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Tabletop Game / Yu-Gi-Oh!

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The standard Yu-Gi-Oh card back, designed to resemble a portal to another world.

"You've activated my Trap Card!"

The Yu-Gi-Oh! Collectible Card Game is one of the most popular card games in the world and one of the pillars of the Yu-Gi-Oh! multimedia franchise. First released in 1999, the card game is developed and published by Konami.

The concept of the card game first appeared in the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga as an homage to Magic: The Gathering, of which author Kazuki Takahashi is a fan. Originally, the manga was intended to feature a new game every few weeks, with the card game (then known in-universe as Magic & Wizards) being one of many. However, Takahashi received large amounts of fan response immediately after the card game debuted in the manga, who wanted to know more about the game. Takahashi in response reworked the manga storyline to more prominently feature the card game, and gradually developed its game mechanics, which are loosely based on that of Magic, which generally agreed with how the characters played.

As the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga began to expand into a multimedia franchise, interest grew to defictionalize the game and turn it into a real game. Bandai released a version of the card game in September 1998 known as Yu-Gi-Oh! (Carddas Version), coinciding with the Toei anime adaptation (the Toei anime also renamed M&W to Duel Monsters as the game's in-universe name). Bandai and Toei's card game did not last, because around late 1998 and early 1999, Konami acquired the rights to the Yu-Gi-Oh! brand.

Konami properly released their version of card game in February 1999, as Yu-Gi-Oh! Official Card Game (before then, they also released a brief series of unplayable collector cards). This is the game that stuck and became the centerpiece of the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. The real game made considerable changes to the rules originally established by Takahashi, and so the manga and anime were revised to more closely reflect the rules of the real game. Aside from the Dungeon Dice Monsters arc in the anime and the Capsule Monsters spin-off, all future media works in the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise focused exclusively on Konami's card game.

Yu-Gi-Oh! has different names and administration structures in different territories. The so-called Official Card Game, or OCG, has been handled by Konami since the beginning; it administers East Asia. The other administration setup, called the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, or TCG, was originally manufactured and distributed by Upper Deck Entertainment, at Konami's own behest, throughout the remaining territories worldwide. However, in 2008, UDE lost the license amid some allegations of wrongdoing, and now the TCG is administered by Konami as well. The game is mostly identical on each side of the Pacific; the only differences are that some cards that debut under one administration do not appear in the other for a good, long while, if ever; there are some difference about the Damage Step rules; the Forbidden/Limited lists on each side differentiates since September 2013; and, Konami alters some card artwork to prevent incidents with Moral Guardians.

A brief summary of YGO's central gameplay mechanics:

    Summary of Central Game Mechanics 
  • Goal: The goal of a duel is to drain the opponent's Life Points (LP) down to 0. Both players start with 8,000 LP, and when one side's LP drains to 0, that side loses.
  • Card types: There are three types of cards:
    • Monster card: By far the largest and most diverse type of cards, monster cards can be summoned to the monster zones on the field, and can then use their effects, attack the opponent's monsters, or attack the opponent directly if there are no monsters on the opponent's field. Monster cards have attack (ATK) and defense (DEF) values that determines their effectiveness in combat.
    • Spell card: Spell cards are green. They have effects that apply once activated in the spell and trap zone of the field.
    • Trap card: Trap cards are red. They can't be immediately activated, but can be set (placed face-down) in the spell and trap zone, and activate in the opponent's turn to respond to the opponent's actions.
  • Summoning mechanics: One of the more famous and infamous aspects of Yu-Gi-Oh! are its many unique mechanics for summoning monsters, with a new Summoning mechanic being introduced with almost every show. Generally, monster summons are divided into Normal Summons and Special Summons. The player gets one Normal Summon per turn (higher-level Normal Summons also require tributes to summon), but has no limit on Special Summoning. Special Summoning is often done through card effects, but there are a whole host of special summoning mechanics used to special summon specific types of monsters:
    • Ritual: Ritual Monsters are summoned from the hand with with the effects of Ritual Spell Cards, and usually require tributing monsters that meet a certain condition, typically monsters whose combined levels equal the Ritual Monster's level.
    • Fusion: Fusion Monsters are summoned from the Extra Deck (see below) with the effects of Fusion Spell Cards, which typically require sending monsters listed on the Fusion Monster card as Fusion Materials to the graveyard.
    • Synchro: Synchro Monsters are summoned from the Extra Deck, and require sending a Tuner monster (a type of monster) and other non-Tuner monsters to the Graveyard, whose combined levels equal the Synchro monster's level.
    • Xyz: Xyz Monsters are summoned from the Extra Deck, and require overlaying two monsters with the same level to summon the Xyz Monster with the same rank as their level, which is then overlaid on top of these two monsters.
    • Pendulum: Pendulum Monsters act like both Spell Cards and Monster Cards, and can be either summoned normally or activated in the Pendulum Zones. If the player has Pendulum Monsters in both Pendulum Zones, the player can use Pendulum Summon once per turn, and summon any number of monsters with levels between the two pendulum monsters' pendulum scales from their hand. Pendulum Monsters are sent face up to the extra deck when they go to the Graveyard, and face up Pendulum Monsters can also be summoned during Pendulum Summoning if they fit the level requirement.
    • Link: Link Monsters are summoned from the Extra Deck, and require sending a number of monsters from the field to the Graveyard as Link Materials, the number of which must be equal to the Link Monster's Link Rating. Link Monsters themselves can be used as one or multiple Link Materials, the latter of which is equal to their Link Rating.
  • Main Deck: The main deck consists of 40 to 60 cards, and can contain no more than 3 copies of any single card; cards on the Forbidden/Limited lists (see below) are limited to 2, 1, or 0 copies per deck due to their power. Players draw 5 cards at the start of the game, and draw 1 card from the deck every turn (save for the first turn of the player going first).
  • Extra Deck: A secondary deck of no more than 15 cards, containing only Fusion, Synchro, Xyz, and Link Monsters. The extra deck stores these monsters for use when their special summoning mechanics are used.
  • Banlists: Yu-Gi-Oh! is unique among the big collectible card games for not using the set rotation practice for their tournament-legal formats, and instead uses the Forbidden/Limited lists as its main method to change up the metagame and restrict overpowered decks. Bar a few exceptions, every card is playable if it isn't specifically listed on the official Forbidden/Limited list.

In 2008, an arcade game called Duel Terminal was released, which allowed players to collect special Duel Terminal edition cards and play quick Yu-Gi-Oh!-themed games. One of the modes introduced was Speed Duel, a streamlined version of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game with simplified rulesnote . The format was later adjusted for and popularized by the video game Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links and the Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS anime, resulting in the introduction of the official TCG Speed Duel format in 2018* . The real-life TCG Speed Duel format uses rules based on Duel Links, with the addition of Skill Cards that players can wield to turn the tide of battle, and (in the TCG) only accepts cards with the "SPEED DUEL" watermark on them (although the cards are legal for TCG play). The Speed Duel format receives its own product, including booster packs and boxes with pre-made decks, and is officially supported by Konami-sanctioned events.

In 2020, Konami released Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel alongside the anime Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS. Rush Duel, though sometimes described as a format, is technically a distinct card game with mechanics strongly derived from Yu-Gi-Oh! but incompatible with it. Rush Duel is currently exclusive to Japan and Korea.

The card art in Yu-Gi-Oh!, despite lacking one central setting, are known to have featured complete storylines with background lore, recurring characters, and even chronological events. These stories are termed "metaplots" here, and can be found here. The character and gameplay details of individual archetypes and series can be found on this Character Sheets page. Subjective tropes can be found here. Trivia can be found here.

This game provides examples of:

