Yu-Gi-Oh! WCT 2006

Yu-Gi-Oh! Ultimate Masters Edition: World Championship Tournament 2006 has a title that's longer than necessary, but that's also true for this post; it'll be a screenshot LP, but I'm sure trying to keep that close to heart.

Containing the entirety of the card pool from the American boosters Legend of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon up to Shadow of Infinity, and then some (such as "promotional" cards), it's also the only Yu-Gi-Oh! game I know to have entire game modes dedicated to variant challenges (e.g. "use only Pyro monsters", "use 80 or more cards in your deck", "win after activating Ojama Delta Hurricane"). Those should be worth showing.

You might be amused by a look at the "old style" of Yu-Gi-Oh! in the same way that Microprose's Magic: The Gathering (alias "Shandalar") will amuse you with Killer Bees and Amulets of Kroog buzzing happily alongside undying Vintage staples, or shopkeepers' "pro tips" about casting Land Tax to feed Coral Helm. Sadly, none of the latter occurs in this game.

Don't know how to play YGO? Neither do I, for a certain definition thereof, so don't be dissuaded. For newcomers, I've tried to explain the game rules in "brief". If this is still too much (and I suspect it is, since I'm not good at brevity), perhaps it'll click gradually while "watching" the game itself.



This game has no story and none of the characters from the cartoon; instead, you will play card games against opponents called "Kuriboh" and "Battery Man C". I hope you like playing card games (I do).



Here's the first screen in a New Game after you've given your name and selected one of ten icons, none of which, I guarantee, will look remotely like yourself. (Both can be changed at any time, as can the game language. Truly a lost age in handheld gaming.)

The options are the so-called "Structure Decks" #1 to #6, which were, in fact, physical YGO products: pre-constructed decks designed to get players started on tournament play bundle Thestalos with a bunch of junk to sell him for a fixed $15 or so on the primary market. Sharks. None of these decks are good representations of a tournament deck of their time, but they aren't completely out of touch, unlike me. The choice doesn't matter that much, as you'll quickly acquire many more cards in this game, but this will still define the first 4-6 hours of gameplay and can jump-start you on an archetype.

An overview of the starting decks shall follow, with listings in spoilerpops. If you don't know these cards, I've marked "staples" of the era with asterisks, and archetype enablers or "niche staples" with asterisks in parentheses. Note that Premature Burial isn't marked, despite being an excellent card (an equipment that resurrects a monster from your graveyard), because you start the game with one copy no matter what -- and it's a Limited card.

If you want, you can now help me Select First Deck. Time allotted for voting: 24 hours. If you have no idea what all or any of the cards do, but the description sounds interesting, "just vote" -- the game won't change much in the long run.

tldr: Pick between solid Zombie-tribal aggro that "cheats" Tribute monsters into play repeatedly by various means (#2), WATER-tribal prison with a field nuke, interesting support, and a single point of failure (#4), or a Breaker + Tsukuyomi + 3x MoF + Swords tournament-level control core stuck in a meaningless and mediocre tribal shell (#6). The odd-numbered decks are just inferior, and not in any way I'd call interesting.

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DRAGON'S ROAR



Signature Play: Masked Dragon can search Armed Dragon LV3 when destroyed by combat, which turns into Armed Dragon LV5 at the beginning of your turn, by its effect. This cheats around the tribute requirement for the bigger dragon. By itself, Armed Dragon LV3 (1200/900) generally just dies during your opponent's battle phase, but not if he has already exhausted all his attacks into Masked Dragons. Then you play Stamping Destruction to remove enemy traps, and bash face with your semi-respectable dragon.

(Armed Dragon LV5 has 5* / 2400 ATK / 1700 DEF and a situational effect that discards a monster to destroy a monster with less ATK than the discard... but only one card presently in the deck has more ATK than the Armed Dragon itself, so this won't remove combat obstacles often -- 2400+ DEF on monsters with < 2400 ATK would be another application, but this too is extremely rare. This dragon can also "evolve" into a dragon you don't have and can't acquire for some time, and once you can, there are better decks to build. Very emblematic.)

Pro: A pair of Noblemen (the most efficient killer of face-down monsters... but it's in the deck that can least hold the board with its monsters alone). Since MST is Limited, Stamping Destruction gives this deck more dedicated spell/trap removal than anyone else starts with. Two copies of Creature Swap. One copy of Call of the Haunted (which is Premature Burial as a trap card; it resurrects one of your monsters), which is another good way to fetch and safely morph Armed Dragon LV3. Super Rejuvenation, if you draw it from a booster, is Unlimited.

Contra: Except for Masked Dragon and Twin-Headed Behemoth (the latter charitably), your monsters are all awful. Luster Dragon won't die in combat with non-Tribute monsters, but that's all. The deck is a one-trick pony and the trick isn't impressive, nor interesting to play. The trap suite is impressively bloated with nonsense.


ZOMBIE MADNESS



Signature Play: T1 Call of the Mummy Special Summons the Tribute monsters Ryu Kokki / Vampire Lord / Despair from the Dark, or you can play Pyramid Turtle, which searches and Special Summons any of the former two. T2, you play Card of Safe Return and resurrect the fatty with Book of Life, drawing Spirit Reaper, summoning and attacking with it for hand and board advantage.

Pro: Pyramid Turtle is a serious candidate for the most insane search-summoner in the game; it can summon any Zombie of choice with 2000 or less DEF from your deck. The only limitation is that there aren't many good Zombies, but thankfully this deck comes with some of the best for its time: Ryu Kokki, Vampire Lord and Spirit Reaper (which is Unlimited here; briefly, it can't be destroyed by combat, though it also dies when targeted by any effect; the ). Zombies are also the deck with by far the most resurrection spells, as they can play the excellent Book of Life. As though that wasn't enough, this deck contains a great spell suite (save for Reload) relative to the rest. Card of Safe Return (also Unlimited!!) allows some hilarious broken decks that I plan to show off, and is a fine card here. What's more, the traps are all useful or better; the Evacuation Device can even situationally refresh Call of the Mummy by springing it on your own stuff. Tribal done right (for the era), and probably the most interesting deck in its initial state.

Contra: Some of the monsters are worthless (but at least they're still Zombies), and monsters are the bottleneck early on; in particular, it's more difficult to find good Zombies than good WATER or generic control monsters. Can draw dead cards easily. Doesn't have as much of a go-to booster pack to buy -- good Zombies are scattered all over the history of YGO. Doesn't evolve much beyond the cards you've already seen.


BLAZING DESTRUCTION



Signature Play: Forfeit.

But to humour this deck, which is at least better than the Dragon one, having two Solar Flare Dragons face-up on the field means your opponent can't attack and takes 1000 LP of damage during your End Phase; they can be searched by UFO Turtle. Alternatively, use Level Limit - Area B (forcibly switches all monsters with 4* or higher into Defense Position; Permanent Spell) and Raging Flame Sprite or the like.

Pro: UFO Turtle is a very good search-summoner -- as are all the 1500 ATK attribute searchers, which are contained in a booster pack that mostly contains junk otherwise, unless you've been desperately looking for nondescript Ritual monsters, or equipment that helpfully locks you into dead draws when it gets destroyed, or a spell that says "discard five to nuke the field", or a trap that destroys monsters with 500 ATK or less. However, said pack does contain some of the best spells in the game as well, and it's quite cheap to buy in bulk. This deck also starts with two Dust Tornados, and Level Limit - Area B can be used in many variants of the Burn archetype, as well as other prisons. Ultimate Baseball Kid is decent and, again, searchable via Turtle. Thestalos is one of the best Tribute monsters in the game (by design; all the "Monarchs" are).

Contra: The deck simultaneously tries to be a burn deck and a beatdown deck. Baseball Kid helps get value from all the monsters that get stuck when you activate Area B, but that's still not the mark of a clear plan. The monster suite is poor, the spell suite includes some questionable picks (Necklace of Command is one of the very few cards in this game that I had entirely forgotten the effect of), and the trap suite is some kind of practical joke. The nail in the coffin, though, is that the following deck is almost a straight upgrade.


FURY FROM THE DEEP



Signature Play: Tribute anything searched by Mother Grizzly to summon Daedalus, use its effect to nuke the field except for itself, play Salvage, laugh for the rest of the game.

Pro: WATER gets the best "tribal" support out of all the attributes thanks to A Legendary Ocean, a field spell that decreases the level of WATER monsters on the field and in the hand by 1, as well as giving them a small (200) ATK/DEF boost. The level decrease both cheats around Tributes for 5*/7* monsters (very powerful) and Gravity Bind (monsters with 4* or higher can't attack) in the case of 4* monsters; this is one of the few decks that can make good use of a Normal Monster, namely one that's 5*/WATER/2450 ATK. Besides which, about a dozen monsters directly reference A Legendary Ocean (technically not quite, but let's save the details for later) and acquire powerful effects (Mermaid Knight is deceptively good); needless to say, a one-Tribute dragon that nukes the field except for itself is ridiculously good. The Achilles heel is that once the Ocean bites it, you also will. Mother Grizzly is a better searcher than UFO Turtle. Mobius is another great Tribute monster (all the Monarchs are; that's their theme).

As if all that wasn't enough, this deck starts you with Tribe-Infecting Virus, an outstanding monster in any deck. Discard, name a monster type, and it destroys all face-up monsters of said type; better yet, you can use this effect multiple times per turn. While you're trading one-for-one in raw cards, mind that this robs your opponent of Normal Summon tempo -- either that, or he used his sources of Special Summoning -- and that the Virus can still attack afterwards, and at 1600 ATK, easily win against many relevant monsters. What's more, while its effect is nominally symmetric, this decks uses types like Aqua (which the Virus itself is) and Fish, which come up rarely otherwise.

A "silent" advantage is that all the cards you want to grab more copies of are contained in the Invasion of Chaos pack, which is one of the most important packs in the early history of YGO; it took until Cybernetic Revolution for the game to change by nearly as much again, and said revolution was due to one single card that pack contained ("guess which", it was Cydra). IOC contained great cards for anti-meta purposes and janky "casual" builds, too; I'll likely sing its praises later on.

Contra: The deck doesn't begin with a means of fetching Ocean or the nuclear dragon, contains a whole bunch of situational or bland cards that will rot in your hand, and many of the good cards won't mesh with the best cards in the game, because those aren't WATER monsters. You'll frequently auto-lose to getting your Ocean blasted or simply not drawing one while you play effect-less 1500/1300 monsters and cast Reload to draw more of them, except one less. Fenrir (from IOC, incidentally) is a disgrace, and I would have preferred The Aqua Spirit. Most of the important cards are 1-ofs, which means you'll draw Space Mambo instead.


WARRIOR'S TRIUMPH



Signature Play: Reinforcement of the Army fetches Marauding Captain, play it to summon the other one in your hand. Your opponent can't attack. Or RotA for whatever else you need, for that matter. The one-card signature play.

Pro: This is a "warrior toolbox", which isn't a real deck, but we'll get to that (maybe). The monster suite is one of the best, although the following deck probably beats it, but not on average. Decent Warriors are easy to acquire, although the one you'd want the most (Command Knight) isn't. All-stars that can go into "any" deck include DDWL, Exiled Force, and perhaps Mystic Swordsman LV2 (sideboard). Reinforcement is a great searcher, even outside the tribe, since many decks play a small suite of 4*-or-lower Warriors. Royal Decree, which prevents all (other) traps from working, is a tremendous prison effect (though not so much at one copy). Ben Kei can be used in a certain OTK deck, and Mataza/Sasuke are fine. Finally, you begin with Giant Trunade.

Contra: The deck has no genuine win condition; at most, you hope to grab the Captain lock while spot-removing their most important monsters. I don't even have to exert myself here; a one-sentence review is that this deck plays a bunch of random equipment (which is a bad idea, since equipped monsters generally trade two-for-one against generic destruction effects), yet contains two copies of Gearfried the Iron Knight (who automatically destroys all equipment attached to him) and two laughably unplayable cards that require Gearfried specifically.

Even non-Dadaist versions of warrior toolbox aren't decks in this meta, I think, although "not being a deck" doesn't exactly matter when playing YGO against the computer. I expect that many of my decks will be worse than warrior toolbox. Some of them not by choice or necessity.


SPELLCASTER'S JUDGMENT



Signature Play: Repeated Tsukuyomi on Magician of Faith behind Swords of Revealing Light / Nightmare's Steelcage, or whatever other means of limiting your opponent's attack you can find. Nothing else is required; you'll occasionally pull off stunts with Magical Dimension, but this is the gem at the deck's heart.

Pro: It contains 3 Magician of Faith and Tsukuyomi, both among the best monsters in the game individually, and an iconic duo in their time. For reference, MoF flips to fetch any spell card from your graveyard, and Tsuku turns a monster to face-down Defense Position when Normal Summoned, then returns to your hand in your End Phase. You can probably see where this goes if your opponent doesn't interrupt it immediately. The spell could be Pot of Greed (draw 2), for instance. As if this wasn't enough, Breaker is a contender for the best (non-Forbidden) individual monster in YGO at the time, and you have a copy of Chaos Sorcerer to get you started on the dominant archetype of the era. There are other good spellcasters; Phoenix of Nephthys isn't a tournament deck, but Apprentice Magician shines fetching Hand of Nephthys just as well as it does fetching MoF. Also contains Swords of Revealing Light (which is another great target for any MoF). You'd be surprised how good Royal Magical Library is against the computer, and once we can change the banlist, it's an OTK tool (a silly one).

Contra: Half the monsters are bad, half the spells are bad (lol Mystic Box), all the traps are bad except for Call of the Haunted (charitably, Spell Shield is a decent card to start with). The deck pretends that it wants to play big monsters and/or sling spells to grow them, and has no synergic theme beyond throwing a bunch of Spellcasters together (note that Tsuku / MoF don't care about each other being Spellcasters in the least), unlike the Zombie / WATER decks. Lack of both Creature Swap and Snatch Steal hurts, especially since your creatures aren't that good (and Tsukuyomi would interact well with both).

Regardless of your choice, you'll additionally receive a "starter deck" that contains, to its credit, about a dozen good cards (as well as another Heavy Storm that you can't use, since it's Limited and all structure decks already come with it):



(Which is where the third Magician of Faith comes from if picking Spellcaster's Judgment.)

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In a nutshell: I like CCGs and I like the GameBoy Advance, so I'll play Yu-Gi-Oh! (frozen in time to 2006) and build decks that will all be silly, but with some of them I won't notice as much, and I'll try to use my time traveller's advantage. Ojama Delta Hurricane will be activated at some point. Pre-made puzzles will be puzzled through, and maybe some emergent ones.

Spellcaster's Judgment


Is there any way you can get the screenshots to come out less blurry? It's not a huge issue, especially at GBA resolution, but it'd be nice.

Edited the screenshot; how's that looking? Illustrations will even look blurry on a DS Lite, but I should try to make the text appear crisp, yeah.

That seems a bit better, yeah.

FURY FROM THE DEEP

Dragons

You mention Zombies and the Deep both having quality cutoffs lategame, but Spellcaster's sounds like it has a lot of easily replaceable junk early on. My Vote's for a smooth transition into silly nonsense, at your convenience.

An update to bridge the remaining half-day:

The game starts on the September 2005 Restricted List. Duo and Graceful are banned, as is Mirror Force for some reason, but Pot still isn't. Confiscation and Dark Hole have left the Forbidden List. Cyber Jar, Exchange of the Spirit and Last Turn are still legal. Scapegoat, Metamorphosis, Thousand-Eyes Restrict and Tsukuyomi are newly Limited, BLS newly Forbidden. Alas.

They'd revert Graceful, Dark Hole and Mirror Force in the next revision and ban Pot (among others, such as Tribe-Infecting Virus), as well as restrict e.g. Treeborn Frog, which debuted in Shadow of Infinity.

