Explaining Yugi's Cardpool to Outsiders

Folks who don't concern themselves with completely useless information will sometimes be amazed at just how messy Yu-Gi-Oh's cardpool is. Just when they think they spot a pattern, it is completely contradicted by another set of cards that seems to make zero sense.

So what's going on? The truth is that while people think of Konami as a singular entity, the groups responsible for designing cards are quite often in different cities, countries, or even continents, let alone in the same room. The cards designed by those folks all end up forming our universal cardpool (aka the number of cards existing for the game) which can get... Quite chaotic.

The Banlist

Before beginning, let us state that both the OCG and the TCG (explanations about those mysterious terms below) have their own banlists. Normally you can include up to 3 copies of each card in your deck. The banlist restricts certain cards that are deemed too powerful, listing them as Forbidden, Limited or Semi-Limited, or in other words 0 copies allowed, 1 copy allowed or 2 copies allowed (instead of the normal 3). The banlist is roughly updated every three months.

The Eternal Format

Alright, so, Yu-Gi-Oh has 2 famous formats that folks often hear of: The fabled OCG and the dreaded TCG. It is also true that Yugi's playable format is what MTG players would call an "Eternal Format" for both the OCG and the TCG. Every card ever printed that is officially available in the east and west respectively, is always legally playable, unless stated otherwise by the banlist. So yes, that "Dark Magician" you got as a kid back in 2001 can very much still be used officially, in tournaments.

Some of your childhood cards might have been errata'd and gotten a bit weaker over time to avoid banning them. Others might have gotten buffed seven f@cking times in a row like it's a bloody video game patch.

No Real "Format" Choice

OCG: Original Card Game. TCG: Trading Card Game.

What's the difference between them? Practically none whatsoever for the players, for one simple reason: You don't get to "choose" your format. Folks living in Asia play the OCG version of the game exclusively, while us, westerners, play the TCG exclusively. What's to stop you, an American, from playing the OCG format instead? Small but significant differences in the cardpool. Quite simply, Asia (Japan) has some cards that have yet to be printed here.

You can't play "Twin Long Rods #1" not because someone told you to, but because it doesn't exist. It was never printed in any Latin language. (in the west only cards written in Latin-based languages are tournament-legal, so you don't get to cheat the system by importing cards directly from Japan. Likewise, the Japanese don't accept any of our cards in their tournaments). The OCG is roughly 3-4 years older than the TCG.

Sidenote: There are also Speed Duels which are "technically" a different format, but they do use some exclusive cards of their own, and the card pool is very limited, & they are a very niche choice that you won't see a lot of folks playing.

The Cardpool

The Bandai Cards

Lets start with the easy one: Before Kazuki Takahashi (Yu-Gi-Oh's original mangaka) sold the rights to the card game to Konami, there was a brief period in the 90s where Bandai had them. Bandai had created their own, "primal" Yugi cards. These are not legal anywhere, even in the OCG, but can fetch quite high prices on Ebay, so if you find one laying around anywhere, consider cashing in. They are distinct thanks to their layout. Many were based on Yugi's Season Zero (but lets not open that can of worms today).

(example of a Bandai card)

The First Years

Duel Monsters, the original show that most of the readers had watched on TV (despite technically being the second Yugi show because of Season 0 but anyway) more or less followed no set rules, until its second season, and even then things were faaar from technical.

The first sets of cards were based on a combination of the fabled Season 0, video games previously released and clearly experimental cards based on the MtG. Eventually, some of the cards featured in the anime started making their way to the card game, or vice versa, but the whole thing was complete chaos. About half the cards we have in the banlist today were cards made in this period of anarchy.

The fact that the cardpool from this period largely came off video games, also meant a whooole lot of filler. Cards were intentionally bad so the player gets a sense of progress as they unlock stronger and better cards. In essence, this translated to a sh!tload of vanilla (non-effect) monsters with absolutely horrible stats, that were garbage even when they were first released. Many of these never made it to the west, as the first TCG releases were a best-of of the OCG cards released over the OCG's headstart of 3-4 years. The fact that most of these video games didn't follow the same rules as the actual card game didn't make things any easier, especially concerning Tribute Summoning in relation to monster Levels.

Some of the typical early game garbage.

The Archetype Emergence

In the final years of Duel Monsters, we ~very slowly~ started seeing the first signs of real archetype experimentation. Archetypes have no real equivalent in MtG, except maybe some support for specific Planeswalkers. They are basically the classification of cards based on their name rather than their characteristics. For example, every card that has "Elemental HERO" in its name, is part of the "Elemental HERO" archetype. A card could say "Special Summon 1 "Elemental HERO" monster from your GY." or something similar, which affects cards based exclusively on their name. Technically, the first cards to get support based on their names were the boobalicious "Harpy Ladies", though the first organized experimentation were the "Archfiends". Archetypes marked Yugi's gameplay going forward.