    open/close all folders 

    A to H 
  • Achilles' Heel: Some cards have deliberate weaknesses to keep things interesting and keep them from becoming too powerful:
    • The Earthbound Immortals are all very strong, unable to be attacked, and can attack the opponent directly. But, they automatically destroy themselves if there's no Field Spell card on the field. Also, there can only be one Earthbound Immortal on the field.
    • Cloudians must remain in Attack Position or they will destroy themselves.
    • In the metagame, this trope is present through deck match-ups and side decking. The most prominent example of this trope the in the competitive scene are, perhaps, the Dark World cards— A deck that is extremely fast, powerful, and can utterly wreck the first duel of the match. However, after said first duel, side in Consecrated Light or Shadow-Imprisoning Mirror and watch as they struggle against it.
    • Pendulum Summoning is a very powerful summoning type, allowing you to summon multiple high-level monsters at once. However, Pendulum Cards can easily be gotten rid of with backrow removal cards like Twin Twisters and Cosmic Cyclone, cards that nearly every deck runs in some capacity. In addition, cards that immediately destroy or negate summons, such as Bottomless Trap Hole and Solemn Warning, shut it down hard as, thanks to the wording, it destroys/negates all the monsters summoned this way, since they were treated as one summon, which results in you losing a lot of your best cards in a single move as a result. Also, Pendulum Monsters whose Summons got negated and destroyed this way go to the Graveyard instead of back into the Extra Deck so they cannot be easily reclaimed.
    • Any archetype that relies on specific spell cards (Gishki, Shaddoll, Masked HEROs, just to name a few) will struggle if said spell is negated by Cursed Seal of the Forbidden Spell.
  • Acid Pool: Acid Trap Hole is a variant of the Trap Hole series of trap cards that targets a face down defense position monster and destroys it if its DEF is below 2000.
  • Action Bomb: Several cards have powerful effects that can destroy monsters on the opposing side of the field but require the card itself to be tributed or destroyed as well. These kinds of cards are usually machine type monsters though a few others exist as well.
  • Action Girl: Several. There are lady warriors, spellcasters, fiends, spirits, fairies... and each of them can kick just as much ass as the male cards, or in some cases even more!
  • Adaptational Modesty: Many female monsters show off their tummies, but end up getting them covered up when being brought over from the OCG into the TCG, like the Mermails.note  However, some such monsters still maintain their bare midriffs (while maybe getting censored in a different way), like I:P Masquerena, Protecting Spirit Loagaeth, Performance of Sword, and all the Valkyrie archetype's monsters.note 
  • Added Alliterative Appeal: The English flavor text for Megalosmasher X:
    With its sound-baffling armor and gargantuan jaws, this primeval predator's phosphorescence was the only possible pardon for its primitive prey.
  • Afterlife Express: The Tour Bus From the Underworld and companion card Tour Guide From the Underworld are a pair of monsters that invoke this aesthetic and specialize in retrieving other monster cards from the graveyard or deck. There's also a similar but much more meta card known as the Tour Bus To Forbidden Realms which lets a player search out a specific type of fiend card from their deck.
  • All There in the Manual: While a good bulk of the lore behind the cards and archetypes has to be inferred from the illustrations of the cards, or the few bits of flavor text from Normal monsters involved in the lore, Konami does also publish lore in the Master Guide series of books, which reveals more information on storylines than cards alone.
  • Alternate Self: In the art of Different Dimension Encounter, two versions of Warrior Dai Grepher meet and point at each other a la the Pointing Spider-Men meme.
  • Amazon Brigade: The Amazoness Archetype. Loads of scantily-clad, athletic, muscular warrior women.
  • Amusement Park of Doom: The main theme of the Amazement archetype, which specializes in trap cards that take on the form of amusement park "rides" and "attractions" that equip themselves to monsters and provide various positive or negative effects. Downplayed in that while their cards can certainly be a headache to deal with for the opponent they tend to be nonlethal and instead just hit their occupants with crippling effects to soften them up or provide a boost to their own monsters.
  • And That's Terrible: Mokey Mokey, according to his card description, "sometimes...gets mad and that is dreadful".
  • Another Dimension:
    • The D.D. (Different Dimension) cards. Since a lot of D.D. cards involve mechanics around banished cards, one can assume that any banished card can be considered 'sent to a different dimension.'
    • D/D also stands for "Different Dimension," while D/D/D stands for "Different Dimension Demon."
  • Anthropomorphic Food: This game has several examples including:
  • Anti-Frustration Features: Unlike the main TCG, the TCG-exclusive Speed Duel boxes are comprised largely of fixed, non-randomized pre-built decks, making it extremely cheap and easy to get into the format relative to other card games. The only randomized product is a pack of all Secret Rares that comes with every box, which tends to feature powerful cards or staple cards. The Speed Duel boxes also offer the chance to reprint old cards that Konami would otherwise have no reason to reprint, making it much easier for players of legacy formats such as Edison who struggle to obtain cards that have historically had limited prints.
  • Anti-Magic: Virtually any card that negates and/or destroys Spell cards could be seen as this. The most famous examples are probably the classic Counter Trap Magic Jammer, which lets the user negate any Spell at the cost of discarding 1 card from his/her hand, and Anti-Spell Fragrance, which does not negate Spells but forces Spells to be Set and disallows their activation until the turn after they've been Set.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack: Monsters that inflict piercing damage, such as Ancient Gear Golem or a monster equipped with Fairy Meteor Crush. When one attacks a defense-position monster, if its ATK is higher than that monsters DEF, the difference is dealt to the opponent as damage.
  • Art Evolution:
    • The artwork featured on the cards was very simplistic in the early days, but as time went on, artwork became more varied, detailed and professional-looking. For example, compare this card (released in the 1st TCG booster) to this one.
    • Also, some specific cards have gotten updated graphics as time goes by. For example, compare the stylized and simplistic design of the 1st Edition Blue-Eyes White Dragon◊ with the more realistic look of the Anniversary Pack Blue-Eyes◊.
  • Artificial Stupidity: The gimmick of the Karakuri archetype is that they must attack if able (even if it would get them killed) and always shift into defense when attacked (even when their defense is lower, and they would survive if they counterattacked).
  • Attack Reflector: Trap Cards like Magic Cylinder redirect damage to your opponent originally intended for you equal to the ATK of your opponent's monster.
  • Asmodeus: "Darklord Asmodeus" is an 8-level DARK-Attribute, Fairy-type monster from the "Darklord" Archetype.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Subpage here.
  • Back from the Dead: Several effects from Monster cards, Spell cards, and Trap cards allow you to return monsters from the Graveyard to the field. Monster Reborn is the most notable of these cards.
  • Bad Moon Rising: This can be seen in the artwork of a lot of cards, usually spells or various nocturnal monsters. Of particular note is the Vampire archetype which features a sinister blood red moon on every other card.
  • Bad Santa: Santa Claws's Japanese name is a pun on the fact that Satan is an anagram of Santa.
  • Balance Buff:
    • It is not uncommon for a series or archetype to receive new support years after its initial introduction, with the intent of making it relevant once again in the current metagame. This is especially true of cards used by characters from the anime. How useful such new support is for the deck and how well they integrate with the older cards varies wildly, but the release of such new support is often seen by fans as Konami's way of appealing to players who are nostalgic about such cards.
    • Following the implementation of the New Master Rules, several older archetypes received in-theme Link Monsters, particularly those focused on summoning multiple monsters from the Extra Deck. This was intended to help their strategies become viable once again under the new rules. How successful this turned out to be varied wildly.
      • As of New Master Rules, 2020 revision, Fusion, Synchro and Xyz monsters no longer have to be summoned to a Extra Monster Zone, leaving only Link monsters (who invented the rule) and Pendulum monsters summoned from the Extra Deck (whose balancing was the reason Extra Monster Zones even exist in the first place) to still require them (Or a Main Monster Zone pointed by a Link monster), making most of the Link support released before the revision utterly unnecessary.
  • Barrier Warrior:
    • Big Shield Gardna, Shield Warrior… Okay, pretty much anything with the word "shield" in its name; Millennium Shield is a Warrior-type... And a literal shield.
    • And, of course, there are many Monsters that can't be destroyed by battle, like Marshmallon, so they're a pseudo-unbreakable shield.
    • Total Defense Shogun is probably the best example, as it's the first of many cards stated to be able to attack while in Defense Position.
    • Some monsters cannot be targeted for attacks if there is a certain type or archetype on the field or keep the opponent from attacking monsters of certain types, such as Solar Flare Dragon and Marauding Captain. Getting two or more of the specific card can block nearly all potential attacks.
  • Beast Man: The Gladiator Beast monster archetype, and the Lunalights, to name a few, are archetypes where the members all have considerable animalistic features while looking fairly humanoid.
  • Beelzebub:
    • "Beelze Frog" is a Level 3, Water-Atributed Aqua-type monster from the "Frog" archetype, portrayed as a black and red frog with little demon wings. He only has 1200 Attack Points, but gains 300 ATK for each "T.A.D.P.O.L.E." in its player's graveyard.
    • "Beelze of the Diabolic Dragons" is a Level 8, Dark-Attribute, Dragon-type Synchro monster from the Duel Dragon archetype. In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, it is used by Sect in his Insect/Hell-themed deck, furthering the parallel to the Biblical demon it is based off of. Beelze also has an upgraded form.
  • Belly Dancer:
    • There's an old Ritual Monster named Performance of Sword, who not only dresses like a belly dancer, but appears to be one; this is further enforced by her Japanese name being "Dancing Soldier." The associated Ritual Spell Card for Performance of Sword is called Commencement Dance, and also features a dancer dressed like this.
    • Some Lunalight monsters also share this aesthetic, most prominently Cat Dancer.
    • Magical Musketeer Starfire and Harpie Dancer both fit the bill to a 'T', the latter at least in her original art.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: Most Insect-type monsters in this game tend to range in shape and porportion from the size of a small housecat to a large battle tank. However, few bugs in Yu-Gi-Oh can compare to the absolutely gigantic Metal Armored Bug which is shown towering over the trees of a forest!
  • Big Damn Heroes:
    • Some cards have effects that emulate this trope. For example, Gorz - Emissary Of Darkness is Special Summoned when you take damage while having nothing on your field, and Starlight Road negates the destruction of two or more cards and Special Summons a Stardust Dragon from you Extra Deck. Not surprisingly, both cards are usually part of the Meta Game for that exact reason.
    • Lore-wise, the Constellars are a group of holy space knights that came from the stars to defeat the corrupted Evilswarm Monsters.
    • The aptly-named Trap Card "Dramatic Rescue". When an Amazoness monster is targeted by any card effect you can return it to your hand, saving it, and play a different monster in its place.
  • Black Magician Girl: Trope Namer, known in English as the Dark Magician Girl. The card itself, however is not a full demonstration of the trope, but there are plenty of cards that are.
  • Blade on a Rope:
    • The artwork for Kunai with Chain depicts a razor-sharp boomerang attached to a metallic chain. The card can either grant a power boost to your monster or stop your opponent's monster from attacking.
    • The Red-Eyes Fang with Chain card depicts a stylized, dragon-shaped shuriken attached to a metallic chain. Its effect enables the player's monster to either attack twice in the same turn, symbolizing the blade's long reach and destructive power; or "steal" one of the opponent's monsters, referencing how its anime counterpart was often used to immobilize the target.
  • "Blind Idiot" Translation:
    • Among the most obvious examples is "Dunames Dark Witch," which is a LIGHT-Attribute Fairy-type. Its original Japanese name is "Dynamis Valkyria". The fact that a card named "Valkyrie" became "Dark Witch" in the US suggests the origins of this mistake; all the same, it's no less inexcusable, especially since "Dark Valkyria" and "Magician's Valkyria" came out in English without any such mistakes.
    • There's Fushioh Richie, Buster Rancher, and Jormungardr. Fushioh roughly translates to undead king, but Richie should be Lich. Buster Rancher should be Buster Launcher and Jormungardr, which is easily overlooked, should be Jormungandr.
    • Some cards inexplicably subvert this (or invert it... or zig-zag... or SOMETHING!) and combine it with the most bizarre cases of Genius Bonus, Bilingual Bonus, and Gratuitous Japanese you will ever see. For example, the card name Giant Trunade seems to contain a nonsense word that means nothing - unless you're familiar with katakana and know that that "trunade" can be reproduced as "toruneido" in katakana - which is normally taken to mean "tornado". The original Japanese name of this card is Hurricane.
    • Fan translations can be guilty of this as well, such as the infamous "Revise Dragon".
    • Any card drawn from Chinese mythology seems to get this in the TCG:
      • The Yang Zing are "Ryusei" in Japan (Dragon Stars, a pun on Shooting Stars, i.e. Meteors).
      • Leng Ling, a Union monster, is heavily corrupted from Renrin (which appears to be the Japanese name for the Jianjian, a bird meant to represent soulmate levels of love in Asian cultures) to the point that it can come off as offensive.
      • The Tenyi remove the Chinese Influences in their names. For example, Shaman of the Tenyi's Japanese roughly translates to "Dragon Sage/Dragon Immortal of the Tenyi", which ties into Chinese folklore/mythology that their ascetic sages who lived in secluded mountainous locations and are generally believed to attain power equal to a God and become Immortal.
    • Even today, it seems that Italian translators are a bunch of morons, with some Italian names reaching Translation Train Wreck levels. One of the most Egregious examples is the card "Performapal Friendonkey", which was initially translated as "Artistamico Amicascimmia", something that means "Artistfriend Friendmonkey". Or the infamous "Number 107: Tachyon-Eyes Galaxy Dragon".
    • In the German version, "Roaring Ocean Snake" is translated as "Brüllende Seeschnecke", which means "Roaring Ocean Snail". The Idiot Translator probably thought that "Snake" is "Schnecke", because it sounds very similar. In reality, "Snake" is Schlange" and "Snail" is "Schnecke".
    • In the same vein, "Anteatereatingant" becomes "Ameisenfressender Ameisenbär" in German. Which means "Anteating Anteater" (it should be "Ameisenbärfressende Ameise"). Admittedly, it's a complicated name, but if you consider that the card is an Insect-type, and the name is a pun, the translation makes no sense.
  • Bling of War: You'd better believe it. Probably one of the better examples would be Eldlich the Golden Lord with his full suit of fancy golden body armor and shiny jewelry.
  • Blow You Away:
  • Booby Trap: They come in just about any shape you could imagine. Naturally, most of these are trap cards, but not always. There are even a few archetypes based on booby traps such the Trap Hole series.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Normal Monsters during the early days of the game. They have no effects but often have good combat stats (except in early Japanese sets, there were a crap tons of weak and lazily designed Normal Monsters, many of which were unapologetically clones of each other), and there's a lot of support for them, including lots of ways to Summon them from the Graveyard. Decks based around them focus on brute force rather than anything fancy. However, in this day and age, the card game has advanced to such a point that unless the Normal monster has a reason for being in the deck, such as being the deck's central card supported by the other cards in the deck, like Dark Magician or Red-Eyes, or being Fusion or Xyz fodder, Normal monsters are glorified target practice in the current meta thanks to the Power Creep in regards to Effect monsters. Thanks to a large number of support cards aimed specifically at Normal monsters, this is becoming less boring and slightly less practical. A deck built around Normal monsters that works well is very possible, but requires lots of forethought and balance.
    • An old-school "beatdown" Deck is typically focused on easy-to-summon monsters with high ATK scores without crippling drawbacks, with a sprinkling of removal to handle threats too strong to best in normal combat, and an occasional buff to turn the tides in an unfavoured battle. These Decks often find value from 1900+ ATK Normal monsters, which is usually enough to defeat a majority of other monsters of their calibre without accounting for effect synergies. Until the development and popularization of archetypes by the GX era, nearly every Deck in the game's early days was like this, and Skill Drain, which nullified all monster effects on the field, kept them competitive even as the meta shifted.
    • Gadgets operated on this principle. The goal of the Deck is to make the game as simple as possible by playing one-for-one destruction cards and, with the help of the Gadgets' self replenishing effect, gain advantage and win almost effortlessly. Such Decks can be really boring to play with or against, but it's really effective when played correctly. Gadget Decks dominating the tournament scene in 2006-2007 called attention to the importance of card advantage, and the concept of plusses and floaters started getting discussed more than before.
    • Machina Force, despite its clunky summon condition, actually saw play... as discard fodder for Machina Fortress, due to its very high level. It helped that it could be searched by Machina Gearframe. However, it has since been outclassed by Machina Cannon and Machina Megaform, which also fulfill the same conditions for Gearframe but are still serviceable monsters by themselves.
    • The original Red Dragon Archfiend's main effect is seen as subpar because destroying all Defense Position monsters is situational and rarely useful, and it has a detrimental side effect of destroying every other monster on your side of the field that did not declare an attack. However, in the early Synchro days, it was commonly used simply because it was an 8 Star, 3000 ATK beater that could be easily toolboxed out. Needless to say, Power Creep has not been kind to it.
    • Take a look at any Extra Deck, regardless if the deck is Xyz focused or not, and chances are you'll at least find one of the following in it: Evilswarm Exciton Knight (prior to its banning), Carnigorgon, the Antiluminescent Knight, Number 101: Silent Honor ARK, and Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer. In fact, this fits a lot of Xyz monsters. They often don't have outstanding effects unlike Synchros and Fusions, outside of decks that focus on Xyz "boss monster"s like Galaxy-Eyes, and can only use their effect so many times unlike other monsters, but are far easier to get out on the field than Fusions and Synchros, and can often be splashed into any deck, regardless of theme.
      • While these cards have been powercrept in recent years, several Link monsters, such as the Knightmares, Borreload Dragon and Borrelsword Dragon, fulfill a similar role, while managing to be even more generic by not even requiring specific Levels.
    • Mystical Space Typhoon. A spell card that's been in the game since the very start, and for more than a decade, it was still one of the, if not the most commonly run of cards, regardless of theme. All it does is let you destroy one magic or trap card on the field, which is incredibly useful, despite not being one of the flashier ways to do so, and it's a quick play. It wasn't until they made Outright better versions of it that its usage in the metagame finally began declining.
    • Playing any deck considered to be "Meta" is this to many duelists. They get the job done, they win tournaments, but at the end of the day, it's a deck that many duelists will run regardless of whether or not they actually care about it, as evidenced by the habit duelists have of selling a deck off once it becomes obsolete. To compound matters even further, this leads to a lot of Mirror Matches, which is a tedious experience to a competitive duelist.
  • Boss Battle:
    • Any monster with more difficult than average summoning conditions, potent effects, high ATK/DEF, or any combination thereof. Lots of decks include one or more either as a lategame finisher that worked with whatever the deck was about, or as an end goal to a combo and engine the deck runs, garnering them the nickname "Boss Monster".
    • The closest thing comparable to an actual boss fight is Vennominaga, the Deity of Poisonous Snakes, who is difficult to summon, yet is nigh-invincible once on the field.
    • During certain events, Boss Duels become available, functioning as a team co-op game mode against a pre-stacked "Boss Deck" which boasts Purposely Overpowered cards for this event. To compensate, players themselves get a range of limited-use perks ranging from being able to draw any card in their Deck once to reviving a defeated player. The whole purpose of this game mode is to simulate the climactic fights against the Big Bad of various anime seasons.
  • Boss Rush: An actual card in the game, and one that attempts to replicate the mechanics of one, as it forces the opponent to fight through multiple B.E.S. monsters in quick succession.
  • Boss Subtitles: The Japanese OCG card names do this a lot. For instance, Dark Paladin in the English TCG is known as Super Magical Swordsman — Black Paladin in the OCG. In general, the TCG tends to be fairly inconsistent about localizing the full names, often resorting to shortened forms to reduce title text. Sometimes, the anime will include them where the card does not (Yugi in the English dub does refer to Dark Paladin, the Ultimate Magical Swordsman). It's also common for retrained versions of old cards to include these to distinguish them from the original, often using their attack names as the subtitle (e.g. Harpie's Pet Dragon — Fearsome Fire Blast).
  • Botanical Abomination: Most Plant-types count as this, particularly the Predaplant archetype.
  • Bottomless Pits: Bottomless Trap Hole, especially since it's one of the most used cards in the game.
  • Bowdlerize:
    • Many cards in the OCG that portray nudity, bustiness, skimpiness, religion, firearms, blood, etc. were modified in the TCG release. Modified cards are listed here. There are some cards that should be censored (i.e. depict nudity), but for some reason have gotten away. Artworks directly made by Takahashi Kazuki himself were never censored, and such as cards Anniversary Pack's "Dark Magician Girl◊" and "Magi Magi ☆ Magician Gal" never made a worldwide release outside of Japan. That "Dark Magician Girl" is the only card that didn't get a release in the international version of Anniversary Pack. However, it did eventually get released in two separate The Lost Art Promotion sets.
      • Terminology and names are also censored. For example, Japanese words meaning "sacrifice", "gun", "bomb", "death", "demon/devil", "god" tend to be swapped for less provocative words in the English version such as "tribute" (yes, it is a verb now), "blaster", "blast", "doom", "(arch)fiend", "lord/divine". French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish don't have any alternative for "demon", though, so they just use it. Some related words are deemed safe because they're masked by their derivativeness, such as "bombardment", "goddess" or "daredevil". The words "sacrifice" and "god" are censored in the real life game, but still used in the English versions of the manga and the anime. Some words are inexplicably censored in the terminology but aren't in names, such as the one meaning "angel" that translate to "fairy" in the Western versions ("elf" in French, formerly "angel" in Portuguese).
      • The most outrageous example of censored names is perhaps "Slifer the Sky Dragon", whereby the mighty Egyptian god Osiris has to adapt the name of one of Yu-Gi-Oh!'s executive producers. Oddly enough, the god Ra still gets to keep his name.
    • Generally, if you see a card with "Des" as part of the name (Except for Dark Ruler Ha Des), chances are that it was "Death" in the OCG.
