"My grandpa's deck HAS no pathetic cards, Kaiba!" "Actually, Yugi, your grandpa's deck is fairly inconsistent and relies too much on the hopes of getting a specific win condition while also being overstocked on middling-to-weak monsters without enough practical effect monsters, magic cards, or traps to-" "Exodia."
"Noooo!!!!! Exodia?!?! That's not possible! No one's been able to summon him!" Also, Kaiba is one to talk, his only plans are higher attack monsters and get Sagi and Crush on the field and hope someone attacks a facedown. And when that doesn't work, threaten to jump off a castle.
I mean a beat down virus deck wasn’t actually a bad strategy, especially with cards like shrink. It could work as either stall or removal if not used for crush card virus directly. Most of kaiba’s cards could beat over the opponents monsters post-virus. And Joey using swordsman of landstar and assume samurai with cards like graceful and skull dice also isn’t a bad strategy, if way more inconsistent. With fairy box and nutrient z It makes for good stalling until he can get jinzo, gilford, or red-eyes. As far as I remember yugi doesn’t really use cards to make good use of his weaker monsters except multiply + detonate for kuriboh, and he has other removal/stall cards that don’t require them, like magic cylinder, swords of revealing light, and mirror force. His poker knights work well for tribute summons and his magnet warriors can summon another decent boss monster, so in terms of the anime it’s got decent ideas at least (though none would be great irl if 1:1 with the anime)
Anyone who's tried to recreate and play with Yugi's decks IRL quickly finds out he's only the best because of his in-universe canon ability to draw any card he wants or needs at any time.
As the main character you can't make his deck have a consistent winning strategy because seeing him win the same way every duel would quickly get boring and for dramatic purposes he has to be on the ropes before he pulls off his miraculous winning strategy. Really it's all his opponents that actually have a reliable win condition in their deck and the tension comes from seeing how Yugi is going to turn it around on them.
His millennium puzzle has the ability to guarantee the best possible outcome for the whielder. Basically if there is only a 1/100 or 1/1000 chance to win the puzzle makes it guaranteed every time.
i've tried it in the most holistic way possible (recreating the actual rules of kazuki takahashi's original game and remaking all the cards to be canon-compliant to function within that) and i find yugi's deck to actually be pretty decent (particularly if you make the reasonable presumption that rarity is a huge factor in what kinds of decks are even possible to make, so you're never up against an _absurdly_ high-powered deck in comparison) but that's only with a limited amount of testing with that
No one in this series had any deck that made sense. It wasn't until GX when they somewhat came together. 5ds onwards were when decks finally started making sense.
@@LilGian1Not really, the actual harpie cards she plays are really bad. I'd say kaiba, cuz he plays a bunch of power spells and has some decent haymaker monsters like la djinn.
Exactly😂 the heart of cards give your win probability an extra 1000% amp so unless you winning by 1001% already u not leaving the victor and getting sent to the shadow realm 😂
To be fair, archetypes weren’t that common in the original series. Most characters would often use cards focused around a particular type or would use several types at once to fill a specific role, either as muscle, protection, or support.
If you look at competitive decklists back then, they also didn't have archetypes, with them playing a nearly fixed set of staple cards, but even then, decks were made with synergy and versatility in mind, for example: goat control had a lot of level 1 monsters you could tribute to make your metamorphosis live and cards like tsukuyomi who could flip the thousand eyes restrict face down so you could use its effect again in the same turn, turn off the attack restriction on restrict to swing for damage, or also you could also use it as generic removal for your opponent's monsters. Yugi's cards barely have any synergy with each other.
@@animegod9585 In Duelist Kingdom they literally did not have set rules for the IRL game at the time. Which is why tribute summoning didn't exist until Battle City, among other things like Yugi attacking the ring around the Castle against Panik, or the Mystic Elf chanting spells.
i mean if i could do that i wouldnt play beaver warrior, i would just make it so crush card virus was always in my opening hand with a monster to tribute, with raigeki and spirit reaper.
In Duellist Kingdom Exodia would've been nearly unbeatable: The opponent can't attack directly and all you have to do to avoid losing is have 1 monster on the field at the end of your turn... that being said all you'd have to do is set monsters in defence mode until you inevitably draw it. Only one card in Duellist Kingdom could combat this (Pegasus's Prophecy Trap). Combine this with Dark Magician and Summoned Skull which were hard to beat for duellists of the time and the deck was extremely oppressive. Battle City: There was a limit placed in this tournament of just 40 cards (since Yugi shows 60 cards this means he'd have to side cards in and out... we see him doing this on screen multiple times in the Blimp). It's likely that he changes the focus of his deck depending on who he is duelling. Although he seems to have a preference for weird gimmicks over consistency... He also for some reason has a preference towards Alpha The Magnet Warrior, the weakest of the three Magnets... siding Beta or Gamma in would work better for an offensive/defensive role. Same for Gazelle The King Of Mythical Beasts who shows up way more than he should. (Yugi is also shown to have Cyber Jar which he never once plays). He also seems to take out Dark Magician and Summoned Skull for a lot of the tournament, since he doesn't play it against seeker, Lumis/Umbra, Possessed Joey or Bakura (Summoned Skull makes 1 appearance against Seeker). He seems to purposely brick his deck (even in the Kaiba duel) by siding in Chain Destruction and Collected Power. Both of which successfully brick his hand in that duel. He does seem to switch between the Magnet and Poker Knight engines and has for the most part removed his bricks like Dark Magician, Red-Eyes, Slifer (For most of the Tournament), Valkyrion and Archfiend Of Gilfer.
cyber jar was actually Kaiba's card, when we see Yugi use it it's because he added Kaiba's cards to his deck which REALLY would have messed up the consistency since we saw Yugi was mostly drawing into his cards during the duel and rarely drew into cards that probably would have bricked his hand. you also have to take into account the anime offered WAY more means to draw cards. Pot of greed, graceful charity, and card of sanctity, as well as card of demise were all legal and playable and were able to vastly help with drawing into resources. hell Yugi had access to the anime verion of monster recovery which was ideal for resource replenishment since if yugi had 1 card in hand, he could used recovery, return a monster to his hand then deck, and redraw 5 cards.
@@ShanaReviews I was referring to certain scenes in the anime where he is seen Deckbuilding in the Blimp. It is implied to be an option for him by this. maybe it was just a background card with a random picture and no distinct identity (like Arkana having Obelisk The Tormentor in his hand in the 4Kids Dub) but he is never seen using it outside of The Virtual World. Best Yugi Deck is: Monsters: Dark Magician Summoned Skull Dark Magician Girl (Gorz The Emisary Of Darkness: Manga) Slifer The Sky Dragon (Substitute Obelisk Or Ra depending on preference). Buster Blader Curse Of Dragon Mystical Elf The Tricky Swift Gaia The Fierce Knight Watapon Kuriboh Kuribandit Sangan Witch Of The Black Forrest Black Luster Soldier-Envoy Of The Beginning (seen in GX) (Marshmallon: Little Yugi's card but I don't want to add to many of those) Spells: Monster Recovery Monster Reborn Brain Control Change Of Heart Pot Of Greed Graceful Charity Card Of Sanctity Mystical Refpannel Dark Magic Curtain Soul Taker Dark Hole Card Destruction Emblem Of Dragon Destroyer Magic Cylinder (Spell in Anime) Polymerization x2 De-fusion (Which just defuses things, not necessarily just Fusion Monsters) Swords Of Revealing Light Fiend Sanctuary Multiply Negate Attack (Manga) Monster Replace (This Places a monster on the field (Not summoning... placing... he can Place Obelisk or Slifer on the Field and it wouldn't return to its previous location) (Timaeus: Optional) Traps: Lifeshaver Mirror Force Spellbinding Circle Mystical Refpannel Disgraceful Charity Regulation Of Tribe Natural Selection Extra Deck: (Cards he is known to play by Anime, Manga and WCS Events) Dark Paladin Ebon High Magician Quintet Magician Arcana Knight Joker (Side Deck option) Gaia The Dragon Champion (Sie Deck Option) Chimaera The Flying Mythical Beast (Side Deck Option) Dark Flare Knight (Because Why Not) Black Skull Dragon (Because Why Not) Meteor Black Dragon (Because Why not) Dragon Master Knight (Because why not) Side: Kings, Queens and Jacks Knight Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Valkyrion The Magnet Warriors Gazelle and Berfomet Mystical Space Typhoon Mage Power (Movie) Magicalised Fusion Premature Burial Mystic Box Dust Tornado Maybe Gaia The Fierce Knight Criticism: He needs more Light monsters for the chaos strategy and he needs more fusion substitutes like King Of The Swamp (this will allow him to cut a lot of his bricks like Buster Blader and will allow him to more easily reach Dragon Master Knight, Black Skull Dragon and Gaia The Dragon Champion (Without having to run Gaia The Fierce Knight) and will allow him to reach monsters like Dark Flare Knight). He also needs more XYZ, Links and Synchros. He could also make use of modern support like the Gaia, Buster Blader, Dark Magician cards, (Red Eyes Dark Dragoon, BLS Chaos Soldier). Pros: His Deck has stupid Draw Power, excellent field disruption, The Ability to easily reach any card in his deck, at least 1 god card (borderline unbeatable) and a decent Fusion line up... with the right additions he could be a big threat threat to a real life opponent with his broken anime cards.
@@therealsilverking4802 this also begs the question as to the rarity and printings of each card because Yugi having a game shop that sells the cards should have had access to some of the substitutes, among others. we know blue eyes has only 4 printings, the god cards are at 1 and even raigeki (which btw in the manga and anime was said to be banned along with LP burners like Hinotama and meteor of destruction). one wonders how the scarcity of these cards is and how easy or hard is it to obtain them if you're not pegasus
It doesnt really make sense to judge yugis first couple decks by the later games standards. Obviously theyre not going to be good like duh...even judging them with GOAT standards is too unfair because its literally the very first couple releases fo cards. Of course they get beat by later cards. Really a waste of time to analyze them like this sorry to say. I like your channel but...this is just naaaaa
There's also the fact that the early ruleset in the OCG was much different than the even _the first Advanced format,_ let alone the fact that the ruleset for the _anime/manga_ during the Duelist Kingdom Saga was far different than even the first OCG ruleset. Hell, the Battle City rules had some clear differences from the Advanced Format too! Example: Direct Attacking was not allowed during the Duelist Kingdom Arc, and you get one attack per turn. EDIT: On top of all of this, the Millenium items in the classic show, and then the Duel Spirits introduced in GX implying the cards in Yugioh are all sentient, actually throws regular card math into disarray, because how often you draw a card _might have more to do with how much that card likes you,_ rather than standard ratios.
