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The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has so many cool cards that are so heavily reliant on the Heart of the Cards that it gets its own page. Many of them are hard to summon or activate, and it's not worth it during a competition.

In competitive circles, these cards are often referred to as "win more" cards: that is to say, cards that don't help you win, but do help you win even more when you're already winning. The typical definition is a card that really only does something if the player already has a strong, established field or is otherwise beating the opponent significantly in terms of resources.

For actual awesome and practical cards, see here. Also, keep in mind, given the right deck, most of these examples can be viable if you have the time and creativity to do so.


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     Instant Win Conditions 
Cards that grant Instant Win Conditions are often difficult to play, but satisfying to see actually work.
  • Good ol' Exodia: It gives you an instant win, but only if you have 5 certain cards in your hand at the same time (the cards can also be played as weak monsters). You can only have one of each in your deck. The only way to use him efficiently is to have a deck completely built around getting him in your hand, which is still a heavily luck-based strategy which leaves you almost defenseless, especially if your opponent uses cards that discard from your hand. However, with more and more stall cards and cards that purely increase draw power, Exodia decks eventually became one of the most hated "solitaire" decks players ever faced, since it's now possible to build a deck that draws almost all its cards in a single turn to get Exodia right away.
    • Exodius the Ultimate Forbidden Lord is much worse than Exodia's inherent Instant-Win Condition. First of all, to summon it, you must shuffle all your monsters from your graveyard to your deck, which is considered impractical as most decks today are graveyard-reliant. Secondly, it begins with NO ATK and is increased by 1000 for each normal monster in your graveyard, and you can send a monster from your hand or deck to the graveyard whenever it attacks. Thirdly, it is banished when it leaves the field. That means once it is gotten rid of, it is pretty much gone for good with your fattened deck, which is considered bad for most players. Fourth and most importantly, to achieve the Instant-Win Condition, you must spend about FIVE turns to send a piece of Exodia each turn with its own effect, which means that you cannot hasten the process to victory with Foolish Burial or other milling mechanics. Giving it multiple attacks in a single turn can do the trick, but the means to accomplish this are quite rare. While Exodius is very easy to summon, can use its effects to your advantage by regaining lost Extra Deck monsters, and be used as Rank 10 Xyz fodder, it is its Instant-Win Condition that succumbs to this trope.
    • In 2019, another Exodia card was announced, Exodia, the Legendary Defender and of course it has a win condition attached. For this one, you need to go through its tedious requirement of Tributing 5 monsters and then proceed to destroy a DARK Fiend monster your opponent owns (which means no cheating with Nightmare Archfiends or Mystic Box) before you get the instant win. Between the absurd Tribute Summoning requirement and specific battle restrictions, it's unlikely this condition will be met with any frequency, since you're generally going to need three specific cards in hand (Exodia, an attribute-changing card like Scroll of Bewitchment, and a type-changing card like DNA Surgery) and five Tributes available. And Legendary Defender has no protection whatsoever. All things considered, if you want to use Exodia as a beater, you're probably better off with The Legendary Exodia Incarnate.
    • Yet another Exodia card was introduced the same year, True Exodia. To win with this card, you have to give your opponent this monster, and put all 4 Forbidden One Normal Monsters on the field, and make sure they are the only monsters in the field. The 4 Forbidden One Normal Monsters are extremely weak Normal Monsters, and if you had these 4 on the field, your best option is to probably Link Summon a bunch of monsters rather than risking them on the field. Evidently, True Exodia is a Joke Character over anything else.
  • Destiny Board is probably one of the most difficult victory conditions to achieve. Not only will you need to have your entire backrow to reserve its Spirit Messages, each one can only be placed during your opponent's End Phase consecutively (which means it takes about ten turns to achieve victory with this set of cards). And should one of the Spirit Messages you control leaves the field, all of them are gone for good! You can use Dark Sanctuary to summon them as monsters, but that still has some problems. First, the Spirit Messages won't have any ATK or DEF and can't be given a boost since they're immune to all card effects, including your own. Sure they can't be targeted for attacks, but Dark Sanctuary doesn't stop your opponent from attacking directly, so you can't use the Spirit Messages as Stone Walls. Most important of all, Dark Sanctuary does nothing to protect Destiny Board itself, which still remains a magnet for every backrow removal under the sun; and with eight-ten turns available to formulate a strategy to get rid of Destiny Board, any player worth their salt will be able to eventually counter it and make all your hard work go to waste. Sentence of Doom mitigates this problem somewhat, since it lets you play a Spirit Message as if you played it using Destiny Board's effect, cutting down the number of turns needed to three. But again, no backrow protection for Destiny Board or the Spirit Messages.
  • Final Countdown: On the bright side, you win automatically after a certain number of turns, and the only way to stop it is to win before that happens. But that certain amount of time? 20 turns. (10 of yours, 10 of the opponent's) And it has a 2000-point cost, and is difficult to search — you essentially have to resolve this on your very first turn to get a chance at winning otherwise you're forced to expend your defensive resources to just hope to get the card, at which point you probably don't have the resources to survive until it goes off. While Final Countdown was more playable in older, slower formats, modern decks' ability to build a formidable board means your defenses can only lapse for one turn at most before losing. The only reason anyone would add this to their deck was if they were a massive fan of Europe. Though the card is limited in the TCG, this is less for its power and more due to being very annoying to handle in tournaments, since decks based around it tend to be designed around playing very long and slow-paced games, which clog up the tight schedule.
  • Inverted with the Difficult, but Awesome Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes. It requires a specific trap card to be activated, and then only in response to the destruction of its predecessor, Vennominion the King of Poisonous Snakes. Both cards have zero attack, but are boosted by the number of Reptiles in your graveyard (fortunately, there's specifically a card for sending Reptiles to the grave from the deck), but once it actually gets summoned, Vennominaga is all but invincible, since it cannot be affected at all by other card effects and if it damages the opponent three times without being killed itself, it's an automatic win. Its Instant-Win Condition is quite redundant since you can easily finish your opponent off with its high ATK.
  • Holactie the Creator of Light requires you to tribute all 3 Egyptian God cards to summon (and no cheating with cards that take the names of other cards, they have to be the originals). If you do summon it, however (and its summon can't be negated), you win the duel instantly, much like Exodia. But aside from decks specifically designed to bring it out, it's rather worthless (and it rarely works even in those decks). Not to mention, if your opponent allowed you to setup to the point where you could get the three God cards on field, you probably could have won in the meantime.
  • Number 88: Gimmick Puppet of Leo is an Xyz Monster that has an effect that can allow you to win the duel within 3 turns of it being on the field. However, it requires you to have no Spells or Traps on the field to use its effect and keeps you from conducting your Battle Phase that turn if you do. This is extremely dangerous against any skilled opponent since it allows them plenty of time to get the right card to stop it before you get that far (which isn't too hard to do as Leo has no protection to speak of) and requires you to be very cautious about what Spell/Trap cards you set/activate lest you give up the ability to use its effect. It also requires 3 level 8 monsters to summon; most of the Rank 8 toolbox has high ATK monsters (such as the Galaxy-Eyes Xyz monsters or some Gimmick Puppets themselves), at which point you have to question why would you even bother summoning Leo instead of any other Rank 8 that could end the game in the same number of turns or less without requiring you to forgo the usage of Spells and Traps. To make things even worse for Leo, there's absolutely nothing stopping the opponent from letting you put 2 counters on it (since you probably won't be doing much else with Leo on the field anyway), and then stealing it with something like Enemy Controller to place the third counter themselves.
    • Although its upgraded form looks a bit better than the original form for not having the latter's restrictions and immune to effect targeting, it is pretty hard to summon as it must be Special Summoned with a "Rank-Up-Magic" Spell Card targeting its original form, and cannot be Special Summoned by other ways. Also, its victory condition is pretty redundant since it has a hefty 3500 ATK that it can still use after using its effect to inflict 1000 damage every turn; by the time it's out of materials, your opponent is probably dead anyway.
  • Jackpot 7's effect is that you can activate it to get it shuffled back into your deck, when it is sent to the graveyard by an opponent's card effect, it banishes itself, and when all three copies of it are banished by their effects, you win the duel. Which sounds cool until you realize how hard and inconsistent it is to pull off. Splashing it into a random deck and expecting the opponent to use backrow removal on it will only result in the opponent being more careful with destroying your backrow (which is good for mind games but nothing else). To meet the condition with any kind of consistency requires also building a deck built entirely around a combo giving your opponent certain monsters to trigger their effects (since that technically makes them the opponent's card effect) and hoping they can't derail the combo (which is pathetically easy to do). The exception to this were decks built around abusing the Morphing Jars' effects by giving them to your opponent and triggering them, since there are enough ways to set it up and don't require particularly specific combos to succeed. The potential for such abuse to pop up in the TCG likely led to the bans of those cards before Jackpot 7 was released.
  • Ghostrick Angel of Mischief definitely counts, at least as far as its win condition is concerned. Its effect is that it can be Xyz Summoned on top of another Ghostrick Xyz monster, wins the duel once it has 10 Xyz materials, and you can attach one Ghostrick card from your hand to it during each of your turns. This means that in a proper Ghostrick deck, you have to minus yourself for at least 7 turns in a row and hope it lives, something that's very unlikely to happen in most duels. There are other ways to pull its win condition off, but none of those methods are consistent enough to be a competitive deck in its own right (for reference, the easiest version uses a Utopia engine that requires four specific Spell cards and roughly half your Extra Deck). The funny thing is that Angel of Mischief is actually a pretty strong card in itself (it's easily summoned, has good stats, is the deck's primary searcher, and using its effect triggers the floating effects of Ghostrick Xyz monsters), meaning you'll see pretty much every Ghostrick player running a few but almost none going for its win condition.
  • Phantasm Spiral Assault requires that a Phantasm Spiral Dragon equipped with the three different archetypal Equip Spells destroy three monsters by battle in order to automatically win the Duel. Granted, the archetype is focused on getting your Dragon out and many of the cards work to re-equip these Equip Spells onto Phantasm Spiral Dragon, but once you activate Assault, your opponent will most likely be doing everything in their power to stop that Dragon from succeeding. Plus, by the time you get the Equip Spells all attached, you have a 3300 ATK monster that does piercing, has destruction immunity, and burns the opponent on a regular basis. You're already winning at that point, so Assault is almost superfluous.
  • F.A. Winners has the effect that if an F.A. whose level is 5 higher than its original level battles an opponent's monster and inflicts battle damage as a result, you can banish a card from your hand, field, or grave, and you win if you banish 3 different F.A. field spells by this effect, and this is also a true once per turn effect. To start, F.A. cards generally don’t benefit from being banished, so you’d likely only ever consider using this on field spells already in the grave or if you’re one away from winning. And secondly, F.A. monsters gain attack equal to their current levels x300, so by the time you can start triggering this effect, especially if you summon their synchro monster, you will have at least one big beater on the field. And by the time you could trigger this effect 3 turns in a row, and the opponent hasn't stopped you by then, then victory is within grasp anyways, so much like Phantasm Spiral Assault, it becomes a giant why bother.