    • Zig-zagged in the "Charmers" case; Eria the Water Charmer and Wynn the Wind Charmer have their skirts lengthened on the Raging Eria and Storming Wynn cards, but not on their normal or Familiar-Possessed cards, presumably because young girls are treated differently from adult women.
    • The Ghostrick Succubus is known outside Japan as the Ghostrick Socuteboss, presumably to avoid the implications of a succubus looking like a little girl.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: A common complaint of the game is that while any card which is useful will be several dollars on the secondary market, Konami has not helped matters in the slightest by creating "Archetypes" - groups of cards which have Theme Naming, have super-synergy with one another, with a very specific deck design in mind upon creation.
    • Konami designs a specific, tournament-quality deck made of new cards which only function with one another & nothing else, then releases that deck in pieces in card packs. Eventually, most of these cards are reprinted at lower rarities in compilation sets, but only after new Archetypes come out which make those cards obsolete. So if you want to win at all in tournaments, you have to shell out lots of money to use an Archetype right when it comes out, or else it'll be an uphill battle to win in tournaments with that same archetype when it's widely available months to years later.
  • Brought Down to Badass: A 3000 ATK monster with its effects negated is still a 3000 ATK monster; nothing to sneeze at. Skill Drain also happens to negate any negative effects the card may have, too, so several monsters actually benefit from Skill Drain. Examples include the Majestic Mechs, Beast King Barbaros and the Qliphort archetype.
  • Brought Down to Normal:
    • Almost literally; the Continuous Trap Skill Drain negates the effects of all monsters on the field.
    • Megamorph reduces the ATK of the monster it's equipped to by half if its controller has more Life Points than the opponent.note  This can turn a slight advantage into a major one by simply equipping it to your opponent's monster.
  • Bubbly Waitress: The SPYRAL agents have Charming Resort Staff as a cheerfully helpful support for their Super Agents. She makes it much easier to get a Super Agent on the field and can even provide combat assistance by reducing an opposing monster's ATK to 0 when battling against a Super Agent.
  • Bullet Seed: Seed Cannon gains counters every time a Plant is Summoned; sending the card to the Graveyard damages the opponent the more counters are on it.
  • Buried Alive: The art and name of Premature Burial implies that its a spell used to revive a person that was buried alive. There's also Foolish Burial which features a guy who seems to have somehow managed to bury himself alive.
  • Cactus Person: "Cactus Bouncer" and "Cactus Fighter" are both Level-4, EARTH-attribute, Plant-type Monsters who look like short anthropomorphic cactuses. Curiously, despite their similar designs and stats, they are not a part of the same archetype.
  • Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Camel-like monsters are known as "Lacoodas" in the international releases. Back when the game was still in its "Blind Idiot" Translation stage, someone translated the Japanese "rakuda" (camel) as "Lacooda," and the term apparently caught on, as it's continued to be used even after the translations have gotten better. Justified in that the original does not say "rakuda"; it says "rakuuda," in katakana, implying that the name is meant to be a play on "rakuda" rather than the actual word. Still a case of Lost in Translation, as a similar pun could have been used for the English version (but then, given it first happened in Pharaonic Guardian, arguably the nadir for the game's translation quality, it's entirely possible there was no one on staff who would have recognized it as a pun).
  • Can't Catch Up: Not only has the game repeatedly gotten new gameplay mechanics, but the newer archetypes simply move a lot faster than the old ones in playstyle. Now, as time goes by, updates do come for older archetypes and series, and if they were used by a popular anime character, they're that much more likely. Most notably, no matter how much time passes, Kaiba's Blue-Eyes White Dragons and Yugi's Dark Magicians are always reliable archetypes. But without real mastery of the game, there's no way a Deck solely from the GX era or earlier could stand up to a post-5Ds deck unless the opponent gets a truly crummy hand.
    • For a very long time, the Ritual mechanics are the most under supported summoning mechanics ever. Ritual decks tended to be clunky, inconsistent and use up a lot resources due to the ritual mechanic itself. Furthermore, it doesn't help that most ritual monsters are vanilla monster with low attack points. However, despite this, from time to time, Konami would release rituals that end up breaking the game (e.g. Demise, Gishki and Nekroz), only to hit them and several generic ritual support (e.g. Advance Ritual Arts, Djinn and Preparation of Rites) straight after. This then resulted in further nerfing to the weaker ritual decks that really needed the generic support. Starting from the Arc V era, things seem to be changing with ritual as they began getting decent support (e.g. Pre-Preparation of Rites, Odd Eyes Advent, Odd-Eyes Gravity Dragon, Red Eyes Ritual, Black Luster Ritual and Prediction Princess Archetype). In addition, many of the new ritual spell cards now have additional effects that make the deck far more consistent.
    • Several players have noted that Synchro Monsters in the ARC-V era were getting neglected by Konami (albeit not to the point of unplayability). Many complained that while Pendulum, Xyz, Ritual and Fusion got a huge support boost in Arc V, Synchro didn't get any boost. It became a lot more apparent when the top tier decks lacked any Synchro specialists; we had the Qliphort (Pendulum), Shaddoll (Fusion), Tellarknight (Xyz) and Nekroz (Ritual). Furthermore, Synchro monsters are constantly having their effects restricted with certain clauses (while Rank 4 Xyz monsters don't) that stop them from becoming powerful. Therefore, this resulted in fans crying that Synchro just can't seem to catch up to Xyz.
  • Captain Ersatz:
  • Captain Fishman: Elemental HERO Ocean is a Monster from the Elemental HERO archetype that evokes the trope, sporting a fishing spear and a dolphin-theme costume.
  • Card Cycling:
    • "Magical Mallet" is a Spell Card that lets you shuffle any number of cards from your hand into the Deck, then draw the same number of cards from the top of your Deck.
    • "Card Destruction" forces both players to discard their entire hand, then makes both of them draw from their Deck such that they refill their hand with the same number of cards. Notably, this card can be used in deck out strategies as activating it while the opponent has more cards in their hand than in their deck (such as drawing via the effect of "Maxx "C"") will cause them to lose instantly.
    • "Trickstar Reincarnation" does this to your opponent by banishing all cards in their hand and then forcing them to draw cards equal to the number of cards banished. This is beneficial as the Trickstar archetype revolves around dealing effect damage whenever the opponent adds cards from their Deck to their hand.
    • All of the monsters from the "Danger!" archetype share the collective effect to reveal themselves then randomly discard a card from the hand. If the revealed card (or any card with its name) was not discarded by this effect, then they can Special Summon themselves and then draw a card.
    • The "Dark World" archetype relies on discarding themselves to generate advantage, so to recuperate lost advantage they typically allow the player to also add or draw cards from their deck when discarded.
    • "Helmer, Helmsman Fur Hire": If a player Special Summons a "Fur Hire" monster to their field while they also have a Helmer on their field, then Helmer's player can choose to use Helmer's once-per-turn action to discard a "Fur Hire" card in their hand, and replace it by drawing a card from their deck.
    • "Runick Fountain" allows the user to cycle back used Runick Quick-Play Spells by targeting up to 3 Runick Quick-Play Spells in the user's Graveyard, returning them to the bottom of the Deck, then allowing the user to draw cards equal to the number of cards returned to the Deck by this effect.
  • Cast from Hit Points
    • Some cards require a Life Point payment to activate.
    • Nearly taken to an extreme with Toon World; the entirety of its text is "Pay 1000 Life Points to activate this card." That's it—it doesn't do anything else by itself. Sure, a lot of Toon monsters need it on the field to be Summoned, but other than that, it just kinda sits there waiting to be destroyed.
    • This is practically the Psychic-type's main gimmick, with frequent payments to either fire off or maintain their effects. To balance this out, a good amount of their support cards involve healing and making use of the lost LP.
    • Some cards, like the Archfiend archetype from Dark Crisis, require a Life Point payment to keep them on the field. A life point payment that is not optional.
    • The cards Cyber-Stein and Magical Scientist. Both are banned in the Advanced Format and Limited in Traditional Format - they both can pull Fusion monsters from the Extra Deck by paying LP.
  • Cat Girl: Various such cards have been printed over the years, with some of the earliest examples being Nekogal #1 and Nekogal #2, a strange pair of Normal monsters that combine the aesthetics of catgirls and pixies.
  • Chainmail Bikini: there are some monster designs whereby a female character wears pieces of armor selectively over certain parts of her body, while leaving others exposed, usually her waist and thighs.
  • Cherry Tapping: The "Sparks" card does a measly 200 points of damage to the opponent— that's it. Most video game versions of Yu-Gi-Oh! reward you with a bonus if you ever manage to finish off the opponent using "Sparks." They give a similar bonus if you manage to finish off the opponent with a Skull Servant, but at least you can give Skull Servant some good Equip Spells and buffs to boost its power (not to mention that the Wight archetype built around it has potential that's nothing to sneeze at).
  • Chest Monster: Man-Eating Treasure Chest and the Dark Mimic cards.
  • Chess Motifs: The first Archfiend monsters released in the Dark Crisis pack. One of their support card is Checkmate.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The "Mark Of The Rose" card causes this in the equipped monster - it switches sides constantly, such that whoever's turn it is at the moment gains control of the equipped monster.
  • Classical Chimera:
    • The Bandai card of the Chimera depicts it as a lion with a dragons' wings and tail.
    • By fusing Berfomet and Gazelle the King of Mythical Beasts, Chimera the Flying Mythical Beast is summoned. It is depicted as a two-headed lion, with the horns of a goat, the wings of a bird, and a snake for a tail.
    • Scrap Chimera, while based on an Alchemical Chimera, bears a striking resemblance to the Greek monster, with the head of a lion, the body of a pegasus, and a snake-headed tail.
    • Chimaera, the Master of Beasts looks nearly identical to the Flying Mythical Beast, though with different coloring and horns. It can only be summoned by sacrificing 3 Beast-type monsters, though is not supposed to be played in any Duel.
    • Guardian Chimera has four heads: one of an eagle, another resembling a horned lion, the third of a dragon, and the fourth akin to a snake, on its tail.
  • Colony Drop: The board-wiping effect of Nibiru, the Primal Being, which has it tribute all face-up monsters on the field, is strongly suggested to be it smashing into the game field and destroying all the monsters on it.
  • Color-Coded Stones:
    • The Attribute "Orb" can give off this vibe.
    • The game has the Gem-Knight cards (a Homage to the Elemental HERO and Crystal Beast Archetypes) which are named for and usually colored after a Gemstone, with one or two exceptions. Their leader Gem-Knight Master Diamond has white armor and an All Your Colors Combined Rainbow Motif sword and background.
  • Colorful Theme Naming: The Dark World archetype monsters are all named after different colors, complete with Dark Overlord Reign-Beaux.
  • Combat Stilettos: The card Glass Slippers is depicted as a pair of pointy-toed high-heel pumps. When equipped to specifically a Fairy-type monster, the card gives a bonus of 1,000 attack points. But if equipped to a non-Fairy, the wearer *loses* 1,000 attack points and cannot initiate battles. The implication is clear: They're hard to fight in - but if you can do it, you can do it well.
    • Various monsters, especially humanoid females, are shown wearing high heels in their artwork.
  • Combining Mecha:
  • Continuity Cameo: Several cards are based on or have characters from the anime/manga on them:
  • Continuity Drift: Early cards with banish effects, such as Bazoo the Soul Eater and Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer, implied that banished monsters had their souls destroyed. Later cards indicate that those monsters are actually sent to another dimension.
  • Cool Boat: Many monster cards that have been released over the years are designed like one of these. Some of the more noteworthy examples are the Gunkan Suship archetype cards which feature giant warships made entirely out of sushi. Yes, really.
    • Weirdly enough, there is another food based ship Xyz monster known as Number 50: Blackship of Corn. If the name seems random take a closer look at it's hull and monster type. That's right, someone apparently made a Cool Boat out of a giant ear of corn!
  • Cool Train: An entire deck archetype of them, based around getting level ten / rank ten monsters on the field quickly.
  • The Corruption:
  • Crazy-Prepared: "Toolbox" is a type of deck that specializes on searching monsters with many unique (and sometimes situational) effects directly from the Deck or Graveyard to counter your opponent. For example, Gladiator Beasts can "Tag Out" after a battle and bring any other Gladiator Beast from the Deck, and Koa'ki Meirus can use some cards to get any monster they want, including a quartet that literally can stop anything.
  • Creatures by Many Other Names: In the English version, it's implied that fairies and angels are the same thing, and based on the Japanese version, they are the same, given that "天使族", a.k.a basically "Angel-type" is translated to "Fairy" in English, and some English cards use both words, like "Doma The Angel of Silence", whose Flavor Text is:
    This fairy rules over the end of existence.
  • Creepy Crows: The infamous Yata-Garasu has probably caused more flipped tables and ruined friendships than all other cards combined. This nasty little thing was quite possibly the most feared card in the entire game back in the day due to its completely broken ability to prevent the other player's draw phase and lock them into a vicious Cycle of Hurting with no way out. When Yata-Garasu was banned many players breathed a sigh of relief...though as of May 17th, 2022, it's become legal to play in official games again (albeit at only one copy), and even before then, was still legal to play in casual games.
    • D.D. Crow is a newer, much less polarizing crow monster.
    • Is one Creepy Crow just not enough for you? Try a whole swarm then!
  • Creepy Doll:
    • The Shaddoll archetype are ALL this. Just look at their boss monster. Hoo boy...
    • The Gimmick Puppets will give some "fanservice" to the opponent.
    • The Frightfur archetype. They're stuffed animals fused with bladed tools possessed by demons.
  • Crippling Overspecialization:
    • Some cards exist simply to counter other, very specific cards and are otherwise worthless. "Anti Raigeki" exists only to counteract "Raigeki", "White Hole" only exists to counteract "Dark Hole", and both "Call of Darkness" and "Call of the Grave" exist only to counter "Monster Reborn".
    • The Allies of Justice appear to be an entire archetype based around overspecialization. Their effects almost exclusively revolve around the opponent's monsters being LIGHT-attribute or face-down. If they're not facing something with those criteria, they're in a lot of trouble. Note that the Worms are all LIGHT-attribute monsters with a lot of flip effects, meaning the Allies of Justice were specifically designed against them, which is supported by the lore.
    • Most of the earlier "HERO" support cards have really specific conditions, which hampered the deck's playability for quite some time. This was resolved when later Elemental HEROes were released that only specified a specific elemental attribute to be summoned; mix that with Super Polymerization that lets you use the opponent's cards as materials and suddenly they're more competitive.
    • The Raidraptor archetype, specifically some of their first boss monsters, such as Rise Falcon. Rise Falcon costs 3 Level 4 Winged Beast monsters (not too hard, since the Raidraptors swarm rather easily, but still hefty) for a monster with 100 ATK, which is incredibly weak. However, Rise Falcon can copy the ATK of a Special Summoned monster their opponent controls, and blitz all Special Summoned monsters the opponent has. The catch? Your opponent has to have a Special Summoned monster for this to work, meaning Rise Falcon could easily be taken out by a Normal Summoned Skull Servant, with 300 ATK, if it is not already boosted by its own effect.
    • The basis of 'anti-meta' decks. Usually, these decks focus specifically on countering whatever the current high tier deck(s) is, often with surprisingly effective results. However, whenever these decks end up facing other kinds of decks such as lower-tier "rogue" decks, they quickly start to fall apart.
  • Crop Circles: Used as a support card for the Alien archetype of course. It lets the player exchange monsters already on their field for an Alien card in their deck.
  • Crossover Cosmology: There are cards based on Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Incan and Norse mythology, among others. The details range from small nods like in the Spirit cards, to blatant reference like in the El Shaddoll monsters. Justified in the anime, as Pegasus the creator of the game claims to have based most of the cards on various inspirations, including the myths he encountered on his world tour.
  • Cute Ghost Girl: The Yo-kai Girls are a series of Zombie-types (plus the Psychic-type Ghost Ogre & Snow Rabbit) that look nothing like the common depictions of undead in mainstream media. Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel even includes Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring as an optional "virtual pet" companion that cheers the player on as (s)he plays the game.
  • Cute Monster Girl: Many exist, but the best example is probably Tour Guide from the Underworld, because she's, you know, a demon.
  • Dark Is Evil: The DARK attribute has the greatest portion of evil-seeming monsters, but…
  • Dark Is Not Evil:
    • Quite a few heroic cards, notably Zombyra the Dark, the Destiny HEROs and the Dark Magician family are also DARK.
    • All Dark World monsters are noble and good, they just look hideous and evil. This is confirmed by the text of Zure, Knight of the Dark World and the Master Guide book.
    • The Allies of Justice are all DARK-Attribute, in spite of being, you know, allied with justice.
    • The Phantom Knights, who are used by an undeniably heroic character in the anime.
  • Daruma Doll: There is a very obscure Monster card from one of the early TCG tournament packs; it's called Dharma Cannon, and is basically a daruma outfitted with a slew of guns. While it has an interesting design, it has seen little to no actual play due to its rarity and the fact it's a low power Normal Monster and hence has no effects. Twenty years later, Konami breathed new life into Dharma Cannon and made a new card for it, although it was in the form of a Normal Trap.
  • Deader than Dead: Cards that are banished (originally known as being removed from play) were initially made such that they'd generally not be seen in the duel again unless one played specific cards to recycle them. However, there are currently so many cards and archetypes that heavily involve cycling cards from the hand/deck/field to the graveyard, from the graveyard to the Banished Zone, then from the Banished Zone right back into the hand/deck/field in a single turn, if not in direct order of one another, every single turn, that not only is Deader than Dead a massively Subverted trope in this game, Death Is Cheap has become something of a Dead Horse Trope to the game. As a result, since 2016 or so, it became standard for cards to be banished face-down as a more permanent way of excluding them. This is because most cards that recycle banished cards refer to some characteristics of the cards, which face-down cards lack. Since there are only 5 cards that can recycle face-down banished cards note , such cards are effectly gone for the rest of the game.
  • Death or Glory Attack: Meta-version: the Spell Power Bond often inflicts such hefty damage on its user that when used, most prefer to end the game on the turn it's used. There's the tangentially related Limiter Removal, which destroys all monsters it affects at the end of the turn. Naturally, the two are often combined with cards such as Cyber End Dragon or Ultimate Ancient Gear Golem to crush the opponent.
  • Death World:
    • The "Venom Swamp" Field Spell will slowly kill everything on the field except the native Venom monsters.
    • The "Zombie World" field spell card causes everything to count as zombies (even in the graveyard!) so it could be called an Undeath World.
  • Deceased and Diseased: The Plaguespreader Zombie which despite it's name doesn't actually have any disease related abilities and just uses a generic revival effect as its only skill.
  • Deck Clogger: Parasite Paracide can shuffle itself into your opponent's deck, and when they draw it, they're forced to summon it and take 1000 damage.
  • Dem Bones: The Skull Servant and related cards, along with numerous other Zombie-types. The Archfiend and Dark World archetypes count as well.
  • Department of Redundancy Department:
    • The "Ninjitsu Art" cards and Thunder King Rai-Oh. "Ninjitsu" means "Ninja Art" and "Rai-Oh" means "Thunder King". On the OCG side, Meikyu Heki - Labyrinth Wall is Labyrinth Wall stated twice in Japanese and English, same for Mirai Yuugo - Future Fusion, "Mirai Yuugo" itself means Future Fusion.
    • It is impossible to conduct a normal draw outside Draw Phase, yet some rulings still redundantly state "normal draw in Draw Phase."
    • "Dragon Knight Draco Equiste". "Draco" is Latin for "Dragon", and "Equiste" is the plural form of "Eques", meaning "Knight". Put together, the card's name translates to "Dragon Knight Dragon Knights".
    • There's one monster with the name Nefarious Archfiend Eater of Nefariousness.
    • Curse of Dragon, the Cursed Dragon is a particularly absurd example of this. The OCG name, "Norowareshi Ryū - Curse of Dragon," is a typical case of stating the name in both Japanese and English, but the TCG didn't even try to carry this convention over like they have done many times before.
    • There is currently no way to Fusion/Ritual/Synchro/Xyz/Link Summon non-Fusion/Ritual/Synchro/Xyz/Link monsters, yet there are many cards list "Fusion/Ritual/Synchro/Xyz/Link Summon a Fusion/Ritual/Synchro/Xyz/Link monster(s)".
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Some monsters' relative ATK scores aren't exactly what you'd expect. For example, the supreme god of the Duel Terminal planet can be punched out by a train or a giant koalanote .
  • Difficult, but Awesome: There are many, including but not limited to these:
    • The concept of 'Winmore' cards are based around this. They often have really good effects and can win the game by themselves, but usually come with such steep summoning requirements that, if you could summon them out, you very likely could have won without them anyways. More often then not, these cards tend to come from the boss monsters of the various animes.
    • The Koa'ki Meiru monsters have high ATK and useful effects and supports. What makes them difficult to use is that they all destroy themselves at the end of the turn if you don't discard the Iron Core card or reveal a card that's the same Type as the monster on the field. Some ways to utilize them include splashing them into another deck full of the same monster Type as them or by utilizing a certain card called Diamond Core of Koa'ki Meiru released in Primal Origins.
    • Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes requires a lot of set-up; a Reptile-based deck, a pre-set "Rise of the Snake Deity", a card to summon and destroy its predecessor and/or a use of "Snake Rain" to flood your Graveyard with Reptiles to boost Vennominaga's ATK. Once all that is said and done, however, Vennominaga is virtually unstoppable since it is completely immune to all card effects, and it needs only to damage the opponent three times for an instant win.
    • Sophia, Goddess of Rebirth is considered this for having harsh Summoning requirement of banishing one Fusion, Ritual, Synchro and Xyz on the field. Once she hits the field however, all cards on the field, graveyard and hand are banished except herself. Not to mention her Summon and effect can't be negated.
    • Then, there's Horakhty, the Creator God of Light. You have to have all 3 of the Egyptian God Cards on the field... With the "card copying its name" trick explicitly negated to prevent abuse. It's well worth the effort, however, as the mere act of Summoning it cannot be negated, and once it's Summoned, you win.