Yugis destiny draw makes his deck composition meaninless because he can draw the exact card he needs when he needs it so all he needs it ways to stall and get the most out of his broken cards he can reuse. You could argue his fodder is just there to make people underestimate him and set up a board he can wipe/steal
That's not how his destiny draw works, his "destiny draw" only works if he is losing and it doesn't give him a card to win it give him a card to survive
As far as Grandpa Mutou's Deck and Duelist Kingdom, there's a few points I want to bring up. First, as far as the anime is concerned, Ritual monsters are not Summoned from the hand; Yugi never actually draws into BLS or Magician of Black Chaos, instead gaining the ability to use them by drawing into their specific Spell Cards; this would imply that anime/manga Ritual monsters sat in the Extra Deck, helping with SOME (not all) of the consistency issues. Worth noting is that anime/manga Thousand-Eyes Restrict has the real game's prevention of attacks, which was stopped by Black Chaos "putting enemy monsters to sleep" on Summon, implying some degree of effect negation, and the Rituals were pretty severely nerfed for real play. Second, Battle City introduces the Advance Rules, as the OCG called them even they debuted for the real game; Advance Summons, or Tribute Summons in the TCG, did not exist until Battle City in the anime/manga, and the first few episodes of that arc are used to show off and explain the new rules for anyone who didn't have an official rulebook. By that metric, Summoned Skull and Dark Magician are, by all accounts, equivalent in power. Add in the high rarity of strong low-Level monsters (Kaiba's Battle Ox and La Jinn were drawn with gold text in a few scenes, implying that they were Ultra Rares, and everyone was canonically surprised by the likes of Gemini Elf), Effect monsters barely being a thing, and the vanillas with low stats make a lot more sense.
I don't think the idea of a extra deck existed back in Duelist Kingdom. Considering how RPG-esqe the duels were, it looked more like the system for the duel arenas had a means of transforming and merging speficic monsters. What kind of logic being used I can't say
@@felinaotsu3161 In terms of what was in the game, no, the Ritual Spell basically just Summons the Ritual monster from the ether. But, as far as mechanics for a functional game, as this video tries to describe, the Extra Deck is probably the best fit.
I mean in the context of season q anime, no sacrafices and direct attacks, even though it is a requirement to play a monster every turn, it makes sense why the deck is full of monsters, but also vanilla monsters like Dark Magician and Summon Skull are actually good
@RUN11690 for Duelist Kingdom, it's implied that polymerization, time wizard, toon world, and metalmorph somewhat, all generate new cards that you don't have to own in order to utilize. Polymerization can fuse any two monsters in the game together, time wizard can age any monsters to varying degrees of usefulness, toon world can turn any monster into a toon and so on. These effects are possible in a fictional story and maybe a video game if you really wanted to expend an extreme amount of development resources, but were obviously impossible in a physical card game and had to be severely altered. So I don't think Yugi ever actually had a copy of Dark Sage. But since he originally owned time wizard he probably researched how his effect could impact every card in his deck before including it.
In fairness, the video was about being able to play a version of Yugi’s deck in real life. As fun as it would be to just assume Duelist Kingdom Rules, you aren’t going to be challenging your friend to a Duelist Kingdom, no Tributes needed game rather than a standard match
This whole video is about analysing how viable these decks would be ON THE ACTUAL TCG! Not even in battle city. Also, what rules? There weren't really well established rules in DK, they just made shit up on the fly.
@OfficialRedTeamReview yeah, it was the original vision for Magic when Richard Garfield designed it in 1992. The thought was that rare cards could be incredibly overpowered because people would only be able to find 1 or 2 for their collections. The game became way more popular than expected, and he wasn't able to predict that the secondary market would appear. The first iteration of Magic rules was 40 card decks with no limit on the number of copies of any cards you could put in the deck. To this day, I believe the creator thinks the best way to play Magic is limited (sealed, where you only get 6 packs to make a deck with, or draft, where a pod of 8 players have 3 boosters each and draft them together). In those environments, decks really do have limited access to rare cards and can practically never have access to run more than one copy of a given rare. When Kazuki Takahashi based a game on Magic in the manga he probably wanted to recreate the experience of limited or being a casual player with a very tiny budget and the exciting, and significantly varied games that came from that.
Yugi's first deck in the anime is close to unbeatable in the rule set. If he made a deck of only monsters, he'd win every duel because you cannot attack directly and could only declare one attack a turn. A deck of only monsters means every turn Yugi can put a creature down to not lose the duel while eventually drawing into Exodia guaranteed. Yugi's first deck is damn near impossible to beat by the duel monsters S1 rules.
Aside from the final decks used in the ceremonial battle and in The Dark Side of Dimensions, Yugi/Atem's deck(s) barely had any symmetry and relied heavily on the Millennium Puzzle's probability manipulation. Was basically a rogue deck with a bit more spellcaster support.
True, I have already written the script for the entirety of yugis decks in the anime, and the funny thing is that yugis deck in the cerimonial duel is actually the closest thing to a competent deck that has synergy in the anime.
Yugi’s deck isn’t supposed to “make sense.” The whole thing was about being somewhat clever and having more faith than your opponent. People in this world play duel monsters backwards and basically only pick cards they’ve seen others use or what they think will win, but the game was initially supposed to be about picking what you felt connected to and what you thought was cool, and finding a way to make it work, using creativity. If you’re analyzing Yugi’s deck using generic analytics, then you’ll never understand it. People joke about the “Heart of the Cards,” but it’s just intelligence mixed with faith, that’s a real thing, people use it in sports all the time. It’s a shame that the franchise that coined the phrase has so many participants who miss the point. Idk why some people play the game, they don’t even enjoy it, really. 😂
I also think the same bro. People became way too serious with this and it ruined the game. This game was all about summoning your fav monster and winning the duel. Now is extremely convoluted.
You don’t generally win tournaments with originality, and people like to win. If you want to be original and win, you need to be extremely well versed in the rest of the game and build within the realm of what is powerful.
I get into that debate with some of my buds, they build their deck to be tournament level but thats not fun for me, id rather play bullshit character decks because thats fun for me 🙂
Real world Yu-Gi-Oh and Anime Yu-Gi-Oh are two completely different things and it's getting really annoying having people try to use constructive criticism while comparing the two as if they're both to share the same rules regulations and expectations of each. The statement that's not what that card does no that's not what that card does anymore. The anime and the manga were the first to do it so for all intents and purposes that's not what it does anymore.. big difference
It's a nice video, but anime-cheese aside (basically pseudo-filler not accounting for battle city rules at times) it's made pretty clear the characters ran 40-card decks when it came to the battle royal so while synergy and consistency can be issues when it comes to these anime decks (i've bricked as soulburner before like 3 matches not duels but matches in a row) their qualities goes up a fair bit i think the big thing about the anime world is that a 4000 life point format favors control decks (and generic burn decks but battle city forced a change there) more than ftk/otk decks, makes it so that clearing your opponent's board even once is a very likely win (i was also trying out "progression duels and "draft duels" to cop a feel for how the 4000 LP format felt for some months now) like, as far as GX era goes, the value of Doble Passe goes up wildly if you're willing to take a direct hit to damage your foe, since your next attack will be a direct one as well, and weaker monsters like Gray Wing are just waiting for a single opening to go crazy when having 8000 life points won't do much but dent/chip your foe down instead I'd personally say, once we hit late ARC-V & VRAINS, ftk/otk decks do catch up with control decks there, since their damage output from a singular attack and ability to negate effects are more live, making the need to dance around traps not as necessary
To be fair, in the game's early years it was much harder to make a comeback after a board wipe. Most of the good board clears and comeback cards were Forbidden early on for this reason. In the current day, many of the power cards that were purely "comeback cards" like Change of Heart, Monster Reborn etc, are going back to 1 copy, meanwhile the card advantage power spells are not.
Yugi's deck perfectly represents all of our decks back in 2002 though 😂 I remember feeling so cool with my Dark Magician, Red Eyes, Blue Eyes, Exodia deck
Rules existed, but in the manga, Grandpa says that the game is so popular because new expansions and new rules, so the game never gets old In Duelist kingdom there are new rules, and in Battle City Kaiba use the Super Expert Rules. For example, the rule of waiting one turn for fusioned monsters or the ban rule for cards like Hinotama
@@OlgaZuccati less cards to draw back then though. And they did run pots of greed Also while not a stated rule, aside from Kaiba's three blue eyes, everyone seems to run one copy of cards.
Grandpa’s deck isn’t actually too bad when compared to the cards that were actually available when the game came out. Vanilla monsters were everywhere and effect monsters were rare when the initial decks came out, literally in the single digits
Yeah, and if even Kaiba, who loves high ATK monsters, had friggin Hitotsu-Me Giant in his deck, imagine how rare the strong level 4 monsters were back then lol
@@VinTheDirector I still remember when Panther Warrior was considered cool because it had 2000 atk at level 4, even though it needed a tribute to attack lol. The power creep is real.
Panther warrior was never good. Even my favorite card Neo The Magic Swordsman who is 4star with 1700 atk wasnt even considered good. Or my later favorite Dark Blade who had 1800 atk and was 4 stars was also a rather bad card compared to all the 1900 atk beatsticks that existed since duelist kingdom era of the card game.
Yeah but you could combo him w/scapegoats to allow him an attack and protect your board. Stuff like Gemini Elf though kinda made it pointless. And I think LaJinn was also one of the best lvl beaters early on.