  • Remember the flashback duel between Pegasus and Bandit Keith?Details  Keith ended up losing the duel, and there is an instance where the winner used a Normal Monster that has evolved to a Duel Winner: Flying Elephant. It cannot be destroyed by opponent's card effect once during the opponent's turn. Once the effect is used and it stays until their End Phase, it can attack for game (regardless of opponent's LP) in your next turn, so long as it is a Direct Attack that causes damage. Sounds cool, eh? But its effect is clunky as hell and your opponent will have tons of ways to stop that, even if it was released during the time it was introducednote . The only way you’d ever win with this is if your opponent does so intentionally or is a special kind of stupid.
  • Relay Soul. To win with this card, you have to give your opponent this card, hope they set it and activate it, and pray the card summoned by this card's effect leaves the field—which is something no sane person would play, especially since there's nothing stopping them from using it to summon a monster to use as Xyz Material, which doesn't count as making it leave the field even if you make them activate it in the first place.
  • Number iC1000. To win with this card, you need to summon Number C1000 first (and let your opponent destroy it with a card effect), which the easiest way to summon is to use Numeron Chaos Ritual. Both cards are intensely tough to summon/activate, as there are several convoluted hoops to jump through (destroying one specific monster you own with specifically a monster effect and getting a Numeron Network in the Graveyard, activating and resolving Chaos Ritual, and hoping your opponent is dumb enough to destroy Numeronius with a card effect and not have another one ready for Numeronia and/or fail to remove Numeronius without destroying it, all while devoting at least half your Extra Deck to pulling this off). But, if you succeed, you get a RANK 13 monster with 100000 ATK (no, seriously you didn't read that wrong), and if you opponent does not attack, you win. And even if your opponent does attack, you can just detach a Xyz material from this card to negate the attack.note  However, a better way to use the Numerons was to summon Number S0: Utopic ZEXAL instead, which could lock your opponent down hard enough that it might as well be an instant win anyway, which actually became a meta strategy and led to its ban in the OCG and TCG. There have been decks that could win using Numerounia's effect, but rather than the intended one, they instead use Neko Mane King to force the opponent to end their turn early.
  • Musical Sumo Dice Games. Let's see its utterly ridiculous effect: "At the start of your opponent's Battle Phase: Roll a six-sided die. Treat the next 6 Main Monster Zones on either field as numbers 1-6, counting clockwise from this card in the Main Monster Zone, and move this card to the zone that corresponds to the result. If a monster is already in that zone, attach it to this card as material. (Transfer its materials to this card.) When the number of materials attached this way becomes higher than 6, you win the Duel. If this card cannot be moved, or if the monster that is already in that zone cannot be attached to this card as material, send this card to the GY." Basically, you play musical chairs with this card until you win, requiring you to: play a deck that can make a Rank 6, get lucky with dice rolls, possibly spend a ton of resources, and keep a monster with no protection alive on the field for likely multiple turns, and even then, your opponent can deny you a possible win by just not entering their Battle Phase before removing this thing. And to make it even worse, it counts Main Monster Zones on either side of the field, meaning an unlucky roll can make it go to your opponent's board and win the Duel for them instead. Needless to say, winning consistently with a strategy that requires this much luck is a pipe dream at best.

     Summoning Requirements 
  • Ritual Monsters:
    • Ritual Monsters are by far the hardest monsters in the game to summon, with the only few Ritual Monsters people actually play being the exception because they're just that damn good. To wit, they could be considered the Flawed Prototype of Synchro Summons. They require a magic card that sacrifices monsters from the field or hand with combined levels equal to or greater than the Ritual Monster's level. Doesn't sound too bad, but the main drawback is that Ritual Monsters, unlike Fusions and Synchros, are stored in the Main Deck instead of the Extra Deck. As a result, they frequently end up being a dead draw unless your deck is specifically designed around them or you already have the Ritual Spell in your hand,note  and unlike other monsters, they can't be resummoned from the graveyard unless already Ritual Summoned, and often have subdued effects for the trouble needed to summon them.

      Over time, Konami has been experimenting with Rituals a lot in an attempt to make them playable. Attempts include improving Ritual Spells such that they can summon more than just one monster, Ritual Summoning using Tributes from other placesnote  or by Summoning the Ritual Monster from the Graveyard, condensing Tribute requirementsnote  or using monsters in the Graveyard as the Tributesnote , giving the Ritual Monsters themselves utility in the handnote , changing the rules of Ritual Summoningnote  or even generic monsters designed specifically to faciliate a Ritual Summonnote . Results have varied, with successes including Nekroz and Drytron Decks, but for most part you still run the risk of a hand filled with ineffectual cards if you drew too many Ritual Monster or Ritual Spells, and you ultimately would be better off focusing on Extra Deck cards as they avert the consistency loss. It's quite telling that some of the generic Ritual support in the game would be downright broken in most archetypes, but often go Unlimited because Rituals are so inherently clunky that they need Purposely Overpowered support to keep up.
    • Vanilla Ritual Monsters are the worst of this bunch, like Hungry Burger and Magician of Black Chaos. They have all of the problems of being annoying to summon and they don't have a good (or even bad) effect to make up for it.
    • In Duel Links however, due to the smaller deck size, Rituals became easier to use, with Relinquished and Cyber Angels topping the meta.
  • Fusion Monsters suffered a lot of the same problems as Ritual Monsters, being that Polymerization and the required fusion materials can end up becoming a dead draw if not already in your hand. Thankfully, Konami caught onto this in the later years of the game, making more "generic" Fusion Monsters that accept a wider range of Fusion Material (instead of one name, they can ask for any monster of a specific category, for instance), alternate ways of sourcing Fusion Material including fusing from the Deck, and even archetypes that Fuse monsters without needing a Spell for itnote .
    • Old school Elemental HEROes are probably the best example of this. Granted, near the end of their era they got a lot of good support and fusions that can be gotten out relatively consistently, and while it is a fun deck to play casually, it still comes off as an archetype that feels like a Flawed Prototype to future fusion archetypes. While the sheer amount of fusions they have allowed for great versatility in their day, they still suffered from a semi-high bricking chance regardless, and most of their fusion materials are too weak to protect yourself until you can draw a fusion spell card or the materials for the fusion you need. Also, compared to fusion archetypes from the Arc-V era like Shaddolls and Frightfurs, they have almost no way of recovering should their field be nuked, or if one of their fusion boss monsters get destroyed. On top of that, quite a few of their fusions can be rather underwhelming, with only a select few even breaking 2000 ATK. Overall, the entire archetype feels like it was Konami just testing out what makes a fusion archetype good; a fact that becomes more apparent with later E-HEROes released during the ZEXAL era having generic fusion materials and better ways to recover overall, making the old school E-HEROes even more of this Trope than they already were.
    • In the early days of the card game, there were worthless fusion cards like Flame Ghost or Fusionist, possibly some of the most useless cards in the game. Even by the standards of the earliest days of the game, a monster with only 900 or 1000 ATK that required a spell and two specific monsters simply wasn't worth the effort no matter how you looked at it. They have found players since then, though, with Instant Fusion turning them into quick Rank 3 fodder.
      • King of all of these horrible early Fusions is Rare Fish, clocking in at 1500 ATK for a Level 4 Fusion that has no effect. What makes him so special? Well, one of his Fusion Materials is the aforementioned Fusionist, meaning in the early days you had to Fusion Summon Fusionist, THEN Fusion Summon a second time to get this guy out! The best part? In Japan, he was initially released in the same Booster Pack as Skull Red Bird, a Level 4 Normal Monster with 1550 ATK and the same rarity, meaning Rare Fish was Power Crept immediately. Quite the rare fish indeed. Thankfully, he's also found a home in budget Rank 4 WATER Decks, where Instant Fusion bypasses all of the hoops required to get this guy out the legitimate way.
    • Other fusions that are useless unless you get very lucky or are very good are Dragon Master Knight, requiring Black Luster Soldier (a vanilla Ritual monster) and Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon, another Fusion monster. Generally, anything that requires more than one Fusion monster is probably more difficult to use than the average player would have patience for. You can use fusion substitute monsters to avoid having to use Ultimate Dragon, but given that Black Luster Soldier isn't exactly an impressive card on its own and Dragon Master Knight does nothing other than have big ATK, it's questionable whether loading your deck with cards like these is worth the payoff.
    • Tellingly, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, which features a rebooted card pool that focused primarily on supporting original generation cards in its initial months, saw classic Ritual Monsters (Relinquished) and Tribute Monsters (Gravekeeper's Chief) elevated into the metagame. However, despite the massive amount of support, Fusion Monsters remained little more than a gimmick until modern cards like Destiny HERO - Dangerous were introduced.
  • Many Tribute Monsters (monsters with 5 or more level stars) in the card game fall under this, especially in the early days. You can spend an enormous amount of resources on it — for instance, two monsters for the feared Blue-Eyes White Dragon — and lose the whole thing to a simple trap card such as Bottomless Trap Hole. The ones that first averted this trope were Summoned Skull, having a fearsome 2500 ATK for just one Tribute, followed by Jinzo which boasted 2400 ATK but a powerful Trap-locking effect. Things changed with the Monarchs which were all Simple, yet Awesome one-Tribute 2400 ATK monsters that provided removal on Summon, and they ruled the metagame until the game's speed picked up in 2009 and they could not keep up.
  • Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth. Summoning it as originally intended is pretty much impossible, as you have to equip Petit Moth with Cocoon Of Evolution, then wait for 6 turns before it can finally hit the field. Some legacy support remedied this, turning the archetype into a semisolid competitor in a game oversaturated with boss monsters. Say hello to Cocoon of Ultra Evolution and Parasite Paranoid, which allow you to bring out two PUGMs in a single turn while also getting rid of one of your opponent's monsters! It's still not particularly good, since it's nothing but a giant beatstick, but it does make the card actually possible to play. And even then, it gets beat out by Ultimate Great Insect, which can be summoned by tributing an Insect with 2000 or more DEF and an Equip Card... like Petit Moth equipped with Cocoon of Evolution. Sure, Ultimate Great Insect has 500 ATK less than PUGM, but 3000 ATK is nothing to sneeze at either. Also, it can't be destroyed by battle and can wipe the board of your opponent's monsters if there's a Field Spell in play, making it significantly more useful than PUGM.
  • The Wicked Gods and the legal version of Egyptian God Cards, heavily nerfed from the anime. They fall to a Mirror Force just as easily as any other monster when they attack. The Wicked Gods struggle even more than their Egyptian counterparts, as they cannot be Special Summoned.
    • The Wicked Eraser is particularly flawed. Its attack and defense are equal to the number of cards your opponent controls x1000, which means if your opponent controls only one monster with 1100 ATK or more, it's done. Though it does have a fairly strong field-nuke effect upon destruction, and it can also destroy itself to trigger that effect, this is a huge waste of resources when dealing with a three-tribute monster that cannot be Special Summoned. Even in its manga appearances, it was called out for being surprisingly temperamental to use, thanks to its constantly fluctuating stats.
  • Metaltron XII, the True Dracombatant is unaffected by the effects of cards with the same card type (Monster, Spell, and/or Trap) as the original card type of the cards Tributed for its Tribute Summon, and can Special Summon any non-Pendulum/Link Extra Deck monster that is EARTH/WATER/FIRE/WIND. So why isn't this card used often in Draco decks? It requires 3 Tributes (very expensive) and can easily be Tributed by a Kaiju. Even when Master Peace got banned, there was still no reason to use it due to the resources the player would need to summon it. But to be fair, he's better than the Egyptian Gods.