    • Sephylon, the Ultimate Timelord, the Big Bad boss monster of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, has an impressive 4000 ATK/DEF, but it requires 10 monsters in the Graveyard to Summon and only from the hand. This can be accomplished through self-milling tactics, but it is still a dead draw early-game. Its effect to Summon a Level 8 or higher Fairy as a 4000 ATK beatstick also requires a deck built around it. Nonetheless, if you can pull this off and remove your opponent's traps, it makes a fantastic late-game finisher. Plus, you're Summoning Godnote .
    • Despite the ridiculous amount of resources a well-built Infernity deck has, the cards' effects require you to have no hand, so it is not an easy deck to use. Reading strategy threads demonstrate the amount of thought necessary to make a consistent deck that doesn't lead to crippling dead cards in hand or needlessly wasting resources. The payoff is huge, though. In fact, living up to its name, while Brionac was still legal, they could execute an infinite loop with Trishula, Dragon of the Ice Barrier that could leave the opponent totally resource-less, though good luck understanding it at first glance.
    • The D/D/D archetype from the ARC-V era was built around being able to effectively utilize every single available summoning mechanic of the era (except Ritual Summoning) as well as many effects that allow special summoning other monsters of their archetype. This means that you have a lot of options, need to very carefully craft the deck around the monsters that make these summons possible, and need to use each card carefully with little room for error. Though, once you master the deck, you have access to tons of options and can regularly pump out very powerful fields that simultaneously have very high attack power and powerful stun effects, such as D/D/D Cursed King Siegfried, Crystal Wing Synchro Dragon, and Number 38: Hope Harbinger Dragon Titanic Galaxy all on one field.
    • Small World is a Spell Card that has an esoteric effect: You choose a monster in your hand, banish it, then reveal a monster in your deck that shares the banished card's Attribute, Type, Level, ATK, or DEF, but only one of them. You then add to hand from your deck a third monster that shares the second card's Attribute, Type, Level, ATK, or DEF, but only one of them, then banish the second card face-down. It's a difficult card to resolve for many decks, but if you can use it it's one of the most powerful monster searchers in the entire game, as it is (technically) completely generic, and serves as a good bait card for Ash Blossom, since if it gets negated it's card neutral since it reveals for cost.
  • Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation: The free-to-play PC implementation Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel. Before that, there was Yu-Gi-Oh! Online and Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links.
  • Dinosaurs Are Dragons:
    • Generally averted. The two have been completely separate Types since the very beginning. Though both focus upon having supremely nasty powerhouses, Dinosaurs tend more towards brute force and ATK gain while Dragons have devastating effects and good ATK.
    • Played straight with the archetype collectively called Evol(ve): Reptiles turn into Dinosaurs that Xyz into Dragons.
  • Disability Superpower: Infernities are a variation of this trope: Typically not having cards in your hand would be considered a bad thing, as it would require you to constantly draw the cards you need from the top of your deck with no backup plan, but Infernities benefit from this situation.
  • Discard and Draw: Many cards use discarding as part of a cost for an effect (e.g. Magic Jammer, Lightning Vortex, Hand Destruction, etc.) or the effect itself (ex.Graceful Charity, Dark World Dealings, etc.) Note that certain cards such as Graceful Charity and Dark World Dealings allow the player to draw cards prior or after discarding as an effect.
  • Disc-One Nuke: The password system (8-digit number printed on the lower left corner of a card) allowed for players to port cards from their existing collection into various video games, but eventually it turned into a Game-Breaker since people can just look up the card codes online without ever needing the effort of purchasing the card in the game or in real life. Eventually, this flaw was remedied, usually by imposing a cost for acquiring a card based on its rarity or power, limiting how many times you can use a single password, and/or requiring you to have had at least 1 copy of the card in-game before the passwords actually work. The system hence transformed from this trope into an Anti-Frustration Feature for rounding off playsets of cards or completing collections.
  • Doppelmerger:
    • Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon is a Fusion monster attained by fusing three copies of Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon can be Fusion summoned the same way.
    • Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon is a Fusion of two copies of Thunder Dragon.
    • Cyber Twin Dragon is Fusion summoned with two copies of Cyber Dragon. Cyber End Dragon is Fusion summoned using three copies of Cyber Dragon.
  • Downer Ending: The Gigobyte story was originally this. Averted when Gagagigo the Risen was released as an Xyz Monster.
  • Drafting Mechanic: Some tournaments have 4-8 players building their decks using a closed draft ("pick a card, pass on the rest, repeat until out of cards").
  • Dragon Rider: There are several, most of which are the result of a fusion between a dragon monster and a more humanoid card. They include Dark Magician Girl the Dragon Knight, Paladin of White Dragon, Alligator's Sword Dragon and the mighty Dragon Master Knight along with many others.
  • The Dragonslayer: This is Buster Blader's main specialty. He gets a powerful ATK boost from each Dragon type monster the opponent has and can fuse with the Dark Magician to become the mighty Dark Paladin who retains his dragon boosting ability while adding the additional power to counter spells. He can also become an even more powerful version of himself by fusing with a dragon monster.
  • Dragon Tamer: The Lord/Lady/King of Dragon cards depict spellcasters who use Magic Music to attract or resurrect dragons that help them in battle.
  • Dragon Hoard: Alluded to in the Flavor Text of The Dragon Dwelling in the Cave.
    A huge dragon dwelling in a cave. It is horrible when it gets angry, although it is usually quiet. It is said to preserve certain treasures.
  • Draw Extra Cards: One card that can draw more cards, is Pot of Greed. It allows the player to draw two cards. In fact, there's an entire archetype, the "Greed" archetype, of related cards, which are all themed around drawing more cards. Another archetype, the Treasure Cards series, allow for drawing even greater amounts of extra cards, but in turn, require more significant drawbacks, from being forced to discard cards or having to skip their turns battle phase wholly.
  • Drill Tank: There have been a few cards with this design over the years:
  • Dub-Induced Plot Hole: Sometimes changing card names from Japanese to English results in the rules getting screwed up since the naming was important. Instances include:
    • The most infamous is the Archfiend archetype. The original Japanese cards used the word "Demon", and for a while the English versions of the cards just renamed them to omit the word. But when "Demon" became an archetype with dedicated support, the English term "Archfiend" was created, and earlier "Demon" cards had a special rule (and later errata text) stating that they are treated as "Archfiend" cards. Particularly confusing is "Summoned Skull", whose Japanese name was "Demon's Summoning"; it later got variants of it to become an archetype, with several monsters that are considered to have the same name as it. But instead of errata'ing its name to something like "Summoned Archfiend", its new cards instead share the effect of having their names treated as "Summoned Skull" while they are on field, while simultaneously being treated as part of the "Archfiend" archetype.
    • The "Guardian" archetype of Equip Spell-themed monsters had a different spelling used in Japanese, "ガーディアン 'Gādian'". That wasn't done in English so now any "Guardian" card that affects them affects any other monster with "Guardian" in its name, too.
    • A few cards have their names changed from the Japanese, and then have to have them changed back because their English names meant they were included in archetypes they ought not to be part of. Two of the most prominent examples are "Harpie's Brother" and "Red-Eyes B. Chick" - their Japanese names are "Birdman" and "Black Dragon's Chick", respectively, so when "Harpie" and "Red-Eyes" got more support, they eventually got renamed to "Sky Scout" and "Black Dragon's Chick". For a while before that, English Harpie cards specified that they affected "Harpie" monsters except "Harpie's Brother".
    • The "Polymerization" card was originally called "Fusion" (Yūgō) in Japan, and other Fusion-support cards are usually literally "Fusion" (Fyūjon) in Japan, with "Polymerization" cards being Fusion in Japanese (Yūgō). The different spelling of the two words meant in the Japanese version, support cards for Fusions had to specify they affected cards that used either spelling; in turn, English versions of those cards have to specify "Polymerization" or any "Fusion" card. However, there was one unrelated card that contained "fusion" in its English name: "Diffusion-Wave Motion," and thus many English Fusion support cards have to specify that "Diffusion-Wave Motion" is not a valid "Fusion" card for their effects.
    • The Japanese names of Rainbow Dragon and Rainbow Dark Dragon are, respectively, "Ultimate Gem God - Rainbow Dragon" and "Ultimate Gem God - Rainbow Dark Dragon." This in turn led to a ruling problem between the TCG and OCG. OCG support cards that affected either of the two simply referred to "an 'Ultimate Gem God' monster" but since the English versions dropped the title from their names, the TCG support cards had to directly name the two. Enter Elemental HERO Rainbow Neos, a Fusion of Elemental HERO Neos with either of the two dragons: in the OCG its Fusion Materials are listed as "Elemental HERO Neos" + "1 Ultimate Gem God monster" while the English card says "Elemental HERO Neos" + "Rainbow Dragon" or "Rainbow Dark Dragon". This creates a problem due to to numerous Fusion support cards that in some way rely on monsters that are specifically named as Fusion materials, which is the case for the English Rainbow Neos card but not the Japanese one. Begin the arguments and confusion over the mentioned card effects applying to the dragons or not. If the TCG and OCG should have separate rulings on such matters is another problem altogether.
      • Then this created even more headaches when the Crystal Beasts got further support, including a new Fusion monster "Rainbow Overdragon", whose Japanese name of course was "Ultimate Gem God - Rainbow Over Dragon". At this time they had to adopt the Theme Naming, so the English Overdragon card, and the two previous dragons, had text added that says they are always referred to as "Ultimate Crystal" monsters, so a new card that works for all three of them properly refers to 'an "Ultimate Crystal" monster'. They also then had to errata every single pre-existing support card for the series to mention they work for any "Ultimate Crystal" monster.
    • An early monster in the Legend of Blue-Eyes booster was Darkfire Dragon, and Pharaoh's Servant brought Darkfire Soldier 1 and Darkfire Soldier 2. Sounds like the makings of an archetype, right? No, because all three of them had entirely different names in the Japanese OCG, and besides that Darkfire Dragon is a different Type and Attribute from Darkfire Soldier 1 and 2, begging the question why the two Soldiers were named after it.note 
  • Dub Name Change: Let’s just say a vast majority of these cards were renamed for a variety of reasons. Some where renamed to avoid religious connections.
  • Dub Text: The artwork for the card Tragedy is an image of a guillotine in Japan. The international version completely replaces this artwork for... a scene of a man stalking a woman in an implied rape scenario.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • Early sets put much more emphasis on Normal monsters, with the only real strategy being how to get yourself the best ATK stat to overpower your opponent. Nowadays you'll hardly ever see any Normal Monsters in a deck unless it's built specifically around them, and high ATK isn't the main focus anymore.
    • Similarly, the Extra Deck *  was almost never used except for one or two Fusion monsters at most, with a general focus on monsters from the Main Deck being the main attack force and your "boss monster" was often included there. Nowadays, a max Extra Deck of fifteen cards is pretty much required if you want to have any hopes of winning consistently, and it's incredibly rare that your boss monster isn't an Extra Deck monster.
    • There have been a few changes in the phrasing of certain rules and cards. For example, Polymerization didn't actually explain what it did in its original printing, since that was in the rulebook. After there started to be more ways to summon Fusions than just Polymerization, the explanation of the card was taken out and put on the card itself.
    • Card text in the earlier sets were quite wordy, offering a lot of additional explanations that were eventually trimmed down in later errata when the minituae of certain mechanics were ported into the rulebook. Still, between the GX and 5D's era, there was still quite a bit of confusion with working out what's a cost, what targets, et cetera, and eventually by the ZEXAL era the game introduced Problem-Solving Card Text that (for most part) standardized and clarified costs, effects, and targets.
    • The earliest days of the game, before it even came to the west, the rulings were a lot different and resembled the Duelist Kingdom arc of the anime more closely. Most notably, you could summon any monster regardless of their level, quick effects did not trigger in the hand (making cards like Kuriboh completely useless), and Fusion monsters could only be Fusion Summoned if the materials were on the field first, and when bounced would return to the hand first before returning to the Fusion (Extra) Deck. Thankfully, these rules only lasted a few months at most before the rules that would become the modern card game started to take shape.
    • Back when Konami was first starting to experiment with the concept of archetypes with Pegasus' toon monsters, they gave all cards under the archetype the abilitynote  moniker of 'Toon', and the cards specifically reference the ability moniker rather than the archetypes name. To this day, they are the only archetype to have an ability moniker, as future archetypes would instead refer to the archetype name of the cards when regarding card interactions. In addition, certain Monsters had different effects such as Amazoness Archer who allowed you to sacrifice two of your monsters to deal 1200 points of damage to your opponent and Karakuri Spider, who in addition to only existing in the video games, blew up an opposing DARK monster it battled at the end of the battle phase, even if it was destroyed instead of exploding if switched to Duel Mode and was called Mechanical Spider in those games.
    • When Speed Duel was new in the TCG, Konami tried printing Speed Duel booster packs in much the same way the normal card game gets them. These proved to be extremely unpopular as they only came with 4 cards in a pack with no rarity guarantees and nearly every card inside them was unplayably bad. Eventually they stopped making the booster packs and settled for the now-standard pre-built deck boxes.
  • Edible Theme Naming: The Madolche's names are puns of French and Italian Desserts.
  • Electric Jellyfish: The aptly named Electric Jellyfish card which is based on an older "normal" Jellyfish card that was only shown to have electric powers in an early episode of the anime. It has the ability to once per turn, negate any effect your opponent tries.
  • Elemental Powers:
    • The idea behind monster Attributes.
    • The specialty of the Charmer Archetype.
    • As the name itself implies, the "Elemental HERO" archetype, down to the point of every basic Elemental HERO being able to fuse with practically any other, except Neos, which has its own flock of Aliens to fuse with.
  • Elephant Graveyard: Mammoth Graveyard was an early staple of Yugi's deck in the anime, but as an individual card it's just plain strange. Despite being an animate mammoth skeleton it's not classified as a Zombie type or even a Beast type but as a Dinosaur type... what? Also, apparently there's a Fusion version of the card (that doesn't use the Mammoth Graveyard itself as a material, naturally) called Great Mammoth of Goldfine with roughly double the power of the original. The only visual difference between the two is that this mammoth is (as indicated by it's name) painted gold. At least it's a proper Zombie type this time around...
  • Equippable Ally:
    • The Dragon-Type Dragunities are both this. As well as Attack Animals.
    • Union monsters, which can either stand alone as a monster (although they are typically weak) or can be equipped to another monster to give them an additional effect.
  • Everyone Went to School Together: The Magistus archetype consists of younger versions of leaders of various spellcaster archetypes that are canonically all in conflict with each other, implying this trope in in effect.
  • Evil Chef: Number 59: Crooked Cook has the ability to nuke every other card on it's owners field to gain temporary immunity to card effects and an additional 300 ATK for each monster destroyed by this effect. The implications for exactly how this power operates is pretty obvious.
  • Evil Counterpart: Many monsters exist as, as their names imply, dark versions of other monsters. These include Dark Grepher, Dark Armed Dragon, Dark Honest, and Dark Valkyria. There are also the paradoxically named Evil HEROes, which are evil equivalents of the Elemental HEROes.
  • Evil Versus Evil: There is a war between Dark Ruler Ha Des and Dark King of the Abyss. Ha Des tricked Dark King out of his throne with Demotion. Dark King got his revenge, but was killed by the Revived King Ha Des.
  • Evil Weapon: The Master Guide says the Equip Spell Wicked-Breaking Flamberge - Baou holds the dark power of Baou, its Guardian spirit. When Warrior Dai Grepher later wields it, he is overcome by the dark energy. He becomes a rampaging monster, transforming more and more until, at the height of his mutation, he was completely unrecognizable as his former self.
  • Evolutionary Levels:
    • Pretty much any monster with LV in its name. Their main schtick is weak cards replacing themselves with stronger and stronger versions of themselves.
    • The Evol Archetype sort of fits this too. "Sort of" in that while the younger versions Special Summon older ones, the younger ones don't need to be offered up in order to do so.
  • Exact Time to Failure: Once you activate the "Final Countdown" card, your opponent has exactly 20 turns (10 of theirs and 10 of yours) to beat you or you win.
  • Exact Words: See Loophole Abuse further down the page for the many ways this trope can be abused.
    • Card effects that grant piercing often don't specify they have to target a monster you control, and the wordings on the card specify that your opponent is the one who takes the piercing damage. This means you can use a card effect like Fairy Meteor Crush to give an opponent's monster piercing, but if they attack your defending monster, your opponent is the one who will take damage.
    • Some Continuous card effects like Call of the Haunted link themselves to a monster under their effects. Individual cards like this tend to vary in wording on what happens to the Continuous card, or the monster card, depending on how they leave the field. For example, if Call of the Haunted's summoned monster is removed from the field in a manner other than being destroyed, Call of the Haunted remains in play and useless. This is a major reason why Premature Burial is banned - its effect only destroys the monster it revives if Premature Burial is destroyed, but if the player gets rid of it in some other way (most famously, by returning it to their hand to use it again) the monster is safe.
    • Many cards require that a player(s) "discard a card to the Graveyard", usually from their hand or deck. But if some sort of card effect is in play that would somehow prevent you from discarding directly to the Graveyard (usually by banishing any card sent to the Graveyard, or sometimes shuffling them into the deck), you can't use card effects like that. On the other hand, card effects that more generally tell you to "discard a card" without specifying it has to be to the Graveyard are still fair game.
    • Does a card say that under certain conditions you can do something? Because that determines if the effect is mandatory or not, which means everything when it comes to chaining cards. Several rules determine the significance:
      • "If x, you can" means that the card is unable to "Miss the Timing".
      • "When x, you can" means that the card is capable of "Missing the Timing" if it is not the last thing to occur.
      • "When x, y" and "If x, y" cannot miss the timing, because they're mandatory.
    • Some cards say "once per turn" while others say "you can only use this effect of <card's name> once per turn." In the case of the former wording, this means if you control multiple copies of the card, or the card leaves the field and is played again, you can use the effect once for each of them.
    • You say your card has an effect that triggers when discarded? Does it say it has to specifically be from the Deck or hand? Does it specify it has to be discarded to the Graveyard? Does it say it has to be discarded due to an opponent's card effect? Does it matter if it's discarded for a cost or by an effect? And as noted above, does it say you can do something when it gets discarded, because that will determine if the effect is mandatory or not when it gets discarded. This is the main reason Dandylion is Forbidden, because it gets its effect when it hits the Graveyard no matter how it gets sent there, and the effect is mandatory so you're promised your two Tokens no matter what happens.
    • Xyz cards have also caused players to take a closer look at cards like Sangan that specify "sent from the field to the Graveyard", because current rulings are that Xyz Material monsters don't count as being on the field, so Sangan wouldn't get its effect when detached from an Xyz monster.
    • Many monsters with a powerful effect or high ATK/DEF say "Cannot be normal summoned or set" followed by a Summon condition. However, Galaxy-Eyes Photon Dragon only says it can be special summoned with its own effect. There is nothing stopping one from normal summoning it.
    • Many cards exist with some form of protection to keep the opponent from getting rid of them easily, but the exact terms are important. A monster may be unable to be destroyed by any effects, but banishing is an entirely different thing and thus are fair game for that. A monster may not be targetable by card effects, but it might still be vulnerable to a card effect that has a more general non-targeting effect.
    • Some cards have their effects last "until the End Phase", while others last "until the end of the turn" or "for the rest of the current turn". This is an important distinction to make, as things can still happen during the End Phase, so in the former case an effect will become active again or a restriction will be lifted, allowing a player to still do things during the End Phase they couldn't earlier in the turn. But if the effect is one of the latter two wordings, it persists through the End Phase until the turn is actually fully over.
  • Extradimensional Emergency Exit: The Interdimensional Matter Transporter card banishes one of the player's own monsters until the End Phase, which is meant to symbolize a monster escaping into an alternate dimension in order to avoid certain death.
  • Eyes Do Not Belong There: Big Eye, Thousand Eyes Restrict, and Hundred Eyes Dragon
  • Fairy Dragons: Ancient Fairy Dragon and its alternate counterpart Ancient Pixie Dragon are serpentine dragons with mantis-like wings. As a Signer and Duel Dragon respectively, they hold great metaphysical power within the story and are strongly associated with manipulating Field Cards to control the environment.
  • Fallen Angel: Darklord Marie, previously known as Marie the Fallen One, is a Level 5 tribute monster with mediocre stats and the ability to increase its owner's Life Points by a small amount each turn as long as it's in the graveyard.
  • Family-Friendly Firearms: Many cards with realistic guns in the art had them replaced with lasers, fanciful guns, or knives, with varying success. Great example of a card that explicitly has a gun◊ on it to less obvious◊. Plus the gun in the original was a burglar's.
  • Fanservice: Zigzagged. Although most cards which seem to gear towards this are edited for the TCG, there are edited cards that still retain some Fanservice elements, such as Chocolate Magician Girl and Isolde, Belle of the Underworld.
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: This card game strongly mixes everything from numerous media and real-life.
  • Farts on Fire: Ferret Flames depicts Fencing Fire Ferret farting out fire to attack a group of Terrene Toothed Tsuchinokos.
  • Feathered Fiend: A number of monsters, but the Blackwings stand out.