To sum up the above, we have not even reached 2004 yet, and Yugi's cardpool is composed of:

• Video-game imports that were based on completely different rules.
• Anime Season 0 imports that were based on completely different rules, even to the aforementioned video-games.
• Cards that came off the anime's Season 1, which more often than not, made up its own rules per episode, since it was written by a guy who cared only about writing a plot and none whatsoever about creating a balanced game.
• Japanese dudes who were studying how MtG in the west was progressing, and were experimenting with what they could pull off in Yugi, mostly by throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stack.

Following me until now? Good. This article is not meant to be a history lesson of Yugi, so I'll only stick to the development parts that directly affect the cardpool.

Chess Archfiends were possibly the earliest archetype in the game to have a common mechanic, though that common mechanic was not supported by any card.

The Duel Terminal

Some of the readers are not even old enough to have seen an arcade in real life. Basically, these are small businesses housing gigantic (human-heighted) consoles, which exclusively play one game each. Their roots are tied to the origins of gaming, but they were mostly created to suck up coins from bored 90s kids. Nowadays, these have completely died out in the west, but in the used-panties-venting-machines Japan, such businesses still thrive.

This is where the Duel Terminal comes in: Arcade machines created by Konami, with a built-in scanning system, that could read the players' actual, physical cards, allowing them to battle against the virtual AIs. Winning games in these rewarded physical, unique cards. While these arcade machines used existing cardpools, they also introduced brand new cards developed alongside the main game and following its technical progression.

Leader of the "Steelswarm" tribe, an army of demon locusts. Their unsealing was one of the most decisive events in the Duel Terminal storyline.

Unlike video games of the past, these new cards were following brand new lore, set in their exclusive worlds. What is now branded as the "Duel Terminal World" is the gigantic epic of tribe wars over the course of in-lore centuries, all of which we saw unfold part by part with each new installment. Entire archetypes were introduced, which were lorewise set to oppose other archetypes, their stories depicted in the artworks and released in products called "the Master Guides".

While Yugi did already follow some storylines, like the fate of "Warrior Lady of the Wasteland", "Gigo" and others, it was never anything of this scale. The tribal wars of the Duel Terminal tied directly to the archetype focus, with each one now strictly following common mechanics. For example, the "Shaddoll" archetype, which is created from stolen monsters of other archetypes (both artwise and mechanics-wise), strictly shares two common mechanics amongst all its maindeck monsters: All of them have Flip effects, and all of them trigger an effect off being sent to the GY by other card effects, & you can only choose one of their two effects per turn.

"Ib" trying to commit suicide so she will not harm her friends while possessed by "Lee". The whole "World Legacy" storyline pretty much centered around saving her, and is structured like a JRPG.

The cardpool did already feature some archetypes that strictly followed common mechanics, like the "Chess Archfiends" and the "Gladiator Beasts", but it was Duel Terminal that set this type of design in stone, which, in my opinion, is what yugi is best at. You can read more about that in other articles of this blog, but basically having a strong common mechanic and revolving the design of a whole archetype around that, allows archetypes to have a strong identity, while at the same time not feeling cheap, as they do not have to over-rely on brainless consistency boosting.

The Duel Terminal storyline has now ended, spanning over many real and in-lore years, featuring tens of archetypes along its run. It was received pretty well by the players, and its design philosophies have stayed, even without the arcade machines. The next isolated world was the "World Legacy", which introduced many of my favourite decks in the game, and once that isolated world's storyline ended, next came the current run of the "Fallen of Albaz" world.

The "Dogmatika" nation turning on "Ecclessia", who they consider unfit for their theocracy after she showed mercy to "Fallen of Albaz".

For me and many others, the Duel-Terminal type card design is the epitome of good design in yugi.

The Anime

With a trend that began in 5Ds, was polished to perfection in Zexal and fully utilized in Arc-V (those are the names of Yu-Gi-Oh shows, each with different characters), the duels between characters started evolving into something more than a simple game being played while the plot went forward. Their playstyles, their cards and the rythm of the duels were all tied directly to the characters and their emotional state while using them. The duels became extensions of heated conversations, in a way.

This trend translated to two things: 1)Some borderline amazing television, where the angrier the combatants got, the more aggressive the cards themselves became, etc for other emotions. 2)Some very unfocused archetypes, because the cards played had to match the emotional state of the users and also serve the plot, as some characters just have to win or lose certain duels for the purposes of the story.