  • Armityle the Chaos Phantom. It requires banishing three cards (the Sacred Beasts, who can also fall under this trope), however since each of those three cards themselves require three cards to play, it really takes a total of 12 cards to get out. It gains a whopping 10,000 attack during your turn, meaning any successful attack would almost certainly win you the game (unless your opponent had a +2000 attack monster or really boosted his life points) since you start with 8000 life points. As if being ridiculously hard to get out wasn't enough, it only gains 10,000 attack during your turn, can be destroyed by any common methods (except battle), and is actually inferior than the combined might of the cards it requires (the Sacred Beasts combined may have as little as 8,000 attack, but usually will have +12,000 attack). However, with the release of the new Sacred Beasts Structure Deck, which contained not only more searchers for the Sacred Beasts, but even a dedicated Fusion Spell card to Fusion out Armityle, as well as a new version of Armityle that not only banishes your opponent's entire field at the end of your turn, but also Special Summons out the original for free, it seems the issues concerning Armityle's summoning conditions have been dealt with—it still isn't a great card, but a 10,000-ATK swing off a single card can usually reliably end a duel.
    • In modern Sacred Beast decks, Uria falls into this. While having him allows you to bring out either Armityle variant or activate the amazing third effect of Awakening of the Sacred Beasts, his ATK is dependent on you using a lot of Continuous Traps in your deck, while the other two simply have flat ATK values. Awakening is one of their best cards, but the only other noteworthy card is Hyper Blaze, which (due to wonky effect interactions) is mostly only useful in a dedicated Uria build, and Awakening's second effect is usually enough to clinch a duel in your favor.
  • Similarly, Exodia Necross. It starts off with 1800 Attack and gains 500 at the start of each of your turns, and can't be destroyed in battle, or as a result of any Spells or Traps (meaning no Raigeki or Mirror Force will get it off the field). The catch is that it can only be Special Summoned with a Spell Card that you can only use if all five pieces of Exodia are in your graveyard, and even then Necross has to be in your hand. And if any of those pieces are removed from the graveyard, it is immediately destroyed and can't be revived. It can also be destroyed by monster effects and can be gotten off the field by any non-destruction removal.
  • Red-Eyes Black Metal Dragon and Metalzoa can be special summoned from deck by tributing their original counterpart on field outfitted with Metalmorph. The problem? You're sending Metalmorph to the grave for a measly 100 attack and defense points increase, while the very monster you sent to grave could reach a higher attack value by attacking anything with at least 300 attack points. Not only that, the monsters are completely useless in the hand and graveyard since they can only be summoned from the deck, forcing you to run cards to return them to your deck should you be unlucky enough to draw them. In short, they're just too much trouble for the measly "reward" you get by playing them.note  The only reason you'd want to make this play would be to make room for a Spell or Trap Card.
  • Steelswarm Hercules is similar to Gandora, except it needs 3 "Steelswarm" tributes (which, even given the Steelswarm's focus on Tribute Summoning, can be quite a tall order), and it does not send itself to the GY at the End Phase.
  • While the Blue-Eyes archetype has gotten some major updates in the Arc-V era that makes them far more usable, to the point of even popping up in tournaments, certain cards of the archetype still seem to only exist because of anime tie-ins, and as such, only really work on Heart of the Cards logic.
    • Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon, which requires 3 Blue-Eyes White Dragons and Polymerization. They don't have to be on the field, and in some ways it's better to fuse them while in your hand than tributing two monsters just for one regular Blue-Eyes. However, it's a steep cost anyway, with very little payoff. All BEUD is, is a 4500 ATK beater with no effects to speak off. If you could summon it, you're just better off using their support to summon two of them onto the field for a rank 8 Xyz monster, or swarm the field with 3000 ATK beaters to possibly OTK the opponent. While it meshes well with decks that can bring monsters back from the grave and protect them from card effects, which the recent Blue-Eyes greatly supports, it's still a lot of effort for a card of fairly limited use.
    • Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon requires the Ultimate Dragon above to be tributed from the field to be summoned. All that trouble to get the BEUD and then send it to the graveyard. Shining Dragon has 3000 ATK, but gains 300 for every Dragon in your graveyard. That means, at summon, it will most likely have 300 ATK less than your Ultimate Dragon (Blue-Eyes x3 + Ultimate Dragon in the graveyard). Fortunately, it comes with the bonus of being untargetable by anything other than attacks, and will most likely be much stronger than anything your opponent has anyway. If you run it, you should run it in a dedicated Dragon deck, which admittedly makes it very powerful, but otherwise there is really no benefit to using it.
    • Paladin of White Dragon is an easily summoned card, but it's still a Ritual monster, even if it's only level 4. You still have to have a monster to tribute for it, and its stats are on par for a level 4. Its main effect is that sending it to the Graveyard lets you summon a Blue-Eyes from your hand or deck, but ultimately this means that you spent an extra card to send two monsters to the Graveyard to get your Blue-Eyes. The only net gain is that both tributes didn't have to be on the field at the same time, and the Blue-Eyes didn't have to be in your hand.
  • Even if it has some of the highest ATK points of any monster in the game, Machina Force is one of the best examples of Awesome, But Impractical due to its extremely difficult summoning conditions of having Commander Covington on your field and sending Machina Defender, Machina Soldier, and Machina Sniper you control to the graveyard. To make things worse, it cannot declare an attack unless you pay 1000 Life Points. What's more, it's a "NOMI", meaning that if your opponent destroys it, it's gone for good (unless you feel like using something like Monster Reincarnation and repeating the whole process of summoning it again.) This card only sees use in a Machina deck as discard fodder to summon Machina Fortress, a far more practical boss-monster for the archetype, and even then it's since been outclassed by the likes of Machina Cannon and Machina Megaform, which have other uses.
  • Sophia, Goddess of Rebirth has a heavy summoning cost of requiring a Ritual, Fusion, Synchro, and Xyz monster to be on the field. However, they can be on either side of the field, and can be tributed against the opponent's will a la Lava Golem. Once it's summoned, its effect activates which banishes everything from both players' fields, hands, and graveyards. Neither Sophia's effect nor its summon can be stopped, meaning that if you pull her off, you'll get an instant 3600 shot at your opponent's life points, if not a game win due to their loss of resources (unless they pull a card like Dark Hole or Mirror Force out of their ass, and even then, they likely won't be able to do anything other than that). Difficult to summon, by no means splashable, but in the right deck (and when you know your opponent enough to use his monster selection strengths against him), it can make quite a punch.
    • While the Nekroz archetype, in general, subverts this for most of their members in relation to what was said about Ritual Monsters at the top of this page, the Nekroz version of Sophia plays it painfully straight. Both of its effects are actually great: lock your opponent's Extra Deck for one Main Phase, or nuke the fields and graveyards. So, here's the impractical: to summon her, you need to tribute 3 monsters on your side of the field with different types. Not impractical enough? It would seem so, except that due to Sophia's restriction, you cannot summon them in the turn you're going to bring Sophia out. Actually, you can't even summon other monsters in that turn, because Sophia must be brought out in a turn in which you didn't Normal Summon, Set or Special Summon. Basically, you have to keep three monsters with different types and exactly 11 levels in your field for one turn to bring her out. And that's not going into the fact she negates the awesome and not-at-all impractical nature of the Nekroz Ritual Spell cards: Cycle cannot summon her from the Graveyard, Mirror cannot banish materials from the Graveyard and Kaleidoscope (the best Ritual Spell in the archetype) cannot summon her at all. "Oh, but I can use the hand effect to keep my opponent at bay, right?" Right, but her effect also requires you to discard one of your Nekroz Ritual Spell cards, which is a huge price to pay in an archetype that heavily depends on their Ritual Summons. Not to mention that her Extra Deck lockout only lasts for that Main Phase 1 instead of the entire turn, other cards work much better than that.
    • Tierra, Source of Destruction, the ultimate evil that absorbs her power in the lore of the game is even harder to pull off, for an even more powerful effect. The Awesome? Tierra spins every other card in the Graveyard, on the field and in both players hands, as well as face up Pendulum Monsters in the Extra Deck back to their respective decks. The Impractical? In order to get this effect you need 10 cards in your possession, all with different names, and you need to return each and every one to the deck. This means you would need to accumulate cards just to get her out, which by that point the game could be decided.
    • Then there's Avida, Rebuilder of Worlds. This card must be Special Summoned (from your hand) by there being at least 8 or more Link Monsters with different names on the field and/or in either player's graveyards, and of this card is Special Summoned, it shuffles all other monsters that are banished, on the field, and in the graveyards into the Decks. Neither player can activate cards or effects in response to this effect's activation. Problem is, you cannot Special Summon other monsters the turn you activate this effect, and your opponent can easily tribute this card with a Kaiju.
  • Back in the old days of the game, there was Gate Guardian, a 3750 ATK monster who can only be summoned by tributing his three components, each of which require two tributes themselves. The best bit? Gate Guardian's three pieces combined have twice as much ATK as Gate Guardian (not to mention pretty decent effects that Gate Guardian doesn't get), and 3 monsters are harder to get rid of than a single target, so Gate Guardian is impractical even in a deck based around him. A good example of this can be found in the last duel of this video. He had to have a perfect hand, get lucky with Monster Gate, discard a Dark Hole, be left with no other cards on the hand or field (aside from the field spell), all to watch Gate Guardian be destroyed by a simple Mirror Force.note  The closest thing to a use it has is its high stats for a main-deck Warrior, making it good fodder for Zubaba General or UFOroid Fighter - but even then, you could do the same thing with, say, any given Black Luster Soldier variant, and lose 750 extra ATK on already-overkill stats in exchange for having a monster that can actually be summoned or do things. That said, after decades of languishing as a forgotten gimmick from the old game, this card was surprisingly expanded into its own archtype, including an improved retrain, Gate Guardians Combined, which has the strengths of the original but a much easier summoning requirement that lets you banish its components from your hand or Graveyard.
    • Gate Guardian is seen as so useless that there's a Skill in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links that amounts to "start with nothing but Gate Guardian in hand and its three components on the field, none of which can actually do anything besides be used to summon Gate Guardian." Effectively, it lets you do the impossible and actually bring him out on your first turn in exchange for not being able to do much else, and given the lower powerscale of that game, whacking someone with a Guardian might actually be enough to win a game or two. It's still seen as a pretty bad strategy, though, especially since you also start with only 500 LP, meaning that you're basically screwed against anyone with monster removal or burn damage.
    • That said, Gate Guardian does shockingly see some usage. Mostly when it comes to farming certain event duelists. As Gate Guardian can be utilized as a unmovable wall to stall your opponent with no worries until you can set up your field. Most commonly, people would use Union attack on Gravekeeper's Vassal with it to farm a lot of points. However, other than this method, no one would ever use Gate Guardian.
