Yu Gi Oh Card Game Character Sheets Cleanup

The issue here is deciding which tropes describe the lore aspects of the cards and which gameplay mechanics can be adjudicated to tropes. Something like the Vampire monsters (which most of them have resurrective immortality, for example) is easy, but I feel that stuff like Ojama and Duston for example, have a trope that describes their "butting in the opponent's field" mechanic yet we may miss it in the shuffle.

Like I said earlier, I think we should focus on the shoehorns (Enemy Summoner, Sixth Ranger, Not the Intended Use, Overshadowedby Awesome, X But Y, etc.) and then get to that. I don't disagree on principle, but I feel that there's bigger problems to cover right now.

Sixth Ranger gets problematic because there's cards that are connected to an archetype via name but have nothing to do with them otherwise. (The Archfiends where many cards like Axe of Despair and Shadow Tamer have Daemon in their names but are random cards just called Daemon and Archfiend Marmot of Nefariousness and Archfiend Mirror being called Air Marmot of Nefariousness and Wicked Mirror in the early video games, Karakuri Spider not having the same look or effect as the other Karakuris (if it attacks a DARK attribute monster, the latter gets blown up after damage calculation and early on in the video games was called Mechanical Spider) and Kagemusha of the Blue Flame being a Shien monster but can't be searched.)

Then, there's cards that work with a certain archetype but, again are unconnected otherwise like Hamon for the Crystal Beasts and Ancient Sacred Wyvern for Aroma

There's a five man band clean-up thread and all examples that don't conform to an addition to a Five-Man Band were agreed to not be Sixth Ranger and as such have been removed. Ironically, this led to quite a bit of Power Rangers examples to be removed from the wiki. We can disagree with that, but under these standards, most of the YGO examples don't count. Anyway, I feel that we can cover actual lore examples for that trope under another trope (like Martha for the other six exosisters, or Diamond Duston for Dustons).

I guess we can come to a compromise and keep the examples like the ones I mentioned already under Sixth Ranger while we find a more fitting trope (where the card is actually a character with lore relevance) but remove the ones where the card is not (the Axe of Despair you mention for example)

Edited by Edgar81539 on Sep 4th 2022 at 12:06:50 PM

Relevant shoehorns I found for latter deletion. I have already covered the A to L folders.

- Discard and Draw

- Sixth Ranger

- Enemy Summoner

- Foil (the characters have to meet with each other to count as foils)

- Man of Kryptonite and Achilles' Heel (used for non-lore enforced examples of weaknesses. Something being vulnerable to monster effects is not an Achilles' Heel (the god monsters and ancient gear chaos giant lack immunity to those effects to enforce a monster clash, for example), whereas something like Earthbound Immortals blowing up if you destroy the field spell is an actual example of the latter.

- Brought Down to Normal (Currently used for any kind of effect negation effects)

- Power Up Letdown, Crippling Overspecialization, This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman (metagaming tropes)

- Awesome, but Impractical, Boring, but Practical, Cool, but Inefficient, Useless Useful Spell, Difficult, but Awesome

- Loophole Abuse and Not the Intended Use (used to shoehorn card interactions not intended by Konami - and sometimes, even effects actually intended by Konami)

- Lethal Joke Character (used for cards that are seemingly weak but can be used in decent/powerful combos, without acknowledgment in the lore/narrative like Skull Servant and Ojama has)

- No-Sell (currently used for any kind of effect that prevents targeting and negates traps, while the actual definition of the trope indicates that the character simply tanks the attack. Under this definition, No-Sell would only be used in "unaffected by" and "can't be destroyed by battle/card effects".) Nigh-Invulnerable is used as a shoehorn in lieu of this too.

- Fusion Dance: The definition of the trope mentions five results for the merge, whereas current YGO design mandates for less restricted fusion materials. This leads to shoehorns like Dante, Pilgrim of the Burning Abyss (of which three Burning Abyss monster is he a Fusion Dance off? Dante is probably one, but does he actually combine in some way with the other Burning Abyss monster, or even take their power?) Starving Venom Fusion Dragon (actually not a fusion of anything) or Witchcrafter Vicemaster (Haine in another uniform and with Genni and Edel standing at her side). So, any examples that don't fit in the five results can possibly go. Not forgetting that sometimes the Fusion Dance is under another mechanic, i.e., Junk Warrior which is visually a fusion between Junk Synchron and Speed Warrior.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Sep 5th 2022 at 10:33:00 AM

I went through the A-to-B page and identified a few more narrative tropes shoehorned into gameplay descriptions:

• Person of Mass Destruction (describes all sorts of boardwiping effects)
• There Can Be Only One (used to describe "you can only control one" effects)
• Death Activated Super Power (used to describe effects that activate upon a card's destruction. I had plans to write a draft on "deathrattle" effects—using the Hearthstone term here—in card games as an actual TLP Trope, but for now I don't feel the need to preserve any examples because the cleanup comes first. We can reintroduce deathrattle tropes in the future if we need to)
• Take Me Instead (describes "if card would be destroyed, destroy/banish this card instead" effects)

Balance Buff is present under the Toon entry and kinda undermines itself by claiming that Toons are still impractical after their various support cards like Toon Kingdom were released even though the entire point of Balance Buff is improving mechanics in a video game by improving how effective they are. Plus the page outright says "It's important to remember that, as a trope, it should only be mentioned when it has significantly changed the gaming experience in one way or another."

More story-to-gameplay shoehorns:

• The Medic (for LP gaining effects)
• Power Creep, Power Seep (original trope is a crossover-focused trope)
• Cutting the Knot

For The Medic, several monsters gain you Life Points but either don't show up in the lore or aren't indicated to have the things that The Medic page says like Dispatcharazzi but several monsters are explicitly The Medic like Cure Mermaid.

The thing is that The Medic is a characterization trope based on team-based games, and it feels too much like a shoehorn. Sister tropes Healing Winds (for Aromage), Heal It with Water (for Dropsies and Cure Mermaid and other water examples), Life Drain, and for miscellanous examples, Heal Thyself should cover the trope.

If a character in some artwork is shown to fullfill The Medic role, then it should count regardless of LP gain effect, as sometimes the healing effect is reflected on returning the monster from the GY, or even healing the opponent instead (for Muscle Medic who is indeed The Medic of Marauding Captain's troops)

Edited by Edgar81539 on Sep 5th 2022 at 7:06:31 AM

Makes sense, plus it'll give Heal It with Water, Healing Winds and the others Card Games which I feel were sorely lacking. :D

I have finally covered all the A to Z folders for shoehorns. Thanks Wuz. Some help would be appreciated on the Duel Terminal, Abyss and etc folders, though I think these can be given some leeway on Sixth Ranger and other characterization tropes as the monsters are actually depicted as teams/tribes/whatever.

One more possibly shoehorned trope: on a lot of these pages, Took a Level in Badass is being used as a generic trope to list monster retrains. Personally, I feel like they are misuses that should all be cut. As I see it, Took a Level in Badass fundamentally focuses on character progression over a period of in-story time, an element that YGO monster card artworks lack, since they usually do not explicitly indicate any in-lore temporal progression.

There is room for argument here though, so I would like to hear your opinions on this.

On a different topic, I want some more opinions on my previous proposal of merging anime-originated monster archetypes into the anime card pages. A lot of monster cards' characterizations are deeply tied to their anime/manga appearances; Blue-Eyes White Dragon is just a white dragon with a pose on the tabletop, but in the anime, it can indicate its personality through its actions, sounds, and anime-provided backstory.

Edited by Wuz on Sep 6th 2022 at 12:16:00 AM

Some more thoughts:

• Tropes describing the gameplay function of Spell/Trap cards should be blanket cut, unless they are relevant (i.e. gameplay-story integrated) to the in-lore characterization of a character.
• We should put clear warnings to stop editors from shoehorning tropes so they can describe monster effects on TV Tropes. This is not the website for that; you can write monster effect descriptions on Yugipedia.
• Card Archetypes are NOT CHARACTERS, and should be split into their constituent individual monsters, which are characters. If one wishes to describe a group of monsters that just so happen to be unified as an archetype, they should make a "Group of characters in general" folder and put tropes in there.

The only thing about groups of characters is that over half of the Card Archetypes involve groups in some fashion (e.g. the Aroma monsters, the Dragonmaids and the Exosisters). Back in the old days of Yu-Gi-Oh, there was focus on single monsters (e.g. Panther Warrior, Dragoness Knight) but as they introduced and developed archetypes, they began introducing groups of monsters more and more.

Agree with the first two, disagree with the last. As First Aid Rules mentions, archetypes are mostly developed around groups/tribes without a clear protagonist or giving equal focus to most individuals on the group. If we deleted every group trope we would end up with an almost empty character page and I feel that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

As for the anime suggestion, my issue with it is that the anime pages should exclusively center on the anime, so adding tropes about the TCG would feel out of place, whereas the card game pages can comfortably indicate the inspirations/references that the cards have, no matter if they originate from the anime, from 30 year old videogames, the manga or are references to other anime and franchises. We can talk the same about the anime Vampire cards and post Dark Saviors Vampires in here, whereas an anime characters page would inevitably be overtaken by tropes dedicated to non-anime Vampire monsters - same goes for Blackwing monsters, Gravekeeper monsters and Number monsters.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Sep 6th 2022 at 10:50:43 AM

Yeah, and the same thing for the Evil HER Oes, given that there's more of them in the card game and not very many in the anime

All that said and done, seems we have finally covered all the shoehorned tropes and metagaming tropes.