For my own curiosity, I've looked up the April 2020 list and added the card's current restriction in parentheses (if not mentioned, it's Unlimited nowadays).

Readers unfamiliar with Yu-Gi-Oh! might enjoy that the card called "Exodia, the Forbidden One" is not, in fact, Forbidden. Then again, I can't fathom that anyone reading this might not have heard of Exodia.


"Tag yourself -- I'm Reasoning (Limited)."

Most of these cards are worth trying to pull from booster packs, even if they're Unlimited today -- while some omissions are eyebrow-raising in hindsight, there are very few cards whose placement on the list is overdone, considering the game at the time (though Mirror Force, Reflect Bounder and Sacred Phoenix stand out, Graceful Charity is very arguable, and I think Lightning Vortex is not a good card, particularly when Dark Hole isn't Forbidden). Incidentally, the stranger choices of card name censorship in Yu-Gi-Oh! (e.g. obviously "Spellcaster" was once meant to be "Wizard" or "Sorcerer", and apparently the opposite colour of "White" is "Dark" or "Ebon") don't seem to admit exceptions for celestial objects.

Both Gravity Bind and Level Limit at only Semi-Limited while MST is Limited certainly helps burn prison (and FURY FROM THE DEEP).

The earliest banlist that this game eventually allows you to switch to is October 2003, I think (which has no Forbidden cards whatsoever, so we might indeed get to play with Yata-Garasu, the only YGO card I know that can cause the computer to click Forfeit). You can also unlock e.g. the March 2006 list with a password.

Spellcaster's Judgment wins the vote! The other votes will be done justice later, though.

Before I formally start off, here's an overview of the booster packs you can buy at the beginning. Those after Ancient Sanctuary are locked until you make progress in the game. Like the Structure Decks, these do correspond to physical YGO products (the DS games dispensed with that tradition, though), but there are "special packs" you can unlock which, for a relatively high price, offer a strongly-themed selection. A key difference to real cards is that each booster only contains five cards, one of which is always a "rare" of some flavour (they're tiered into Rare, Super Rare, Ultra Rare, and Secret Rare; funnily enough, almost all cards in that very small final category are junk).

Individual cards can also be bought directly by their reference number (each YGO card has a unique eight-digit code printed upon it), which I'll call a "password" for tradition. Prices are generally "sensible and then some"; Sangan isn't that rare to find in Metal Raiders, but costs 9100 DP because it's a very good card (in those days). That's about the price of 30-40 booster packs (later packs cost more, to account for "power creep").

DP are "Duelist Points", the in-game currency. You get more by winning matches ("duels"). Unlike with Shandalar or the YGO games I've played on DS, opponents never drop cards directly.

There's no detailed card reviews here -- I'll talk about interesting cards as they come up in the game, and I'll go over the starting deck in detail (after I've swapped out the bland junk as much as possible). Nothing here is "required reading".

Junk isn't listed unless it's funny. That's to taste, of course. I've tried to be generous, and I'm more sympathetic to some "1.0/1.5" cards than some "5.0" ones. Forbidden cards remain unrated, as by the time we can change the banlist to use the larger part of them, money won't be such an issue.

My categories
5.0: Format staple.
4.0: Strong option for a strong deck, or archetype staple.
3.0: Decent option for a strong deck, or good in-game staple (since we won't have all the great cards for a while), or staple for a weak archetype.
2.5: Extremely narrow staple (requires another specific card to have any purpose).
2.0: Spice. Great if you can guess everyone's tastes. Don't overdo it.
1.5: Probably has some real use in this game, whether in the challenge modes, or after changing the banlist eventually, or as a card that notably improves the starter deck.
1.0: Probably has amusement value in this game.
0.5: Infamously terrible. There might well be a challenge themed around it.
Unrated: Everything else, which is either obsolete from square one, or I haven't found anything of interest to do with it (yet).

The game itself allows you to rate the cards on a five-heart scale, and sort your imaginary binder ("trunk") accordingly -- an idea that the DS games dropped, unfortunately (Spirit Caller only allows you to toggle a boolean "favourite" flag).

LEGEND OF BLUE-EYES WHITE DRAGON (LOB; 150 DP, 126 cards)


In short: Once you see fit to grab Exodia, buy this pack -- it's cheaper than buying the pieces by password, at least for the first few, and you'll likely find Dark Hole and SoRL along the way, as well as the 3*/4* targets for Metamorphosis. Don't buy it early.

METAL RAIDERS (MRD; 150 DP, 144 cards)


In short: Contains a deluge of completely unusable cards, but the 5.0 tier consists of cards that immediately catapult your deck up a "tier", so to speak. It's a much better pick if you don't start Spellcaster's Judgment, of course; but even then, Sangan, which markedly improves every single aggro or control deck (just not combo, which you certainly can't build early on), is a mere Rare here, and would cost an astronomical 9100 BP by password. Not a bad purchase.

SPELL RULER (SRL; 200 DP, 104 cards) (f.k.a. MAGIC RULER)


In short: Buy if your deck could use those 1500- ATK attribute search-summoners. Wouldn't recommend it early, though, even if that top tier seems alluring -- chances are you'll get nothing of use instead, and the search-summoners are much more useful at 2-3x than 1x. Once you unlock a banlist where Delinquent Duo is allowed and are willing to switch to it, buy this pack in bulk by all means, because you really want Duo, or 3x MST, or Forceful Sentry, or Painful Choice, when legal.

PHARAOH'S SERVANT (PSV; 200 DP, 105 cards)


In short: Undercosted pack that contains some amazing staples and some cards that can stand in for them in-game alright (e.g. Lightforce Sword, Morphing Jar #2, Goblin Attack Force); I recommend it. If you pull Thousand-Eyes, go for MRD next until you have 2-3 MoF, then PGD for Metamorphosis.

LABYRINTH OF NIGHTMARE (LON; 250 DP, 105 cards)


In short: Probably not worth buying while you don't already have a Chaos or Shift core. Once you do, there are several good supplements to either strategy in here, but screw Destiny Board clogging up the rare slot five times. Unlike Exodia, it doesn't even have an application. Or beat the average rare in the pack, for that matter.

LEGACY OF DARKNESS (LOD; 250 DP, 101 cards)


In short: Pretty good pack to buy early. The ceiling isn't as high as in Pharaoh's Servant, but many cards here are playable early on, and it has about a dozen cards that are almost guaranteed improvements to your in-game deck. The computer really can't deal with Lily well, if you're lucky enough to pull her (she's one of the few good Secret Rares).

PHARAONIC GUARDIAN (PGD; 300 DP, 108 cards)


In short: Good pack to buy early if you're aiming for prison (i.e. started with deck #3 or #4) -- it contains the self-recycling flip monsters, foremost Des Lacooda and the Swarms (no Tsuku required), in addition to Spirit Reaper. Some further cards specifically support burn prison. This booster also contains Terraforming to fetch A Legendary Ocean, if you've started with FURY and want to stick to WATER monsters, but it doesn't offer much else for WATER (maybe Gora Turtle). The top tier is great, but don't buy this just for Metamorphosis. Overall, a strong pick, and probably the best one for ZOMBIE MADNESS, since even silly cards like Royal Keeper are decent enough improvements over some of your starting gear, and Spirit Reaper / Book of Life certainly is.

MAGICIAN'S FORCE (MFC; 300 DP, 108 cards)


In short: Paradise for burn effects (just look at that 3.0 tier plus Secret Barrel), two of the best monsters in the game, as well as two strong utility monsters in Magical Merchant and Apprentice Magician. I love Roulette Barrel, too -- that card never quite leaves the pool in this game once you've drawn it, and it's amazing for a common.

If you draw and want to play XYZ machines, try to get Shining Angel from Spell Ruler. Messenger of Peace helps that deck anyway.

DARK CRISIS (DCR; 300 DP, 106 cards)


In short: Pretty thin for value, but 3x Skill Drain gets you out of deckbuilding jail -- and it's just a Rare. Don't buy this if you just care about Tsukuyomi or DDWL.

INVASION OF CHAOS (IOC; 350 DP, 112 cards)


In short: Probably the best pack once your pool has some depth, but just about each of the cards listed above supports a different archetype -- you'll end up with a mess and a DMOC (without Reasoning). I used to begin with buying IOC only, but I think it's best to save this for a while -- even Chaos Sorcerer won't help you much when your LIGHT monsters all suck and need to commiserate with the remnant of your dragons. FURY FROM THE DEEP probably still wants to buy this just for the three 5* WATER monsters, more Leviadragons (if lucky), and Lekunga. SPELLCASTER'S JUDGMENT probably shouldn't try to go Chaos just yet; buy PSV, LOD or PGD instead.

ANCIENT SANCTUARY (AST; 350 BP, 112 cards)


In short: Unfortunately contains Monster Gate and Night Assailant, but avoid this early -- lots of terrible 2* Normal Monsters and cards meant to "enable" them, which don't (but I'm going to try). Lots of effect monsters that barely reward you under narrow conditions. Lots of do-nothing spells/traps. The usual power level panic after releasing a very good set.

The silver lining is that the Agents / lifegain deck rips apart a certain game mode. FURY FROM THE DEEP might just want to risk it for two more Mermaid Knights (would be 2600 BP by password), which is a decent common for the deck and might just come with the huge reward of Level Limit - Area B, but don't overdo it.

I spent my starting 3000 DP on 10 packs of PSV and 6 packs of MRD. I got particularly lucky with the former; you'll see. First, the complete decklist for those who know what all these cards do:



For those who don't, I'll go over some of the most important cards now. In describing their effects, I've tried to simplify them and imitate the "new style", e.g. separating the condition and the consequence with a colon. Those glosses won't match what's shown on the GBA, nor the official revised wording.

The game attempts to categorize the effects of its cards, too -- see the icons in the top bar.


Magician of Faith (1* / Spellcaster / LIGHT / 300 ATK / 400 DEF) (3x)
FLIP: Add 1 Spell Card from your Graveyard to your hand.

The present and future star of the deck. Even by herself, she gives you a second use of a Limited spell of your choice. I've talked about Pot of Greed, which draws two cards. If you have an extra card per turn, you're probably going to win in the long run. Unfortunately, this deck does not, in fact, begin with Pot of Greed, which languishes in one of the worst booster packs. Let's not go there. Fortunately, there's an acceptable alternative:


Swords of Revealing Light (Normal Spell) (1x)
When this card enters the field: Your opponent's monsters are flipped face-up. While this card is on the field: Your opponent can't attack. This card stays on the field until your opponent's third End Phase from now.

The deck also contains a spell called Nightmare's Steelcage that's inferior in every way, but still serves the same purpose -- and Swords is Limited, so Cage is the closest you can get to additional copies.


Tsukuyomi (4* / Spellcaster / DARK / 1100 ATK / 1400 DEF / Spirit) (1x)
Cannot be Special Summoned. While face-up: Returns to its owner's hand in the next End Phase. When this card is Normal Summoned or flipped face-up: Target face-up monster is flipped into face-down Defense Position.

Tsukuyomi (a woman in YGO, it seems) not only defeats any monster with less than 1100 DEF by herself, but also allows you to re-use your Flip effect monsters, costing only your Normal Summon for the turn. The idea here is to fetch Swords with MoF every time it expires, then summon Tsuku to flip MoF down again. Even if our opponent destroys the Swords on his turn, we'll still get it back once more, buying three turns to draw another MoF and restart the engine.

We don't start out with any cards that can search our deck for Tsuku or SoRL, but we can search for Magician of Faith:


Apprentice Magician (2* / Spellcaster / DARK / 400 ATK / 800 DEF) (2x)
When this card enters the field: Put 1 Spell Counter on a valid target. If this card is destroyed in battle: You can choose a Level 2 or lower Spellcaster from your deck and Special Summon it in face-down Defense Position.

Search-summoners like this also provide some protection from opposing monsters; note that Apprentice Magician is a valid target for her own effect. If we have Tsuku in hand and our opponent is attacking with two monsters, we can fetch the second App Mage from the first attack, then MoF from the second, flip it face-up on our turn and immediately flip it face-down again. Net gain: two spell cards for one monster card (and two Normal Summons). For instance, we could fetch this twice:


Fissure (Normal Spell) (1x)
Target your opponent's face-up monster with the lowest ATK: Destroy it. (Choose one, if tied.)

After which the burden is on our opponent to play another monster and attack, lest we can play Tsuku on MoF again. That's all "in a vacuum", but you get the idea.

Nobody played this IRL at the time, but only because the superior Smashing Ground (targets highest DEF instead) was allowed at three copies, and people would gladly have activated Scapegoat (in brief, a Quick Spell that makes four 1* / 0 ATK / 0 DEF tokens) in response to Fissure. When these were removed from the format, Fissure proved to be a fine card in its own right and ended up Limited for a while.

While Magician of Faith generally doesn't need to fear combat or removal, there are exceptions, such as this card we're running ourselves:


("Remove it from play" was the old wording for "exile".)

Nobleman of Crossout is a staple spell -- not least for lack of alternatives; most good monster removal requires the target to be face-up. Some words are cut off here, but you're not missing much beyond "shuffle the decks afterwards". What's interesting is that this does allow each player to check the other's deck (in this game, at any rate), but only when this does hit a Flip effect monster, and the effect is symmetric. Obviously, the computer won't do anything with the information, but you can. While hitting an enemy MoF with Noble would be painful, the deck has -- and in its current state, needs -- other resources to win.

Good thing this deck comes with one of the best monsters of its time:


Breaker the Magical Warrior (4* / Spellcaster / DARK / 1600 ATK / 1000 DEF) (1x)
When this card is Normal Summoned: Put a Spell Counter on it (max. 1). While this has a Spell Counter: Increase its ATK by 300. Remove a Spell Counter from this card: Destroy target Spell or Trap Card on the field.

In September 2005, 1900 ATK is the best possible value for a 4* (and thus Tribute-less) monster without a drawback effect (of course, Cyber Dragon throws this off balance), while 1600 still beats most of the "utility" crew. Breaker is excellent: if he destroys one enemy monster as well as a spell/trap, he has gained an irrevocable advantage, and he's interesting because you get to choose whether to destroy a possible combat trap at once, or attack first and see if it was something your opponent would rather have activated in response to the spell/trap destruction effect. (Destroyed cards are not countered.)

Spell Counters are marginal. I can't think of serious cards other than Breaker that use them. Sometimes you can use Apprentice Magician to drop another counter on him and feel good about it. There's a card that nukes the enemy field if you have at least ten total Spell Counters on your stuff (Magical Mega Ton Cannon), but good luck with that. If I was playing WCT2008, that card could have served a purpose since it can be used with Destiny HERO - Diamond Dude (that's the name), who cheats around the prerequisite and leaves you with just the nuke. We are, undoubtedly, going to see a Theme Duel challenge about acquiring far too many Spell Counters over the course of a duel. (You still have to win that, too.)

We also have a few less useful "beatsticks": Skilled Dark Magician (4* / Spellcaster / DARK / 1900 ATK / 1700 DEF; effect can summon Dark Magician after three spells, but that's not worth having Dark Magician in the deck as a potential dead draw), Dark Elf (from a MRD booster; 4* / Spellcaster / DARK / 2000 ATK / 800 DEF; must pay 1000 LP to attack, but his field presence is for free, at least) and Gemini Elf (4* / Spellcaster / EARTH / 1900 ATK / 900 DEF; no effect), a tremendous card some two years before this game because it was the first Tribute-less drawback-less monster with 1900 ATK, but marginal at this point. I could have sleeved a Luster Dragon over the latter (4* / Dragon / WIND / 1900 ATK / 1600 DEF), but as much as I've stressed that this deck doesn't care about Spellcasters, there's one card that does, giving Gemini the edge:


Magical Dimension (Quick Spell)
Must have a Spellcaster face-up on the field. Choose and Tribute 1 monster: Special Summon 1 Spellcaster from your hand. Then you may destroy one monster on the field.