  • Theinen the Great Sphinx: 6500 ATK on the turn that he's summoned, and 3500 ATK on all the other turns. In order to get him out, you need to summon Andro Sphinx, and Sphinx Teleia. Each requires two simple tributes to get out (unless you control Pyramid of Light - see below - in which case you can Special Summon them via their own effects by paying 500 Life Points apiece, but only from your hand). You then need to somehow destroy BOTH at once in order to summon Thenien. They do make a card for accomplishing this, called Pyramid of Light. When active, it does nothing, but if destroyed, it will destroy all of the Sphinx cards that you control. Problem is, if your opponent somehow destroys it while you have only a single Sphinx out, then you just lost your good monster. Not that the gain would have been worth it since, assuming you have a card that can simultaneously destroy your Sphinxes like Dark Hole, you would need to pay 2000 Life Points (a quarter of the total 8000) and four cards for that 6500 ATK monster. You could just not use Pyramid of Light... except you pretty much need Pyramid of Light if you're going to guarantee yourself of summoning Theinen, otherwise you'll need to give up quite a few resources if you're planning on summoning Andro and Teleia without Pyramid of Light.note  Besides, Andro and Teleia have some respectable skills of their own, being able to deal burn damage equal to half the ATK or DEF respectively of a monster in Defense Position, and 3000 and 2500 ATK are both fairly respectable in their own rights. There's just one more problem, you cannot attack with the monsters on the same turn you summoned them whether you Special Summoned (via Pyramid of Light) or not. Even with that downside, the two monsters are Rank 10 XYZ fodder.
  • In the anime, Sugoroku Muto's Ancient Dragon. It's a pretty powerful Monster, make no mistake; it's got 2800 ATK, it revives itself as long as you've got Ancient City out, and it has a proto-version of Red Dragon Archfiend's effect (only better, since it only destroys your opponent's monsters). However, it easily beats Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth in the "friggin' impossible to Summon" category - at least PUGM requires only two cards to summon. Ancient Dragon requires seven, and an insanely complicated procedure. First, you need to activate Ancient City, a Field Spell that is needed for the other cards. Then, you need to activate Ancient Tome, a card that would be sort of useful if not for the discard effect. Then, you need to summon Ancient Giant, a roundly mediocre Level 5 Monster with 2200 ATK and no effect other than damaging you when you don't attack with it. Then you need to activate Ancient Key, which Summons two Stone Giant Tokens, which could lose a fight to a Basic Insect and have the same effect as Ancient Giant (only slightly worse - Ancient Giant does 300, Stone Giant Tokens do 500 each). Then you need to switch those Tokens to DEF (and yes, that does mean you take damage from their effects). Then, you need to switch them back to ATK, which activates the effect of Ancient Key, destroying the Tokens and activating Ancient Gate. Only then, you can use Ancient Gate to discard Giant and Tome to summon the dragon. This was, of course, intentional; Sugoroku considered being able to Summon one an impressive accomplishment and did it mostly to settle a bet.
  • On the subject of very effective Monsters with annoyingly-difficult Summoning conditions, meet Fusioh Richie (or Nosferatu Lich if you're not dumb). Richie has a pretty impressive set of stats, he's immune to Spell and trap card effects which target, and he can Summon a Zombie once per turn. He was also available in Pharaonic Guardian, a very early set, at a time when Zombies were a very popular Deck type. This obviously led to a massive surge of Decks with him as the ace, right? Well, not so much. To Summon Richie, you need to play Great Dezard, a one-Tribute Spellcaster with 1900 ATK, and then use Great Dezard to destroy at least two opponent's Monsters. Only then can you Tribute Dezard to summon Richie. This means that, in order to make Richie the ace it was meant to be, you have to stick a card with no synergy and mediocre at best stats into a deck built around a specific type and have it stay alive long enough to destroy at least two monsters and summon a card that does have synergy with your deck. Even in the days when Summoned Skull was considered a game-winning card, this was way, way too slow, and in the modern day, it's gone from slow to glacial.
  • To Summon Montage Dragon, you discard three Monsters. The awesome? Montage Dragon's ATK is equal to their combined levels x300, which can easily lead to a card strong enough to One-Hit Kill the opponent; he maxes out at 10800. The impractical? Discarding three monsters sets you back heavily in card advantage (playing it on the second turn involves dropping two-thirds of your hand), Montage Dragon is a complete dead draw if you don't have three other monsters in your hand, and Montage Dragon has no protective effects, making it a massive clay pigeon for every Trap under the sun. Overall, it will either win you the Duel in one turn, or die the second it hits the field and leave you with no options... and if your opponent is even remotely competent, it'll be the latter.
  • Super Quantal Mech King Great Magnus is a Rank 12 Xyz monster. Yes, a Rank 12. It requires 3 Level 12 monsters to summon, which will very rarely happen; but it can be summoned via its archetype's field spell. The impracticality of it is that in order to summon him this way, you need to have three other Xyz monsters either on the field or in the Graveyard, and in order to get his better effects, you need more materials on him. A hell of a lot of work for this guy... Well, should you pull off the impossible, you have a Rank 12 monster with 5-7 materials, giving him immunity to virtually any card effect, places a lock on the opponents deck, and can spin cards back to the deck with one Xyz material... Or you could just run Dreadnought Dreadnoid into something and then use it's effect to count as all your material needs for any rank 10 or higher Xyz.
  • Synchro Monsters that require other Synchro Monsters as Synchro Materials can fall in and out of this trope, depending on their summoning requirements. A few examples:
    • The Majestic Signer Dragons (Majestic Star Dragon and Majestic Red Dragon) both require their base Signer Dragon, a specific Tuner, and an extra non-Tuner to fill out the missing Level. The result is something really powerful... but only sticks around for the turn, reverting to the base Signer Dragon afterward. Not helping matters is that the pre-requisite Tuner only has a restrictive effect that pigeonholes it to its one role, so the Majestic Signer Dragons require external assistance to Summon. Things have gotten better with Converging Wills Dragon that performs the role efficiently.
    • Shooting Quasar Dragon and Cosmic Blazar Dragon have the hallmarks of this trope: Quasar has 4000 ATK, can attack twice, can negate anything once per turn, and summons Shooting Star Dragon from your Extra Deck when it leaves the field (awesome); Blazar can negate any Effect, Summon and Attack by banishing itself until the End Phase. They require a Tuner Synchro Monster and two non-Tuner Synchro Monsters whose levels add up to 12 as materials (impractical). At first glance, they seems like more "deplete your hand to summon them, leaving you with no defense" monsters, like Gate Guardian above. However, a good number of Synchro Monsters give you extra draw power, which somewhat balances it out; specifically, one of the most commonly used materials is T.G. Hyper Librarian, a Lv.5 Synchro Monster that lets you draw a card whenever either player Synchro Summons anything while it's on the field, making it a staple in Synchro decks. Combine this with Formula Synchron, a Lv.2 Tuner Synchro Monster, and you're all but guaranteed to draw a minimum of 3 cards while summoning them. Combined with the versatility of Lv.5 Synchro Monsters in general, this means that while they aren't practical as your main monsters, they can very easily be splashed in most Synchro decks.
    • Red Nova Dragon is similar, but with slightly laxer requirements and a less powerful effect. It only requires Red Dragon Archfiend (a Lv.8 Synchro Monster) and two tuners, with the sum of the three monsters' levels being 12. This means that you can theoretically get it out easier than Shooting Quasar Dragon above. In practice, however, it's not so simple; as it requires a specific monster as a material, your opponent can prevent you from summoning it by removing that monster from the field, and it isn't as easily splashed as Quasar. In terms of effects, it gains 500 ATK for each Tuner in your Graveyard, and can negate an opponent's attack by banishing itself, after which it returns to the field at the end of the turn; it also looks very badass. However, while it can't be destroyed by your opponent's cards, it has no such protection from being banished, forcibly tributed with a monster like Lava Golem, or returned to the hand or deck. It also lacks the ability to negate effects. Overall, this leaves it more impractical than the aforementioned Quasar Dragon, although new Red Dragon Archfiend support cards make it viable when dueling for fun.
    • Red Supernova Dragon has 4000 ATK, gains 500 ATK for each Tuner in your GY, cannot be destroyed by your opponent's card effects, and you can banish ALL cards your opponent controls when your opponent activates any monster effect or declares an attack. Problem is, it requires 3 Tuners + 1+ non-Tuner Synchro monsters to Synchro Summon this card, and it's even harder to summon then Red Nova Dragon. At least, it would be were it not for Crimson Resonator, which allows you to summon either Red Supernova or Red Nova with ease using just it and a level 4 by Tuning into Red Rising Dragon. And, ironically, if not for Junk Speeder, which is trivial to summon with Junk Synchron & Converter, and can call three tuner friends... but is blatantly designed for Yusei's deck, not Jack's.
    • In its debut, the entire Synchro mechanic itself was impractical in Duel Links because the smaller deck sizes left little room for Tuners, which at the time were hard to get out and were very weak on their own. In addition, because performing the summon required at least two monsters on the field, and there are only 3 zones available, it could easily be intercepted by meta staples like Enemy Controllernote  or especially Treacherous Trap Holenote . The mechanic only saw widespread play when Synchro archetypes were released that could easily Special Summon spam, such as the notorious Legendary Six Samurai.
  • Zushin the Sleeping Giant may very well be the all-time champion of this. To summon this guy, you have to keep a Level 1 Normal Monster (i.e. a monster with bottom-of-the-barrel stats and no effect) alive for most likely 10 TURNS. In a game where even monsters with all kinds of protection effects tend to last 2 or 3 turns at most and Duels can be decided within the space of one. And you have to have Zushin in hand for all 10 turns. On the other hand, if you manage to do the impossible, you get a monster that can beat down basically anything the opponent throws at it and is immune to every card effect - but can only deal 1000 damage at a timenote . Notably, Zushin was even considered Awesome, But Impractical In-Universe in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: it was considered to be on-par with the Egyptian Gods, but even though every man and his dog had a copy, nobody has ever been able to summon him until Team Taiyou pulled it off, it's that hard to summon. You could circumvent this problem by using Ecole de Zone to summon a Mask Token with high ATK and/or DEF due to Loophole Abuse of the fact that Tokens count as Normal Monsters or even a monster like Charcoal Inpachi to give yourself a chance while using multiple copies of Zushin to place multiple counters per turn, but it's a slim one since even taking four or five turns while having three or four specific cards is far too slow to awaken this sleeping giant.
  • Goddess of Sweet Revenge's effect is essentially a hand trap field nuke with the added benefit of being able to Special Summon any monster in its controller's deck. However, a couple of very situational conditions have to be met just to use this card's effect: 1. The card's controller must not have any other cards in their hand or their field (this includes spell and trap cards) 2. Your opponent must be attacking with one of their monsters. If a player manages to get into the kind of situation that it is literally made for, then it is awesome, as it allows the controller to make a quick surprise come-back (provided it isn't negated, as it has no protection against the myriad of effect-negating cards detailed elsewhere on this page), but any other situation leaves this card a complete dead draw.
  • The likely king of ineffectual boss monsters: D.D. Jet Iron. Oh, yes, it has 4000 ATK, but its summoning requirement is sending four rather specific monsters to the Graveyard from the hand or field, and none of those four are anything above mediocre. On top of that, its only effect is being able to tribute itself to revive those same monsters - which might actually be more useful, since three of them are also fairly high-level. But only one of the cards used to summon it is searchable, and searching it out requires you to tribute one of the other ones, so you'll almost never be able to bring it out! Unless you're the biggest fan in the world of its anime wielder or Babel II, there's almost no reason to even attempt using it.
