YMMV / Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game

A-C

• Accidental Innuendo: In general, the censors are pretty good at catching these in card artworks. For a few examples:
  • Ego Boost's original artwork has Lava Battleguard's face level with the other figure's crotch, and the other figure's expression doesn't help dissuade the less-savory implications. The TCG artwork moves the Battleguard to the side, to make the artwork look less questionable.
  • Vanity's Emptiness has the body of Vanity's Fiend removed in the international release, to make it look less like he's flashing the viewer.
  • Sacred Noble Knight of King Artorigus has a very... interestingly placed Tron Line near his crotch. Naturally, it's no longer there in the international artwork.
  • Konami abbreviating words in card names, often into just the letter "D", leads to a lot of unintended snickering. Little D probably gets the worst of it, with Lord of D. and Lady of D. not that far behind.
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • A minor case, but the Traptrix theme ended up receiving a lot of ire purely because their art was featured as candidates for Japanese sleeve artwork, with many Western fans decrying the fact that due to the theme featuring images of cute girls seemingly designed to pander to Lolicon otaku, it would be the top result. Ironically, the top result ended up being Shay/Kurosaki with his Raidraptors from ARC-V, who was the Western fans' top pick.
  • Maxx "C" is an interesting case. It is near-unaminously despised by TCG players for being one of the most broken cards ever printed to the point of being format warping and players continue to be appalled that the card continues to remain legal at 3 copies in the OCG and Master Duel. On the other side of the pond, however, while most OCG players will not tell you that they like the card, they are more likely to be of the inclination that the card's existence is a necessary evil for gatekeeping degenerate combo strategies out of relevance (such as Adamancipator Block Dragon combos and Number 86: Heroic Champion Rhongomyniad) that they would otherwise be forced to ban if Maxx "C" was removed from the game.
  • "Waifu" archetypes that mainly tend to consist of cute anime girls are much more contentious in America than in Japan. Partly due to people seeing it as pandering to the stereotypical Otakus, and partly because it takes away from more interesting designs and lore. It doesn't help that Konami often tends to push them into being meta decks to make their presence more prominent.
• Anti-Metagame Character: A great deal of cards and archetypes over the years saw much play because of their playstyle countering common playstyles or meta decks at their time.
  • Gravekeepers, despite their age, see occasional niche use because their focal Field Spell, "Necrovalley", shuts down effects that would move cards out of the Graveyard. As more modern archetypes get mileage out of recycling and reusing resources, Necrovalley can shut down an enormous variety of plays.
  • At the height of its reign, "Sky Striker" was the king of this trope. In a game that has become overly centered around spamming out big boards of monsters to go into even bigger monsters and shut their opponents out of playing via monster negates before killing them off in one turn, "Sky Striker" does virtually the opposite: an archetype centered around having one monster on the board at any given time, using said monster to turn every duel into a grind game and generate advantage, and make the majority of their big plays using the vast array of Quick-Play Spell Cards and search/draw power they can search, set and recur. Because of the deck's one-card starter nature, it is also able to cram in a large number of handtraps compared to combo decks that they can use to keep their opponent from establishing boards when going second.
  • "Runick" is designed similarly to "Sky Striker" with the stipulation of focusing on a deck out win condition. Their gameplay contains no archetypal Main Deck monsters whatsoever and focuses on summoning their Fusion Monsters to protect and support the user while their vast array of Quick-Play Spell Cards methodically destroys the opponent's deck turn by turn. They play relatively well with other archetypes that don't require the Battle Phase to play, leading to several variants with Runick splashed in as an engine, most famously with Spright since two of their four Fusion Monsters are Level 2.
  • The "Dogmatika" Main Deck/Ritual Monster archetype that is explicitly designed to counter and delete the opponent's Extra Deck monsters, including the ability to rip cards directly out of their opponent's Extra Deck to get rid of them, as the vast majority of meta decks rely on their Extra Deck to make meaningful plays.
  • Likewise, the "Bystial" archetype consists entirely of Main Deck Effect Monsters who are designed to counter special monster types, including Extra Deck monsters and Ritual Monsters. Their boss monster, "The Bystial Alba Los", is a blanket negate against every monster card in the game that isn't a Main Deck Effect Monster.
  • "Exosister" is able to play whenever their opponent moves a card out of their Graveyard. It saw a boost in play in the OCG after new support arrived and the "Tearlaments" archetype was introduced, the latter of whom specifically revolves around returning cards from the Graveyard into the Deck to Fusion Summon.
• Audience-Alienating Era: Granted, when the franchise entered this and if it's recovered from it are subjects of much debate in the fanbase. There are some key eras though...
  • Most 'tier zero' formats such as PePe, Zoodiacs and so forth are prime contenders, due to the Power Creep of those decks being so extreme that no other decks can compete with them, thus stagnating the meta until they are hit by the banlist.
  • Dragon Rulers is considered to be the most infamous instance of Power Creep in the game; they would have been considered 'tier zero' had it not for Spellbooks also dominating the same format as them (thanks to Spellbook of Judgment).
  • Monarch VS Kozmo format is considered a contender for this trope due to it being the first two major decks to start up the 'keep the opponent from making as many plays as possible' style of decks and for going on far longer than most formats before Konami finally hit them with the ban hammer.
  • Early VRAINS was accused of this for going back to the 'push the new summoning mechanic at the expense of older summoning mechanics' style that the ARC-V era broke (it didn't help that the Summoning mechanic itself, and the new rules that it was tied to, were so heavily controversial). Thankfully, later sets would start giving more support to older summoning mechanics once again, but it would only break out of this trope near the end of its lifespan where the April 2020 Revision was announced.
  • The notoriety of Firewall Dragon based loops and FTK caused the entirety of 2018 to be considered as this by the majority of the playerbase. This period lasts until the tail end of the year when its finally announced that Firewall Dragon is finally getting banned, to the delight of the playerbase. In TCG side, this ban is further backed by banning several degenerate engines such as Rhongomyniad, Rank-Up Azathot, and Topologic Gumblar Dragon.
• Awesome Art: The art on the cards. Good lord, there are so many amazing examples that it's impossible to list them all.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Several cards, usually boss monsters such as Judgment Dragon, Dark Armed Dragon,^note both capable of easily nuking the entire field Grapha, Dragon Lord of Dark World,^note easily revivable with its own effect Shi En,^note negates a Spell/Trap once per turn and can protect itself etc. Either they're excellent for the theme, or overpowered.
  • Xyz Monsters, for being even easier to summon than Synchros, as well as Ranks replacing Levels (which can throw off several card effects) made quite a rift. Even well outside of the era it debuted, there's still a lot of contention over them due to a lot of Xyz monsters still remaining powerful, consistent, and splashable, and often very, very easy to spam, especially with the later-introduced Pendulum Summoning mechanic. Some people claim that it's good something averted the Power Creep trope in the franchise for once, while others feel it's stagnating the game and makes Duels boring to watch. Rank 4 spam in particular tends to get a lot of heat directed its way.
  • Exodia is still very popular since the first episode, but since the recent Exodia decks tend to take ages for a single turn and not allow the opposition to play, the Forbidden One has moved to this category.
  • Cyber Dragon was very popular in the GX era, since it's easy to summon it, but veteran players tended to hate it for single-handedly making the old metagame obsolete. This softened over time due to Power Creep, with newer players being generally unfamiliar with how much of an impact it used to have, and the hate for anything Cyber Dragon as a whole being shifted to Cyber Dragon Infinity.
  • A lot of players dislike HEROes because, being the theme of choice of Judai/Jaden Yuki, they pretty much took over the game for several booster packs, they dominate the Fusion mechanic, and have more support and numbers than actual types. It didn't help that several of those cards received no changes when they were ported to real life, resulting in sets being clogged with cards that were very situational, even in their intended Deck. Despite this, the theme remains highly popular, which has led to "HERO" spawning off multiple sub-archetypes that are well liked on their own, which only adds to the controversy as "HERO" support keeps ballooning in number through the years and every few sets.
  • Nekroz used to be really popular for being a very strong deck that made Ritual Summoning (an Ensemble Dark Horse mechanic in itself) prominent. But the problem was that once they hit, they were a) extremely rare due to being in short print, thus costing way too much money, and b) immediately took over most tournaments, to Tier 1 if not 0 levels. Pretty much every non-Nekroz player dreaded seeing them, especially fans of other Ritual decks for landing a lot of their key cards on the Forbidden/Limited list, which they depended on to be just barely playable. That being said, the hate quickly softened once Djinn Releaser of Rituals was banned, as this locked the deck out of its worst combo, and more than a few people had been asking for some of its cards to be unbanned (especially Shurit, which only left the Forbidden list in early 2019), even looking back on the Nekroz era as one of surprising diversity.
  • New Types often cause this, with many seeing them as redundant. The Psychic-Type largely escaped this, but the Wyrm-Type (basically Dragons) and Cyberse-Type (similar to Machines) are more contentious. Some are happy to have new Types, while others wish that some other Types would get the attention, particularly since the Cyberse are prominent in Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS in comparison to the downplayed Psychic and ignored Wyrm.
  • Was Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer bad for the game? While other monsters have been debated over this topic before, never has it been more heated than with this card. Detractors point out that it's a generic Rank 4 that gives a powerful out to many, many older boss monsters and situations, and is suspected to be the main reason why most newer cards have "cannot be targeted by card effects" on them. People who believe he wasn't also point out how Power Creep is always a thing, and by no means was he as game changing as other cards back in the day such as Cyber Dragon and that, by itself, it can't really do much else once it gets its effect off.
  • The "Utopia" monsters. They have several evolutions, forms and spin-offs, with many players liking the aesthetic and battle-focused effects of the monsters, alongside the numerous puns and clever references to the "Number" archetype and Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL. Other players don't care for any of this and simply dislike how prominent the theme is through the game, with many of "Utopia" forms having game-ending effects on easily accessible monsters, with "Number S39: Utopia the Lightning" and "Number 39: Utopia Double" being the main targets of scorn.
  • Generic boss monsters tend to be hated by a subset of players thanks to how easily accessible they are, their powerful effects, and the fact that practically no match can be played without a duelist having to take into account the possibility of their existence in the opponent's deck. On the other hand, many players appreciate the help they bring to lesser themes and decks, giving them a powerful option that can contend with stronger opponents, and usually being a better endboard than those theme's own boss monsters. Of these, "Baronne de Fleur" (from the Synchro mechanic), "Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS - Sky Thunder" (from the Xyz mechanic), and "Apollousa, Bow of the Goddess" and "Accesscode Talker" (both from the Link mechanic) are the most contentious. This point was really brought to a head with Superheavy Samurai's brief stint in the meta with the only reason for their meta relevance being for their ability to bring out the aforementioned boss monsters with end-boards containing any actual Superheavy Samurai monsters being rare.
  • The "Fur Hires": either a clever spin on naming conventions that gives some distinctiveness to an otherwise unremarkable theme, or the single stupidest thing the localizing team has ever done.