This card seems to put you at a net card disadvantage -- but since it's a Quick Spell, you can activate it as a response whenever you would have lost the Tributed monster to combat/removal anyway, making this an effectively neutral card that provides an advantageous trade and can provide you with tempo. If you were planning to Tribute Summon a Spellcaster, this essentially grafts an unrestricted monster removal spell to it -- at Quick Spell / Trap speed. It may verge on junk, but for now, I'm glad enough to have it that I've slotted some second-rate Spellcasters into my deck (that is, second-rate even at this stage) just to ensure this won't be a dead card, rather than swapping out Magical Dimension itself.

There's one non-Spellcaster monster, which I was lucky to draw from one of the PSV boosters, that I couldn't leave out:


Jinzo (6* / Machine / DARK / 2400 ATK / 1500 DEF) (1x)
While this card is face-up on the field: Trap Cards cannot be activated, and the effects of Trap Cards in play are negated.

Iconic. You might remember him as one of Joey's aces in Battle City, so he clearly got something right at that time. Or from the time Machine Beatdown was a relevant deck at Worlds and players paid outrageous money for Mechanicalchaser (1850 ATK, no effect), and presumably cursed this game when Gemini Elf hit the shelves. Jinzo is good because he's likely to shut down at least one card (with a chance for much more) while winning combat against another, and you can save him for a likely occasion (i.e. your opponent has a Set spell/trap and a monster). His main drawback is, of course, requiring a Tribute; we have three cards that can resurrect, though.

With only a handful of decent Trap Cards in my binder, I'm not concerned about the prison's symmetry. The rule of thumb is that you can run four Traps alongside Jinzo in your deck without having to worry about conflict. 2400 ATK is near the upper threshold for one-Tribute monsters, too -- only two relevant ones beat it in the combat hierarchy, and one of those loses to Tsukuyomi -- incidentally, this also separates Jinzo from the Monarch pack (all 2400 / 1000).

Except for Gemini Elf, I've also made sure that all my monsters are LIGHT- or DARK-attribute, because I certainly wanted to keep this card in the deck:


Chaos Sorcerer (6* / Spellcaster / DARK / 2300 ATK / 2000 DEF) (1x)
Cannot be Normal Summoned. Can only be Special Summoned by exiling 1 LIGHT and 1 DARK monster from your graveyard. Once per turn, during your Main Phase: You can target one face-up monster on the field and exile it. If so, this card can't attack that turn.

One of the three "Chaos" monsters, distinguished by their Summoning condition. (The other two don't have "Chaos" in their English names, and are Forbidden.) This is why LIGHT and DARK are the most relevant attributes. For not demanding a Tribute, Chaos Sorcerer offers excellent combat stats, and what he can't defeat in combat will fall to his effect instead; unlike removal spells, he keeps a field presence afterwards. A monster removal spell isn't a sufficient response: you'll emerge from that exchange at +1 card.

It's all about commitment: if you imagine Chaos Sorcerer and Jinzo facing off against each other, whoever of the two hits the field first will lose to the other, either by combat or by effect. While fewer cards disrupt monster effects than combat, most of the cards that disrupt combat are Trap Cards.

There's one quirk of the YGO rules that's relevant here, and won't be obvious: while the card says "can only be Special Summoned by...", it would be more accurate to write "if you've never Special Summoned this card in the duel yet". If you Special Summon a Chaos Sorcerer by the "Chaos" effect and he enters the graveyard afterwards, you can resurrect him with Premature Burial or the like. The

Finally, there are few cards that interact with the exile zone, but they do exist, and some are win conditions, e.g. bringing all those monsters in exile back to the field (most notably Dimension Fusion, which is symmetric, and Return to the Different Dimension, which isn't). Thus, Chaos Sorcerer not only threatens to take over a middle-game, but also prepares a potential blow-out in the endgame -- and often both just by hitting the field.


This, uh, Fairy-type (the localizers weren't allowed to say "angel" for a while, although the card's name barely disguises it) appears to be the love-child of Rayman and Pit from Kid Icarus. At worst, this monster gets attacked and replaces itself as a card, costing us "just" a Normal Summon, or it gets Nobled and goes to card game hell instead of all our MoF, in another balanced exchange. I don't mind that, either. LIGHT attribute and a potential Tsukuyomi outlet make this good enough in my book; there exist monsters with "FLIP: draw 1" and additional tricks or combat stats, but none of them are LIGHT. Or available to us right now.

The PSV boosters have also contributed The Shallow Grave to the deck, which is an interesting spell: both players can Special Summon a monster from their graveyard in face-down Defense Position (it can't be Flip Summoned that turn, as per the rules). That's obviously great with Magician of Faith, since it's another way to re-use the Flip effect, but it could also resurrect Chaos Sorcerer, whose DEF is more than enough to withstand an enemy Battle Phase.

The MRD boosters had nothing much; alas, no Sangan or Solemn Judgment. Masked Sorcerer (900/1400) draws a card when he deals battle damage. Share the Pain is a Normal Spell that requires me to Tribute a monster, after which the opponent must do the same. I can't activate it while I have no monsters, lest it would be decent, but I could still sacrifice a spent MoF when Tsuku is nowhere in sight. The card would be tolerable if we could exploit that Tribute condition by using monsters with graveyard effects, or magic up large numbers of tokens from nowhere (ahem, Scapegoat), but we can't. That it's in the deck should tell you something about what isn't.

Other great cards:
* Heavy Storm is a Normal Spell which destroys all spells and traps on the field. This often leads to card advantage, and is among your most valuable cards against the first-tier enemy who plays a prison deck.
* Lightning Vortex is a Normal Spell. Discard one; destroy all of your opponent's face-up monsters. Situational and expensive ("discard one" is a serious cost in YGO, though also a serious opportunity), but might save your life.
* Premature Burial and Call of the Haunted both target a monster in your graveyard and Special Summon it face-up to the field. Both "attach" to said monster: if it gets destroyed, so do they; if they get destroyed, so does the monster. Both are staples. An example of their routine: discard Jinzo to Lightning Vortex and dig him up again for no Tribute; you can even still Normal Summon afterwards. The main difference between the two is that Premature Burial is an Equip Spell and Call of the Haunted is a Continuous Trap. A finer point is that Premature Burial will not destroy the resurrected monster if it gets scooped up by Giant Trunade (a classic combo), whereas Haunted will. Haunted also sticks around when you Tribute the resurrected monster, and idly clogs up a spell/trap slot in that case, though usually not to any consequence.
* Mystical Space Typhoon (Quick Spell) and Dust Tornado (Normal Trap) both read "Destroy a Spell or Trap card on the field." Dust Tornado comes with a strange clause where you can Set more spells/traps afterwards, at times that you usually couldn't. Both are staples.
* Sakuretsu Armor (Normal Trap) destroys an opposing monster that's currently attacking. Staple trap. I'd like to have two, but it's in an underwhelming pack (Dark Crisis), especially since we already have Tsukuyomi.

Next time: I'll finally play the game.

I never got into the physical game, but I did grab World Championship 2007 for the DS, which is a very robust game -- I really liked the puzzle mode and various challenges.

I haven't played it in forever, but it looks like my most-used deck was a Warrior deck with a whole bunch of equipment cards. Hard to say for sure, since I have 25 decks, most of which are gimmicks designed for a specific challenge.

Wait, I thought Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End was one of the remaining two.

There's a few Warrior/equipment decks possible in this game (and probably more I can't think of); Divine Sword - Phoenix Blade in particular can set up Dimension Fusion / Return from the Different Dimension; there's a Gearfried/Smoke Grenade of the Thief combo that essentially allows you to play 3x Confiscation (or 4x if you slot in real Confiscation); and then there's Ben Kei, of course. I think the DS games also have Command Knight in an early pack (the E-Heroes one?), which is a monster that can last you for a long while if you pull it and incentivizes further warriors, and I think Reinforcement of the Army also comes early.

Yes. Yes, it is. And I'm astonished at how I failed to parse that.

BLS did really lose "Chaos" in translation, though.

As mentioned, instead of testing our skills against Yugi or Kaiba (as happens in e.g. Stairway to the Destined Duel, the first GBA YGO game), WCT2006 invites us to fight our choice of adorable furball, meta goat, skull meme, a sentient hygiene product, or Sailor Moon. This might seem regressive, but in fact, I find that this game has the most interesting beginning of any handheld YGO game. Your opponents get all-star staples from the start, and so do you -- no deck of random beatdown Normal Monsters, but real interaction!

Skull guy in particular is notorious, if not as much as Spirit Caller's Mototani, but for similar reasons ("turns out burn prison with Stealth Bird does pretty well against random beatdown Normal Monsters"). I mostly remember him for one specific card I had never seen before as a kid.


Kuriboh appears to play spells/traps that impede your attacks and resurrection so that he can Tribute Summon his 7-8* monsters. I noticed that his monsters are LIGHT / DARK, but the Chaos Sorcerer I expected never showed up; he might not have one.

He started out with Swords of Revealing Light, which I couldn't interact with, so I played an early Share the Pain to deny him Tribute material. I Set Magician of Faith and resurrected Chaos Command Magician (a marginal 2400 ATK 6* LIGHT Spellcaster which isn't "Chaos" except for its name) with Call of the Haunted (visible as the top card in my Graveyard, above my deck), which lost combat to his 2500 ATK / 2100 DEF 7* Dark Magician, the yellow-bordered monster you can see above. (It's yellow-bordered because it's a Normal Monster, meaning it has no effect. Unlike MtG, a good handful of cards do care about "vanilla", and it can be a fringe strategy -- we'll probably play around with this later.)

I flipped MoF on my turn to retrieve Share the Pain -- trading two cards against one, but I already had a big card advantage and was happy to give up some material to remove his last meaningful card, since Swords' 3-turn counter was about to expire. He's topdecking here (starting his turns with no "alive" cards in play or in the hand), which is always a back-to-the-wall position, and drew nothing while I had Premature Burial (rightmost card in my hand) to bring back Chaos Command Magician and convert the advantage.

The other cards in my hand were Shallow Grave (middle) and Mage Power (left). I've described Shallow Grave in the deck overview, whereas Mage Power is an equipment that confers +500 ATK and DEF to the equipped monster for each card in your spell/trap zone. It can produce big numbers, since you can Set as many spells/traps as you want per turn, and Premature Burial/Call of the Haunted are sitting in your spell card zone anyway, but I'd argue that it's worse than Share the Pain at this stage as (effective) monster removal, and it can set you up to lose hard to Heavy Storm. Shallow Grave performed much better, since it allowed me to resurrect MoF face-down and simply bash the Dark Magician my opponent chose with my C.C.M. in combat afterwards.


Scapegoat's deck isn't what you might be expecting. Instead, the Goats play monsters like this: 2000+ ATK without Tributes and serious drawbacks. In our duel, they started with Pot of Greed, played "Cathedral of Nobles" (unreleased outside Japan at the time, I believe; the official name is Temple of Kings; it's a Continuous Spell that allows you to activate Trap Cards immediately after Setting, and can also summon "Mystical Beast Serket", which they don't have in their deck), and attacked my face-down Royal Magical Library (0 ATK / 2000 DEF) with this Chainsaw Insect, then Set a spell/trap and passed the turn to me:


My set card is Dust Tornado, but there's no reason for me to activate it yet -- I'm not attacking here, so their Set being a combat trap doesn't bother me, and I might be able to shut it off with Jinzo anyhow. Likewise, Cathedral isn't doing anything by itself except to suggest that the Set is, indeed, a combat trap -- why not activate it otherwise.

I figure that Nobleman won't do much good against this opponent, and discard it to Monster Reincarnation (second from the left) to put a monster of my choice from my graveyard into my hand. That's Library by default, of course. The aim here is to play Magical Dimension as a combat trick to Summon Apprentice Magician, which can search for another if destroyed; this ensures I'll have Tribute material for Jinzo on the following turn, while also getting rid of the insect, which would tie Jinzo's ATK -- which means that, if they fought, both would be destroyed.

I could just have set App Mage and search-summoned another, then MoF, but in that case, MoF would have had no target spell to fetch before I Tributed it to Jinzo, except if I played Monster Reincarnation on App Mage before the flip / Tribute. The main issue is that I didn't want to commit to MoF when the Goats could draw Skill Drain at any time, which is a Continuous Trap that costs 1000 LP to activate; while active, it shuts down all monster effects on the board (effects that trigger anywhere else, such as App Mage's search effect, which resolves from the graveyard, still apply). This is the key piece of their strategy, and I should guess they play three. That's also why I need to summon Jinzo a.s.a.p., because whichever hits the field first will blank the other's effect.

I'm highlighting Skill Drain because it's a particularly important card, and I expect it will be featured in a good handful of builds...


...and apparently, it was their Set after all. This makes the computer look decidedly clumsy, as it should have turned over Skill Drain after playing Cathedral to shut off Chainsaw Insect's drawback, instead of allowing me to draw Magical Dimension from that. This wouldn't have happened, because I would have Dust Tornado'd Skill Drain in response to their attack declaration ("hehe") -- but it suggests that the computer isn't aware of the Cathedral's effect at all, so I didn't have to do anything to equalize against their Pot.

Anyhow, their attacking monster (at once signified and obscured by those crossed swords) is another interesting card: Fusilier Dragon, the Dual-Mode Beast, which is neither a Dragon nor a Beast (7* / Machine / DARK / 2800 / 2000). Its effect allows you to Normal Summon or Set it without the Tributes it would demand by the rules, but if so, its base ATK and DEF are halved while it's on the field. This has three main applications:

(a) The first half of the effect is active in your hand, but the second, disadvantageous one, is active on the field. This card begs to be paired with Skill Drain, and that's indeed what's going on here.
(b) Another possibility is to exploit that its star level doesn't change, and some cards do care about that. With Metamorphosis, this turns into any 7* Fusion Monster.
(c) If you Summon this face-up, then flip it face-down via Tsukuyomi or Book of Moon (or whatever else you're playing), the drawback effect ends (lol). YGO is full of lawyering like that, and I love it.

DARK and Machine are just icing to make it on-theme with some other good cards. By the way, you must respond to Skill Drain with spell/trap destruction immediately, or Fusilier Dragon will get its effect denied, and still remain at 2800/2000 when Skill Drain is destroyed later (it "forgets" about how it was summoned; this is also why the (c) play works).


However, in our case, I destroy Skill Drain to turn on its drawback effect, and 1400 ATK isn't getting through the Library's DEF. Chainsaw Insect gets crushed by Magical Dimension afterwards, and I Tribute App Mage for Jinzo on my turn, destroying Fusilier Dragon, but ending me on a notable card disadvantage (even counting out Cathedral, lol). I realize that, after all, Setting App Mage without playing Dimension would have been preferable, because of the extra card I would have obtained from Chainsaw Insect -- it didn't enter combat here, only declared an attack. That's a distinction.


They don't really come back after this, though. Chainsaw Insect is the only Tribute-less monster they have that can reach 2400 ATK without Skill Drain, so they would have had to draw and trade off Jinzo with that (giving me an extra card), or play some removal / Snatch Steal; I'm not sure if they have either.

Their board shows some more would-be Skill Drain exploiters. Jirai Gumo (2200 ATK) flips a coin when attacking, and if you call it wrong, you pay half your LP. Great. Goblin Attack Force (2300 ATK / 0 DEF) is more viable -- indeed, its existence alone makes Jirai Gumo not so. Whenever it attacks, it forcibly switches to Defense Position in your Main Phase 2 and can't move to a different position by itself on your next turn. If nothing else, it can punish a hasty Cydra; it's obsolete in this game, though, because Cybernetic Revolution introduces Goblin Elite Attack Force (2200 ATK / 1500 DEF), which is better in every way except losing to the regular Force (2300 ATK is a virtually empty tier otherwise). Neither is all that important, but note that both are 4* Warriors and can thus be searched on-demand by Reinforcement for the Army.