  • Ten Thousand Dragon was released to commemorate the milestone of 10,000 cards in the OCG. While it can have 10,000 in both ATK and DEF, its Summoning condition does not make it worth playing outside of meme decks; it must be Special Summoned (from hand) by Tributing Monsters whose sum of ATK and DEF are 10,000 or more. If you've got that total of stats on board, then you're probably already in a good position. Plus it's hard to justify throwing all that away for what's essentially a big beatstick with no protection unless you're aiming to close the game. Also, if it gets negated, your 10,000 ATK/DEF drops to a big fat zero.
  • Armed Dragon Catapult Cannon can easily erase the opponent's field, and prevent them from using almost anything. But to Summon it, you need to have Special Summoned both VWXYZ and Armed Dragon LV7, which are boss monsters of distinct archetypes with no synergy, and there are restrictions that keep you from trying to cheat it out. There does exist a way to facilitate its summon... but it involves use of a third tangentially related archetype, that being Ojamas and their Ojamatch and Ojamassimilation cards. Building your Deck to accommodate all this will make it ridiculously bricky, and it's much more convenient to just devote your deck to one archetype.
  • T.G Halberd Cannon/Assault Mode. To summon this card, you need to summon T.G Halberd Cannon which has the exact same summoning requirements as Shooting Quasar Dragon mentioned above using a very specific Trap Card. When your opponent would Summon a monster, you can negate the effect to banish that card and all Special Summoned monsters your opponent controls. It has 4500 ATK, but you'd never see it in the meta, likely because it's more difficult to summon than Shooting Quasar Dragon. Though this card can be Summoned significantly easier with Assault Reboot, albeit still needs other "/Assault Mode" monsters mentioned below.
    • In fact, any of the "/Assault Mode" monsters could qualify, since their overly-specific summoning requirements could result in them becoming bricks clogging your Deck that only offer a 500 point boost to their tribute's ATK and DEF, something that can easily be achieved with any other card.
  • Even for its time, a majority of the Neos archetype suffered from just being a very clunky archetype that crowded out most pack space, due to the main gimmick of the deck relying on the high-Level Normal Monster Neos making a Contact Fusion with a weak Neo-Spacian to make a Neos Fusion that forcibly returns itself to the Extra Deck at the End Phase (unless you have Neo Space) without refunding your initial investment. The Triple Contact Fusions, which need Neos and two Neo-Spacians, have generally better effects and affect the board state when they inevitably leave the field, though the costly material requirement plants them straight into this trope.
    • Elemental HERO Cosmo Neos can lock your opponent from activating cards, also cards your opponent controls cannot activate their effects for this turn, and destroys all cards your opponent controls during the End Phase. You need to shuffle Elemental Hero Neos and 3 Neo-Spacian monsters to summon this card. Needless to say, even if this card was released in 2007, it's still too slow to summon.
    • Elemental HERO Divine Neos. It must be Fusion Summoned using any 5 "Neos", "Neo Space", "Neo-Spacian", or "HERO" monsters (including at least 1 "Neos" or "Neo Space" monster, 1 "Neo-Spacian" monster, and 1 "HERO" monster). All you get is a mediocre 2500 ATK monster which only effect is that you can banish one "Neos", "Neo Space", "Neo-Spacian", or "HERO" monster from your Graveyard, also it gains a measly 500 ATK, and until the End Phase it also gains the banished monster's effects. If you wanted to copy monster effects, Windwitch - Crystal Bell or Phantom of Chaos might be better alternatives, simply because they can copy any monster. The one thing Divine Neos is good for is as a target for Future Fusion, and even then only for dumping 5 Monsters from the Deck to the Graveyard rather than actually summoning the darn thing.
  • Cyberdark End Dragon. A 5000 ATK monster, unaffected by your opponent's activated effects, and can Equip monsters from either GY to itself to increase the number of attacks it can perform each Battle Phase. Needless to say, it's tough to summon: It must either be Fusion Summoned by fusing 2 specific Fusion cards or Special Summoned by Tributing 1 Level 10 or lower "Cyberdark" Fusion Monster equipped with "Cyber End Dragon". For the latter condition, you generally use Cybernetic Horizon to dump Cyber End Dragon and then Summon Cyberdarkness Dragon which can equip Cyber End without extra support. Going into Cyberdarkness also takes a lot of setup, since you're going to need 5 Cyberdark monsters for its Summon (facilitated by Cyberdark Chimera letting you fuse from your hand/field/GY with the Power Bond it searches). The output is definitely amazing, with a line of play that needs only two specific cards in hand to Summon it, but should your Horizon or Chimera get negated all that you have left are a few puny monsters for your opponent to run over.
  • Soul Drain Dragon sounds like a pretty impressive card to have in your corner since it's a Level 8 monster with 4000 ATK (one of, if not the only monster of its kind with that many attack points) and it gains ATK equal to the difference between your Life Points and your opponent's if it's Special Summoned and your Life Points happen to be lower, making it almost ideal as a comeback card. Why almost? Because it can only be Special Summoned using a Dragon Xyz Monster's effect (of which there are currently a grand total of four that qualify), it can't be Normal Summoned, it can't deal damage by destroying monsters or direct attacks, and it has no protection from card effects. While this does make it a good means of clearing any face-down Defense Mode monsters without worrying about how much DEF it has, if that monster happens to be a monster like Doom Donuts, then you just wasted an Overlay Unit.
  • Royal Straight Slasher. It must be Special Summoned with "Royal Straight", which requires giving up King's Knight, Queen's Knight, and Jack's Knight from your hand or field. Upon summon, if you have the above cards in your Graveyard, you can mill one monster of each level from one through five to wipe the opponent's field. While the mix of Graveyard setup and a board-wipe might sound impressive, the summoning condition of Slasher is surprisingly tricky, and its effect is hard to activate in its own deck, since most Three Musketeers of Face Cards decks don't run Level 1 or 2 monsters.
  • Mirage Knight sounds like an excellent card to have for a beatdown strategy. After all, it can give itself a boost based on the original ATK of the monster it was battling. However, it can only be summoned by the effect of Dark Flare Knight, a Fusion Monster that needs another Fusion Monster to be summoned. While said Fusion Monster can be brought onto the field with Instant Fusion, there's still the issue of Mirage Knight banishing itself at the end of the turn it attacks, so be prepared to have a follow-up if Mirage Knight didn't win you the Duel.
  • In the spinoff Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel, the entire Maximum Summoning mechanic. Here's how it works: if you have three specific Maximum Monsters in hand, you can play all three at once as a single monster with gigantic ATK and three separate effects (due to being three cards combined into one) which can't be forced into Defense Position and is usually immune to being destroyed by Traps. The problem is that first part: "if you have three specific Maximum Monsters in hand." The format as a whole is completely lacking in search effects (the closest thing you can do is mill a bunch of cards and hope you mill the ones you need, then recover them from the Graveyard), making it horribly inconsistent to gather the necessary parts. Furthermore, Rush Duel's Draw Phase mechanics (drawing until you have 5 cards in hand) means that holding onto Maximum pieces penalizes your draw power while they sit like bricks in your hand, since each card you don't play is 1 less card you get to draw on your next turn. As a result, actually pulling off a Maximum Summon is something that only happens once in a blue moon when someone gets an exceptionally good topdeck. It's quite telling that Konami gave up on trying to make the mechanic viable and made later Maximum Monsters have decent stats and effects when Tribute Summoned instead, allowing you to just use them as serviceable ordinary monsters.

     Activation Requirements 
  • In an excellent example of Power Creep, Injection Fairy Lily has long since succumbed to this. Back in the days where tribute monsters ruled the game, this monster could instantly boost its attack by 3000 to kill any of them at a 2000 Life point cost, often more than worth it due to the resources they pooled into it. This made it limited and briefly banned in the early days of the game. Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to pump out gigantic beaters, and Lily's effect is too expensive to be worth using over those. The only time it's seen in the limelight since was its brief stint as one of the few outs at the time to the infamous Apoqliphort Towers.
  • Quite a few cards are based on controlling a specific collection of monsters. This rarely ends well.
    • For how impressive it sounds, Huge Revolution certainly falls under this trope. If the conditions are correct, you can send your opponent's entire hand to the Graveyard and nuke their entire field, which should put them at a huge disadvantage. But those conditions? Three weak, specific Normal Monsters with no relation to each other (they don't fall under an archetype that supports them) that have different Types, Attributes, and Levels, making searching for them all but impossible. Even if you somehow manage to pull it off, the combined original ATK of People Running About, Oppressed People and United Resistance (i.e. the three monsters needed to activate this card) is a mere 2000, and you're unlikely to have another monster to inflict further battle damage. If that wasn't enough, it is a Trap Card that can only be activated during your Main Phase, which completely goes against the point of it being a Trap Card (i.e. being able to be activated during either player's turn). And you still have to Set it and wait for your next turn before you can activate it. Not to mention the revolution can easily be negated by every Counter Trap under the sun. It is almost completely impossible to build a Deck around this card, and it's not recommended to try.
    • Similar to Huge Revolution, we have The Law of the Normal, this card also nukes your opponent's field and hand, and you need 5 Level 2 or lower Normal Monsters (i.e. monsters with bottom-of-the-barrel stats and no effects) on the field in order to use this card. The one silver lining of this particular card is that Tokens count as Normal Monsters and most low-level Normal Monster support is based on spamming them out, so it's not as hard to fulfill the activation conditions, but you still need a way to actually kill the opponent after playing it since low-level Tokens and Normal Monsters can rarely OTK through battle damage even with a full board of them. Triangle Power or in some cases Shield and Sword does make that part a little easier, but while filling the field with weak Normal Monsters isn't too insane, it's still very hard to search out Law of the Normal, often leaving you with a field of weak monsters and nothing to do with them.
    • Dark Scorpion Combination when it goes off is pretty cool: it allows all your Dark Scorpions or Don Zaloog to attack the opponent directly, circumventing their low ATK values. While it reduces the damage they deal to the point that you'll only deal a maximum of 2000 damage, all the Dark Scorpions have effects that activate when they deal damage, meaning using it should set your opponent back pretty far in advantage (one card sent back to the hand, one back to the deck, one discarded, one Spell or Trap destroyed, one search for you). The problem? It can only be used while your field contains one of each of the five Dark Scorpions. Even with every bit of Dark/Warrior consistency boosting you can find and Mustering of the Dark Scorpions, this is still almost impossible to pull off, since the Dark Scorpions are frail, low-power monsters that need to be able to inflict damage to do anything, one of whom is level 5—playing them as intended, that's seven specific cards in your starting hand. On top of that, it's a Normal Trap, which makes the effect even slower and easier to stop—so even with the aforementioned perfect hand, you still have to set it and wait a turn—while providing no gain whatsoever, since it's useless during the opponent's turn. The effect is harder to pull off than many instant-win conditions or any of the above nukes, and all for the sake of 2000 damage and triggering your Dark Scorpion effects. It's been observed that the effect would actually be pretty balanced if it was a Continuous effect that simply let them attack directly for reduced damage at any time; as it stands, it's one of the worst cards in the game.
  • In the card game, we have Final Destiny, which destroys all cards on the field at the cost of 5 discards. Since the maximum hand size is 6 (barring the use of spells like Hieroglyph Lithograph and Infinite Cards), playing Final Destiny leaves you with likely no hand and no field, giving you no way to take advantage of the freshly-cleared field. Not to mention, getting 5 cards in your hand to discard is a pretty tall order to begin with unless you drew Final Destiny in your opening hand.