  • Fighting Panda: Gyaku-Gire Panda is a Beast-type monster with the appearance of a vicious and angry panda. Its special effect grants it 500 attack points for every monster on the opponent's field. It appeared in the anime as one of the monsters used by model, actress and martial artist Vivian Wong.
  • Fiery Redhead: The Spirit Charmer card Hiita the Fire Charmer as well as her older versions are all cards depicting a redheaded girl who can use the element of fire and tame monsters that are Fire-Attribute.
  • First-Player Advantage Mitigation: The first player can't conduct their Battle Phase on their first turn, as they would otherwise get a nigh-unavoidable shot at their opponent's LP. It turned out that the game still had a considerable first-player advantage, so as of the Master Rules 3, the first player's first turn also lacks the draw step. At the same time, the player going second can use "hand traps" (Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring most notable among them) to disrupt the player going first, or break open their board with cards like Evenly Matched or Lightning Storm. Worse, if the Speed Duel format, perhaps most notably via Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, is being followed, starting hands begin at 4 cards per player, which can handicap the first turn player that has to start with said paltry hand and doesn't even get to decide whether to go first or second if they win the coin toss and they run a deck that benefits more from going second.
  • Frog Ninja:
    • The Anime-exclusive card "Illusion Ninjitsu Art of Hazy Toad" depicts a ninja being overshadowed by a giant golden toad. It grants a "Ninja" monster you control 1000 ATK during your opponent's Battle Phase.
    • Another Anime-exclusive Illegal Summon depicts the Trope Maker Jiraiya himself riding a toad. The effect allows each player to Special Summon a Level 4 or lower monster from their decks, referencing Jiraiya's ability to summon a toad.
  • Fungi Are Plants: Certain Plant-type monsters are actually fungi, like Mushroom Man.
  • Fusion Dance: Fusion has been a gameplay feature since the early days of the game, but the Elemental HEROes are entirely based around fusing with one another, with dozens of potential combinations present. To a lesser extent, the newer Gem-Knight archetype is also based around Fusion.
  • Fusion Dissonance: As shown in these videos, some of the older Fusion Monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh! look nothing like their recipes. To cite just one, Witch of the Black Forest and Lady of Faith (both female) combine into the Musician King (a male guitarist).
    • However, it's subverted in that there's also the implication that some Fusion Monsters are not made by the recipes combining their bodies. For example, the anime shows the Time Wizard magically aging the Baby Dragon to turn it into the Fusion monster Thousand Dragon (without any Fusion card!). Then again, the anime is unreliable as it operates on rules different from the real life games and there's no in-universe explanation given as to how most of these weird fusions occur.
    • Zigazagged later in Yu-Gi-Oh!'s lifespan, when Fusion and similar monsters started gaining more non-specific materials, with the artwork depicting only the "canon" combination. E.g. the Metalfoes consist of a series of humanoid monsters riding vehicles, and a series of Fusion monsters representing the same characters wearing their vehicles as Powered Armor... except that any of the Metalfoes' basic forms can be used as material for any of their Fusions. Most of these Fusion Monsters make it clear that the artwork is just a limitation in depiction. Like how the card "UFOroid Fighter" is simply a combination of UFOroid and any Warrior-type card, with the result adding the ATK and DEF of its Fusion materials. The Warrior depicted in that card is "Elemental HERO Tempest" for consistency with its first appearance in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, but the idea behind the card is that the Warrior-type monster rides the UFOroid and it could have been any other Warrior.
    • The game also has a whole class of "Fusion Substitute Monsters", which share versions of the effect "This card can be used as a substitute for any 1 Fusion Material whose name is specifically listed on the Fusion Monster Card, but the other Fusion Material(s) must be correct." (usually restricted to materials or Fusions of a specific category). This was later nerfed by the introduction of Fusion Monsters with an effect which prevented them from being Fusion Summoned except using materials with the proper names. At least until the introduction of Elemental Hero Prisma, a Fusion support card whose effect lets it change its name.
  • Fuuma Shuriken: Available as an equip card for ninja monsters. In addition to giving them a sizable 700 point ATK boost it also hits the opponent for 700 points of damage when it leaves the field.
  • Game of Chicken: Chicken Game, a field spell card which adds a "flirting with self-destruction" mechanic. (The player with the least LP can not take damage, but each player on their turn can sacrifice LP to activate different effects, including healing their opponent.)
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • Normal Monsters, especially old ones, have flavor text that make them seem more threatening than how they'd perform in the game. Take Maiden of the Moonlight for example. Powers beyond mortal comprehension, huh? That 1500 ATK certainly says otherwise! Sure there are SOME examples where it fits, like the famous Blue-Eyes White Dragon (in terms of ATK, there are not many monsters that can stand up to it), but it's just ridiculous for the most part. In fact, this is what made Shapesnatch a Memetic Badass.
    • In the Duel Terminal storyline, Mist Valley Thunder Lord is the one that destroys Ally of Justice - Catastor (a feat shown on Thunder Lord's artwork). This is despite the fact that Catastor's effect destroys any non-dark monster that battles it, and Thunder Lord does not have an effect that would make it immune.
  • Gashadokuro: "Gashadokuro, the Skeletal Mayakashi" is a Level 11 Zombie Synchro monster from the Mayakashi archetype, manifesting as a giant skeleton decked-out in Samurai armor.
  • Gate Guardian: In the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, there's "Gatekeeper", a mechanical creature who seems to guard dimensional gateways. There's also "Gate Guardian", the Paradox Brothers' ace monster in the anime. Presumably it guards gates with its mighty power.
  • Gentleman Thief: The White Magical Hat seems to be one. He has very low combat values but can steal away a card from the opponent every time he hits them with battle damage and dresses in a fancy suit, monocle, and top hat.
  • Geo Effects: Field spells are used to change the terrain of the battlefield and have their own special card slot seperate from the regular spell/trap card zone. In the early years of the game most field cards were extremely basic with effects that only gave a small power boost or decrease to certain types of monsters and did nothing else. As the game went on this slowly changed with newer field cards offering a much grater variety of abilities and mechanics that affected the gameplay in a much more meaningful way.
  • Get Out!: Slacker Magician kicks Akashic Magician and Alchemic Magician out of her house after getting fed up with their staring contest antics. In gameplay, Get Out! lets you bounce two of your opponent's Extra Deck monsters back into the Extra Deck.
  • Giant Medical Syringe: Injection Fairy Lily is a fairy nurse that is carrying a massive syringe. As a card, she is a Spellcaster-type card with 400 Attack and 1500 Defense with the effect of granting herself 3000 Attack whenever she attacks or is attacked at the cost of 2000 Life Points on the player. Despite the card depicting her with a syringe in the actual card game, the English version of the anime replaces it with a rocket.
  • Gladiator Games: Gladiator Beasts, a set of monsters that are Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and has the gimmick of "tagging out" with each other after a battle. Bonus points for Konami showing their work by using the real gladiator types and weapons/battle tactics for most of the cards, as well as real-life Roman figures for the namesakes of the most powerful Beasts.
  • Glass Cannon:
    • The Lightsworns were designed as this with a combo of Fragile Speedster. Most of their monsters are quite powerful and a good Lightsworn deck will probably win very quickly... or not win at all. This is because almost all of them send cards straight from your deck to the graveyard at the end of the turn, meaning your deck will burn itself out after a while.
    • There are also quite a few monsters that have high attack points but pathetic defense points. The mighty Rainbow Dragon has 4000 ATK and 0 DEF, for example. Similarly, the Inverz/Steelswarm monsters all have 0 DEF. If a clever player runs cards that can switch attack and defense positions or stats, or outright nuke said low-defense monsters, these monsters are toast.
    • Several archetypes can make very powerful plays if not interrupted. If they are successfully interrupted or don't have a good opening hand, they tend to flounder around, vulnerable for several turns at worst.
    • Pendulum decks in general are infamous for this, especially "Magicians". If left unchecked, they can make terrifyingly oppressive combos and boards that rival meta decks in terms of preventing your opponent from playing the game and can basically win the game on their own. However, they are cripplingly weak to interruption and are generally unable to run interruption themselves without giving up much-needed consistency, making going second a death sentence in many (but not all) cases. This is largely why they've fallen out of relevancy on top of Master Rule 4 nerfing Pendulum Summoning, as many modern decks can do what Pendulum decks can do but easier and with less fragility.
  • Gold and White Are Divine: Several LIGHT attribute monsters make good use of this aesthetic in their designs and artwork. It seems to be especially common among angelic Dragon and Fairy types.
  • Golem: We have Laval Golem, Destroyer Golem, Dummy Golem, Grinder Golem, Block Golem, Golem Dragon, Golem Sentry, Goggle Golem, Mine Golem, Revival Golem, Millennium, Brain Golem, Ancient Gear Golem (along with its counterparts Ultimate Ancient Gear Golem, Ancient Gear Megaton Golem, and Toon Ancient Gear Golem), Magic Hole Golem, Chronomaly Mud Golem, The Piece Golem archetype (Small, Medium, and Big, along with the Fusion Monster Multiple Piece Golem) and Scrap Golem.
  • Gotta Catch 'Em All: This is impossible in real life (unless you're insanely rich and have a lot of spare time on your hands, and even then Tyler the Great Warrior is truly one-of-a-kind). However, the video games do permit you to, with enough time, fill out your collection with their entire in-game card library.
  • Gratuitous English: At this point, the OCG probably has more cards and booster packs with English than Japanese names. A good deal of Japanese cards also have English names.
  • Gratuitous Japanese: In the first few booster packs, UDE's policy was that cards with English names in the Japanese version would have their names in the Western versions be Japanese. Examples include "Raigeki" ("Thunder Bolt"), "Ansatsu" ("Assassin"), "Hyozanryu" ("Diamond Dragon"), "Seiyaryu" ("Holy Night Dragon"), "Hitotsu-Me Giant" ("Cyclops"), "Ryu-Kishin" ("Gargoyle"), "(Manga) Ryu-Ran" ("(Toon) Dragon Egger"). Some cards simply use the Japanese name, such as "Umi", "Yami", "Sogen", "Umiiruka", "Ookazi", "Michizure". They've since stopped, but some card names are left untranslated.
  • Great White Feline: The All-Seeing White Tiger which is described as "A proud ruler of the jungle that some fear and others respect."
  • The Grim Reaper: Several monsters released over the years take an obvious inspiration from this design with Reaper of the Cards being the most well known due to his brief appearance in the anime. Unfortunately, he lost a lot of his scare factor due to only having 1380 ATK points, meaning he could be punched out by things like an elf with a sword or a mermaid with a bow and arrows even before the Power Creep the series became known for began to set in. Nowadays the poor guy can even be punched out by a smiling cartoon strawberry! Ouch.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • Now that there are thousands of individual cards in the game (with updated rulings, to boot,) keeping track of these can be a pain. Fortunately, there are official tournament judges and even a wiki to help with this, but there are some things that will not be immediately obvious to a player that requires him to double check from an official source to confirm it. For example: Cards like Axe of Despair and Summoned Skull are now considered to be "Archfiend" cards (the newer prints even say so on them). If you had the old versions of these cards, how were you supposed to know?
    • "Properly summoned". Long story short, if a monster that cannot be Normal Summoned/Set (such as nearly every Extra Deck monster, or anything that has the "Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set" or "Must first be Special Summoned" clause) finds its way into the Graveyard or banished in any way other than being sent there after being summoned via its correct summoning procedure, it cannot be Special Summoned to the field under any circumstances, even overriding the "ignoring its Summoning conditions" clause. This even includes monsters that were properly summoned then sent to the Graveyard/banished then summoned back to the field, as once they return in this way they lose their "properly summoned" flag and cannot be brought back a second time. This is an integral rule to the modern card game but is rarely touched upon by rulebooks, causing many beginner players to wonder why they can't summon back a Fusion/Synchro/Xyz/Link Monster that they dumped to the Graveyard from their Extra Deck.
    • There are some rulings specific to certain cards that don't make sense even in the context of established rules and only seem to work because Konami has specifically stated that it works a certain way, and to no one's surprise this tends to trip up people who haven't already memorized these specific rulings. Two notorious examples are "Warrior of Atlantis" and "Interrupted Kaiju Slumber".
      • Warrior of Atlantis is a card that lets you add the card "A Legendary Ocean" from your Deck to your hand. However, "A Legendary Ocean" is one of many cards with the conditional text "This card is always treated as 'Umi'." printed on it, which means that for all intents and purposes, its actual name (except for the one printed directly on the card) is "Umi" and not "A Legendary Ocean". Since this would make Warrior of Atlantis do pretty much nothing since there is no search target for its effect, Konami eventually ruled that it can add "A Legendary Ocean" to your hand even though A Legendary Ocean is always treated as having the name "Umi".
      • Interrupted Kaiju Slumber is a Spell Card that destroys all monsters on the field, then Special Summons two "Kaiju" monsters with different names, one to each side of the field. For the 99% of other cards in the game, to Summon a monster or activate and resolve an effect that Summons a monster, you must be able to meet the conditions of Summoning throughout the process of Summoning, which is why you cannot do things like Special Summon a Warrior monster from your Extra Deck by using a Warrior you control as material while "There Can Be Only One" is face-up on the field. "Kaiju" monsters have a conditional effect that states that each player can only control one "Kaiju" monster, so theoretically "Interrupted Kaiju Slumber" cannot be activated while either player controls a "Kaiju". However, Konami has stated that you can in fact play "Interrupted Kaiju Slumber" while either player controls a "Kaiju", on the basis that "then" is conjunction used between the effect that destroys and the effect that Special Summons, meaning that they do not occur with the same timing.
  • Haunted House: The various Ghostricks (naturally) all live in one together and now there's even a theme park ride based on it! There's also the monster Ghost Belle & Haunted Mansion which features a cute ghost belle (un)living in her haunted mansion.
  • Healing Shiv: Monster Reborn's international artwork depicts a dagger that resurrects monsters. note 
  • Healing Spring:
    • The spell card Spring of Rebirth gives its owner 500 LP each time monsters return to their hand from the field.
    • There's also the Hidden Springs of the Far East field spell card which allows both players to regain 500 LP each turn and activate one of many additional beneficial effects.
    • The Amazoness archetype has access to their own private hot spring that heals their controller for any battle damage they take, likely to symbolize the Amazons relaxing in the springs after a hard day of intense fighting.
  • Heel–Face Revolving Door: Gigobyte, who changes alignment 4 times over the course of his life. According to the various cards featuring him he began as evil (Gigobyte), became good after meeting the Marauding General (Gagagigo), underwent "body reconstruction" that turned him evil (Giga Gagagigo), became even more evil as he quested for ultimate power (Gogiga Gagagigo), then after meeting his old friend again this time as Freed, the Matchless General, he became good again (Gagagigo the Risen).
  • Highly Specific Counterplay: The game features some narrow counter cards:
  • History Repeats: In the early eras that predate the banlist, every deck converged towards beatdown with the same generic staples filling out the deck, and at its worst every deck gravitated towards playing Chaos and the Envoys, thus creating the infamous "Cookie Cutter Chaos Control". Then the banlist was established, eliminating numerous cards from legality and forcing players to work with substitutes. Archetypes got established, fleshed out, and became deck-defining... but then they eventually get condensed into value engines, some of which are so efficient that you only need one specific card in hand to start a combo that ends on a boss monster, and Power Creep has led to hand-traps becoming essential to disrupt the opponent from turn 1 (Ash Blossom being a prime example) and introduced very good generic extenders and boss monsters that overshadow archetype-specific bosses. So now, while you still have archetype-based decks, it's not unusual for several different decks to have lines of play that converge into the same combos and boss monsters and supported with the same set of staples; at its worst you get "pile decks" which are a collection of the most effective generic engines.
  • Holiday Personification: There is a set of three Normal Pendulum monster cards that represent the last three major holidays of the year—Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. They all have mediocre stats but possess Pendulum effects that involve changing either a face-up monster's level or their own Pendulum Scales based on the roll of a six-sided die.
  • Holy Hand Grenade: Remember Horakhty, the Egyptian god that won the day against Zorc in the original anime and manga? She's a card now, and her effect is like this. Good luck Summoning her, though...
  • Homage / Shout-Out: The game started off as a homage to Magic: the Gathering for the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga.
    • Since the physical card game is created by Konami, it's only natural that a few of their other game series would make some appearances. Many examples include...
    • Given Konami also owns Castlevania, there exist a good number of references to it in Yu-Gi-Oh!, which are enough to warrant their own subsection.
      • The Vampire Hunter is an extremely obvious shout-out. The monster himself appears to be Leon Belmont with the Vampire Killer whip.
      • Vampire Lord is based on Count Dracula, and its effect revives it on the next turn if it was destroyed by a card effect. Its interaction with Vampire Hunter is basically a summary of the video game series - Vampire Hunter destroys Vampire Lord, who is then revived and the cycle repeats.
      • Vampire Scarlet Scourge also looks like Alucard, or Soma but in Dracula's more traditional clothing.
      • Destiny HERO - Plasma's effects are based around Dracula's powers in the video game series.
      • Worm Zero is a large ball made of parasitized bodies, similar to Legion.
      • Vampire Fraulein's clothing seems to be based on Camilla, Dracula's obsessed devotee in the game series and The Starscream in the Netflix show.
      • Arlownay is a recolored Alura Une, introduced in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
    • Raigeki Break is an obvious one to Great Mazinger.
    • The Six Samurai archetype seems to be intended as an homage to Seven Samurai. Shien is meant as an Homage to Oda Nobunaga.
    • The Deformer archetype (Morphtronic in English to avoid copyright issues) is a collective reference to Transformers and other giant mecha shows for kids in Japan such as "Golden Warrior Gold Lightan".
    • Look at Super Vehicroid - Stealth Union. Now look at this.
    • The Prophecy and Arcana Force archetypes are both based on the Major Arcana of Tarot cards.
    • Genex Ally are incredibly similar to the original Mega Man (Classic) characters.
    • The ability of Gladiator Beast monster to switch places with another Gladiator Beast from the deck after battling has been unanimously dubbed "Tag Out" by the playerdom.
    • The Elemental Heroes, or at least the earlier non-Fusion ones, are based on various American superheroes (Avian / Hawkman, Bladedge / Iron Man, Necroshade / Spawn).
    • The Elementals weren't the only ones: Destiny Heroes, two in particular, were based on two chracters in classic Novels (Double Dude/ The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Dreadmaster/ The Man in the Iron Mask) and one Evil Hero is based on one of the X-Men (Malicious Edge/Wolverine).
    • And the Masked Heroes as a whole are nods to the Kamen Rider franchise.
    • More specifically, the Inzektor monsters design, and their overall effect of a stronger armoured Inzektor over a lighter faster Inzektor is a shout out to Kamen Rider Kabuto.
    • Several cards use characters from other Shonen Jump series.
    • While the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG is itself based off Magic: The Gathering, very few cards from the former actually reference the latter... except for the Prophecy archetype. The Prophecy Destroyer's art style is very Magic-esque, while Wheel of Prophecy could be an Expy or Captain Ersatz of Ajani Goldmane, a Planeswalker from the Magic universe. Temperance of Prophecy can also be said to resemble Jace Beleren.
    • And the other way around works, too. Check out the Silent Swordsman and Silent Magician. Now look at Kargan Dragonlord and Guul Draz Assassin... and Chandra Nalaar's Japanese Duel Deck art.
    • Prophecy Destroyer, in turn, references Summoned Skull, whose manga version was a homage to Magic the Gathering's Lord of the Pit (Level 7 to reflect Pit's mana cost of 7, called "Demon's Summon" in the OCG to reflect Pit's Summon Demon type, has alternate fleshy red artworks that look closer to Pit).
    • Drill Warrior and Drill Synchron are suspiciously drill-happy, but it's not hard to squint vaguely and see the Gurren Lagann influence, particularly in the drill arm and its pose.
    • Garlandolf, King of Destruction resembles a certain King of Evil. His Ritual Spell also bears an uncanny resemblance to a temple from that series.
    • The Dragon Maid archetype brings to mind a certain manga series.
      • Vampire Retainer may be a wolf, but its normal white right half and deranged black left half, with jagged teeth and flaming red eye, bring to mind Monokuma.
    • The artwork for Scrap Factory features a robotic hand giving a thumbs up as it's being melted in a vat of molten steel, in reference to the iconic scene from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
    • The Deep-Space Cruiser IX is a pretty clear reference to a certain famous sci-fi series with a very similar name.
    • Several archetypes mix their references to popular franchises to create a whole new set of cards with tributes to each of its various components. The SPYRAL archetype mixes James Bond with Metal Gear to create a futuristic group of super secret agents equipped with high tech gadgets like power armor suits and spy drones while the Vendread archetype combines Spawn with Resident Evil and The Thing (1982) to create a magical revenant zombie apocalypse.
    • The Toon archetype cards Dark Rabbit (and by extension its in-universe incarnation "Funny Bunny") and Toon Gemini Elf each seemed to be based on (or at least very heavily inspired by) Roger and Jessica Rabbit.
    • The rare and obscure Flying Elephant card is basically Dumbo in all but name, complete with the giant oversized ears.
  • Hot as Hell: There's the early Equip Spell Malevolent Nuzzler that features an (implied nude) demon woman in its artwork and boosts the ATK power of the monster it's attached to by 700. The owner of the card can also choose to feed it 500 LP to recover it when it's sent from the field to the GY. Like many other cards, the original Japanese edition gave a much clearer picture of the Spell's true nature by naming it "Akuma no Kuchizuke", which translates to "Demon's Kiss" in English.
  • Humongous Mecha: Many of the Machine-type monsters, especially some of their Fusions.
  • Hu Mons: Human-like monsters have been featured in the game. The Warrior-type is filled with these, but there is also the Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl, who are Spellcaster-types.