As a final remark on this duel, Monster Reincarnation is proving to be a stronger card than I had thought -- it's a net -1, after all, and I considered it mainly relevant to Reasoning combo (to feed Monster Gate). Funnily enough, though, our deck resembles Reasoning combo in that it seems to hold unnecessary spells at any given point that you wish you could convert, even in a -1 trade. Here Gemini Elf comes back to win on the spot after I've fetched Monster Reincarnation with MoF.


I fight Watapon next, who plays a deck full of LIGHT monsters individually ranging from decent to excellent, but without any way to exploit the theme. You'd expect Luminous Spark if nothing more creative, but instead, it plays The Sanctuary in the Sky, which is themed around Fairies.

My starting hand consists of App Mage, Skilled Dark Magician (4* 1900/1700 beater with essentially no effect, since I'm not running Dark Magician), Spell Shield Type-8, Royal Magical Library, Share the Pain and Monster Reincarnation. I Set Library and Spell Shield and pass. This is a good time to mention the Library's effect: Whenever any player activates a Spell Card, this card gains a Spell Counter (max. 3). Remove three Spell Counters from this card: Draw a card. With two spells I can see myself using early, an App Mage to add another spell counter (they're not just good for Breaker, after all), and the Library's solid 2000 DEF (but 0 ATK), I figure that I should play it first, before the enemy could play Tribute monsters that would overwhelm the Library's DEF. There's no way to Normal Summon in face-up Defense Position regularly, which I'd obviously prefer to do here, but the computer loves attacking into your face-down monsters if you have no monsters with dominant ATK, so the worst possibility is getting Nobled / Mystic Swordsmanned etc., in which case I'm also fine with that hitting Library instead of App Mage, which needs to fetch MoF at some point, or Skilled Dark, which I might need to fight my enemy's board presence.

My opponent removes Spell Shield with Nobleman of Extermination (this is Nobleman of Crossout for spells/traps), then Normal Summons Ninja Grandmaster Sasuke (4* / Warrior / LIGHT / 1800 / 1000), whose effect destroys face-up Defense Position monsters immediately when it engages them in combat, but only if they were face-up when it declares the attack (so the Library lives this round). This card is quite good -- for instance, there are reasons to Special Summon Chaos monsters in Defense Position, and this punishes them for it; furthermore, it matches up well against Spirit Reaper / Marshmallon, which several enemies in this (and future) games love to use.

On my turn, I Normal Summon App Mage (Library spell counter #1), Tribute it to Share the Pain forcing Watapon to sacrifice Sasuke (#2), and play Monster Reincarnation (#3) to retrieve App Mage and get another card back via Library:


Good draw -- it considerably raises my chances of a second, even a third Library activation. I decide against using it immediately, though -- this field state doesn't seem concerning yet, nor do I have the means to draw another card off Library here.


The computer eventually summons Airknight Parshath (in the centre; 5* / Fairy / LIGHT / 1900 / 1400), who "tramples" (deals combat damage even if your monster was in Defense Position) and draws you a card whenever he inflicts combat damage, like Masked Sorcerer. Unlike the Sorcerer, he has a real ATK stat -- not as high as most Tribute monsters, but since he can repay you immediately (and makes an even stronger target for resurrection) and twists "defensive" cards like Scapegoat and Spirit Reaper into liabilities, this is an excellent card. I Steelcaged in response, since I had drawn an MoF and wanted to Set it for Share the Pain, but not give the enemy an extra card from Airknight.

There's also a Reflect Bounder. When you attack it, you take effect damage equal to the ATK of the attacking monster, and combat damage is calculated afterwards (so you're taking 1700 damage or more), but then the Bounder explodes. I consider this a mediocre monster.

If not for Steelcage preventing me from attacking, my play would have been to Summon App Mage (counter #2 on Library), attack the Bounder, destroying both, allowing me to search-summon another MoF, then Share the Pain on the spent MoF in my Main Phase 2 to force Watapon to sacrifice Parshath. Not an option here, but hilariously, he Tributes Airknight to my Share anyway, because apparently the computer thinks much more highly of Reflect Bounder. Library lucks into drawing Fissure, making that choice moot, and...


...don't I know you from somewhere?

When Copycat enters the battlefield, it can copy any opposing monster's (original) ATK / DEF -- but not anything else. It's an alright card, since it'll trade favourably against any Tribute or Chaos monster, and as a 1* Spellcaster, it could even be searched by App Mage if we had a copy. Here, though, the computer is playing it as an effect-less 400/800. I suspect that this was the last remaining monster in its hand, as it will probably evaluate any monster as better than none. I punish it with a lucky topdeck of Masked Sorcerer.


The computer gives up by playing Sanctuary with no Fairies in sight and giving me another Library card. Normally, I'd be worried about committing this many face-up monsters to the field, since Lightning Vortex for +2 certainly makes that card look good, but my card advantage is large, and even after topdecking Vortex, the enemy would just have one card left in hand (and a Sanctuary which I doubt is "alive").


Snatch Steal is an equip spell that takes over a face-up monster your opponent controls. Your opponent gets +1000LP during each of their Standby Phases, but this is rarely good compensation. Control reverts if Snatch Steal gets destroyed, though. It's not enough, as my Lightning Vortex deals with the stolen Jinzo.

The Library certainly came through in this game, drawing a total of three cards.


Magical Dimension can't be activated if you hold no valid targets for it to Special Summon, and Chaos Sorcerer has that Chaos clause, so it's a dead card until I draw another Spellcaster. Masked Sorcerer isn't exactly resilient, either. Activating Steelcage T1 seems like the obvious play, but committing Sorcerer to the field is more arguable: If Steelcage is destroyed, Sorcerer might well share its fate. The downside is that I would waste the turn's Normal Summon -- I might well draw another monster T2. In the end, my judgment is tipped by the presence of Monster Reincarnation: if I ever need Sorcerer back, I'm probably willing to give up either of my monster removal spells for it (likely Share the Pain). Of course, with Chaos Sorcerer, having a DARK monster in the graveyard may also turn out to be an asset if I draw a LIGHT monster next, too.


Pikeru (that's her name; in fact, we started with this card, if you refer to the Spellcaster's Judgment decklist, but it's awful, so we'll likely never see it) assembles this board just before Steelcage expires. Not pictured: A second Set spell/trap. Toon Gemini Elf has a lot of text, but its most important properties are being unable to attack on the turn it's summoned, and forcing you to discard one when you take combat damage from it (one of several YGO cards that took this cue from MtG's Hypnotic Spectre). It mirrors the regular Gemini Elf for combat stats, type and attribute.

Our enemy has also played a Field Spell: Yami, which gives all Spellcasters and Fiends on the board +200 ATK/DEF. Minor, but it could decide combat (you can see that the Toon Gemini Elf has boosted stats because they're printed in yellow, rather than white). You'll immediately realize the downside of symmetric Field Spells: we also happen to be playing Spellcasters.

The other monster she has summoned is called The Unhappy Girl. It's small, indestructible by combat while in Attack Position, and a monster that has attacked it can't attack again while The Unhappy Girl remains in Attack Position. Because it's in love. You've probably figured out our opponent's theme by now.

I draw App Mage on my turn, and decide to Flip Summon Masked Sorcerer and attack the Unhappy Girl for a chance at an extra card; I don't care much about the fascination effect. If Pikeru should activate a combat trap such as Sakuretsu Armor (I don't know if she has anything like that, and prefer not to look it up), I can respond with Magical Dimension summoning App Mage in Defense Position and destroying Toon Gemini Elf, which is the play anyhow if the attack goes through, just later.

She does activate a Trap:

Another symmetric effect. (The cut-off text is "You can only activate this card when a..." and "...field".) This one benefits me more than her, though: I select Dark Elf, the secret lore deck tech, which has 2000 base ATK to Toon Gemini Elf's 1900, saving myself a removal spell. (Dark Elf's drawback is paying 1000 LP every time it attacks. It cannot cast RUB.) Her choice is Gemini Elf (non-Toon), and when she tries attacking Masked Sorcerer, I activate Magical Dimension in response and get rid of Gemini Elf, planning to exploit The Unhappy Girl by attacking it next turn, then playing Share the Pain.


She seems not to approve of my plan, but her discard to Vortex is Injection Fairy Lily (3* / Spellcaster / EARTH / 400 / 1500; can pay 2000 LP during combat to give her a momentary increase of 3000 ATK), a monster she could have stabilized the field with. I suppose the computer overrates Lily's drawback a bit. She proceeds to Set her last pathetic card.


I draw Brain Control (Normal Spell; pay 800 LP, take control of an enemy face-up monster for a turn) and play Monster Reincarnation (much love!), discarding Mage Power (no love) to retrieve App Mage. Vortex won't deny me my rightful MoF.


"My grandpa's deck does not have pathetic cards," says Sailor Moon in defiance. Mystical Space Typhoon (which was originally neither mystical nor in space) is a Quick Spell that destroys a target Spell/Trap on the field, and is a good one-for-one answer to the Premature Burial that I tried using on Masked Sorcerer. I summon Mirage Dragon, attack, and pass.

She topdecks Pot of Greed, and gets back into the game, summoning "herself" (2* / Spellcaster / LIGHT / 1200 / 0; effect is to gain some life for each monster you control at the beginning of your turn) and equipping her with a card I'd forgotten about.

It can only equip Pikeru or her rival, Ebon Magician Curran, to increase their ATK by 800. If they destroy a 5* or higher monster in combat, you can summon their upgraded versions from your deck, which still aren't good. The card is silly, but Mirage Dragon dies all the same. On the flip side, this means I now have a LIGHT monster in the graveyard.


Instead of summoning Chaos Sorcerer here, though, I play Brain Control on Pikeru, then Share the Pain. Weird Vortex, but okay.


I hold off on Chaos Sorcerer for a while longer, because if you summon him while your opponent has no monsters, that's one of the relatively few opportunities for them to gain a balanced exchange against it. Pikeru surprises me by revealing that her deck plays Scapegoat, which you can see in action (or more accurately, in the graveyard) here. Surprise wall of four 1* Beast / EARTH / 0 / 0 tokens! They'll stop my attempts to attack her Life Points directly for a while. I do Summon Sorcerer on my Main Phase 2 here to exile a Sheep Token (actually, tokens can't get exiled, they are just removed).

Scapegoat is useful by itself, and better yet if you can exploit these tokens in other ways. We'll see that sooner or later. Unfortunately, Scapegoat isn't contained in any of the regular booster packs, but I'll buy it via password if I manage to draw certain cards from PSV and PGD. You can probably guess which ones.


This screenshot makes me shiver: all my cards committed to the field and ready for my opponent to reveal her Set Trap as Mirror Force. Except, of course, that this is the one YGO game that bans Mirror Force, and your opponents must adhere to that as well. (The card was, in fact, Sakuretsu Armor, delaying lethal damage for a turn.) This is why Mirror Force is usually not Forbidden.

Had to keep that oh so valuable Black Luster Soldier branding.

giant annoyance.

I'd agree that Bounder is an annoying design because it rewards blindly drawing multiple copies (as it can't be searched by anything) and its controller has no decisions to make about its effect. At least, the then-current banlist allows you to punish it thoroughly: Bounder is Limited, dominated by Chaos Sorcerer and Tsukuyomi alike, and monster removal as good as Smashing Ground is Unlimited.

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More duels against Kuriboh

I wonder into how much detail I should go about duels and decks.


Duel #1 is decided by App Mage / Library again. My Set here is a second Magical Dimension, so I play App Mage, Dimension it into Masked Sorcerer destroying the opponent's Gearfried the Iron Knight (1800/1600), and play Heavy Storm on the opponent's single Set. You wouldn't usually do that, but in this case, it will both place the third Spell Counter on Library and clear the path for Masked Sorcerer's attack, drawing me two cards.


Before and after.

The Set destroyed by Heavy was Magic Cylinder, which negates one enemy monster's attack and inflicts damage to your opponent equal to said monster's ATK. This often fails to address the problem, but is a defensible card in non-prison burn, and was historically played in tournament sideboards to tiebreak matches (if time ran out, the player with fewer LP would lose). I loved this card unreasonably as a kid playing Stairway to the Destined Duel, since it matches what you'd expect a Trap Card to do, and in those days, utility monsters were less important and the flow of battle much more swingy, so Cylinder was better at keeping you alive.

I'd like to write an aside on Stairway at some point -- I remember it fondly as my first YGO game, but this game holds up much better nowadays.


In duel #2, I start with one of my new cards -- I had been buying Pharaonic Guardian packs, which contain the "Gravekeeper's" class of monsters (and Reasoning) at common. I think Gravekeepers are a fine deck to build in any of the GBA/DS games. They appear in early packs, most of them at common, and only need their Field Spell to become powerful: Necrovalley, aside from giving Gravekeepers +500 ATK and DEF (there are two with 4* / 1500 ATK, so you'll beat the 1900 crowd), negates all effects that "affect" the graveyard, and forbids exiling cards from the graveyard, for both players. No more resurrection (except by a certain Trap that can only target Gravekeepers), no more Sangan and search-summoners, no more Chaos monsters (or, in later games, Overload Fusion) -- it addresses your issues with not having the same playset of staples as your opponents. As icing, PGD even includes Terraforming, a Normal Spell that searches any Field Spell from your deck.

I should note that Necrovalley has received substantial errata over time, no longer denying all effects that merely trigger from the graveyard. By the old wording, though, it's one of the most prominent "rogue" cards; in fact, it can be played without any Gravekeepers at all.

Two Gravekeepers are good even without Necrovalley: Gravekeeper's Spy (4* / Spellcaster / DARK / 1200 / 2000) has a Flip effect that Special Summons a target Gravekeeper with 1500 or less ATK from your deck -- which means that it can target further copies of itself. With 2000 DEF, a pair of Spies is difficult to overcome in a single Battle Phase. I only owned one copy at the time, but had a near-substitute in Gravekeeper's Guard (4* / Spellcaster / DARK / 1000 / 1900; FLIP: return 1 opposing monster on the field to its owner's hand), which still reaches that key 1900+ DEF. The bounce effect is decent if you draw it from your deck, although its main use lies with Spy (which can't summon it face-down). Since Spy is a Spellcaster that fetches additional Spellcasters, it also makes Magical Dimension more powerful, which I'm still running two copies of.


The opponent had built a small army, with two Gearfrieds and one Maha Vailo (4* / Spellcaster / LIGHT 1550 / 1400). Maha Vailo isn't a good card, except in those handheld games where you're forced to run Normal Monsters with high ATK/DEF, weak Equip Spells, and other such cards in the beginning, which makes it able to beat your opponent's Summoned Skull (6* / Fiend / DARK / 2500 / 1200; no effect; relevant in Stairway-age YGO due to sheer ATK power) when most of your other cards probably can't. It does this by gaining 500 ATK/DEF for each Equip Spell attached to it.

The computer had attacked my face-down Gravekeeper's Spy with Maha Vailo and activated a Trap that awards Maha +500 ATK for the turn (called Reinforcements), but the defeated Spy replaced itself with Gravekeeper's Guard, which the 1800 ATK Gearfrieds still couldn't push through, and the computer has simply lost a card in that exchange. This illustrates why I'm not fond of Mage Power and other such ATK/DEF-boosting Spell/Traps.

In the picture, I've just summoned Chaos Sorcerer and will exile Maha Vailo first, "just in case" my opponent really played with Chaos monsters. Gearfried is EARTH-attribute, so his presence in the graveyard wouldn't concern me much. While it doesn't influence my decision, his own equipment-destroying effect also sabotages the most important resurrection card, Premature Burial, since that's an Equip Spell, whereas Maha stands to gain slightly for that reason (you'd still rather just revive e.g. Jinzo, though).


Chaos Sorcerer doesn't lose tempo to Swords of Revealing Light, but I figure that I should still counter the Swords with my Spell Shield. If I draw one of my beatsticks next and he doesn't have Swords active, that's an opportunity to gain further card advantage by combat; my opponent might also get back into the game by playing a few monsters face-down, which Sorcerer can't touch.

