The Complete History of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Meta: Part 1 (2002-2005)

[Music] in late september of 2001 yu-gi-oh dual monsters began airing in the united states and almost immediately became a cultural phenomenon the main focus of the show was the titular card game and its massive success in america guaranteed that a physical version of dual monsters would hit store shelves in the near future the game had already taken off in japan and proven its potential market value and so after making a deal with konami to acquire the yu-gi-oh license upper deck entertainment sought to capitalize on the show's popularity and bring the game to a western audience and while i'm sure both upper deck and konami were expecting the game to be successful since its target audience was probably the anime's fan base of kids and teenagers i don't think they or anyone really could have anticipated that yugioh would go on to become one of the most complex popular card games of all time with a history and lore 18 years in the making and just as deep as the one present in the anime and manga it was based on while the only experience many people have with yu-gi-oh comes from playing the game casually when they were younger behind the scenes there has always been a fiercely competitive dynamic and perpetually evolving metagame this is the story of yugioh's competitive landscape and how its many eras were defined by the strategies that dominated it cards that would take the game by storm and most importantly its base of dedicated creative players both willing and able to push the game to its absolute limit [Music] the yu-gi-oh trading card game made its debut outside of japan in march of 2002 with the release of legend of blue eyes white dragon and just like the anime had about six months before this the game almost immediately exploded in popularity uh pretty much everyone started playing it like it wasn't just a nerd thing it wasn't just like a weird person thing the people that were playing sports are doing it i mean boys and girls were all playing it pretty much the entire like classroom was playing it at this point though the game's appeal while widespread it was still mostly casual so there was no metagame to speak of yet there was like no rule book or anything lob didn't really come with anything on some packs so you really have to talk to the store owner to really get some info about the game but it really was like the recess meta none of us had sleeves none of us really had deck boxes you know you got the rubber band around your deck in like a plastic baggie fortunately this initial wild west period was pretty brief towards the end of the month the yu-gi-oh trading card game saw another major release and the roots of the competitive game began to take shape [Music] although the legend of blue eyes booster set was responsible for introducing many people to the game the release of the kaiba and yugi starter decks was what really propelled it into the mainstream yugi kaiba format that's like when you know a lot of people first got into the game they got like their you know their starter decks the most important thing about these starter decks is that they gave all potential players access to the game's official rule book this of course allowed a competitive scene to even exist in the first place and while the overwhelming majority of yugioh's players were casual ones local tournaments were already being held at various game shops and many players showed a clear interest in not only building the most powerful deck but playing that deck the most optimally i am told that this is a cross of chess and pokemon how exactly does one play yu-gi-oh one could at this point describe yugioh's rules as simple simple enough anyway that many people were able to pick up the basics just by watching the anime see each card has an attack number and a defense number first player to eliminate their opponent's life points wins the duel like many other trading card games yu-gi-oh is built around the idea of stripping another player of a vital resource in this case life points the most straightforward and typically the most effective way to decrease a player's life points has always been to deal damage by attacking with monster cards unless stated otherwise all monsters have the inherent ability to declare an attack either on an opposing player or on another monster and a monster's attack point score is indicative of how much damage it deals when attacking and how powerful it is relative to other monsters given the landscape of the early game it may have actually been true at this point that this attack point score was the most important thing about a monster [Music] following the release of both starter decks the card pool was still fairly limited while legend of blue eyes brought a whopping 126 cards into the game many of them were almost completely useless because lob the cards were just awful monsters didn't even have effects the only true effect monster was like zodia's head 87 of these 126 cards were monster cards and of those 82 were either normal monsters or fusion monsters with no effect starter dex yugi and kaiba collectively added 59 more cards into the card pool and 35 of them were also normal monsters this meant that most of the available monsters were clearly and undeniably worse than the truly exceptional few worth playing login was like a beast 1800 beat down let's go la jin the mystical genie of the lamp was a level 4 monster with 1800 attack points making it the most powerful monster a player could summon without tributing other monsters since the game prohibited players from playing any more than three copies of the same card in their deck other weaker monsters like neo the magic swordsman and battle ox level 4 monsters with 1700 attack were played alongside legion as they provided more consistent access to powerful monsters that could be normal summoned immediately giant soldier of stone and even occasionally monsters like aquamador and the mystical elf saw play due to their high defense values 2000 was after all the highest baseline stat printed on a level 4 lower monster by far but cards like these could typically only be used defensively or as set up for the future summon of a monster like summon skull [Music] attack summon skull was very strong one tribute monster that was the same attack as a dark magician while it certainly would have been cool if the format had been split between people playing dark magician and people playing blue eyes dark magician was made obsolete by the level 6 summoned skull summon skull had without a doubt more attack points than any other one tribute monster in the game and was even more powerful than many two tribute monsters like gaia the fierce knight and red-eyes black dragon blue eyes on the other hand was with no caveat no asterisk the most powerful monster in the game but this came at the cost of it being much more difficult to summon than summon skull summon skull was the more likely of the two to actually make its way onto the field but if a person could manage to summon blue eyes there wasn't a single monster that could kill it in battle aside from another copy of blue eyes while these powerful normal monsters were the bread and butter of most early decks they weren't the only monsters that saw competitive play as few of them as there were effect monsters did exist at this point but many of them had effects that just weren't powerful enough to make up for their lackluster stats of the 13 available effect monsters only four were truly useful and even though it was still powerful the weakest of these four was probably heinhain hanhane like many other early effect monsters has a flip effect meaning that its effect only activates whenever it's flipped face up either by the person who initially summed it face down or as a result of being attacked while face down henhane's effect allows a player to put any monster on the field back in the hand of its owner which again was fairly powerful but it was in most cases a strictly worse version of either wall of illusion or man-eater bug [Music] wall of illusion was arguably the best of the four as it had both a powerful effect and a respectable stat line its 1850 defense stat made it powerful enough to survive being attacked by anything that could be summoned without tributing and on top of that it would always at least temporarily remove anything that tried to kill it from the field it effectively served the same purpose as heinhain but unlike heinhoen it would usually remain on the field after being attacked due to its high defense stat and it was also able to remove multiple monsters from the field since its effect was not a flip effect and instead went off whenever it was attacked even if the attack destroyed it and even if it had already used the effect before this made removing it from the field through battle incredibly annoying as the only monsters powerful enough to do it had to be tribute summoned and even if they were able to destroy the wall of illusion they would be returned to the hand afterwards and their owner would need to go through the process of tribute summoning them all over again man-eater bug and trap master the last of these four were like kane hayne flip monsters with removal based effects they actually seem to be part of a three-card series along with armed ninja as each of their effects targeted and destroyed one of the game's three core kinds of cards monsters magic cards and trap cards nobody played arm ninja because most powerful magic cards weren't worth setting face down and with the sole exception of swords of revealing light didn't remain on the field after being activated the ability to destroy monsters and trap cards on the other hand was extremely powerful and more than made up for the pitiful attack and defense scores of both man-eater bug and trap master man-eater bug legend and wall of illusion were the game's first true staple monsters and found their way into mini decks both competitive and casual alike trap master wasn't quite as omnipresent as any of these cards but it was still popular among competitive players due to the power of trap cards [Music] trap cards offered the unique benefit of being usable during either player's turn and were usually designed to take advantage of this there were only nine of them released between the first booster set and both starter decks but a surprising number of them were actually pretty good without a doubt the best of them were trap hole and wabaku cards that were so good that pretty much anyone who played the game ran both at 3. trample was one of the most reliable forms of monster removal in the game and was particularly useful against monsters that needed to be tribute summoned wabaku meanwhile was one of the only cards in the game that offered players any sort of protection from their opponent and it was pretty good protection at that it essentially skipped the other player's battle phase after being activated and since it could be activated at almost any point during either player's turn stopping it was really difficult another trap card that was extremely popular but not quite as good as either of these two was reinforcements the focus placed on attack points and the battle phase during this period allowed this card to shine as good as the game's few viable trap cards were however they couldn't compete with the power of what was easily the best kind of card in the game magic cards like trap cards magic cards had effects that were at the time typically much more powerful than those given the monsters unlike trap cards and even flip monsters however magic cards can be activated immediately with no setup at all required from the player this made them inherently more powerful than most monsters and traps for the simple fact that they were much much faster two of the most popular early magic cards were fissure and swords of revealing light these two were pretty similar in function to trap hole and wabaku respectively one could get rid of a monster and to the other was a powerful stalling card both saw about as much success as the staple trap cards of the era but they were far from the best magic cards in the game they were completely eclipsed by another group of cards often referred to as the power five [Music] [Music] these weren't just the most powerful magic cards in the game they were by a white margin the most powerful cards in the game i mean these cards are iconic right those are like classic any deck that included them was better for it and so they were played by pretty much anyone who had access to them they were so powerful and so widely used in fact that they led to the creation of the game's first forbidden and limited list where many of them have remained for the entire life of the game [Music] the first edition of this list went into effect at the beginning of may but it didn't actually ban any cards 10 cards were limited and two were semi-limited the first five cards to be placed in the limited section were the five pieces of exodia while these cards did act as an alternate win condition they have almost never been at the center of any of the game's most powerful decks it was probably for the best that they were placed here but it's hard to say that this had a substantial effect on the metagame what ended up being far more impactful was the decision to limit the previously mentioned power five magic cards i can completely understand why these cards were all limited in the context of 2002 yu-gi-oh just because these are game slash format warping cards for the time when you have a card that literally just says destroy all monsters on your opponent's field it's crazy right and it's it's so funny that a card that literally just says draw two cards was limited but like now in modern yugioh sense is banned that just goes to show how powerful drawing cards is in this game the two cards placed in the semi-limited section were also magic cards while card destruction was not omnipresent in the early metagame it may have been problematic if everyone could play three copies of it in their deck this card in multiple quantities hypothetically makes it very easy to force another player to lose by decking out and without a sight it was also occasionally played as a powerful draw card since pot of greed was now limited swords was a pretty big deal because unlike wabaku it allowed players to stall for three turns instead of just one like stalling three turns was like oh i can draw into my red gekki this ban list was the last major event of yuki kaiba format which meant that the game was able to stabilize over the course of the next month with dark hole and reiki limited fissure had become the most consistent way to get monsters off of the field with a card effect it was one of the most reliable ways to get rid of a wall of illusion without attacking it and it also made committing to attribute someone too early very risky which led many players to wait to summon their deck's boss monster until they had at least two monsters already on the field this is one of a handful of reasons that summon skull beatdown ultimately became the best deck of the format setting up a field of three monsters before summoning the blue eyes was pretty tough and in many cases even if a player properly played around fissure their blue eyes would just get destroyed by trap hole or perhaps even rygecki or darkhole for this reason those truly dedicated to making blue eyes work often played lord of d and the flute of summoning dragon cards that could help bypass the need to tribute monsters entirely a handful of other cards were experimented with and saw scattered success throughout this period but none would stick around for long yugioh was on the verge of its first major shakeup brought about by the june release of its next core booster set metal raiders added a staggering 144 cards to the game and thus nearly doubled the available card pool of course not all 144 were actually good but given the sheer volume of new cards the game was bound to see a noticeable leap in power while beatdown decks and summon skull beatdown decks in particular continued to dominate the meta the cards added in metal raiders almost completely changed how these decks and the game in general were played [Music] surprisingly this set's magic cards were actually largely overshadowed by many of its new traps which brought with them the idea of a brand new form of interaction negation you activated my trap card actually started to matter unlike for example trample and wabaku these were not cards meant to respond to one action or effect with another the purpose of these new cards was to prevent certain things from happening entirely there were five new cards with a negation clause in this set and four of them in particular were designed to negate individual cards all of them were counter-trap cards meaning that they couldn't be responded to once they were activated except with other counter-trap cards and they all allow the player to trade some of their resources in order to completely negate the activation or summon of another card [Music] what's interesting is they all asked the player for something different in exchange they all had a different cost and because of this solemn judgment and horn of heaven saw very limited play a lot of people did not like solemn judgment during its original release like it's the omni negate but you have to pay half your life points i think it's fascinating that this didn't just become like a staple immediately out of the gate like i think looking back some people are probably just like i don't