    I to R 
  • Ice Magic Is Water: There is no "Ice" type; typically Ice-themed monsters are Aqua-type and Water attribute. An entire archetype of ice monsters, the Ice Barriers, are the most prominent examples.
  • "Instant Death" Radius: Several monsters have the ability to destroy their enemies at the start of the Damage Step, bypassing the actual act of combat once an attack is declared.
  • Instant-Win Condition: Several, listed on the Useful Notes page.
  • In the End, You Are on Your Own: Regardless of what the TV series have you believe, friends don't mean much in a standard 1-on-1 game.
  • Invulnerable Knuckles: An important gameplay aversion. To explain: If your monster attacks an opponent's defense-position monster, and the defender has more DEF than the attacker has ATK, it's the attacker who takes damage; think of it like punching a brick wall with your fist. This is one of the reasons why monsters can be Summoned in face-down defensive position; the attacker doesn't know what he's in for. Some decks can be built around this, with defensive monsters that flip themselves back down and "Shifting Sands" in play that lets you randomize the positions of your face-down monsters.
  • Joke Item:
    • Typically, many of the Short Print cards printed per main set are intended as these (such as Cold Feet and Oops!).
    • The flavor text of Normal Monsters printed in the later years of the card game lampshade their worthlessness when compared to Effect Monsters. Examples include Rabidragon, Wattaildragon, and Alligator's Sword.
  • Kamaitachi: The Yosenju archetype. Yosenju Kamaitachi is the gust of wind (it returns an opponent's card to the hand), Yosenju Kamanitachi cuts the opponent (it can attack directly), and Yosenju Kamamitachi applies the ointment (it adds a Yosenju to your hand).
  • Kid Hero: Hero Kid, naturally, as well as Elemental HERO Neos Alius. There are other child monsters as well, but it's unknown how heroic they are.
  • Kill It with Fire: Is the strategy with a lot of Fire/fire-themed cards, such as Elemental HERO Flame Wingman, Volcanic Doomfire, Achacha Archer, and Backfire.
  • King Mook: Many boss monsters (particularly Fusion cards) seem to have been deliberately designed with this trope in mind. Mokey Mokey King for example, is just 3 regular Mokey Mokeys fused into a towering skyscraper size and Ojama King is just a giant bulky Ojama with a little crown on his head.
  • Knight Templar: Vylons are so focused on creating a world of Perfect Pacifist People that they are willing to make a World of Silence to accomplish it. By killing everyone, apparently.
  • The Last of These Is Not Like the Others: Meta-example. The OCG Twitter likes to make posts asking people about their favorite cards of a particular variety, showing cards that fall under that category. While usually all but one of the cards fall under a single archetype (one that's usually meta relevant or at least respectably playable within the last year) the last one is completely unrelated to the other cards in any way other than it shares the category highlighted. Some examples:
    • Trap Cards, featuring the prolific Solemn counter trap card series; Solemn Wishes, which is related by name; Balance of Judgment, which features the same Grandpa God as the counter trap cards; and......Fetters of Fenrir.
    • Warrior-type monsters, featuring Noble Knights, and Hayabusa Knight, an unrelated double attacker that predates all of them by over 10 years.
  • Lava Magic Is Fire: Many high level Pyro and Fire elemental cards have lava themes, such as the Volcanic series.
  • Leeroy Jenkins: Some cards have compulsory attack effects (i. e. Berserk Gorilla, Battle Mania).
  • Leet Speak: There's a card called Mind Haxorz. Seriously.
  • Lethal Joke Character: In general, the ever-changing metagame and introduction of new interactions and rules can turn some formerly silly-looking cards into potent combo pieces.
    • The Ojamas were this from the start, three exceedingly weak monsters with no attack points and no effects, but with a support spell card that nukes your opponent's field if you've summoned all three of them. Then they got a number of support cards that turned them into a viable swarm/lockdown archetype.
    • "Gift Card" increases your opponent's life by 3000, but if you combo that with "Bad Reaction To Simochi", or have "Nurse Reficule The Fallen One" on the field, which turns healing into damage, you've just dealt a serious blow to the opponent.
    • "Skull Servant" was famous for being an extremely weak card (in fact, most video games give you credit if you can win a game with the Skull Servant). Then Konami built the Wight archetype around it, and all of a sudden it was a genuine threat.
    • Grinder Golem and Inferno Tempest. Grinder Golem Summons a monster with 3000 ATK to your opponent's side of the field and gives you two tokens with 0 attack points. Now, attack the Golem with one of your tokens, take 3000 damage, and activate Inferno Tempest. It removes every monster in both players' decks and graveyards from play. You may even be able to perform an OTK by activating D.D. Dynamite which does 300 damage for every card of your opponents that is removed from play. Grinder Golem has the bonus of having low defense points, so you can Summon it to the opponent's field in defense position, then use it as fodder for a monster that needs to destroy a monster by battle to activate an effect, while also providing tokens for other effects.
      • And then Link Monsters came out, and Grinder Golem became so lethal they had to ban it. The short version: Link Monsters love tokens because of their nonspecific material requirements, and Grinder Golem is two free tokens to get your Link combos started, to say nothing of the number of absolutely busted Link-2 monsters. Worse, some Link monsters could bounce Grinder Golem back to your hand, allowing you to do it all over again and boosting the resilience of Link-spam decks.
    • Foolish Burial sends a monster straight from your Deck to the Graveyard, which would seem like a bad idea on its own, except if you combine that with anything that lets you revive a monster, you've just hand-picked a monster from your deck to be Summoned onto the field. There's a reason this card is limited to one per deck.
      • Foolish Burial also sets off Dandylion, which Summons two Level 1 tokens when sent to the grave. This is especially useful when Synchro Summoning. If you Summon Debris Dragon after doing this and use it to revive Dandylion, you can now Synchro Summon any Dragon-type Synchro Monster between level 5 and 9, and then gain another two Level 1 tokens. All this from two cards.
      • Using the above strategy and a Level 1 Tuner, you can Summon Formula Synchron and Stardust Dragon, and then Shooting Star Dragon, which has 3300 ATK and a myriad of powerful effects. If you use Glow-up Bulb as the Level 1 Tuner, it can revive itself and you can play a second level 2 synchro monster, allowing you to play Shooting Quasar Dragon. So you just played a 4000 ATK monster with three cards, and drew an extra one thanks to Formula Synchron. All 4 of the setup cards, Foolish Burial, Dandylion, Formula Synchron, and Debris Dragon, have since been limited.
      • In fact, Foolish Burial sets off any monster effect that has "send to the Graveyard" as its activation requirement, and that's a lot of monsters. The above combo is by no means the only or even the most lethal combo that can be chained off of Foolish Burial.
    • Mokey Mokey is a Normal Monster with 300 ATK. Its major draw is in the form a Continuous Spell Card that increases its ATK tenfold if another Fairy-type monster you control is destroyed. Belowski/Mokeo from the GX anime showed how formidable that could be when used right.
    • "Outstanding Dog Mary", a 2021 support monster for the "Outstanding Dog Marron" card that originally released in 2005, is an unremarkable and otherwise terrible Level 1 monster that can send itself from the Graveyard to either the bottom of the deck or search out Marron and place itself on top of the deck. It enables an FTK. The ability to place itself at the bottom of the deck is comically potent, as if the deck is built around it, you can use Monster Gate or Reasoning to mill your entire deck, then use Link Monsters and the Graveyard effects of Machina Ruinforce to crank out Superdreadnought Rail Cannon Gustav Max four times to burn your opponent for 8000 damage.
    • Most cards that only gain Life Points are deemed useless as they merely delay the inevitable without affecting the board state (i.e. attempt to add to what the player has on field or in hand, or disrupt what the opponent has). However, tournament rules keep matches to a maximum of 40 minutes, and if that time limit is reached, the game goes into a 5-turn overtime, and a win is issued to the player with the higher LP at the end of that overtime. In that context, LP gain cards can suddenly help decide between a win or loss.
    • "Senet Switch", a Spell Card repeatedly mocked over the years since its original release in 2006 for being utterly pointless, was eventually made into a viable support card for the "Valiants" archetype, a Pendulum archetype released in 2022 whose entire gimmick is moving monster cards around the field. Valiants even have a Spell Card, "Valiants' Var - The Land of Beginning", which specifically searches "Senet Switch" to improve consistency and help trigger the archetype's monster effects.
  • Light Is Good: Many heroic monsters are of the LIGHT attribute, including the likes of Neos and Utopia.
  • Light Is Not Good:
    • The Arcana Force monsters are LIGHT monsters, but are the signature cards of one of the main antagonists in the anime.
    • The Worm Archetype is the central antagonist of the Duel Terminal storyline. Their threat forced the other combatants to invent the Ally of Justice series of monsters specifically to counter their light-based attacks.
    • The Vylons are an interesting example. In the story, they teamed up with the Lavals, Gishki, Gusto, and Gem-Knights in order to beat back the Steelswarms. This ultimately leads to Vylon Omega defeating them. But as it turns out, those sets were only working together to beat the Steelswarms and prior to that were also fighting each other. The Vylons wish for a perfect existence for everyone, but they now see that's impossible. So they've decided to use Vylon Disigma to kill them all.
    • Despite Santa Claws's Japanese name referencing the Devil, he is of the LIGHT Attribute.
  • Lightning Lash: the card Bolt Penguin, who has electric whips as its arms, and uses them as its weapon. Another card, Electro-Whip, is an Equip in the form of an electrically-charged whip.
  • Living Lava: A good handful of EARTH and FIRE attribute monsters are this, often with wildly varying stats and usefulness. On the bottom end of the scale we have Dissolverock, a low level normal monster outclassed even by most other normal monsters. On the high end of the scale we have Lava Golem, a massive beatstick that can quickly kill an opponent through sheer burn damage if they can't find a way to get rid of it.
  • Living Program: Cyberse monsters are creatures of digital energy and cyberspace.
  • Living Statue: Rock type monsters often come in this form, though a few monsters from other types might occasionally fit the bill as well such as the Beast type Neko Mane King which is based off a type of Japanese cat statue often placed near the entrance of stores and shops.
  • Living Toys: From classics like stuffed animals and building blocks to magician action figures and evil jack-in-the boxes Yu-Gi-Oh really has something for everyone when it comes to weird and unique toy monster designs.
    • The entire Speedroid archetype features monsters with designs based on toys and games children play such as yo-yos, marbles, dominos and dice.
    • Despite their Edible Theme Naming seemingly suggesting that they are perhaps Anthropomorphic Food instead the same is heavily implied to be the case for the Madolche archetype as well with the card Madolche Nights in particular depicting them as dolls in a child's bedroom.
  • Lizard Folk: A number of Beast, Beast-Warrior, and Reptile-type monsters resemble humanoid reptiles. Rude Kaiser and Gagagigo, just to name a few.
  • Logic Bomb: Pole Position has a deceptively simple effect: the monster with the highest ATK on the field is unaffected by Spell Cards. It's arguably better known as the game's premier generator of infinite loops, because when designing this card, they clearly did not take into account the existence of Spell Cards that increase ATK, which generate numerous scenarios that cause Pole Position to completely break the game's mechanics. The rulings for the card are largely taken up by various infinite loops Pole Position can trigger, which are handled by either making certain moves illegal or destroying the offending card (often Pole Position itself), and it's only ever shown up in one video game, presumably because the programmers for all the others couldn't be bothered to deal with it. Konami eventually cleared this up with an Obvious Rule Patch that makes moves that would cause infinite loops to no longer be illegal, and any infinite loops created would simply send the offending card to the Graveyard instead.
  • Loophole Abuse: Many older cards are worded in such a way to allow this as the game and its strategies have progressed and evolved in ways the card game back then couldn't have foreseen.
    • Mind Control lets you take control of an opponent's monster, but it can't attack or be Tributed and goes back to them at the end of the turn. When it was first released it didn't have a lot of uses, mostly just Fusion (which was rarely used) and getting a monster out of the way so you could attack directly. Then came Synchros and Xyz, which state their Summoning methods don't actually count as Tributing, so a Mind Controlled monster can be used for them. Thus the formerly useless Mind Control became Limited.
    • Similar to Mind Control, Instant Fusion - pay 1000 Life Points to special Summon a Level 5 or lower Fusion monster from the extra deck, but it can't attack and is destroyed during at the end of the turn. Unless you need Tribute fodder, entirely useless, since none of the Level 5 or below Fusions at the time were any good even if they weren't only around for one turn. Then Synchros came, and this card, combined with a Tuner, let you Summon pretty much any Synchro monster you wanted. And then came the Xyz cards, which can do just about the same thing.
    • Two old school revival cards have this. Premature Burial states that when it is destroyed, the monster it revived is destroyed. Its effect says nothing about the monster dying if the card is just removed from the field, most famously by returning it to the hand to be played again. Call of the Haunted meanwhile says that when the monster it Summoned is destroyed the card itself also goes, but as with Premature Burial it doesn't go if the monster is removed from the field, leaving Call of the Haunted face-up and useless, unless you have something like Scrap Dragon. Both of the above cards have been on and off the Forbidden list for years, with the aforementioned liability of Call of the Haunted likely being the only reason it's off while Premature Burial is still on. Be sure to pay attention to if a card specifically says removed from the field or destroyed, it makes a huge difference.
    • Destiny HERO Diamond Dude lets you flip the top card of your deck once per turn: if it's a Normal Spell, you can send it to the Graveyard and on your next turn you can activate its effect. The key word there is "activate it's effect." As this page lists, that means you don't need to meet activation requirements or pay activation costs to use the effect, leading to tons of abuse potential. Also, Diamond Dude's effect of letting you use the effect is a condition set once his effect resolves, so even if he leaves the field before your next turn, you can still use the effect of the discarded Spell.
    • The Wind-Ups are almost explicitly designed to exploit a ruling quirk. Each of them have effects that can only be activated once while on the field. But if it's flipped down and back up or left the field and came back, then you can re-use the effects. Their initial boss monster, Wind-Up Zenmaister, resets their effects by flipping them down and back up.
    • Tour Guide From the Underworld Summons a second monster when she comes into play, with lots of limitations on what you can do with it. But, of course, it doesn't forbid you from using the monster with mechanics that were added to the game later, like Xyz or Link Summons...
    • Heart of the Underdog lets you draw an extra card if you draw a Normal Monster in your Draw Phase. However, it doesn't specify it has to be your "normal draw," so if you have a Quickplay Spell or Trap that lets you draw, like Reload or Jar of Greed, you can activate it during the Draw Phase for an extra chance at a free draw. Reload is particularly exploitable with this — you shuffle your entire hand into the deck and draw the same number of cards as you shuffled in, and as long as one of them is a Normal Monster, Heart of the Underdog triggers. Hell, with the rulings on Quickplay spells, if you draw into a second Reload, you can activate it from your hand and keep the drawing going.
    • Dark World monsters are all about this. They (and a later archetype with similar mechanics, Fabled) get their effects when they're discarded to the Graveyard. However, if you discard them for a cost, say for a card like Magic Jammer, their effects don't trigger; because they were discarded on activation of the card, they miss the timing to activate their effects. This has resulted in many Dark World support cards that let you do something, then you discard a card from your hand, because then the discarding is part of the card's effect, not the cost, and the Dark World monster's effect will trigger properly.
    • Dicephoon seems an unremarkable card; roll a die with a 3/6 chance of destroying a Spell or Trap card, a 2/6 chance of taking damage, or a 1/6 chance of destroying two Spells and Traps. Why run it over, say, tried-and-true Mystical Space Typhoon, when there's only a 66% chance of it working? Because according to the way the card's effect is wording, it doesn't target on activation, you select which card you want to destroy on resolution, which means if your opponent tries to chain their cards to avoid losing them needlessly, you can just destroy something else. And no, they can't chain them once Dicephoon resolves and you choose what's being destroyed, rules say chains must be declared on activation, it's too late once it resolves. Oh, and because it isn't for sure a card will be destroyed on activation due to the dice roll aspect, Stardust Dragon and similar "negate a card that destroys" cards can't be chained, either. Dicephoon is pretty much designed by a Rules Lawyer to mock players who don't know how the rules work.
    • There's also numerous cards that cause things to happen at certain times during the turn. This makes some cards like Solomon's Lawbook (skip your next Standby Phase), and Dimensionhole and Interdimensional Matter Transporter (banish a monster until a particular turn phase) Crouching Moron Hidden Badasses because they allow you to avoid various effects by "dodging" turn phases. For the latter, there's Spirit Monsters, which have a universal effect that specifies they return to your hand during the End Phase of the turn they're Normal Summoned or flipped face-up. So if you banish them from the field and they return later or find a way to skip your End Phase, they get to stay on the field because the End Phase of the turn you played them has passed, and the return effect says nothing about them returning to the hand on subsequent turns.
    • Machina Fortress has the effect that you can discard Machine-type monsters from your hand with total levels of 8 to Special Summon it from the hand or Graveyard. However, Machina Fortress is itself a Machine, and thanks to the rulings and wording of its effect, you can discard Machina itself for its own effect cost, and then Special Summon it from the Graveyard when its effect resolves. And to boot, Machina Fortress is Level 7, meaning the last level needed can come from any Machine-type monster in the game with a Level. In practice, it's effect might as well read "You can discard 1 Machine-type monster to the Graveyard to Special Summon this card from your hand."
    • Several cards refer to affecting a card with a particular word or phrase in its name, for example the Vehicroid support cards specify they affect "roid" monsters. However, this means those same cards can be used on Dark Jeroid, and any future card with the word "roid" even if they aren't Vehicroids.
    • Several cards, most famously Harpie Lady and her variants, say in their text "This card is always treated as Harpie Lady". This refers to purposes of deck construction too — Harpie Lady, Harpie Lady #1, #2, #3, and Cyber Harpie, all count as the same card, so you can only have three total. In turn this has led to cards with effects reading like "This card's name is treated as <name> while it is on the field and/or in the Graveyard", bypassing the card limit rule so support cards for that specific monster are easier to use. The Harpies, Cyber Dragon, and the Frogs, all abuse this to the extreme.
    • Pre-Preparation of Rites possesses the potent effect to search out both a Ritual Spell Card that lists in its text, the name of a specific Ritual Monster, and that exact Ritual Monster at once. When first introduced, it was designed to alleviate the clunky gameplay that came with several early Ritual Spell Cards being only able to Ritual Summon one specific Ritual Monster. After its release, however, a few nonspecific Ritual Spell Cards (cards that can Ritual Summon a range of Ritual Monsters that possessed certain listed qualities) were introduced with supplementary effects which listed a specific Ritual Monster, allowing these otherwise broad cards to also be searched as well. These include Revendread Origin, Rise of the Salamangreat, and Rebirth of Nephthys. A response from Jerome McHale, a Konami R&D specialist, issued when Revendread Origin was revealed, flat-out stated that being able to search these Ritual Spell Cards was the company's intent all along.
    • An entire deck was built around abusing Self-Destruct Button and tournament rules in order to repeatedly force ties until the timer runs out, then winning in sudden death (or taking the first duel of the match and running out the timer). This Griefing strategy got the card banned in the TCG.
    • Many cards say "you can only use this card's effect once per turn". However, if the card is removed from the field and played again, or flipped face-down and then back-up, that restriction is reset and you can use the effect again. Or, if you have multiple copies of the card, all of them can use their effect once each. This led to more modern cards specifying "you can only use the effect of <card's name> once per turn", to put a stop to this kind of explotation.
    • Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS - Sky Thunder is a Rank 12 Xyz Monster that can be Xyz Summoned by using an Xyz Monster you control as material during the same turn that an Xyz Monster battled. Note the wording on it says "an Xyz Monster battled" and not "your Xyz Monster battled". This means that attacking your opponent's Xyz Monster qualifies for the summoning requirement of AA-ZEUS, which can come up in extremely rare fringe cases.
  • Lost in Translation:
    • When it comes to card names which are a crucial game mechanic, the localizers have taken an awful lot of liberties, and then had to fix the messes they've caused by various name changes and types of work-around text. This is because the game only respects Japanese names, and more often than not, names in other languages aren't simply direct translations, but are meddled with with artistic license. Japanese PunnyNames are also very hard to translate, and the puns are often ignored.
    • The Brotherhood of the Fire Fist monsters are all references to the classic Chinese novel, Water Margin, but with animal puns blended into the names. The TCG removes the connection they're from/named after Water Margin Characters. This is likely due to not being able to maintain the pun, as well as the novel being less famous in the West.
  • Luck-Based Mission:
    • No matter how you build it, running an Arcana Force deck inevitably turns into this.
    • Also, Lightsworns. Lightsworn cards send cards from the top of the Deck to the Graveyard, and abuse this with plenty of monsters whose effects activate in Graveyard. Of course, many key cards, including the Game-Breaker Judgment Dragon need to be in the hand to use. Running Lightsworns is just hoping you get the right cards in your Graveyard and the rest in your hand. Just as Arcana Force, you can try to build them to get around this, but most of the time it's better not to.
  • Lunacy: Mystical Moon. It powers up Beast-Warrior type monsters.
  • Made of Explodium: Scrap monsters are always either being destroyed by their own effects or the effects of their support cards. Fortunately, their secondary effects usually kick in after this, allowing you to recycle other Scrap cards.
  • Mad Scientist: Kozaky and the Magical Scientist. Some card artworks suggest that these two are actually best buds.
  • Magical Land:
    • It's only advertised as a citadel, but if you look closer at the Magical Citadel of Endymon card art, it houses an entire little kingdom/village inside the magical barrier.
    • Arguably, the entire monster world would count, as it's the home of all sorts of fantastic creatures.
    • Secret Village Of The Spellcasters is a textbook example, a hidden village for spellcasters.
  • Magical Library: Used as a monster card oddly enough. It has 0 ATK but with 2000 DEF it makes for a decent wall and will allow its controller to draw a card if they they can keep it alive long enough to put 3 spell counters on it.
  • Magic Cauldron: Seen in the artwork of Cauldron of the Old Man which is a new variant of an old spell card called Poison of the Old Man from the Magician's Force booster pack. Both let the player choose between restoring some of their own LP or dealing some direct damage to their opponent's LP.
  • Magic Knight: There have been several spellcaster cards released over the years that have designs based on warriors such as Neo the Magic Swordsman, Breaker the Magical Warrior and the fearsome Skull Knight.
  • Magic or Psychic?: The game has Spellcasters and Psychics as separate monster types. Interestingly, many Psychic-type monsters resemble older Machine-type, Fiend-type, or Spellcaster-type monsters (such as "Mutant Mindmaster", "Cipher Soldier", "Mind on Air" and especially "Jinzo").
  • Magikarp Power:
    • The LV Monsters start off as low-Level monsters with poor, if any, effects and low stats. But as they survive and grind through various requirements, they evolve into higher Level forms.
    • One of the biggest Magikarps in the game is Winged Kuriboh, who, on its own, simply prevents you from taking damage for a turn. There's a card that can replace it with a "Winged Kuriboh Level 10", which makes every monster your opponent has on the field explode and damage them equal to the total ATK of the monsters destroyed, usually more than enough to finish them off and win the Duel.
    • There are also cards that slowly build up power over time - they gather tokens, so many turns need to pass, etc - with strong effects that trigger once they're charged up.
    • As a meta example, a lot of old weak archetypes (Gravekeepers, Batterymen, Frogs) will often receive new support cards in sets released years later that suddenly make them much more viable.
    • The Ojama owns this trope. As if Ojama Delta Hurricane!, which obliterates your opponent's hand and field but requires the three Ojama brothers as an activation condition, weren't enough, the later additions to the family, Red, and Blue, can mass-Summon fellow Ojamas from the hand and tutor Ojama cards from the deck respectively. Last but not least, Ojama Country can Summon Ojamas from the grave and flips the attack and defense of all monsters on the field. Run with Ojama King and other Stone Wall monsters and...
  • Mana Burn: Averted for the most part due to cards generally being free to play in Yu-Gi-Oh with no resource costs, but there was an early set called Magician's Force that invoked this. The pack introduced Spell Counters as a special type of magical fuel for certain cards to use to activate effects along with a trap card that removes all Spell Counters on both sides of the field.
  • Man-Eating Plant: Literally, but note that it is considerably less frightening than your usual Man-Eating Plant because it only has 800 attack points; on the other hand, we have the Gigaplant.
  • Maneki Neko: Neko Mane King is an Egyptian themed version of one. He has 0 ATK/DEF but can end the opponents turn instantly if he's killed via a card effect.
  • Manipulating the Opponent's Deck:
    • One type of strategy in the game is "milling" which forces the opponent to send cards to the grave until their deck is empty and they have suffered a Deck Out.
    • Some cards like Goddess Skuld's Oracle let's the player manipulate the positioning of the top cards in the opponent's deck, forcing the opponent to draw into their worse cards.
  • Mask of Power: Not too many, but enough to count as a series.
  • Mass Card Removal: Many cards have effects that destroy all cards or monsters on the opponent or both player's board. However, even more powerful than those are cards that banish all cards or send cards on the field to the graveyard, because many monsters often have immunity to being destroyed but are not immune to banishment or sending.
    • Spell that destroys all monsters on a side of the field:
      • Raigeki: Targets just the enemy
      • Dark Hole targets both sides of the field.
    • Black Rose Dragon is a Synchro Monster that gives its controller the option to destroy every card on the field, including itself, when it is Synchro Summoned.
    • Divine Arsenal AA-Zeus is an Xyz monster that can send all cards on the field to the Graveyard at Spell Speed 2, and can even activate this effect multiple times in a chain to force the effects through negations.
    • Topologic Zeroboros mandatorily banishes all cards on the field when a monster is Special Summoned to a zone a Link Monster points to. While it also banishes itself, it can summons itself from the banish pile in the next turn after it used its effect.
    • Nibiru, the Primal Being is a hand trap designed to punish overextension by being able to mass tribute all monsters on the field if the opponent summons more than 5 monsters in 1 turn.
    • Evenly Matched: An incredibly powerful mass removal "hand trap", which forces the opponent to banish cards they control face-down until they control the same amount of cards as the player. By being able to be activated from the hand on an empty board, doing so will force the opponent to banish all but 1 of their cards (as the player controls Evenly Matched on the field at resolution).
  • Master of Illusion: The Illusionist type is inspired by phantasmal entities and magic used in the early manga that have powers outside the realm of conventional magic, such as reality magic and hypnotism. Illusionist monsters have a shared card effect that prevents them from being destroyed by battle by an opponent's monster or destroy an opponent's monster by battle.
  • Meaningful Name: Whether they are individual cards or an archetype of cards that share a word in their names, most cards are designed with mythological, pop culture references and Japanese-specific puns in mind. Their names, visual and gameplay design can be based on major godly figures from Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Japanese, Mayan mythologies, to characters from Chinese literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or the Star Wars franchise, to computing terminology, to Jewish mysticism, to Tarot Cards, to the Western Zodiac, to weather phenomena, to wrestling moves, to historical weapons, to types of winds, to planets in the Solar System, to musical terminology, etc., basically any systems or collections of various things.
  • Mechanical Evolution: Machine King. Its youngest form is labeled as being from the year 3000 BC! Interestingly, the chronologically earlier forms seem to have been created as an afterthought.
  • Mechanical Monster: Many machines resemble living creatures, like the Cyber Dragon line. On the flip side of things are the Scrap monsters, which clearly look mechanical but technically count as just about everything except machines—insects, beasts, dragons and so on.
  • Mega-Microbes: The game released a few of these guys early on in its run. There was the Giant Germ that could split into two when attacked, the dissolving Ameba blob that damaged the opponent if control of it switched and the Vile Germs which were... a low level equip spell card for Plant type monsters for some reason.
  • Message in a Bottle: A card with this exact name exists as a support for Xyz monsters. Its effect is likely meant to simulate the specially summoned monsters returning from being lost at sea.
  • Metagame: Very much alive and thriving. Because of Power Creep, exactly what decks and cards are considered meta tend to change on a whim. The Forbidden/Limited lists that change every 6 months tend to both reflect and change the Metagame as well.
  • Metaplot: An occuring theme for many cards. The various Master Guides have detailed some of the card storylines, but unless you read Japanese that doesn't help much either. A fair chunk of fanfic is devoted to spinning a coherent story out of the various references.
    • Examples would be the story based on the artwork of the Gagagigo, Inpachi, Goblin cards, Royal Cards, Different Dimension cards, as well as various monsters appearing in the art of other cards. The lack of flavor text on most cards meant that any story that might have been present was completely lost.
    • The new Duel Terminal arcade game's card archetypes seem to have this going for them, as evidenced by a few cards both within the Duel Terminal and outside it. note 
  • Meteor-Summoning Attack: Several cards have artworks that represent the player casting a meteor spell to attack their opponent's monsters. Examples include Meteor of Destruction, Red Reign and Meteorain.
  • Mighty Glacier: Some decks require a lot of set-up before you can bring out the big offensive guns. One example is the Destiny HEROs, who are almost all defensive monsters that help the player increase their hand and field presence. This is because their two trump card monsters, Plasma and Dogma, require three Tributes to Summon (but are so powerful they can really hamstring the opponent once finally out).
  • Mind Control:
    • One of the main features of the Aliens is infecting opposing cards with A-counters (called "A-cells" in lore) which they can then take control of. Mind control effects are often limited in some way, so if you can avoid destroying your stolen monsters, they might come back to you.
    • There are also a series of spells that perform that trope directly. It started with Change of Heart and Brain Control, and now we have Mind Control.
  • Mi'raj: There are two mi'raj cards.
    • Al-Lumi'raj, part of the "Breakers of Shadow" booster pack, owes its name to a portmanteau of "al-mi'raj" and "lumen". It's a constellation spirit in the form of an al-mi'raj with the addition of four long barbels and pronounced fangs. It's of the wind attribute and jointly Wyrm / Tuner / Effect as far as type goes.
    • Salamangreat Almiraj, part of the "Battles of Legend: Hero's Revenge" booster pack, is a robot al-mi'raj. It's of the fire attribute and jointly Cyberse / Link / Effect as far as type goes.
  • "Miss X" Pun: The Ms. Judge card depicts a female judge (who may or may not be misjudging).
  • Monster Clown: A literal example! Mystic Clown... Dream Clown... Crass Clown... Saggi The Dark Clown... as you might have guessed none of these guys are very pleasant. Luckily, most clown cards are fairly weak or have no effects. Most.
  • Monster Whale: While all whale-like monsters technically qualify, there are some that are especially good fits. Fortress Whale, Citadel Whale, and Mega Fortress Whale are some very scary-looking monsters that resemble a cross between a sperm whale (though the latter two appear to have baleen) and a fortification with turrets. Orca Mega-Fortress of Darkness is like the three aforementioned monsters, except it, as its name suggests, more so resembles a killer whale. The most notable example is the Eldritch Abomination Earthbound Immortal Chacu Challua, representing the Killer Whale Nazca Line and being the size of a large building.
  • Mook Maker: Anything that generates Tokens regularly, like "Goka, the Pyre of Malice".
  • Moon Rabbit: The Inaba White Rabbit seems to be based on this myth. It's a spirit monster that returns to the hand each turn and can bypass the opponent's monsters to attack them directly.
  • Mundane Made Awesome: The "C" cards, which use fancy imagery to make cockroaches seem like Eldritch Abominations.
  • Mundane Utility: Some handtraps, powerful cards that can disrupt your opponent's plays during their turn, can also be useful as generic combo extenders in a pinch. "Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring", for example, is a Level 3 Tuner and can be Special Summoned by "Crystron Halqifibrax", and "Effect Veiler" is a Level 1 Spellcaster Tuner that doubles as a valid Special Summon target for the effect of "Selene, the Magistus Moon Maiden".
  • Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Seen on too many cards to list. Senju of the Thousand Hands is probably the current king of this trope though, for obvious reasons.
  • Mushroom Man: There are cards specifically named Mushroom Man #1 and #2.
    • There's also the Sylvan Komushroomo which is a mushroom man that has been lit on fire. He has very high DEF and can destroy spell/trap cards when sent to the graveyard from the deck by an effect.
  • Mutual Kill: Both monsters are destroyed when they have the same ATK (unless they both have 0 ATK) and attack each other.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Alligator's Sword and several other Normal Monsters released in Legendary Collection 4: Joey's World had their flavor text localized to Brooklyn accent.
    • Previously, a Duel could not end in the middle of a card effect resolving, even if a player's LP had already reached 0. This meant that, using Berserker Soul, it was possible to continually inflict damage to the opponent until you were forced to stop by either excavating a non-Monster Card or hitting the upper limit of repetitions, replicating Yami Yugi's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Weevil in the Orichalcos arc. New rules targeted at a completely different effect have unwittingly prevented this phenomenon.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Has its own page.
  • Necessary Drawback: Triple Tactics Talent is a card that combines three Spells that are currently on the banlist in some way (Pot of Greed, Change of Heart and The Forceful Sentry) and allows you to pick which effect you want. The big catch is that it can only be played if your opponent activated a monster effect during your Main Phase. This means that, in the most desirable scenarios, you have either been handtrapped or are going second, meaning that this card only functions if you are already at a disadvantage and is thus balanced by this condition, as it is otherwise a dead draw.
  • NEET: The Slacker Magician, who is called the "Shy NEET Magician" in Japan.
  • Negate Your Own Sacrifice: The popular Stardust Dragon can sacrifice itself to prevent some other card on the field from being destroyed, but it can also bring itself back every turn it does this.
    • Similarly, Destiny HERO - Destroyer Phoenix Enforcer can sacrifice itself to destroy a card on the field, but can bring itself back every turn it does this.
  • Nerf:
    • A really big nerf occurred when Synchro Monsters were introduced. The "Fusion Deck" became the "Extra Deck," and instead of being allowed to have an unlimited number of Fusion Monsters in it (barring the "no more than three with the same name" rule) players were now limited to 15 Fusion and/or Synchro Monsters. This is because Synchro Monsters generally do not specify the Materials needed to Summon then, so it would be too Game-Breaking to allow an unlimited number of them in the Extra Deck, but this was a major blow to Elemental HERO decks, since there are way more than 15 different Elemental HERO Fusion combinations.
    • Since they can't re-write the rules as written on a card once it's been issued, sometimes Konami will limit how many of certain powerful cards you're allowed to have in your deck, sometimes just 2, 1, or none at all. These "limited/forbidden" lists change every six months as new cards are introduced that change the balance of the game.
    • Beginning in 2015, Konami began using errata more liberally. Instead of only reserving it for clarifying card function or making subtle changes that minimally affect their performance, they began using errata to bring some cards off the Forbidden list, usually greatly depowering them or dramatically changing their function in the process.
    • In 2017, with the release of Link Monsters and the Extra Monster Zone, there are no longer any dedicated Pendulum zones. Instead Pendulum zones share the same spots as the left- and right-most Spell\Trap Zones so that your Pendulum Scales now compete for space with your other backrow.