  • Interestingly, the Tearlaments archetype, despite being the centerpiece of an incredibly controversial Tier 0 format, has some dissenting opinions surrounding it. A large number of players hate the archetype for typical Tier 0 deck things like being incredibly broken and killing all forms of deck variety and playability during the height of its power. However, there remains a non-insignificant crowd of fans who vouch that the deck is one of the most fun and skill-oriented decks in the game's history and that its main issue is being ahead of its time; that is, it plays Yu-Gi-Oh! in ways that virtually no other deck has ever done before by being able to consistently interact with the opponent during either players' turns and enabling a high level of back-and-forth chess-style gambit gameplay, but because no other deck was released at the same time that was capable of matching it on even ground it naturally became the most broken deck of the format. Some believe that the Tearlaments style of gameplay could be a possible evolution of the direction of Yu-Gi-Oh! if Konami is willing to create archetypes that encourage interactivity without simply printing a bunch of negates.
  • The "Runick" archetype. Either beloved by some players for its extreme flexibility allowing players to build unique decks that utilize the archetype's Quick-Play Spells as both material to fuel other strategies and forms of interaction, or fiercely hated by other players for their deck banishing gimmick and near-endless recursion and draw power with "Runick Fountain" making games against them unbearable and un-fun, something not helped by the fact that Runick often tends to be synonymous with endless floodgates.
• Broken Base: A severely broken one. The game has been going for twenty-five years now; over that time the playerbase has not only seen dozens of formats and metagame archetypes come and go, but the very rules of the game have changed with things like Priority being removed, the playing field being changed (the addition of Pendulum Zones and Extra Monster Zones), and new summoning methods and rules being introduced. As a result, fans can have strong opinions on which era of the game was the best and which one (if any) ruined the game beyond repair.
  • A particular point of contention is how the game plays. In the early era of Yu-Gi-Oh up to about the 5Ds era, duels tended to take more turns, decks focused on a few key monsters, there was back-and-forth play between duelists, and many simple one-for-one exchange cards were staples. These days duels usually consist of fewer turns but are just as long, as duelists focus on chains and chains of summonings, getting out monsters with negation and destruction effects to shut down the opponent's plays (while navigating through their opponent's own negation and destruction effects), and massing card advantage through recycling and search effects. Fans of the older style claim that the modern game is dull as duels are usually decided in a couple of turns that take several minutes to sit through as players execute endless combos; fans of the newer style say the older formats were slow and boring while the newer formats are more fast-paced and action-packed.
  • The original Forbidden List was a huge uproar in the community at the time. Some saw it as a much needed change to the game as several recently released cards forced players to play one type of deck to stand a chance at tournaments, while others became rabid at the thought that their expensive cards would now become utterly worthless. This is the sole reason why there is a Traditional and an Advanced Format in the English TCG. As the years went on, the Forbidden List became even more controversial because of how it's used, with perceptions being that Konami will avoid restricting certain cards because they make money off of decks that use it being popular, or that they will ban cards just to make other archetypes in newer packs more viable so players will chase them instead. And of course there's also arguments about which cards should be banned, which ones should not be, if decks that get hit by the ban list have been nerfed too heavily to be competitive anymore, and if the OCG and TCG should use the same Forbidden List or not due to either side of the fanbase having exclusive cards that can make a big impact on the metagame.
    • While the Forbidden List is updated on a regular rotation, Konami and UDE will occasionally ban cards while the current format is on-going. The first card to ever do that was Cyber-Stein when a Regional tournament was won by a One-Turn-Kill tactic involving Stein. Game loyalists who trust the company more than the competitive scene thought the game should continue as is until the next ban, fearing that people can easily cry foul at any point in time and cause repeated banlists mid-point instead of as scheduled, causing problems with world champions having to constantly adjust. On the other hand, others who saw the one-turn-kill madness coming screamed "told you so" when they knew that certain cards are going to break the game, questioning why Konami or UDE didn't do so from the start.
  • Very often, expensive high-demand cards have been re-released as inexpensive common cards, or made available in structure decks and special packs. Some will praise the decision for allowing powerful cards to be more accessible to a wider variety of players, while others will grind their teeth and scream bloody murder as the cards they've shelled a lot of dough for suddenly become dime-store commons. For example, compare a Tournament Pack 2 Morphing Jar with this one.
  • The creation of TCG-exclusive cards or cards released in the TCG before the OCG. On one side, fans praised UDE for having cards come out outside of Japan before Japan was able to get them because for years there were cards in the OCG that were very powerful but took months or year to come out in the TCG. On the other hand, the TCG released Allure of Darkness, a card that caused various cards to shift during the current format with semi-limited to even banned cards. While Allure wasn't limited, players pointed out that the card itself help fueled the Tele-DAD problem exponentially. This argument also extends to any time that a structure deck or booster pack changes cards between the TCG and OCG; some will prefer one or the other and resent they didn't get it, while others feel they should be the same on principle.
  • Is a Tier Zero format good? Players in favour of this cite that you have fewer matchups to account for, and when everyone is playing the same deck, the winner is decided on skill in piloting, deckbuilding, and side-deck decisions. Those who are against it argue that the demand for the best deck in the game drives prices so high that attempting to compete becomes a greater Cash Gate than normal, and the lack of variety makes tournaments a lot less exciting.
  • The presence of Toon monsters in Duelists of Destiny/Dragons of Legend 2. Many players hate the fact that the majority of the GX portion of the cards consists of cards that support Toons ^note Despite being a Duel Monsters theme although the listed cards came from the GX era)., feeling that it should've been filled with cards or a theme more fitting of the GX era (Such as Fossils or Cyber Angels^note Cyber Angels later received support in the third set in addition to more coming from ARC-V, while Fossils eventually appeared in the 2020 Collection Pack/Battles of Legend set) while others don't seem to mind as Toons haven't had any support cards for over a decade (Unlike Red-Eyes ^note Which is also guilty of this, while having cards fill both DM and GX slots, which just received a good amount of new support cards in Clash of Rebellions). While there is a third group who doesn't mind the Toon support, but believe that they shouldn't have made up the majority of the GX portion of the set.
  • The presence of cards that originate from the currently airing anime in the Dragons of Legends sets. Given that it was supposed to be releasing long requested anime cards from the older series, many players do not like the idea of cards from the current series appearing in what supposed to be a nostalgic set (ZEXAL cards in Dragons of Legend, ARC-V cards in Duelists of Destiny/Dragons of Legend 2), claiming that they could be added to any upcoming sets as they had already started adding more Anime-based cards than they used to. Others argue that it may be the only chance for certain cards to appear at all since they're cards from one-shot and filler characters.
  • With the reveal of Link Monsters, the game's fanbase was absolutely shattered with the new rulings that came with them. Specifically, the Pendulum Zones are now part of the back row, essentially taking up two slots if you want to Pendulum summon. However, the biggest point of contention is that you can only summon one Extra Monster at a time unless you manage to summon a Link Monster beforehand and even then, you can only summon them in designated zones the Link Monster converts from main monster zones. Either you love it for promoting a slower game state and bringing back the old "protect the castle" boss monsters that were rendered obsolete for ages now, or you despise it for single handedly screwing over a massive number of decks and how majorly the game has changed in one small swoop. This was the first major change in the game field in an almost 20 year history bar the slight modification to the field during the Pendulum Era, one of the biggest rule changes, and one of the most drastic changes to pre-existing mechanics. This change heavily Nerfs several decks reliant on the Extra Deck, while promoting slower strategies and Main Deck monsters. Fortunately, Extra Deck monsters can still be brought back to the Main Monster Zones by a card effect if they're removed from the field by either being sent to the graveyard, banished, or switched to the opposite side. The debacle as a whole has calmed down since the April 2020 revision to the rulings, which allows Fusion, Synchro and Xyz Monsters to be summoned from the Extra Deck without needing a Link Monster.
  • The change to the Legendary Duelists pack formats for Legend Duelist 3. In the first two packs, three characters from Yu-Gi-Oh! and Yu-Gi-Oh! GX received four new cards that supported their decks, while in Legend Duelist 3, this changed to one character from each of the first five series receiving five such cards. The contention comes from the characters getting support being Kaiba, Zane, Crow, Kite, and Sawatari in comparison to the more minor characters who would receive support in previous packs and who usually don't get any focus. However both parties agree that no-one will miss the random Duel Links meta cards added at the end of each pack.
  • Should Maxx "C" be unbanned in the TCG? Detractors will say that it's good that Maxx "C" is banned, as it's an incredibly broken card that can easily put players in lose-lose situations, where they either stop their turns short or give their opponent tons of advantage, neither of which are fun. They also note that it tends to warp the meta around itself, turning games into a Luck-Based Mission where getting Maxx "C" in their opening hand means that they win right there, unless their opponent can negate it or plays a deck that doesn't Special Summon often. Supporters enjoy having a card that can scare other players into cutting their turn short, especially if they hate combo decks and want more ways to force them to stop their combos. Some also like the novelty of having a card that is so broken that it wraps back around to being balanced. There are also a few combo enthusiasts who want a legal Maxx "C" because they enjoy "The Maxx "C" Challenge", showing off that they can Special Summon so much that they can force players who use Maxx "C" to deck themselves out. The debates got even more heated with the release of Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, an official card game simulator that had a modified version of the OCG banlist with Maxx "C" unlimited. This meant that there were now more people on each side of the debate, as it was the first time in years (or the first time in general) that many TCG players witnessed how strong Maxx "C" was and how thoroughly it shut down combo decks.
  • "Lore" archetypes getting heavily pushed by Konami has been a very divisive topic over the years. Many of these archetypes are tied to independent storylines or one of the many metaplots spanning several different archetypes. Many of these storylines are well-received, but the archetypes tend to be seen as Creators Pets due to a great deal of them introducing meta-defining or otherwise immensely powerful cards. A great example of this is the Yu-Gi-Oh! Abyss storyline; of the (currently) 11 different archetypes (including "Albaz Dragons") featured in the story, at least six of them have topped the meta at some point. This came to a head with "Tearlament", another "lore" archetype from the "Visas Starfrost" story, which, in conjunction with "Spright" (from the "Abyss" story), completely overran the OCG's competitive scene, eventually resulting in "Tearlament" becoming Tier 0.
  • The overreliance on hand traps in the modern meta game to balance out modern decks. Some see it as a band-aid at best and accused the game of becoming a case of open with a hand trap or die and wish Konami would take more serious efforts in reigning in the game's serious Power Creep issues in recent years. Others view it as a great way of dealing with the Power Creep that doesn't neuter the more combo-oriented design the modern game has developed into. That isn't even getting into the topic of if being hit with a hand trap feels good or not.
  • Should Yu-Gi-Oh! have set rotation? It's the one thing almost every other card game has that Yu-Gi-Oh! does not, and irrefutably a major factor in setting itself apart from other card games. Supporters believe periodically restricting older cards when new cards get printed could theoretically solve issues most players have with the game by effectively removing most of the best cards from the game and forcing Konami to stick to a consistent power level to keep a stable meta. Some argue that Yu-Gi-Oh! already has a miniature form of set rotation in the form of the Forbidden/Limited list and as such this would just be an extension of what the game does already. Detractors feel otherwise, as not only would this require radically changing how product releases and card design work, but it could also increase the game's already exorbitant price tags and discourage reprints of cards that stay out of rotation for a long time. In addition, some argue that a lot of the fun in Yu-Gi-Oh! comes from Konami printing innocuous cards that can be broken by randomly having synergy with some dumb one-offs from 2004 or so, an appeal that set rotation would invariably get rid of.