know why we just weren't all running three of this just because of how powerful the card it is they valued life points a lot more because it was just a race at the time it wasn't about maintaining a solid position as much magic jammer and seven tools of the bandit on the other hand did see immediate and widespread success with magicjammer being the more popular of the two despite how good many of these new traps were the power five were still the best cards in the game and negating any of them was typically better than negating another trap card like oh but what if they were gecking me and i spent all this time setting up my entire field and they're just going to destroy it all then they started to realize hey i can use stuff in my hand to kind of substitute the destruction that said there was one new trap card in this set that could give the power 5 a run for their money mirror force also had a negation clause it negated monster attacks but what was much more important was after it negated the attack [Music] mirror force is just it's a board wipe but it's a board wipe that you get to use on your opponent's turn which i think what was so appealing about it especially with mirror force where people have to manage a resource not over commit that's when the that evolution started to really take place in tcg anyway the monsters added in metal raiders were just as if not even more impactful than the new traps first of all there were two new monsters that challenged le jin's position as the game's most powerful level four monsters seven colored fish and dark elf these two almost immediately made many of the normal monsters that had been popular before the release of metal raiders obsolete with seven colored fish in the game there is no reason to play neo or battle ox and cards like mystical elf and giant soldier of stone were a lot less useful than dark elf since they couldn't be used to attack people started to identify like they started min maxing if you want to summon the level 4 monster it has to have 1800 attack or else it's worthless this set also included plenty of good effect monsters and most of them followed the same design philosophy as the ones in legend of blue eyes in both starter decks a lot of them could be split into groups based on what they were designed to do and in most cases this was to manipulate and control resources but unlike their predecessors these new cards didn't always do so by removing cards from the field magician of faith and mask of darkness for example allowed the player to recycle magic and trap cards respectively equal as these two may seem magician of faith was definitely the better card here since magic cards can be activated immediately recycling them is a lot more effective than recycling trap cards is also at this point magic cards were just generally better than traps anyway and most of the good ones were limited to one copy per deck because of all of this she was good enough to become a metagame staple and many people chose to play the maximum three copies of her in their deck while we're on the subject of spellcaster type effect monsters there is another really good one released in this set [Music] she and sengen mostly did the same thing they could search the player's deck for pretty much any monster they wanted so long as that monster had less than 1500 attack points in sangan's case or less than 1500 defense points in witch's case even though the card pool was very small at this point these two had a vast range of search targets they could even search for each other and triggering their effects wasn't difficult at all none of the other effect monsters released in this set were anywhere close to as popular as sang in witch or magician of faith but there were still a handful worth mentioning crass clown and dream clown saw occasional success as the focus of the brand new clown control deck where you're actually trying to like kind of protect your clowns and switch them back and forth from defense attack and pop things while also using resource cards like sangan and which i believe that's one of the other decks that pops up during this era at the same time white magical hat and masked sorcerer laid the foundation for hand control which was nowhere near as powerful as it would eventually become at this point but saw light experimentation in a meta that was still mostly dominated by beat down in dragon rush the main thing that kept these monsters out of the spotlight was their stats unlike most of the other staple effect monsters of the time these cards didn't do anything upon being sent to the graveyard in order to get anything out of their effects players actually needed to keep them on the field and doing so was pretty difficult when cards like legitim dark elf and seven colored fish were all over the place the clowns could be protected by cards like wabaku and miriforce and their effects could be used to get rid of any monsters more powerful than them but there weren't a lot of ways to reliably trigger white magical hats effect there were a handful of halfway decent-equipped magic cards released in this set that provided monsters with pretty substantial attack point boosts but none of them were as strong as they needed to be to turn white magical hat into an actual threat there wasn't enough to really buff him up yet you don't have access to spare but like people do start to get the idea that like if i can do that it's great the best magic card in the set without a doubt was heavy storm this card is dark hole but for magic and trap cards and it was invaluable for dealing with problematic pieces of disruption like trap hole and mirror force heavy storm taught people how to be conservative it ended up making it to where you just can't set infinite back row it's like you always have to fear and respect storm because while heavy storm is in the format if you went like set five pass heavy storm was going to literally just obliterate you as with the previous batch of cards many of these new cards were strong enough that it called for an update to the banned list in july 2002 just one month following the set release mirror force was limited and sangin which of the black forest and heavy storm were all semi-limited as was the case before most decks were largely composed of a bunch of the same good staples and only really diverged when it came to a handful of individual cards that said beatdown and dragon rush were still different enough that they were given different names and both were still all over the place there was now an even more noticeable slant in favor of beatdown as the consistency gap between these decks had grown wider which of the black forest could grab summon skull straight from the deck and the magicjammer could negate the flute of summoning dragon now that mirror force was also a part of the equation actually keeping a blue eyes on the field was slightly more challenging and while this applied to beat down players as well it was a far less serious problem for them due to how much easier it was for them to summon their boss monster dragon rush players could still take advantage of the new search network by using either sengin or witch to retrieve lord of d but this was only helpful if they had both the flute of summoning dragon and one or more dragon monsters to summon with it already in their hand another big way this format differed from the last was in the availability of staple cards most of the good stuff released before metal raiders was included in one of the two structured acts the only exceptions being raigeki and pot of greed both of these cards were also pretty affordable especially when compared to mirror force and magicjammer which demanded a much heftier price other cards like heavystorm and 7tools were also somewhat pricey so this time around many of the formats best cards didn't see as much play as they otherwise would have solely due to how expensive they were on the secondary market and as bad as this may have seemed at the time this problem was about to get a lot worse in the months following the release of metal raiders yu-gi-oh's competitive scene began to pick up steam there were no high-profile tournaments to speak of yet but sanctioned events were hosted locally and regularly at game stores all over the world perhaps to incentivize players to attend these events licensed tournament stores were given tournament packs unique boosters that could only be obtained by participating in an official tournament the first tournament pack entered circulation on september 1st and it introduced 30 new cards to the game most of these new cards weren't any good as a matter of fact all of them were pretty awful except for one [Music] mechanical chaser if you played yu-gi-oh back in the day you understand mechanical chaser's legacy 1850 the one card to beat legend by 50 points and for the longest time that mattered a lot up until this point the playerbase may have taken for granted how accessible the game's best monsters had been seven colored fish and legend were anything but expensive even though the metagame had practically been constructed around them of course this was only true because they were easy to get a hold of and mechanical chaser quickly proved that but the thing is no one could really get their hands on this card because it was a tournament pack card tournament packs only came with three cards per pack instead of the usual nine and they were also less likely to contain foil cards to put things into perspective axe raider is a card that would have been outdated by the time the first starter decks came out but because of how rare it was it was more expensive than many of the best cards in the game axe radio was a really expensive card when they first came out mechanical chaser on the other hand was actually really good and it was even more rare than axe raider was 200 200 as minor as the attack difference may seem mech chaser was essentially a better version of a card that had been the bread and butter of competitive play all the way up until its release it was bound to have a noticeable effect on the game however seeing as each copy of the card was worth 200 it was pretty rare to run into somebody who played one much less three of it in their deck the advantage that these few players had over the rest of the player base was pretty substantial though it was just a landslide so i have this guy from my locals named kyle miller and he got a hold of three mechanical chasers kyle started to go over to these 50 60 man tournaments taking down like every single one winning full boxes and billy only remembers the frustration of running into mech chaser time and time again and it just being this money wall [Music] two weeks after the release of the first tournament pack magic ruler made its way on the store shelves while metal raiders did much to expand the game's pool of viable trap cards as its name implies this set was heavily focused on magic cards [Music] a magic themed booster set may have seemed like a bad idea at the time since for it to be any good it would have to include at least a few magic cards as strong as the power 5. against all odds magic ruler actually pulled this off by introducing five power play magic cards of its own the three most famous cards in the set confiscation delinquent duo and the forceful sentry all allowed the player to remove cards from their opponent's hand delinquent duo was technically the best since it discarded two cards at the same time delinquent duo i don't know who in testing thought that card was okay like delinquent duo was such a degenerate card rather than just playing your own game you're just not letting your opponent play at all they have to lose two cards right away so your starting hand is now three cards but the others had the advantage of letting the player choose which card they wanted to get rid of i'm just gonna look at your hand and get rid of your card confiscation even though it only rips one the hand knowledge that you get from your opponent is almost better than ripping out a card with delinquent duo so like that's a debate that's been going on forever at this point life points is starting to matter less and less and people are realizing that hey control is probably the way to go as long as you have at least one life point left you don't lose and that's like what magic really really pushed for like confiscation a lot of these cards they have life point cost painful choice was a few years ahead of its time but it was by no means bad because of this it could turn itself into any one of the five best cards left in the player's deck and with the help of already popular cards like monster reborn and magician of faith it could give them access to two or even three of the five cards if you have five ideal targets to put into your hand you can just put out all five painful choice really doesn't take its own towards chaos i want to say but right now people are trying to figure out can i use it with magician of faith and make it worth it finally there was snatch deal unlike most equip cards snatch steel didn't do anything to beef up the monsters of the person playing it it was actually meant to be equipped to an opponent's monster at which point control of the equipped monster would change though snatch steel was certainly the best equipped card in the set it wasn't the only good one magic ruler included a handful of others and among them the best was acts of despair simply put this was as good as it got in terms of cards that boosted attack points and unlike stimpak it didn't have any glaring drawbacks [Music] [Music] this set's contributions extend beyond the individual cards it added as it also introduced three new kinds of magic cards to the game quick play cards are a sort of hybrid between trap cards and traditional magic cards they can be activated from the hand just like regular magic cards but if they are set face down then they can be activated during either player's turn just like trap cards can magic ruler included four of these but only two saw any actual success rush recklessly was like reinforcements but better in every way it didn't need to be set before being used and it also offered a bigger attack boost it wasn't as strong as acts of despair but it was far more versatile and it wasn't really susceptible to being destroyed the same way equip cards were this was also fairly important following the release of magic ruler since the set also featured mystical space typhoon a new way for players to remove threats in the back row while the card lacked the overwhelming power of heavy storm like fissure it was a much needed alternative to a mass removal card that many players ran as many copies of as they could spell and trap destruction back in the old days of yugioh they viewed it as like wow this card is really powerful continuous cards are exactly what they sound like they stay on the field after being activated until they're destroyed there were also four of these in magic ruler and while none of them were good enough to be staples three of them formed the backbone of the first popular burn deck the goal of a burn deck is to kill the other player through effect damage this was possible before the release of magic ruler thanks to cards like just desserts but it was nowhere near as practical as it became with the help of many newly released cards depending on what the other person was playing messenger fps had the potential to be a strictly more powerful version of swords of revealing light though it couldn't stop the other player from attacking with weaker monsters like sangen it was perfectly capable of keeping the game's most powerful monsters at bay and this was important as it meant that anyone who played it had significantly more time to accrue resources that they could use to burn through their opponent's life points cards like ukazi and just desserts were obviously effective enough at this but they couldn't hold a candle to toll and chain energy so for those of you that don't know for chain energy either player now no matter what they want to play it's gonna have to pay a thousand life points to normal summon them and set or activate cards from his or her respective hand oh god oh boy our opponent so each player is going to have to pay 500 life points to advance on that game state what a combo enjoy only playing five cards by the way this is really edgy games day holy this might go to deck out the set's most interesting additions to the card pool were ritual cards ritual monsters were a brand new kind of monster that could not be normal summoned and instead had to be special summoned through the use of ritual magic cards while this was cool in theory in practice the ritual summoning mechanic was deeply flawed most of them had no effect and to summon them a player needed a lot of resources readily available like rituals just mechanically buff and this is like before we got a lot of the stuff we have now but like you it's a it's a three-card investment well technically two because you keep the ritual monster but you need to specifically have your ritual monster your ritual spell and then a monster to use as tribute for the ritual spell so you use the ritual spell on the monsters you neg to to summon the monster this created numerous issues with consistency as often times a player would have one or the other but not both then on top of that the player needed to tribute other monsters as part of the process all to summon a card that offered nothing but an okay stat line and it's like this is all you're getting for your cards it was just yeah the only exception was relinquished who actually had