I'll need to discard a Spell Card as an additional cost; the Spell Shield permits you to skip this cost if the spell you're countering targets a certain monster, but SoRL doesn't. That's a two-for-one trade in the opponent's favour, but Shallow Grave has no purpose without monsters in my graveyard -- if I need it back, I already have Magician of Faith in my hand.

We don't talk about Spell Shields Type-1 through 7. They don't exist.


Duel #3 starts me on a weak opening hand, although it does at least contain the forbidden "Share the Brain" combo again, so I can punish my opponent if he plays two monsters (the computer usually won't hesitate). I set Apprentice Magician and pass, planning to use Share the Pain on the resulting flipped MoF next turn. My opponent thwarts this with Tribute of the Doomed (Normal Spell; discard 1, then target a monster on the field: destroy it). It's a net -1 card, whereas good monster removal trades evenly against its target, but it has a purpose if your deck can consistently exploit the discard; even so, there are better such enablers. In Tribute's defense, it's a card from Metal Raiders, i.e. so ancient, the historical Pharaohs probably did play with it. Incidentally, this also applies to Share the Pain.

I play Heavy Storm against his two Sets and discard Mage Power to Monster Reincarnation (once again) to retrieve App Mage. With the Brain Control + Share the Pain combo in hand and as many as two Magicians of Faith, I think I can simplify this in my favour.


The computer doesn't play another monster, though, making the combo inapplicable. I draw Masked Sorcerer on my turn, which is great to place on an empty board. I could flip MoF for Heavy Storm and tribute it to Share the Pain, but at 900 ATK, I'd expect the Sorcerer to die by combat to the next monster summoned by the opponent.


Instead, I flip MoF for Mage Power (maybe a little love), equip it to Sorcerer and set Share the Pain ("so many applications") to boost the Sorcerer's ATK by 2x 500, allowing him to defeat Gearfried in combat. Against a Set spell/trap, I think I wouldn't have gone for this -- too many possible Sets would interact with either combat or Mage Power, whereas only counter-traps can stop Share the Pain. ...that, and simple card advantage.


Duel #4. My opponent summons La Jinn the Mystical Genie of the Lamp, whose name is even more verbose than I am (4* / Fiend / DARK / 1800 / 1000) and which can claim a brief career of dominating the primordial soup of YGO, being (iirc) the only 4* drawback-less monster with 1800 ATK, until he was dethroned by Mechanicalchaser (1850 ATK), which was a "promotional" card. In Stairway to the Destined Duel, it would have been playable as an ersatz Gemini Elf / Vorse Raider / Slate Warrior, and can give you trouble early while you're still forced to play with cards like Beaver Warrior.

The most interesting decision here occurs when he has a Set and those monsters you see in the image, while I hold MST, Swords, Library, and have a Set myself (I forgot which -- maybe Call of the Haunted), as well as a face-down Skelengel. I Summon Library in Attack Position, then MST his Set (spell counter #1). Usually, MSTing a Set spell/trap while you have your own Set spell/trap will backfire if you were taking aim at your opponent's MST or Dust Tornado, or less ubiquitous Quick-speed spell/trap destruction. In this case, however, I'm willing to take the -1 to ensure that my opponent can't respond to my Swords with MST / Tornado: MST is Limited here, and Tornado must first be Set. Indeed, the set was MST (spell counter #2) and I slam down SoRL (#3) to draw two cards off Library + Skelengel, protecting my card advantage from being equalized at once by combat. Not airtight, of course, as Heavy Storm was still possible, but YGO can indeed be chess-like sometimes with its frequent material-for-position trade-offs. I like that.

It turns out that my draws are Brain Control and Chaos Sorcerer, making my Swords look slightly clumsy, because I drew into two possible combos to clear the enemy monsters with. Brain Control + Share the Pain has been seen before, vs. Pikeru, but here I use Share to tribute Skelengel, removing one enemy monster, then immediately exile Skelengel (and some DARK monster) to summon Sorcerer and remove the other. SoRL was still protecting my 0 ATK Library, though, and I ended up drawing a second card off that later.

Out of all cards currently in my deck, I'm most surprised by Share the Pain, not by its uses as such, but by its consistency in practice. If it could be used while you control no monsters yourself, I'd consider it genuinely well-designed; perhaps not stronger than Smashing Ground, but more interesting.

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Overall, I think the designers could have made Kuriboh's deck stronger; it seemed as though it could have been in an earlier game, such as Stairway (maybe that was a sub-theme for flavour, like Pikeru's all-girl squad). I get the impression that it was meant to include 2-3 Chaos Sorcerer instead of generic EARTH monsters, and testing led to a change.

I think I'd have enjoyed playing my janky Spellcaster deck against janky Chaos with a LIGHT/DARK monster base of e.g. Maha Vailo and -- especially -- Kuriboh itself, which can discard itself to prevent one instance of combat damage on the opponent's turn; at least in this age of YGO, no other monster's effect closely resembles it. Any time there was a LIGHT monster in the computer's graveyard and two cards in the hand, you'd take a risk summoning and attacking into their open board -- but Kuriboh is -1, so Sorcerer will only equalize afterwards, and even DRAGON'S ROAR has its signature face-down Masked Dragon -> Armed Dragon LV5 play to deal with a Sorcerer in combat.

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Highlights of opening more Pharaonic Guardian packs


Metamorphosis (Ultra Rare). I've held off on explaining Fusion Monsters, so here's their formal introduction: Fusion Monsters are violet-bordered; you put them in your Extra Deck Fusion Deck, which is separate from the Main Deck, and isn't drawn from; if Fusion Monsters would return to your hand, they go back to the Fusion Deck instead; they are Special Summoned via various cards.

Fusion Monsters were originally "balanced" around a Spell that put you at -2 cards and these had to be specific ones, case-by-case. For this price, you usually obtained a 1500 ATK dragon without effects, but even a 4500 ATK dragon without effects that devoured four specific cards was demonstrably unplayable by this method. You might as well have tried for Exodia. Various "improvements" appeared, and were ignored until the release of Cyber-Stein (3* / Machine / DARK / 700 / 500), which could Special Summon any monster from your Fusion Deck for 5000 LP, such as the 4500 ATK dragon. Combined with an equipment that doubled a monster's ATK while your LP were lower (Megamorph), it spawned what I believe were the first OTK decks.

Metamorphosis, though, was (as far as I know) the first card designed with the idea of interpreting your Fusion Deck as a suite of always-accessible monsters that rewarded field commitment, multiple times in a duel (Magician of Faith). As such, I'd call it as relevant to the history and development of YGO as, say, Necropotence was to the history and development of MtG.


Three copies of Reasoning (Common). The cut-off text specifies that you can Special Summon the found monster if your opponent called the level wrong. Otherwise, it goes into your graveyard along with all the rest -- which can still be very useful. This is a steal at Common; it's a key staple of certain combo decks, but also enables hybrid builds that care about finding and reviving Dark Magician of Chaos. The computer doesn't exactly make informed decisions about which level to call, either.


Three copies of King Tiger Wanghu (Common). He's one of the most reliable ways to interact with an enemy's Tsukuyomi, aside from hitting it with discard effects, and it shuts off a good bunch of other utility monsters such as Treeborn Frog or Scapegoat tokens. I'm interested in pulling this early because Stealth Bird can't thrive against this (3* / Winged Beast / DARK / 700 / 1700; when flipped face-up: deals 1000 damage to your opponent; can flip itself to face-down Defense Position once during your Main Phase).

Three copies of Gravekeeper's Spy (Common), and indeed most of the Gravekeeper cards, but only one Necrovalley (Super Rare), and no Terraforming yet.


I also pull Mirage of Nightmare, which the Restricted List adjudicators have condemned to eternal prison (rightfully, I'd say). What strikes me is its glittering animation (not visible in the image), which marks it as Secret Rare. That's not true for the physical card: looking it up, it was Super Rare in the American issue of Pharaonic Guardian, and Common in Japan. Hence, it's not guaranteed that Sangan is a Rare in this game's Metal Raiders pack, and my previously-issued judgment of which packs to buy was flawed from the start!

If you don't know this card:


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About Challenge Modes

Aside from Duel Puzzles, three of these exist:

* Limited Duel: You must duel and win under an additional deckbuilding or gameplay restriction. In a wonderful twist, the computer doesn't necessarily have to do the same.
* Theme Duel: You must win the duel accomplishing a certain milestone.
* Survival Duel: Duel random opponents until you lose... and your Life Points carry over.

You unlock additional challenges as your completion % of the game (which it shows you in the Options screen) increases. Right now, I could attempt the following:

Limited Duel
* Medium / High Level Forbidden: Can't include monsters above 4*.
* Tributes Forbidden: What it says. This isn't limited to Tribute Summoning, but also includes costs. I'd lose automatically if I played Share the Pain.
* Traps Forbidden: What it says.
* Large Deck A: Must run at least 60 cards in the deck.
* Sets Forbidden: You can't set monsters or Spells/Traps. I remember this one as quite difficult.

Theme Duel
* Battle Damage: Inflict 10,000 points of Battle Damage. This is barely a variant.
* Special Summon A: Perform 10 Special Summons in one duel.
* 10x Trap: Activate 10 Traps in one duel.
* Draw: Not drawing cards -- this is about reaching a remis, such as by both players reaching 0 LP simultaneously. In fact, the illustration (in the spoiler) suggests no fewer than three cards that can accomplish this.

* Hand Destruction: Force your opponent to discard 20 cards. There's certainly a deck I have in mind here.

2007 adds a fourth challenge mode: Puzzle Duel. Given a setup, you must win by end of turn. It's fantastic; easily the best part of the game as far as I'm concerned. I love it in any game that does something like it.

Puzzles are in this game as well. I'll transcribe some of the more interesting ones, then.

Here's a still life from one of the last duels I played with the modified starter deck. I was behind on LP and card advantage already, with a field that seemed hopeless for Masked Sorcerer, but had just topdecked Skilled Dark Magician. I figured that one of these traps was likely to be a combat trap that would allow me to respond with Magical Dimension, fizzling the trap (i.e. its target would have vanished by the point it resolves) and destroying that last defending monster, allowing Sorcerer to draw me one and potentially equalize.

Like MtG, YGO puts card effects on a stack, and effects can be responded to before they resolve; stacks, of course, are last-in-first-out (LIFO): the final response resolves first. This is the only reason why Dimension can achieve anything at all; its innate -1 is equalized by the opponent wasting a card on targeting something non-existent after Dimension has resolved.

What happened instead was that my opponent activated Sakuretsu Armor to destroy my Skilled Dark, I responded with Magical Dimension, and my opponent responded to that with Widespread Ruin (similar to Sakuretsu), which killed the Magician first, causing Dimension to fizzle. I lost to the hygiene product in short order, then lost another game to its Airknight. Probably the strongest of the first-tier opponents, disregarding that Skull Servant is more annoying to play against, and might school you more thoroughly as a kid.

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This is the Skull Servant's deck:

Foolish Burial is the card that I had never seen before as a kid (it wasn't available from any booster pack at the time), and immediately adored. It's a Normal Spell that searches your deck for any monster -- and puts it in the graveyard. Which is just another pile of resources.

The deck's intended strategy is to cast Level Limit - Area B or Gravity Bind (both Continuous, and stop monsters of level 4* or higher from attacking; the former is a Spell, the latter a Trap) while assembling Skull Servants in the graveyard to power up the King (whose ATK is 1000 times the number of Servants and Kings in your graveyard). Of course, the computer doesn't realize this, and tends to use Goblin Zombie to fetch itself or Spirit Reaper (indestructible in combat; dies whenever targeted by any effect) instead. The King also has an effect that, if it has just been destroyed in combat, allows you to exile a Servant or King from the graveyard to Special Summon it right back to the field. The computer always uses it if possible, even if the King was at 1000 ATK before and would contribute nothing at all to the board state. This tends to be self-defanging.

The greater danger comes from Stealth Bird (3* / Winged Beast / DARK / 700 / 1700), which inflicts 1000 damage to you whenever it's Flip Summoned, and can flip itself to face-down Defense Position once per its controller's turn, during the Main Phase. Behind Area / Bind, this has roughly the same effect as certain other birds being flipped. There exist a few such self-flipping monsters; the Skull Servant also plays Des Lacooda, which draws you a card when flipped. Both are serious clocks. Lacooda (a camel) is like having Skelengel + Tsukuyomi in one package, though it must be thoroughly protected from all attacks (500/600 stats), since the self-flippers don't trigger an effect when flipped by combat.

It's likely to be the first deck you encounter in this game that doesn't fight on the same axis as yours (unless you chose the FIRE or WATER decks), but only Zombies and Warriors have disadvantaged match-ups -- Dragons starts with 3x Stamping Destruction, and Spellcasters can beat him by reaching MoF + Heavy Storm repeatedly. I still opted to "counter-deck" him instead, building on my earliest purchases of Pharaoh's Servant and Pharaonic Guardian packs; the three key ingredients were Reasoning, King Tiger Wanghu, and Light of Intervention. (See the previous update for descriptions of the former two.) The only monster in the Servant's deck that doesn't immediately get blasted by Wanghu's effect is a King of the Skull Servants at 2000+ ATK. What's more, the computer seems unaware of said effect; I've seen it happily Summon Mystic Tomato (1400 ATK), revive it with Premature Burial, and then revive it with Call of the Haunted. The only problem is Wanghu's explicit blind spots of Flip Summons and Sets; by himself, he can't actually stop Stealth Bird. Given that I've failed to realize that Chaos Emperor Dragon's name contains the word "Chaos", I'm not surprised by my mistake.

The Pharaoh's Servant pack offers a solution (at common). The Continuous Trap Light of Intervention prevents monsters from being Set or flipped face-down; they enter face-up Defense Position instead. I like this card on principle; it stops all Flip monsters still in hands, which could already mean a de-facto card advantage, and interacts with many other cards -- nothing is safe from Chaos Sorcerer or Lightning Vortex now, for instance, or you can play cards like Royal Magical Library in face-up Defense Mode without having to wait for an attack. The computer fails to acknowledge that Light of Intervention interacts with the Tiger; enjoy the show. Of course, the Servant isn't helpless against this combo because his starting hand is likely to contain some monster removal; Exile Force gets crushed (it can't respond with its own trigger before it's destroyed), but Smashing Ground and Vortex work just fine.

Wanghu can't be searched by the usual suspects (1700 ATK is too much for Sangan/Giant Rat, and he's not a Warrior), so I went with the Reasoning approach instead. A Reasoning turbo shell rewards playing few monsters, for better control over the target. (It's possible to use the card as a toolbox in "hybrid" Magician of Faith control, though; we might well see that later.) I didn't have the obvious staple yet (see below), so I went with 3x Wanghu, Chaos Sorcerer, Jinzo, and Mystical Knight Jackal (yet another Pharaonic Guardian card). While Jinzo conflicted with the Wanghu/Intervention combo, his ability to shut off Gravity Bind made him a necessary evil -- my options for spell/trap removal, as well as Chaos fuel, were limited otherwise.

Playing a whole lot of games against the Servant, I realized that my deck still couldn't deal with his prison consistently enough, so I added counter-traps. I had found most of the good PGD cards, so I switched to Invasion of Chaos packs -- playing with Reasoning, I now had a very good argument for hunting Dark Magician of Chaos and Dimension Fusion (more Chaos Sorcerers are always good, of course). Neither appeared until I was just about done with this grind (but grinding is barely noticeable when you're trying to refine a deck, after all: the great advantage of CCGs), but I did draw 3x Cursed Seal of the Forbidden Spell. It has the same "discard a Spell Card: counter target Spell Card being played" effect as Spell Shield Type-8, but it compensates the -1 net card with the unique effect that your opponent cannot play another spell of the same name as the countered one for the rest of their life the duel. Since my Reasoning turbo deck didn't actually have a one-turn kill so much as a prison combo, playing this felt on-theme (besides grievances with my own Jinzo), and I included it mainly to stop the dangerous Level Limit - Area B, but it could also trade neutrally against Lightning Vortex (which also discards as a cost), which was appreciated given how few monsters I was playing, and occasionally provoked the computer into Heavy Storming its own prison -- it may do that, if it gains card advantage in the exchange -- or protected Light of Intervention from said Storm; material for position ("which is future material").

