Story Breaker Power / Yu-Gi-Oh!

Yu-Gi-Oh! has a lot of Story-Breaker Power, where many opponents faced by our heroes have overwhelming cards which can break the story if not defeated. Similarly, some of the heroes also possess quite powerful ace-in-the-holes used as a last resort.

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Duel Monsters and Manga

• The Blue-Eyes White Dragon is the most powerful monster in the original manga and Yu-Gi-Oh! anime that could be summoned without any secondary requirements or summon conditions. Having 3000 Attack Points back when the game started players with 2000 Life Points meant the White Dragon could win almost any duel just by being played as soon as you drew it, giving birth to the idea in-universe that the Blue-Eyes brings victory. Pegasus only made 4 copies of the card because it was so powerful, and Seto Kaiba getting 3 of them was treated as the greatest Oh, Crap! moment in the manga's history. The overwhelming advantage of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon began to wane the longer the franchise went on, starting with Battle City requiring 2 tributes to summon it normally, and ending with the once mighty dragon no longer impressive in the face of newer monsters with powerful effects and easier summoning methods.
• The series zig-zags the trope with the Exodia cards, which singlehandedly gave Yugi his second victory against Kaiba's much more powerful deck. Not long afterward, they were pitched into the sea by a rival using a cheap ploy. It's anyone's guess how much the ability to make an instant win would have helped out Yugi in the following arcs. As time went on, however, Exodia was shown to be the very definition of Awesome, but Impractical, riddled with weaknesses and drawbacks, the least of which being the issue of drawing all five cards out of a deck of at least forty without Yugi's insane luck of the draw on your side. Unless someone had a deck specifically revolving around Exodia, using the thing was extremely difficult, and even then there were inherent problems, as shown when Yugi fought the first Rare Hunter. The individual pieces could be dead draws when a duelist needed a strong monster, and they were vulnerable to attacks on the hand. One Card Destruction could spell ruin for the mighty Forbidden One. Ultimately, Exodia stopped showing up in its vanilla form, and duelists instead went for different incarnations of it: Gozaburo Kaiba's Exodia Necross, or Adrian Gecko's Exodius, the Ultimate Forbidden Lord.
  • In the real - life card game, Exodia is inconsistent at best. But with Yugi (or other protagonists') canon ability to draw any cards they want at any time, it would make any duel completely unfair. Here's how it would most likely go.
• Pegasus' Toon World can turn regular monster cards into "Toon" type monsters that are impervious to battle destruction, and can hide inside Toon World on Pegasus' turn to become totally impervious to all harm. Much like the Blue-Eyes White Dragon above, Pegasus never released Toon World to the general public because every duelist having an army of Bugs Bunnies and Daffy Ducks would be a disaster for game balance, but he kept it for himself anyway. When Kaiba and Yugi dueled Pegasus, they had to come up with creative ways to destroy the Toons instead of relying on brute force. Toon World became less powerful after the Duelist Kingdom arc ended and the anime updated the card's rules to match its real-life counterparts (i.e. No turning every monster you want into a Toon, and Toons weren't Nigh-Invulnerable anymore) and, more importantly, made Anti-Magic cards (even in their most broken form, the Toons can't survive without Toon World on the field) a lot more common.
• Pegasus' Millennium Eye allows him to read the minds of anyone he wished, even during a duel. Pegasus used this to read Bandit Keith's mind and humiliate him by asking a child in the audience to play the perfect counter to Keith's move. Pegasus basically couldn't be surprised, ever, by any strategy any opponent came up with because he could read their minds to see it and prepare accordingly. Kaiba countered the powers of the Eye by topdecking without looking at his cards, and Yugi switched minds with Dark Yugi after each played a card to do the same. Even Kaiba's strategy ultimately failed because, while Pegasus couldn't out-predict him anymore, his own deck was also just stronger than Kaiba's.
• The Egyptian God Cards are immune to basically everything except massive brute force. By the end of Battle City, Yugi had obtained all three, and he spent the rest of the series, filler, or spinoffs either getting them stolen or just not drawing them. The only time after the Battle City arc where Atem plays the Gods in a serious match is the Ceremonial Duel, which in the anime required a very clever strategy and a lot of very questionable ruling applications. While in the manga, there were more restricting Super Expert Rules which makes them veer more into Awesome, but Impractical as Yugi guesses he likely put only one God in a Deck (though turns out it was two and Yugi countered it), and only Obelisk was successfully summoned.
• The worst one was the Devil's Avatar from Yu-Gi-Oh! R, used by the main villain - on top of possessing godly immunity, being unaffected by even the other God Cards bar Ra, it was also impossible to overpower with brute force, with its ATK always being slightly higher than the strongest card on the field. It required a custom card to elevate another God enough to force a draw.
• Ishizu's Millennium Tauk allows her to see into the future, and her visions are frighteningly accurate. Like Pegasus, she would be unbeatable in a normal duel because no strategy could surprise her. She uses her powers to reverse Seto Kaiba's entire Crush Card strategy against him by seeing what he would play beforehand and preparing for it. If Kaiba didn't have his own connection to a Millennium Item, he would have played into Ishizu's hands and lost their duel.