an extraordinarily powerful effect it was also by a wide margin the lowest level ritual monster in the game which also meant that it was the easiest to summon these things weren't enough to completely make up for the previously mentioned issues with ritual summoning but it brought enough to the table that it was occasionally played only index built specifically to take advantage of it however speaking of monsters despite the set's theme there were actually more monsters than magic cards in it but only a handful of them made their way into the meta game many of the monsters in the set followed in the footsteps of saint and witch by offering players resources upon being sent to the graveyard [Music] there were six different monsters that could all upon being destroyed by battle summon any monster of a specific attribute straight from the deck as long as the monster had 1500 or less attack theoretically this was even better than what sang in her witch offered since these effects summoned their targets instead of just adding them to the hand but the many stipulations attached to the process kept most of these cards out of the competitive discourse mystic tomatoes stood out from the rest however and almost immediately saw moderate success since its ability to summit dark monsters made it a direct pipeline to many of a player's most powerful tools nimble momonga and giant germ did something similar but were at least initially not quite as popular unlike the elemental recruiters these cards only let players summon extra copies of themselves instead of picking whatever card they wanted but in exchange the player was allowed to summon up to two monsters at once instead of just one since momonga summoned itself in defense position and also caused a bigger netswing in life points upon being destroyed it was more popular than giant germ but both were mostly ignored in favor of mystic tomato for quite some time momonga was certainly present in the metagame following magic ruler's release but it wouldn't truly catch on until much much later i love nimble momonga i played it automatically at this point actually like i caught on to it somewhat early one thing people don't like is that you could draw two this is one of the first cards people start this guy well you don't want to draw two of these none of these monsters could compare to cyberjar though upon being flipped face up it could wipe out an entire board and then give both players five cards split between their hand and field cyber jar is freaking crazy i love the card but it was really a double edged sword like giving your opponent five cards giving yourself five cards blowing up the entire field cyber jar to me is such a yu-gi-oh card like it is one of the most high variance ridiculous effects i have ever seen in my life like it's just like there's no other way to put it this card could not exist in any other card game on october 1st two weeks after the release of magic ruler the forbidden unlimited list received another update which limited cyber jar all of the hand control cards painful choice snatch steel and a seventh card named upstart goblin that had yet to receive much attention the playerbase wasn't given any time to adapt to these changes before the next major shift in the meta however as this banlist update happened on the same day as the release of the second tournament pack morphing jar is such a good card [Music] morphing jar was really the only good card in the pack and like mechanical chaser before it it was an ultra rare whether it was better than mechanical chaser or not in the short term is up for debate but it was certainly very powerful even though it couldn't nuke the board or special summon monsters like cyberjar could using it was generally a lot less risky since cyberjar often left the other player with a lot more to work with at this point it was actually the only card in the game that could simultaneously leave the other player with less cards than they started with while leaving the person playing it with more cards than they started with in terms of like swings of card advantage morphing jar is definitely up there i think one of the things i like the most about morphing jar was when it comes to the more psychological aspect of yu-gi-oh and bluffing you could just set like let's say a man-eater bug and just set like your whole hand of what's actually settable and your opponent is going to 90 of the time think you have morphing jar and play like you have morphing jar and that way you can basically control what your opponent does if you set everything now it doesn't signal just like i have the thing to negate storm that also can signal i have morphing jar you know other cards don't necessarily create a dynamic like that a lot of the time audit cards you know they get played and they do what they're supposed to do a card like morphing jar that does more than what it just says on the card i think always just sets a very interesting precedent for how the game progresses later on like mechanical chaser this card probably would have been a staple if it was more accessible but because of how expensive it was it was just too difficult for the average player to get a hold of for it to have even a somewhat widespread presence in the early metagame i traded like almost this whole binder for a morphing jar back then the next court booster set pharaoh servant hit the scene only two weeks after the second tournament pack seeing as the last booster set was only a month old at this point the meta game was still in the process of developing around all the new cards it added beatdown continued to dominate in the post-magic ruler meta but lately its competition had been a lot more varied clown control and dragon rush managed to stick around and they'd been joined by burn relinquished and hand control decks barely anyone was sure what the best version of each deck was at the time of pharaoh servant's release however and it provided all of them with even more tools to experiment with most of the good stuff in this set came from its pool of magic and trap cards but that isn't to say it didn't have any good monsters goblin attack force took the idea at the core of cards like dark elf to a brand new extreme by being a level 4 monster with 2 300 attack points at this point its value was debatable because dark elf could still deal with anything that this thing was meant to deal with except for another newcomer from pharaoh's servant named the fiend mega cyber this card was notable for being one of the first monsters in the game that could essentially special summon itself for free monsters started to see a bit of shifting as well you got stuff like goblin attack force like monsters were getting stronger and easier to summon neither card attained staple status but both of them fit like a glove in particularly aggressive builds of the beatdown strategy even outside of these decks goblin attack force specifically was fairly popular due to witcher attack power you don't really need to attack with goblin attack force you can always sit on it like a very aggressive wall of some sort this set also introduced a new member of the jar series of flip monsters like morphing jar and cyberjar before it morphing jar 2 was a complete blowout whenever its effect resolved its power ceiling wasn't quite as outrageous as its predecessors but unlike both of them it could effectively end the battle phase since it got rid of all attack position monsters on the field and all the monsters that replaced them had to be set face down morphing jar 2 was the most annoying card combined with morphing jar 1 the thing is morphing jar 2 could summon out just more morphing jar 2 over and over and over again to mill out someone's entire deck this point a lot of players had cut many of the low-level monsters that dominated the early game in favor of newer alternatives but there still weren't any alternatives to the best of the original high-level monsters this would change following the release of pharaoh's servant [Music] jinzo almost immediately replaced summon skull as the best boss monster in the game while its attack stat wasn't quite as high this was hardly a problem thanks to its powerful effect [Music] trample wabaku and mirror force had always been pretty annoying pieces of disruption that made it really difficult to reliably tribute summon a monster like when you summoned them it felt bad because it gets trapped or do anything with a tribute summon monster once it was already on the field jinzo didn't care about any of these cards none of them could do anything to him or even be used at all while he was on the field this made choosing to summon him a lot safer than doing the same with other high-level monsters which many players agreed was much more valuable than 100 extra attack points just off the top my head jinzo was probably the most impactful card in that set at the time just because it really changed the dynamic with trap cards and with cards like mirror force yes it was 100 attack less than a sum and skull but like i mean the payoff of not having to worry about anything in your opponent's back row like that was just monumental [Music] i activate imperial order for a mere 700 life points per turn this car cancels out all your magic cars [Music] pharaoh's servant also introduced the ultimate foil to jinzo a continuous trap card named imperial order this was without question the single best trap card released up to this point even eclipsing mirror force in terms of potential impact order was frustrating all the way through chaos man your power cards are so many spells magic cards were still the strongest type of card in the game just like they always had been so the ability to deny another player access to them altogether was obviously very useful since it was a trap card order could also be activated in response to magic cards allowing it to act as a sort of pseudo-magic jammer its optional maintenance cost also meant that on top of everything else the person playing it could get rid of it whenever they felt like it by simply choosing not to pay for it imperial order like right now of course we got the irrad one where you can't turn it off manually but back then it was just a free spell negation you had like some judgment uh magic jammer but imperial order was like you just activate this card you just got a free negation and you don't keep it yeah like you could choose when to turn it off and that's what made it so powerful the fact that now you can't is i honestly think they should have made it that way in the first place because it would have been a stronger balancing mechanism even to this day imperial order is still played because spell cards are one of if not like just the most powerful card type because of just how much they're they allow you to do and imperial order being just one of the biggest roadblocks in wanting to play spell cards it's uh it's legendary jinzo was one of the only ways to deal with this card since order negated most of the back row removal that existed at this point as a matter of fact perhaps as a direct response to imperial order pharaoh's servant introduced players to dust tornado this was essentially mystical space typhoon in the form of a trap card which under most circumstances would have made it strictly worse but the presence of imperial order in the mid game made this card a necessity since it was aside from jinzo one of the only reliable ways to remove the card from the field [Music] so [Applause] call of the haunted was another trap card alternative to a popular magic card in this case monster reborn just like dust tornado it was for the most part worse than its magic card counterpart but for different reasons mystical space typhoon was a quick play magic card so it could already be used during either player's turn this meant that dust tornado didn't really benefit from being a trap card aside from its utility as a way to destroy imperial order monster reborn on the other hand was a regular magic card and thus could only be activated during the main phase of the turn of its owner this meant that call of the haunted could actually be used in a few interesting ways that monster reborn couldn't but they call the haunted was also really cool too because it started changing the game and how people had to think because it like if your opponent had a set card and they were attacking with their monsters if there was a monster in the grave they could resurrect and kill you for game you could lose if that set card was called the haunted because you could use it like offensively like that or you could use it defensively to protect yourself from dying and i think that was pretty cool perhaps in order to compensate for all this added utility the card was given numerous drawbacks it could only summon monsters from its owner's graveyard the monster it summoned had to be in attack position and if it left the field for any reason the monster it summoned would be destroyed these came on top of the fact that it couldn't be used immediately like monster reborn could being a trap card and all so even considering all of its unique benefits it was a pretty substantial downgrade that said monster reborn's effect was still really powerful and the card was also limited so to most players call of the haunted was a welcome addition to the card pool strangely the set featured a second alternative to monster reborn as well except this one was also a magic card premature burial carried with it all of the same stipulations as call of the haunted did with the only exception of course being that it didn't have to be set for a turn before being used now in exchange it was given an additional life point cost on top of everything else but just like with call of the haunted none of this was enough to dissuade players from using it monster reborn's effect was again really really good and there were plenty of people who were more than willing to make these kinds of concessions if it meant that they could essentially run extra copies of it in their deck the only other magic card in the set whose immediate impact was comparable to premature burials was noblemen of crossout this card brought an idea to the forefront of competitive play that had already been introduced but had yet to truly catch on it removed from play instead of simply sending certain cards to the graveyard some cards forced others to be removed from the game entirely and this was the first high profile card designed to do that while this alone would have been enough to set the card apart from other one-for-one removal cards like fissure and the mystical space typhoon it took things a step further by removing from play all copies of its target from both players decks this card was extremely useful given the growing power and popularity of flip monsters and was one of the only ways aside from reiki and dark hole to deal with them yeah i i cross out definitely changed the dynamic of like flip effect monsters which as we said there's you know cyber jar there's man eater bug morphing jar came out around this time and and for pretty much all future flip effect monsters too and being able to just deal with set monsters doesn't have to be flip effect monsters just anything your opponent sets the fact that you just have a single piece of removal just to deal with it these six cards compose the set's lineup of new competitive staples but of course they were far from the only new cards to see meta success magic drain and mirror wall were decent and cheap alternatives to magic jammer and mirror force respectively magic train allowed players to ignore magicjammer's discard cost and mirror wall had the benefit of not being on the limited list ceasefire was a borderline staple card that while certainly popular was almost exclusively played in the side deck it made dealing with flip monsters a lot easier and it also provided a power boost to burn decks as a matter of fact this set did quite a bit to power up both burn and hand control skull invitation burning land miner goblin official attack and receive and type 0 magic crusher all had burn effects and gravity bind like messenger of peace could be used to keep the player safe from potential attacks these were by no means game defining or even definitive for burn decks but they all saw at least minor experimentation hand control meanwhile was given time seal and light for sword two cards that helped slowly but surely whittle down the resources in another player's hand the set also featured limiter removal which was most useful to players who already had two of the most expensive cards in the game jinzo and mechanical chaser this card was one of the first enablers of a reliable one-turn kill and was really effective because it was often used in conjunction with jinzo the ban list in december put many of these powerful cards in check and even changed the placements of some previously released cards like witch of the black forest surprisingly though given how quickly pharaoh's servant had come out following magic ruler the next major shift in the metagame wouldn't happen until march of the following year when the game would take its furthest leap forward and power yet on march 1st yu-gi-oh players saw the release of two new booster packs labyrinth of nightmare and the much less impactful tournament pack 3. at first glance tournament pack 3 may seem like a big deal since mechanical chaser was reprinted in it as a far more accessible super rare but it just so happened that labyrinth of nightmare made the card irrelevant with not just one but two new monsters [Music] gemini elf was a strict upgrade in terms of