One final note of computer insanity: it will target its own Spirit Reaper with Next to Be Lost for reasons thoroughly unknown.

The best inadvertent (...probably?) counter-tech this deck has for Wanghu/Light is The League of Uniform Nomenclature, which would ordinarily summon two Skull Servants from the deck to join one already in play (it only works on small Normal Monsters, making it usually not a consideration in deckbuilding). Chained to Wanghu, it instead dumps three of them in the graveyard, making the Kings an immediate danger.

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I gradually acquired the cards to make a Reasoning/Gate combo deck to defeat the rest of the Free Duel opponents with -- the remaining ones are locked behind completing the variant challenges, which I now have a good stock of cards for.

Here's the current decklist:





You might be familiar with this kind of combo deck, where the entire deck is the combo. If not, here's a teaser, showing a typical winning board state:



I have four cards left in my deck on my second turn, and intend to swing for lethal damage after metamorphing The Creator into Cyber Twin Dragon. My first turn, for that matter, was to Set Solemn Judgment (the strongest counter-trap in WCT2006) and pass.

You can't attack on T1 of the game; this is the sole advantage to going second by the old rules. I still choose to go first with this deck, since that means an extra card on the attacking turn -- it's unlikely that the enemy can punish my empty board on T2. Playing first also allows me to set Solemn Judgment T1, protecting my combo on T3.

An overview of the new and pivotal cards for this archetype follows.


I've introduced Reasoning already. The card asks your opponent to call any monster level, then turns over the top card of your deck repeatedly until it finds a monster that can be Normal Summoned (monsters that can't are called "nomi", by the way), then Special Summons it face-up (in either position; you choose) if your opponent called its level wrong. All other cards go to the graveyard. It thus rewards

* playing dual-Tribute monsters with incredible effects that usually suffer for their restrictive summoning conditions
* playing Chaos Sorcerer, and other such "nomi" monsters that are summoned by exiling cards from your graveyard; better yet if they count as fuel for their own species, because Reasoning will dump them along with the spells/traps
* playing monsters that trigger good effects when Special Summoned
* playing a monster suite that's hard for the opponent to call one obviously correct level for
* playing few monsters at all, such that you're reasonably informed to which one you'll hit; this will also lead to more cards getting dumped in the graveyard, which you probably want
* cards that retrieve cards from your graveyard, especially Spell Cards (not least since it's a spell itself, and decks that cast Reasoning will want to cast it multiple times)
* luck No, let's not be facetious, despite the increased importance of starting hands. At the very least, you need to have your decklist memorized to make the most of Reasoning decisions. Reload is another card that's difficult to play correctly, even if the gist is often obvious. In the same vein, unlike MoF control, you regularly have a good reason not to slam Pot of Greed on sight -- you might want to save it for after the Reasoning/Gate, but not always.

You may wonder how the computer determines which level to call on Reasoning. I certainly do, but I've noticed that it always calls a level between 4* and 7* inclusive. Needless to say, this unreasonably rewards playing 8* monsters, when that should really make your opponent's life easier. See below.

If you win a game with no cards in your deck, you receive an extra 1500 BP. That, too, made me want to play this card and deck.


Monster Gate is Reasoning with a -1, but no call clause -- it will always summon its target. When you hold both and have a monster active, it's time to make a judgment call as well. Other than that, thank the designers for allowing you to play effectively six copies of Reasoning with more resilience to probability (and awareness thereof) than they should have.


Or make that seven. Serial Spell on either of Reasoning or Monster Gate is a fantastic glue, because in some games, you will only see that one copy, and the entire deck is geared around that one spell. Besides, Reasoning combo decks tend to empty their hands when they attempt to go off, tend to have situationally-useless cards in hand (such as nomi or tribute monsters, which you might want to discard anyway, or repeat copies of Trunade), and are comprised mainly of spells, which can be Set in advance to avoid discarding them. Note that this copies the effect, but not the cost of the targeted spell, so Monster Gate summons two monsters for just one Tribute and a discard, which is downright fantastic. While Serial won't have many other targets (what's the point of casting Lightning Vortex twice in a row), you can always Serial Spell Pot of Greed to get four cards for three, which is Graceful Charity on steroids. Graceful is Forbidden.

If you tried to Serial Spell Metamorphosis, it would still just give you one Fusion Monster; pity. Brain Control is another sensible target, though.

I certainly didn't invent Reasoning/Gate, but this card is one of my more signature spices. More than one copy would cause problems, I think -- there's not enough targets for it, and not enough ways to convert dead Spell Cards favourably.


Speaking of which, here's Pot of Greed, in my binder at long last. The designers showed mercy and made it merely Rare in a pack full of bland junk, when it obviously deserves much more glitter. I understand it would have been unwise to let the 3x MoF + Tsukuyomi structure deck include this. Pot's effect is effortless card advantage (which is tremendous already) that asks you to recycle it and win. Even as a kid, I quickly learned that this was one of the best cards; you see it draw Raigeki just in time to kill your opponent's board that would have swung for lethal, and immediately understand.

Reasoning combo can't play Magician of Faith to gain repeated Pots, but who needs that when you can have Dark Magician of Chaos (8* / Spellcaster / DARK / 2800 / 2600). No image because he's wordy. His effect is threefold:

* When Normal or Special Summoned, he retrieves a Spell Card of your choice from your graveyard to your hand.
* When he destroys a monster by combat, said monster is exiled rather than sent to the graveyard.
* When he would enter the graveyard from the field, he gets exiled instead.

Which means that if Reasoning/Gate hits this, you can immediately fetch Reasoning/Gate again, apart from having just obtained a 2800/2600 monster that screws with your opponent's search-summoners (since many of those need to hit the graveyard) -- and which could alternatively fetch Pot of Greed to earn you card advantage before the Battle Phase has even begun, or fetch Metamorphosis to turn this into the brutal Cyber Twin Dragon, which has 2800 ATK and can attack twice per Battle Phase. DMOC is the staple monster of Reasoning combo, drastically increasing its reliability.

That third effect is not mainly a drawback, by the way. Sometimes it does interfere with a play you'd like to make; if nothing else, this makes it unreliable Chaos fuel; but exiled monsters are far from untouchable. If nothing else, mass resurrection from the graveyard isn't trivial in WCT2006. Which is to say...


It all starts to come together now. Repeated Reasoning/Gate finds DMOC while filling the graveyard with Chaos-fueling monsters; DMOC names Pot or Monster Gate or Metamorphosis or anything you might want, gets Tributed, and you cast Dimension Fusion to bring him back for another spell (hurr!), along with any summonable monsters you pitched to your Chaos Sorcerer in hand. (In fact, you can even use Chaos Sorcerer's effect on your own monsters to "flicker" them now.) If you name Dimension Fusion with DMOC, you'd have a perpetual engine if not for the steep LP cost. The drawback of symmetry is less concerning; your deck already has to deal with your opponent's board anyhow, and once your deck is mostly in your graveyard, you can retrieve Lightning Vortex at will.

As for the other monsters in the deck, Chaos Sorcerer is a known all-star. Soul of Purity and Light (6* / Fairy / LIGHT / 2000 / 1800) is another nomi, which requires two LIGHT monsters as fuel instead. It doesn't have any effect worth speaking of, but that's not what it needs to do here -- providing free Chaos fuel from every Reasoning/Gate, and shifting the other LIGHT monsters to the exile zone, are its main tasks, which it performs admirably; the burst of 2000 damage might also help you reach lethal damage on occasion, especially if you can't morph to Cyber Twin Dragon for any reason.


But it's the little ones you have to watch out for. Reasoning by itself couldn't suffice as a reliable tribute provider for Monster Gate; a tribute-less monster is needed. While this one can't be searched from the deck using other spells, unlike certain alternative Chaos-fuel candidates, Sacred Crane stands out for its effect. Hitting this with Reasoning/Gate means a free card; using this as LIGHT-attribute fuel for nomi monsters and casting Dimension Fusion means a free card; reanimating this with Premature Burial means a free card. If all your spells cantrip, what can stop your combo deck? The Crane even provides a relevant ATK stat.

I played Crane at three copies and just two "fatties" previously, but two Cranes and three "fatties" (including DMOC) seem to work better. Speaking of which, let me introduce those batteries-in-both-senses:


The Creator, whose cut-off text concludes "...cannot be Special Summoned from the graveyard" (what would Jesus do), turns any of your hand cards into a resurrection spell, once per turn; in effect, any of your non-contributing cards is Sacred Crane now after the first gets Gated to fetch this, and you can summon DMOC from your hand at no cost, since the net exchange is neutral. Nothing stops the Creator from being retrieved via exile and Dimension Fusion, either; I've occasionally exiled him with Chaos Sorcerer's field effect when I couldn't reach lethal damage, but held Dimension Fusion.

The icing is level 8* -- making him immune to Reasoning failures thanks to the computer's silliness, and providing another Metamorphosis material for Cyber Twin Dragon, which much improves this deck's OTK opportunities. A human opponent would start calling 8* every time once they saw this in your deck, which must be the main reason why it wasn't run much historically. Thunder as this monster's type is a rather flavourful touch, and mechanically means that you're probably not getting any use out of its type (Thunder monsters and support are both very sparse, at least in 2005). The Creator has exactly one specific support card, his Incarnation, which is a 1600/1500 4* LIGHT Warrior, i.e. Chaos fuel searchable by Reinforcement for the Army, but its effect is just to Tribute itself to Special Summon the Creator from your hand, which is emphatically not where this deck wants the Creator to be, so it's not pertinent.

The third big creature is Mystical Knight of Jackal (7* / Beast-Warrior / LIGHT / 2700 / 1200) -- drawn from Pharaonic Guardian again, just to highlight how many good cards that set appears to include. The Knight has a simple effect: you may place any monster that it destroys in combat back on top of your opponent's deck. This threatens a gruesome lock, and forces the enemy to concede field presence unless they have searcher monsters, which are great answers to this. The computer fails to consider this entirely, and will endlessly shove the "best possible monster" in front of this card while you can grab the best hand you need. In essence, against the computer, this card is Yata-Garasu, except it can be found via Reasoning. Yeah. I thought about using another Creator or a DARK monster to help Chaos Sorcerer, but this admittedly outperforms its competition, even when it "shouldn't" (but neither should DMOC or The Creator be immune to Reasoning failures).


The opponent might have the arrogance to try and interact with your deck, using set Quick Spells or Traps. Therefore, here's three copies of Giant Trunade, friend to all OTK-affine decks during the halcyon days of allowing three copies (yeah). The card is a -1 by itself, but that shouldn't deter you, because it will protect you from far worse exchanges and bring home games against would-be prisons; when no next turn will occur after firing it, Trunade means three more copies of Heavy Storm. The card also features in a number of stock combos; the most important one is that it can recycle Premature Burial (but not Call of the Haunted) without destroying the equipped monster, due to how Burial is worded. I've been wondering whether three Trunades are one too many with all this cantripping, though.

I used to have Swords of Revealing Light in the main deck because Trunade scooping it up means that it blocks attacks for five turns, and it was better than the cards I had at the time, as well as comboing with Lightning Vortex and being well-protected by Solemn Judgment. It's mostly just helpful when the deck has already drawn a terrible hand, though -- it's better to play cards that alleviate this problem directly, especially since not every opposing deck cares about Swords.


Card Destruction and Reload can avert the most awful hands (and those will happen) and dig deeper into the deck, though Reload is notably worse since it might serve the same cards up again, and I consider it a necessary evil. Both of these cards are inherently -1, but combo doesn't care because holding 3x Chaos Sorcerer is probably a -2 at best. You get the idea. I had to buy the former card via password for 9100 DP, since it's not in any regular booster, but it's a combo staple (not only for Reasoning/Gate) -- I'm sure it'll pay back.

Playing Reload at three copies is defensible, but two seem sufficient to me.


Traps inherently drain tempo since you can't activate them on the turn you draw them, but there's still a few traps that you can reasonably use. Reckless Greed is another copy of Pot with a drawback that isn't one if the extra card wins you the game; you'll want to delay its activation for as long as you can, of course.


Solemn Judgment is YGO's closest approximation of MtG Force of Will; the card can counter anything while it's being played, but at the cost of half your LP (roughly analogous to FoW's discard). Like Force, it both protects you from opposing combo decks and protects your own combo from interaction, although countermagic is, on the whole, far less important to YGO (in 2005, at least; I have no idea about the current state) than to MtG eternal formats. If you want counter-traps, though, this should be your first consideration.

When you first play Solemn, it teaches and validates the maxim that LP are the least important resource. When you play it for long enough, you eventually suspect that this isn't true. In this deck, it mainly interferes with Dimension Fusion (being unable to pay 800 for a make-or-break Brain Control / Premature Burial is very unlikely).

Solemn's other big use is to protect a combo deck when it fails to reach one-turn kill damage. If my opponent holds Lightning Vortex, he could easily crush my board after that and win, for instance, but now he also needs S/T removal; if there's two Solemns (which I can definitely draw here), not even that will help. In other words, drawing Solemn can substitute for drawing more combo pieces because you need less of a board to win; Reasoning combo has no fixed borderline with Reasoning "turbo", the toolbox/control variant. Indeed, the latter approach might be stronger -- a well-protected DMOC plus a Dimension Fusion for him and two Sacred Cranes tends to win games already, no need to OTK.

The final card that's new to the LP is Upstart Goblin. This Normal Spell draws a card (i.e. replaces itself) and gives your opponent +1000 LP. It's a way to play "fewer than 40 cards" with a small drawback; the 1000 LP can make a difference in decks that win by attacking with a large board on a single turn, such as this is; but Cyber Twin Dragon tends to "overkill" with its 5600 burst when combined with DMOC and a Crane + Sorcerer, which is the usual procedure. An alternative is Jar of Greed, which also replaces itself, but is a Trap, thus inherently slow.

The aforementioned Temple of Kings (FKA Cathedral of Nobles, which I frankly prefer, even if it makes no sense with a card depicting an Ancient Egyptian structure) gets around said slowness, by the way. I wonder how a deck focused on it and card-drawing traps would fare; I don't have the ingredients yet, though (including Cathedral itself).

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Marginal points of interest: Brain Control vs. Snatch Steal is a judgment call; both take over a face-up monster, but I've lost a game to getting Snatch Steal hit with Dust Tornado (it's an Equip Spell), whereas Brain Control has no easy answer (that enemies in this game play regularly) and can be replicated by Serial Spell. I have yet to be screwed by the 800 LP fee, and when you cast Brain Control in combo, the End Phase is probably not going to occur (you'd give back the monster, technically). Either one's presence makes it sensible to fill your Fusion Deck with at least one monster for each level, so you can transform a stolen card with Metamorphosis; I haven't listed most of them, but Darkflare Dragon deserves a mention besides Cyber Twin, because it's one of the very few 4* Fusion Monsters in this game. The card is a 1500 ATK DARK Dragon without an effect, which is laughable, but it's DARK, and most pertinently, allows Metamorphosis to put a Sacred Crane in the graveyard. It's not the go-to play, but definitely useful.

Reasoning did take a hit with the September 2005 banlist, because it could previously run 3x Scapegoat, both to protect itself and as tribute fodder for Monster Gate that doesn't interfere with Reasoning/Gate itself, as well as 3x Metamorphosis (which could also turn goat tokens into Thousand-Eyes Restrict). I've opted against Scapegoat here -- I rarely lacked for Monster Gate fodder -- but it could definitely be included, perhaps over one copy of Soul of Purity and Light. It would require some further adjustments away from OTK and towards turbo-control, though, since clogging up my field with goat tokens will prevent OTK attacks.