Do you know in how many occassions your "Blackwing" monsters will have been destroyed during your turn and you would be in desperate need of an LP boost to survive an opponent's burn strategy in the real game? NEVER. This is the kind of stuff that gets thrown to the card game's way when the anime's needs must be met.

Say that character "A" is introduced as a really angry dude. The archetype "X" he plays will naturally reflect that, being some form of beatdown deck, or something similar. Now say that 20 episodes later in the series, character "A" is having a redemption arc, and has gone from being an a-hole to wanting to protect someone. Now that same archetype "X" has to completely abandon its beatdown focus and focus on defensive effects that protect monsters. The show writers are doing great work with character "A", almost writing poetry, but ALL those cards from archetype "X" end up in our card game, and they are just a mess. That's not to mention the countless times when character "A" has to win against character "B". To build the tension in the duel, character "B" has set up an almost unbreakable board, to drive the tension high. Now for character "A" to pull a win with his established archetype "X", suddenly the archetype has a card 100% specifically designed to deal with character "B"'s deck, that does not fit anywhere with the rest of the archetype. See how things get f@cked?

Until the recent "Vrains" anime ended, about 50% of the cards released in packs were either directs imports from, or support for, decks that were featured in the anime. While there were some efforts for anime archetypes to have common mechanics (like the very respectable "Superheavy Samurai", or "Trickstar"), in general it is simply a chaos of consistency-boosting effects and overly specific counters. The unsuccessful ones usually suffer from too many situational cards. The successful ones still suffer from too many situational cards, but they also have 10+ searchers all on their own.

The "Performapal" archetype represents Arc-V's protagonist's desire to make people smile, and were therefore circus animals, with a focus on doing gimmicky entertaining stuff. Now sometime in the later episodes the protagonist is going through a possession, which makes him go berserk. Aaand pop, here comes the above guy, who has f@ckall to do with the rest of the archetype, to represent the protagonist's edginess at the time, using burn damage effects.

That is not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie

Do you know when an archetype stops receiving support in Yugi? NEVER. Remember: Yugi uses an Eternal format, that deck that you were playing 20 years ago is still legal in tournaments, and if Konami decides to randomly release a single strong card that supports it, it can suddenly become relevant again. This is a common and ingenius practice by Konami to keep players hooked.

Hey, remember those "Arcana Force" cards that we released in 2006? Well, here is a searcher card we released for them... In 2020. Hey remember "Aliens"? Yeah, we bet you don't, but anyway here are two borderline amazing cards for them in 2021. Actually, why limit it to archetypes? Her, remember "The Legendary Fisherman" from the second season of Duel Monsters, a card that absolutely noone ever played even when it first came out? Well, here are some completely broken support cards for him, about 20 years after his release. Nothing. Ever. Dies. Every single booster that has come out for more than a decade randomly remembers at least one ancient deck and prints support for it.

Ok, this thing just came out and it is f@cking amazing. It is also support for a deck that was introced in bloody 2006.

To be clear, I don't want to present this as a purely positive thing. Konami's constant deck revivals quite often translate to consistency booster after consistency booster, which cheapen the decks. The anime characters' decks usually suffer from this most. 2006's Yugioh GX anime featured Jaden Yugi as a protagonist, with his Deck, "E-Heroes", a Deck with no common mechanics apart from a mild focus on Fusing Monsters. Again, the Deck was released in 2006, lets see how many consistency-boosting cards there are for "E-Heroes" today, WITHOUT counting the generic searchers for the broader "Hero" archetype. We are simply going to look EXCLUSIVELY at card that strictly support "E-Heroes" and not all "Hero" cards. And the answer is... 13. 13 different cards that search cards from the Deck, either Summoning them if they are monsters, adding them to the hand, or sending them directly to the Graveyard. Again, I'm not counting all the support cards for "E-Heroes", I'm counting specifically the cards that search the deck. This does not make for a healthy game.

Simple Booster Originals

This doesn't need much explanation, but many of the cards released in boosters are simply originals, connected to far smaller lores within their own universe, cards that are meta jokes by Konami for how poorly they've handled some banlists (no, seriously), or otherwise depicting what-if scenarios. Alternatively they might have no explanation whatsoever, like the fan-favourite yokai girls and the like.

(fans of the blog know I have a soft spot for Yuki here)

The Structure Deck Stuff

Structure Decks have always been a weird mix for Yugi. They are composed of 50% reprints and 50% original cards, they are only useful when bought X3, each can be built in 2 distinct, and they are more or less considered on the meta side of things. Specifically, Structure Decks have traditionally had completely overpowered bosses that affect the meta of the game for years to come and while in general they follow a certain theme each, it is rare for them to strictly follow specific common mechanics.