    • Pretty much everything that has already been said about Final Destiny can also be said about Guarded Treasure. You discard 5 cards, subsequently drawing 2 cards and drawing 2 cards instead of 1 for your normal draw during your following Draw Phases if it's still on the field. Drawing cards is a key to success in the card game, but in addition to the problems mentioned above with Final Destiny, you have to wait for your following turns to get much use out of Guarded Treasure, and if your opponent has any competence whatever they'll be able to destroy it before the first one.
  • Hero Flash is what you get after playing its component letters, H - Heated Heart, E - Emergency Call, R - Righteous Justice and O - Oversoul. The individual letters are unsearchable Spells but they are all pretty good in their own right — E is a searcher, R is S/T removal, and O is a Monster Reborn for a Normal Elemental HERO. H, being a buff spell, is the only one of questionable quality. When you put them all together and activate this card... you get a Normal Elemental HERO monster from your Deck, and your Normal Elemental HEROes get to attack directly this turn. It's a very poor payoff for all that buildup, especially given the poor stats of most Normal HERO monsters, and you're better off just using Emergency Call on its own.
  • Reign-Beaux, Overlord of Dark World: He's the big daddy of the Dark World archetype (until they got a new big daddy), who gains effects when discarded by effects (but not costs) and gains better effects when discarded by an opponent's effect! This guy, however, needs to be discarded by an opponent's effect in order to do anything, and while there are ways to force an opponent's effect into letting you discard (such as with Dark Deal) they're way too inconsistent to rely on as a main tactic. But if you do manage to discard him by your opponent's effect, you get a monster with a respectable 2500 ATK AND you get to destroy all your opponent's monsters OR their spells and traps! However, Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World is only marginally less awesome but summons himself when discarded by your own effect, so he's one of the more practical cards in a Dark World deck.
  • The Spell card Reversal Quiz: To use it, you have to discard your entire hand and get rid of every card you have on the field. Afterwards, you have to guess what the card on the top of your deck is (Monster, Trap, or Spell). If you guess correctly, you get to swap Life Points with your opponent. Whilst this seems like a decent enough payoff, if you fail to guess the card on top of your deck, you're essentially defenseless against your opponent (unless you've got more Life Points than them, which defeats the purpose of playing the card in the first place). If you do guess it correctly, you'll still have to hope that the very next card you pick up is a decent card which can defend you from your opponent, since they'll essentially get a free shot at you after you activate Reversal Quiz. If it isn't a decent card, then by the time you can get a decent enough defense up, your opponent will probably have whittled your Life Points down to what they were when you played the card. In short, it is virtually impossible to play Reversal Quiz and get out of a situation which only it could have solved/improved. The only use of this card is a really gimmicky OTKnote .
  • The Counter Trap card Judgment of Anubis has a cool name and an awesome effect: you can negate a card, destroy a monster, and inflict damage equal to its attack points all at once. However, the negated card in question has to be very specific: a Spell card that destroys your Spell/Trap cards. In practice, it becomes essentially an anti-Heavy Storm/Mystical Space Typhoon card similar to cards like White Hole which are powerless against anything else and thus are most likely to just be a dead draw.
  • Tellarknight Ptolemaeus's effect to detach 7 materials to skip the opponent's turn, definitely fits this trope. As it is literally impossible to summon it with more than 6 materials (and in most cases, no more than 5), the fastest way you could possibly get to this is by exhausting pretty much all your resources to give it those 6 materials and hope it lives until your next turn, spending at least one Stellarknight card from your extra deck in the process. And, quite frankly, if you can manage to have 6 level 4 monsters on your field, you probably have far better options than waiting a turn to skip the opponent's turn after that (especially in a warrior deck like Tellarknights, where Number 86: Heroic Champion - Rhongomyniad was an option to lock your opponent down hard enough that you're basically skipping their turns anyway). Thus, you'll probably never use or see this effect used in competitive duels with it legal.
  • Converging Wishes Special Summons 1 "Stardust Dragon" from your Extra Deck if you have 5 or more Dragon-Type Synchro Monsters in your Graveyard and equips it to Stardust Dragon. When equipped, it gains ATK equal to all the combined ATK of all Dragon-Type Synchro Monsters in your Graveyard. Also when it destroys an opponent's monster by battle, you can banish 1 Dragon Synchro monster to make it attack again. This could easily result in a 10000+ ATK multiple attacker, but the cost of activating this card is utterly ridiculous; getting 5 Dragon Synchros into your Graveyard without the Duel being over at that point is something that almost never actually happens, and even then, Converging Wishes is a Trap that's only useful on your own turn (as the summoned Stardust Dragon is banished during the End Phase), meaning you have to wait for a whole turn to use it even after setting up the conditions.
  • Zoodiac Boarbow, which by default can attack the opponent directly, also has an effect that, if the conditions are met, forces the opponent to send all their cards on the field and in their hand to the graveyard if this card inflicts battle damage, an effect that will almost certainly win you the duel against most decks if successful (it swaps to defense afterwards, but it's moot by that point). But, said conditions are completely absurd, requiring having a minimum of 12 materials stacked beneath it. Sure, the archetype has ways of stacking Xyz on top of other Xyz multiple times a turn, but doing so requires, at minimum, waiting a turn after summoning this with at least one non-Xyz Zoodiac attached as a material or one Fire-Formation spell (since ATK points are necessary to trigger this effect in the first place), using few (if any) of the xyz monsters' effects, dedicating an absurd amount of extra deck space to individual Zoodiac xyz monsters, and finally, getting the chance to successfully attack and resolve the effect. If said attack fails, all of the effort you put into it goes to waste. And, when the archetype as a whole has quickly become a major Game-Breaker due to the effects of Ratpier, being able to Xyz summon using only one monster, and the rest of the archetype's Xyz monsters' far more practical effects (see this page for more details), you begin to wonder why they bothered giving Boarbow such a horrendously impractical effect at all.
    • This became especially ironic with the release of Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS - Sky Thunder. Summoning this monster requires you to have attacked with any Xyz Monster during that turn and that's it, and what you get out of it is a monster that can wipe the entire board for two materials at Spell Speed 2, while also not being Once Per Chain or Once Per Turn. The easiest way to meet this conditions is with a Direct Attacking Xyz Monster...like Zoodiac Boarbow. So instead of trying to throw caution to the wind to somehow trigger Boarbow's massive effect, it's far easier to just summon Boarbow early on top of any Zoodiac, swing for a pittance of damage and then in Main Phase 2 Xyz Change a bunch of times to summon a Zeus with an absurd amount of Materials which also happens to have an effect that is arguably better than Boarbow's alternate effect to begin with (Can't force the hand discard, but you get to do the board wipe at any point). Now the effect has gone from Awesome, but Impractical to just pointlessly redundant in the face of such a Game-Breaker.
  • Sextet Summon, requires you to banish SIX monsters with the same original Type but different monster card types (Ritual, Fusion, Synchro, Xyz, Pendulum, Link) from your hand, GY, and/or face-up field, then Special Summon 1 monster with the same original Type as the banished monsters from your Deck or Extra Deck. The effect is decent, but nowhere near worth the absurdly steep cost, especially as it doesn't ignore summoning conditions, not to mention probably unnecessary as any halfway decent deck should be able to get its key monsters out at least somewhat consistently in the first place.
  • The Six Shinobi. The awesome? It lets you skip your opponent's entire turn. They won't even be able to draw a card! The "but"? You need a certain number of Six Samurai monsters with different Attributes to use it. Steep, but somewhat doable. The impractical? You need six monsters for this to work. Wait, what?note  As Rata puts it: "I feel like if you manage to get your board to this state, there won't be a next turn."
  • Considering its really cool-looking effect in the anime, Gandora the Dragon of Destruction is considered this for four reasons. First of all, this card cannot be Special Summoned, which means that you will have to tribute two monsters on your field or use a double-tributer. Secondly, you will have to pay half of your LP to nuke the field except this card. Although it banishes the cards, there are plenty of cards that don't have anywhere near as bad of a cost. Thirdly, this card gains 300 ATK for each card destroyed this way. However, the ATK boost is not impressive unless there are lots of cards on the field beforehand. Fourth, and lastly, this card is sent to the Graveyard during the End Phase of the turn it was Summoned.
    • Gandora has an even more powerful version, Gandora Giga Rays the Dragon of Destruction. A NOMI monster (meaning you have to Special Summon it by its effect first) that hit the field for the "simple" cost of any 2 monsters in your hand and/or on the field. It instantly gains 300 ATK for every banished card, so in a dedicated build, it could swing as a beefy beatstick. But what makes it fit this category is its other effects. By paying half of your Life Points, you can do a variety of increasingly devastating effects... depending on how many Gandora cards with different names are in your Graveyard. For 1, you just nuke the field, for 2, you banish everything on the field, and if you have copies of OG Gandora, Gandora X, AND Gandora Giga Rays in your Graveyard, you get to banish EVERYTHING on the field AND in both player's Graveyards, meaning you most likely won't get a second chance to use that powerful of a nuke again that Duel. Plus, getting those monsters in the Grave will most likely telegraph to your opponent exactly what you're trying to do if they have any logical sense. Satisfying as hell, but not very reliable. It's even worse in the OCG, since you can only activate the "up to 2" effect because Gandora X The Dragon of Demolition is banned thanks to the card inverting this trope and instead being an extremely reliable FTK tool in combination with the Crusadia cards and the Guardragons.
  • End of the Line is a Trap Card that has the ability to draw you two cards or four cards. The problem? It can only be activated if you have less than 100 LP, and its four cards condition can only be fulfilled if you have less than 10 LP, meaning that it is virtually unplayable since very few games go under 100 LP, much less 10.note  The only deck that is realistically capable of playing this card is Dinomorphia, and even then it is widely considered a gimmick at best since it's both unsearchable and doesn't help the archetype whatsoever.

     Other 
  • Having more than forty cards in your deck. You may be able to get away with forty one - forty three, but going to the max sixty card limit is generally seen as a bad thing. Sure, having extra cards in the deck for any given situation is nice, but it makes actually getting the cards you need in any given situation much, much harder to draw.
    • Konami apparently took note of this and started to make some cards that actually avert this nature. Two notable examples are Pot of Desires, who nets the player the infamous "Pot of Greed" advantage at the cost of losing 10 cards from his deck permanently, and That Grass Looks Greener, which can mill 20 cards from the player's 60-card deck if played on the first turn, effectively setting up plays for an entire game. In fact, Grass did its job a bit too well, becoming almost a win condition if resolved and getting limited and later banned in the TCG.
  • From a meta, non-card game itself example: Konami actually did make toy Duel Disk to play the card game with anywhere, but they were rife with problems. Even disregarding the obvious fact that they don't come with super advanced holographic imagery, and the fact that they were intended for young children to play with, as something that can work with the card game, it still deserves a mention here. Early creations didn't include an extra deck or banish zones, and the slots that held the cards in were too small for sleeves, making accidentally bending and tearing the cards frustratingly common. Even though later Duel Disks would fix this problem, there were still quite a few annoyances. Not only do they give the wearer insane wrist cramps shortly after putting them on, you'll likely get a few eyebrows raised your way if you tried playing with someone with it outside. Additionally, it's hard to keep track of what the opponent has played and make sure they don't pull any sleight of hand when they're far away, meaning it's likely you'll only ever use it inside while standing close next to someone, and if that's the case, you're better off just playing at a table where you can sit down and have a better view of the field.