  • Can Yu-Gi-Oh! be "fixed"? After decades of Power Creep, players from nearly all points in the game's lifetime bemoan that it became an unplayable mess after one point or another, prompting them to either stick to that older format or withdraw from the game entirely. Konami, by its own admission, struggles to get fresh blood, which has been commonly attributed to how much there is to digest and how there's not really a good way to learn it all, barring the unlikely situation of the game receiving a fundamental rework or reboot. But there's a good contingent of the community that argues that the current state of the game is merely an extension of what it has been like from the start (like setting up unwalkable boss monsters or running shutdown/control/stun). When many of the proposed "solutions" end up just creating more "problems" ^{for instance}People who want to see a limit on the number of Special Summons that can be conducted in one turn would immediately be hit by floodgates, which despite being also heavily reviled also cannot be entirely eliminated either because then there would be little to no interruption for people who chain several cards together, some argue that Yu-Gi-Oh! is fine as is and that there's no way to fix what was never broken (in effect, Yu-Gi-Oh! has no "solution" because it has no "problem").
• Cargo Ship: Admit it, TCG/OCG players, you've gotten "attached" to a specific card or cards (?)... Especially if that card has served you well over the years or just plain eye candy.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict: Especially prevalent when you involve players whose first impressions of the game were from the anime or their childhood, but have only returned to the game without brushing up on how it has changed. Many returning casual players are not fond of the Power Creep that the game has undergone over the years, especially when they require expensive cards to keep up. The game's steep learning curve and complex card text also turn some new players away. Competitive players, on the other hand, feel that the game can be very enjoyable provided both players are playing decks of similar power level, and that the other camp's vision of "the gool old days" were fueled by their Nostalgia Filter and they're choosing to complain rather than adapt. Some players even note that competitive Yu-Gi-Oh even in the past is guilty of FTKs and lockdowns that most complaints would be aimed at.
• Common Knowledge: Take a shot every time someone claims that the "Beetrooper" archetype is supposed to be based on bees and not beetles. Try not to get wasted.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In most tournaments, you'll likely only see three, maybe four decks at most when it comes to the final brackets. Because of the Power Creep, what decks people main during tournaments fluctuates with each era, but none the less, you're unlikely to encounter any other decks besides this in any major tournament.
  • This trope gets taken up to eleven in certain formats with "Tier Zero" Decks - those that take up at least 65% of top decks of an event, resulting in a ridiculous number of Mirror Matches observed in tournament finals. Well-known examples include Chaos (the deck that birthed the banlist), Tele-DAD of the early Synchro era, PePe (Perfomapals/Performages), Zoodiacs (which were an interesting example of this in that their engine could actually be injected into another deck to help make it competitive), SPYRAL with Double Helix, Firewall Dragon FTK, and Ishizu Tearlaments.
  • For decks that have stood the test of time, Lightsworns; or at least their engines. With the Light of Judgment Structure Deck available, its not hard to make a budget deck that one can have fun with the game while learning some of the ins and outs of the game as well. Go on any online Yu-Gi-Oh simulator and see how many matches you go without encountering a Lightsworn player, or someone using a Lightsworn hybrid deck with another deck theme that benefits from being sent to the graveyard.
  • Some cards have been so potent that they've affected how people play in apprehension of them, such as not playing their Spells and Traps in the same column as an opponent's face-down in case of Infinite Impermanence, or not summoning more than 5 times in case of Nibiru, the Primal Being.
  • Several generic Extra Deck monsters or generic engines are so strong that they overshadow the rest of the Deck they're being used with. When any two Effect Monsters from even the most underplayed of archetypes can go into Predaplant Verte Anaconda that then uses Fusion Destiny for Destroyer Phoenix Enforcer, or when a Tuner and non-Tuner makes for Halqifibrax followed by Auroradon and ending on Borreload Savage Dragon or Baronne de Fleur, it gets egregious when rogue decks converge onto the same few generic boss monsters, sometimes at the cost of their original game plan. There's a reason why the monsters that enable these combos are on the banlist.
• Crack Pairing:
  • In some pixiv fanart, Aleister the Invoker is paired up with Sky Striker Raye, as their themes have plenty of synergy.
  • And seeing as Invoked works well with Dogmatika, Aleister is paired up with Ecclesia. The irony is so thick with this, you could cut it with a knife. Pairing up someone associated with the occult with a maiden following a Catholic Church ersatz is pretty strange, indeed.
  • In a largely platonic example, Laundry Dragonmaid gets paired with Eldlich the Golden Lord of all things, mainly because Laundry isn't as strong a play-starter as the rest of the Dragonmaid cohort, but her milling effect has great synergy with Eldlich Spells and Traps that are otherwise difficult to voluntarily put into the Graveyard. Fanart commonly depicts Laundry under the Golden Lord's employ rather than alongside her usual coworkers.
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • When it comes to design, the Jurrac Monsters are this to an insane degree. Case in point? They are dinosaurs. On fire!
  • In terms of mechanics, the D/Ds; both for their high-risk high return design and for being the first theme to have Fusion, Synchro, AND Xyz Monsters.
  • Superheavy Samurai, which can be played using solely monsters; in fact, the deck actually encourages it.
• Creator's Pet:
  • Blackwings. It seems that Konami is a little too fond of giving this already fortified theme support, to the point where some people are getting fed up of seeing them, and their support only increased due to the ARC-V anime. It doesn't help that their most iconic user is typically seen as a Creator's Pet himself.
  • A few people saw Number 16: Shock Master in the OCG as this. Its lockdown effect and easy summoning conditions saw it quickly banned in the TCG, but it remained for quite a while in the OCG due to what was assumed it being a V-Jump promo, and thus a bit of blame was directed at Shueisha for keeping such a broken card in the game (until its January 2016 OCG banning).
  • Burning Abyss after they got Beatrice. Konami hyped up the deck to hell and back, made it one of the major selling points for Premium Gold (along with Kozmo), and didn't hit it in the April 2016 banlist despite it being meta for nearly 2 years and being one of the more potent decks. The fan-suspected reason for keeping the deck alive was so that Konami could make money on people trying to buy the deck through Premium Gold.
  • Many proclaimed Monarchs and Kozmos to be this. While the two decks are a touchy subject in the player base for various reasons, usually because of how they play,^note Both rarely, if ever touch their extra decks, Monarchs revolves around tributing the opponent's monsters and keeping them from playing as little as possible, Kozmo sits on untargetable beaters that float into other untargetable beaters that can banish your cards when summoned it became rather apparent that Konami wanted these decks to be the only meta-relevant ones for a good long while when the next few banlists were revealed after they hit the scenes. Not only was DracoPals, the only other deck that was meta-relevant, more or less killed off shortly afterward, but the very next banlist months afterwards, Monarchs and Kozmo were left mostly untouched while the banlist attacked decks that hadn't been meta-relevant for almost a year^note Odd-Eyes Magicians getting Wisdom-Eye Magician limited to one or going after rogue decks and a few generic cards that made rogue decks even remotely relevant. While Monarchs eventually got nuked by the banlist after 2016 worlds, Kozmos were still this trope in many of eyes thanks to, at most, getting a slap on the wrist by the banlist. Their only major hit was Dark Destroyer to 1... While the banlist unlimited several other cards that made it a non-issue. Needless to say, Kozmo haters were unamused, though Power Creep would set it.
  • Xyz in general, especially Rank 4 Xyz. Their major built-in advantages over other summoning methods, intense splashability (and resulting Complacent Gaming Syndrome), massive card pool, ridiculous flexibility, and dirt-simple playstyle would all be enough to make them disliked in the fanbase, but it's made worse by the fact that Konami loves to print out newer and better Rank 4s and ways to make existing Rank 4s even more ridiculous, while other summoning methods and even non-Rank 4 Xyz tend to either have their cards restricted to themes or end up being much more limited than their Rank 4 counterparts. Most fans were happy to point out the absurdity of Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V portraying Xyz Dimension individuals as a scrappy underdog La Résistance against the terrifying soldiers of the Fusion Dimension, while at the same time in the real game, Xyz-based decks like PePe were ripping the meta a new one and Fusion-based decks were trying to scrape together something playable from what remained of Shaddolls (although when the plotline was first introduced, Shaddolls were the prominent deck over the previous Xyz meta).
  • Link Monsters. Not only are their Material requirements far simpler than anything beforehand, but the New Master Rules that introduced them also restricted Extra Deck summons (including face-up Pendulum monsters) to one space unless you have Link Monsters convert Main Monster Zones into Extra Monster Zones, provoking accusations of Character Select Forcing to utilize Extra Deck-heavy strategies.
  • Due to their prominence in Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, the Cyberse-Type consistently received new members and support during the VRAINS era to the point of taking over the Starter and Structure Decks and making up a large portion of Link monsters.
  • Cyber Dragons became this in mid-2018; receiving Link support in main Booster Pack series Cybernetic Horizon, support from their appearance in the GX manga in Collector's Pack 2018, and support in Legend Duelist 3 based on the GX anime (after their user, Zane/Ryo had already received support for his Cyberdarks in a previous Legendary Duelists pack).
  • Tearlaments got accused of Konami favoritism pretty hard. They were explicitly designed to be incredibly broken, with a unique Fusion Summoning mechanic that isn't archetype-locked and goes massively plus in card advantage, alongside a suite of overpowered support that 95% of decks would die to have, including negation/destruction cards that also work to fire off the archetype's monster effects. Not only that, they received even more support in two consecutive main sets after their release in addition to the Duelists of Pyroxene box that released the Ishizu Fairy retrains that seemed specifically designed to make Tearlaments insanely broken. Despite being potentially the most powerful Tier 0 deck in the game's history, both formats refused to do anything about the deck for at least 6 months, causing much player fatigue and discontentment about every major tournament boiling down to Tear mirrors and Floowandereeze. Even when the deck was hit in the OCG enough cards were left playable for the deck to simply keep steamrolling everything else in the format, forcing more severe hits a few months later, and even that refused to kill the deck. In the West, the TCG saw what happened in the OCG and to prevent something similar from happening absolutely nuked the deck from orbit, forcing an amount of bans/limits to the deck not seen since the Dragon Rulers. Notably players were STILL terrified of the deck performing but as of now, the hits seem to have worked in the West.
  • Sky Striker. With access to a compact splashable engine and some incredibly powerful cards such as Engage! & Hornet Drones, the archetype saw notable competitive successes, especially during the TOSS/Eternal format^note Thunder Dragon/Orcust/Salamangreat/Striker, a well-regarded period of the Yu-Gi-Oh! metagame. Owing to how powerful Engage! and Hornet Drones are (both are still on the Forbidden/Limited Lists in the OCG/TCG), and how Sky Strikers often saw play with cards like Kaiser Colosseum and the infamous Mystic Mine, many players did not like playing against the archetype. Many fans of the archetype played it not just due to its power, but also the stellar artwork, and Raye appearing attractive to them. The archetype has continuously received support throughout the years ever since its introduction back in 2018, Raye, Roze and Engage! have received alternate artworks which is usually done for popular or famous cards (only a handful of cards have received alternate artworks over the years), A reprint of Reinforcement of the Army - a 20+ year-old generic Warrior Support Spell was even released with alternate artwork featuring Raye and Roze, and they were featured in the first arc of the Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG Stories manga. However, the reveal that Raye herself is only 15 years old did notably cause quite a commotion amongst the playerbase. Nevertheless, it's no secret that Konami likes this archetype quite a lot, far more than its Eternal Format peers, with the possible exception of Salamangreat, as that was a heavily featured Cyberse archetype in the VRAINS anime.