A lot of these can be explained simply by side decking, which the anime shows the characters side decking their decks multiple times throughout the show, which is why some of the more specific cards might be there Edit: Also where are the rest of yugi's decks? The video just ends after battle city.
Just because you don't believe in the heart of cards and you're incapable of drawing the card you want in each turn doesn't mean the Yugi's Deck sucks, ok?
He runs a toolbox deck with a handful of gimmicks, with no searches and little cohesion, held up by the millenium puzzle's magic deck stacking powers. Great for a story where big flashy counterplays and hard to prep boss monsters with no protection looks cool. Terrible for any real game.
Hello Duelist Kingdom Era had no scarifies nor where the rules back then the same as modern times. Don't talk tribute summon when there was no tribute summon in Duelist Kingdom Era.
This was cut out of the video, however initially I had it set that all decks were applied to the same battle city rules, as trying to analyse one decks power with another set of rules would have been tricky to do, whilst holding the rest of the decks under a different set of rules.
I Really Don’t Care about the Anime Duelist KINGDOM Era Rules! Those rules only apply to that Focus point in the series, especially when you remember the Field Mechanics were Very different and Better Explained in the SUB! Battle CITY is the Definitive Yugioh! And Even then, Yugi’s Deck Still doesn’t mAke any sense due to the Hodgepodge Nature of All the Cards at the time!
Because I uploaded it initially, but realised that the retention was bad as it took 3 minutes to even explain the rules, (which set of rules I was using), how sometimes anime effects were different even in the same arc, how I can’t use duelist kingdoms ruleset because some of them are essentially just “do whatever you want within reason”, where most people just want to get ahead to the actual content of the video, which is looking at yugis decks. I would have added a tiny disclaimer instead, but as TH-cam only allows cutting and not adding content I had no choice but to cut it.
I like to think that Yami Yugi is just way ahead of our collective understanding of the game's meta. He intuitively comes up with stuff that beats out the top tier decks he goes up against, using cards that the community at large has overlooked.
Honestly, Yugi’s decks may not be very competitive in the real world, especially by 2024 standards, but they actually synergize among themselves really well. You can craft a really versatile deck from the pool of cards he’s used across the years.
The decks porpuse wasnt necessarily meant to be support or anything based via chemistry relation, since the milllenium puzzle has probability manipulation its good for consistent wins through outs and massive plays via specific win conditions, The millenium puzzles prob manipulation activates only when yugi is about to lose or has a critical situation needed to be surpassed.
I love the idea that the deck is DESIGNED to almost immediately be on the cusp of losing because of how bad it is, so that you can then top-deck your hyper-specific answer and win. Every card in the deck is part of a build-around, and you're not building around a combo or a specific card, you're building around a magic artefact that you own.
In a tv show, a deck's consistency is kind of a detriment. Its more interesting to watch Yugi employ different strategies episode to episode than just running the same engine multiple times per duel for 200-some episodes.
I think people spend too much time analyzing the cards instructions based on the show and real life. You are all forgetting the meaning of the show. FRIENDSHIP! HEART OF THE CARDS!
The original game wasn't that consistent to begin with. There were lots of non effect really trash monsters with really only a handful of good ones, which is why kaiba went so far to collect all the really good base stat line ones and spent all that money putting his deck together. The other duelists in the show didn't really have super consistent decks either except for the theme decks, and even then they had some duds as well. The show was built around only showing 1 specific strategy to win per duel and it's specific counter. It wasn't made to win the same way every time, it was supposed to be a chaotic mess of cards that could pull off near any "strategy" with the "heart of the cards" to give you exactly what you need when you need it to pull off the combo that in real life almost never happens.
The early game wasn't around archetype, so it was mostly "what is cool and what fits the character". I know that the side manga Yu-Gi-Oh R tried to do something where he would exclusively use Dark attribute monsters.
I feel this is a good video of showing how much the anime screwed up Yugi deck by either adding random nonsense or just trying to make the deck more legit. I do want to clear up something though, Yugi changes his deck up during the battle city semi finals adding in the poker knights as he needed a way to summon slifer quickly. The other thing which is I feel you should also mention the original manga situation of cards to show how it was much more viable like for example Valykion was supposed to be a fusion monster similar to xyz dragon cannon but for some reason they didn’t do that.
This was an enjoyable watch. I’d be interested to see if a similar analysis could be done with other characters like Joey or Kaiba, or even other protagonists like Jaden
12:10 yeah I can't really argue with this, this is how I'd fix it. Gazelle Retrain : When this card is Normal or Special Summoned you can add 1 "Berformet" from your deck to your hand. While you control a face up "Berformet" you can Special Summon this card from your hand and if you do add 1 "Polymerization" from your deck to your hand. Berformet Retrain: (lvl 4 not 5) When this card is Normal or Special Summoned you can add 1 "Gazelle the King of Mythical Beasts" from your deck to your hand. While you control a face up "Gazelle the King of Mythical Beasts" you can Special Summon this card from your hand and if you do you can add 1 "Polymerization" from your deck to your hand. Chimera Retrain: (Atk is 2300) Must first be Fusion Summoned. Your opponent cannot activate Spells or Traps during the Battle Phase. When this card is sent from the field to the GY you can Special Summon 1 "Gazelle the King of Mythical Beasts" or "Berformet" from your GY in face up defense position. This not only makes Chimera much better since he freezes Spells and Traps but it turns Gazelle and Berformet into 1 card combos to summon him, making this strategy very consistent.
Yugi rebuilds his deck in preparation for each opponent with the exception of the initial battle city duels since he could be dueling anyone. Hence, his deck that he uses against Kaiba that included Dark Paladin and Slifer is not the same as the deck he plays vs Arkana and also different from the deck his uses vs Marik
0:19 that's what protagonists are their always powerful no matter what that the artist/creators, make their attitude kind of dumb/clueless at some point most of them are like that. They made all main characters in anime like that even if yugi don't have strong cards, he can still manage to get out in a tight situation win his battles to opponents have strong decks. They won't be considered as the main character of that anime series, if they can't beat their opponent have strong advantage, from the start a good example of mc that is like that is Son Goku.
Plot armor is powerful when you have the creators crafting it on you...hell they also have it where it can possibly protect you from immorality when things get tough 😂
The rules of the first season (I think): Ritual monsters are in the extra deck (so it's the same as fusion monsters in term of card disadvantage). You cannot attack your opponent directly the same turn you destroyed by battle one of their monsters. No tribute summons (you can normal summon anything without tribute). Also, several "vanilla" monsters are shown to have effects (the elf singing to reduce an opponent's monster's attack, the giant soldier destroying the moon)
*Weevil throws Exodia* Yugi: WHY TF YOU DO THAT? Weevil: YOUR DECK IS F**KING SUCKS WITH THAT EXODIA WHY U USE THAT IF YOU ARE NOT GONNA SUPPORT THAT CONSISTENCY??
To be fair, the Millennium Puzzle of Unity seems to have the ability to manipulate the odds of allies and friends to being in the right place/getting a perfect chance to help Yugi and Yami Yugi in times when they need help. This is significant because we have been shown that some cards have souls or partially contain the soul of their original owner. This ability tends to make the normally inconsistent decks brokenly powerful.
I wonder why people pretend to forget that tcg rules didn’t exist when manga came out. Duelist kingdom arc was like D&D with cards. Also everyone forget yugi in Duelist Kingdom arc was forced to replace the five exodia pieces with 5 weak monsters he was siding on the ship
Pretty much. In the original series it showed up only twice as a game and wasn't intended to be a full series. So its rules were left vague and unbalanced so that the writer could do whatever he wanted that he thought would be cool in that moment. Since the game rules weren't formalized yet this carried over to duelist kingdom which then affected the anime despite it airing when the game was finally released. Battle city was an attempt to fix this and bring the manga (and thus the anime) more in line with the official rules, albeit with a few minor tweaks to help with pacing and to give the writer a bit of flexibility in the writing.
to be fair during the 1st season there were not many 4 star monsters that had more than 1500... matter of fact quite a few 5 star monsters had around 1500 lol so the low atk is viable during the time
I would love to see how you would change these classic cards & decks to be better designed in those early seasons. For instance, I would change DM Girl to be level 4, and Dark Magician to be level 5 & give it an ability.
Thank you for having a more grounded approach to this topic. However, I do think this raises the question of how much better or worse everyone's elses decks were in comparison. As awful as Yugi's decks might be, they only have to be better than his opponents'.
The thing is, you can't says that yugi have all of the card. Look at the blue eyes, there only 3 available. So, if you says he should use card A instead of card B is dumb. Because he most probably doesn't have card A.
Burning Land does nuke active field spells when played, but it's also a consistent 500LP burn each turn to the active player, so if you manage to keep an LP advantage higher than 500LP you can eventually burn away a lot of their life until you get the chance to hit them direct with monsters.
I think a big thing about the Duelist Kingdom decks is that Yugi was in a rough equilibrium with the people around him. The anime, in particular, based on the playmat games at school seemed to imply the overall power level of duel monsters was something closer to the Dark Duel Stories/(Yu-gi-oh! Duel Monsters!) games on the gameboy, where you started playing with common collectibles of Kuriboh's power level, and your starting ace is something like Frog the Jam. In that environment, Yugi's mixed deck for Duelist Kingdom seems pretty heckin strong, and most of the people he plays against are of similar power level, he only really seems to be super far behind against Kaiba, who uses his fortune to bypass rarity, and Pegasus, who has single-print gimmicks. Modern TCG rules have been significantly power-crept and "combo-crept" because those decks, which were portrayed as elite in the story, became the default start pack IRL.