      The concept of the Extra Monster Zone also put a great restriction on Extra Deck-focused playstyles, as the player would need to dedicate some of their Extra Deck to the use of Link Monsters if they want to play more than one Extra Deck monster at once. This also imposes a heavier opportunity cost in the building of the Extra Deck, as every Link Monster included means less space for what they really want to play en masse.

      The restriction would be lifted with the April 2020 revision to the New Master Rules, permitting Fusion/Synchro/Xyz monsters to once again be Summoned straight into Main Monster Zones without needing Link arrows, thus reducing the need to have Link Monsters available. Pendulum Monsters coming face-up from the Extra Deck would still be restricted to Extra Monster Zones or Linked zones.
  • Never Say "Die": Any monster with the word "Death" in its name has it changed to "Des" as a deliberate transliteration, hence "Death Frog" is "Des Frog" (and "Death Koala" is "Des Koala").
  • New Season, New Name: After 5D's cards began appearing in the game, "5D's" was added to the name of the game in the box logo and in some other places. The same for Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, and Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Quite a few cards can be used to Special Summon a more powerful monster upon the death of the first. For example:
    • Vennominon, the King of Poisonous Snakes, revives itself when destroyed by battle, so the most effective way to deal with it is to destroy it by card effect. Doing so fulfills the activation condition for Rise of the Snake Deity, which Summons Vennominaga, the Deity of Poisonous Snakes, a monster that is outright immune to all other card effects and can instantly win the game in three hits.
    • Yubel is probably the best example: If you attack it, then you take damage instead and Yubel itself survives. If you destroy it, then it becomes stronger. The only way to destroy it is... waiting: Yubel needs a sacrifice each turn to stay alive, and being destroyed this way won't bring up its stronger forms. Unless, of course, your opponent abuses the many reusable Tribute fodders in the game; then you're screwed. Ironically, Yubel's final form is actually the easiest to get rid of, and it cannot summon another Yubel, so forcing the stronger form to evolve further can open a path to get rid of it permanently.
    • The Meklord archetype is considered this if you are playing a Synchro deck. Just by destroying one of their monsters by a card effect (which is pretty common thing to do) you've opened the door for its main monsters to come down and begin snatching your boss monsters.
    • The Shaddoll archetype from Duelist Alliance. Its main power card, Shaddoll Fusion, gets its massive power if it's able to grab its Fusion Materials straight from the deck. What condition must be maintained for this to happen? The opponent must control a monster Special Summoned from the Extra Deck. About 8-10 years ago, this would be too situational. Now? Well, if you're playing the game now take a look down at your current deck. Chances are it relies on monsters Special Summoned from there. Congrats, chances are you're going to allow Shaddoll decks to do a tapdance on your face just by trying to play your deck normally. There's really no surprise as to why this archetype is dominating the OCG after ONE SET.
    • Dragon Horn Hunter hunted dragons because she needed their horns to mix up a cure for the plague threatening her village. While she was away, several dragons that had been disturbed from their nests by her actions found her village and burned it to the ground.
  • Ninja:
    • The Armor Ninjas, which revolve around modifying their levels for Xyz summoning monsters like Blade Armor Ninja and Number 12: Crimson Shadow Armor Ninja.
    • In later packs, Ebisu has been added as "Masked Ninja Ebisu", which means you can now have the Main 4 characters from Ganbare Goemon.
  • Non-Human Undead: Quite a few, including the variants of legacy cards (i. e. Summoned Skull -> Archfiend Zombie Skull, Red Eyes Black Dragon -> Red Eyes Zombie Dragon, etc.).
  • Non-Indicative Name: Only 1 Normal Summon can be performed per turn, but there is no limit on the number of Special Summons per turn. In the very early game, this rarely mattered since Special Summons were rare and mostly limited to graveyard revival, but modern decks are known for Special Summoning over a dozen times per turn. This means the Normal Summon is in fact the most special type, since you still only get one per turn apart from a few limited effects that can give you an extra one.
    • On the other hand, Flowandereeze decks can Normal Summon so many times per turn, that they are basically Special Summons with a different name.
  • Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Not Quite Dead: Numerous cards allow other cards to return from the Graveyard (either to the field or the player's hand), though not so much that Death Is Cheap. In fact most Zombie monsters have effects like this.
  • Not the Intended Use: With over ten thousand cards in the database, there's bound to be some unexpected interactions, especially between cards hailing from distinct eras of the game's history. See here for more details.
  • Nuke 'em: Shown in the artwork of Final Destiny. Not to mention it is one of the very few cards that lets you wipe out the whole field.
  • Numerical Theme Naming: The Karakuri archetype. In Japan, their names are actually numbers: "Karakuri Soldier Nisamu," for example, is written with the kanji 弐参六 (236). In the US, the dual nature of their names is retained by translating the kanji as both a model number and the actual reading thereof (or a variation); e.g. "Karakuri Soldier mdl 236 'Nisamu'".
  • Obvious Rule Patch: The card game has had a few over the course of the series, usually in response to new mechanics or players deciding to get rather smart with an existing rule. It has its own page here.
  • Ominous Floating Castle: The Castle of Dark Illusions, which also provides a bonus to Zombie type monsters.
    • The Cloudcastle may not seem so ominous at first due to its 0 ATK and beautiful artwork but it's ability to special summon a high level monster from the graveyard and make it so that weaker monsters can't attack right away proves it to be a very credible threat.
    • There's also Number 68: Sanaphond the Sky Prison which is a giant magical building that looks like a floating castle and has the ability to temorarily lock down the GY and make itself immune to destruction by card effects.
  • One-Hit-Point Wonder: All except a dozen or so monsters only need one attack to be destroyed, regardless of how low or high the difference is. A few of them have effects where they are destroyed after they are attacked, regardless of ATK or DEF points.
  • Ouija Board: The Spirit Message series of cards are based around this design and can be used to claim an instant victory if a player can spell out the full message. In the OCG the letters spell out "DEATH" when completed while in the TCG they spell out "FINAL" instead.
  • Our Angels Are Different: The monster type known as "Angel" in the OCG was Bowdlerized to "Fairy" for the TCG overseas.
  • Our Centaurs Are Different: Mystic Horseman (his Japanese name is Centaur/Kentauros). If used as Fusion Material with Battle Ox, the two become Rabid Horseman (the Japanese name is Minokentaurus, a cross of the words Minotaurus and Centaurus). There's also Chiron the Mage, and Centaur Mina, who is also a Fusion Monster.
  • Our Demons Are Different: The Fiend-type monsters are called Demons in the OCG. Heck, the Archfiend archetype is called Demon in the OCG.
  • Our Dragons Are Different:
    • Mostly western dragons, though a few eastern dragons also appear. Some dragons stretch the definition of "dragon," like Black Rose Dragon, which appears to mostly be a giant rose with thorny vines and a dragon head.
    • And now the first Arc-V set introduces a new type that is this trope within the game— Wyrm (Genryu)note  monsters, who are incompatible with Dragon-type support cards.
  • Our Fairies Are Different: The Fairy-type monsters. Most of them do look like fairies, others not so much.
  • Our Hippocamps Are Different: The Tatsunootoshigo card, which depicts a hippocamp, is a fine example of a cross-cultural mutual homage as it deals with the Western view of a seahorse as a horse and the Eastern view of a seahorse as a dragon. In Japan, the card is known as "Shiihoosu", which is the transliteration of the English word "seahorse". In all Western languages, the card is Tatsunootoshigo. "Tatsu no otoshigo" means "bastard child of a dragon" and is the Japanese word for seahorses.
  • Our Imps Are Different: Horn Imp (just plain Imp in the OCG) and Feral Imp (Gremlin in the OCG) were released in some of the very first packs; the former is a regular-sized humanoid with a horn, while the latter is a small green beast with wings and large ears. Sadly, both have seen zero play, thanks to far more powerful cards showing up immediately after; even their screentime in the anime consisted purely of them chumping out to Yugi's opponents.
  • Our Manticores Are Spinier: The Manticore of Darkness is a powerful Beast-Warrior type monster with the body of a muscular human, the head of a lion, black feathery wings and the tail of a scorpion. It can also sacrifice another beast, beast-warrior or winged beast type monster to revive itself when killed.
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: Plenty of individual mermaid-themed Monster Cards exist, including Cure Mermaid, Enchanting Mermaid, and Red Archery Girl. The game also has archetypes that center on mermaids: Mermail and Tearlaments.
  • Our Minotaurs Are Different: Battle Ox (whose Japanese name is Minotaurus) is the prime example of this card game.
  • Our Monsters Are Weird: Very weird, indeed. All of them range from the most unusual-looking ones to humans, normal-looking animals, mermaids, dragons, sentient objects, zombies, and so much more. Even robots are not excluded. Likewise, they can be a combination of any of them.
  • Our Sphinxes Are Different: Sphinxes are an archetype of monsters with leonine bodies and usually humanoid heads. They include Andro Sphinx (a humanoid lion), Sphinx Teleia (a winged, woman-headed sphinx with a chain and collar around her neck), Theinen the Great Sphinx (a centauroid sphinx with Andro Sphinx's upper body and Sphinx Teleia's lower), Dimension Sphinx (an Egyptian sphinx statue), Criosphinx (another centauroid, but with blue skin and the horns and muzzle of a ram) and Hieracosphinx (lion body, wings and falcon head).
  • Our Vampires Are Different: The Vampire archetype is less known for sucking blood (only a few of them even have Life Drain effects) and more for various types of Resurrective Immortality and devouring the opponent's deck.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: The Zombie-type monsters, even though they are called Undead-type monsters in their Japanese names.
  • Out-of-Turn Interaction: Extremely common in YGO. Trap Cards, Monster Cards' Quick Effects, Quick-Play Spell Cards, and most Trigger Effects can all be activated in the opponent's turn to disrupt the opponent, with specific effects ranging from summoning monsters, destroying cards, or negating effects. Much of the YGO metagame is built upon making disruptions and playing through disruptions.
  • Painting the Medium:
    • When imported into the English TCG in Legendary Collection 4: Joey's World, a handful of Normal Monsters seen in Joey's first deck from the anime feature flavor text written in the style of the Brooklyn accent he sports in the English dub, but are otherwise translationally faithful to the original Japanese OCG flavor text.
    • The English translators took advantage of the Punny Name of the "Fur Hire" archetype and worded their support as supporting "monsters "Fur Hire"", rather than ""Fur Hire" monsters", as would otherwise have been standard convention.
  • Palette Swap: Quite a few monsters appear to be the same type of creature as another card, but with their colors edited. Examples include Kuriboh◊ and Wretched Ghost of the Attic◊, Skull Servant◊ and The Wandering Doomed◊, and Root Water◊ and High Tide Gyojin◊.
  • Paper Talisman: These can be seen in the artwork of several different cards, typically either spells or traps. Time Seal is one such card.
  • Personality Powers: Light-based monsters are often benevolent, or overbearing and intimidating. Earth monsters are usually unsubtle, but balanced and grounded. Dark monsters are often sinister, but sometimes more "crafty" than evil. (Especially if you associate dark with "magic"). Wind decks are often fast but flighty, and not always dependable; the vast majority of Spell and Trap destroying cards are named after wind effects. Fire decks love roasting the opponent and the "Backfire" card causes them all to be Made of Explodium (by burning the opponent when a Fire monster is killed), or else are highly aggressive and hotheaded, burning through their own cards. Water monsters can be weak with surprising Hidden Depths and clever utility.
  • The Power of Friendship: Actually exists in card form, in Yu-Jo Friendship, Unity, and United We Stand, but of which signify a large boost in power by metaphorically uniting your monsters together.
  • Physical God: Obviously not to us, but within the cards there are the Egyptian Gods, Wicked Gods, Sacred Beasts, Earthbound Immortals, and Aesir monsters, all of which are powerful and have effects that protect themselves in some way while devastating your opponent.
  • Planimal: Quite a number of cards combine plant and animal attributes for some pretty interesting effects and artwork. The Predaplant archetype in particular prominently features monsters that mix plant traits with various predator species of beasts and insects.
  • Plant Person: Many of the stronger Plant type monsters will often take on this form. One of the most powerful examples is Number 87: Queen of the Night a rank 8 Xyz monster that can easily overpower a Blue Eyes even without its many useful material detachment effects.
  • The Plague: With a handful of virus cards to play with, very few of them don't dish out immeasurable damage to the opposing player. Crush Card Virus, Epidemic Eradication Virus, Deck Devastation Virus, and Cell Explosion Virus.
  • Poison Mushroom:
    • "Parasite Paracide" is a card that gets inserted into the opponent's deck face-up. When (s)he draws it, it gets Summoned to the field and (s)he takes damage. As a side-effect, it also causes all opposing monsters to count as Insects).
    • "Mushroom Man #2" damages its controller at the start of the turn, but can be shifted to the opponent at the cost of some of your own life points. This card becomes an exercise in playing "hot potato" with the opponent and it's not very popular these days, since they could just tribute it for a Tribute Summon or use it for a Synchro Summon.
    • "Lava Golem" and "Volcanic Queen" are both very powerful monsters with high ATK—but you Summon them to the opponent's side of the field. The trick is that they burn their controller each turn (and you get to Tribute opposing Monsters to Summon them, getting rid of some of their cards), so if you're playing a stalling-based deck with indestructible monsters, they're stuck with something they can't easily get rid of that damages them each turn.
  • Power at a Price:
  • Power Copying: A handful of cards, such as the banned "The Tyrant Neptune" card, have the ability to copy the name and effects of another card in the field or Graveyard. "Starving Venom Fusion Dragon" can copy the name and effects of one Level 5 or higher monster on your opponent's field, while "Supreme King Dragon Starving Venom" can copy the name of effects of any Effect Monster in the field or Graveyard and gain piercing damage for doing so. The latter effect is what eventually got "Supreme King Dragon Starving Venom" banned in the TCG, as it is ridiculously easy to bring out in any Pendulum Magician or Odd-Eyes deck due to its Contact Fusion effect and can pull off shenanigans like copying the effect of "Lyrilusc - Independent Nightingale" for an FTK, or copying the effect of "Odd-Eyes Revolution Dragon" in the Graveyard to wipe the entire board, deprive both players of recycleable resources, and get a massive beatstick.
  • Power Creep: Yu-Gi-Oh suffers somewhat from Power Creep corresponding with the release of each new anime. The idea is that, to make the new game mechanics and wealth of new cards playable, they have to be stronger than what's already available. Most of the old cards that are still used tend to be "staples". This is sometimes subverted through the Forbidden & Limited List which attempts to balance the game out and can sometimes make older cards useful again.
    • Perhaps one of the best demonstrations of the trope is Raigeki. A staple card in the early days for a good reason, it's a Spell that destroys all monsters on your opponent's side of the field. It was banned for years, but in recent years has been on and off the banlist. Why? Because many modern decks are just so resourceful, able to search out cards from the deck and recycle and revive things in the graveyard, that losing all of your monsters in play isn't the instant deathblow that it used to be. There's some decks that may not even want to run Raigeki, as they may not have room for it versus all the other support Spells they want to run, and some decks don't even really need it.
    • The addition of new ways to Special Summon monsters (specifically, Synchro and Xyz) represent a major form of Power Creep. In the old days of Yu-Gi-Oh!, certain Special Summons (Fusions and Ritual monsters) required their own cards for set-up (such as Polymerization, Fusion Material monsters, or the Ritual Magic Card), and generally could not be as easily deployed. The metagame tended to favor powerful single-Tribute monsters at highest (such as Summoned Skull). Nowadays, the right deck set-up can swarm the field with Special Summoned level 7 or 8 monsters.
    • "Twin-Headed Behemoth" is a monster that, when destroyed, revives itself at the end of the turn with lowered stats, an effect which can only be used once per duel. Rather useful when it came out, as it ensured you would have a monster in play on your next turn to tribute for a summon or use for a Fusion. However, in today's metagame Behemoth is pretty useless thanks to its effect being slow and defensive; the only decks that could hypothetically make use of it, Rank 3 Toolbox or a Cyberdark deck, have much more useful monsters to play with anyway. At the time of its release Behemoth was Limited and saw a fair amount of usage; now it's Unlimited and no one is likely to be running it in any deck.
    • A common criticism of the game is that, unlike Pokémon and Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! lacks any "Standard" format - a format that would only allow players to use cards from the last "n" sets. This has caused a constantly-fluctuating and extensive banned list, as well as older cards completely breaking the new Summon types.
      • For example, Magical Scientist, which was long considered vastly inferior to Cyber-Stein (because MS only allowed you to summon level 1-6 Fusion monsters that died at the end of the turn and couldn't attack your opponent directly, while Stein allowed you to permanently summon ANY 1 Fusion monster), is now considered one of, if not THE, most broken cards in the game, because he can - by himself - summon-spam Fusion monster after Fusion monster, as his lifepoint cost is FAR lower than that of Cyber Steinnote . This became a problem when combined with Catapult Turtle, who can launch the monsters at the opponent directly for damage (and there are enough Fusion Monsters with just enough ATK to kill the opponent before you ran out of life points) or overlay them to form an army of Xyz Monsters. Though he is squarely on the Banned list in Advanced Format, if a Standard Format were instituted, there wouldn't even need to be a Banned List that has him on it.
      • A more positive example is Relinquished. When it came out in the third-ever set, it was pretty good, but it quickly fell off the radar - it was a Ritual Monster, which made it a bit too tricky to Summon to be worth it, and its effect (absorb an opponent's monster and gain its ATK and DEF) wasn't quite as amazing as it sounded. Then there came Preparation of Rites, which made drawing Relinquished and his Ritual Spell very easy... then Mystic Piper, which made it even easier... then Kinka-Byo, which let you repeatedly revive Relinquished and Mystic Piper... then Djinn Releaser of Rituals, which, if used to Summon Relinquished, let Relinquished negate all your opponent's Special Summons and could be used from the Graveyard. Even better, Relinquished's absorbing effect is surprisingly good in the current metagame, because it's technically not a destruction effect and therefore bypasses most traditional defenses. The result is that Relinquished, a card released back in 2000, can still perform well in niche decks.
    • This also applies to card immunity where as the game progresses, many monsters often have stronger immunity where outing supposedly becomes harder yet at the same time easier as the meta progresses. For example, if a card cannot be destroyed by battle, then they can easily remove it using a card effect such as Mirror Force or Raigeki. If a card cannot be destroyed by card effects or benefit from being destroyed, then the opponent can just banish it using Dimensional Prison or Caius or spin it to the deck like Raiza or Castel, or absorb it like Number 101. So they upped it by preventing it from being immune to being targeted which can be easily dealt with cards like Raigeki. When they have both immunities to card effects, players can still out them with non-targeting non-destruction removal such as Trishula, Erebus, Trivver, or use Utopia the Lightning whose effect prevents monsters from activating their effects and allowing the latter to raise his attack to 5000 without any counters. So they upped it even further by making it straight-up unaffected by every other card effects, so you think that will finally make them invincible? Well it would have if it weren't for the Kaijus whose summoning conditions requiring a player to tribute a monster and since its part of an inherent summoning condition, no immunities will stop a player from removing it short of either using Mask of Restrict or having a description that says "cannot be tributed". By VRAINS era players simply do not let the opponent make their own plays as if they managed to summon their boss monster, the game would have probably already been decided anyway.
  • Power Creep, Power Seep: Much of the ultra-powerful and ultra-fast nature of the gamenote  comes from the fact that, unlike Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! doesn't have proper "set rotation," meaning all cards are always legal. New archetypes are designed in a bubble to work only with themselves, but adding in just 2-3 older general-use cards takes them from "Overpowered by Design" to flat-out "broken". This has also led to such things as the once-unstoppable Cyber-Stein being vastly overshadowed by its once-weaker cousin, Magical Scientist - MS can only summon level 6 and lower Fusions for one turn, but at a cost of only 1000 LP each. This was bad back when Fusions were the final stage of monster power, and you wanted the biggest around for as long as possible. Now, it's a one-man win-condition due to summoning up to 4 level 6's which are then used to fuel Rank-6 Xyz Monsters, summoning more Fusions to fuel even more Xyz Monsters, etc., setting up for a complete lockdown.
  • Power Equals Rarity: Played straight, subverted, and otherwise messed with.
    • The early Japanese flavor text of "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" flat out describes how "rare" it is. In the manga and anime, there are only four copies of "Blue-Eyes". In real life, its high rarity only counts when it comes to individual editions; "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" is actually one of the most reprinted cards, so far with the most distinct artworks.
    • Some cards get their rarity changed from the OCG to the TCG. For example, Mecha Phantom Beast Dracossack: It was an Ultra Rare in the OCG that was upgraded into a Secret Rare in the TCG.
    • Notably subverted at times where a really powerful card is released as a Common or Rare upon initial release. Notable examples include Pot of Greed, Sangan, Witch of the Black Forest, Cold Wave, Bottomless Trap Hole, Royal Oppression, Fire Formation - Tenki, Leo, the Keeper of the Sacred Tree, etc. These cards get re-released as much rare versions, up to and including Super, Ultra, and Secret.
  • Power Limiter: Part of the backstory behind Gearfried The Iron Knight. When it gets released, look out.
  • Power Nullifier: Any card that negates monster effects, Skill Drain being the most notable.
  • Power of the Void: Several monsters' effects that simply remove cards from the field evoke this, such as Caius the Shadow Monarch, which banishes a card from the game (and all similar variations of this effect), and Steelswarm Girastag, which sends a card to the grave. Both cards evade effects that protect cards from destruction, which is considered very powerful in the game.
  • Power-Up Letdown: Aside from the inherent almost Ritual-level difficulty of summoning a Chaos Xyz monster, several of them have effects that are worse than the original. The best example is Number C92: Heart-eartH Chaos Dragon. The original can banish nearly every card played in an opponent's turn, has protection from being destroyed by battle while redirecting battle damage to the opponent, and can revive itself with 1000 ATK times every card banished when destroyed with Xyz material. Its Chaos form? Loses the ability to redirect damage (while only having 1000 ATK to boot), gives your monsters Life Drain (which rarely makes up for the damage you take) and negates effects for a turn, likely only once. Not to mention it's hard enough to get the original out in the first place.
  • Power-Up Mount: Some monsters and equip cards can behave like this. Dracoback, the Rideable Dragon from the Adventurer Token archetype is a good example. It's a small dragon companion with a saddle that can be ridden by adventurers.
  • Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage: Surprisingly, a lot of "Illegal" and tournament prize cards are this. A lot of them share the same effects of "if you attack your opponent with this card and reduce their life points to zero, you win the match". They can't be used in "official" duels for one, and sure, they sound good... If not for the fact that a lot of them need to tribute three monsters of specific types and/or attributes to summon, most non-tournament duels only have one duel per match anyways, and there's nothing stopping your opponent from surrendering before you attack them, saving them from losing the entire match. About the only prize cards that would be worthwhile among them would be a few Pendulum monsters... And that's purely for their pendulum scales alone.note 
  • Proud Peacock: There's a Fusion Tuner monster called Allvain the Essence of Vanity that looks like a ghostly peacock. It has 2100 DEF but 0 ATK and no special effects.
  • Punny Name: The absolutely majority of cards have names with interesting names (if overused Japanese-style dad jokes were interesting), some translate well into other languages, some get cringe-worthy localizations, some are just abandoned because of their complexity and incompatibility with non-Japanese language.
  • Purposely Overpowered: Konami is often accused of making cards or archetypes like this only to ban or limit their key cards soon afterward. One of the most blatant cases of this was the TCG including Sixth Sense in Legendary Collection: Joey's World, a card which had been Forbidden in the OCG for years as it gave a player a 33% chance to draw 5-6 cards.note 
  • Put on a Bus: Rather interestingly Lampshaded. Since a number of cards have been put on the "forbidden" list Konami has released a series of cards depicting their bus ride, primarily focusing on Sangan: Mistake, depicting them all getting on the bus, Tour Bus to Forbidden Realms, depicting part of the ride and presumably the point where Sangan realizes the bus isn't coming back, and Shared Ride with a crying Sangan being consoled by the angel from Graceful Charity.
  • Rainbow Motif: Several groups of cards in the game have this as a design element, typically with each color being represented by a member of the group, most prominently the Crystal Beasts and their ace monster, Rainbow Dragon. Other cards that have this include the Artifacts, Earthbound Immortals, Fire Formations, Guardragons, Mekk-Knights, The Weather, and World Legacy monsters.
  • Regional Bonus: As compensation for getting most product several months later than the OCG, the TCG gets World Premiere cards, which are new cards added to Core Booster sets that don't exist in their respective OCG counterpart box. These range the gamut from whole archetypes (such as Danger!, Kaiju, and Gold Pride) to one-off cards. The cards eventually get printed in the OCG in their annual World Premiere Pack booster box, which tends to get printed towards the end of each year.
  • Regenerating Health: As long as you have "Darklord Marie" in your graveyard, you gain 200 LP each Standby Phase. A lot of other cards can heal as well, but they have to be on the field, where they are wide open to attacks or effects.
  • Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The Alien, Venom, Worm, and Reptilianne archetypes. In fact, it's because of this trope that the Aliens and Worms (which are Starfish Aliens) are classified as "Reptiles," because they're so wrong.
  • Reset Button:
    • The now long-banned card "Fiber Jar" resets pretty much everything in the duel except for Life Points and cards that were removed from play. Its only purpose is to draw out duels and make them even longer, so it was banned to prevent this.
    • "Odd-Eyes Revolution Dragon" is a downplayed version of this, as it allows you to pay half your Life Points to shuffle all cards on the field (except itself) and in both players' Graveyards back into the deck. This is offset by the fact that it is a Level 12 with an extremely difficult summoning restriction (must be Pendulum Summoned from the hand or Special Summoned by tributing three Dragon-types you control—one Fusion, one Synchro, and one Xyz), and once its effect resolves it's just a beatstick with ATK equal to half your opponent's LP.
  • Retcon:
    • A few cards have been renamed outright in order to make them fit better with later-released archetypes: "Amazon Archer" became "Amazoness Archer," "Oscillo Hero #2" became "Wattkid," and the various "Heroes," such as the "Elemental Heroes," are now all officially "HEROs," since there are five different sub-archetypes which use the keyword.
    • The inverse has also occurred, with cards being renamed to exclude them from archetypes they're not a part of: "Red-Eyes Black Chick" became "Black Dragon's Chick", "Frog the Jam" became "Slime Toad", and "Harpie's Brother" became "Sky Scout".
  • Retired Badass: The set "Storm of Ragnarok" heavily implies that the support monsters for the Six Samurai archetype were the original members of the group.
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: In every country besides the U.S., Barrel Dragon is known as Revolver Dragon. One look at the original OCG artwork shows why.
  • Riddling Sphinx: Ordeal of a Traveler forces your opponent's monsters to win a guessing game if they want to attack you; the art depicts a traveler being questioned by a sphinx.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter:
    • Many low-level monsters, but special mention goes to the many Kuribohs, the Charmers' familiars, and the Neo-Spacians' Chrysalis forms.
    • The Watt and Naturia archetypes are made up almost exclusively of these.
    • Baby Tiragon is an especially noteworthy example of this as it's supposed to be a Dragon type. It looks more like a child's stuffy toy than anything resembling a firebreathing lizard.
    • The Melffy monsters are all but run-of-the-mill animals, especially compared to the countless other monsters in the game, but the art style of the Melffys turns their adorability up to eleven.
    • The Purrely archetype is a series of Fairy type catlike monsters whose Xyz forms take on elemental themes. Some consider them the game's equivalent to Eevee. Purrely's Quick-Play Spells show it doing various cute activities.
  • Rocket-Tag Gameplay:
    • Thanks to the Power Creep over the years, most duels are usually very brief nowadays. Generally, if you don't manage to take out an opponent in one turn, or at least field cards with effects that make it difficult to retaliate, there's a very high chance they might end up one-turn-killing you the very next turn. The only exceptions to this would be if both sides are using an archetype that hasn't seen any major additions in a few years, or if one player is playing a very defense oriented deck, and even then with the latter, it'll likely only buy you a turn or two at most.
    • Taken to its logical conclusion when dueling against a First Turn Kill Deck, with a side of Luck-Based Mission. The FTK Deck either kills immediately once it takes its turn, or it fails to do so and becomes incredibly vulnerable to the opponent as it has invested so many resources into its combo that it cannot put up a good defense in case it fails.
    • Many Alternate Win Condition decks are like this as well, because they're almost always too slow outside of their win condition to stall mainline strategies. For example, decks relying on winning via Exodia often consist of a draw engine for pieces and nothing else, so the two most likely outcomes are either the Exodia player draws everything they need, or gets OTK'd in return should they run out of steam before drawing all their pieces.
  • Rock Monster: The often-overlooked Rock type. They usually belong to the Earth attribute and often have high defense points and defense-related card effects.
  • Roll-and-Move: Musical Sumo Dice Games is a Rank 6 Xyz Monster that can move around the field during your opponent's Battle Phase by rolling a die, then getting shifted across the Main Monster Zones clockwise based on the number rolled. If it lands in your opponent's Main Monster Zone and there is a monster there, it absorbs that card as Xyz Material, and if it has more than 6 Xyz Material after using this effect, you instantly win the duel.
  • Rule of Seven: There are seven different attributes: FIRE, WATER, WIND, EARTH, DARK, LIGHT, and DIVINE.