E-F

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Early on in the game, Jinzo was extremely popular due to being one of Katsuya Jonouchi/Joey Wheeler's signature cards on the show, and also for generally being considered the best boss monster when he was introduced into the card game, having the second highest attack power of any single tribute summon just barely behind Summoned Skull while also providing a way to bypass some of the more powerful Trap Cards at the time. To this day, he's still fairly popular due to his practicality, as well as his pretty ghastly design.
  • Early on, the Gemini Elves were popular for being a strong level 4 Normal Monster and being sexy twins. In general, level 4 Normal Monsters with 1900 ATK tend to be pretty popular in comparison to some others, such as Vorse Raider & Luster Dragon.
  • Tour Guide From the Underworld, for being a Cute Monster Girl, making Xyz summoning really easy, and possessing one of the most broken effects in the game when teamed with Sangan....until Konami ruled otherwise. For a while, a single copy of her card alone was commanding $200, more than twice the price for a box of the set she's released in!
  • The fanart for the Charmers is immense, especially in Japan. For example, take Pixiv. Red-Eyes, one of the most well-known themes in the game, has around 9 pages of artwork. The Charmers, on the other hand, have at least 60 pages. Being adorable on top of having an intriguing lore certainly helps, as did the trickles of new cards for their lore during the ARC-V era. It got to the point where they got their own structure deck.
  • Skull Servant. Among the many, many weak and underpowered normal monsters, it was known as the weak and underpowered normal monster (probably because it came first in the set, it looks goofy, and even its flavor text acknowledges its weakness). Konami even acknowledged this by making an entire theme around it and having it be a running joke in card art cameos.
  • Noble Knights are a popular theme in the TCG for their mythology and unique play style based on Equip Spell cards. This led to them getting additional exclusives in the TCG release of Shadow Specters and an entire section of the site dedicated to showcasing the theme's cards, overshadowing the horror-themed cards that were meant to be the focus of the set.
  • Poki Draco, due to a Facebook page, as a prank and to prove a point on how foolish people buying singles can be, temporarily causing an inflation in its price by putting a bunch of them up for $15 on ebay.
  • Ultimate Conductor Tyranno. Despite not appearing in any of the anime/manga series and its only printing being in a Structure Deck, it's one of the most well-liked and popular boss monsters in the game for its massive 3500 ATK, its great effects, and being a giant electric T. Rexpy.
  • Any deck from the "good old days" of Yu-Gi-Oh! can be this, especially if they receive new support that makes them competitive. One deck in particular stands out - Gravekeepers. It was not only one of the first archetypes in the game, but is actually one of the few that invokes the ancient Egyptian mythology that the very game itself is rooted in. Not only that, but gameplay-wise, they received constant support from Konami during the Zexal era that kept them relevant, and were also widely regarded as the most powerful Anti-Meta deck, due to its star card, Necrovalley, putting a stop to most Graveyard strategies. Fans rejoiced when Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links came out and made them into a top-tier deck, and even after it lost that status over time, it's still one of the most fondly regarded decks in that version of the game as well.
  • The Madolche theme proved extremely popular with Japanese fan artists for being both creative and adorable in terms of appearance.
  • The U.A. (Ultra Athlete) theme is rarely talked about by Konami, rarely receives any focus, and its cards are consistently of the lowest rarities possible. Despite this, the theme has caught the eye of many a player for its unorthodox yet effective strategies and its terrifyingly powerful support Spell Cards. The theme only got three cards a set and were silently discontinued, until they were finally given support in Phantom Rage, around five years later since their last support.
  • Performapal Friendonkey was usually seen as the best Performapal card. Partly due to its semi-useful ability, mostly because of its awkward facial expression, and its common rarity means that you'll be pulling a lot of them from packs^note as if the guy is making fun of you spending your hard-earned money and only getting multiples of him.
  • While most of the Performapals aren't popular, Yuya's Pendulum Magicians and Odd-Eyes cards are due to being a well-designed Pendulum theme that can incorporate all the Extra Deck summoning methods. Once enough of them were revealed, they seized online playing sites by storm. Pendulum Magicians would go on to become one of the few decks to get not one, but two Structure Decks dedicated to them, while Odd-Eyes would quickly become one of the most supported archetypes in the franchise.
  • Again, while Performapals aren't too popular, Performapal Skullcrobat Joker is easily the most popular one, with many citing him as the only good Performapal ^note Though, that may be a bit of an overstatement since they eventually did get a lot of better cards, but that's a completely different topic all together thanks to his powerful searching effect for monsters not of the Performapal theme, such Odd-Eyes and the Pendulum Magicians, as soon as his Normal Summon, and even if he's destroyed by a Trap Card that doesn't negate the act of summoning in itself, the effect still goes off, as well as having good ATK and Pendulum Scale range that doesn't have too big of a draw back to it. ^note Can only Pendulum summon Performapals, Odd-Eyes, and Pendulum Magician monsters, which in a pure Odd-Eyes Magician deck isn't too big an issue.
  • Toons, some of the star cards of Pegasus, had been largely ignored by Konami for close to a decade, and as such, many fans clamored for relevant support, as evidenced by a lot of fan-made cards that will turn up on a simple Google Search. They finally received support in 2015, and although some duelists were quick to dismiss them due to the Toons' ill-deserved reputation of being useless, their popularity soared as a feasible and fun deck to use once the usefulness of support such as "Toon Kingdom" and "Comic Hand" became apparent. Their reception of more support in 2020's Toon Chaos set was met with similar praise.
  • To the dismay of many a fan, the U.A. are not to receive any support in Clash of Rebellions and will most likely remain without a second Level 4 for the longest time. They were replaced, and normally this would be a source of great rage... were the replacements not Kaiju, who manage to avert Replacement Scrappy status entirely and were very positively received from the minute they were revealed (again, without a word from Konami). To the joy of many however, the U.A. would indeed return in Phantom Rage.
  • Chaos Dragons have long been a popular deck due to its theme being centered around a combination of good and evil dragons, spellcasters and fiends, as well as how well the deck has held up over the years due to the central mechanics (manipulate the grave, banishing LIGHT/DARK to special summon) being concepts that still receive support to this day, allowing a number of variants than can adapt to the meta fairly effectively.
  • Traptrix. When a poll for a new card sleeve was shown and they were one of the choices, they beat the others in popularity and became the leading choice, although see Americans Hate Tingle.
  • Shaddoll proved to be incredibly popular throughout the years, being able to build hybrids with about everything and receiving constant waves of (unfortunately - or fortunately depending on how you view the archetype - mediocre) support many years after their initial release ended. It reached its end when Konami released a Link version of their boss monster (Construct), with many players on the western community expecting or asking for her return from the banlist, and deriding the new monster for being a pain in the ass for Shaddolls to use. Being able to easily mix with TRAINS, another Ensemble Dark Horse, just cemented their spot.
  • TRAINS. A series of monsters based on trains and railway infrastructure, the deck's insane concept (they are not monsters in the form of trains; they're plain sentient trains) along with being able to easily overwhelm the opponent through damage, pure beatdown and easily summoning Rank 10 monsters (one of the hardest ranks to make) made many players fall in love with them. Being the favorite deck of a certain famous yugituber helps a little too...
  • Pretty much any card to come out of Korea. The Entities are a Lovecraftian theme of Xyz, Synchro, and Fusion Summoning that captivate many with their horrifying/awesome artworks, the Paleozoic are a Trap Monster theme unlike any we've seen, and even the individual monsters are just so utterly fascinating that it's hard to avoid wanting to use them, such as with Dinosewing or World Carrotweight Champion.
  • The Zefra are widely liked for their multi-theme support and rich lore, despite initially not being as powerful as other competitive or Pendulum decks in most variants.
  • Witchcrafter Madame Verre has drawn in fans due to her smug expressions and interactions with other Witchcrafter monsters in the art of their Spells.
  • While considered relatively outdated today, Kaiser Sea Horse has a minor following, mostly in part to being one of Kaiba's incredibly cool looking cards, with some practicality back then and in some slower formats as a relatively easy way to get out Blue-Eyes White Dragon or Sanga of the Thunder.
  • Ancient Gears have quite a few fans, from the designs of the rusty warriors and beasts to their fun playstyle, being that of a beatdown deck that can bring out high leveled and incredibly powerful boss monsters easily, while also preventing backrow from stopping them when they attack.
  • It's common for themes considered bad to have a specific card (usually a generic/semi-generic boss monster) that many people adore, such as Ally of Justice Catastor and Arcana Force XXI - The World. A big example would be the boss monster of the Venom theme, Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes, partially because of her ridiculous power, as well as having a lovely design (which was edited for the TCG). It's not uncommon to see people make Reptile decks focusing on bringing her, and by extension, Vennominon the King of Poisonous Snakes, out onto the field, usually with help of other Reptile themes like Aliens and Worms.
  • The Six Samurai, despite not getting any attention in the anime, certainly have their share of fans for their cool aesthetic that flawlessly blends Cyberpunk with Feudal Japan, surprisingly well-developed lore, having a surprisingly powerful boss monster for its time in Great Shogun Shien, and just being badass samurai. They also got waves of support cards over the years, including monsters for all the Extra Deck summoning methods, letting them keep up with the ever-shifting meta and even making them extremely powerful at certain points. It was more common for people to get Strike of Neos and Storm of Ragnarok packs for the Six Samurai cards in them rather than the Neos and Nordic cards the sets were focused around.
  • The Borrel dragons are very popular even among those who've never watched Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, for being very splashable robotic gun-dragons that have a variety of potent effects, from hijacking opposing monsters to attacking twice with a massive ATK boost to negating any monster effect that comes their way. Borrelsword Dragon get the most of this, for being a terrifying beatstick that's been meta-relevant the longest out of the cards in its archetypes and for being a robotic gun-dragon with a sword on its head.
  • Arguably most surprising of all are the Sacred Beasts, GX's answer to the Egyptian & Wicked Gods. Between them all, they saw the most frequent experimentation for some time, and managed to come in second place in a poll, above fellow Ensemble Darkhorses the Charmers and only being beaten out at the last minute by also fellow Ensemble Darkhorses the Shaddolls by 1%. Granted, while some people voted for the sake of meme value, there were plenty who were generally curious to see how Konami would handle making a Structure Deck for rather dated boss monsters, and many believe the incredibly close vote still won them a Structure Deck in the distant future. To say the excitement many had once it was confirmed their Structure Deck would release on March 20, 2020 was immeasurable would be an understatement.
  • Danger!? Tsuchinoko? isn't well-liked because of its effect, which is a free Special Summon, but its utterly adorable artwork has made it a much meme'd critter in fanart.
  • Fantastical Dragon Phantazmay is well-loved, not only because it's a useful handtrap (especially during the New Master Rules), but also for its uncanny resemblance to Thanos, with its being released between Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
  • Despite not seeing play in most deck lists of her own archetype, Laundry Dragonmaid is one of the most popular Dragonmaid monsters purely because of her endearing Dojikko personality in the artwork for various cards in the archetype. When a datamine for Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel revealed the existence of a Mate based off of her in the game's files, the fanbase rejoiced.
  • Out of the Ghost Girls series, Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring gets the most play for its powerful negate effects. Combined with its cute design, it sees plenty of fanart, sometimes showing her holding back a torrent of monsters by herself.
