Yu Gi Oh Card Game Character Sheets Cleanup

I think that the issue with troping metagame-relevant cards and tropes that only make sense from metagame contexts (such as "This card was banned/limited because of this and this), can be curtailed the same way the issue was curtailed in the Pokemon Character pages, which is adding a disclaimer at the top of the character pages.

"Entries relating to Smogon, competitive Pokémon strategies, or the metagame will be commented out or removed. If they can be rewritten in a more neutral manner, please do so."

So, for example, making an entry about Tradetoad being a Suspiciously Similar Substitute to Substitoad given how the latter was banned would be a valid entry in the "Frog" character folder, while the next entry (which doesn't even say anything regarding the Dragon Rulers as characters) would be cut.

• In an almost twisted sense, this happened in the actual meta as well. Dragon Rulers are generally argued as, at full power, one of if not the most powerful archetype in the game, but never "officially" reached a legendary Tier 0 status. The reason: Spellbook of Judgement was such an overwhelmingly powerful Spell that it practically singlehandedly allowed Prophecy to be on at least comparable footing with the Dragon Rulers, thus in turn meaning that while both Decks were ludicrously powerful, because they both generally saw an equal amount of play, neither had the usage percentage to be qualified as true Tier 0 Decks like Tele-DAD. Think of an Up To Eleven situation of Monarchs vs Kosmos or the most recent Eldlich vs Adamancipators.

Started the rework on the D and E-F pages, which were some of the worst offenders regarding Wall of Text and the aforementioned problems. I added the following disclaimers to the pages so we have something to work with from now-on.

• Entries relating to competitive Yu-Gi-Oh strategies, or the metagame will be commented out or removed. If they can be rewritten in a more neutral manner, please do so.
• Series or archetypes without character-related lore will be removed.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Aug 18th 2022 at 11:51:21 AM

Can we cut down the Wall of Blather on The Sacred Beast's entry here? I feel like the ones for Awesome, but Impractical and Balance Buff could be easily cut down to and combined like so: Awesome, but Impractical =/= Balance Buff: When the Sacred Beasts were first released in the TCG, they weren't very popular due to having to send 3 cards to the Graveyard (Continuous Spells for Hamon, Continuous Traps for Uria (which had to be set first and activated later) and three Fiends for Raviel) and the fact that they had no protection whatsoever once summoned (although Hamon was a popular boss monster for Crystal Beast decks due to having better practicality than Rainbow Dragon). Years later, various support cards such as Dark Summoning Beast, Opening of the Spirit Gates and Fallen Paradise gave the players the ability to get the Sacred Beasts out faster (usually only one) and most importantly, granted protection and in Fallen Paradise's case the ability to costlessly draw two cards each turn and renew your hand. These cards gave the Sacred Beasts a much better showing.

Also, I'd like the Dragonmaids to be kept because of their nice little narrative, and their popularity with fans (especially Laundry)

Lore can constitute anything as small as an appearance in another card (which most archetypical cards have, there's even the common joke about "that one card/monster that is just a group shot"). By this standard, Dragonmaids are one of the most lore-heavy archetypes (not only do most of their support include multiple group shots, but Laundry also gets to cameo on multiple trap cards).

By "archetype or series without lore" I'm talking about stuff like the Mirror Force trap cards, the Polymerization archetype and the Effigy series (both of which I just removed a few hours ago) yet include no characters (the first) or lore of their own (Effigy).

Regarding the Sacred Beast examples, rules prohibit combining tropes in a single entry, but I will see what I can do, thanks for reminding me that the "S" folder also has a massive problem with word cruft and natter. IIRC, Balance Buff is for videogames that regularly release balance patchs or series that make changes to the characters or equipment through releases, both of which don't apply for YGO, so as such I will be removing Balance Buff entirely from the character folders.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Aug 18th 2022 at 4:12:21 AM

The "S" folder Part 1 is done for now. Work is a bit easier than it seems at first glance, merely owing to the fact that the troper to blame for all these walls of text (which I think may have been the same for Doll Monsters, Egyptian Gods and Sacred Beasts), liked to copypaste card effects verbatim, then adding a nattery starting line to segue in another massive wall of text detailing why the cards fit that particular entry. Some of their preferred lines were "to wit", "more precisely" and variations of those two, so it was just a matter of cutting away everything before and after.

Removed "Sasuke Samurai", "Shogi" and "Skilled Magician", which have no lore of their own and their entries only state gameplay mechanics.

