Never Recycle Your Schemes in Anime and Manga.
- Justified in Assassination Classroom. Once Koro-sensei knows how to defeat a tactic, he's smart enough and aware enough that it will never have a chance of working on him again.
- Attack on Titan: During the first big confrontation with them, Armin manages to distract and freak out Reiner and Berthold by telling them that Annie was being tortured by the government. It succeeds in shaking them up enough that the squad can escape. Then the trope becomes deconstructed when Armin attempts to pull this off a second time during the next confrontation, specifically wanting to use it on one of them to get them to agree to avoid fighting and talk things out. However, Berthold bluntly tells Armin that they don't care anymore and attacks, with Armin only managing to survive because of Mikasa's fast intervention.
- Digimon Adventure 02: Despite having numerous interactions with the 11 Digimon partners of the (at the time) 11 Chosen Children, the Digimon Kaiser only tries enslaving two of them with his Evil Rings a grand total of 3 times in his entire arc.
- Mazinger Z: Big Bad Dr. Hell played straight it most of the time, coming up with a new Robeast, weapon, or device that put Kouji or Mazinger Z through the wringer (Gromazen R9's acid blaster could melt Aphrodite A's armor, Kingdan X10 projected mirages, Holzon V3 set eathquakes off, Jinray S1 flew at Match 5, Aeros B2 could absorb Mazinger's attacks and hurl them back, Desma A1 caused hallucinations, Gumbina M5 was nearly impervious to all Mazinger's weapons...) and then he never tried to use it again, as well as never thought to combine many of them in a single superior robeast that compensates for the weakness of each individual weapon. However, sometimes he averted the trope by improving old weapons or reusing formerly successful strategies.
- Team Rocket, particularly the Jessie/James/Meowth trio, from Pokémon: The Series plays with this a bit. In a general planning sense, they avert it, as they do enjoy digging pitfall traps, using Paper-Thin Disguises, and using giant machines to try to capture Pikachu/the Pokémon of the week. However, they play it straight when it comes to more specific plans. Often times, their plans would go off without a hitch if not for the interference of the "twerps." If they'd simply wait for the "twerps" to move on and then try again, they could quite possibly steal every Pokémon in the show not named Pikachu.
- While played straight for the most part in Samurai Pizza Cats, one episode Big Cheese decided to build a giant killer robot that was an amalgam of every single one of the giant killer robots they used before. Not only did it look even more ridiculous than usual, but it was destroyed rather unceremoniously when Lucille panicked and unloaded her missile hairdo on it.
- Tiger Mask usually averts this, as Tiger Mask's Finishing Move proves itself effective again and again... But it also provides a very good justification for the trope, as some wrestlers do come up with counters:
- His original finisher, the Ultra Tiger Drop, consists in bowing at a charging enemy and lifting him on the shoulders, running on the ropes, and then jumping and dropping him on the ring. While it is just as devastating as it's described (and in fact the first use ended up killing a bear), after first seeing it, Star Apollon comes up with the very easy counter of keeping his legs shut and not moving, his superior skills allowing him to do just that until a desperate Tiger Mask doesn't jump on his face and hits his head until he has to open his legs or fall down. Then in a later encounter, Mr. Question (the most skilled wrestler in the series) simply grabs the ring ropes, ultimately neutralizing the move for good.
- The second finisher, the Fujiyama Tiger Breaker, consists in using a Tomoe Nage
◊ and then, before he falls, kicking the opponent in the back three or four times before kicking him very high, stand up, catch his fall with the head and execute a backbreaker. While devastating enough that one of the first victims compared it to being thrown from the top of Mount Fuji (how the move got its name), a number of wrestlers came up with counters... And found that Tiger Mask was ready for those: Bobo Brazil thought of landing on his incredibly hard head only to learn that Tiger Mask could turn it in a devastating piledriver; Black V, being too elastic for submission moves to work on, thought he was immune to it, only to cry in terror when he saw that Tiger Mask had come up with a follow-up that even he couldn't take; the Convict had the smarts of suckering him in a chain deathmatch so that the handcuff would prevent him from being thrown high enough but found out the ring post was an acceptable substitute for Tiger Mask's head. Then Miracle 3 landed on his longer arms and did this◊ to make sure Tiger Mask's legs would give up before his arms, and Tiger Mask could not come up with a counter for that.- In the anime, Tiger the Great used the same counter as Black V with a variation: after landing on the hands he took advantage of Tiger Mask's sheer shock at what just happened to just jump away.
- The sequel of the anime, Tiger Mask W, continues with the theme, as the new Tiger Mask gets both his finishers countered after a while, something that happens also to Tiger the Dark and Tiger the Great the Third.
- Transformers Victory: Played with in "Attack! The Shuttle Base", when Hellbat learns about a shuttle base the Decepticons have previously attacked offscreen two times before, which is now being used to ship cargo because the humans think the Decepticons won't attack it a third time.