Incidentally, Soul is my main "innovation" (such as it can be) to this shell, along with Serial Spell and Solemn Judgment. I wish I had more cards that can discard it profitably -- a notable gap is my lack of Magical Stone Excavation (discard two, retrieve a spell), which is definitely a card in this game, because I've seen it in a puzzle, but I know it won't be in any of the regular booster packs.

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Battle Detail

Now that we've seen the cards, here's a slightly closer look at how the deck wins in practice:


My opponent had a Set Spell/Trap. After a T1 Serial Spell on Pot of Greed, I've just Gated Crane into Jackal and resurrected it with Premature Burial (drawing another Monster Gate -- wherein the Crane's power is on full display), which I scooped up with Trunade. Playing Burial before Trunade did run the risk of getting Burial Dust Tornado'd, but there's a big reward to recovering Burial, and with another Crane in hand and Jackal poised to negate my opponent's next draw, I considered my position sound enough that I could recover from a lost Burial on T5.

Now I can Gate Crane to find what's guaranteed to be either DMOC or the Creator. If it's the former, excellent: I can name Gate for retrieval, get The Creator, and Dim Fuse to get DMOC back. If it's the latter, I still have the play seen here:


Discard Crane to the Creator's effect, resurrecting the other Crane. Draw another card. Then play Premature Burial, drawing a third.


Thanks to the wonders of Sacred Crane, the risky Trunade/Burial pays off by hitting lethal in the form of Reasoning. Nonetheless, had I not drawn this, or my opponent had been able to call 8*, Solemn plus Jackal's draw-denial plus scooping up Burial with my remaining Trunade (unnecessary here) would probably have sufficed to close it out "control-style" at this card advantage.

We have definitely not seen the last of Reasoning. If you've been thinking about whether Dim Fuse + DMOC can truly go infinite when supported by a third card, for instance (or know already that it can), you'll be vindicated later.

Next time: Some Challenge Duel variants.

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Puzzles

The first one is easy, but I've included it because it resembles playing Reasoning/Gate: a slew of cards in hand, and you have to identify and discard the ones that aren't contributing, while (solution spoiler) sacrificing your monsters for positional gain. The second one is more convoluted. In these puzzles, the aim is always to win on the same turn; you begin in your Main Phase 1, and all cards that start on the field are treated as though they've been on the field on your prior turn.

The enemy avatar for these puzzles is The Tricky, by the way, another card you're unlikely to have seen before as a kid in 2005. I can't think of an application for it (you'd usually want Cyber Dragon, or if looking to use the Special Summon for combo, Gilasaurus), but that doesn't mean there's none, and it's an elegant design. WIND is arguably the worst attribute to have in 2005, unfortunately.

#1: "Wall of Zoa"


Your LP: 100 -- Opponent's LP: 3000

Your field: 3x Divine Dragon - Excelion (Attack Position); Next to be Lost (Set)
Your hand: Monster Reincarnation, Hysteric Fairy, Premature Burial, Back to Square One, Tribute to the Doomed, Dark Hole

Opponent's field: 3x Metalzoa (Defense Position)

Hint:

Solution:


#2: "Riddle Challenge"


Your LP: 1500 -- Opponent's LP: 4850

Your field: Jinzo, Great Spirit (both Attack Position), Penguin Soldier (face-down Defense Position); Ultimate Offering (active), Mystic Wok (Set), Fuh-Rin-Ka-Zan (Set)
Your hand: Milus Radiant, Bladefly, Little Chimera
Your deck: Star Boy, Catapult Turtle

Opponent's field: Rabid Horseman (EARTH / 2000 ATK), Steam Gyroid (EARTH / 2200 ATK), Red-Eyes B. Dragon (DARK / 2400 ATK), Neo Bug (EARTH / 1800 ATK); The Dark Door (active), Gravity Bind (active)

Hint:


Hint:


Solution:


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PS. The actual revised YGO term for MtG's "exiled" is "banished", but I find "your banished zone" clumsier than "your exile (zone)", and unlike the card designers, I have no need to pretend that YGO and MtG's similarities are entirely coincidental (though calling YGO a mere imitation of MtG is wholly unfair, I.M.H.O., if you're talking about any post-2004 format). WCT2006 still uses the old wording of "removed from play", anyhow.

Re Pot of Greed: Remember when Pokemon TCG had Bill at Common and Professor Oak at Uncommon?

Indeed. And both at four copies. Base/Jungle/Fossil Pokemon TCG is fine madness.

I've bought and enjoyed the GBC game thereof, but I don't think I'd have anything new to say about it, not even on variants. There's a good overview of the paper meta here; I'll only add that Dewgong (uncommon) is the best Stage 1 to carry you through the game while lacking the haymaker Basics and Tuff, and that the speedrun uses Diglett/Dugtrio.

I like that idea mentioned at the end, that of banning the known top tier of universal cards. Maybe something for a Tabletop Simulator weekend.

YGO was the most restrained of the big three CCGs on the obligatory broken draw spells, because even MtG had Contract from Below (and Ancestral Recall, but that can be defended). The closest card to that in this game is Mirage of Nightmare. Yamata Dragon has a Contract-like effect, but if you can summon this and hit your opponent with it, you could have won that game with "any other card".

Reasoning : destroy your deck so that your monsters may live.

Flip Prison



The Skull Servant had the right idea about Des Lacooda (the leftmost card in the first row). The deck is weak to Giant Trunade generally and OTKs specifically, but the computer can't react in the deckbuilder or with e.g. Light of Intervention from the sideboard. This deck has cleared the following Limited Duels:

* Medium/High Level forbidden
* Tributes forbidden
* Attacks forbidden
* Special Summons forbidden

Self-flipping monsters dodge most of the common monster removal in this game while face-down -- there's still e.g. Nobleman of Crossout, Raigeki Break (which the computer doesn't play aggressively) and cards specific to Dark World decks, of course, but you'll notably dodge the one mass monster destruction spell of note, Lightning Vortex. The results of a flip prison won't be easy to revert with an uncountered Storm + Vortex.

Flip control is blatantly non-interactive outside of Solemn Judgment; the two flavours of Swarms (flip to destroy monsters or spell/traps respectively) are only included to punish field commitment, such that a breach in your spell/trap prison won't lead to immediate disaster. Spirit Reaper likewise offers a second layer of defense, not only by being indestructible in combat, but also by exploiting empty boards which the Swarms help to create, either by effect or by threat, since a player taking combat damage from the Reaper must discard one.

In fact, this flavour of deck doesn't require burn cards like Wave-Motion Cannon or Stealth Bird at all; if I cared more about consistency than speed, I'd ditch them in favour of more Swarms, although Reckless Greed could stay -- its disadvantage is more than repaid by the extra camel or protection that it draws.


Elegant, isn't it? Gravity Bind, as so often, remains the best prison card in the game, but needs support against the likes of Jinzo, Breaker / MST, and Heavy Storm / Giant Trunade. Solemn Judgment works well against most of these -- I've forgotten whether I've mentioned it, but since Solemn Judgment reacts to the Summoning, i.e. before the monster is considered to have "hit the field", Jinzo can be countered by Solemn. The main issue is that you just have three Solemns, and Solemn is so important that I'm playing 3x Jar of Greed to find it, which I prefer over Upstart Goblin here since Jar can bait and capitalize on spell/trap removal.


Time Seal is Forbidden nowadays, and the definitive card to illustrate that tempo matters even when card advantage is even. It plays well with once-per-turn effects, of course (the Reaper's discard effect is one, too). If you can recycle this with Mask of Darkness + Tsukuyomi or the like, you have a winning threat. Drop Off is similar, but drops the would-be draw into the graveyard instead, where it might still be productive, or even much more so.


Wall of Revealing Light asks you to pay any multiple of 1000 LP; then, as long as it remains on the field, opposing monsters with ATK no greater than the paid cost cannot attack. It clashes with Solemn Judgment, but you need both of those cards for the deck to work.

No other card in the game can so drastically decrease your LP in a controlled fashion. That ability gives rise to yet another inconsistent, but hilarious OTK.


Messenger of Peace allows more commonly-played creatures to dodge underneath than Gravity Bind and Level Limit - Area B, and those two should be preferred generally, but it protects Stealth Bird just as well as those cards. The upkeep cost is negligible, and mainly used such that you can destroy this card at will once you're ready to attack with large monsters again; it's a viable sideboard choice against aggro decks for that reason, even if your own monsters are hindered by it as well.

I wouldn't run this -- at least not at 3x -- if I had the remaining copies of Wall and Level Limit, but it's a suitable substitute.

There was also a challenge about using only Toon monsters, which aren't worth the words (short version: they care far too much about a do-nothing Continuous Spell named "Toon World", have other silly restrictions, almost no synergy with each other, and almost no support, although they get one of the best Spell Card searchers in the game, nearly on par with Reinforcement of the Army -- in fact, outdoing it on principle, since it can search itself and other non-monster cards). Since I had 3x Toon Goblin Attack Force and 3x Toon Gemini Elf, I slotted them into a generic prison shell along with this card:


as well as Astral Barrier, which is the same card, except for applying to all monsters. There's also a card named Spirit Barrier that turns all combat damage you suffer to 0 as long as you still control monsters. While this is a rather poor three-card combo due to how vulnerable it is while not even winning games by itself, my Toon-using opponent predictably didn't bring mass spell/trap removal because it would have destroyed his own Toon World, making my prison a moot point.

There's also a challenge called "Spirit Monsters Only" and I dread it more than the routine drudgery of Toons, because Spiritual Energy Settle Machine is a worse card than Toon World (somehow) and all the Spirits except for Tsukuyomi and Asura Priest would be dreadful monsters even if they never returned to the hand (maybe Maharaghi would be alright). I have an idea, though.

Another one that sounds "insane", but which I do at least look forward to: "Normal Summons Forbidden". Note that your opponent is not affected by this.

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Cydra Fusion Chaos



The original version of this deck was made for the Limited challenge of LIGHT-Attribute Monsters Only, but it didn't deviate much (no Jinzo and Sangan; a third MoF / Merchant / Power Bond in place of Dekoichi; Chaos Sorcerer was 2x Soul of Purity and Light instead). I've since found that this defeats the Tier 5 opponent playing Fiend aggro (Raviel, Lord of Phantasms) much more consistently than Reasoning, though still not without losses (I'm about 60-8). The deck might be running too few DARK monsters, as well as too many monsters in general; Giant Trunade might be defensible at 1-of, but this isn't strictly an OTK -- more a control deck with a stronger OTK option than usually.


Here's Cyber Dragon, the best LIGHT monster printed since Magician of Faith. 2100 ATK punishes almost every monster that doesn't normally require a Tribute, whether in Attack or Defense Position, and unlike most monsters, this card shouldn't have been able to trade against itself. Chaos Sorcerer keeps Cydra on a leash when it jumps in, but must beware that it could tribute to Monarchs, since 3x Treeborn Frog certainly makes them viable, or Jinzo.

Neither staple cards nor dedicated support can search Cydra from the deck, unless you want it in the graveyard -- which isn't that useful, given that its effect won't matter in there, and Overload Fusion isn't in this game.


What can be searched, though, is a card with effectively the same name as Cydra. Proto-Cyber Dragon does nothing else, barely winning combat against Sangan, but it doesn't need to. Since its effect isn't active in the deck (or hand), you can play three of them alongside three "real" Cydra.


Shining Angel is one of the six 1500- ATK search-summoners; all of them have 1400 ATK (dodging Messenger of Peace) and their effect tied to one of the attributes, and all of them are fantastic monsters -- the FIRE and WIND searchers only suffer from their relative paucity of good search targets or attribute-specific uses, not inherent weaknesses. Obviously, the LIGHT/DARK searchers are once again particularly blessed, but EARTH and WATER have their uses (the latter most recently for Treeborn Frog).


I've mentioned Cyber Twin Dragon, whose 5600 burst damage fuels one-turn kills after metamorphing from any 8* monster. There's another way to grab it easily, though:


The Light - Hex-Sealed Fusion has two effects; the more relevant one is mostly cut off here. When you have the fitting Fusion Material for any LIGHT monster in your Fusion Deck on the board, you can tribute them all, including this card (which, by its first effect, on display, will stand in for one of them), to Special Summon said monster. Unlike Metamorphosis, this is both searchable and a 3-of. There are EARTH and DARK variants as well, if you're wondering. It will still cost two Tributes to summon Cyber Twin, but since Cyber Twin is never one of your hand cards, and you will nearly always fetch one of the materials via Shining Angel, this isn't nearly as disadvantageous as with regular Tribute monsters; besides, Cyber Twin may well pay back +1 by destroying two monsters in a single Battle Phase.

This card could be seen as a prototypical Tuner monster.


Power Bond performs an actual Fusion Summon* (a particular kind of Special Summon), which might be a first for the LP. What's relevant, though, is the cut-off text: the monster you summon appears with doubled ATK, and you take damage equal to its original ATK at the end of this turn.

Hex-Sealed Fusion cannot be used as a substitute with this, since a card named "...Hex-Sealed Fusion" isn't explicitly "listed on the Fusion Monster Card" (edit: or because Cyber Twin demands it via its own text; at least one of the two); otherwise, I'd play this at three copies. The effect is still excellent, though; with Solemn Judgment or Heavy Storm protecting it, Cyber Twin Dragon at 5600 ATK is a serious threat to win the game (which, at -2, it had better be). The OTK package isn't the focus of the deck, but lowers the threshold to a winning advantage, makes it less likely for the opponent to come back with good topdecks, and punishes the computer's usual mistakes of making random attacks or not accounting for counter-traps when selecting its spells/traps.

* Though the old wording might not indicate it. The important distinction, anyhow, is that a Cyber Twin "properly" summoned by Bond can be revived with Premature Burial, but not one "improperly" summoned by Hex-Sealed Fusion.


Dekoichi is a better Skelengel, and easier to acquire in this game, anyhow. Ignore the text about the "freightening" wagon (it's a bad normal monster that you'll draw without a Dekoichi in sight); nobody ever uses that, because "FLIP: Draw 1" with 1400 ATK and being Chaos material is fine enough. Monsters that replace themselves with another card generally excel in WCT2006. Dekoichi further distinguishes itself by being a Machine, just like all the Cyber Dragon cards and the "natural fit" Jinzo (OTKs enjoy disabled traps), wherefore...


...I can run Limiter Removal, another OTK outlet for the ages. Ironically, given the name, this card is Limited in September 2005. It's another way to make Cyber Twin lethal, but even a simple Cydra + Dekoichi might win on this. There are enough good Machines that you can run Limiter Removal as a subtheme in control; in near-prehistoric YGO, when Mechanicalchaser was dominant on battlefields and this card was Unlimited, Machines were the beatdown deck of choice.


Two more staples, Creature Swap and Confiscation. The former benefits from MoF and such monsters that are "spent" after flipping, combos with Shining Angel etc. (a monster goes into the owner's graveyard, so you get to search after trading it off -- fantastic), and can furthermore trade off isolated (read: functionally dead) Hex-Sealed Fusions / Proto-Cydras. "-1" isn't the end of all arguments.

The latter has been Forbidden forever, and will likely remain so, but the September 2005 restricted list still allowed it. Running Confiscation effectively turns the worst card in your deck (which you would play instead of Confiscation) into an answer to your opponent's best card in their hand, whatever that might be, while also providing you with perfect knowledge of said hand, and further reinforcing that you should always choose to go first under ancient rules. 1000LP is nothing.

Not convinced?


