that snake eyes ash that wins them the game on the spot. Also giving more cards that are extenders in right scenarios and not just also starters forces you to play more engine cards, and not just rely on two/three 1 card starters that do it if uninterrupted.

If the game becomes so fast that two players play during each others turn. It would be the next evolution of Yu-Gi-Oh. But it will probably be the end of old archetypes and new players. Every archetype will need a way to get new support and a way to have new combo lines during your opponents turn. Having bestials alone won't solve this since each card has to work for their archetype. Even something like gladiator beasts could never come back unless they had a card that had a mini battle phase in the middle of your opponents combo. And if we get to this point that means new players would have the biggest wall they have to climb to even attempt Yu-Gi-Oh, knowing trap cards don't do anything unless the card mentions it can be activated in your hand. Making sure they have a set up of reprinted staples and a current deck with current support. That or you would just tell them to go play in edision. Cause the current format is not possible to play without studying how to play it.

Wow, I am in love with your make up. The video is great too. <з

One more point in favour of Nibiru: It is way more punishing toward one card combo decks that play 30 handtraps, that have few ways of extending through a resolved Nib.

...the true culprit is...konami's RND

If konami wants to keep powercreep. Extra deck hand traps should be the answer. Let me always have the answer

If you entire meta is based around decks that cannot be stopped by anything in the game, except a card with an effect that cannot be interacted with outside of it's activation window and shuts down the entire game because of it, it's not a very good meta. I've said it before, and some people were very mad that I said this, but Dimension Shifter is just Maxx "C" in reverse. It's a lingering flood gate, but instead of giving you cards on the opponent's special summons, it gets rid of cards that do the opposite of special summoning.

I think another point of evidence is the fact that Konami bafflingly hit counterplay rather than these cards themselves, but mostly I'm talking about just how bad of a look it was from a design standpoint to limit Psy-Freamegear Gamma (which s an effective ban on that card because a 1-1 ratio is not worth drawing driver in a lot of cases) but leave Dimension Shifter at 3, especially since Konami has not only not hit Shifter but also refuses to take Gamma off of the limited list long after SHS and a select few other powerful synchro decks was doing problematic things with 3 gamma. A smaller discussion could also be had about the TCG's recent decisions to hit generic Extra Deck Negates to avoid hitting newer cardboard also could potentially leading to there being fewer outs to Nib, but it's nowhere near the disasterous decision to limit gamma and leave shifter untouched.

At least Dimensional Fissure and Macro Cosmos can be popped as annoying as they are. If they wanna keep Dimension Shifter legal then I should be allowed to play Dimension Fusion and make my opponent wait 5 seconds the next time they activate Shifter in Draw Phase... because they still will activate it. Love this video.

you look especially pretty today RJ

I mean I personally don't like Decks being able to play on both turns. I like the concept of My Turn and Your Turn, but when I'm playing something like Skull Servants it's turned into Your Turn and Our Turn, giving me no benefit. It also extremely draws out my mental stack to the point where I can't remember if my Hard Once Per Turns have been used when "This Turn/My Turn" has been thrown into the bin of nebulous concepts. Playing against something like Ghoti where they've played 8 more times on My Turn than I have to the point where I can't remember things about my Deck and my opponent can't remember if they've used their Once Per Turns or the fact that it is even *MY TURN* is not enjoyable. Waiting after I've played a card for my opponent to play a card, resolve, activate that card's On-Summon Effect, resolve, activate another card, bink, Banish/Destroy a card, bink, activate that Banished/Destroyed card, so on and so forth makes me want to beat my head against a jagged stone wall for the what feels like hours between me resolving say a Wightprince send and me getting to play another card. Maybe something along the lines of "You cannot activate cards or the effects of cards with this card's name until the End Phase of the next turn" or "On your opponent's turn: You can only activate the effects of *"(INSERT ARCHETYPE)"* Monsters from your hand up to thrice per turn." could help to reign in the tracking my illegal notebook would need to help us with.

If we do go down this super interactive turn route I really hope its limited to basic combos and not full board development. Being able to establish multiple fusions on turn 0 is a crazy amount of power that most decks will just never be able to achieve. The far more realistic aim is the approach found from Rescue-Ace where specific cards allow to access in archetype interruptions on your opponent's turn, but those effects still feel very handtrap adjacent.