Two issues remain now

- Finding out what tropes can replace the older shoehorns fittingly.

- Moving the RUSH character pages to a more appropiate page.

For the first issue, I'm gonna suggest the following

- "Power Nullifier" for what was covered under "Brought Down to Normal". The trope definition seems to fit; a super-power that can turn-off all other super-powers. It also has been used already in some pages.

- "Nigh-Invulnerable" for Towers-esque monsters ("unaffected by all effects"), while "No-Sell" remains in use for "can't be destroyed by 'X'", and lesser variations of this ("Unaffected by Traps", "Unaffected by Spells"., etc). There's a precedent for this since the anime always depics this kind of monster as "No way, he survived that??!!" and then the protagonist has to figure out a way to counter them (seen with Chaos Ancient Gear Giant, The Arrival @Ignister, Vennominaga, etc.)

- "Anti-Magic" for every character that negates and destroys Magic and Trap cards, but only those specifically.

Is there any trope that can reflect all those "can't be targeted by x" effects? No-Sell was previously used for this, but as I already mentioned before, No-Sell definition is to be used when the character tanks the attack unharmed, while "can't be targeted" can be filed under "forcefield deflects the attack" and "dodging" instead of that.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Sep 7th 2022 at 12:39:21 PM

One more thing to clean up: on the lore-based YGO card game character sheets, some of the editors created duplicates of Card Archetype tropes as individual character tropes; the duplicates in the archetype folders should be cut.

About replacing the shoehorns, I would say just cut them for now. I personally don't consider gameplay tropes to count as character tropes by default.

Quick question. What should we do with Summoned Skull? It's an Archfiend, but its cards have it separate from the other Archfiends besides Black Skull Dragon

Keep its own folder, we have separate folders for Black Luster Soldier (despite it being a Chaos monster) and used to have separate folders for the Four Dimensional Dragons. Should just remove the duplicate tropes that cover Summoned Skull in the Archfiend folder and move any pertinent ones.

In that regard, I will create a Four Dimensional Dragon folder that covers all those archetype folders I deleted since on their own they lack lore and characterization tropes. As a group they're a different story. Odd-Eyes is the only one that has enough characterization on its own to stand as its own folder.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Sep 8th 2022 at 1:01:18 AM

One more shoehorned trope to cut: Hoist by His Own Petard. It's a story trope that's commonly used on the Character Sheets to describe strategies.

More misuses.

• Assist Character is commonly misused for "supporting other monsters", even though the actual trope has a very specific definition related to Fighting Games.
• Necromancer is commonly misused for generic monster revival effects.
• Black Sheep is misused when it is applied to archetypes that do not involve an actual family.
• Crazy-Prepared being used to describe "archetypes having access to everything" is a misuse
• Nerf: Like the misuses of Balance Buff, having weakened effects across different continuities (anime -> card game or manga -> card game) is not a nerf.
  • Additionally, while Nerf can be arguably molded into the contexts of "nerfing certain decks", Decks are not characters, and trope pertaining to Decks should be cut.

Edited by Wuz on Sep 9th 2022 at 2:34:06 AM

Well, the Early-Installment Weirdness for Tabletop Games page explicitly mentions nerfing in terms of cards adapted from the anime and manga being changed and I'm pretty sure fans have referred to cards from those being nerfed as well (e.g. the real life Winged Dragon of Ra only carrying over its HP to One effect and pay 1000 life points to destroy a card on the field and having to have a bevy of support cards released to give it it's effects back and Card of Sanctity going from a very powerful "Draw until you have six cards" to a mostly useless card that requires you to remove all of your cards on the field and your hand from play and then draw two cards)

I think Adaptational Badass Adaptational Wimp can be used instead of Nerf , just have to avoid extremely detailed explanations if more than two cards are going to be covered.

Don't forget that Necromancer still applies to a ton of actual cards tho, such as Zombie Master and some Spellcaster monsters. Fair to remove it from others and replace it with Back from the Dead, as long as lore wise it is actually reviving the dead.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Sep 8th 2022 at 6:12:28 AM

A few more things to cut:

• Zerg Rush. Cut instances where it is exclusively used to describe non-lore strategy.
• Take Up My Sword / Thanatos Gambit: More shoehorned descriptors for deathrattle effects.

Edited by Wuz on Sep 13th 2022 at 2:48:50 AM