Some help would be appreciated on the "N", and "C" pages, as the "Numbers", "Noble Knight", "Chronomaly" and "Crystal Beast" folders all suffer from the same kind of problem. Searching "to wit" in the first page shows 31 results.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Aug 18th 2022 at 12:29:13 PM

Thanks!

I'll help clean up the N subpage. I've always wanted to clean up the Numbers folder but I've never managed to come up with a satisfactory cleanup guideline myself.

I have noticed that Dragonmaid Laundry seems to be rather popular what with her Dojikko design on the cards, popularity outside of her archetype (mill three cards when Normal or Special Summoned) and is pretty popular in Paleozoic and Eldlich because she doesn't eat up the Normal Summoning. Also, someone on Reddit's Master Duel community drew a piece of artwork spotlighting her and the Eldlich called "Souvenirs from the Golden Land" and someone else made up a card based on the artwork which the artist thought was real at first! Would Dragonmaid Laundry count as Breakout Character for her archetype?

I just want to remark this: there are a lot of interesting Gameplay-Thematics integration in YGO card effects, with things like Number 24: Dragulas the Vampiric Dragon having effects that mimic a Vampire sleeping and waking up. However, TV Tropes is absolutely the wrong place to document these things: TV Tropes simply doesn't have the necessary card game/player-game dynamics tropes to properly "trope" things like these.

Even basic things like "Draw 2 discard 1" or "Floating upon being destroyed" (or even the concept of a "creature" in a card game—it's not a fighter, not a party member, not an RTS unit, and not a player character) are just not tropes on TV Tropes. I can empathize with writers trying to shoehorn these interesting gameplay dynamics into preexisting tropes... but at the end of the day, they are still misuses.

Edited by Wuz on Aug 19th 2022 at 12:19:18 AM

Card Cycling is a draft for Discard and Draw-ing cards.

...

Edit: Calling the vampire-thing a pun on Rise from Your Grave is not impossible?

What would we need to trope the specific concept of "creature" for, that can't be covered by broader, more general than TCG concepts?

Edited by Malady on Aug 18th 2022 at 9:24:14 AM

• On Rise from Your Grave, that trope is a narrative trope; using it to describe mechanical gameplay feels wrong to me, and "using narrative tropes to describe mechanical gameplay" is the main cause behind 90% of the current YGO Character sheets' trope misuses.
• On CCG creatures, I have no idea if there are any larger gaming concepts that covers these things.

Related to this whole discussion on CCG Troping, would it be possible to start up a separate project focusing on creating new tropes for Collectible Card Game Tropes? We can involve more non-YGO card game players for that project and provide more perspectives on how collectible card games are designed in general.

One last note, maybe "using soulless mechanical gameplay to imply narrative tropes (without using text or visuals)" could be a trope itself.

Edited by Wuz on Aug 19th 2022 at 12:43:29 AM

Not sure how Narrative Rise from Your Grave is, if the Folklore example is valid, then it really would be about anything just, rising from their grave, and it's a very vampire-related trope.

But I can see how other tropes could be misused.

...

Edit: If it were Soulless, the Graveyard wouldn't be named that, and just be named the "discard pile" or something, nor would it IIRC have tombstone iconography in the card mats.

The implicit narrative is about summoning and sending to war, monsters?

Edited by Malady on Aug 18th 2022 at 9:59:54 AM

Well, the issue at hand here is that sometimes the grave is just kind of represented as a "resting place" (Dragonmaid, Sky Striker) while sometimes it's actually meant to represent the grave. I would personally go through a case-by-case basis and find a more fitting trope. I think "Came Back Strong", "Came Back Wrong", "We Can Rebuild Him" (in the case of machine-type monsters), "Rescued from the Underworld" and "Resurrective Immortality" should cover most cases, with "Necromancy" covering "Zombie Master" and "Doomkaiser Dragon" for example. As I said before, case by case basis.

So the "resurrection" trope would actually fit with zombie archetypes, vampires and monster whose artwork (or lore) explicitly references the resurrection, like Treeborn Frog, while the aforementioned Sky Striker and Dragonmaid wouldn't have this trope.

This is something we could probably cover later anyway; the most "urgent" issues are cutting on the walls of text, series/archetypes whose folders are only filled with gameplay mechanics, and the overuse of metagaming tropes as character tropes (all those "Not the intended use", "Awesome but impractical", "Cool but inefficient" "Balance buff" entries, for example)

Edited by Edgar81539 on Aug 18th 2022 at 12:24:17 PM

I am really stressed and anxious right now. I felt really uncomfortable about the streak of edits I made in the past hour, and I feel equally uncomfortable about reverting them.