attack points and so it became the new face of powerful level 4 monsters jim and i elf like you know we have mechanical chaser beat now hooray the other card bazoo the soul leader was a bit more interesting bazoo's effect let a player remove up to three cards in their graveyard from play and its attack would go up by 300 points for each the card was supposed to specify monsters in its effect but due to a translation error any cards in the player's graveyard could be used this made it very easy to crank the zoo up to 2500 attack points and if the player was low on resources it could still at the very least trade blows with a gemini elf interestingly enough this set also included a hard counter to the zoo kaiku the ghost destroyer kaiku wasn't as powerful as gemini elf or even mechanical chaser but it was one of the first monsters in the game to have both a high stat value and a powerful effect gemini elf was like super saiyan 2. everyone could be super saiyan now so all the 1800 beat sticks they all can gain decent effects now you got stuff like kaiku where it just prevents the graveyard from being manipulated kaiku is a very interesting card because this was like la jin power creeped like to infinity you know kaiku could not only get rid of resources from another player's graveyard but it also had an effect that prevented the opponent from removing cards in the graveyard from play which by extension could stop bazoo from increasing its attack points in the first place speaking of bazook kaiku also benefited from a similar translation error at first they're mistranslated and you can remove any card for these cards so kaiku could remove any two from the graveyard bazoo could remove any three and the trap card most importantly called skull layer could remove any cards from the graveyard to pop so if you go read skull layer is along the same concept and you remove from play any number and instead of monster cards it's cards and your graveyard destroy a face-up monster on the field who's level is equal to the number of cards so for just four cards out of your graveyard you can go pop any level four that's getting summoned one more monster of note was on byra the dark in a vacuum without taking card price and availability into consideration this card may not seem very good but gemini elf was a secret rare making it very difficult for the average player to get their hands on three copies sambira however was a common and despite his many restrictions he could kill one potentially even two copies of gemini elf all by himself [Music] in addition to many high attack monsters this set included two extremely powerful equipped cards magepower and united we stand both boosted the attack and defense of the equipped monster relative to the number of cards the player controlled they allowed monsters to easily reach some pretty absurd attack values and they even brought about another offshoot of the basic beatdown strategy focused on mahavillo a monster that had been released all the way back in magic ruler many decks that didn't play maha still ran both of these new cards as well but they weren't staples the same way any of the three new monsters were mage power and united we stand like you said it's like the first like genuinely good equipped spells just because of like it seems silly that these cards used to be good but like if you go like summon monster set for mage power that monster has like 2 500 extra attacks so just the the power scale of how big a monster could get would just be absurd most of the new trap cards were either niche or subpar but one was good enough to join the other staples like imperial order and mirror force torrential tribute was like a combination of trap hole and dark hole and because of its reactive nature one could argue that it was even better than dark hole was but a torrential is probably the most impactful card long term from the set torrential tribute everything gets destroyed a board wipe that you could flip on your opponent's turn it wasn't they didn't have to attack it could just be on summon people are smart about it they they use their sagans to toggle it themselves people had to learn how to play around that card again it kind of created the heavy storm dynamic where you had to be more conservative in thinking and respect your opponent's back row because it's like if they have torrential i might just lose the game so a lot of times you might see older yu-gi-oh players not playing into it by over committing to their board and summoning a second monster they might just poke with like whatever monster they have on the field because if they have the possibility of not running into torrential they're not going to and so that again it just taught players to be very conservative jar of greed and magic cylinder saw occasional play as well but neither came close to offering the power of torrential tribute what really pushed this month over the edge was the simultaneous release of starter deck joey and started at pegasus on march 30. though many of the best cards in both decks were just reprints from older sets they each included one of the best cards in the game [Music] scapegoat and graceful charity were both better than any of the magic cards in labyrinth of nightmare while there was some debate about whether scapegoat belonged in the main deck or the side deck and some people opted not to play it at all it certainly had a noteworthy metagame presence probably enough to warrant being called a staple even though the tokens it generated couldn't really be used for anything at least not yet this kind of defensive power was almost unprecedented unlike swords of revealing light this card didn't need to be activated preemptively and could be used to intercept incoming attacks not to mention it also wasn't vulnerable to magic and trap card destruction now all that said as you may expect graceful charity was definitely the better card here you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who wasn't running it in their main deck and it isn't very hard to see why graceful charity this had been banned before it even was legal but you draw three and you discard two it more or less did the same thing as pot of greed and while it wasn't necessarily better it also wasn't necessarily worse it could be either or depending on the situation and the discard cost while usually a drawback allowed players to do a lot of things that pot of greed didn't let's say you drew like monster reborn off graceful charity but then you could like discard the jinzo in your hand and monster reborn the gentle like that's so powerful and just for simplified yu-gi-oh back then it was just taking the game to a completely another level and as if these cards hadn't already done enough for the game just a little over a week later stairway to the destin duel shook things up again by introducing two more staples to the card pool each copy of the game included a promotional pack and all of these packs contained the same three cards one of them was nothing more than a collectible for fans of the anime but the other two seemed like they were tailor made for competitive play harpy's feather duster more or less speaks for itself this was the rygeki to heavy storm's dark hole and was just as popular as you would expect sinister serpent on the other hand was powerful in a way that wasn't quite as obvious at first glance it doesn't really appear to do anything but as it turns out there were actually a lot of very easy and useful ways to take advantage of its effect you essentially created infinite discard fodder for you so just as an example if you did decide to play cards like let's say magicjammer or just any good discard card graceful charity would probably be a better example here it's a card that you choose to play in your deck that you know technically doesn't do anything but if you ever have it in tandem with these other cards that require you to discard whether for cost or as part of the effect you aren't losing any card advantage as a result of that and the funny thing is in a very simplified game state you could effectively just keep setting sinister serpent over and over again so you never technically lose a monster while you're drawing cards off the top of your deck each turn so it was this really weird card but it actually just made a tremendous impact on the game as usual most of the best new cards made their way onto the limited list between the two updates released in april and may 9 total changes were made graceful charity was the only semi-limited card while magic cylinder sinister serpent harpy's feather duster and the two new equipped spells were all limited sangan and heavy storm made their way to the limited section as well in sangin's case because he like witch of the black forest continued to get better every time new monsters were released they just like they power crept themselves as more good stuff came out and in heavy storm's case because harpy's feather duster did the same thing it did by this point it was pretty clear that yugioh was a much different game than it had been a year prior but one thing hadn't changed and that was that beatdown was still the best deck around despite how many challengers had attempted to take its place this was still the most popular and most powerful deck in the game just like it had been back in may of 2002. the deck was a sort of ship of theseus though it's hard to say whether or not it was the same deck it used to be since pretty much all of the original pieces had been swapped out for new ones at this point the deck was certainly more control focused especially when compared to truly dedicated versions of the beatdown strategy but it's still aimed to do the same thing overwhelm the opponent with powerful monsters while using other tools like magic cards trap cards and effect monsters to control the game it's also worth pointing out that even with mechanical chaser out of the picture there were still plenty of expensive staple cards that a lot of players either couldn't or didn't feel like paying for this obviously affected deck building since it forced people to find alternatives to anything they didn't have which allowed a lot of cards to continue seeing play that otherwise wouldn't have speaking purely in terms of optimization though there really was no reason to play most of the stuff that had defined the early game and surprisingly the same was soon to be true of the beatdown deck itself one of the deck's oldest rivals hand control was about to be powered up substantially by the release of legacy of darkness in june and pharonic guardian in july these two sets changed the game in plenty of ways and one of the most notable ways they did is by giving hand control a bunch of new tools [Music] legacy of darkness had yatagarasu and drop off and pharonic guardian had spirit reaper and don zulu what was perhaps the most surprising about these four cards is just how good they actually wound up being none of them were all too different from white magical hat after all and if that card hadn't pushed hand control over the edge well it was hard to see why these would danza luge in particular was almost identical but despite this he was arguably the most important piece of support the deck received in either set there were a handful of different reasons for this but more than anything else the card owed a lot of its success to mystic tomato which had an extremely strong metagame presence at the time tomato had always been fairly popular following its debut and magic ruler but now that sengen and witch were both limited it was seeing an unprecedented level of representation the fact that everybody could only play one witch and one sang-in meant two things first that they showed up in the hand a lot less frequently and second that using one to search for the other was a much bigger commitment now that players had no extra copies to fall back on mystic tomato did a lot to minimize both issues by providing consistent access to both monsters and letting players pick which one they wanted to summon based on what monsters they wanted to search for anyone who was already playing mystic tomato for this reason didn't have to go out of their way to include don deluge in their deck since he was also a dark monster with 1500 or less attack this was one advantage he had over white magical hat the other being his higher attack point score one of hat's most glaring weaknesses was the fact that it could be killed by pretty much any non-flip monster in the game while don zaloog was no powerhouse sangan and witch couldn't kill it and it could at least trade with an attack position mystic tomato together these two things meant that he was safer and more convenient to summon and easier to keep alive than magical hat was which of course also meant that resolving his effect was a lot easier too all of these things also applied to spirit reaper while this monster couldn't attack over really any meta-relevant monsters it made up for this by itself being immune to battle destruction this protection gave the card added utility outside of its role in hand control decks particularly as a stalling tool and ironically made it an effective shield against other monsters with discard effects like its own spirit reaper was also another one that became a very popular card um don zelugu was really good uh john salute was broken even when they weren't actually able to resolve their effects both monsters don zulu in particular were capable of applying a lot of pressure by simply being on the field it wasn't uncommon for players to use cards like raigeki and mirror force just to kill one or to search for gemini elf with witch for the same reason conversely they also made a person's power cards more valuable not just because they could be used to get rid of either monster but also because it was easy for both don zulu and spirit reaper to take advantage of big swings and momentum following up a reiki or dark hole activation with an attack from one of these two was an often devastating one-two punch that was very difficult to recover from and there were plenty of other cards floating around the meta landscape that could generate similar openings for them a lot of this also applied to yatagarasu and that's to say that yadda was good for many of the same reasons that these cards were but it was different in a few ways that were while subtle still very important one of the most unique things about this card was that it didn't have a discard effect but instead forced whoever it dealt damage to to skip their next draw phase now at a glance this may seem almost identical to the effect of a card like white magical hat since both have the same activation conditions and both leave the opponent with one less card in their hand the difference becomes apparent when asking the following question what happens when these monsters attack somebody who doesn't have any cards in their hand [Music] due to the nature of their effects there was actually a universal way to play around most of the hand control monsters already built into the game many players upon seeing a spirit reaper or a danza luge that they didn't have an answer for would begin setting as many cards as possible from their hand to the field these monsters and even cards like delinquent duo for example couldn't force someone to discard cards they didn't have to begin with after all from a certain perspective though you could say that's exactly what yatagarasu did this was the only hand control monster that could actually stop the player it attacked from getting a hold of new resources now under normal circumstances practically speaking an attack from yatagarasu wasn't any more devastating than an attack from zaloog reaper or magical hat if any of these monsters attacked the player with four cards in their hands then after their next draw phase they would still have four cards in their hand as opposed to five where things diverge a little bit is what happens when these monsters attack somebody who doesn't have any cards in their hand in three of these four cases the effects won't actually do anything and the attacked player will have one card in hand after their next draw phase in yatagarasu's case however after the draw phase the attacked player's hand will still be empty this player now completely out of resources would under normal circumstances not be able to do anything to protect themselves from being attacked by yada on their opponent's following turn and so their draw phase would be skipped again on their next turn then again on the turn after that then again on the turn after that over and over and over until they finally ran out of life points now as you may expect these three monsters weren't the only powerful newcomers both sets offered players quite a few powerful monsters to experiment with and many of them helped beat down just as much as some others helped hand control legacy of darkness in particular featured plenty of new tools for beatdown to use including two new level 4 monsters that both had 1900 attack points both monsters had unique stipulations attached to them so they weren't quite as practical to use as gemini elf but they were a lot easier to get a hold of accessibility aside spear dragon's effect actually made it fairly popular it was one of the first meta meta-elephant monsters with a piercing effect which basically meant that whenever it attacked a defense position monster it would still inflict battle damage to the person who controlled it this was a pretty big deal since its presence in the game made setting low defense monsters like magician of faith fairly risky when