Love the video. Younger me thought Yugi's deck was OP, so I went out to get (mostly) every card to play against my friends. Older me can't believe I didn't play something else lol. I thought Dark Magician was the shit...It's shit alright lol
I think the single most confounding card for me in DM is dark energy. They said it triples the attack of ANY dark monster. Think of all the times that shit could have otked someone with incredibly basic monsters. Especially in duelist kingdom where people had 2000 lp.
the Yugioh video game, Legacy of the Duelist, did make Yugi's decks feel more powerful by filling them out with cards that help strongly with the situational duel. For example, cards like Sangan and Heart of the Underdog make it easier to get all of Exodia in your hand during the duel against Kaiba. And in the duel against Mako, Yugi's deck had Attack the Moon, a card based on the strategy he used to defeat Mako in the anime, along with Guardian Golem, just so he had more rock-type monsters to use with that card.
to be fair, it was when the game first came out. The anime is based on the manga, and in the original manga, the game wasn't even an official game yet. I'd say a realistic version of Yugi's deck is the last duel with Atem vs Yugi,which is split between the 2, but does make sense in terms of an early game play style. One of my favorite duels in the series actually.
What I've found playing various versions of Yugi's deck (I did a gauntlet of decks from Link Evolution against each other) is that Yugi's deck is mostly good when it can cheat out Dark Magician with multiple copies of Monster Reborn & Graceful Charity.
Grandpas deck feels like it’s the definition of casual play. Does it always win? No. Is he a tournament grinder? No. Is it fun and easy to use while teaching new players how to play the game? Yes.
Hey, put some respect on Grandpa's deck. Not only were 1500 attack point monsters rare, thus he has a powerful beat down gameplan, but you were not allowed to make direct attacks if your opponent summoned a monster on their last turn so by forgoing spells and traps that meant you could stall out indefinitely until Exodia won the game, a tactic no one else could attempt as Exodia was so rare only an archeologist like Grampa had all five. Really, I don't think it would be possible to build a better deck than Grampa's deck.
@@brennantmi5063 that does makes sense the fact rex is a runner up with a two headed king rex. so I guess this means most enemy players have like 1000 atk or less
The millennium items all had different powers yugi had the most powerful one the puzzle had the power of probability like domino from x-men basically the power of luck
I'll defend some of Yugi's card from Battle City and beyond. Chimera is actually the very beginning of a case study into what Yu-Gi-Oh! had to do to make fusion summoning a competent mechanic. Because right out of the gate, between the materials and the Polymerization card, fusion summoning effectively threw half of your opening hand into the garbage for a beatstick that didn't even equal the sum of its parts. Berfomet could technically search the other fusion material (if you could get around the damn tribute summon), and Chimera revives one of the materials if it dies. There was an attempt here to compensate for the loss of card advantage that's inherent to fusion summoning, and for Caveman Yu-Gi-Oh! standards, it wasn't terrible. There was a similar situation with Kaiba's Twin Headed Thunder Dragon, where the fusion material can discard itself for two extra copies of itself to facilitate the fusion summoning. It wasn't that good, but as far as turning fusion summoning into a competent mechanic, it was at least a start. Also, I'll defend Buster Blader. Yugi's Battle City deck had next to no synergy, but Buster Blader was at least a meta tech choice given the circumstances. We're talking about a level 7 tribute summon whose stats and effect are specifically designed to get over Kaiba's Blue-Eyes. In fact, if the manga (and the portion of the anime that was adapting the manga) copied the TCG effect of Buster Blader, this guy would counter Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon ON IT'S OWN. 500 extra ATK for every Dragon on field and in grave means 500 for the Ultimate Dragon itself, plus 1500 for the fusion materials in grave. That would've been 4600, JUST ENOUGH to get over the 4500 fusion beatstick.
His deck only works because of the Millennium Puzzle. Basically for those who don’t know, the MP can tell who’s winning a match and knows every card in the game, what they do, and where they are. If it senses its user is losing it will give it a card to change the tides. The more desperate the situation, the stronger counter you draw. Basically the Puzzle rigs RNG in its user favour whenever they are put on the back foot. So basically it’s impossible to win against anyone using the puzzle unless there’s literally no guarantied win con. Basically you need to start on equal footing, and draw a card that counters literally anything Yugi can throw at you in one go. If you can’t do that, then you just lose, as winning doesn’t become a possibility, but only a matter of time.
I just made a Yugi battle City profile but a 2024 version and it makes a lot of sense and strong. I liked it so much i made my own anime to show it off. 👍
I mean, you mentioning how Yugi's deck requires a lot of cards in hand kinda goes well in battle city with Card of Sanctity, he can essentially Pop-off with his high-cost cards and then just Card of Sanctity back with no issue. would it work in the real world, probably not, but it does seem like a strategy.
In the sub of Yu-Gi-Oh GX Season 4, this is actually covered. Decks are built to only work with that Duelist's Soul. Cyrus tried to use Zane's deck, and the deck kept bricking him. Everything was a dead draw because decks go back to being "regular" draws without the proper duelist's soul.
Hey im not a big fan of the series but i find your breakdown and explanations interesting. I was hoping to pitch in a series idea where you could probably walkthrough cool or well known irl matches, tournament matches maybe. Id really like to watch these vids out there but i dont understand what’s going on and why big plays are big plays. Hope u think these seems entertaining enough to think about.
Yugi's deck makes perfect sense since he can draw whatever he wants. The best way to build a deck with that power is just add a whole.bunch of "what-if" cards like Berserker Soul or Lightforce Sword specifically to counter Exodia that one time.
By my recollection, Yugi used his grandfather's deck from the duel against Kaiba until the duel against Rebecca Hawkins. Based off of that, if we make a list of every different card Yugi used (or appeared to use), that makes a 54 count deck list with Exodia and Time Wizard, 48 cards without (assuming one quantity of each card).
Funny that if you take all the pull of available cards from Atem/Yugi, you can build a pretty good and consistent spellcaster beatdown/control deck, only focusing on DM, DMG, DMOC and BLS Envoy (thanks to a powerful chaos engine) the majority of the spells and traps are the ones that were forbidden in the goat era, and he has a lot of draw power, usually you are not gonna be without monsters thanks to have a lot of cards to special summon magicians like crazy. Even compared to later character decks (also some from Vrains), Atem can stand very well againt them. If you just try to use the most iconic monsters like the Gods, Gaia, Buster blader, the magnets, then yeah the deck is trash unplayable, but playing it with head, it would surprise you how good it is
![[#2024MAMA] ROSÉ (로제), Bruno Mars - APT. | Mnet 241122 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dgGqD28J6aQ/mqdefault.jpg)
"My grandpa's deck HAS no pathetic cards, Kaiba!"
"Actually, Yugi, your grandpa's deck is fairly inconsistent and relies too much on the hopes of getting a specific win condition while also being overstocked on middling-to-weak monsters without enough practical effect monsters, magic cards, or traps to-"
"Exodia."
🤣🤣
"Noooo!!!!! Exodia?!?! That's not possible! No one's been able to summon him!"
Also, Kaiba is one to talk, his only plans are higher attack monsters and get Sagi and Crush on the field and hope someone attacks a facedown. And when that doesn't work, threaten to jump off a castle.
🤓👆
I mean a beat down virus deck wasn’t actually a bad strategy, especially with cards like shrink. It could work as either stall or removal if not used for crush card virus directly. Most of kaiba’s cards could beat over the opponents monsters post-virus.
And Joey using swordsman of landstar and assume samurai with cards like graceful and skull dice also isn’t a bad strategy, if way more inconsistent. With fairy box and nutrient z It makes for good stalling until he can get jinzo, gilford, or red-eyes.
As far as I remember yugi doesn’t really use cards to make good use of his weaker monsters except multiply + detonate for kuriboh, and he has other removal/stall cards that don’t require them, like magic cylinder, swords of revealing light, and mirror force. His poker knights work well for tribute summons and his magnet warriors can summon another decent boss monster, so in terms of the anime it’s got decent ideas at least (though none would be great irl if 1:1 with the anime)
Effect Monsters were incredibly rare in the early game, especially the OCG.
Anyone who's tried to recreate and play with Yugi's decks IRL quickly finds out he's only the best because of his in-universe canon ability to draw any card he wants or needs at any time.
As the main character you can't make his deck have a consistent winning strategy because seeing him win the same way every duel would quickly get boring and for dramatic purposes he has to be on the ropes before he pulls off his miraculous winning strategy. Really it's all his opponents that actually have a reliable win condition in their deck and the tension comes from seeing how Yugi is going to turn it around on them.
In other words, the scumbag cheats like there's no tomorrow.
His millennium puzzle has the ability to guarantee the best possible outcome for the whielder. Basically if there is only a 1/100 or 1/1000 chance to win the puzzle makes it guaranteed every time.
i've tried it in the most holistic way possible (recreating the actual rules of kazuki takahashi's original game and remaking all the cards to be canon-compliant to function within that) and i find yugi's deck to actually be pretty decent (particularly if you make the reasonable presumption that rarity is a huge factor in what kinds of decks are even possible to make, so you're never up against an _absurdly_ high-powered deck in comparison) but that's only with a limited amount of testing with that
@@Envy_May I'd like to know more about your tests.
No one in this series had any deck that made sense. It wasn't until GX when they somewhat came together. 5ds onwards were when decks finally started making sense.
Yami mariks was decent
I feel like in duel monsters the only person who’s deck sort of made sense was Mai Valentine. She made a deck around Harpie’s.
@@LilGian1 Ah yes archetype decks, the salvation and bane of card games
Just like forbidden memories lol, i always thought that's the rule of Yu-Gi-Oh, until i play NDS version years later
@@LilGian1Not really, the actual harpie cards she plays are really bad. I'd say kaiba, cuz he plays a bunch of power spells and has some decent haymaker monsters like la djinn.
The reason why it doesn't make sense is because you forgot to calculate the heart of the cards.
Exactly!! Dude totally forgot to add in the most important element to Yugi’s Deck 😂😂😂😂
or just having bullshit main character powers
Yugi just be using magic to stack
😂😂😂
That and Yugi wouldn't have more than 1 of most of his iconic cards
It's because you didn't believe in the hearts of the cards.
Its all about the heart of the cards Kaiba!