• The Virtual World arc introduces a Deck Master mechanic, in which each player picks a monster that can be Summoned to the field at any time, but with the drawback that its controller loses if it is destroyed. The Deck Master also gains a unique ability that can be used at various points in the Duel. Some of the Deck Master abilities are ludicrously overpowered, such as Judge Man, who can destroy all monsters the opponent controls even during their turn. This is offset by the arc villains, the Big 5, mostly being too incompetent at the game to use them to their fullest ability. For instance, Nezbitt's Deck Master, Robotic Knight, has the ability to deal 500 damage for every Machine type monster discarded (up to 3 per turn). As previously mentioned, such burn damage is overpowered in a 4000 LP format (just ask Duel Links players who played against similar decks), but he uses it in the most inefficient manner. In a 3 on 1 duel, the best use would be to target a specific player for 1500 damage to take them out one-by-one, but every time he uses it, he instead inflicts 500 damage to all players, thus diluting the amount of damage done.
  • Noah, being the administrator of the virtual world, uses a Ritual Spell as a Deck Master which has more abilities than every other Deck Master seen so far, as it can use fallen monsters as meat shields and as a source of Life Points. When that Deck Master goes down, it replaces itself with Shinato, which can shift his Life Point advantage even further and even save itself from destruction to bypass the Instant-Win Condition in the Deck Master rules.
• The Seal of Orichalcos from the DOMA Filler Arc grants its owner massive advantages over their opponent; 500 ATK points for their monsters, allowing up to 10 monsters on their side using the Spell/Trap Card Zone, this "backrow" of monsters being protected from battle so long as their "frontrow" monsters were alive, couldn't be removed from the field due to magical means^note Though Konami claims this was a lie by Gurimo and no one tried to remove more than once, and enabling control over the God Cards without having to be of Egyptian descent. The massive advantages this card gave DOMA forced the heroes to discover new story breaker powers of their own just to equal them.
• The Legendary Dragon cards. The Eye of Timaeus, The Fang of Critias, and The Claw of Hermos could fuse with any monster or trap card to create a new monster or equip spell out of thin air. Suddenly the Fusion Decks of the heroes became thirty feet deep due to the insane versatility offered by these cards, especially since the resulting fusions were often given the exact ability needed to end the duel in their favor. They were used solely to counter the threat of the Orichalcos, and left the anime afterwards.
• The Arc Villain of DOMA, Dartz, not only has two upgrades to the Seal that push his Life Points through the roof and makes his monsters impervious to Spells and Traps, but he also runs a few strategies that make him nearly invincible. Kyuorta negates all battle damage he takes, and he protects it with several destruction-resistant monsters; when it goes down, it gets replaced with Shunoros, which has stats equal to the massive amounts of damage he's negated and has arms that are always stronger than what they're battling. When that goes down he busts out his final trump card — A monster with infinite ATK. Not only did it take the protagonists six episodes to defeat him, Dartz's cards had them on the defensive almost constantly, and it takes a convoluted loop (and never-seen-before card effects) to defeat it^note Though Divine Serpent Geh has no effect protection, and thus can be easily outed by card effects of which both protagonists have, albeit Orichalcos Tritos did offer Dartz protection and it required Legend of Heart to destroy it.
• One that is a literal Game-Breaker, is Golden Castle of Stromberg. It cannot be destroyed, and forces your opponent to attack every turn... and any monster he attacks with is immediately destroyed, and the opponent takes damage. Furthermore, your opponent has to sacrifice half his deck every round. It's so powerful... because it was intended as a single-release promo and illegal for play in-universe. The villain of the arc hacked the systems to recognize this card as legal and also to add more effects to create an even bigger advantage for his representative.^note What is inferred from commentary is that the cost of giving up half the Deck was supposed to apply to the user of the card, not the opponent, and that the destruction invulnerability was also absent on the original version of the card. Yugi defeats it anyway, because he's that darn good, by virtue of having only 1 card left, which means he cannot remove half his deck. Cue the Castle exploding.
• Because all duels start with 4000 Life Points in the anime and manga, Effect Damage becomes a far more powerful option. Dark Bakura is the first person to demonstrate this with his "Just Desserts" Trap Card. In real life, its effect of dealing 500 Effect Damage per monster on the opponent's field wouldn't be worth a second glance, but during the Duelist Kingdom arc, it was one of the most devastating Trap Cards existing thanks to each duel beginning with 2000 Life Points. Dark Yugi almost lost his first duel with Dark Bakura thanks to one use of "Just Desserts". Notably, Kaiba banned all Effect Damage cards from his Battle City tournament later in the series,^note Specifically, just the cards that could be used without cost. His Ring of Destruction and Obelisk the Tormentor cards require sacrificing monsters to deal effect damage. and the possessed Joey is given these cards to use freely to get an upper hand in his duel against Yugi. Later series feature monsters with massive burn damage potential that should be able to end the game in an instant, such as Destiny End Dragoon and Dark Strike Fighter, but plot contrivances make it so that they are unable to get their effects off before the opponent defeats them.