I loved this discussion, I agree with you in basically every point. The thing is, Yubel with the double Iblee lock just won the Duelist Cup in MD, Konami needs to change it's philosophy with card design and banlist if they want the game to succeed. Imagine a new player and they get Iblee locked twice, I would just go play another game.

the tragic thing about shifter is that YGO has a pretty good template for what GY hate is actually good for the game. Bystials; They can often banish a key-card that disrupts a combo while putting a decently sized body that has further upside. BUT there is a lot of cool counterplay involved and they're not complete bricks either. Honestly, I think bystials could use 1-3 memers that can banish a fire to summon themselves, making for hate on snake-eyes that isn't uninteractable macro-cosmos.

I saw some of the preamble to this video on twitter so I've been holding onto this, but pendulums in general (including PePe) do by design use the GY quite a bit (all the ways they indirectly put themselves into the ED from the field to use them there) while also having other parts of the design space that aren't dependent on it (the ability to do a pend summon, being a spell, the effects that happen because you tried to put a card into the ED or act off a method of being put into the ED such as destruction and they don't tend to have effects reliant on being sent to or in the GY. They just have a game mechanic that means they rarely ever actually go there unless acted on by an effect, and while it wasn't designed to Shifter is one of those effects.

Everytime Konami makes a new handtrap or card to ""deal"" with abuse of certain mechanics all it does is exacerbate the problem. I've always said that the solution to power control is right there and it's with the ban list. If Konami would stop with the idiotic bandaid solutions and tackle it directly the game would be in a better, and we wouldn't have community members arguing about these types of problems cards every day.

Bro your hair is so hot, how do you do it? Ship me the shampoo/conditioner combo!

One idea presented here I take issue with... the value of metagaming during deckbuilding is questionable at best. It's overly centralizing and removes the skill involved in building an actually good deck in favor of simply building a deck that loses to any competently built deck but excels at competing with the other horribly built decks in the meta. If your deck loses to a card existing, your deck is unplayably bad and devoid of any and all strategic insight. Yugioh's toolbox is so incredibly varied and accessible that "just have the out" is not a matter of randomness, it's a matter of CHOICE. You CHOSE to build your deck in a way that actively avoids using the cards that protect your strategy. The cards exist, and "those cards are bad in the meta" is simply incorrect if you're considering your own deck in the context of the meta.

The literal only thing Dimension Shifter should be capable of doing is shutting down toxic and unhealthy strategies for any game where its mechanics are relevant. And Nibiru's ability straight up shouldn't be able to happen in a healthy game. The fact that you need to have exceeded the game's ONLY resource mechanic 5x over in order for Nibiru to be ALLOWED to work should tell you that the game needs to be completely reworked from the ground up whenever Nibiru is a playable card, let along strong.

In defense of Kashtira, of all things, while Arise-Heart sucked the very life out of the game, the archetypes susceptibility (once diablosis was sent to the farm *ahem*) towards more "basic" forms of interaction, such as flipping them face down, capitalized upon, infamously, by the ninja deck, felt good to me personally. This doesn't really move the needle as a whole, but is a thin strand of silver hair on the black woolen pullover that was that metagame, nonetheless. Shifter has aged to become another Maxx C like card. A lot of defenses for it read very similarly to me and, for a lack of ability to do so, you can't drop shifter after you combo off going first, so we lose that banger argument against it. Nibiru I am a bit torn on. Actually, screw that, I think Nibiru is good as a "sanity check" for the modern game of YGO. What I am torn about is Konami's willingness to print generic endboard pieces that insulate you against it at no real cost. Phantom of Yubel sticks out like a sore thumb, especially since Apo got banned in the TCG. What droll is to searches, Nibiru ought to be for combo lines but in the inverse: if Nibiru is "too ineffective" against the field, and not for reasons such as every deck ending on CDI pass or equivalent, I'll wager that something somewhere else is broken. Playing into nibiru ought to hurt substantially. It shouldn't necessarily be gamelosing on the spot, but you should feel the weight of the rock dropping on your head for the remainder of your plays or make tangible concessions for playing around it. As an off the cuff suggestion, maybe having a way to prevent certain monsters from being tributed as a form of targeted counterplay (sorry Lair of Darkness and Soul Crossing enjoyers).