  • For all intents and purposes, the Gunkan archetype is designed to be a pack filler archetype, being a somewhat bricky Rank 4 engine without particularly good boss monsters. In spite of this, the archetype has earned the adoration of fans everywhere for their awesome food-battleship theme and the sheer amount of flavor in its card effects trying to make the player feel like they're really roleplaying as a sushi chef. You can even find players wielding the deck while cosplaying as sushi chefs!
  • Lovely Labrynth of the Silver Castle is an exceptionally popular character, especially among Japanese fans. Not only is her design considered incredibly gorgeous as it is hot, but she also happens to be the star of one of the most powerful Trap decks to ever grace the game, befitting of her lore status as a powerful dungeon master.
• Epileptic Trees: The true identity of El Shaddoll Construct was this for a while, as it didn't fit the normal conditions for the other Shaddoll monsters.^note With the exception of Construct, they had the same ATK/DEF as their former forms The Master Guide 5 eventually revealed that it was, of all things, Gem-Knight Lapis.
• Fan Nickname: Now has its own page.
• Faux Symbolism: Some themes released in the Duel Terminal storyline started with DUEA include references to judaism, specifically Qliphort, Shaddoll and Infernoid.
• Fetish Retardant: One of the more justified reasons for◊ editing card art.
• Foe Yay Shipping:
  • Winda and Ariel are frequently paired up by Japanese fans, even though they're from opposing factions in the Duel Terminal storylines.
  • Sky Striker Aces Raye and Roze were immediately shipped together once the art for Sky Striker Maneuver - Scissors Cross was revealed, and their lore in Master Guide 6 only furthered it.
  • A love-triangle variant between Shiranui Squire and Dakki, the Graceful Mayakashi, with Yuki-Onna, the Ice Mayakashi being the challenger. The artwork for Ghost Meets Girl - A Shiranui Story, Fateful Hour, and Ghost Meets Girl - A Mayakashi Manuscript speak for themselves.
  • S-Force Rappa Chiyomaru and I:P Masquerena get paired up due to their rivalry in the S-Force universe.
  • One-sided from Labrynth of the Silver Castle towards Ms. Knight. Labrynth of the Silver Castle gets dismayed on days where Ms. Knight doesn't show up at all.
• Franchise Original Sin: The game has several flaws that have existed since the very beginning, but become increasingly problematic as the game evolves.
  • Fans of the game often bemoan the ever-increasing Power Creep. This is a thing the game has always done, and if anything, the creep was most noticeable in its early years. The first six or seven new sets in Japan were basically just the game introducing monsters that were better in every way than the ones in prior sets, and then introducing Effect Monsters that had the same stats as the Normals in prior sets but could actually do stuff. At the time, though, this was seen as a good thing, as the meta of early sets had been simplistic, slow, and dirt-stupid, and the more complex and useful cards made the game a lot more interesting. It's just that, with twenty years of cards accumulating, the game inevitably hit a breaking point, resulting in a meta where games between two skilled players with good decks rarely last more than three turns.
  • For all the complaints about later era Yu-Gi-Oh! becoming a "keep the opponent from playing at all" game or that it's "like playing solitaire while someone watches you", it can be hard to remember that lockdown/control decks have always been a part of the game. Even one of the most famous "old school" formats, Goat Format, was based around keeping the opponent from playing as much as possible. However, the speed of the game has drastically changed, making it far more noticeable when someone manages to lock you down turn one as opposed to several turns in. Earlier days of the game, there was at least a chance to either thwart your opponent before the setup or you had a way to set up counter-measures to stop the locks before it shut you down. Currently, it's completely possible off of one card to set up a wall of monsters with excellent defense and protection if you know the chain of events. A recurring joke of the game is "What's a turn 5?", mocking yet acknowledging how fast the game has truly gotten.
  • The banlist in its first incarnation was a major cap on the game's creep, ending the reign of Chaos Format as well as broken decks like Makyura Exchange or Scientist FTK. However, Konami also realized its value as an easy fallback for releasing something broken, which led to the cycle of deliberately releasing overpowered cards, presiding over a meta dominated by those cards, then once everyone owned a set, banning them for years on end, just in time for the next wave of overpowered cards that the old cards would have actually been balanced against.
  • Throughout the 2010s, it became increasingly evident that Burn cards (cards based on direct damage), especially of the "tribute a monster to do damage" variety, were overpowered, with many decks whittling the opponent to nothing before they could even get a turn. But in reality, these cards had always had the potential to be broken—the very first large-scale tournament in Asia, two years before the game's international release, was won by a player using a Cannon Soldier deck, and the aforementioned Scientist FTK used a pre-nerf Catapult Turtle to do its thing. At the time, the problem was perceived to be the mass-summon cards that both decks utilized, and it was believed that simply restricting those cards would prevent the problem. When the game's Power Creep hit the point that the mass-summons those decks were capable of were no longer outliers, nearly every card with a tribute-to-burn effect found itself on the banlist.
  • The Walls of Text on modern card effects have become an increasing source of contention since the 2010s, and overwhelmed players have suggested that the game start using keywords like Magic: The Gathering does. However, even in the early days of the game, there were cards like Relinquished, Thousand-Eyes Restrict, Last Turn, and Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning that have lengthy card effects (especially before the Problem-Solving Card Text method was introduced in 2011). The difference is simply that, in the game's earlier years, most non-Normal Monster Cards had one effect, so card effects that were several lines long were less common. The game's Power Creep has all but forced cards to have two or more effects just to be competitively viable, exacerbating the length of card effects.

G-L

• Game-Breaker: Has its own page, but in general, every card on the Forbidden/Limited List has been this at some point.
• Genius Bonus: Here.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The "Fur Hire" theme has a much higher profile in the TCG compared to the OCG, where it was fairly unremarkable. This is thanks to how the translators handled the English translation of the theme's card names and support. See Woolseyism for more details.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • It's common knowledge that the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game was inspired by Magic: The Gathering, to the point where some Magic players would refer to it as a ripoff. Now, when you consider some of the rule changes that has taken effect since Pendulums arrive, and the fact that there are now "Artifacts" in the game, and you have some Yu-Gi-Oh! players now decrying that it's becoming too much like Magic.
  • Anyone calling for Sangan's ban after the cards listed below and his Memetic Loser Woobie trip.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Has its own page.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Remember the time when players did the Tour Guide From The Underworld + Sangan combo? That's what Burning Abyss players do now.
  • Back in 2010, Konami released the Duel Terminal theme Gem-Knight, which consists of sentient humanoid gem stones with super powers who became stronger by fusing with each other. Sounds familiar?
  • Frog the Jam (now Slime Toad), a weak level 2 Normal Monster, had a Memetic Loser status in the TCG due to "Blind Idiot" Translation forcing it to be specifically excluded from every effect involving the Frog archtype. Fast forward to 2016, and Frog the Jam actually became a key card of one Frog variant in the OCG due its status as a Normal Monster allowing the deck's new boss monster, Toadally Awesome, to be summoned easily via Rescue Rabbit.
  • Garlandolf, King of Destruction, a monster inspired by Ganondorf from The Legend of Zelda and often nicknamed that by the player base, is a weaker version of an earlier card named Demise, King of Armageddon.^note Demise can destroy all cards on the field except itself for each payment of 2000 LP, while Garlandolf can only destroy face-up monsters with less DEF than his ATK on-summon. Incidentally, Skyward Sword would later reveal that Ganondorf's ancestral incarnation was a being named Demise.
  • The "Senet" cards and mechanic, cards that revolved around the placement of cards on the field, were widely reviled even by the creators. Even when Link monsters made card placement important, old column-based mechanics were still outdated and underpowered. And then Vaylantz was introduced, with direct synergy to Senet Switch...
  • Ancient Fairy Dragon was widely viewed as one of the weakest Signer Dragons, but after Field Spells became far more prominent, it became the first one to be Forbidden.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: While Cyberse as a new type did need their support and their prominence is to be expected given their focus in Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, many players began to get tired quite quickly of the starter and non-R Structure Decks between 2017 and 2019 quite often giving support cards for Cyberse monsters.
• Junk Rare:
  • Probably the earliest examples of Junk Rare were Celtic Guardian and Mystical Elf in Legend of Blue-Eyes. Both were Super Rare - the same rarity as powerful Spells like Raigeki, Dark Hole, and (the then powerful) Swords of Revealing Light - but they had lower stats than Commons like Uraby and Skull Red Bird and Rares like Giant Soldier of Stone and Aqua Madoor. On top of that, they were available in the Starter Decks sometime later. (This was an odd bit of The Artifact; LOB was a combination of several sets, and Elf and Guardian had been released in some of the earliest sets, where they were strong enough to justify their rarity. They had been packed in with stronger cards from later sets, and then their rarities hadn't changed.)
  • Many of the nostalgia-based decks in the second third of the ARC-V era are decent at best, but have high rarities to cash-in on the then upcoming 20th anniversary nostalgia.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Has its own page.

M-R

• Memetic Badass:
  • Shapesnatch, a joke of a card that requires a tribute, yet has stats mirroring a low leveled monster. This has led to ironic appreciation for it, with players joking about his flavor text stating it has "horrible power".
  • In a similar ballpark, Morinphen for Japanese players. The card is so famous it even got thematic sleeves based around it after winning a poll.
  • Trent, completes the trifecta of monsters that need a tribute, yet have awful stats, and yet for some reason the playerbase latched onto them .
  • Hungry Burger stands high and above between the early Ritual filler thanks to its terrible stats and the fact that it is, well, a burger. The sheer disconnect between a game that has badass dragons, warriors and wizards, and yet a burger is said to be able to eat them adds to the hilarity factor. Became something of an Ascended Meme with the release of the Nouvelles, an archetype that officially supports Hungry Burger.
  • Gameciel, the Sea Turtle Kaiju. It is famous among the playerbase for outing LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Herald of Perfection with 5 negates in hand? Kaiju. Expurrely Noir with 10 materials? Kaiju. The Arrival @Ignister with 6000 ATK? Kaiju. It is the all-too-often response whenever someone asks how to out an incredibly powerful monster with immunity to effects in some form.
  • Nibiru, the Primal Being. Watching the field of an opponent filled with powerful, threatening monsters all becoming a giant rock (token) thanks to this card led to the playerbase falling in love with it. Additional hilarity is added to the mix when the player that used it, is unable to do anything about the token (which often has gigantic stats), sometimes leading to them losing instead.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Red-Eyes Black Dragon is touted as holding "potential" in contrast to Blue-Eyes' "power", but this is generally spoken sarcastically in regard to its unimpressive stats on a Level 7 monster, alongside a gimmicky archetype that focuses more on emulating Joey Wheeler's deck than actually being good.
  • Rainbow Dragon, thanks to being a boss monster that even in its own deck is vastly outshone by other options the deck has, ^note Crystal Beasts are more known for their ability to get Rank 4 Xyzs out on the field, or back in the day, being able to summon Hamon, Lord of Striking Thunder. and generally having lackluster effects for the amount of trouble needed to go through in order to summon him.
  • Sangan quickly became this thanks to a series of cards showing his trip to where banned cards go and his terrible luck along the way, along with shades of being The Woobie.