Personally I don't go crazy for Structure Decks due to them generally being poorly designed with an emphasis on overtuned bosses and too much brainless consistency boosting that makes them feel cheap, but they are still considered one of the better choices for building tournament-worthy decks on a budget (sometimes a bit too worthy, if you ask me).

In the last two years, the power level of released Structure Decks has dropped considerably, but it is only a matter of time before they determine the meta once more.

This bloody thing has been meta since 2017...

Sum-Up

Alright, so to sum it up, the cardpool consists of:

• The first generation of cards.
• Booster originals.
• The big saga, lore-tied archetypes.
• The anime-originating ones.
• Support for older archetypes.
• Beefy Structure Decks

I understand that we've had a complicated trip so far, but what's important to keep is that cards are first printed in the OCG, which is the Asian-country format, and from there get eventually transferred to the TCG, which is the west's format. Got that? Great.

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TCG Exclusives

Yeah, them ramen-eaters can suck it! We've got our own stuff that will eventually, with years of delay get transferred over to them. As the name implies, these cards are designed in America or Europe, and it's a while before the OCG gets them. To be clear, I'm not talking about 1-2 cards here, I'm talking about the consistent release of entire archetypes for the past decade or more.

TCG exclusive cards either follow no lore, or have a lore strictly contained within their own archetypes, and not interconnected with other cards' (...except when it is). TCG exclusive archetypes follow the design philosophies of the Duel Terminal, meaning the entire archetypes are focused on one very specific common mechanic among their cards, which makes them some of the most enjoyable stuff you can play. 

Their impact on the game is almost randomly placed on either end of the extreme. Either people barely noticed they were there, like the recent fiasco that was "War Rocks", or they exploded into popularity so much that they completely changed the game, like "Kaijus" and "Kozmos". Possibly the single most influential TCG exclusive archetype to come out were the "Burning Abyss", an archetype of fiend monsters based on Dante's Inferno. They were released in 2014. Want to know for how long they stayed meta-relevant? So do I, because the f@cking things still won't die.

The Kaijus, along with their Field Spell "Kyoutou Waterfront", were designed by Americans and then imported to Japan.
Try to wrap your head around that.

Korean Exclusives

Technically Korea is part of the OCG release cycle, but realistically, there's no more communication between Korea's design teams with Japan's than ours. Korea (it was never specified but I will assume we're talking about South Korea) had at one point started releasing cards at a steady rate like the TCG a few years ago, but that eventually died down after a certain fiasco that we will mention below. As far as I remember, the only Korean archetypes are the "Entity" monsters and the "Burgersstoma"/"Paleozoic" archetype. Other than that the country has only been releasing some singles over the years, the most famous of which is "Fiendish Rhino Warrior", which is heavily played in the TCG-made "Burning Abyss". 

Speed Duels

Speed duels are (sort of) a different format, and were very clearly an experiment by Konami, for the rushed decision that was to follow. They use a very limited card pool from the main game, particularly focused on the first season of Yugioh (the one where Yugi is the protagonist and that you probably watched back in the day), with cards that were featured in the anime. Compared to the modern game, they are very slowly paced, and they are more or less completely abandoned in Japan, while in the west they continue to see some popularity, especially with younger audiences. The main-game cards reprinted for Speed Duels (they have a "Speed Duel" note on the bottom-left) can be used in the main game, but not vice versa.

Speed duels have somewhat different rules compared to the main game:

• 1 less card drawn at the start of the duel.
• 2 less monsters & spell/trap zones.
• 10 less cards in the Extra Deck, which is exclusively used for Fusions.
• 20 less cards in the main deck.
• 4000 less starting LP (4000).
• No Main Phase 2.
• They also use the Speed-duel exclusive Skill Cards, which are separate from the player's Deck, and give players an one-time ability they can use at any point in the duel.

The super-popular digital game Duel Links is basically an advanced version of Speed Duels

Rush Duels

The final product for what Speed Duels were an experiment for, Rush Duels have not yet been imported to the west other than than an upcoming video game adaption for the Nintendo Switch. The seventh season of the Yugioh Anime (called "Yugioh Sevens") only features Rush Duels, and is, for me, completely underrated.

While there are a lot of callbacks to the main game in Rush Duels' cardpool, the cards used in Rush Duels are exclusive to Rush Duels, and cannot be used in the main game (called "Master Duels") at all. The differences with the main game include: 

1. Limited number of available zones & starting cards in hand and extra deck space, no Main Phase 2, similar to Speed Duels. 
2. No Standby Phase.
   