Honestly, one of my favorite things about Yu-Gi-Oh! is that one of the most divisive strategies involves a cute little bird going on a big adventure.

Max C to 3! Also, Leave Aku and Dwayne alone!

I love the choice of topic for video & all but dear lord RJ. How do you look better in every video

This video ending with "actually the carceral system framing this was bad all along" is incredibly on brand

My thoughts on this are that if both players are on decks of even remotely relevant power levels, there should not ever be an easily activatable card that single-handedly wins the duel. I also somewhat disagree with the common belief that the power creep of the entire game is just so totally out of hand and unfixable. There are absolutely still decks with turns of a reasonable length, beatable end boards, and fair gameplans overall. I've personally been playing Centur-ion with the deliberate choice to exclude Crimson Dragon on Master Duel and I generally have a blast hanging around Plat and matching into off meta decks. If you are willing to handicap yourself a bit in terms of deck selection and specific builds, you can 100% still have fun back and forth games without the need to make extensive plays on both turns or use blowout cards, and I seem to be enjoying yugioh a LOT more than most people online say they are as a result. I would be completely in favor of banning Shifter, Nib, and lot of other cards in the same vein. But as a Master Duel player, I have the luxury of essentially playing by my own banlist and just quickly scooping out of any game where these cards show up.

Glad you still post yugi things from time to time 😊

I understand the concept of nibiru as a way to stop overextending, however, not every deck that special summons a lot is overextending, some just… require a lot of summons to do small advantages in order to reach a midrange board.

Im suprirsed droll wasnt also included in this

Konami's refusal to ban Dimension Shifter is one of the big reasons I quit as the most egregious example of their poor handling of the F&L List in general. I gave them some time to introduce (or unban) counterplay to it, but they also refused to do that. If you're the player going second into a Shifter, your counterplay choices are to play a one-of Gamma with a brick or to be on a Fairy deck that can play Orange Light. There is no other counterplay to it in the entire game going second.

I think Draw Phase Shifter should be discouraged. Psy-Framegear Gamma to 3 :)

Adds a new layer of meaning to that Rush tournament of the floating hat aliens.

Good Yugioh Morning! What's your favorite #DeckThatLosesToNibiru or #DeckThatLosesToShifter? Additional points I want to make: - Stuff like Fenrir that's good going both first and second without being a boardwipe and improves markedly within its archetype is also rad. - Evenly Matched is similar in its gatekeeping to Nib, but doesn't limit TH-cam combo decks the same way. - YT combos aren't the only thing hurt by Nib, but Nib being here sure helps prevent them. - A lot of people claim Shifter "supports rogue decks", when it does the opposite in reality. It pushes a few fringe decks to the front that gatekeep the rest of rogue playability. As you were

Playing devil's advocate here: If there are multiple copies(2-3) of something like Caius monarch, would that actually occur that frequently? You say it would be too huge of an advantage if someone drafted 2 copies of it, but my curiosity leads me to believe this wouldn't happen THAT often considering these cards are top prio to pick up. If 2 are in the draft cycle, how likely is it that 1 player gets both? I think it would be highly unlikely, and if it does happen it's just super lucky.. Therefore if it ever does happen, it might be kinda cool where someone can draft an explosive deck for that one draft and deserves a win. That possibility is also exciting to anyone, that they could potentially get a really nutty draft, creating perhaps a more fun draft. What do you think?

How well has this drafted? My biggest concern about committing to making this cube is that it might be too difficult for my friends who didn't play in the edison/5Ds era. I LOVE this golden age of YGO and I want to share how awesome this time of YGO was to my friends who only know classic DM. Do you think this cube is flexible enough to be played more "generic" or is archetype knowledge important here?

its always awesome to see you upload

10,000 lol he thinks thats a lot

what website do you draft on?

what system do you use to draft the cube.

this game has some of the cutest card art