  • The playable version of the Winged Dragon of Ra was quickly hit by this sentiment, as it was released without many of the effects its anime incarnation had, and possessed two effects that actively contradicted each other, forcing players to choose between using one and forgoing the other. It did not help matters that it could not be Special Summoned and possessed no inherent protection from card effects. While attempts were made to increase the card's playability through releasing Ra's two other forms as separate cards and creating more support cards for Ra, many fans simply came to see the number of cards created solely to "fix" Ra as indicative of how badly designed the original playable card was to begin with.
  • Goyo Guardian, thanks to the OCG-based errata that made it so you needed an EARTH Tuner to summon it. This after years of not being relevant at all in the TCG and the entire playerbase agreeing that it could go back to 3 (which it DID prior to the errata) and it would still do nothing. For a while, this combined with Memetic Badass regarding the OCG's apparent fear of unbanning it. Duel Links highlighted this again with how it's acquired in that game.
  • Stratos holds basically the same position as Goyo Guardian in reverse, for having been banned for years in the TCG despite being Limited for years in the OCG and having made little real headway there, and for being a key card in a popular deck type (as well as the only useful WIND-attribute in a deck heavily focused around varied attributes). Things got even louder when Stratos was dropped to Semi-Limited in the OCG, and continued to make no real headway, and when the TCG version of a HERO-focused Structure Deck swapped out Stratos for Avian, of all things, just to make the WIND fusions in the deck playable. Yugioh Puppet Show by Yugimation portrays Stratos as The Friend Nobody Likes among the banlist residents. He was finally Limited in September 2018, though A Hero Lives was re-Limited as well.
  • Elemental HERO Air Neos, which has never gotten a reprint, is absent from both Duel Links and Master Duel, and is bizarrely obscured from the artwork of Instant Contact, which is based on a shot of Neos and its six basic Contact Fusions from the third opening of GX.
  • Black-Winged Dragon is generally considered pathetic compared to the tangentially related Blackwings that dominated the 5Ds era. Life Stream Dragon is also derided for being a Tuner Synchro Monster whose Level is too high for most Synchro Summons that require them. It's probably not a coincidence that both were introduced in the anime long after the initial four Signer Dragons, as their owners weren't originally Signers.
  • Gem-Knight Garnet. Prior to Brilliant Fusion's ban, it was often shoved into unrelated Decks so it could be dumped alongside a LIGHT monster to Fusion Summon Gem-Knight Seraphite, which allowed for a second Normal Summon/Set. Garnet itself is a Normal Monster (albeit with an impressive 1900 ATK for a Level 4), leading to its name representing cards that you don't want to draw at all.
  • Little D because of... its unfortunate name.
  • The entire D/D theme became this upon the release of Links, as a Deck based around complicated strategies to string together many Extra Deck summons was seen as the most likely to suffer under the new ruleset, and it was taking center stage in the anime to advertise a bunch of cards that would likely become unusable in a matter of days. Variants of "I can't believe ARC-V ended with Yusaku shooting Reiji's deck ten times" were fairly common.
  • Pendulum Monsters post-ARC-V. The New Master Rules not only restricted all Special Summons from the Extra Deck, including face-up Pendulums, but also got rid of dedicated Pendulum Zones, forcing players to keep their leftmost and rightmost Spell & Trap Zones free if they want to Pendulum Summon. Heavymetalfoes Electrumite, one of their best support cards, ended up getting banned. No Pendulum Monster was even featured in the VRAINS anime, with Rituals getting more attention. While the April 2020 Master Rules released Fusion, Synchro and Xyz from the Extra Monster Zone restrictions, face-up Pendulums remained chained to it alongside Links (who were at least designed with the Zone in mind). It has led many to believe that Konami just got fed up with the mechanic.
  • The War Rock archetype quickly became the butt of many jokes after its release due to a combination of both its monsters having underwhelming Battle Phase effects that would've been considered okay prior to 2010, and also being a TCG exclusive archetype, which in the past ranged from being experimental and interesting (Myutant and U.A.), or outright meta-defining (Danger! and Burning Abyss), thus leaving many excited players disappointed.
  • Behemoth the King of All Animals is frequently portrayed as a go-to punching bag for weaker monster in card art such as Cross Counter, Lucky Punch, Set Uppercut, and Duck Dummy. Cards like Duck Dummy, The Big Cattle Drive, and Underdog show that these instances have caused Behemoth to become genuinely terrified of low attack monsters, especially Rescue Rabbit.
  • The S-Force archetype. They exist in a lore world that includes meta-defining cards such as I:P Masquerena, Time Thief Redoer, and the PSY-Frame archetype. The actual S-Force cards that are supposed to be fighting them, on the other hand, are a mediocre gimmicky floodgate archetype that revolves around card columns, which can be easily manipulated and dodged by all of the above cards and more. This eventually came to a head with S:P Little Night, a retrained version of S-Force Rappa Chiyomaru who was immediately suspected to be one of the best cards in the entire game when she was revealed, leading to numerous jokes about how she had to leave the S-Force to become a good card.
  • Lo, the Prayers of the Voiceless Voice got memed into being a memetic loser because of her notoriously low ATK of 50. Some fanart has her losing to monsters with 1000 and below ATK.
  • In general, support cards for prominent anime characters or themes, such as "Dark Magician" and "Blue-Eyes White Dragon", are often treated with disrespect by the game's more competitively oriented playerbase, as they are perceived as being "nostalgia bait" cards for decks with little to no competitive viability whose artworks and effects tend to be very situational for no other reason than to homage a significant anime moment, but are printed anyway because Konami knows they can make money off of older anime fans who will pay to recreate or improve upon their favorite character's strategies. VRAINS cast characters generally avoid this sentiment as that anime ensured that 90% of the cards in the show were competitively viable, and once in a while you get a set where anime support works out a little too well, such as the horrifyingly broken retrains of Ishizu Ishtar's cards.
  • TCG World Premiere archetypes since Series 11 have begun to gain the unfortunate reputation of consistently suffering from Low-Tier Letdown. This includes Materiactor, War Rock, Beetrooper, Libromancer, Ghoti, Gold Pride, and Tistina archetypes, all of which suffer from very glaring design flaws that make them difficult to use in competitive play, be it poor consistency and/or susceptibility to interruption, or lack of meaningful payoff for playing the deck as intended. This is also where the whole thing about "second wave support" comes from, as since the TCG print of Rise of the Duelist Konami has elected to break up World Premiere archetypes into two Core Boosters, with half the cards coming in their introductory booster and the other half coming in their immediate successor booster. The obvious intent is for players to buy into the first wave with the expectation that they will buy into the second wave when it shows up, but the reality is that either the second wave rarely ever fixes problems identified with the first wave, or the first wave appears promising only for the second wave to grant little to no improvment to the deck.
  • Lovely Labrynth of the Silver Castle in both artwork for the theme and to an even more exaggerated degree in fanart. She's depicted as hopelessly enamoured with "Knight-chan" and hopelessly unable to to stop her from conquering her Traps.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own part in here.
• Nightmare Fuel: But of course.
• Older Than They Think:
  • As can be seen from this very page, Konami receive a lot of hate from their "recent" practices with the banlist, but this has been the case since the start of the ZEXAL era with the much-reviled March 2012 list.
  • The refusal of stores to allow Zoodiac players has been done before with PePe, as explained here.
  • The continual complaints about Power Creep and overpriced power cards have existed since the very beginning of the game. In fact, the first few OCG releases saw the monster stat ceiling constantly raised so that rare and powerful cards would be invalidated in merely weeks.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • Looking back upon older themes and cards thanks to the game's ever progressing Power Creep, it can be rather hard to figure out why they were popular and even worth it to consider running. This is primarily thanks to the earliest days of the game being very slow paced in comparison to today's meta. As such, it may be rather off-putting to some to go back and play older themes and decks, as much of the game's earliest strategies consisted of "summon single high power monster, give it good equip card, then proceed to beat the enemy into the ground over several turns of play" in comparison to the rapid searching and mass summoning strategies of today's metagame.
  • Good examples of this phenomenon include Man-Eater Bug, Mechanicalchaser, Fissure and Trap Hole. Back in the day, these cards were some of the most powerful and splashable cards in the game, being key components of multiple competitive decks, but decades of power creep, the ever-evolving strategies and changes in the game have made them either too slow, too weak or too situational to ever be considered in any competent deck nowadays.
• Self-Fanservice: Many Yu-Gi-Oh! fanartists tend to omit El Shaddoll Winda's puppet-like features on their fanart of her. She often looks a human wearing a skin-tight outfit.
• Pandering to the Base:
  • Generation Duels seem to be this for the people who dislike the game past a certain format. Generation Duels nearly ban all cards past the era it's set in and has banned cards limited to what they were during the generation.
  • The "Duelists of the Abyss" pack features WATER support cards, with emphasis on the Shark monsters and Nash from ZEXAL as its cover character. Its parallel in the TCG, "Duels from the Deep", instead features Mako and Citadel Whale, causing players to accuse the TCG of pandering to fans of Duel Monsters over the later series.
• Periphery Demographic: Despite being a "children's card game", the majority of the playerbase consists of teens and adult males. Japan even made a video for them.
• Popular Game Variant:
  • One of the most popular alternative ways to play is Goat Format, named so for both the prevalence of the spell Scapegoat as well as an acronym "greatest of all time". It uses the card pool, rules, and banlist of the game in April of 2005, which was considered a standout among older players since it's when the game broke out of its Early-Installment Weirdness and had a tonne of deck variety but hadn't devolved into combo-centric Power Creep yet.
  • Edison, taking its name from the last Shonen Jump Championship that took place in 2010 in Edison, New Jersey. It is mostly played by duelists that find the staples played in Goat to be too game-breaking, prefer an enviroment that enables higher diversity in deck-building, and want a format where monsters play a more defining role, with the same lack of combo-centric strategies and a bevy of iconic and powerful cards like "Stardust Dragon" and "Dimensional Prison".
  • Two more variants are based on the Forbidden/Limited list: Traditional, which allows banned cards (up to one of each), and Advanced, which completely disallows cards that are Forbidden at all. Another type sometimes seen in competitive play is the Sealed Deck duel, which gives both players identical decks, but no one knows the contents.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Neo-Spacian Aqua Dolphin was long regarded as one of the more useless of the Neo-Spacians, but mid-2018 saw it gain significant use in tournament play as an answer to handtraps.

S-W

• The Scrappy:
  • Among all of the cards ever printed, the card archetype commonly referred to as "floodgates" (alternatively "stun") is the card type that is the closest to being universally hated among the entire playerbase. These are cards designed specifically to outright stop your opponent from performing certain actions, such as having certain Types or Attributes of monsters on the field, using effects on the field, Special Summoning at all, or using Spell or Trap Cards. They are supposed to be balanced by the fact that a large majority of these cards affect both players, which theoretically also slows down your opponent, and typically only seeing one of them in an otherwise standard deck isn't super problematic in most cases. However, there are decks whose entire gameplan is to field as many of these cards as physically possible, and in doing so completely stop the opponent from playing the game entirely and either sit there and wait for a deck out or watch as the opponent's single monster cherry taps them to death. Dealing with multiple floodgates at a time usually requires very specific outs, such as mass backrow removal, but players playing these decks will often run cards to check these, such as omninegate Counter Traps or "Hugin the Runick Wings" to block their cards from being destroyed. As such, the existence of floodgates is often accused by players of being extremely uninteractive and boring, and the only ones who want to play these sorts of decks are specifically trying to cheese wins off of "real decks" in the most mindless way possible that requires virtually no skill on the pilot's part.