a player was low on life points this added a brand new layer of depth to the game and changed the way a lot of players approached its later stages now despite how good it was spear dragon did have one fatal flaw that being its goblin attack force esque drawback which left it helpless for an entire turn after it declared an attack fortunately unlike goblin attack force it didn't have to stay in defense position for two turns but that being said it did still have zero defense points so it was really easy to get rid of while it was in defense position it was ironically actually a perfect attack target for other copies of spear dragon so doing anything with this card went low on life points was pretty risky there was also another monster with a piercing effect in this set the level 5 air knight parshath this card was interesting because it had to be tribute summoned despite the fact that its attack point score was the same as spear dragons it didn't have all the other drawbacks but tribute summoning was a pretty big investment especially without the trap protection offered by a card like jinzo that said parshath was similar to jinzo in the sense that it made up for its relatively low attack power with the strength of its effect anytime someone used it to deal damage to their opponent they got to draw a free card it was like a sort of reverse white magical hat or dawn's a luge except because parsheth dealt piercing damage and had a much higher attack stat its effect was significantly easier to trigger given the current meta landscape and the growing power of hand control an effect like this was extremely valuable and ironically at a time when cards being discarded from the hand was more common than ever the fact that parshath needed to be tribute summoned wasn't as relevant as it otherwise would have been on that note there was actually another fairly meta relevant one tribute monster in legacy of darkness and it couldn't be special summoned from the graveyard like jinzo and parshath could dark ruler hades was a level 6 fiend monster that actually had both of them beaten in terms of attack power and while it was sometimes a bit less convenient to summon than they were when it did hit the field it had the potential to be just as impactful any monster with an effect that triggered when that monster was destroyed by battle could be negated by hades and at the time that included the overwhelming majority of meta relevant effect monsters sangan and witch morphing jar cyber jar mystic tomato nimble momonga even man-eater bug all of these cards essentially got reduced to normal monsters if they were destroyed by hades this was one of the most oppressive effects in the entire game not on the same level as imperial order or jinzo but still enough to win games almost by itself the fact that it couldn't be recovered if something happened to it did hurt its viability and unlike both parshat and jinzo it couldn't be searched by witcher singing but it was still popular enough to have a known meta presence in terms of sheer raw attack power hades was one of the most powerful one tribute monsters in the entire game second only to summon skull yeah had 50 more attack points than jinzo first of all that's massively important but he wasn't the most powerful monster introduced in legacy of darkness there was another newcomer in this set even more powerful than blue eyes white dragon but unlike expectations would suggest it didn't need two tributes to be summoned and actually didn't need to be tribute summoned at all [Music] as powerful as he was hades was totally eclipsed by injection fairy lily this card took the design philosophy of cards like dark elf and goblin attack force to a brand new extreme allowing players to trade 2 000 life points for a temporary 3 000 attack point boost during either player's turn this made her significantly more powerful than any and all meta relevant monsters at the time and she was a lot easier to summon than any monsters that could come close to competing with her thanks to her low level and base stats yeah it pretty much outclasses almost everything in terms of like attack points uh it is a bit high risk because you are paying 2000 life points to activate the effect uh fairy lily i also believe was limited a bit later on as well so that just goes to show the power that that card has because while i would say exiled force is better because it has to kill the monster in battle right so if you know it had some immunity to being destroyed by battle or just had some other threat like let's say it was like a flip effect monster or something like that injection fairy is like a little bit weaker in that regard but like let's say you had outed jinzo let's say there's so many different cards that are just like big and sometimes you just need something bigger to get over it injection fairy lily was that go-to card for that aside from the obviously steep life point costs needed to attack and defend with her this card's only real weakness was the fact that she was earth attribute which meant that mystic tomato couldn't summon her from the deck she could be summoned by giant rat but this required the person playing her to actually play giant rat in their deck many people opted not to since she was already searchable by both witch and sangan and the monsters the giant rat could summon from the deck aside from her usually weren't worth the deck space they took up they weren't all terrible though included in this pool of monsters was nimble mumonga as well as another newcomer from legacy of darkness named exiled force this card could tribute itself to destroy any monster on the field so in essence it was like a walking version of cards like fissure and tribute to the doomed it was pretty similar to injection fairy lily in the sense that it was a fairly low commitment way to remove monsters from the board when other monsters couldn't do the job since they were both searchable by singing in witch getting a hold of them was also quite a bit easier than getting a hold of magic cards with removal effects like rygecki darkhole and fissure jinzo and imperial order could also shut down cards like these and other forms of removal like torrential tribute and mirror force so there were a lot of in-game situations that only these two could deal with of the two exiled force was particularly reliable because it didn't have to attack to remove monsters from the field so cards like mirror force and even magic cylinder couldn't stop it really the only way to prevent an effect like this from going through was with a card like solemn judgment which while more popular now than it was when it released was still far from seeing widespread competitive play as for other utility monsters introduced in both sets there were a handful but they all saw varying levels of success twin-headed behemoth could revive itself at the end of the turn it was destroyed sasuke samurai could destroy any defense position monster regardless of how many defense points that monster had and without flipping that monster face up if it was set face down lesser fiend would remove monsters from the game entirely when it destroyed them by battle instead of just sending them to the graveyard and guardian sphinx well this card was like a one-sided cyber jar that only got rid of the other player's monsters and instead of destroying them returned them to the hand unlike most other flip monsters though guardian sphinx's effect wouldn't activate if it was attacked and flipped face up rather it needed to be flip summoned which coupled with the fact that it needed to be tribute summoned made it a bit less consistent than cards like cyberjar it was still very powerful though especially because the effect could be used more than once but it wasn't nearly as popular as cyberjar had been and still was speaking of cyberjar though there was actually another brand new jar monster introduced in legacy of darkness and it was without a doubt the most annoying one yet fiber jar um if we're talking about poorly designed cards uh that def that was a big card you got the reset button definitely one of the biggest nightmares ever let's just let's just be thankful that noblemen of crossout existed and exiled force by extension like the other jar monsters fiberjar's flip effect was explosive it could and often would completely change the tempo and flow of a game if it resolved everything in the game that wasn't removed from play got shuffled into the deck by this thing cards in the hand cards on the field and cards in either graveyard at a time when resource management more specifically controlling the number of cards in both players hands was more prominent than ever an effect like this was particularly annoying because it allowed players who either were losing or had essentially already lost the game to completely equalize the playing field with just one card you're basically playing game two of course fighter jar also shuffled itself back into the deck with this effect meaning that it could be used again in the same game and then again after that when you read it it's like oh this is kind of cool like restarts the game and then you realize that that means the game could essentially go on like to infinity and it kind of just creates all these like weird situations and i'm just happy that card's on the ban list the prominence of hand control cards even outside of dedicated hand control decks ensured that this card became a staple almost immediately after its release it was easy to use and it was an extremely effective comeback tool arguably more so than both morphing jar and cyberjar plus it was also searchable by both which and sengin who as mentioned earlier could be summoned from the deck by a mystic tomato so in the event that things did start to go south getting a hold of this thing usually wasn't particularly difficult there was also a surprising lack of reliable ways to counter it at the time exiled force and sasuke samurai were the only searchable ways to destroy fiberjar without allowing its effect to resolve and this likely contributed to the fact that along with fibrejar and yatagarasu exiled force was one of the most popular cards introduced in either legacy of darkness or pharonic guardian most of as a matter of fact the overwhelming majority of staples added in both sets were monsters but there were a handful of new magic and trap cards that managed to shake things up a little bit [Music] out of nearly a hundred new magic and trap cards from legacy of darkness and furonic guardian these three saw the most immediate tournament success by a wide margin book of moon was the least popular card here but it was still played by a large portion of the player base due to its immense flexibility it lacked the obvious power and explosiveness of cards like raigeki and pot of greed but as a quick play magic card that could be used on monsters from either side of the field there was a stunning amount of different ways that this card could be used ring of destruction was the standout card here it was the staple of both sets anyone who had the card played it you either had this card or you didn't if you had it then you would win if you don't have this card unfortunately you're always at the mercy of someone's ring of destruction it has such quick timing you can activate it whenever you want and if you're about to lose you can force a draw its purpose was pretty simple it was meant to remove annoying monsters from the field and they could even end games altogether with the burn damage it inflicted this burn effect was actually extremely relevant because the card could destroy monsters from either side of the field if the situation called for it it could essentially enable any monster to attack twice by destroying them after they've dealt damage to another player's life points this wasn't some sort of niche interaction either this combo was very practical and very deadly and was used to end games all the time mirage of nightmare was the weirdest card here and overall one of the weirdest cards in the game at the time of its release mirage let whoever activated it draw up to four cards but during their opponent's standby phase and depending on how many cards they already had in their hand there was a catch though and it was that during their own standby phase anyone who drew cards this way had to randomly discard the same number of cards unlike with graceful charity it was pretty difficult to benefit from this discard effect because the player using it had no influence over what cards were being sent to the graveyard sending those resources to the graveyard your only payout for them is to revive them through most reborn premature or all the haunted so the interesting thing to know with that is once those resources are gone at this point there's no payoff to getting rid of them while getting rid of a jinzo or a sinister serpent was nice it was generally better to avoid having to discard cards altogether with this effect because of again the lack of control the player had over what they discarded the card saw tournament success in spite of this for two reasons first of all the ability to draw four cards at the same time was excessively powerful especially at a time when cards with hand destruction effects were all over the place second of all there was actually a way to bypass this discard effect and that was by destroying the card before it could resolve properly since mirage was a continuous magic card it had to stay on the field for anything it wanted to happen to actually happen so just about everyone who played it also took to running two or more often three copies of mystical space typhoon which they could use to destroy it something that wasn't particularly common before this point since typhoon was quick play it could be used during the draw phase or the standby phase to destroy mirage before it could force the player to discard anything mystical space typhoon had plenty of other applications outside of this specific interaction as well so the people who played this combo usually didn't feel like they were losing anything by playing these additional copies of the card if imperial order was set beforehand it could also be used to negate mirage's discard effect during the standby phase so especially when considering all the other cards with draw effects in the game and the fact that mirage allowed the player to draw up to four at once it was pretty standard to see it together with one of the cards that could stop its discard effect both sets made a handful of other notable additions to the game like veronica guardian's grave keepers and legacy of darkness's warrior type support which was the foundation for something that would eventually go on to become known as the warrior type toolbox but for now dex belt to focus on concepts like these took a backseat to beat down in hand destruction decks which were at the time without question the two most powerful and most successful decks in the game as was standard by this point each set's release brought with it an update to the limited list one in july for legacy of darkness and one in august for furonic guardian together these updates made a hefty number of changes and between them many of the new staples ended up in the limited section graceful charity was also limited in august which was a pretty big but not necessarily unexpected change since nearly every successful tournament deck had included two copies of charity for as long as they'd been allowed to the july update also semi-limited four new cards from legacy of darkness and the august update took limiter removal and backup soldier off the list entirely but these were comparatively minor changes most players agreed that the limits specifically were pretty significant which was especially important because these changes were going to be enforced at an upcoming tournament that was well it's difficult to properly convey the magnitude of something like this especially compared to the extent of what the majority of yu-gi-oh players had experienced by now which was a typical weekend at locals this upcoming tournament was a bit more high profile than that ladies and gentlemen upper tech entertainment and economic corporation welcome you to madison square garden for the yugioh world championship 2003. [Music] announced on june 30th of 2003 the world championship was an invitational tournament featuring 18 players from all around the world the participants were all either national champions or top ranking players on the game's official leaderboard which kept track of player scores based on their performance at smaller tournaments all 18 of these players had already proven that they were among the best in the world so it goes without saying that this was up to this point the pinnacle of competitive yu-gi-oh altogether the decklist submitted by the players paint a clear picture of the contemporary metagame control and beatdown were the decks to look out for and were the only decks represented at the world championship this was the perfect opportunity for hand control and those who believed in it to prove what it was really capable of by putting itself to the test against the deck that had defined the game for the past year and a half to say that the hand control players were successful in doing this would be an understatement almost all of the beatdown players at the tournament were eliminated during the first round and those that did make it to round two were playing beat down control hybrids none of these players would go on to win a single match during the tournament's top eight leaving control as the only deck