To keep myself sane, I am going to step away from editing the YGO Character Sheets for at least a day. However, I would like to consolidate some of my confusions I faced during my edits into several questions:

• Currently, we have pages dealing with cards as they appear in the TCG/OCG, and pages dealing with cards as they appear in the card game in the Anime/Manga. Should these pages be merged? (Example: the folder "Dark Magician" on Characters.Yu Gi Oh Card Game D and the folder "Dark Magician" on Characters.Yu Gi Oh Original Series Cards)
• While editing Characters.Yu Gi Oh ZEXAL Cards, I experimented with having individual folders for individual monsters, as they are the individual "monster-characters" that the character sheets are supposed to focus on. Should this format be extended to other pages or reverted?
• I have been blanket-cutting uses of Awesome, but Impractical on the character sheets; is this correct? Using the Pokemon comparison, some of the Pokemon character sheets still use Awesome, but Impractical.
• Should Sky Striker be merged with YGO OCG Strories character sheet in some way, since, like how the Master Guide covers card lore, the OCG Stories are also covering card lore?

I'd say treat them like the anime cards (Dark Magician, NEOS, Seven Roads Magician, etc.) and keep their sections on both pages because the manga has a lot of backstory that the cards don't (e.g. Raye's age). Plus, the anime cards have more backstory than the TCG ones (such as explicitly saying that Dark Magician Girl is Mana's spirit monster which is only hinted at by the Palladium Oracle Mana card)

Edited by FirstAidRules on Aug 19th 2022 at 5:17:32 AM

I'm in favor for a thorough cut this time around regarding the "x but y" tropes in order to curb the overuse of the metagaming tropes as character tropes (though I think Nerf should stay (with a rename probably), for example, as long as it doesn't devolve into a massive explanation of the effects that got nerfed in the manga/anime to OCG transition, and simply says "it had "x" effect but this was changed because "insert reason""), then later we can work on an agreement of what standards should such tropes have, and add a few examples back (we don't need "awesome but impractical", "cool but inefficient", "power up letdown" and "useless useful spell" all at the same time when the troper that was using all of them would add exactly the same card effects under the entries, for example).

In regards to monsters with anime and manga backstories of their own, keep them split. This page should cover characterization tropes in the game alongside the applicable gameplay tropes.

In regards to singular monsters with a shit ton of forms, I say give them their own character folder inside their relevant sub-archetype. In case of "Number 39: Utopia" this could easily be solved simply by moving all the tropes referencing it from the "Numbers" folder to the "Utopia" folder (if it doesn't exist already).

Edited by Edgar81539 on Aug 19th 2022 at 11:46:50 AM

Update

I finally went through all the pages, added the disclaimer and removed the folders that had archetypes/monsters that either lacked characters entirely (Kunai with Chain, or the Virus cards for example), lacked lore, and as such, characterization tropes (La Jinn and Man-Eater Bug were only added because of nostalgia, for example), or are groupings of characters that only share a single feature and no other characterization tropes (each of the zombie counterparts and dark counterparts of each monster should probably be added to their relevant folder, i.e., "Red-Eyes Zombie Dragon" to the "Red-Eyes" folder.).

The only example I felt a bit iffy about was the "Hand" folder, since I think some tropes could be added to that one, maybe I will re-add it later once I make enough research in Yugipedia.

Issues remaining

- Walls of text in the archetype folders

- Overuse of metagaming tropes in substitute of characterization tropes

- Discussing tropes that can replace current shoehorns

- Discussing "x but y" troping and how it should be handled to avoid the repetition ad nauseam of metagaming concepts.

Also, I think that RUSH cards should have their own page, independent of the OCG page. Splitting pages for big archetypes would probably be useful too, such as one for "Hero" and all its sub-archetypes.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Aug 19th 2022 at 11:44:10 AM

I don't quite understand the decision to keep the "card game lore" and "anime/manga lore" split. Yugioh cards themselves deliver a pitiful amount of lore due to their lack of flavor text or explanations of what's going on in their card artworks. Many cards' "card game lore" are also intimately tied to their appearances in the anime and manga.