I think the heart of the cards in real life is money. Kaiba had it right. They just want rich kids to be on their toes
@@KYMan678 Its more like luck when we are honest since Atem is a hella gambler in season zero
@Winklarson420 true. But I was jk around
Exactly😂 the heart of cards give your win probability an extra 1000% amp so unless you winning by 1001% already u not leaving the victor and getting sent to the shadow realm 😂
To be fair, archetypes weren’t that common in the original series. Most characters would often use cards focused around a particular type or would use several types at once to fill a specific role, either as muscle, protection, or support.
If you look at competitive decklists back then, they also didn't have archetypes, with them playing a nearly fixed set of staple cards, but even then, decks were made with synergy and versatility in mind, for example: goat control had a lot of level 1 monsters you could tribute to make your metamorphosis live and cards like tsukuyomi who could flip the thousand eyes restrict face down so you could use its effect again in the same turn, turn off the attack restriction on restrict to swing for damage, or also you could also use it as generic removal for your opponent's monsters.
Yugi's cards barely have any synergy with each other.
@@OlgaZuccati This is referring his deck in the anime though. Also, Yugi’s deck does have some synergy to it.
In battle City they were quite literally building decks as they were going along the tournament
@@animegod9585 In Duelist Kingdom they literally did not have set rules for the IRL game at the time. Which is why tribute summoning didn't exist until Battle City, among other things like Yugi attacking the ring around the Castle against Panik, or the Mystic Elf chanting spells.
They also appear to have a limit of 1 per card also, so they used a lot of filler in their decks...
Yugi’s deck does make sense. It’s a jack of all trades deck for someone who can will any card he needs to the top of his deck.
yeah sure, and magically he chnages his deck hundred times knowing which exact cards are required for each battle.
@ yes he does. He’s the protagonist…
i mean if i could do that i wouldnt play beaver warrior, i would just make it so crush card virus was always in my opening hand with a monster to tribute, with raigeki and spirit reaper.
@@uuh4yj43 then the show wouldn’t be very exciting would it
Or, more precisely, he likely has the ability to draw any card he wants about two or three times per duel.
99% of people using Yugi's deck fail because they don't believe in the heart of the cards
Are you saying yugi's grandpa didn't believe in the heart of the cards???
@@Msg_Soy not enough to win lol
Nahhh
In Duellist Kingdom Exodia would've been nearly unbeatable: The opponent can't attack directly and all you have to do to avoid losing is have 1 monster on the field at the end of your turn... that being said all you'd have to do is set monsters in defence mode until you inevitably draw it. Only one card in Duellist Kingdom could combat this (Pegasus's Prophecy Trap). Combine this with Dark Magician and Summoned Skull which were hard to beat for duellists of the time and the deck was extremely oppressive.
Battle City: There was a limit placed in this tournament of just 40 cards (since Yugi shows 60 cards this means he'd have to side cards in and out... we see him doing this on screen multiple times in the Blimp).
It's likely that he changes the focus of his deck depending on who he is duelling.
Although he seems to have a preference for weird gimmicks over consistency...
He also for some reason has a preference towards Alpha The Magnet Warrior, the weakest of the three Magnets... siding Beta or Gamma in would work better for an offensive/defensive role. Same for Gazelle The King Of Mythical Beasts who shows up way more than he should.
(Yugi is also shown to have Cyber Jar which he never once plays).
He also seems to take out Dark Magician and Summoned Skull for a lot of the tournament, since he doesn't play it against seeker, Lumis/Umbra, Possessed Joey or Bakura (Summoned Skull makes 1 appearance against Seeker).
He seems to purposely brick his deck (even in the Kaiba duel) by siding in Chain Destruction and Collected Power. Both of which successfully brick his hand in that duel.
He does seem to switch between the Magnet and Poker Knight engines and has for the most part removed his bricks like Dark Magician, Red-Eyes, Slifer (For most of the Tournament), Valkyrion and Archfiend Of Gilfer.
Maybe he just didn't draw DM or summoned skull that game
we said the pharaoh was the king of games not the king of deck building
cyber jar was actually Kaiba's card, when we see Yugi use it it's because he added Kaiba's cards to his deck which REALLY would have messed up the consistency since we saw Yugi was mostly drawing into his cards during the duel and rarely drew into cards that probably would have bricked his hand.
you also have to take into account the anime offered WAY more means to draw cards.
Pot of greed, graceful charity, and card of sanctity, as well as card of demise were all legal and playable and were able to vastly help with drawing into resources. hell Yugi had access to the anime verion of monster recovery which was ideal for resource replenishment since if yugi had 1 card in hand, he could used recovery, return a monster to his hand then deck, and redraw 5 cards.
@@ShanaReviews I was referring to certain scenes in the anime where he is seen Deckbuilding in the Blimp. It is implied to be an option for him by this. maybe it was just a background card with a random picture and no distinct identity (like Arkana having Obelisk The Tormentor in his hand in the 4Kids Dub) but he is never seen using it outside of The Virtual World.
Best Yugi Deck is:
Monsters:
Dark Magician
Summoned Skull
Dark Magician Girl
(Gorz The Emisary Of Darkness: Manga)
Slifer The Sky Dragon (Substitute Obelisk Or Ra depending on preference).
Buster Blader
Curse Of Dragon
Mystical Elf
The Tricky
Swift Gaia The Fierce Knight
Watapon
Kuriboh
Kuribandit
Sangan
Witch Of The Black Forrest
Black Luster Soldier-Envoy Of The Beginning (seen in GX)
(Marshmallon: Little Yugi's card but I don't want to add to many of those)
Spells:
Monster Recovery
Monster Reborn
Brain Control
Change Of Heart
Pot Of Greed
Graceful Charity
Card Of Sanctity
Mystical Refpannel
Dark Magic Curtain
Soul Taker
Dark Hole
Card Destruction
Emblem Of Dragon Destroyer
Magic Cylinder (Spell in Anime)
Polymerization x2
De-fusion (Which just defuses things, not necessarily just Fusion Monsters)
Swords Of Revealing Light
Fiend Sanctuary
Multiply
Negate Attack (Manga)
Monster Replace (This Places a monster on the field (Not summoning... placing... he can Place Obelisk or Slifer on the Field and it wouldn't return to its previous location)
(Timaeus: Optional)
Traps:
Lifeshaver
Mirror Force
Spellbinding Circle
Mystical Refpannel
Disgraceful Charity
Regulation Of Tribe
Natural Selection
Extra Deck: (Cards he is known to play by Anime, Manga and WCS Events)
Dark Paladin
Ebon High Magician
Quintet Magician
Arcana Knight Joker (Side Deck option)
Gaia The Dragon Champion (Sie Deck Option)
Chimaera The Flying Mythical Beast (Side Deck Option)
Dark Flare Knight (Because Why Not)
Black Skull Dragon (Because Why Not)
Meteor Black Dragon (Because Why not)
Dragon Master Knight (Because why not)
Side:
Kings, Queens and Jacks Knight
Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Valkyrion The Magnet Warriors
Gazelle and Berfomet
Mystical Space Typhoon
Mage Power (Movie)
Magicalised Fusion
Premature Burial
Mystic Box
Dust Tornado
Maybe Gaia The Fierce Knight
Criticism: He needs more Light monsters for the chaos strategy and he needs more fusion substitutes like King Of The Swamp (this will allow him to cut a lot of his bricks like Buster Blader and will allow him to more easily reach Dragon Master Knight, Black Skull Dragon and Gaia The Dragon Champion (Without having to run Gaia The Fierce Knight) and will allow him to reach monsters like Dark Flare Knight).
He also needs more XYZ, Links and Synchros.
He could also make use of modern support like the Gaia, Buster Blader, Dark Magician cards, (Red Eyes Dark Dragoon, BLS Chaos Soldier).
Pros: His Deck has stupid Draw Power, excellent field disruption, The Ability to easily reach any card in his deck, at least 1 god card (borderline unbeatable) and a decent Fusion line up... with the right additions he could be a big threat threat to a real life opponent with his broken anime cards.
@@therealsilverking4802 this also begs the question as to the rarity and printings of each card because Yugi having a game shop that sells the cards should have had access to some of the substitutes, among others. we know blue eyes has only 4 printings, the god cards are at 1 and even raigeki (which btw in the manga and anime was said to be banned along with LP burners like Hinotama and meteor of destruction).
one wonders how the scarcity of these cards is and how easy or hard is it to obtain them if you're not pegasus
Unforgivable Continuity Error #72
S4 E32: Rafael digs up a duel disk years before Kaiba Corp even considered development on them.
Magic
That's the powah of tha Orichacamalos mayn.
S4, my beloved
It doesnt really make sense to judge yugis first couple decks by the later games standards. Obviously theyre not going to be good like duh...even judging them with GOAT standards is too unfair because its literally the very first couple releases fo cards. Of course they get beat by later cards. Really a waste of time to analyze them like this sorry to say. I like your channel but...this is just naaaaa
There's also the fact that the early ruleset in the OCG was much different than the even _the first Advanced format,_ let alone the fact that the ruleset for the _anime/manga_ during the Duelist Kingdom Saga was far different than even the first OCG ruleset. Hell, the Battle City rules had some clear differences from the Advanced Format too!
Example: Direct Attacking was not allowed during the Duelist Kingdom Arc, and you get one attack per turn.
EDIT: On top of all of this, the Millenium items in the classic show, and then the Duel Spirits introduced in GX implying the cards in Yugioh are all sentient, actually throws regular card math into disarray, because how often you draw a card _might have more to do with how much that card likes you,_ rather than standard ratios.
Yugi's deck was bad for that era as well though. The best decks had 1900 ATK beaters and battle trap cards and spells.
Not to mention picking dark magician over summoned skull every time. Even times when skull would have been more useful @zeroflame33
@@zeroflame33 That was in the TCG. In the OCG, _Celtic Guardian was actually considered a meta card for awhile._
@aliesterus1.023 wait, what? When was Celtic guardian meta?
Yugis destiny draw makes his deck composition meaninless because he can draw the exact card he needs when he needs it so all he needs it ways to stall and get the most out of his broken cards he can reuse. You could argue his fodder is just there to make people underestimate him and set up a board he can wipe/steal
He's basically a cheater
That's not how his destiny draw works, his "destiny draw" only works if he is losing and it doesn't give him a card to win it give him a card to survive
"He can draw the exact card he needs when he needs it"
In other words, he's using Forbidden Memories' final six AI.