From the Mono-LIGHT challenge duel. Incidentally, look at my opponent's avatar -- I didn't know this when I made my deck, and perhaps I'll return one day with a Seto Kaiba cosplay instead (but Blue-Eyes White Dragon support is lacking in this game, make no mistake). The computer has shot itself in the foot by not playing Pot T1 immediately, something no human player would credibly have done when holding a hand of only tribute monsters and equipment, plus whatever those Set spells/traps were. (If I'd gone first, I'd have known that, too.)

I proceeded to Set Shining Angel -- I didn't think setting MoF for a second Confiscation was useful, as the computer's entire hand was dead for the time being, and wanted to preserve Proto-Cydra since I had Power Bond already. I tributed it for Airknight, which fell into Bottomless Trap Hole (exiles target 1500+ ATK monster right when it's Summoned), and the computer stabilized with Marshmallon (indestructible by combat), which would have been weak to the Knight... but instead of drawing some cards while I held no answers, it tributed Marshmallon to its own Airknight, which was promptly devoured by Cydra.


From a different duel -- #4, I think. This would have been lost without Limiter Removal on top of Power Bond, as I didn't have enough LP to buffer the Bond recoil. While Soul of Purity and Light can hold off Cydra in isolation -- its effect, usually negligible, weakens enemy monsters by -300 ATK during the opponent's Battle Phase only -- the computer could simply remove it next turn with its D.D. Warrior Lady (4* / Warrior / LIGHT / 1500 / 1600), which can exile itself along with any monster it fights (after combat damage was dealt), then attack with Cydra for game. I'm not sure if this use of DDWL occurs to the computer, especially since it isn't aware of Soul's effect whenever it's not conducting its Battle Phase.

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The perils of translation. I sure hope nobody uses this card to fetch 1400/1200 Normal Monsters or a Quick Spell that increases one monster's DEF by 700 for a turn. Of course, no translator could predict that naming some card "Guardian" rather than "Guard" would clash with a themed batch of monsters, all of which are arguably worse cards than Celtic Guardian to boot, some three years later. Nonetheless, I can't help but smile when yet another card must inform me, for the sake of accuracy and balance, that "Frog the Jam" (2* / Aqua / WATER / 700 / 500; no effect; revised name Slime Toad) does not count as a Frog, whereas B. Skull Dragon (mostly notable as a 9* Fusion Monster; 3200/2500, no effect) and some random 900/700 marmot are both to be considered Archfiends.

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Here's another puzzle.

Your LP: 100 -- Opponent's LP: 1600

Your field: Blue-Eyes White Dragon (Attack Position) linked to Call of the Haunted
Your hand: Elemental Hero Wildheart, Drillroid, Fissure, Stop Defense, Cyclone Boomerang

Opponent's field: Spirit Reaper, Nightmare, Yomi Ship (all in Defense Position); Non-Spellcasting Area, The Dark Door (both active), Mirror Force (set)

Hint:


Solution:


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From now on, updates will be weekly at best.

Magical Library OTK

New decklist. I used this for the Traps Forbidden challenge. Despite appearances, perhaps, this deck is both more "serious" and more consistent than Reasoning/Gate variants. What's more, it can genuinely win on T1, since its win condition doesn't require you to attack. I certainly didn't come up with this; I believe players didn't use it back in the day (unlike Reasoning or Empty Jar) and it was invented during the Revival, but I might be wrong on that.


The Royal Magical Library from the starter deck has returned. Finding Libraries fast is the biggest concern; we also have to address that three Spell Cards will only convert to one more draw -- until we find extra Libraries among those cards, which we'd also need to Special Summon.


Magical Stone Excavation (thus the revised name) is a tremendous asset in spell-based OTK decks. The cost looks steep, but you can fetch various cards that pay it back; when in doubt, Pot of Greed + a single Library almost breaks even already. Spell Reproduction provides three additional copies with a slight additional drawback, and was released first. (One of the few reasons to buy Dark Crisis packs in-game; it's at Common, too.) The discards have their uses; mainly, this allows us to dump extra Libraries into the graveyard and resurrect them with Premature Burial. If you draw the win-con early, when the game state isn't ready for it, you can also pitch it to one Excavation/Reproduction and retrieve it with another afterwards.

There's another important spell card besides Pot that these two will recycle:


We've seen Giant Trunade a few times already, performing the stock combo with Premature Burial and clearing the opponent's spell/trap zone for a decisive turn. In this deck, these effects are both welcome, but not the main purpose of the card's inclusion. Have you guessed it already...?


I love this deck particularly because it finds absurdly effective uses for cards that serve no apparent purpose. The Continuous Spell Toon World solely enables Toon Monsters (they're not worth bothering with, except for Toon Cannon Soldier, but that's because it's a Cannon Soldier that can be searched by the next highlighted card), which refer to it in their card text, but it does nothing by itself except to cost you 1000 Life Points.

This deck plays no Toon Monsters at all.


It does, however, play Toon Table of Contents, which is an amazing searcher mainly held back by its lack of good targets, though Toon Cannon Soldier exists and can fuel a Dark Magician of Chaos FTK. This card can and usually should fetch itself; you're thinning your deck by four, naming Toon World as your final fetch, while also drawing a card off the Library. That's almost as strong as Pot of Greed, and we're not just playing Toon World because it provides another search target that can be used as discard fuel.


Half the secret to unlocking the power of Toon World is a seemingly forgettable piece of equipment from the same Stone Age set. The ATK boost isn't worth a card, and neither is burning your opponent for a one-time 500 damage; even combined, this is nothing. However, that burn trigger is, in fact, unique for a Spell Card in this game.

Technically, we only need one copy of Black Pendant in the deck, but a certain Continuous Spell (Archfiend's Oath) that I'd have liked to include isn't available in this game, despite having been released in the physical Dark Crisis booster. I don't know why -- the game features other cards with "name a card" effects, after all. Without Oath, there's less use for Convulsion of Nature (a Continuous Spell that turns both players' decks upside down; Trunading it effectively allows you to skip an impending bad draw from Library, and of course, it fuels Predict effects), and without both of these, the deck requires alternative Continuous/Equip Spells.

The idea is to scoop up Continuous and Equip Spells with Giant Trunade repeatedly, of course. Then you play them all again, effectively doubling the exchange rate of Library until the next Trunade, Library, Pot or anything to fetch Pot/Trunade with comes along. It's the same method by which the Sramos deck wins in MtG: you cast this guy (or his functional equivalent, Puresteel Paladin) in a deck full of hilarious chaff equipment with converted mana cost 0, cantripping Bone Saw for Paradise Mantle; once you run out of fuel, cast Retract to cantrip all your equipment again before you win via e.g. Grapeshot.

WCT2006 doesn't have a Storm analogy, but what it does have is...


Reversal Quiz. Send your entire hand and field to your graveyard (!!) to guess whether the top card in your deck is a Monster, Spell or Trap. Reveal it, and if you've guessed right, you exchange your LP total with your opponent's. The plan is to cast Toon World (-1000 LP) and Premature Burial (-800) repeatedly by scooping them up with drawn or Excavated/Reproduced Trunades; once your LP are reduced to at most 500, set Black Pendant and cast Reversal Quiz; due to the LIFO effect stack, Reversal Quiz resolves before the Pendant's graveyard trigger, so your opponent is set to minuscule LP and promptly dies from the Pendant's 500 damage.

Of course, you still need to call the top card of your deck right. While you can't activate Quiz when your deck is empty, you can draw every other card in your deck and, thanks to having your small monster suite memorized and running no trap cards, will have no trouble. Another way is to play this card:


Which is strong with Library anyhow, since you can use it to recycle Pot/Trunade as your next draw. This never coexisted with a legal Yata-Garasu, but in WCT2008, where you're eventually allowed to run one Forbidden card in your entire deck, it comboes with Sky Scourge Nohrellas (nomi, must exile 3 DARK Fiends and 1 LIGHT Fairy to Special Summon; effect: "nuke the field and all players' hands, then draw one card") and that tyrant fowl from the night's Plutonian shore.

Yata-Garasu is still not legal on any banlist I've unlocked in this game.


Here's another fantastic deck-thinner. Just don't Normal Summon it; an effectless 1600/1500 for a Tribute wasn't exciting even when this first came out. Look at its other effects, though; it instantly puts a LIGHT monster into your graveyard as Chaos fuel, and while the +1 might not yield cards of direct use, you can always pitch this to discard effects (i.e. one Excavation is free); it also allows Card Destruction/Reload to dig one card deeper when refreshing your hand, and provides legal targets for Premature Burial.

For a while, I ran Chorus of Sanctuary as a one-of Field Spell to get an extra scoop-up from Trunade, but I liked the freedom of not having to Excavate/Reproduce Black Pendant.

Unfortunately, the deck doesn't lend itself well to screenshots, and it takes a long time to finish any given duel with it; unlike Reasoning, you'll never get the valuable Extremely Low Deck bonus, either, due to the win condition.

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It might be hard to believe that this pile works; here's a duel.


No Library yet, but Sangan (leftmost) can fetch it by effect once it gets destroyed. Thunder Dragon is here to fuel Magical Stone Excavation shortly, and I also dig for Toon World. The opponent (playing Fiend-tribal aggro) summons a 1900/1500 beatstick (Archfiend Soldier) and destroys my set Sangan. I should have delayed Toon Table here, though, even though that makes my T3 draw slightly decrease in quality.

In a real duel of this era, you should almost never set Sangan because Nobleman of Crossout can then exile it, denying you the effect; the only argument for setting it is that you either expect your opponent to trade DDWL for it at once (much less of a setback than Noble, as DDWL usually wants to remove larger monsters) or know that they can't Noble.


T3: I summon the Library, and Upstart Goblin draws Premature Burial. With my cards in hand, I can get two more Goblins and a Library card if need be.


That's about what I've wanted to see. Discard Library to Feather, targeting Upstart Goblin, then resurrect Library with Premature Burial, drawing Goblin for another free spell counter.


Play Giant Trunade. Draw two.


Play Spell Reproduction, targeting Giant Trunade. Play Level Limit and Premature Burial. Trunade. Draw two.


Play Pot of Greed. Draw two, then draw two again shortly afterwards. You can imagine how much this deck suffers from Graceful Charity (the other universal draw spell for the ages) being Forbidden, but with Pot allowed, it's manageable.

By the way, Confiscation revealed that his hand contained Protector of the Sanctuary (4* / Fiend / EARTH / 1100 / 1900), whose effect is that your opponent cannot draw cards outside their Draw Phase. The only answer I have in my deck is Cyber Jar, which Sangan could at least have searched, had my opponent summoned it on T2. The Protector is Limited, because he enables a rather bleak combo (with Morphing Jar / Card Destruction).


At this point, I have lethal -- following Trunade, Excavation can discard two Reloads to return Feather (Cyber Jar and the third Library are still in my deck, and I don't feel like taking a 1/6 loss chance from Reversal Quiz), which can discard Toon World after I've played the other Toon World to shrink my LP to 400. It's still T3.


Empty palm vanquishes the wicked!

Don't worry. Thanks to Trunade, there's no chance of a set Fairy's Hand Mirror.

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While I won't be building the decks in detail (or maybe later), there are other ways both to abuse the Library and to draw (rather than just mill, as Reasoning does) your entire deck in a turn.


Butterfly Dagger - Elma fuels about a million different OTKs. If you equip this to Gearfried, the Iron Knight, who automatically destroys any equipment attached to him, congratulations on finding an infinite loop! It does nothing by itself, but every time you activate Elma, the Library gets a spell counter. Elma is another of the cards that seem to be destined to eternal Forbidden status.


Likewise for Card of Safe Return, but it's still allowed at three copies in this game. Here's a way to close the loop:


The cut-off text reads "...to Special Summon this monster from your graveyard." Please note that Manticore of Darkness is a Beast-Warrior itself, so you can discard Manticore of Darkness #1 to activate the effect of Manticore of Darkness #2 in your graveyard, which activates the effect of Manticore of Darkness #1, to which you can pitch Manticore of Darkness #2 from the field, etc. If you do this with Card of Safe Return, you draw your entire deck. While Manticore can't be searched by most cards, you can run 3x Foolish Burial and hope to draw the three-card combo; a Beast tribal deck can hold its own for a while, anyhow. After drawing your entire deck, you can win with e.g. 3x Blasting the Ruins (Normal Trap; requires 30+ cards in your graveyard: burn opponent for 3000 damage).

What? No love for Magical Mallet? (Or Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon?)

Your wacky combo deck is way more high-concept than anything I ever came up with.

Some love for Mallet, for sure -- but afaik it hadn't quite been printed in the summer of 2005 yet, so if this was a contemporary Goats deck, it wouldn't have been included. The game goes a half-year beyond that card pool, and I've seen Mallet played against me already; alas, it can't be pulled from any of the "mainline" boosters, and I had just blown 16,000 DP on 3x Magical Stone Excavation (same issues). Otherwise, it would have been mentioned instead of Reload.

For those who don't know Mallet's effect:


Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon has seen fringe use as the token 7* LIGHT Metamorphosis target in the Reasoning deck (although it barely improved on St. Joan), but I think a vanilla 2800 ATK monster isn't a good reason to run Polymerization or trade in your card advantage.

Edit: In fact, Thundra also comboes with the aforementioned Convulsion of Nature, since even if you have no copies in the deck anymore, you can discard Thundra to shuffle your deck if the top card looks useless for the moment.

Too kind. I didn't come up with this deck, either, it's a classic Goat Revival FTK. Don't know who made it, or whether Sramos was a direct influence. (The Convulsion of Nature sub-theme also calls to mind Tight Sight, which is a damn beautiful MtG deck.)

I did discover the Elma / Gearfried interaction on my own as a kid in 2005, fascinated by the YGO card catalogue I'd asked my parents for -- thanks to that and the GBA games, I never bought many physical cards. I "invented" index-card proxies shortly thereafter; one of the first ones I made was Gora Turtle. I also remember thinking Woodland Sprite + Elma would go infinite, but Sprite does not explicitly say "destroy". I should try in this game, though.

I also never played YGO much against other kids, but one time, during cancelled lessons in primary school, I was invited to play against another kid, who had a large collection of cards up to the Pharaonic Guardian* booster, and he basically invented Cube Draft on that occasion. I beat him with the forbidden combo of The Eye of Truth + Bad Reaction to Simochi. In fact, that pair might show up in the LP as well. If anyone knows what a "Simochi" is, please enlighten me.

* Thought it was Labyrinth of Nightmare, but on reflection, I think he had Guardian Sphinx.

I don't know but I think it might be related to whatever a "Trunade" is.

It looks like a mangled transliteration (like "Erikshieler"), but I think "Giant Trunade" is due to the censors. It was first printed in the same set as "Mystical Space Typhoon", whose original name was "Cyclone"; "Giant Trunade" was plain "Hurricane". They must have deemed these insufficiently cartoonish, given that storms can wreck lives... but Heavy Storm, whose Japanese name is (roughly) just that, was allowed through as such.


As was this card. I love that this received an erratum on flavour text (guess where) -- too late for the German translator, who presumably never saw the artwork, opting to improve on what they must have seen as a "typically American" lack of modesty, thus changing it kindly to "a female fairy".

Then there's Snatch Steal, whose German name translates back to "Snapsteel", one of these magical blunders that ends up more evocative than the original.
(Nabokov; source. The term he alludes to is "Lukomorye", I think.)

Appropriate was also misunderstood as the adjective rather than the verb, and translated as "proper" ("angebracht"), though that is less interesting. I think there's enough content for a side-update on YGO translations of the era, though...

Abandoned.

e: or finished? Hard to say with open-ended sandbox games, but the fact is I didn't 100% it (well, 99.6% it because of the Huge Revolution bug ) and I didn't show off everything I had intended to, e.g. how to demolish Survival Mode, where you must battle until you lose, and LP carry over.

(You use The Agent of Power -- Mars with lifegain, because lifegain also carries over. Mars' ATK is equal your LP minus your opponent's (or 0 if that's negative); enjoy Cyber-Stein not costing 5000.)