represented from the semifinals onward there was no room left for doubt at this point beatdown had been completely obliterated and hand control had taken its place as the new best deck in the game [Music] two of the top four players had built notably aggressive versions of the hand control deck yuin lung from hong kong played two copies of donza luge and three copies of drop off while mike rosenberg from the united states played three copies of spirit reaper and two copies of drop-off both of these players were paired against each other during the semi-finals and in a written report of the event submitted to pojo.com rosenberg explains that lung was able to secure a clean 2-0 victory if i recall was pretty lopsided i i don't think i had a very good matchup against him honestly he was just a better player i felt like i was pretty fortunate to get through as many single elimination matches as i did and i i like it's really hard for me to recall what the details were i i i do not recall having a close match against it after the semi-finals rosenberg would play against wait how soon also from the united states to determine who would come in third place the match that would determine the champion was between yuin lung and shigeki kitamura from japan the first two games were decided by ring of destruction in both cases it allowed the person playing it to push for immense damage all at once with just a single monster kitamura won the first game and lung won the second though something worth mentioning about game 2 is that it was extremely long because fibrejar's effect resolved four times throughout it i just recall the two uh casters who were doing an announcement for those who were like watching from the big screen in that tournament venue you could hear them incrementally getting more tired as they talk about a fiber jar flipping and basically resetting both of what these decks are trying to do with hand control as the last two had been game three was extremely intense but was ultimately decided by a late-game heavy storm played by lang this allowed him to safely attack for game winning in both the match against kitamura and the title of world champion mike rosenberg meanwhile secured a third place finish by winning his match against waita soon meaning that both of these highly aggressive builds of the hand control deck went completely undefeated at the world championship aside from their lone run-in with each other something rosenberg's deck lacked in comparison to lungs however was the consistency provided by playing mystic tomato zang and kitamura both played three copies of the card and they were the only players at the world championship who did even upper deck's official coverage of the tournament made note of this remarking on the power of to paraphrase them the heavy deck manipulation provided by witch sangan and mystic tomato lang and kitamura's success at this event would make playing mystic tomato and to be more specific playing two or three copies of the card significantly more popular going forward something else that played a role in yuan lang's victory though was his side deck which was more well tuned to the competition than anyone else's in the room it didn't help me that like my side deck was also i mean frankly speaking it's kind of a joke um when you look at those cards i wasn't utilizing it nearly as much since i was pretty all in on the hand destruction strategy and he just knew how to utilize a side deck when i really didn't so that was the biggest challenge i was winning really heavily on the back of just the hand control strategy being so good and a lot of competitors even in the socal scene like it was an era where you didn't have a lot of information unless you had a leg up with stuff like the ocg and you were learning from metas that had already kind of developed and so like it's really just that main strategy carried a lot to the point that you did i didn't need to rely on side decking skills and he absolutely had a side deck plan long side deck was notably anti-hand control which may speak to his experience as a player of the yu-gi-oh official card game or ocg the version of the game originally released in japan and other parts of asia before it was localized in the rest of the world for context the cards from legacy of darkness and pharonic guardian had all been playable in these regions since may of 2002 meaning that the players from these regions had already seen the effects that these cards had on the metagame a long time before the world championship seeing as he was now the world champion and also had an extra year's worth of insight and experience many players opted to copy his deck entirely side deck and all given the fact that it was obviously very powerful even aside from players building replicas of lung stack hand control saw a notable spike in popularity after the world championship though due to the fact that it included mini ultra and secret rare cards like donzelo and yatagarasu beatdown continued to see plenty of play at the local tournament level for once though it wasn't because it was the best deck in the game but because it was the easiest to play and the cheapest to build as robert smith wrote during his official coverage of the 2003 world championship the emergence of this deck hails a new age in yugioh as the best monster in your deck isn't always the one with the highest attack value this certainly seemed to be the case as hand control's total dominance was unquestionable at this point all that remained to be seen was whether or not things would stay that way when the next core booster set came out magician's force was released exactly two months after the date of the world championship and just over a month after the start of the fourth season of competitive play one thing that's noteworthy about it is that it was the first set to use the term spell card instead of magikarp this was due to legal reasons that aren't relevant to the competitive history of the game but it is important since from here on out we'll be referring to these as spell cards funnily enough none of the new spell cards were really that good anyway all of the worthwhile cards on the set were monsters and many of them were ironically spell caster type first of all the set featured two more level 4 monsters with 1900 attacks the ultra rare luster dragon and the super rare skilled dark magician since they were both lower rarity they weren't nearly as cost prohibitive as gemini elf and neither of them had any stipulations the way that thunder nianyan and spear dragon did the only thing that kept them from truly replacing gemini elf was the fact that they both had more than 1 500 defense points meaning much of the black forest couldn't grab them from the deck there was another level 4 1900 attack monster in the set that didn't have this issue though a card that was for multiple reasons actually measurably better than gemiini [Music] [Applause] i guess in magician's force there were there's actually a lot of cards in here that were really really good this is when like 1900 became the standard i guess everyone can go super saiyan 2 now breaker the magical warrior was like kaiku a monster with both a high attack stat and a powerful effect unlike kaiku however he can actually go head-to-head with the most powerful level 4 monsters in the game while breaker technically only had 1600 attack points whenever he was normal summoned he received the spell counter that gave him an extra 300. the power slowly kind of climbed up and see breaker the magical warrior was basically a 1900 b6 with a decent effect a player who controlled breaker could trade this spell counter for the ability to destroy any spell or trap card on the field regardless of whether it was face up or not breaker found homes in almost everything alright so we're gonna we're gonna start with my favorite card of all time breaker the magical warriors so why this card was so powerful was because breaker was essentially a mystical space typhoon on a body and what's even better is that if you didn't need the mystical space typhoon effective breaker he was probably the strongest uh normal summon in the entire game because he would be 1900 attack and that only lost to like very specific things or removal breaker is in my head i think one of the few cards that actually like has its effect named after him people would summon breaker and they would say break the back row i think that just kind of goes as a testament to just how uh just the legacy and the impact that that card really had in the game breaker couldn't hog the spotlight all to himself though because there was another level 4 effect monster in this set that caught people's attention almost immediately it didn't have 1900 attack points but what it could do when it hit the field made this practically a non-issue oh i said also i had tribe infecting virus the king tribe infecting virus had all the makings of a staple monster it was good for all the reasons that exiled force was good but was better in a handful of ways due to multiple advantages it had more attack points could destroy more monsters at once and didn't leave the field when it used its effect it also wasn't once per turn and you can tribe your opponent as much as you want as long as you have cards in your hand unsurprisingly tribe was one of the most popular cards in the set and immediately became a metagame staple alongside breaker when the ban list was updated in november these were the only two cards added and both of them were limited curiously though this update to the limited list didn't even acknowledge another new card from magician's force the card that was arguably the most powerful card in the set and definitely the most problematic a level 1 spellcaster monster named magical scientist magical scientist is is like a nightmare fuel for me i think this is like the first mistake in the game this card allowed players to special summon any level 6 or lower fusion monster in the game by simply paying a thousand life points at first glance its effect may not seem all that strong because the monster at summoned couldn't attack directly and was returned to the extra deck during the end phase well the thing is it's not once per turn [Music] it introduced the notion of first turn killing ftk's there are just random strategies that appear every now and then this was kind of like the first rendition where you're able to just shoot your opponent to death with a catapult turtle [Music] it's like so what happened oh you lose as long as someone could manage to get both magical scientist and catapult turtle on the field at the same time it was impossible to stop them from pulling off a combo that would kill their opponent on their first turn doing this might sound a bit more difficult than it actually was because catapult turtle is a level 5 monster with no built-in special summoning condition but cards like reasoning last will monster reborn and gillosaurus could all be used to make sure that one way or another these two ended up on the field together it was it was too easy to do anytime an ftk is introduced into the game simply just not fun they're playing solitaire [Music] ah the only thing that the magical scientist deck really lacked at this point was consistency at the time of magician's forces released the accessible card pool was fairly limited in what it could do to streamline the process of getting a hold of the pieces needed to perform this combo so while magical scientist ftk didn't dethrone hand control it almost immediately established its presence in the metagame and magical scientist himself was actually a welcome addition to many hand control decks he was a searchable way to access pretty much any level 6 or lower fusion monster in the game which as one would expect was extremely valuable while the monsters he summoned couldn't attack directly there was nothing that stopped them from attacking other monsters and a lot of the fusion monsters he could summon had extremely powerful effects thousand eyes restrict could get annoying monsters like jinzo off the field dark ball to the terrible like hades could deal with flip monsters or monsters like mystic tomato sang in her witch and ryusenshi could protect the player from threatening trap cards like mirror force magic cylinder and ring of destruction so the release of magician's force didn't change anything as far as hand control being the best deck was concerned if anything it just made the deck stronger with these three new staple cards it did introduce a handful of cards that saw some experimentation at the local level but none aside from these three that had immediate long lasting effects on the metagame it did not have a ton of relevance on the tournament scene scenes like the three that were listed which to be fair one of them did introduce a new deck like there there were some things that like aged pretty well and i think people toyed around with some cards marionette was another one of them i think yeah like it wasn't particularly good there's a lot of cards that people tried to build around locally but they weren't exactly successful marionette i think was one of the ones that stands out to me at the the local tournament scene uh just because it could get very large and it did have some card advantage built into it there was still one more booster set scheduled to be released before the end of 2003 at this point but just like with magician's force it would only debut a small number of cards that immediately impacted competitive play uh didn't have an impact immediately definitely had much more of an impact later star crisis was rather a minor set with the exception of a few cards i think notably dd warrior lady had the most relevance in local tournaments at that time released on december 1st of 2003 dark crysis was the first core booster set that didn't really have an immediate effect on the tournament scene the set wasn't terrible and did feature a handful of decent cards but only a handful the standout among them was dd warrior lady a card similar in function to exiled force whenever this card battled another monster whether she was the one attacking or the one being attacked she could remove herself and that other monster from the game entirely because there were already other monsters with similar removal effects on the card pool at this point like exiled force and tribe infecting virus she wasn't totally game changing but she was good enough to become a meta game staple and find her way into most deck lists one advantage that she did have over both of them was that her effect could be triggered during either player's turn which made getting her off the field without another removal effect pretty annoying yeah she she was very good uh very protective uh dd warrior lady what differentiated it so much from exiled force is one of the biggest downsides of warrior lady is that you have to go to your battle phase right but one thing that warrior lady did very well that exiled force did not is the fact that it could uh banish or remove from play in old terms whatever it was attacking into and why that was so unique is because you could deny your opponents uh sandgan for instance there's just so many different cards that you could just banish and ensure they didn't hit the graveyard so that for instance they couldn't resurrect it it wouldn't get an effect because it didn't hit the graveyard so on so on and also it had a very decent stat line as well it was 1500 attacks so like it wasn't tiny so it even just held up pretty well on its own and it just created another interesting dynamic for the game at the time of the set's release dd warrior lady was overwhelmingly its most popular monster but one of the set's secret rares vampire lord caught the attention of many players as well one of the things that made playing him so enticing was that pharaonic guardian included a lot of cards designed to support zombie type monsters the most notable of which being pyramid turtle pyramid turtle was pretty similar to all of the attribute summoners that made their debut and magic ruler but instead of summoning monsters of a specific attribute with 1500 or less attack from the deck pyramid turtle could summon any zombie type monster from the deck as long as it had 2 000 or less defense points and this of course included vampire lord playing this engine was in theory a pretty easy way to get a monster onto the field capable of dealing with just about anything that didn't need to be tribute summoned since he also revived himself whenever he was destroyed by a card effect permanently dealing with him was actually pretty tough vampire lord was kind of uh it was one of those cards that was really annoying to deal with unless you had something like funny enough dd warrior lady because as long as it kept going to the graveyard bike artifact it didn't have like it was a five-star monster and it wasn't like the highest stats but it was annoying enough that it warranted needing some sort of option to deal with it because again like this is what we were saying earlier when we talked about front of guardian zombie decks were starting to kind of come up a bit and people were like looking to vampire lord as like a card also vampire lords effect that a lot of people overlook of sending cards from the deck to the graveyard uh was actually pretty big because you have to think when we're back in the old yu-gi-oh days and like the 10 to 15 spells in their deck are like all really really good and you force them to send a spell to the graveyard it's not like instant card advantage but like it's forcing them to get rid of one