@@costelinha1867 Meteor B Dragon and Blue eyes ultimate dragons for days
As far as Grandpa Mutou's Deck and Duelist Kingdom, there's a few points I want to bring up.
First, as far as the anime is concerned, Ritual monsters are not Summoned from the hand; Yugi never actually draws into BLS or Magician of Black Chaos, instead gaining the ability to use them by drawing into their specific Spell Cards; this would imply that anime/manga Ritual monsters sat in the Extra Deck, helping with SOME (not all) of the consistency issues. Worth noting is that anime/manga Thousand-Eyes Restrict has the real game's prevention of attacks, which was stopped by Black Chaos "putting enemy monsters to sleep" on Summon, implying some degree of effect negation, and the Rituals were pretty severely nerfed for real play.
Second, Battle City introduces the Advance Rules, as the OCG called them even they debuted for the real game; Advance Summons, or Tribute Summons in the TCG, did not exist until Battle City in the anime/manga, and the first few episodes of that arc are used to show off and explain the new rules for anyone who didn't have an official rulebook. By that metric, Summoned Skull and Dark Magician are, by all accounts, equivalent in power. Add in the high rarity of strong low-Level monsters (Kaiba's Battle Ox and La Jinn were drawn with gold text in a few scenes, implying that they were Ultra Rares, and everyone was canonically surprised by the likes of Gemini Elf), Effect monsters barely being a thing, and the vanillas with low stats make a lot more sense.
Also, the grandpa deck had blue eyes, for like 10 minutes
They also implies that anything that have somewhat High atk on the card were SUPER rare.(only 4 blues eyes in the world?!)
I don't think the idea of a extra deck existed back in Duelist Kingdom. Considering how RPG-esqe the duels were, it looked more like the system for the duel arenas had a means of transforming and merging speficic monsters. What kind of logic being used I can't say
@@felinaotsu3161 In terms of what was in the game, no, the Ritual Spell basically just Summons the Ritual monster from the ether. But, as far as mechanics for a functional game, as this video tries to describe, the Extra Deck is probably the best fit.
What’s more confusing is bro had 3 gods a bunch of high level monsters how the bell did he never brick
H E A R T O F T H E C A R D S
I mean in the context of season q anime, no sacrafices and direct attacks, even though it is a requirement to play a monster every turn, it makes sense why the deck is full of monsters, but also vanilla monsters like Dark Magician and Summon Skull are actually good
For duelist kingdom, Yugi originally had Time Wizard so he also has Dark Sage.
@RUN11690 for Duelist Kingdom, it's implied that polymerization, time wizard, toon world, and metalmorph somewhat, all generate new cards that you don't have to own in order to utilize.
Polymerization can fuse any two monsters in the game together, time wizard can age any monsters to varying degrees of usefulness, toon world can turn any monster into a toon and so on. These effects are possible in a fictional story and maybe a video game if you really wanted to expend an extreme amount of development resources, but were obviously impossible in a physical card game and had to be severely altered.
So I don't think Yugi ever actually had a copy of Dark Sage. But since he originally owned time wizard he probably researched how his effect could impact every card in his deck before including it.
Duelist Kingdom doesn't require tributes, you can't judge it based on battle city rules
In fairness, the video was about being able to play a version of Yugi’s deck in real life. As fun as it would be to just assume Duelist Kingdom Rules, you aren’t going to be challenging your friend to a Duelist Kingdom, no Tributes needed game rather than a standard match
This whole video is about analysing how viable these decks would be ON THE ACTUAL TCG! Not even in battle city. Also, what rules? There weren't really well established rules in DK, they just made shit up on the fly.
You can totally judge it by battle city rules. I don't see why we couldn't. It's *very* easy to do.
@@costelinha1867 there where rules in DK
The anime just fucked it up and ignored them
@@robertparkhurst4034jokes on you we play how we want 🤣
Yugi is from an Era where 3000 beat sticks ruled. His deck makes alot of sense
5:32 with no tribute rules, why wouldn’t you play all level 8 monster?
Level 8s are rare in the anime I think
Their unreasonably rare, to the point in which millionaires can only afford like 6 of them.
@@jobhunter5090 I actually didn't know this haha. makes more sense, now
@OfficialRedTeamReview yeah, it was the original vision for Magic when Richard Garfield designed it in 1992. The thought was that rare cards could be incredibly overpowered because people would only be able to find 1 or 2 for their collections. The game became way more popular than expected, and he wasn't able to predict that the secondary market would appear. The first iteration of Magic rules was 40 card decks with no limit on the number of copies of any cards you could put in the deck.
To this day, I believe the creator thinks the best way to play Magic is limited (sealed, where you only get 6 packs to make a deck with, or draft, where a pod of 8 players have 3 boosters each and draft them together). In those environments, decks really do have limited access to rare cards and can practically never have access to run more than one copy of a given rare.
When Kazuki Takahashi based a game on Magic in the manga he probably wanted to recreate the experience of limited or being a casual player with a very tiny budget and the exciting, and significantly varied games that came from that.
Yugi's first deck in the anime is close to unbeatable in the rule set. If he made a deck of only monsters, he'd win every duel because you cannot attack directly and could only declare one attack a turn. A deck of only monsters means every turn Yugi can put a creature down to not lose the duel while eventually drawing into Exodia guaranteed.
Yugi's first deck is damn near impossible to beat by the duel monsters S1 rules.
Which is why it's sucks in today game.
Aside from the final decks used in the ceremonial battle and in The Dark Side of Dimensions, Yugi/Atem's deck(s) barely had any symmetry and relied heavily on the Millennium Puzzle's probability manipulation. Was basically a rogue deck with a bit more spellcaster support.
True, I have already written the script for the entirety of yugis decks in the anime, and the funny thing is that yugis deck in the cerimonial duel is actually the closest thing to a competent deck that has synergy in the anime.
It's more like a toolbox deck. You gotta consider the state of the game on the very first cards, like a comment above suggested.
Yugi’s deck isn’t supposed to “make sense.” The whole thing was about being somewhat clever and having more faith than your opponent. People in this world play duel monsters backwards and basically only pick cards they’ve seen others use or what they think will win, but the game was initially supposed to be about picking what you felt connected to and what you thought was cool, and finding a way to make it work, using creativity. If you’re analyzing Yugi’s deck using generic analytics, then you’ll never understand it. People joke about the “Heart of the Cards,” but it’s just intelligence mixed with faith, that’s a real thing, people use it in sports all the time. It’s a shame that the franchise that coined the phrase has so many participants who miss the point. Idk why some people play the game, they don’t even enjoy it, really. 😂
I also think the same bro. People became way too serious with this and it ruined the game. This game was all about summoning your fav monster and winning the duel. Now is extremely convoluted.
You don’t generally win tournaments with originality, and people like to win. If you want to be original and win, you need to be extremely well versed in the rest of the game and build within the realm of what is powerful.
I get into that debate with some of my buds, they build their deck to be tournament level but thats not fun for me, id rather play bullshit character decks because thats fun for me 🙂
Real world Yu-Gi-Oh and Anime Yu-Gi-Oh are two completely different things and it's getting really annoying having people try to use constructive criticism while comparing the two as if they're both to share the same rules regulations and expectations of each. The statement that's not what that card does no that's not what that card does anymore. The anime and the manga were the first to do it so for all intents and purposes that's not what it does anymore.. big difference
That was the best explanation about yugioh and overall deckbuilding.
ANYTHING makes sense when you have the Heart of the Cards.
There you go
Or the power of friendship! 😃
It's a nice video, but anime-cheese aside (basically pseudo-filler not accounting for battle city rules at times) it's made pretty clear the characters ran 40-card decks when it came to the battle royal
so while synergy and consistency can be issues when it comes to these anime decks (i've bricked as soulburner before like 3 matches not duels but matches in a row) their qualities goes up a fair bit
i think the big thing about the anime world is that a 4000 life point format favors control decks (and generic burn decks but battle city forced a change there) more than ftk/otk decks, makes it so that clearing your opponent's board even once is a very likely win (i was also trying out "progression duels and "draft duels" to cop a feel for how the 4000 LP format felt for some months now)
like, as far as GX era goes, the value of Doble Passe goes up wildly if you're willing to take a direct hit to damage your foe, since your next attack will be a direct one as well, and weaker monsters like Gray Wing are just waiting for a single opening to go crazy when having 8000 life points won't do much but dent/chip your foe down instead
I'd personally say, once we hit late ARC-V & VRAINS, ftk/otk decks do catch up with control decks there, since their damage output from a singular attack and ability to negate effects are more live, making the need to dance around traps not as necessary
To be fair, in the game's early years it was much harder to make a comeback after a board wipe. Most of the good board clears and comeback cards were Forbidden early on for this reason. In the current day, many of the power cards that were purely "comeback cards" like Change of Heart, Monster Reborn etc, are going back to 1 copy, meanwhile the card advantage power spells are not.
Yugi's deck perfectly represents all of our decks back in 2002 though 😂
I remember feeling so cool with my Dark Magician, Red Eyes, Blue Eyes, Exodia deck
23 minutes to not realize the card game rules didn't even exist when this came out
Rules existed, but in the manga, Grandpa says that the game is so popular because new expansions and new rules, so the game never gets old
In Duelist kingdom there are new rules, and in Battle City Kaiba use the Super Expert Rules. For example, the rule of waiting one turn for fusioned monsters or the ban rule for cards like Hinotama
@@nicolasarroyo1746not when the manga was released.
things like card advantage and dead draws are still applicable to whatever the fuck they played in the show
@@OlgaZuccati less cards to draw back then though. And they did run pots of greed
Also while not a stated rule, aside from Kaiba's three blue eyes, everyone seems to run one copy of cards.
It was that time when yugi fusion sumoned joys firewarior with dark magician. New monster was created just for the plot.