Yu-Gi-Oh! GX

• The Super Fusion/Super Polymerization, an Artifact of Doom that was the focal point of the third season and later became a permanent part of Judai's Deck afterwards. This little number could fuse together any two monsters, even if the opponent was controlling them, essentially letting the user make their own cards (at the very least, nearly every time it was used, it created a card that made no sense for the owner to have). Every time it was used, it immediately shifted the balance of the duel — and that was just in the game; the card could also fuse together just about anything, including living beings and entire universes. It was only used to fuse something besides cards once, and its user, Judai, spent most of the final season either playing friendly duels that didn't warrant ungodly power or conveniently not drawing it.
  
  Super Polymerization would eventually re-appear in ARC-V, and while it's still a very strong card that wins games whenever it resolves, this iteration doesn't have any out-of-game abilities and is essentially Brought Down to Normal.

Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds

• Aki's Signer Dragon; Black Rose Dragon can destroy everything on the field upon being Synchro Summoned. The ability to wipe the board on-demand contributed to the card being a staple in real life, and probably contributed to Aki not getting many duels since Aki could turn around any troublesome situation just by bringing out Black Rose Dragon.
• Kiryu's Dragon ace from the Dark Signers arc; Hundred Eyes Dragon. Summoning it is straightforward (the usual Dark Synchro summon), and it has the same stats as Blue-Eyes White Dragon. However, its real strength are its two broken effects. Hundred Eyes Dragon lets him gain the effects of every DARK monster in the graveyard. With Kiryu's main handless combo strategy resulting in most of his cards being in the graveyard, this makes Hundred Eyes Dragon ridiculously hard to get rid of. And even if it gets destroyed, it lets Kiryu choose to any card from his deck to his hand; no restrictions on what he can get. Understandably, it was severely nerfed for the IRL card game, only getting to copy one effect at a time and searching an Earthbound Immortal on destruction.
• Zigzagged with the Earthbound Immortals, the signature cards of the Dark Signers. Earthbound Immortals all share an immunity to the opponent's spell and trap effects, cannot be attacked, can attack directly even if the opponent has monsters and each have a unique effect on top of all their immunities. However, as the Signers fight them, several weaknesses become apparent. First, they need a field spell active in order for their effects to be active (though admittedly not too much of a problem when the majority of duels required Speed World to be active). Secondly, while they can't be attacked, the rulings interpretations used means that direct attacks are allowed through them. Thirdly, while they're immune to direct effects from the opponent's spells and traps, they're not immune to indirect effects (like a card that stops the battle phase or a card that uses one of the Dark Signer's spells or traps). Finally, their list of immunities doesn't include monster effects, and monster effects became very prevalent with 5D's (Black Rose Dragon, as mentioned above, can just outright destroy everything, including an Earthbound Immortal).
• The Machine Emperors have the ability to absorb Synchro monsters, in a series where everyone's most powerful monsters are Synchro monsters. The Three Emperors of Yliaster absolutely dominate in their duels thanks to them and Yusei spends the first half of Season 2 in fear of another duel with one and spends a good portion of it looking into countermeasures against them until he unlocks Accel Synchro and Shooting Star Dragon.

Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL

• The Shining Draw ability possessed by the protagonist Yuma Tsukumo when fused with Astral, which allows him to create any ZEXAL Weapon he wants... and later, any card he wants. Every ZEXAL Weapon conveniently possesses exactly the correct abilities to win the current duel, and they can be alarmingly complex—presumably, the only reason Yuma doesn't just declare that the cards he creates with Shining Draw automatically win the Duel is out of fairness.^note The most egregious of these is Leo Arms that allows an extra attack during the Main Phase 2. Naturally this effect is absent in print. Add in the fact that Yuma's deck is very OTK-friendly, and Yuma spends much of the second series either out of commission or unable to fuse with Astral just so that every single episode didn't become "summon Hope, Shining Draw, win."
• Number 7: Lucky Straight. Anyone who possessed this card was given Winds of Destiny, Change! powers, as demonstrated by the original owner Charlie McCoy. Charlie was able to roll 6's on his dice roll effects whenever he needed to, and gave him a come from behind victory against a duelist that would make Judai and Atem jealous. Against Yuma, Charlie was able to gain 100,000 life points thanks to Lucky Straight's powers and a continuous spell card requiring dice rolls. Yuma could only win after breaking the Bargain with Heaven that granted Charlie Lucky Straight's powers, which only happened because Charlie played a very convenient spell card that allowed the prophecy to be fulfilled. Even though Charlie could no longer use the power, anyone he transferred ownership of the card to still could, though this doesn't seem apply to Yuma and Astral, possibly due to the Key preventing the luck effect like it does a Number's possession.
• The Barian Chaos Draw, the Shining Draw's Evil Counterpart, isn't quite as stupidly unfair, but that's not saying much. It only ever makes a single card, but that card is Rank-Up Magic - The Seventh One, a card that more or less allows the user to play the upgraded version of their ace card right off the bat for no cost. It singlehandedly tipped the balance of power in the direction of the Barian Emperors, and allowed them to wipe out about three-quarters of the show's cast.
• Don Thousand takes this trope up to eleven, even by series standards. His Deck makes use of a Field Spell that lets him activate Spells and Traps from his Deck at will, some of which include changing what Spell or Monster that an opponent has activated or Summoned. It also lets his own Xyz Monsters use their effect without needing Xyz Materials, blatantly ignoring the limiting factor inherent in the Xyz Monster design, and with minimal resources, employ a combo that can One-Hit Kill his opponents. When that's beaten, he switches up to Summoning a monster with 10,000 ATK along with other effects that let him steal the protagonists' monsters for his use. When that is defeated, he gets to Summon a monster with 100,000 ATK that resists destruction and forces the opponent into a Morton's Fork of attacking into its ridiculous ATK score or getting an instant loss (and just on the off chance that his opponent somehow fields a monster with more than 100,000 attack, it can negate attacks too). It takes the protagonists' own Story Breaker Power to defeat him.

Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V

• Z-ARC runs a deck designed to be a Master of All with the four Summon methods, focused on summoning his ace monster and uses cards with various interlocking defensive effects that make it very difficult to get rid of. His main Pendulum cards also have never-before-seen scales of 0 and 13 to allow him to Pendulum Summon anything. On top of that, it also is capable of summoning upgraded, corrupted versions of all 4 Dimensional Dragons consistently on the opponent's turns, and even has the ability to destroy cards added to the hand outside the Draw Phase, rendering Action Cards and tutoring moot. Even if by some miracle you manage to destroy it, it's a Pendulum Monster, so he can use his aforementioned Pendulum scales to summon it again. Unlike other instances of this trope with regards to past Yu-Gi-Oh! villains, his Purposely Overpowered cards serve to illustrate Z-ARC's fear of losing, something that the rest of the cast begin to call him out on. In the end, it takes four cards specifically designed to be his Achilles' Heel and Yuya deliberately sabotaging Z-ARC from the inside for the last blow in order to finally take him down.
• Crystal Wing Synchro Dragon's effect lets it No-Sell and destroy a monster on the field once per turn, and take that monster's ATK. When it battles a Level 5 or higher monster (essentially, anyone's strongest cards), it gains their ATK, on top of its own. This means that it can destroy nearly any monster and inflict 3000 points of damage. Naturally, Yugo only duels four times with it: two end with instant victory, the third has him defeated by Rin, due to the recursion effects of her corrupted Fusion monsters Windwitch - Crystal Ball, and the fourth has him lose to Yuri, whose Greedy Venom Fusion Dragon just so happens to have a Graveyard effect to destroy Crystal Wing.

Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS

• The main protagonist Yusaku Fujiki/Playmaker's main ace monster is this, and a Game-Breaker in the real game that was eventually Forbidden and later received an erratum. Firewall Dragon can return monsters on either field or in the Graveyard to the hand up to the number of monsters co-linked with it, or Special Summon any monster from the player's hand if a monster it points to goes to the Graveyard. The first ability would have been able to wipe almost any monster off the field with no strings attached, while the second could have enabled Playmaker to swarm the field almost endlessly far sooner than he eventually did. He subsequently only used Firewall Dragon five times before it was Forbidden in the real game and it stopped appearing in the anime, and when he did use it Kryptonite Is Everywhere tended to be in effect, as most of those times, his field was either too depleted to use it properly or his opponent had an effect to counter it (most notably, main rival Revolver/Varis's Borreload Dragon couldn't be targeted by monster effects). The one time none of that was in play, Playmaker brought Firewall Dragon out against a Mook and curbstomped him in a single turn.
  • Yusaku's final ace monster, Accesscode Talker, is absurdly good and is also a Game-Breaker in the real game that's regularly used to close out games. First, its base attack is the usual 2300 that all of Yusaku's "Code Talkers" have, but it gains 1000 ATK for every Rank a Link Monster used in its Link Summon has. In the real game, this pretty much means that it comes out swinging with at least 4000 ATK right off the bat (when it was used in the anime, it got a whooping 7300 ATK due to using the Link-5 Firewall Dragon Darkfluid in its summon). Its second effect, which is why it's so effective at closing out games, is that it can destroy any card on the field by banishing a Link Monster from the field or graveyard, it can repeat this effect by banishing a Link Monster with a different attribute from those that have already been banished for its effect, and it cannot be responded to, which means that it can pretty much destroy an entire board with little to no resistance once it comes out. Yusaku only gets to pull him out in the last episode to counter the usual overpowered monster the Final Boss has.
• The series also has roughly one per Final Boss of the season.
  • Revolver/Varis in the first season had Topologic Gumblar Dragon, which on its own is already pretty strong; if a monster is Special Summoned to a zone it points to, it destroys every card in both players' hands, depriving them of their resources. Its truly ridiculous abilities are unlocked when it is Extra Linked, already a case of this trope; not only does it protect everything Extra Linked from being destroyed by card effects, but once per turn it can destroy every card in the opponent's hand and inflict 3000 damage to them, and this effect cannot be negated, to the point where it is literally called Deus ex Machina in the Japanese version. Revolver only uses this card twice in the series, both against Playmaker, and never uses it again after that. The kicker is that Gumblar Dragon was naturally nerfed when it was released in the TCG/OCG; both of its effects are limited to only being able to discard up to two cards and the first forces the user to pay the same cost, and the player can only use one effect per turn...and it was still too powerful and was Forbidden in both formats.
  • Bohman in the second season didn't necessarily have an overpowered monster, but an overpowered Skill. He was already capable of surpassing the main protagonist Playmaker by not only using Storm Access to grab a random Link Monster from the Data Storm, but doing so in a Master Duel where it wasn't even part of the rules, but in his final duel with Playmaker he upgrades this to Master Storm Access, which can not only be used once per turn, but once per opponent's turn as well, and created the first known Link-5 monsters in the series. Playmaker winds up needing outside interference to shut this Skill down a few times just to survive.
  • Ai in the third season gets away with being an Invincible Villain for most of it just by being so skilled that only Yusaku has a chance at beating him. For the final duel of the series however, he busts out the first (and for a very long time in real life only) Rank-6 Link Monster: The Arrival Cyberse @Ignister. First, its original attack is equal to 1000 times the number of Link Materials used to summon it, and it gets another 1000 attack for every other card its controller controls, including itself. It gets summoned with the full 6 materials, meaning it has at base 7000 attack and easily escalates further, spending most of the duel easily with at least 10000 attack. Second, it can place a counter on itself which makes it immune to all other effects. This includes itself, but the counter can be removed to make it only immune to the opponent's cards for the rest of the turn. Finally, it can once per turn just flat out destroy a monster and then summon a token, which boosts its attack further.
• On the heroes' side, Aoi's Trickstar deck is incredibly powerful. It's a very consistent burn deck that can do heavy damage, in a show where life points start at a mere 4000. The deck was also infamously during its heyday, resulting in many of its cards being hit. In theory, a deck like this would annihilate pretty much everything that comes its way. But for this series, nearly every character packs dozens of monsters that can negate effect damage, often as an arbitrary secondary effect just because.

Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS

• The duelists rather than cards come across as this, though their cards do play a big factor.
  • Nail Saionji and his Maximum Monster Yggdrago the Sky Emperor. It can't be destroyed by Traps, can destroy any Level 8 or lower monster once per turn, and change a defensive monster into Attack Position, and has 4000 ATK to boot. Note that Rush Duel as a whole is roughly early DM levels of power. And since it's a Maximum, Nail can drop it basically whenever he wants since his Deck focuses on drawing through his cards and rearranging them until he gets the three pieces of Yggdrago. He beat main protagonist Yuga in their first Duel and it took Yuga's own Maximum to barely scrape out a win as Nail shuffled his Maximum into his Deck twice. Following this Neiru is generally on the heroes' side, but his account is banned due to the conditions of his and Yuga's Duel so he can't just wreck any opponent they come across. When he finally did Duel again, he joined Yuga and Roa in the Team Battle Royal and basically swept the competition with Yggdrago until they hit the finals. Gakuto came close to defeating Yggdrago, but was eventually forced to tie with a very lucky draw. In the second season, when he does Duel again it's on the villains' side.
  • Deuteragonist Tatsuhisa "Luke" Kamijo as well. He's easily the best duelist in the show and would probably have been able to defeat any of the Arc Villain characters, and is thus generally relegated to Dueling Joke Character Duelists. When he actually does start dueling the heavy hitters he wipes the floor with them to the point that Yuo Goha sways Luke to his side after losing to him to turn him against the heroes and the first thing he does is wreck Roa Kirishima in a Duel. Then there's his alter ego The☆Lukeman, who is even stronger thanks to having Fusion, which was what allowed him to defeat Yuo. The only reason The☆Lukeman himself was eventually defeated was because a meteor fell from the sky containing a Fusion card that Yuga punched while wearing a Gohanium suit, adding the card to his Deck, and because he didn't mean to really do so, he isn't penalised for breaking the rules. He later went up against Yuga Goha, the biggest villain of the show and defeated him too, through sheer abuse of the Magic Poker Equation while he was using Yuga's Deck, not his own.
  • Asana Mutsuba's Wyrm Excavator the Heavy Cavalry Draco. Like Yggdrago, it can't be destroyed by Traps, but it also gains ATK for every card in the player's hand, in a format where players automatically draw until they hold five cards each turn, and has an effect to draw more cards and destroy any Traps the opponent was hoping to use. Asana curb-stomped Yuga when they first dueled, and he was only able to force a draw with his own Maximum because Asana hadn't got the chance to replenish her hand. While the above-mentioned Yggdrago still remained, Wyrm Excavator was destroyed so Asana couldn't curb-stomp any opponent she dueled in one move and wasn't restored until the end of the series by Galian, who used it against Asana but was defeated before he could replenish his hand.

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