of the best cards at their disposal straight out of their deck so it was not even not only just a persistent threat but it was also slowly draining your opponent of resources and just just a very solid card all around as good as he was though vampire lord didn't have the same metagame presence as dd warrior lady and was really only being experimented with at this point vampire lord people played it when they probably shouldn't have dark crisis did also feature another level 4 1900 attack monster one that was easier to get a hold of than both skilled dark magician and luster dragon and unlike both of them actually searchable by witch of the black forest archfiend soldier was the first true budget alternative to gemini elf that didn't come with any caveats or drawbacks this set actually had a lot of decent like commons and easy to access cards all the best players have 1900 v6 well i guess most of the rest of the public will also now get access to 1900 attackers the spell and trap cards and dark crisis were mostly underwhelming with a handful of exceptions sakuratsu armor made its debut here but only saw limited play due to the fact that mirror force was obviously superior immediately following its release butterfly dagger elma was probably the most talked about speller trap card in this set it was an equipped spell but wasn't actually notable for what it did when it was equipped to a monster the reason so many people initially had their eyes on this card was because of its potential ability to cause an infinite loop with its second effect gear free the iron knight immediately destroyed any equipped spell that was equipped to it and so if a player had him on the field and elma in hand they could activate the card infinitely since it would keep getting destroyed before adding itself back to the hand because magicians force had introduced a lot of cards that gained spell counters every time a spell card was activated and could activate effects by removing these spell counters there is a lot of potential for abuse with this infinite loop particularly through royal magical library which could allow a player to draw through all the cards in their deck with this combo the card as well as dex belt to abuse it saw more speculation than actual competitive success though while it like magical scientists opened the door to its own ftk magical scientist decks were simply better than dex belt to use this card were it was just more consistent and required the player to have less specific cards in hand butterfly dagger alma and um gear freed was very very people people started to take notice to that set it wasn't anything too major taking off but people did take note that this is an interesting interaction speaking of these two decks dark crisis did also include spell reproduction which made both of them a decent bit more consistent but didn't push either of them over the edge yeah so like it had most of its pieces spell reproduction probably moved the needle a couple points um but like i think most people were pretty set in their ways like they either played the deck and then they would take in the upgrades or they wouldn't play the deck because they thought it was cheese there are some consistency issues with the deck as well so like especially if you're doing like single elimination tournaments like you could have you could have a pretty boring day or a quick one in order to address these ftk strategies the next update to the ban list in february limited both butterfly dagger alma and magical scientist which reduced the consistency of both decks by a little bit vampire lord was also limited along with another new card from dark crisis named reflex bounder that had seen some success after the set's release but wasn't anywhere near as popular as dd warrior lady this update to the limited list like dark crisis itself wasn't particularly impactful and did little to change the way the game was played overall tournaments were more or less filled with the same decklists as before only these decklists now had one or two dd warrior ladies thrown into the mix the release window of dark crisis was just the calm before the storm however as there was another booster set slated to release just a month after this update to the forbidden and limited list its release on march 1st of 2004 would completely overshadow the release of dark crisis and the cards it was going to add to the game seemed capable of warping the entire meta almost overnight there was this crazy set that came out called invasion of chaos that changed everything [Music] the invasion of chaos is literally the reason why we have the forbidden list [Music] [Applause] we may have talked about the graveyard being the resting place of most monsters but no now that is just your gas tank among other things invasion of chaos introduced a series of monsters that could be special summoned by removing certain monsters in the graveyard from play two of these monsters in particular were to put it lightly a pretty big deal you got black luster soldier you have chaos emperor dragon both of these monsters have 3 000 attack and they are special summons they don't eat up your once per turn normal summons you have a 3 000 attack monster that you can special summon for free but on top of being big monsters they had crazy effects black was a soldier had two effects he could just you know just i don't care what the fact is dude the other effects you just get two attacks that at any moment you could possibly die out of nowhere and then chaos emperor dragon doesn't let people play yu-gi-oh it's it this is a power horseshit these weren't just staples the way prior powerful cards had been as soon as it became legal to play them they conquered and reshaped the tournament scene overnight they weren't just slotted into decks the way that most cards were they were so powerful that most people played them and changed the way they built the rest of their deck just to make sure they could use these two optimally this gave birth to a brand new deck of course which most people simply referred to as chaos most of the best cards in the game at the time were already light and dark anyway so you just had these cards that naturally fit into your deck and would just incentivize you to want to play these overpowered cards moving forward light and dark monsters became significantly more desirable and while this did breathe life into some monsters that otherwise probably wouldn't have seen play it also made staple cards that just about everyone was already playing better than they were in the first place so rather than outright replacing many of the decks that were prominent before the release of invasion of chaos the chaos deck formed by combining these new chaos monsters with these existing decks in other words truly pure chaos decks were rare it was more common to see decks like chaos beat down chaos zombie chaos warriors so on and so forth more than any of these though there was one deck that synergized with the new chaos cards particularly well with the sole exception of yatagarasu all of the hand control monsters were either light or dark and all of them could be summoned by their respective recruiter on top of that and perhaps most importantly chaos emperor dragon could fulfill the deck's win condition by itself invasion of chaos hadn't brought with it the end of hand control it had just made the deck stronger rather than allow itself to be made obsolete by the new chaos engine hand control merged with it in the process creating one of the most dominant decks in the game's history chaos control [Music] despite the fact that it wasn't light or dark yatagarasu was one of the deck's lynch pins because of the way it interacted with chaos emperor dragon though emperor dragon's effect was a double-edged sword designed to leave both players on an equal playing field the person playing it could dodge having their entire hand depleted as long as there was a senior witch on their side of the field when the effect was activated see chaos emperor dragon didn't stop the cards that sent to the graveyard from activating their effects if it sent singing or witch from the field to the grave this way they could still search for anything they normally would yatagarasu happened to be searchable by both this actually slotted into hand destruction decks really easily and chaos emperor dragon was just over the top with like a sangin or a witch of the black forest on the battlefield because then you get the effect as soon as everybody loses all their cards your opponent gets one draw step if it's a brick they just never draw another card again because you have yata in your hands [Music] oh guess what if you happen to have a sangan or a witch of the black forest on your field just pay a thousand and you can search yatagarasu and just automatically win the game it's because it introduced a lock into the game a lock which is worse than some people say worse than fdk but it's basically in the same realm of first turn killing someone you lock them out of drawing like i said those kiosk monsters were literally they took all the good stuff that we've had throughout the years and they were the missing piece of the puzzle to kind of complete the trifecta of what we deemed one of the most toxic formats in the game but there was no way these cards could actually change things that much right these were two unsearchable monsters sure some people might build their decks around them but the idea that they were going to completely change the entire tournament scene well that was just ridiculous wasn't it within about a week of the set's release chaos decks were everywhere at both the local level and the regional level but many players were skeptical of the viability of these new cards there was already a decent amount of debate about whether chaos was better than control or vice versa and while plenty of people were leaning towards chaos there were also plenty of other people who believed that non-chaos builds of hand control were still the best decks in the game and that things were going to stay that way as long as the cards that allowed the deck to function were legal to play classic hand control lists that didn't include either of the chaos monsters continued to populate and perform well at regional events as did non-chaos versions of warrior and zombie along with a few left field picks like grave keepers all of these decks ran into the same problem though for some reason they kept losing to chaos you were just at such a severe disadvantage if you were not playing some sort of chaos build though all the way through late march and even early april there were still plenty of people being openly critical of the idea of building an entire deck around two unsearchable monsters chaos was proving to be pretty flexible the more time passed the more apparent it became that it wasn't strictly necessary to build a deck around these two it wasn't unheard of for people to play three black luster soldier and three chaos emperor dragon but it was also pretty common for people to just play one of both one of one or the other two of both two of one or the other the ratios didn't really seem to matter before long some vanilla hand control players even started playing a single copy of chaos emperor dragon in the side deck [Music] the cards just kind of fit into a lot of decks especially control not much if anything needed to be changed to include them though non-chaos decks were still performing well for example at two different regional tournaments a non-chaos warrior deck came in first place it was becoming more and more standard to play at least one emperor dragon or soldier by the middle of april almost every control deck had started playing one of both and what little room for deviation existed at this point would be almost completely eliminated by the next update to the forbidden limited list [Music] on april 17th blacklister soldier and chaos emperor dragon were both limited but this didn't actually diminish their metagame presence strangely even though there were only two of them from this point forward and they were more often than not the only monsters in any deck that played them that couldn't be searched for by either witch or sainion most people still called the decks that played them chaos decks again it wasn't the decks that played them were dramatically different in composition than decks that didn't it's just that they were both so powerful that they turned any game that they participated in into a race to get one of them onto the field first or to take the steps necessary to make sure they couldn't hit the field in the first place summoning either of them was almost like an alternate win condition and there were plenty of cards in the game that made it easy to perform the setup necessary to do so the existence of the chaos monsters made putting resources into the graveyard desirable to the extent that the intended drawbacks of cards like graceful charity and painful choice were more benefit than cost at this point and not just these two monsters either this set added two more high-profile chaos monsters to the game [Music] some people took to running chaos sorcerer essentially a cheaper less powerful version of black luster soldier in order to supplement the two more powerful chaos monsters chaos sorcerer just by itself is just an incredibly powerful card like yeah it has the same cost as bls or chaos emperor so maybe you're not getting as much value as you would from those other cards but chaos sorcerer is still a 2300 attack monster that can be special summon for free and at the very least it can just banish a monster there's plays where you can just summon out chaos sorcerer banish one of your opponent's cards and then use it as tribute fodder for like jinzo like that's insane even more popular than chaos sorcerer was dark magician of chaos sometimes referred to as dmoc it didn't function the same way the other chaos monsters did but at the time of its release it was widely considered to be the most powerful 2-tribute monster in the entire game its ability to immediately retrieve any spell cards from the graveyard further incentivize the use of cards like painful choice and mirage of nightmare since now on top of the fact that light and dark monsters in the graveyard could be considered live resources dark magician of chaos could turn any spell cards in the graveyard into live resources as well its second effect was extremely good at countering chaos decks since it could rob blackluster soldier and chaos emperor dragon of the fuel they needed to summon themselves and it was also good at countering vanilla control decks or any other decks that played cards with effects that triggered when they were sent to the graveyard which was just about every deck in the metagame at this point while most people still agreed that tributing two monsters just to summon another was almost never worth it this wasn't really a problem for demock since he ended up in the graveyard very frequently most people didn't tribute some of him it was a lot more common to summon him from the graveyard with one of the game's three revival staples when using monster reborn specifically he could add the reborn back to hand allowing the player to special summon another monster from their graveyard immediately with either soldier or emperor dragon in hand to back this up this was almost always enough to deal lethal damage and this could all be done in one turn without even normal summoning a monster high level play was accelerating to a breakneck pace one where games could be decided in as few as two or three turns most people had more than enough draw power to make sure they saw one of the two chaos monsters that early and as soon as one of them hit the field it was game over as the format continued to evolve it became clearer and clearer that the only way to compete with chaos was to play chaos or to build a deck that could end games just as quickly as it could [Music] [Music] magical scientist ftk decks were still running rampant and the invasion of chaos had actually made them a bit more consistent by adding reload to the game a card that could take unplayable hands and turn them into hands capable of performing the one turn kill combo some people turned to magical scientist ftk because they believed it was one of the only decks fast enough to compete with chaos [Music] the new set had also laid the groundwork for another similar deck by adding manticore of darkness to the card pool this card was mostly unremarkable aside from its involvement in a loop where it could summon itself from the graveyard infinitely combined with card of safe return a card released all the way back in labyrinth of nightmare this combo enabled anyone who performed it to draw through their entire deck in one turn if they wanted to neither deck was consistent enough to truly compete with chaos though [Music] other decks capable of operating at a high speed like warrior rush and machine limiter removal beatdown did their best to compete with chaos and while they managed to place well it was impossible to ignore that they were being outperformed they just couldn't close the gap no matter how hard they tried even with the help of the next core booster set [Music] ancient sanctuary was released on june 1st of 2004 but it was a total dud of a set only two of its 111 new cards saw any immediate success and neither of them did anything to make chaos any worse [Music] the cards that did see success only did so to a limited extent as well the borg the thunder monarch was played but only rarely and usually as a one of in the