  • For the old-school players, Yata-Garasu was this before its ban. Once Yata hit enough times (usually twice), the game was essentially over since the opponent would have no means of drawing cards to stop the loop. It got particularly bad with the release of the original Chaos Emperor Dragon, which wiped the entire field and hand, but didn't stop its user from blowing up a search card to get Yata to peck away at the now defenseless opponent. This combo is why veteran players consider Yata the reason the Forbidden List exists in the first place.^note The rulebook always hinted at one, but there were no Forbidden Cards until after the Yata + Emperor Dragon combo. It's telling that after aeons of Power Creep and multitudes of other cards being released from the banlist, the majority of players still insist it should never come back, because in many situations, its effect may as well read "If this card inflicts Battle Damage to your opponent, you win the game."
  • El Shaddoll Wendigo is universally disliked for being rather useless in the deck it's supposed to be in.
  • In terms of expansion sets, Cyberdark Impact is almost universally hated, due to introducing several themes that were dead in the water from the get-go. The booster's themes included "Chain" cards that can only be used if enough card effects are chained together^note Its Spell and Trap Card suite was usable, especially with Chain Strike being potent enough to go on the Limited list, but the monsters were horribly overcosted/underpowered for the setup they required, or the "Senet" series of cards that do things relying on the physical placement of cards in the card zones, and which Konami admitted was a terrible idea prior to the introduction of Link Monsters. It also attempted to renew the LV series but weighed down its two monsters with poor stats and restrictions that they were effectively unplayable. The Cyber Ogre "theme" consisted of just three cards and never took off the ground. Even the Cyberdark cards - the ones that the set is named for - are seen by many as too weak, even at the time of its launch. That said, the pack did serve as the debut of several cards that found their place one way or another.^note Chain Strike sees use as a persistent rogue deck, Snipe Hunter became an excellent removal tool shortly after its introduction, Instant Fusion turned into a Game-Breaker many years later, Barrier Statues saw some use as "floodgate" tech to prevent the opponent from playing well, and Black Horn of Heaven even saw some use as a tool against Extra Deck summons..
  • Duelist Pack: Dimensional Guardians (a set meant to introduce OCG-only legacy support to the TCG) was universally met with derision from the playerbase not only because of its questionable rarity bumps^note Performapal Ballad and Barracuda are Junk Rare in all the extension of the concept, but also because the pack was the last chance for Fluffals/Frightfurs to become meta in the TCG by bringing the coveted Frightfur Patchwork. Instead they only brought Frightfur Daredevil and Frightfur Reborn, earning the ire of multiple players and being met with boycott menaces.
  • The Performapals from the anime. They started out the era by being a Low-Tier Letdown, then swung across to High-Tier Scrappy with several sets and support that came for them later on, reaching its peak with Breakers of Shadow, where it got enough support and good hybrid cards that with a well put together deck, it can effectively lock out the opponent from even playing the game, even if they go first, in addition to a lot of meta decks suspiciously getting their key cards banned around the same time to the point of making them useless. It got so bad that some players started to attempt to make decks that could specifically counter them out of cards from older themes in protest, and players of its sister deck, Odd-Eyes Magician, dreaded the eventual crossfire that would happen to their deck, either from the ensuing ban list banning key cards that work well with both or players maiming decks specifically to counter Pendulum summoning decks in themselves. On top of that, their designs can be quite off-putting and their theme^note technically ATK manipulation and searching, but still somewhat unfocused can come off as rather random.
  • Zoodiac Ratpier, for being the single card that made the Zoodiac theme so infamous and for making it that for most decks to compete at the time they needed it with a hybrid Zoodiac engine in order to keep up with other decks using the Zoodiac engine.
  • Any cards that cause other cards to end up on the banlist rather than being banned themselves^note Elemental HERO Stratos being the exception, as its nature as such is poorly understood. The Dragon Rulers are the most famous example of this, but Instant Fusion also became a well-known example^note though it did eventually become Limited, as are Blaze Fenix, the Burning Bombardment Bird^note it frequently causes a number of FTKs in any given generation of the game and despite this, it's never once been banned, instead getting several other cards used in its FTKs, usually from more popular themes, banned instead and Crystron Halqifibrax^note enables a breathtaking amount of Extra Deck spam with its two abilities and is hilariously easy-to-make, resulting in a lot of unassuming Tuners getting removed because of Halqifibrax searching them out while Halqifibrax itself dodged banlist after banlist in the TCG; the OCG, by contrast, put it on Limited.
  • "Floowandereeze" has a huge target on its back in this department. It is commonly considered massively boring to both play and fight against, as it involves lengthy control combos on both players' turns that ends on floodgates and generic techs to stop the opponent from playing the game along with infinite recursion while also being resistant to many common meta decks and cards. It is the pure definition of "just draw the out" since most decks cannot deal with it if they do not open with the correct cards. In non-TCG formats, it is also the only meta deck immune to the omnipresent "Maxx 'C'", much to the frustration of Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel players.
  • Over time, "Pendulum" (the deck, not the summoning mechanic), also sometimes referred to as "Pendulum goodstuff", has become regarded with disdain by many players. It is effectively the culmination of what many casual players dislike about modern Yu-Gi-Oh!, being a seemingly incoherent mishmash of engines and archetypes that happen to play well together and engage in lengthy solitare combos whose endgame is ultimately cranking out a wall of negates made out of virtually every generic Extra Deck boss monster they can fit in, from Borreload Savage Dragon to Apollousa to Odd-Eyes Vortex Dragon etc. and shut their opponent out of playing.
  • The Gold Rare rarity is oft-maligned by many players due to how much it sticks out like a sore thumb relative to other card rarities and its incredibly high propensity for defects, with both printing errors and flaking due to high heat being very common scenarios.
  • Among the many infamous archetypes during the closing sets of Series 11, the Kashtira archetype stands as widely disliked due to their playstyle being seen as downright toxic, having some of the most uninteractive and frustrating cards in the game. The archetype's gimmick revolves around banishing cards face down to a practically insane extent and completely wall out the opponent from being able to do anything by locking down all of their zones with ease. And with access to effects that can look through both part of the main deck and the entire extra deck to banish whatever they want they pretty much warp deckbuilding around them by merely existing to prevent a single resolved effect from being game ending. While the second half of Series 11 was loaded with infamously broken cards and archetypes, Kashtira stands as the most reviled for being incredibly obnoxious and unfun to play against.
  • "Hot Red Dragon Archfiend King Calamity". Originally designed as a protection tool for Resonator decks to go into to prevent the opponent from interfering with their turn, the advent of "Crimson Dragon", a Synchro Monster with generic materials that can shuffle back another Synchro Monster on the field to cheat out a Dragon Synchro Monster from the Extra Deck as a Quick Effect, has turned King Calamity into a generically splashable turn skip button for any Synchro deck that can dump enough monsters on the board to make two Level 12 Synchros, earning it the ire of many players for being unfun and degenerate while also artificially propping up the viability of Synchro decks by forcing them to rely on it to have an actual gameplan.
• Scrappy Mechanic: See here for a list.
• Shipping:
  • Sangan x Tour Guide From The Underworld, back when detaching Xyz Materials was considered as sending cards from the field to the graveyard. The fanart speaks for it.
  • Before Tour Guide existed, Sangan x Witch of the Black Forest, due to both being general search cards that were banned together and even got a fusion card which combined the both of them (oddly enough right after they were banned).
• So Bad, It's Good: After twenty years of Power Creep, some players perceive it to be this, especially when compared to other card games — there's an undeniable power disparity between the best decks and everything else, and the lack of a resource system leads to a lot of crazy combos you can perform from the get-go, but the ability to throw out these crazy combos can hardly be found in other card games and it contributes to this game's charm.
• That One Rule: Tied with Scrappy Mechanic, there are several rules that aren't perfectly intuitive and will catch new players off-guard, contributing to a very steep learning curve even though PSCT tries to make things a little clearer. See the main page for a list.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • About a number of things. Some argue about changing the original, dark artwork from early packs to lighter, more anime-esque, to the game originally having few Effect Monsters and a ton of Normal Monsters with now-banned Spell Cards being the only salvation against them, to most decks having nothing but Effect Monsters. Another variation is people who preferred the pre-5D's generations, before things like Synchros and Tuners were introduced.
  • Anytime a new summoning mechanic gets added to the game, you can bet people will be complaining about it as soon as it's revealed. Synchro, Xyz, Pendulum, Link... You could make a drinking game out of the number of times you see people complaining about the new monster type being "broken", even if the "new" monster type is several years old (or sometimes, decades old).
  • PSCT (Problem Solving Card Text). Though intended to make card effects logically easier to interpret, it ends up making some cards being a cross between Captain Obvious and Colon Cancer if the player couldn't adapt. Here's an example for the card Mystical Space Typhoon^note In this case, the change was done to clarify that it targets, which since the card game relies on Exact Words, is a very important distinction:
    Old Text: Destroy 1 Spell or Trap Card on the field.
    New Text: Target 1 Spell/Trap Card on the field; destroy that target.
  • Other cards can wind up ambiguous and confusing as well. Here's a comparison with Magic Drain.
    Old Text: When your opponent activates a Spell Card: Negate the activation and destroy it. Your opponent can discard 1 Spell Card to negate this card's effect.
    New Text: When your opponent activates a Spell Card: They can discard 1 Spell Card to negate this card's effect, otherwise negate the activation of their Spell Card, and if you do, destroy it.
  • A particularly egregious example of PSCT is the "Dark World" monsters' new text, which is often cited as being so confusing, it creates more problem instead of solving any.
    Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World (old text): If this card is discarded from the hand to the Graveyard by a card effect, Special Summon it. If this card is discarded from the hand to the Graveyard by your opponent's card effect, you can select up to 2 cards your opponent controls and destroy them.
    Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World (new text): If this card is discarded to the Graveyard by a card effect: If it was discarded from your hand to your Graveyard by an opponent's card effect, you can target up to 2 cards your opponent controls; Special Summon this card from the Graveyard, then destroy those cards (if any).
  • The rule changes that would take effect once the Pendulum Monsters arrived (the player who goes first doesn't enter their Draw Phase on that turn, and Field Spells no longer override and destroy each other) were initially met with scorn, but this eventually changed, as the playerbase came to appreciate not needing to engage on field spell wars and first turn still reigning supreme in terms of being able to play uninterrupted.
  • Often the reaction to card effects changing from how they were used in the anime and manga. In some cases, such as The Winged Dragon of Ra, this actually does make the card unplayable competitively. Other times, it's because the card ends up with a completely different effect (e.g. Dystopia the Despondent, which originally prevented Xyz summons).
  • Link Monsters and the New Master Rules in general. While all the previous mechanics got a fair share of backlash, most people became accustomed to them over time. Link Monsters got enough hate upon their introduction to eclipse Synchros, Xyzs, and Pendulums combined because of the new rules they brought along with them: Each player can only summon one Extra Deck Monster at the start and must summon a Link Monster in order to convert Main Monster Zones into viable Monster Zones to Summon other Extra Deck monsters to. Considering how Extra Deck-focused most decks were, many complained upon reading this rule, claiming it single-handedly killed off a majority of decks, while also causing decks that rely on Main Deck monsters to suddenly become overpowered overnight, thanks to being unaffected by the rule. In short, the New Master Rules were the biggest upset in the history of ''Yu-Gi-Oh!", and Konami would end up largely walking them back in April 2020.^note The April 2020 revision changed the "Extra Monster and linked Zones only" rule to only affect Link Monsters and Pendulum Monsters summoned face-up from the Extra Deck, allowing Fusions, Synchros, and Xyz Monsters to once again be played anywhere.