Consider the Four Dimensional Dragons; without anime/manga lore, the in-game card artworks only tell you that they are big flashy dragons (with funny orbs). Their current folders likewise are primarily just gameplay descriptions (as lore-less as the recently cut Attribute Knights), or lore information taken from the anime.

I have no problem discussing with fellow tropers how anime/manga cards should be handled in regard with these folders, so let's add this to the issues to discuss at the end of the issues that already were brought up.

So, just to make sure, folders that consist exclusively of gameplay description tropes and no lore/characterization/visual design/narrative design tropes should be cut right?

As an example, should the folder for Allure Queen be completely cut?

Allure Queen is an archetype of DARK Spellcaster-Type LV monsters who are capable of equipping the opponent's monsters to themselves if Special Summoned properly. Included in the archetype is the Warrior-Type monster Queen’s Bodyguard, which helps to protect them from being attacked. They are used by Queen in Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS.

---

• Achilles' Heel: Allure Queen LV3 and LV5 are at a huge disadvantage against Xyz and Link Monsters, since their effects can only target monsters who have levels like Normal, Effect, Fusion, Synchro, and Pendulum Monsters. LV7 however lacks this problem and is capable of equipping any kind of monster she wants, as long as you Special Summon her through LV5's effect.
• The Assimilator: Once per turn during your Main Phase, Allure Queen LV3 and LV5 (if the latter is Special Summoned through the former's effect) can select a monster your opponent controls whose level is equal or less than their own and equip them. LV7 if Special Summoned through LV5's effect is capable of equipping any monster, regardless of how high its level is or whether or not it actually has a level.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Allure Queen LV5 and LV7’s effects can only work if they are Special Summoned through LV3 and each other's effects, which means using cards like Level Up! is out of the question. But if you can get them onto the field this way, they can be potentially devastating monsters.
• Sixth Ranger:
  • Queen’s Bodyguard, a Warrior-Type monster whose effect protects Allure Queens from being attacked.
  • The anime-only Golden Allure Queen, a LINK-3 Link Monster that gains ATK equal to the combined total ATK of all Allure Queens her arrows point to, can render one Allure Queen you control immune to destruction by battle or card effects and can destroy one of your opponent's monsters if the latter effect is used.
• Taking the Bullet: If an Allure Queen would be destroyed by battle while equipped with a monster, the equipped monster is destroyed instead.
• Weak, but Skilled: Allure Queens are not very strong with LV7's ATK and DEF only being 1500. However, their ability to absorb the opponent’s monsters can be lethal if you can get them onto the field properly and provide them with good protection.

Also, what is the general status on the Wall of Text cleanup? Are we ready to move on to the other issues on these pages?

Edited by Wuz on Sep 1st 2022 at 8:29:40 PM

Yeah, cut the Allure Queen. Also, The Crystal Beasts and Dark Necrofear are pretty big blathers as well.

Also, the Djinns should be split on account of not really being similar to each other. Djinns that support Ritual Summoning and Musical Djinns shouldn't be in the same folder.

I have covered most of the wall of text issues in the pages, there remain some principally in the Numbers, Hypnosister/Risebell and Crystal Beast pages, so let's just deal with those whenever possible. We should cover the issue with the shoehorns probably now.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Sep 1st 2022 at 12:53:04 PM

I would like to propose this: with the exception of tropes describing gameplay effects that are clearly intended to have lore significance (e.g. Albaz's fusion effect), all gameplay descriptions on the character sheets should be cut, and clear notices should be added to stop new ones from being created.

I was inspired by this discussion about "Characters" in Chess. Fundamentally, the events that transpire within a physical YGO gameplay—summoning your Destroyer Phoenix Enforcer with Verte Anaconda and having it pop Ojama King—are abstract events that do not form a story, and the things that occur on that "dimension" should not be treated as character tropes.

The actual character tropes should only relate to how the characterized monsters interact with their own appearances inside the card, and their backstory and lore—Destroyer Phoenix Enforcer is a variation of an older hero monster, Verte Anaconda is a hybrid monster of a snake and a plant, and Ojama King is one ugly motherfucker.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this proposal.

Edited by Wuz on Sep 4th 2022 at 12:16:38 AM

I'd say so. There's plenty of cards that can work together in metagame terms but not in story (e.g. Ancient Sacred Wyvern and Aroma monsters because Aroma cards focus on gaining as many life points as possible and Ancient Sacred Wyvern's first effect is if you have more life points than the opponent, it gains Attack equal to the difference)