side deck enemy controller was much more popular but nowhere near as popular as the most noteworthy cards from prior sets at the 2004 us national championship many players outright ignored these cards in favor of older cards that had been rediscovered given a new purpose thanks to the chaos monsters just before the proper us national championship there were two last chance qualifier events where players could compete for a chance to be invited to nationals over 200 players participated in these events and 85 of them were playing at least one blackluster soldier or chaos emperor dragon most of these 85 percent were playing both where the idea of a game dominated by the two chaos monsters had once seemed ridiculous to a good chunk of the player base and now seemed just as ridiculous to think that there was anything that could come along and stop it the april update to the limited list which only hurt chaos and manticore decks hadn't slowed the deck down the release of a new set hadn't slowed the deck down and at the 2004 world championship it became clear that even banning seemingly vital pieces of the deck like yatagarasu and painful choice couldn't stop it the world championship which this time was hosted on july 25th in los angeles was a bit different than prior high-profile yu-gi-oh events this was the first official yu-gi-oh event outside of regions where the ocg was played that didn't use the tcg's banned list since cards were at least in the ocg well ahead of the tcg the ocg's forbidden and limited list needed to be different to reflect this all the way back on march 1st of 2004 at the same time invasion of chaos was released in the tcg the ocg released an update to the forbidden limited list where multiple cards were actually placed in the forbidden section many of these cards were staples or at least considered integral to chaos's ability to function this ban list with all 10 of these banned cards was used at the 2004 world championship and so for that reason it's a bit difficult to judge the viability of certain deck builds or tech choices but regardless the ban list update didn't actually seem to affect chaos's representation at the event just like at the u.s national championship about 85 percent of the decks present were chaos stacks including the decks built by all of the players who made it to the top four all four of these players and the winner of the event masatoshi togawa from japan in particular were playing decks that seemed to be focused on chaos tagawa's list was notable for featuring two copies of kaiku in the main deck an extremely powerful anti-chaos card since keeping it on the field meant keeping one's opponent from summoning the chaos monsters following this event chaos and all of its variants continued to perform exceptionally well all across the tcg many players assumed that when the tcg received its next banlist update it would begin using the version of the banned list that was effective at the 2004 world championship and since that list hadn't affected chaos's representation at all it seemed like the deck was going to be around for a very very long time one thing that upper deck and konami had taken note of at the world championship however was the positive reaction to the banned list a lot of people seemed pretty happy that they didn't have to worry about cards like imperial order harpy's feather duster or rygeki and a lot of other players not just limited to those who were present at the world championship seemed a little bit sick of the chaos monsters and so the tcg decided to take things a few steps further than the ocg had well it was it was pretty obvious because this there was a major breakthrough after invasion of chaos which was the very first ban list anything that felt like it would make the game not quote-unquote fun they were just completely taken out on august 25th through a somewhat unorthodox update to the forbidden and limited list it was announced that 13 cards would be forbidden starting october 1st the game would stay as it was for just over a month and during this period chaos continued to dominate as expected at what was then the largest yu-gi-oh tournament ever with nearly 1200 players a european event named battle city amsterdam every single player in the top eight was playing both blackluster soldier and chaos emperor dragon and six of these players were also playing yatagarasu while the august announcements had upset a few people because well frankly if the october list looked anything like upper deck said it was going to it was going to be a total bloodbath to a lot of people something like this was starting to look pretty necessary the game was approaching an event horizon of sorts something conveyed extremely well by the fact that just a week after these changes were announced but not officially enforced at a massive tournament with exponentially more player attendance than any tournaments before it the decks created by the top 8 players there all shared at least 20 of the same cards the game was facing a serious diversity problem or lack thereof one that only something this drastic could fix to say that it did change the game when these bans finally took effect on october 1st would be a massive understatement this update was insane borderline apocalyptic and in addition to the bans that were announced back in august this list also limited five cards out of the blue then just like that with the stroke of a pen from upper deck and konami chaos at least as people currently knew it was totally annihilated [Music] along with the rest of the minigame to say this changed things a lot many of these cards were in a league of their own in terms of popularity to the extent that the term staple doesn't do them justice it can be said without hyperbole that most of them were included in literally every successful tournament deck of the three banned cards that this didn't apply to two of them had been key pieces in the most powerful deck in the game that said the list didn't fundamentally change the game as much as one might expect there were still quite a few building blocks left over from the previous format that people could use as a foundation for deck building seeing as there were also a lot of cards that people had experimented with throughout the reign of the chaos monsters there was actually still plenty to work with when constructing this new metagame plus on top of that there were two more core booster sets scheduled to be released around this time as long as both of them weren't repeats of the ancient sanctuary situation then they'd have to include some new cards that could help fill the void soul of the duelist was released on october 1st the same day these bandless changes took effect and the next set rise of destiny wasn't far behind it came out just two months later on the 1st of december for most tcg players though some regions like france and spain received the set even earlier on the 1st of november these sets both shared the same major issue which was that they were mostly filled with lackluster cards there are many things about them that are arguably more interesting than the cards they added to the game actually soul of the duelist was the first tcg booster set to follow the ocg's release structure the ocg's core sets had always brought less cards to the table than individual releases in the tcg and that's because the tcg had always combined two of the ocg's smaller packs into one larger pack the packs didn't actually contain more cards inside them but drew from a larger card pool since this was the first set to be a one-to-one import of an ocg set soul of the duelist surprised players by only adding 60 new cards to the game it also removed secret rares entirely which in theory meant that many of the set's better cards would be easier to obtain the thing is the set really only had one good card and that was mobius the frost monarch with feather duster band and mystical space typhoon limited spell and trap removal had become much more scarce than many players were used to this card allowed players to easily destroy multiple cards in their opponent's back row which made it a popular side deck option moving forward but that was it really ojama king and sandwich were decent cards that could be summoned with magical scientists and there were some other cards in the set that saw experimentation around this time period but none of them made their way into topping deck lists at premiere events aside from occasionally popping up in one or two side decks here and there rise of destiny was very similar in terms of how it impacted the game dark blade the dragon knight was another popular fusion monster that could be summoned by magical scientists and two trap cards from the set divine wrath and peku circle of enchantment made their way into tournament deck lists almost immediately but usually only in the side deck and only occasionally something else that was unique about these sets is that neither of them prompted a dedicated ban list update this had technically been true of ancient sanctuary as well though according to upper deck the october first list had been quote updated for ancient sanctuary all things considered the titanic ban list update the changes to the way the ban list was handled and to the core booster sets the game felt noticeably different from this point forward and these weren't even the only new developments in the tournament scene while regional tournaments were still happening just as frequently as they had been before starting in december they'd be joined by a new kind of tournament called shonen jump championships these events were hosted jointly in part by upper deck and in part by shonen jump the company responsible for publishing the yu-gi-oh manga according to upper deck sjc tournaments were meant to be a tier above regionals in terms of prestige not on the same level as something like the world championship of course but essentially the height of competitive yugioh during the normal tournament season among the top eight decklists were somewhat varied since the new meta was still far from solved but there was one type of deck that was more popular than everything else it actually had a few different names because it wasn't particularly well defined at this point one of its most popular names was cookie cutter since while each version of the deck usually wasn't the same from person to person it was generally thought of as an assortment of various staple cards in metagame.com's coverage of sjc gencon they called this deck hybrid though many players still called it chaos control because it almost always played black luster soldier along with a suite of light and dark monsters the deck's identity and game plan certainly weren't as clear as those of prior decks like beat down control and chaos but most players knew they were looking at it when they saw it this deck whatever it was took up six of the top eight spots at sjc gen con and all six of them were playing black leicester soldier in addition to 21 more of the exact same cards 29 of the same cards can be found in at least five of the six cookie cutter main decks 31 and at least four and 37 in at least 3. given how much all of these lists had in common it was pretty much impossible to deny that this deck did have a unique identity even if it was one that was much less pronounced than most players were used to the remaining two top 8 players were henry k playing magical scientist ftk and miguel flores playing an earth deck miguel's deck was pretty similar to the other cookie cutter lists in a lot of ways so in order to distinguish between the two of them it wasn't uncommon to call the more popular version of the deck cookie cutter chaos and to call other non-chaos versions of the deck cookie cutter blank in this case cookie cutter earth one thing that's particularly striking about the deck lists here is the lack of cards from soul of the duelist and rise of destiny some of them were present but the tournament was dominated by cards from march of 2004 and earlier the only deck present in the top eight that significantly benefited from any new cards was magical scientist which was made even more consistent by the newly released serial spell and by monster gate from ancient sanctuary dark magician of chaos reload and the slew of new fusion monsters with more than 2100 attack points didn't hurt either so the magical scientist act present at this tournament was probably the most consistent version of the deck so far things didn't change too much in the coming months at least not on a macro level at the next three sjc events which all took place in february of 2005 cookie cutter chaos either maintained or increased the top 8 representation that it established at sjc gen con now while the big picture metagame mostly stayed the same the perception of all sorts of individual cards changed to varying degrees throughout this time period all sorts of experimental stuff saw tournament success as the format continued to develop and some of these cards even managed to catch on as key players in the metagame the relatively newly released blade knight and didi assailant cards both released as part of different promo packs in the last quarter of 2004 were quite a bit more popular in february than they had been in december some people in the top 8 of sjc gencon had been playing blade knight but it was a lot more common to see this at the three sjc's that happened in february dd assailant went from not being present in the top eight of sjc gen con at all to being somewhat popular among topping players at all three sjcs in february this was a little bit surprising since he wasn't a light or a dark monster and his effect was a little bit worse than dd warrior ladies but this definitely wasn't the weirdest meta trend of early 2005. with mystical space typhoon limited the combo of using mirage of nightmare together with it had become significantly harder to do but nobody actually wanted to stop playing mirage of nightmare so it became fairly standard to play a copy or two of emergency provisions just to destroy the mirage and keep all the cards it allowed the player to draw this was the only thing that generated any interest in this card from tournament players though a card named metamorphosis from veronica guardian also kept popping up here and there usually just as a one of in the main deck now this card hadn't been completely invisible since its release back in 2003 or anything but it had never been at the forefront of the metagame a few months after it was added to the card pool magical scientist was released a searchable way to summon a bunch of fusion monsters all at once without losing any card advantage metamorphosis forced whoever was using it to tribute a monster first before they could summon the fusion monster this was a two-card investment since the metamorphosis itself had to be used and it had to take a monster off of the field with it compared to magical scientists who stayed on the field after using his effect this felt obsolete like a needlessly bigger commitment more people started experimenting with it in 2004 after the release of invasion of chaos because one important thing that was better about it than magical scientists was the fact that it kept the fusion monster at summoned on the field permanently at least until the monster was destroyed this was important for a couple of reasons like first of all it was a lot easier to put a monster summoned by metamorphosis into the graveyard than it was to put a monster summoned by a magical scientist into the graveyard usually the monsters summoned by scientists ended up in the extra deck it was possible to get them into the graveyard just not particularly practical there were also plenty of good fusion monsters that had really good effects while they were on the field effects that were good regardless of whose turn it was the best examples of this were thousand eyes restrict and last warrior from another planet cards that were significantly more impactful if they managed to stay on the field for more than one turn now by 2005 magical scientist wasn't searchable anymore because both sangan and witch were banned plus now that players didn't have to worry about both blacklister soldier and chaos emperor dragon together in the game at the same time yugioh had slowed down enough to make a lot of the monsters that this card could summon viable control tools the magical scientist was still the preferred choice for summoning fusion monsters at this point significantly more popular than metamorphosis was but this could only stay true of course as long as magical scientist was legal to play the playerbase was expecting a new ban list update at any moment now after all and the last one had gone pretty far out of its way to get rid of any problematic cards which most players agreed magical scientist was one of the card was definitely a relic of a bygone era that many players wanted to see gone and well if the promotional material for the next booster set was indicative of anything it seemed like the game was more than willing to leave some aspects of its roots behind for the first time ever yugi wasn't even on the cover of the next booster set in fact one of the japanese posters advertising the set featured a totally different guy who looked like he was from an anime but he definitely wasn't from duel monsters [Music] trouble never looking too hard we're back at class they never touch this [Music] [Music] come on

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Id: ZP61wUYPs_M

Length: 125min 15sec (7515 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2022