Grandpa’s deck isn’t actually too bad when compared to the cards that were actually available when the game came out. Vanilla monsters were everywhere and effect monsters were rare when the initial decks came out, literally in the single digits
Yeah, and if even Kaiba, who loves high ATK monsters, had friggin Hitotsu-Me Giant in his deck, imagine how rare the strong level 4 monsters were back then lol
Yeah there is progression in the series as effect monsters becomes more things changes. That beginning of Yu-Gi-Oh grandpa deck isn't bad
@@VinTheDirector I still remember when Panther Warrior was considered cool because it had 2000 atk at level 4, even though it needed a tribute to attack lol. The power creep is real.
Panther warrior was never good. Even my favorite card Neo The Magic Swordsman who is 4star with 1700 atk wasnt even considered good. Or my later favorite Dark Blade who had 1800 atk and was 4 stars was also a rather bad card compared to all the 1900 atk beatsticks that existed since duelist kingdom era of the card game.
Yeah but you could combo him w/scapegoats to allow him an attack and protect your board. Stuff like Gemini Elf though kinda made it pointless. And I think LaJinn was also one of the best lvl beaters early on.
A lot of these can be explained simply by side decking, which the anime shows the characters side decking their decks multiple times throughout the show, which is why some of the more specific cards might be there
Edit: Also where are the rest of yugi's decks? The video just ends after battle city.
Let's be honest, Yugi's deck was 40 blank cards and they filled in as he drew them to be whatever he wanted them to be
Just because you don't believe in the heart of cards and you're incapable of drawing the card you want in each turn doesn't mean the Yugi's Deck sucks, ok?
He runs a toolbox deck with a handful of gimmicks, with no searches and little cohesion, held up by the millenium puzzle's magic deck stacking powers.
Great for a story where big flashy counterplays and hard to prep boss monsters with no protection looks cool.
Terrible for any real game.
Actually tht kind of deck is what made yugi fun to watch you didnt know what he haf because there was no synergy
Counterpoint: heart of the cards baby
Hello Duelist Kingdom Era had no scarifies nor where the rules back then the same as modern times. Don't talk tribute summon when there was no tribute summon in Duelist Kingdom Era.
This was cut out of the video, however initially I had it set that all decks were applied to the same battle city rules, as trying to analyse one decks power with another set of rules would have been tricky to do, whilst holding the rest of the decks under a different set of rules.
I Really Don’t Care about the Anime Duelist KINGDOM Era Rules! Those rules only apply to that Focus point in the series, especially when you remember the Field Mechanics were Very different and Better Explained in the SUB!
Battle CITY is the Definitive Yugioh! And Even then, Yugi’s Deck Still doesn’t mAke any sense due to the Hodgepodge Nature of All the Cards at the time!
@@Monoanalysis why would cut it out if it gave important context?
Because I uploaded it initially, but realised that the retention was bad as it took 3 minutes to even explain the rules, (which set of rules I was using), how sometimes anime effects were different even in the same arc, how I can’t use duelist kingdoms ruleset because some of them are essentially just “do whatever you want within reason”, where most people just want to get ahead to the actual content of the video, which is looking at yugis decks. I would have added a tiny disclaimer instead, but as TH-cam only allows cutting and not adding content I had no choice but to cut it.
I like to think that Yami Yugi is just way ahead of our collective understanding of the game's meta. He intuitively comes up with stuff that beats out the top tier decks he goes up against, using cards that the community at large has overlooked.
Honestly, Yugi’s decks may not be very competitive in the real world, especially by 2024 standards, but they actually synergize among themselves really well. You can craft a really versatile deck from the pool of cards he’s used across the years.
The decks porpuse wasnt necessarily meant to be support or anything based via chemistry relation, since the milllenium puzzle has probability manipulation its good for consistent wins through outs and massive plays via specific win conditions, The millenium puzzles prob manipulation activates only when yugi is about to lose or has a critical situation needed to be surpassed.
I love the idea that the deck is DESIGNED to almost immediately be on the cusp of losing because of how bad it is, so that you can then top-deck your hyper-specific answer and win. Every card in the deck is part of a build-around, and you're not building around a combo or a specific card, you're building around a magic artefact that you own.
In a tv show, a deck's consistency is kind of a detriment. Its more interesting to watch Yugi employ different strategies episode to episode than just running the same engine multiple times per duel for 200-some episodes.
I think people spend too much time analyzing the cards instructions based on the show and real life. You are all forgetting the meaning of the show. FRIENDSHIP! HEART OF THE CARDS!
Yugi’s duelist kingdom deck had the Living Arrow. That card did whatever you needed it to do lmao
10:29 "Alpha with the highest ATK" bro the cards are right there
That was a brain fart moment I can’t lie 😬
The original game wasn't that consistent to begin with. There were lots of non effect really trash monsters with really only a handful of good ones, which is why kaiba went so far to collect all the really good base stat line ones and spent all that money putting his deck together.
The other duelists in the show didn't really have super consistent decks either except for the theme decks, and even then they had some duds as well.
The show was built around only showing 1 specific strategy to win per duel and it's specific counter. It wasn't made to win the same way every time, it was supposed to be a chaotic mess of cards that could pull off near any "strategy" with the "heart of the cards" to give you exactly what you need when you need it to pull off the combo that in real life almost never happens.
You should rate them based on the era and rules of the anime at the time
this video reminds me of when I was figuring out the best way to build Yugis deck from his card pool from the anime. Great video!
Growing up is realizing that almost every deck in the anime is pretty much completely useless competitively and complete trash.
Well, at least in Vrains some of the archtype and cards have record in competitive game
The early game wasn't around archetype, so it was mostly "what is cool and what fits the character". I know that the side manga Yu-Gi-Oh R tried to do something where he would exclusively use Dark attribute monsters.
I feel this is a good video of showing how much the anime screwed up Yugi deck by either adding random nonsense or just trying to make the deck more legit. I do want to clear up something though, Yugi changes his deck up during the battle city semi finals adding in the poker knights as he needed a way to summon slifer quickly. The other thing which is I feel you should also mention the original manga situation of cards to show how it was much more viable like for example Valykion was supposed to be a fusion monster similar to xyz dragon cannon but for some reason they didn’t do that.
This was an enjoyable watch. I’d be interested to see if a similar analysis could be done with other characters like Joey or Kaiba, or even other protagonists like Jaden
12:10 yeah I can't really argue with this, this is how I'd fix it.
Gazelle Retrain :
When this card is Normal or Special Summoned you can add 1 "Berformet" from your deck to your hand. While you control a face up "Berformet" you can Special Summon this card from your hand and if you do add 1 "Polymerization" from your deck to your hand.
Berformet Retrain: (lvl 4 not 5)
When this card is Normal or Special Summoned you can add 1 "Gazelle the King of Mythical Beasts" from your deck to your hand. While you control a face up "Gazelle the King of Mythical Beasts" you can Special Summon this card from your hand and if you do you can add 1 "Polymerization" from your deck to your hand.
Chimera Retrain: (Atk is 2300)
Must first be Fusion Summoned. Your opponent cannot activate Spells or Traps during the Battle Phase. When this card is sent from the field to the GY you can Special Summon 1 "Gazelle the King of Mythical Beasts" or "Berformet" from your GY in face up defense position.
This not only makes Chimera much better since he freezes Spells and Traps but it turns Gazelle and Berformet into 1 card combos to summon him, making this strategy very consistent.
We all know Rebeca had the best Deck in the series.
the fact that he used this deck and still mostly wins means he is truly the KING OF GAMES.
Yugi rebuilds his deck in preparation for each opponent with the exception of the initial battle city duels since he could be dueling anyone. Hence, his deck that he uses against Kaiba that included Dark Paladin and Slifer is not the same as the deck he plays vs Arkana and also different from the deck his uses vs Marik
0:19 that's what protagonists are their always powerful no matter what that the artist/creators, make their attitude kind of dumb/clueless at some point most of them are like that. They made all main characters in anime like that even if yugi don't have strong cards, he can still manage to get out in a tight situation win his battles to opponents have strong decks. They won't be considered as the main character of that anime series, if they can't beat their opponent have strong advantage, from the start a good example of mc that is like that is Son Goku.
Plot armor is powerful when you have the creators crafting it on you...hell they also have it where it can possibly protect you from immorality when things get tough 😂
The rules of the first season (I think):
Ritual monsters are in the extra deck (so it's the same as fusion monsters in term of card disadvantage). You cannot attack your opponent directly the same turn you destroyed by battle one of their monsters. No tribute summons (you can normal summon anything without tribute). Also, several "vanilla" monsters are shown to have effects (the elf singing to reduce an opponent's monster's attack, the giant soldier destroying the moon)
*Weevil throws Exodia*
Yugi: WHY TF YOU DO THAT?
Weevil: YOUR DECK IS F**KING SUCKS WITH THAT EXODIA WHY U USE THAT IF YOU ARE NOT GONNA SUPPORT THAT CONSISTENCY??
Wtf is wrong with your grammar son?
One thing you forgot… believing in the heart of the cards which give you plot armor… L essay for not thinking about this 😂😂😂 (great video bro)
To be fair, the Millennium Puzzle of Unity seems to have the ability to manipulate the odds of allies and friends to being in the right place/getting a perfect chance to help Yugi and Yami Yugi in times when they need help. This is significant because we have been shown that some cards have souls or partially contain the soul of their original owner. This ability tends to make the normally inconsistent decks brokenly powerful.
I wonder why people pretend to forget that tcg rules didn’t exist when manga came out. Duelist kingdom arc was like D&D with cards.
Also everyone forget yugi in Duelist Kingdom arc was forced to replace the five exodia pieces with 5 weak monsters he was siding on the ship
Pretty much. In the original series it showed up only twice as a game and wasn't intended to be a full series. So its rules were left vague and unbalanced so that the writer could do whatever he wanted that he thought would be cool in that moment. Since the game rules weren't formalized yet this carried over to duelist kingdom which then affected the anime despite it airing when the game was finally released. Battle city was an attempt to fix this and bring the manga (and thus the anime) more in line with the official rules, albeit with a few minor tweaks to help with pacing and to give the writer a bit of flexibility in the writing.