  • Cards that rely on coin tosses and die rolls are the very embodiment of this trope by default, as they revolve around chance. They tend to have powerful effects if luck is on your side but effects that are detrimental to you otherwise. For example, the Trap Card Gamble can be activated if your opponent has 6 or more cards in their hand and you have 2 or less, and allows you to draw until you have 5 cards in your hand, which would be a Game-Breaker if it didn't revolve around a coin toss that can result in your next turn getting skipped instead if you fail (and your opponent somehow holding a full hand of cards). The Arcana Force monsters revolve entirely around coin tosses, and the Deck will collapse in on you if you're unlucky. Dice Re-Roll and Second Coin Toss can give you a second chance, but it's still not recommended to build a Deck around cards that rely on luck. The one exception is Sixth Sense, which can either result in you drawing an insane amount of cards or milling your own Deck, both results can be taken advantage of in the modern game as many Decks are Graveyard-reliant. In fact, Sixth Sense is considered a Game-Breaker and was immediately Limited and then banned upon its introduction to the TCG in 2013, and in the OCG it has been banned since 2005.
  • Super Vehicroid Stealth Union, a Combining Mecha Fusion Monster with an effect that lets it attack all the opponent's monsters, deal damage even if the monsters are in Defense Mode, and reduce your opponent's monster count by one by equipping it... made of four specific monsters plus a card that lets you Fusion Summon, and halves its own ATK every time it attacks until it's done attacking. It's quite concerning that this monster, which takes 5 specific cards to summon, is effectively only 100 ATK stronger than the Normal Summonable Asura Priest.
  • The Dark Crisis booster pack brought quite a few of these in addition to Exodia Necross, an example being Berserk Dragon. While it has 3500 Attack, it can only be Special Summoned with the Quickplay Spell Card A Deal with Dark Ruler on a turn that one of your Level 8 monsters is sent to the Graveyard. It also gets to attack all monsters on your opponent's field once... but in addition, it loses 500 Attack at the end of each of your turns, which will quickly make it easy prey to anything tough your opponent has. However, this did see ladder use in Duel Links with Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys decks (albeit less consistent than a pure Nephthys deck), which provided an easy way to fulfill its summoning condition with Fire King Island and synergized well with Nephthys's Spell and Trap clearing effect for a surprise extra 3500 ATK to finish the game.
  • Some of the Spirit Monsters from the Legacy of Darkness booster pack and such can be this. An example is the Yamata Dragon, who packs 2600 Attack and upon inflicting battle damage, allows you to draw until you have five cards in your hand. There's also Hino-Kagu-Tsuchi, which has 2800 Attack, and, if it does battle damage to the opponent, they have to discard their entire hand during their next draw phase before they draw. The problem is that both of them take two tributes. Now let's look at the main drawbacks of Spirit Monsters. First, they can't be Special Summoned in any way, so it's usually not worth it unless you build a deck around them. Second, they return to your hand at the end of the turn, so it can mean trouble if they're the only things you have on the field. There is the Spiritual Energy Settle Machine, which allows them to stay on the field, but you have to discard one card from your hand each turn to keep it on the field. And if that leaves the field at any time, the spirit monsters return to the hands, so it's not the easiest thing to maintain. However, later support cards for Spirit Monsters makes them easier to summon, and Hino-Kagu-Tsuchi's effect is potentially game-ending enough to promote it from this trope to high-risk, high reward.
  • Ultimate Obedient Fiend: 3500 attack and 3000 defense, and negates the effects of monsters it destroys... but in order for it to attack it has to be the only card on your side of the field, and you can't have any other cards in your hand.
  • Big Shield Gardna has 2600 DEF and it requires no Tribute to summon. The catch? At the end of the Damage Step of a battle where this card is attacked, it turns to attack mode, and it only has 100 ATK, meaning that your opponent's next monster will both destroy Big Shield Gardna and get a direct swing at your Life Points. However, though it is impractical as a defender, it was commonly used in burn decks since ramming into 2600 DEF still hurts a lot.
    • Similarly, Destiny HERO - Defender has 2700 DEF and requires no Tributes to Normal Summon/Set, but woe betide you if it's in face-up Defense Position during your opponent's Standby Phase, as they'll be able to draw another card.
  • Some of the Archfiend monsters, particularly the ones introduced in Dark Crisis, can be considered this. On one hand, they have a side effect that allows you to roll a die in response to your opponent's cards that target it, and if it ends up a certain number, you can negate the effect completely and destroy it. However, it comes at a rather large turnoff of a cost: they force you to pay between 500 and 900 Life Points (depending on the monster) during each of your Standby Phases whether you want to or not, unless you have less than the required amount (in which case the monster is destroyed), even if Skill Drain is active. You can remove this effect using the field card Pandemonium, however.
    • Checkmate, their intended Finishing Move card, is particularly baffling: it allows Terrorking Archfiend to attack directly. While this certainly isn't terrible, it's only 2000 damage, since Terrorking's effects are battle-destruction related. It also requires the sacrifice of another monster, which is a cost Archfiends aren't very good at paying. Mostly, the card is notable for spending an awesome name on an effect that doesn't even come close to winning you the game. Sure, you can still boost Terrorking until it has respectable enough ATK, but by that point, you'd be better off boosting up a monster with native direct-attacking.
  • Rocket Arrow Express has 5000 attack (one of only a handful of monsters that do) and just requires your field to be empty to special summon it from your hand. The problem is that its effect makes it so you can't conduct your battle phase the turn it's summoned, you can't activate any card effects or set anything while it's on the field, and it destroys itself unless you discard your entire hand each of your standby phases. All of this adds up to a monster that has extremely high attack but makes you into a sitting duck for your opponent when you summon it (unless the opponent happens to have a Skill Drain on the field, though even then, you still have to pay the maintenance cost). Even in the anime, reactions to summoning this thing were basically "what the hell?" However, it's Not Completely Useless, since you can still summon monsters, meaning pairing it with Night Express Knight means you're all set for a Rank 10 Xyz Summon (which is as hard as it sounds, by the way), but even then it's been replaced by more practical Rank 10 enablers like Heavy Freight Train Derricrane and Super Express Bullet Train which have broader use cases and don't require you to skip your Battle Phase.
  • Muka Muka was a 600 ATK Level 2 Monster that gained 300 ATK and DEF for every card in your hand. This sounds like a good deal, since if you draw him on the first turn, you can get a Level 2 Monster with 2100 ATK... and his big brother, Enraged Muka Muka, costs a tribute but starts with 1200 and gains 400 for each, which would give him 3200 ATK in the same situation. So what's the problem? Well, he's completely useless in the mid-game, because by then both players probably have only one or two cards in their hand. Even if you draw him early, it's a better strategy to just play the cards in your hand instead of letting them sit there to power up Muka Muka. There are Decks that try to focus on drawing tons of cards to inflate Muka's strength, but let's be honest - if you have a whole Deck focused on drawing cards, it's a better idea to just run Exodia. Surprisingly, it actually was seen in some early tournaments, which ran a copy for use as a finisher, though this was more a testament to the power of an unlimited pre-errata Sinister Serpent and Painful Choice than anything.
  • LV Monsters zigzag this. Their concept (protect a weak Monster and then Tribute it to summon an upgraded form) sounds like it'd be rife with this, but in practice, they vary quite a bit. The payoff for a LV line can be as devastating as the Spell-sealing Horus the Black Flame Dragon LV8... and then there's Dark Lucius and Allure Queen, who are terribly underwhelming. To level up Dark Lucius, you need to use his 1000-ATK LV4 form to destroy an opponent's monster, then bring out his 1700-ATK LV6 form and negate an opponent's monster's effect that activates when it's destroyed, and only then can you summon the respectable LV8 form You are probably asking, "What if I try to start from the LV6 form?" Then you're screwed; Lucius's higher forms only get their effects if summoned by a lower form, so starting from the LV6 form leaves you with a weak card with no effect. (And no, they don't get their effects if you use Level Up, either.) You're probably also asking, "What if my opponent doesn't have a Monster with an effect that activates when destroyed?" Then you're screwed, because LV6 can't activate its effect and level up. And Lucius is the stronger one. Allure Queen has the same drawback of its cards losing their effects if not Summoned by a lesser form's effect, but they add in the problem that they rely on the opponent having the right Monsters on the field. Furthermore, their effect (equip an opponent's monster onto themselves) is pretty much a watered-down version of Relinquished, a much older and easier-to-play card. Allure Queen LV7 has only 1500 ATK and no way to raise it, which makes it a sitting duck. At least if you couldn't jump through all the hoops, you could use Lucius LV8 as an effect-less beatstick, but attempting to Normal Summon Allure Queen LV7 is about as dumb as strategies get.
  • Many 2000 ATK+ Level 4 or lower monsters have some kind of drawback: Giant Kozaky, Flash Assailant, Zombyra The Dark, Nuvia the Wicked, Unfriendly Amazon, Goblin Attack Force and that's just a sample. The practice started to die down around the release of 2000-ATK Normal Monster Gene-Warped Warwolf, but even before then, players had largely refused to bite (with a few standout exceptions like Goblin Attack Force and Berserk Gorilla). Put simply, most cards with the aforementioned drawbacks suffered such severe drawbacks that you needed to restructure your strategy to accommodate them, which flew in the face of Boring, but Practical Beatdown strategy: sure, you could set your whole hand and Flash Assailant would be good, sure, you could play Scapegoat and Panther Warrior would be acceptable... or you could just play Gemini Elf, which has only 100 less ATK. The fact that Beatdown in general has fallen heavily out of favor means that even Gene-Warped Warwolf is pretty much meaningless today, so what chance has a loser like Boar Soldier got?
  • Number 30: Acid Golem of Destruction. It boasts a good 3000 ATK - one of the highest among Rank 3 Xyz monsters- making it a very potent beatstick. However, it also prevents you from Special Summoning, forces you to detach one of its Xyz Material every turn or take a hefty amount of damage, and on top of that, it can't attack at all while it has no Xyz Material. As such, it's only really used for attacking in situations where it can end the game, when a player desperately needs to get over a high attack monster, or alongside a Skill Drain. This is because its real use, as implied in the anime, is to use a card like Creature Swap or Mystic Box to give it to the opponent, tossing them a useless monster that shuts down their strategies and kills them in four turns.
  • Raidraptor - Final Fortress Falcon is a rare Rank TWELVE Xyz which can be summoned by ranking up Raidraptor - Ultimate Falcon. It has 300 more ATK and 800 more DEF, and if it has a Raidraptor monster as material, is unaffected by card effects. But instead of field suppression, Final Fortress is first and foremost an offensive attacker, letting you banish a Raidraptor from the Graveyard each time you kill a monster by battle to attack again, and letting you detach an Xyz Material to put all banished Raidraptors back in the Graveyard. The problem is, Raidraptors already have several monsters that are lower-Ranked and thus easier to bring out while having better multiple-attack effects, or with the release of the dual-archetype Raidraptor/Phantom Knights support in Phantom Rage, they can simply make Arc Rebellion Xyz Dragon and One-Hit Kill the opponent if they have a big enough board. Last Strix helps you get this monster out faster, but it is still ungainly and loses its immunities if its materials are detached (and, more importantly, Last Strix makes it unable to deal battle damage on the turn it comes down, which is less than ideal for a multiple attacker), making Ultimate Falcon an overall better boss monster. It doesn't help that Ultimate Falcon's immunity means it's also unaffected by your own Rank-Up Magic cards, meaning that the only ways to summon Final Fortress Falcon are either the aforementioned Last Strix or Soul Shave Force on a destroyed Ultimate Falcon (which costs half your LP and requires you to have already summoned Ultimate Falcon properly and your opponent to have defeated it), or by using much clunkier or costlier Rank-Up Magics on lower-Ranked monsters.