  • Some infamous 4Kids dub alterations worm their way into the TCG whenever cards based on the anime are made, causing exasperated cries of Konami killing perfectly good card names in the name of accuracy. One good example of this is the card "This Creepy Little Punk", a card based on Kalin Kessler from 5D's and named after a line said by his opponent Lawson, which many feel is an inferior name to the original Japanese card name "Return of the Reaper" that comes from the exact same duel.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A lot of promising themes are killed off and forgotten before they amount to any significance, or even get enough members to be a real deck. Sometimes this is due to the theme belonging to a character — usually one-off villains — who only got a very small amount of dueling screentime, resulting in only their cards that they played in the show being printed.
  • In general a lot of themes are exclusive to the anime and manga, even if they could see real life play without needing to be changed much. To their credit, Konami began making efforts to avert this beginning with the climax of the ZEXAL era in their Collection Packs.
  • The Lightrays are a series of cards meant to parallel the Dark Counterpart series, as Light Counterparts of existing monsters with effects revolving around banishing and recycling Light monsters. It only got six members before it was forgotten, although the basic concept is later revisited with the Metaphys theme.
  • The Machine King goes through a lot of forms and is mentioned in the flavor text of other Machine cards to be some sort of, well, king of Machines. Despite this none of his four forms offer any support to the others and no real theme has yet to come of it.
• Tough Act to Follow: The Abyss metaplot is one of the most beloved storylines in the entire card game not related to the anime, with an exciting and explosive storyline, compelling characters, awesome worldbuilding, and fantastic artwork and cards. Another major plotline, the Visas Starfrost metaplot, was started during the run of Abyss in Battle of Chaos, but is often considered inferior to Abyss due to a lack of coherency in its story or characters, with most of its side characters considered not especially interesting beyond Visas Starfrost himself (who is also a third of the characters in the storyline). The Visas metaplot is mostly remembered for its onslaught of Game-Breaker archetypes that pushed immense changes to the state of Yu-Gi-Oh! as a card game.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • There are plenty of archetypes in the game, but several of them are often tied to characters who have very little dueling screentime, and so their archetypes have only a handful of cards, let alone useful ones, and are basically abandoned unless backed up by legacy support. This even extends to card subtypes like Spirit, Gemini, and Union, although Konami made an effort to avert this during the ARC-V and SEVENS eras and some of the older cards found use in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links and in Speed Duels.
  • While Extra Linking had always existed since the start of Link era, very few cards specifically benefit from being Extra Linked. Among them, only one legal Monster (the Forbidden Topologic Gumblar Dragon) has such effect while the rest of them are only available through illegal Match Winner cards. Presumably, due to Gumblar Dragon being an incredibly overpowered card due to its discarding effect, on top of the Extra Link blocking off the opponent from playing the game on even ground^note though the 2020 revision of the Master Rules allows players to once again summon non-Pendulum or Link monsters from their Extra Deck anywhere on their field without relying on Link Arrows, Konami refuses to print anymore cards that gains additional effect on an Extra Linked field.
• Ugly Cute: There's a lot.
  • Pain Painter. There's something oddly endearing about a chubby little zombie with paintbrushes.
  • Sangan may well be the cutest three-eyed demon monster out there, especially with his continued Woobie status.
  • The entire Frightfur theme, that despite being composed of violent edgy Fiend-type monsters, is still based on plush toys.
  • Skull Servant, due to both being infamously weak and being a goofy, grinning skeleton. The later Wight cards got rather less goofy artwork and thus aren't quite as cute... at least until they started getting portrayed as a family of Ridiculously Alive Undead and started showing up in cards with cartoonier artwork as a result.
• Unexpected Character: Often done when older cards get new support or even entire themes based around them. But the most bizarre example comes in the form of Thunder Dragons becoming a proper theme. At least older examples had a character that used them in the Anime/Manga, or had some fanbase popularity. Thunder Dragon was used exactly twice by Kaiba in the anime, was the ace for Tristan in a spin-off, was overshadowed by Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon in Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, and had been out of the meta for around a decade.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • For some reason, Effect Veiler gets a bit of this despite her Tertiary Sexual Characteristics. The relative lack of certain... secondary characteristics may have something to do with it.
  • Dharc the Dark Charmer, especially for being the only guy among a group of girl spellcasters.
  • The Helios line was distinctly female in the original artwork, but the international releases greatly reduced the bustline and made them look ambiguous.
  • Dian Keto's TCG art led to a lot of players believing she was a man before Rush Duel came around with cards based on a younger version of her.
  • Tsukuyomi, despite being based on a male god, often gets mistaken as female for those unfamiliar with Shintoism because of his purple twintails and because they're accustomed to the moon being represented by goddesses in Greek and Roman mythology.
• Win Back the Crowd: While the card game never really lost a large portion of it to begin with per se, being crowned the most played and popular card game in the world, a lot of people ended up leaving from one era to the next due to it often ditching the summoning mechanic they had gotten used to in the era it was introduced for the latest new summoning mechanic just introduced in the next era. The ARC-V era addressed this complaint though in the fact that, not only does the respective anime give a good focus on all summoning types, the card game itself did a lot better with focusing on all the summoning mechanics instead of the latest one specifically. (a.k.a.: Pendulum Summoning, which, if anything, was more based around supporting previous summoning methods.) In fact, for the longest time, two of the most powerful and competitive decks in the game focused specifically on Fusion and Ritual summoning, respectively. It also introduced a lot of new support to older themes that haven't gotten any major additions in years, slowly starting to bring them onto the same level as current decks.^note Red-Eyes, Black Luster Soldier, Buster Blader, Dark Magician, Magician Girls, and finally, Blue-Eyes as a Tier 1 deck, to name a few. While the VRAINS era focused on Link Monsters exclusively for a time, it brought all the other Summoning methods back in its fifth pack (and had included them in its first).
  • Series 11 sought to win back older fans who were alienated for the VRAINS era (and its rule set). First, the Master Rule changes undoes the blatant Character Select Forcing with Link Monsters, by allowing Fusion, Synchro and Xyz Monsters to be summoned in any monster zone again while keeping the restrictions for Pendulum and Link Monsters so that the summoning methods are more balanced. Secondly, rather than tie in the real life cards to the current anime (which is instead tied to Rush Duel), the booster sets of Series 11 and onward focus on providing support for older themes, with each set tied with one of the older series in a set rotation, ensuring that many themes and summoning methods received equal amounts of attention, and popular older archetypes got to see play again after being shafted in older formats.
• The Woobie:
  • Sangan. Mistake, Tour Bus to Forbidden Realms, Shared Ride, Wrongful Arrest, and Mistaken Accusation are actually telling a story, specifically of the banned monsters' realization that they've been Put on a Bus and aren't coming back. Shared Ride, the card with the angel from Graceful Charity attempting to console a crying Sangan, is what already put him into woobie territory, with the cards that came after it where he gets arrested and thrown in jail only hammering home the fact. It's easy to be mad at Konami for the major Kick the Dog moment. The fandom therefore rejoiced when an errata was revealed for Sangan that didn't kill his usefulness.
  • The Amorphages are ordinary animals that have been infected by the evil Vector Pendulum the Dracoverlord with bacteriophages (hence the name) that forcibly turn them into dragons. Judging by their artwork, the process appears to be quite painful.
• Woolseyism:
  • "Des Frog" may have been a transliteration, but it set up the fusion between three of them to be called "D.3.S. Frog" in the English translation. And they preserved the "Death" connotation by naming its signature spell, originally called Death Chorus, Des Croaking.
  • "Morphtronic Datatron" was originally a lighter in the Japanese game; the English art edited it into a USB flash drive, which fits the Morphtronic theme of electrical appliances and gadgets better (though it does create a Dub Induced Plothole in that the monster is a Pyro-type Fire-attribute).
  • As explained by Kevin Tewart, at that time the U.S. Head of Development for Konami, "Lightsworn" replaced "Lightlord" because "Lord" is a male title even though many of the cards were female or indeterminate ("Lightsworn" is also seen as more appropriate by many TCG players since their play style implies servitude rather than control). "Inverz" became "Steelswarm" among other things because words sound more mundane when you know their meaning (although this did backfire a little when the Verz archetype debuted, as "Verz" became "Evilswarm" and since all Inverz/Steelswarm cards also count as Verz/Evilswarm cards, this forced their support cards to use the rather awkward "lswarm").
  • When the Qliphoth/Qliphort theme was introduced to the TCG, they changed many of the theme restrictions from specifying Qliphoth to simply Qli. This allowed for more creative names for their support cards.
  • The Ritua, a WATER theme based around Ritual Summons with a name that was clearly a pun on the English word "Ritual". Keeping this name would have caused potential issues down the line (any card which specified "Ritual" would have inadvertently included the entire theme as well as its likely intended targets), so the TCG instead called them Gishki. Why is this a Woolseyism? Because Gishki is a pun on Gishiki, the Japanese word for Ritual, thus preserving the original pun.
  • The "Darklord" theme gets two of these in the form of Bowdlerizations:
    • Darklord Ixtab is named after a Mayan goddess of suicide. The TCG changes her name to "Darklord Ixchel", the name of a Mayan goddess of midwifery and medicine.
    • Darklord Lucifer was translated into Darklord Morningstar. As "morning star" is a direct translation of "Lucifer", this keeps the original allusion but removes the overt religious reference.
  • The "Fur Hire" theme, previously fan translated as "Skyfang Brigade", originally received a lot of flak from fans when its official English TCG name was revealed, due to said name being seen as an Punny Name on the part of the translators. However, after English proxies of its cards were revealed by Konami, the theme became a Memetic Mutation among the fanbase, in no small part to the fact that the English translators clearly had fun Painting the Medium with the card text. This is most evident where the theme's support cards word its support as supporting a "monster "Fur Hire"", rather than an ""archetype" monster" as is standard convention, highlighting the sort of characters those monsters are. Due to the creativity shown by the translators in how the theme was ultimately handled, large portions of the fanbase now look fondly upon the cards, crediting said translators with turning an otherwise unremarkable and obscure theme in the OCG into a source of humor and in-jokes, thus drastically increasing its profile in the TCG.
  • Number 41: Bagooska, the Terribly Tired Tapir originally had a large quantity of sake bottles in its artwork. This was Bowdlerized into pillows instead, which many TCG players prefer because it makes him look cuter.
  • In the OCG, the "Phantom Knights" archetype had an issue with its Spell/Trap support's archetype string being "Phantom", which was used for unrelated monsters like Grass Phantom and Odd-Eyes Phantom Dragon. This forced its archetype support cards that affect the whole archetype to clunkily state "'Phantom Knights' monsters and 'Phantom' Spell/Trap cards". The TCG dodged the issue by changing "Phantom" to "Phantom Knights" and "Phantom Knights" to "The Phantom Knights", allowing for said effects to simply state "'Phantom Knights' cards".

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