3. Only 1 Trap can be activated per Chain.
4. Certain cards are marked as "Legend" cards, and a player can only have 1 of them in their Deck and only X1 (they're basically the real broken stuff).
5. At the start of each turn, the turn player draws until they have 5 cards in their hand. 
6. There is no limit to the number of times you can Normal Summon per turn. 
7. Maximum Summon cards & mechanic. 
8. Original monster types used exclusively for and by Fusion Monsters (such as "Cyborg"/"High Dragon", which do not exist in the main game). 
9. Card layout & cardpool unique to Rush Duels.

Speed Duels always felt to me like the main game, but less and slower. The Skill Cards did their bit to add a unique flavor to them, but it was not nearly enough. Rush Duels are just their own thing, which I love. The mechanic of drawing until you have 5 cards at the start of your turn instead of the standard 1 card incentivizes overextending, either for defense to survive your opponent's turn or for offense to break through your opponent's board and deal as much damage as possible before their turn comes, and makes turnarounds very feasible. There is also a very heavy emphasis placed on non-Effect monsters, and paying costs for your effects, usually in the form of milling cards from the top of your Deck or discarding cards from your hand, which balances the game just right. Furthermore, it is nice that the game is for the most part unclogged from all those weird Extra Deck monster types and brought down to a more basic, fu~MAXIMUM SUMMON!

This right here is Yugi's Mystic Elf from her younger days... Partying it up in an 80s-style disco... Did I mention a younger Dian Keto used to be a gold-digger (in "that" sense) and a prison warden in BDSM gear (no, really)? Rush Duels are great. Anyway, notice the completely different card layout for the Rush Duel cards.

Chaos

This article got derailed a bit with Speed and Rush Duels, so taking them out of the equation, I want you to look at the rest. The game's ongoing cardpool is not made by a single design team, but rather by 6 different ones, which must all balance their respective cards to about the same power level and at the same time, ensure that they don't interact with each other too much.

One of the most characteristic examples of the mess that is created, was the dual release of "Toadally Awesome" by the Japanese and the "Burgersstoma"/"Paleozoic" archetype by the Koreans. 

The "Frog" archetype has been a joke and a source of gimmicky, niche strategies for years in Yugi. Consisting of Level 1 or 2 WATER, Aqua monsters, "Frogs" were an archetype in name only, with no specific focus in their designs (each one did its own gimmicky thing, completely unrelated to other "Frogs" for the most part. "Frogs" got about 1 new card per year for more than a decade. Power-creep included, they were never really played as a Deck of their own. 

At that time, Konami released "Toadally Awesome", a completely overpowered boss with very difficult to gather materials (2 level 2 Aqua monsters, by no means monsters commonly found in decks), that supported the "Frog" archetype. It was a 2200 ATK monster that could:

• Summon a "Frog" from the Deck once per turn.
  
• Tribute an Aqua monster, including the "Frogs" Summoned by its effect or even itself, to negate and steal an opponent's card (be that monster or spell/trap).
• If it hit the GY in any way, including tributing itself for its steal, it returned any WATER monster from the GY to the hand, including itself.

With "Frogs" only having 2 practically usable cards to serve as materials for the Summon of "Toadally", the boss was designed as a pay-off for a very niche, largely unreliable Deck, for folks who wanted to do some fun experimenting on a clearly casual level.

At the same time, the Koreans released the "Burgersstoma"/"Paleozoic" archetype, an archetype consisted entirely of Traps with generic effects to disrupt your opponent and act as a toolbox, that could be Summoned as monsters after their first use as a trap... That could be Summoned as Level 2, Aqua monsters. For FOUR YEARS players were banging their head against the wall of stupid that was the "Paleofrog" deck, which almost completely dominated the meta in many formats, until power-creep finally started settling in and slowed it down. Even by today's standards, it is very frustrating to deal with.

I think I speak for everyone when I say this toad can go f@ck himself.

Conclusion

Yugi is gonna piss you off as much as you're gonna love it. Way too many minds and hearts with absolutely no common vision have created the game we see before us today. While we should not just give Konami a pass for all the sh!t we're being served (I have had just about enough of Fusion Spells that can Fusion exclusively from the Deck, personally), it is important to understand that a physical card game is going to have a lot more trouble getting balanced than a digital product that can be patched at any time. Want to enjoy the game? Take a deep breath, be creative, and throw a "Mystic Mine" player off a rooftop.

(Newcomers to the blog should know that a red butt is a happy butt.)