  • Flower Cardians, an archetype based on the game Hanafuda, have unparalleled drawing and deck-thinning capabilities, the ability to make dozens of summons in a single turn through both monster effects and summoning Spells Super Koi Koi and Flower Gathering, and multiple powerhouse Synchros, including Lightshower, who has 3000 ATK, protects all your Cardians from targeting and destruction, and does 1500 damage per turn, and Lightflare, who has 5000 ATK, negates Spells and Traps and the effects of monsters it battles, and summons Lightshower for free when it dies. It'd be the most powerful Synchro archetype in the game, if not for one little problem: bricking. Flower Cardians have a grand total of two monsters that can be summoned without controlling any other cards, meaning that unless you get them or one of their summoning Spells in your opening hand, you're going to get mulched. And to make matters worse, while they have many draw cards, the majority of them only work if the card you drew was another Cardian, and while they have easy spamming and Tuners, many of their effects limit you to summoning more Cardians. This leads to a deck that needs to be played pure to use its full potential, but doing so also makes the deck's weaknesses most evident.
    • As if all of the above wasn't enough, Flower Cardians received a support card in 2020 that matches just how awesome but impractical the deck is as a whole: Super All In!, which allows you to return a Synchro monster you control to the Extra Deck to summon 4 Cardians from the graveyard, draw a card, and summon it if you drew a Cardian. Sounds great so far, but if you didn't draw one? You lose half your life points and blow up all the monsters you just summoned (and any others you control, but this would be one at most). In addition to this, the fact that Lightshower and Lightflare require four and five monsters to summon respectively means that at most, you really only break even on card advantage, and that's if you drew a monster off of the effect. However, Super All In! does at least let you get a Spell or Trap back from your graveyard at the end of your turn... but only if it was discarded by the effect of a Cardian monster.
  • The Timelords can be Normal Summoned without Tribute if you control no monsters, are immune to destruction by any card, you take no battle damage from battles involving them, and have pretty powerful effects after they battle. Completely undefeatable? No. First, they cannot be Special Summoned from the Deck (though their own support gets around this), which is pretty bad in a metagame focused on fast Summoning. There are ten of them (and that's barring Sephylon, the Ultimate Timelord), and they all have 0 ATK and 0 DEF barring Sandaion and Sephylon (and the former prevents any player from taking battle damage from battles involving it. Yes, that includes your opponent), making it extremely foolish to build a Deck around them as they clog up 25% of your entire Deck. Also, during your Standby Phase, they are shuffled back into your Deck. On top of all that, their powerful effects rely on them getting off an attack, and they are not immune to being returned to the hand or Deck, or banished. One attack-negating effect from your opponent, and their effects are wasted and you must watch them meaninglessly shuffle themselves into your Deck on your next turn.
  • The Superheavy Samurai. Not only are the majority of them massive robot samurai, but many of their best monsters can attack while in Defense-Position using their DEF as ATK. Not only that, but these monsters also have DEF as high as ''4800,'' making them close to indestructible. Oh, and some of their higher leveled monsters can be Special Summoned without a sacrifice. So what's the catch? Any Deck that focuses on them has to focus on them alone. That means you can't bolster it with other cards outside its archetype, not even Spells or Traps. A pure Monster Deck sounds horrendously imbalanced already, but very few Superheavy Samurai monsters have ATK that breaks 2000, meaning any card effect that forces monsters into Attack Mode would screw you over big time.
    • Subverted as of their 2023 support, which is far less restrictive in what monsters you're allowed to summon outside of the archetype, making Superheavy Samurai one of the more powerful Synchro decks, either by filling the board with powerful Extra Deck monsters or straight-up performing burn OTKs. Sadly, it comes at the cost of making the in-archetype boss monsters less attractive to summon by comparison.
  • Five-Headed Link Dragon. 5000 ATK, unaffected by other card's effects, cannot be destroyed by battle by most Attributes, and can nuke your opponent's field. The catch is its extremely costly Summoning condition of five monsters and that you can only activate its nuke effect if each monster had a different attribute as long as one of them isn't LIGHT, making this card not worth the effort, especially when the likes of Borrelsword Dragon or Accesscode Talker can be made for much less. Also, you have to banish 5 cards from your Graveyard for every one of your opponent's turns to keep Five-Headed Link Dragon on the field.
  • Remember Dragon Master Knight from the anime? Remember how awesome it was seeing two fated rivals combine their strengths to form an unstoppable force of nature mighty enough to fell a god?note  Well, as to be expected with such cards, the moment it came to print, it was a disappointment. You can only Fusion Summon it and all it does is boost itself by 500 ATK for every Dragon you control except itself. Not only that, but you also need Black Luster Soldier and Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon to Fusion Summon it, both of which are incredibly powerful and incredibly difficult to summon beatsticks in their own regard. Doesn't help that the two don't have good synergy with each other.
  • Dark Bribe and Recall have become this. They are generic Counter Traps that can be chained to most Spells/Traps, or monster effects, respectively. Considering that the large majority of Counter Traps have restrictive activation requirements, these two seem welcome... until you realise they also let your opponent draw one more card. In a game where hand advantage is incredibly important to the extent that one draw can make the difference between victory and defeat, cards that let your opponent draw more are not worth any advantages they offer. If you want to run a generic Counter Trap, it's a better idea to just run Solemn Judgment/Warning/Strike. That said, they were considered extremely useful back in the day, and were widely played; it's just that the modern game has become so hostile to Counter Traps that unless one is playing a mostly-Traps deck, it's hard to justify using anything but the best ones available.
  • Even in her time and in a deck with Insect Queen in mind, it's pretty cumbersome to get some mileage out of her. For starters, she's level 7, meaning you need two Tributes to even get her on the field (or The Trojan Horse, which can count as two for an EARTH monster). Next, while she does gain 200 ATK for every Insect on the fieldnote , her base ATK of 2200 is pretty low (requiring four Insects on the field just to catch up to Blue-Eyes), and she needs a Tribute in order to attack thus effectively giving her 200 ATK less than when she came onto the field in a best-case scenario. Sure, she summons a Token every time she attacks a monster, but you still need a Tribute in order for her to attack, and that Token only has a measly 100 ATK/DEF. And she summons it at the end of your turn IN ATTACK MODE! Unless you took necessary precautions, no points for guessing which monster becomes your opponent's target on their turn. There does exist Metamorphosed Insect Queen, which rectifies Insect Queen's shortcomings on top of protecting your Insects from your opponent's card effects as long as there is at least one other Insect on the field and gaining another attack Tributes permitting. The only downsides to MIQ are that she doesn't get an ATK boost from Insects anymore (though she already starts well ahead of her older counterpart at 2800) and she needs to be summoned by a card effect, which can easily be done with cards like Cocoon of Ultra Evolution.
  • The Rank-Up-Magic cards are pretty useful, since they let you summon an Xyz Monster that's one or two Ranks higher than one you have on the fieldnote . Plus, any Xyz Materials that were on the targeted monster get carried over to the summoned monster. While pretty much all of them do get flack for only being useful on certain archetypes or needing very specific conditions to use them, they also have some handy effects to make up for it, like stealing one of your opponent's Xyz Monster's materials or giving your Xyz Monster a boost... And then there's Rank-Up-Magic - The Seventh One. In order to use this card, you have to draw it on your normal Draw Phase, reveal it to your opponent, and then activate it at the start of your Main Phase 1 before doing anything else, basically telling them flat out what your next move is. And that happens to be using The Seventh One to use any of the Number 10X monsters to summon its respective Number C version. That means you will be blatantly telegraphing to your opponent that you'll be summoning a monster that will only be able to use its ability once, if it's lucky, although spitting out a free Chaos Number with a good statline is always a decent effect, and some of them don't care about only having one material or only need to use their ability once to give you a big advantage. But that's assuming your opponent doesn't negate something along the way. That's not taking into account the very likely possibilities that you drew The Seventh One due to a card's effect or you drew it in your opening hand, making it a brick. And did we mention that you can only use The Seventh One once per Duel?
  • Time Wizard. As much of a game changer as it was in the anime, in the game it's completely different. Once per turn, you flip a coin, and based on the result, you can either destroy all of your monsters and take half their total ATK as damage or destroy all of your opponent's monsters. Note how the damage effect doesn't apply to your opponent. Not only that, but it's not a heads-or-tails situation as with most other cards that involve a coin toss. You have to toss the coin, call heads or tails, and based on whether you called it right or not, you either wipe your board of all monsters and take half their combined ATK as damage or wipe your opponent's board of monsters.
  • Dark Sage seems like a good card to have in a Dark Magician deck. After all, he has 1100 DEF more than Dark Magician, making him a pretty good Stone Wall, and can search your deck for a Spell Card. He can even be summoned from your deck. However, the only way to get him onto the field is to activate Time Wizard's effect with Dark Magician on the field and hope that you called the coin toss right so you can tribute Dark Magician and summon Dark Sage. Also, that Spell Card search effect only activates when he's been summoned, meaning splash decks will need the Heart of the Cards if they plan to get some mileage out of this effect.
  • The Malefic monsters seem pretty cool on paper, with the vast majority of them being corrupted versions of ace monsters of key anime characters, like Malefic Blue-Eyes White Dragon. However, the archetype does come with a few caveats.
    • Any deck that uses them has to focus on them alone with little to no room for outside support.
    • All of their heavier hitters need a Field Spell in play in order to not destroy themselves once summoned, with Malefic Paradigm and Malefic Paradox needing Malefic World specifically.
    • Said heavier hitters that aren't Paradox, Paradigm, Stardust, or Truth Dragon are just glorified beatsticks. Not to mention you can only have one corrupted Malefic monster on the field and you can only use it and it alone to attack, meaning the ones exclusive to the archetype aren't going to do much. Not helping is how they have the exact same ATK and DEF as their regular counterparts, which you need to banish from your deck in order to summon them.
    • Malefic Blue-Eyes, Red-Eyes and Rainbow Dragon all require you to banish their counterpart from the Main Deck, which means that if you draw the counterpart, not only are you given a dead draw, the corresponding Malefic monster also becomes a dead draw unless you're running extra copies of the original or have a way to shuffle it back.
    • Malefic Territory does help to protect Malefic World (though it doesn't do anything to protect itself), negates Malefic's monster effects during the Battle Phase so you can attack with other monsters, plus it makes it so you can't have duplicates of a corrupted monster instead, but this can be a bad thing since Truth can wipe the board of all your opponent's monsters and Stardust won't be able to protect whatever non-Malefic World Field Spell you have in play.
    • Speaking of Truth, it can only be summoned after another Malefic monster was destroyed and by paying half your Life Points.
    • You pretty much need Malefic Stardust if you have a non-Malefic World Field Spell on the field or if you do have Malefic World but you don't have Malefic Territory.

Alternative Title(s): Yu Gi Oh

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