Imagine exodia's final part being face down at the bottom of the deck, you'd win if you draw it but 35 ish turns is quite a long duel
This was a great video I love the visual kf showing all the cards in the deck that we see throughout the series
Would love to see you analyse more anime decks such as Joey's or Kaiba's! This was a great watch!
Thanks to algorithm that I found your channel! I hope to see more of these videos from you.
Yeah right? I’m so glad I stumbled across this. I can’t wait for further uploads!
I’m confused why you consider tribute summons for the pegasus arc. That didn’t become a thing until kaiba’s tournament.
to be fair during the 1st season there were not many 4 star monsters that had more than 1500... matter of fact quite a few 5 star monsters had around 1500 lol so the low atk is viable during the time
I would love to see how you would change these classic cards & decks to be better designed in those early seasons.
For instance, I would change DM Girl to be level 4, and Dark Magician to be level 5 & give it an ability.
It doesn't matter, because he can summon pot of greed and draw three additional cards
That math is definitely wrong lmao
Thank you for having a more grounded approach to this topic. However, I do think this raises the question of how much better or worse everyone's elses decks were in comparison. As awful as Yugi's decks might be, they only have to be better than his opponents'.
The thing is, you can't says that yugi have all of the card. Look at the blue eyes, there only 3 available. So, if you says he should use card A instead of card B is dumb. Because he most probably doesn't have card A.
9:49 it took me till now to realise that Buster Blader is 90% legs
To be fair to Ragnarok, it actually says it removes from play all *cards* your opponent controls. Not just monsters. But yeah, it's super situational.
Burning Land does nuke active field spells when played, but it's also a consistent 500LP burn each turn to the active player, so if you manage to keep an LP advantage higher than 500LP you can eventually burn away a lot of their life until you get the chance to hit them direct with monsters.
I think a big thing about the Duelist Kingdom decks is that Yugi was in a rough equilibrium with the people around him. The anime, in particular, based on the playmat games at school seemed to imply the overall power level of duel monsters was something closer to the Dark Duel Stories/(Yu-gi-oh! Duel Monsters!) games on the gameboy, where you started playing with common collectibles of Kuriboh's power level, and your starting ace is something like Frog the Jam.
In that environment, Yugi's mixed deck for Duelist Kingdom seems pretty heckin strong, and most of the people he plays against are of similar power level, he only really seems to be super far behind against Kaiba, who uses his fortune to bypass rarity, and Pegasus, who has single-print gimmicks.
Modern TCG rules have been significantly power-crept and "combo-crept" because those decks, which were portrayed as elite in the story, became the default start pack IRL.
Love the video. Younger me thought Yugi's deck was OP, so I went out to get (mostly) every card to play against my friends. Older me can't believe I didn't play something else lol. I thought Dark Magician was the shit...It's shit alright lol
At least Summoned Skull was good for its time for the stats
I think the single most confounding card for me in DM is dark energy. They said it triples the attack of ANY dark monster. Think of all the times that shit could have otked someone with incredibly basic monsters. Especially in duelist kingdom where people had 2000 lp.
His deck isnt supposed to make sense his power is he pulls the exact card he needs when he believes. He wills his deck to exist as he needs it
the Yugioh video game, Legacy of the Duelist, did make Yugi's decks feel more powerful by filling them out with cards that help strongly with the situational duel.
For example, cards like Sangan and Heart of the Underdog make it easier to get all of Exodia in your hand during the duel against Kaiba.
And in the duel against Mako, Yugi's deck had Attack the Moon, a card based on the strategy he used to defeat Mako in the anime, along with Guardian Golem, just so he had more rock-type monsters to use with that card.
to be fair, it was when the game first came out. The anime is based on the manga, and in the original manga, the game wasn't even an official game yet. I'd say a realistic version of Yugi's deck is the last duel with Atem vs Yugi,which is split between the 2, but does make sense in terms of an early game play style. One of my favorite duels in the series actually.
What I've found playing various versions of Yugi's deck (I did a gauntlet of decks from Link Evolution against each other) is that Yugi's deck is mostly good when it can cheat out Dark Magician with multiple copies of Monster Reborn & Graceful Charity.
Grandpas deck feels like it’s the definition of casual play. Does it always win? No. Is he a tournament grinder? No. Is it fun and easy to use while teaching new players how to play the game? Yes.
Hey, put some respect on Grandpa's deck. Not only were 1500 attack point monsters rare, thus he has a powerful beat down gameplan, but you were not allowed to make direct attacks if your opponent summoned a monster on their last turn so by forgoing spells and traps that meant you could stall out indefinitely until Exodia won the game, a tactic no one else could attempt as Exodia was so rare only an archeologist like Grampa had all five. Really, I don't think it would be possible to build a better deck than Grampa's deck.
@@brennantmi5063 that does makes sense the fact rex is a runner up with a two headed king rex. so I guess this means most enemy players have like 1000 atk or less
Since Yugi has Dark Magician, the magician would give Yugi the right cards he needs at the right time.
The millennium items all had different powers yugi had the most powerful one the puzzle had the power of probability like domino from x-men basically the power of luck
I always think of it that way that the series played in our past and thats why the competition back then wasn't as optimized as today's decks
I'll defend some of Yugi's card from Battle City and beyond. Chimera is actually the very beginning of a case study into what Yu-Gi-Oh! had to do to make fusion summoning a competent mechanic. Because right out of the gate, between the materials and the Polymerization card, fusion summoning effectively threw half of your opening hand into the garbage for a beatstick that didn't even equal the sum of its parts. Berfomet could technically search the other fusion material (if you could get around the damn tribute summon), and Chimera revives one of the materials if it dies. There was an attempt here to compensate for the loss of card advantage that's inherent to fusion summoning, and for Caveman Yu-Gi-Oh! standards, it wasn't terrible.
There was a similar situation with Kaiba's Twin Headed Thunder Dragon, where the fusion material can discard itself for two extra copies of itself to facilitate the fusion summoning. It wasn't that good, but as far as turning fusion summoning into a competent mechanic, it was at least a start.
Also, I'll defend Buster Blader. Yugi's Battle City deck had next to no synergy, but Buster Blader was at least a meta tech choice given the circumstances. We're talking about a level 7 tribute summon whose stats and effect are specifically designed to get over Kaiba's Blue-Eyes. In fact, if the manga (and the portion of the anime that was adapting the manga) copied the TCG effect of Buster Blader, this guy would counter Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon ON IT'S OWN. 500 extra ATK for every Dragon on field and in grave means 500 for the Ultimate Dragon itself, plus 1500 for the fusion materials in grave. That would've been 4600, JUST ENOUGH to get over the 4500 fusion beatstick.
His deck only works because of the Millennium Puzzle. Basically for those who don’t know, the MP can tell who’s winning a match and knows every card in the game, what they do, and where they are. If it senses its user is losing it will give it a card to change the tides. The more desperate the situation, the stronger counter you draw.
Basically the Puzzle rigs RNG in its user favour whenever they are put on the back foot. So basically it’s impossible to win against anyone using the puzzle unless there’s literally no guarantied win con. Basically you need to start on equal footing, and draw a card that counters literally anything Yugi can throw at you in one go. If you can’t do that, then you just lose, as winning doesn’t become a possibility, but only a matter of time.
I just made a Yugi battle City profile but a 2024 version and it makes a lot of sense and strong. I liked it so much i made my own anime to show it off. 👍
I think what the Anime doesn't convey is that cards were hard to obtain. It was a deck filled with a lot of one offs.
They don’t need to make sense when you can draw whatever you want at will
Mystical Refpanel is also so situational that it's got a specific list of card that it can be used on, and there were not many back then,
That is why he is the king of game. I mean, have you seen him destroy the moon, Peak.
I mean, you mentioning how Yugi's deck requires a lot of cards in hand kinda goes well in battle city with Card of Sanctity, he can essentially Pop-off with his high-cost cards and then just Card of Sanctity back with no issue. would it work in the real world, probably not, but it does seem like a strategy.
In the sub of Yu-Gi-Oh GX Season 4, this is actually covered. Decks are built to only work with that Duelist's Soul.
Cyrus tried to use Zane's deck, and the deck kept bricking him. Everything was a dead draw because decks go back to being "regular" draws without the proper duelist's soul.
but have you factored in the heart of the cards.
Back when the series started he didn’t really need a theme but after the game advanced they started giving him a more complete deck in the movies
Hey im not a big fan of the series but i find your breakdown and explanations interesting. I was hoping to pitch in a series idea where you could probably walkthrough cool or well known irl matches, tournament matches maybe. Id really like to watch these vids out there but i dont understand what’s going on and why big plays are big plays. Hope u think these seems entertaining enough to think about.
Valkyrion is super interesting, cause he's basically like the bridge point between rituals and the later contact fusion mechanics.
Yugi's deck makes perfect sense since he can draw whatever he wants. The best way to build a deck with that power is just add a whole.bunch of "what-if" cards like Berserker Soul or Lightforce Sword specifically to counter Exodia that one time.
By my recollection, Yugi used his grandfather's deck from the duel against Kaiba until the duel against Rebecca Hawkins.
Based off of that, if we make a list of every different card Yugi used (or appeared to use), that makes a 54 count deck list with Exodia and Time Wizard, 48 cards without (assuming one quantity of each card).
Funny that if you take all the pull of available cards from Atem/Yugi, you can build a pretty good and consistent spellcaster beatdown/control deck, only focusing on DM, DMG, DMOC and BLS Envoy (thanks to a powerful chaos engine) the majority of the spells and traps are the ones that were forbidden in the goat era, and he has a lot of draw power, usually you are not gonna be without monsters thanks to have a lot of cards to special summon magicians like crazy.
Even compared to later character decks (also some from Vrains), Atem can stand very well againt them.
If you just try to use the most iconic monsters like the Gods, Gaia, Buster blader, the magnets, then yeah the deck is trash unplayable, but playing it with head, it would surprise you how good it is
I think that the older original yugioh is better than later yugioh tcg