    S to Z 
  • Sacred Bow and Arrows: Fairy-types can power up with the Silver Bow and Arrow Equip Spell. The Fairy-types Skelengel and Number 102: Star Seraph Sentry wield bows in their artwork, and in some video games other Fairies are depicted as fighting with bows.
  • Satanic Archetype: While not outright stated to be the devil, Diabolos seems clearly inspired by the devil. If his name (devil in Greek) and the title "King of the Abyss" did not tip you off already, there's also a LIGHT version of him, indicating he did at one point fall from grace or possibly the opposite.
  • The Scapegoat: Scapegoat, which summons a bunch of token to take blows for you.
  • Scary Jack-in-the-Box: The viciously grinning clown abomination that is Bickuribox! It even appeared in an episode of the anime in a very memorable scene where it dealt the death blow to Kaiba in his duel with Pegasus. By pulling a scythe out of its mouth and slicing Kaiba's last monster to ribbons.
  • Scary Scorpion: Scorpion monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh tend to have very low combat stats and really nasty effects. Steel Scorpion can kill a monster that battles it a few turns after the attack and 8-Claws Scorpion gets a massive attack power boost when it targets a face down defense position monster.
  • Schizo Tech: Due to the Fantasy Kitchen Sink and different aesthetics of cards over the ages, you can expect to see a field full of cards depicting different levels of technological advancement.
  • Schmuck Bait: The illustration of Reckless Greed shows a greedy man reaching for a treasure chest that is clearly over a trapdoor and has a snake lurking amid its gold.
  • Science Wizard: Magical Scientist is a Spellcaster-type monster whose name and design obviously invoke this trope.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Seeing the destruction the war was causing, the Ice Barriers decided to unseal Trishula, the strongest of the Ice Barrier Dragons. It did NOT end well.
  • Sequel Escalation:
    • Remember the old days where Summoning more than one monster in one turn is hard to do? Now Summoning multiple monsters with over 2000 ATK in one turn while still having a healthy hand size is completely normal to be seen. So much that you could parody the infamous Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series "screw the rules" scene by matching two decks from two different eras.
    • Blackwings especially get that treatment when it's your first time playing them. If they don't OTK you, they must've gone first (and therefore could not attack).
    • What makes this even more disgusting is that, early in the game's life, "tutors," or cards which search your deck for a card (from Demonic Tutor from Magic: The Gathering), were extremely rare and restricted. Sangan and Witch of the Black Forest, for example, were both two of the only real "tutors" for a very long time, and were Limited as soon as the game premiered, since they let you search for Exodia pieces, among other useful monsters (later cards also let you search for other cards, but were usually extremely restrictive or very hard to activate). Cards which drew cards were slightly more plentiful, but still reasonably uncommon. However, these days, draw cards are either Limited or have restriction which hopefully prevent you from drawing Exodia; meanwhile, monsters which not only tutor upon summoning but also SPECIAL SUMMON the monsters they tutor for are commonplace, making summon-spamming the M.O. of many, many decks. It's gotten so ridiculous that one deck in the Traditional format wins with almost 100% certainty by simply having Rescue Cat in your opening hand, which then begins a gigantic chain of summons, resulting in 4-5 monsters Synchro & Xyz monsters which completely lock down your opponent before they can even draw their first card.
    • Synchro Monsters in general are this. Now Summoning your deck's ace monster is usually done mostly with monster effects and is usually Summoned in your first or second turn. In the olden days, you were considered lucky to Summon any thing over a level six without deliberately stalling or using Foolish Burial + Monster Reborn.
    • Then came Xyz monsters, which were even more easy to summon than Synchros since they only required two monsters of the same level on the field, a feat that's far easy in this day and age, and possibly easy had they debuted back during the early days when summoning one monster per-turn was the norm, especially with rank fours being the most wildly supported and versatile Xyzs out there.
    • Then there's Pendulum Summoning, which is pretty much "Summon all the monsters!". If the monster card in your hand or the Pendulum Monster in the extra deck has a level that falls between the pendulum scales of the pendulum cards in the pendulum zone, you can summon as many of them as you want onto the field. Granted, most Pendulum Monsters either have negative effects for their high scale or are locked down to a specific archetype, but the ability to summon a bunch of monsters of varying levels still proves to be a powerful force in the game, especially since it makes the above two summoning methods far easier to pull off.
    • Link Monsters put a damper on how many things a player could Special Summon, only to introduce a different kind of Special Summon spam due to them being even easier to Summon than most of the above. Link Monsters that aid in Summoning other monsters get potentially ridiculous as they too can be used for a more advanced Link Summon, which leads to a long sequence of plays involving monsters of increasing Link Rating all in one turn.
    • Fusion Monsters themselves have also gotten some rather big buffs, too. In the early days, the only way to summon Fusion monsters was with "Polymerization", which made Fusion Summons rather hard to pull off, as there weren't many ways to search for the card and the required Fusion materials at that time. Later on, Elemental HERO Neos debuted, introducing "Contact Fusions" (monsters that can be created without Polymerization so long as their materials are on the field), and several monsters that allowed one to search for the Fusion card followed suit. Good, but still a bit harder to summon in comparison to Xyzs and Synchros. Nowadays, cards that let you Fusion Summon monsters by using cards from your Deck, Graveyard, hand, and field at the same time are not uncommon, and there are several "substitute" monsters one can use for fusing, in addition to most later Fusion monsters having more lax Fusion requirements. (Two monsters of specific archetypes, or two monsters of specific elements being the new norm) On top of all of this, Fusion monsters have notably been getting far more powerful abilities than Synchros and Xyzs to make them Difficult, but Awesome. The most notable are Masked HEROes, who are 'Fusion' monsters that only require one monster card to summon.
    • To really sum it up, back when the Extra Deck was called the Fusion Deck, players used to only run Fusion monsters that were either Elemental HEROes or Cyber Dragons, and even then, Fusion Decks would maybe have around five to seven monsters in it. Nowadays, having an Extra Deck of fifteen cards—the maximum—is pretty much required if you want to have any hope of winning, even against casual decks.
    • Of particular note is the Maxx "C" Challenge. A player can discard Maxx "C" on either player's turn to draw 1 card every time their opponent Special Summons a monster during the current turn. The challenge is to Special Summon enough monsters in one turn that the Maxx "C" user loses by drawing their entire deck with its effect. The fact that this challenge not only exists but is very possible for many decks should speak volumes about how ridiculous you can get with summoning a bunch of monsters in one turn.
    • Compare some old cards with new ones. The old cards usually have fewer and shorter effects, while new cards can easily fill their entire text box. Pendulum Monsters, due to having two text boxes to manage, can look like a Wall of Text with four-point font. The strongest boss monsters in the game can have three or more distinct effects, on top of summoning conditions and effect activation restrictions which prevent a Combinatorial Explosion otherwise.
  • Series Mascot:
    • Kuriboh and Winged Kuriboh have been this for the series at large for years, while Stardust Dragon is the mascot for the 5D's era. Number 39: Utopia seems to be one for the ZEXAL era, just as Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon is ostensibly the mascot for the ARC-V era.
    • Kuribon and Kurivolt are the Kuriboh variations for 5D's and ZEXAL. However, they haven't been used nearly as much as the first two Kuribohs, being just special cards while Kuriboh and Winged Kuriboh had spirit forms. In addition to the Kuribohs, each series protagonist has a monster typically used most by them: Dark Magician, Elemental HERO Neos, Stardust Dragon, Number 39: Utopia, Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon, and Firewall Dragon. These monsters always have 2500 attack and most of them have 2000 defense.note 
  • Set Bonus: Aside from archetypes clearly designed to only work with members and related support, several cards gain a bigger bonus if you control or have all members of a set.
    • Stronghold the Moving Fortress starts as a mediocre 0/2000, but gets 3000 ATK if you control Green, Red, and Yellow Gadget.
    • Most notably, Exodia wins you the game if you get all five parts in your hand. The individual pieces are mediocre monsters.
    • Very similarly, Destiny Board wins you the game if you take the time to let it finish spelling out its word.
    • Awakening of the Sacred Beasts has three increasingly oppressive effects that it applies to the opponent as its controller controls more Sacred Beasts with different names on their field. To gain access to all three effects, the controller must control all three Sacred Beasts.
  • Shared Life-Meter:
    • Life Points work sort of like this. Monsters battling each other remove Life Points from each player, and when a player's Life Points reach zero they lose, along with all the monsters they were controlling.
    • In a more straightforward fashion, official Team Dueling rules have both members of the team share a pool of 16,000 Life Points.
  • Shield Bash: The Bashing Shield is an equip spell card that boosts a normal summoned monster's ATK by 1000 and makes it so its controller doesn't take any battle damage from it, which makes it pretty useful for both offense and defense.
  • Shock and Awe: Thunder-type monsters. Additionally, a lot of cards that deal with destroying monsters happen to be named after or themed after electricity, like Zaborg the Thunder Monarch, Raigeki and its variants, Elemental HERO Thunder Giant/Evil HERO Lightning Golem, and so on.
  • Shown Their Work: As the YMMV page under Genius Bonus explains, the makers put a fair amount of effort into things when they make an archetype based on famous mythological or historical topics. Even examining card art can tell a story in itself.
  • Sigil Spam:
    • The Koa'ki Meiru monsters all feature their emblem somewhere on their person.
    • Gusto monsters all carry a metal amulet with a shuriken design on it.
    • Most of the cards that use the Spell Counter mechanic carry the sigil for that theme.
    • The Emblem for the Six Samurai appears in the background of every card in the theme, however the only member to wear the emblem is "Legendary Six Samurai - Shien".
    • All the X-Saber archetype have the emblem of an X somewhere on their person. Even more so, the XX-Saber all wear red capes as well has having the emblem.
    • Every post-Trishula Duel Terminal Archetype features a logo of some sort.
  • Simple, yet Awesome: The original Monarchs' base design is a strong 2400 ATK single-Tribute monster with a single-sentence effect that lets them take out threats on the board when they are Tribute Summoned. They've proven so efficient that they have seen play for a few years since their debut in around 2004 and practically set the standard for Tribute monsters, only becoming obsolete when the game's speed picked up around 2008.
  • Skill Gate Characters: Of the card game variant. Some cards/effects prevents other cards from being destroyed by battle and/or card effects such as Beelze of the Diabolic Dragons and Mechquipped Angineer. However, skilled players usually main cards that can get rid of other cards without destroying them.
  • Slaying Mantis: The early game included a pair of medium tier mantis cards called Flying Kamikiri #1 and #2 for insect decks. The first had slightly lower combat stats and a useful effect while the second was just a vanilla beater with no special abilities but a higher ATK score.
    • The Naturia Mantis is a deceptively cute yet deadly version of this trope. Despite looking like something that crawled out of a show for preschoolers it has pretty high battle stats for such a low level card and the ability to destroy an enemy monster as soon as its summoned if its controller can discard a Naturia monster from their hand.
  • So Last Season:
    • The major complaint about the game is that with each era, Konami has been taking the focus away from the previous summoning type for the new summoning type introduced. Fusions barely got any support and took a lot of hits when Synchros and Tuners were introduced, then Synchros and Tuners were barely focused on and took a lot of major hits when Xyzs were introduced. However, Series 11 give all major summoning types equal focus.
    • Formerly banned cards such as Tsukuyomi received this effect since their effects are far less devastating in a faster metagame where multiple Summons in a turn are prevalent.
    • The Arc-V's era, however, seems to be doing it's hardest to avert this trope. How so? Well, for the longest while when it started, the number one archetype in the OCG was Shaddolls. Their claim to fame? Fusion summoning! Also in that set is the Yang Zing, an archetype that introduced an entirely new type of monster (Wyrm) and they are based around Synchro Summoning, and then you have the Satallarknights, which are based around Xyz Summoning. As if all that wasn't enough, for the longest time, the Nekroz archetype was the tournament winning archetype during the era. Why is this notable? Because their main summoning mechanic is Ritual summoning! Even archetypes that haven't gotten any support in years like Red-Eyes had gotten a lot of support during the era!
    • Ironically enough, the hallmark Mechanic/Summon of Arc-V, Pendulum Summoning, was completely underpowered for the longest while at the start of the era, as Pendulum cards were rather rare, and often either had negative effects for their high scale, or were locked to a specific archetype of monsters, and even then, they were mostly used to support previous summoning methods like Fusion, Synchro, and Xyz. It wasn't until around mid-era did Pendulum-centric archetypes like Qilphorts and Igknights finally start making a name for themselves, and make the mechanic more notable for more than just getting Synchros and Xyzs on the field. Every type of summoning in the ARC-V's era is getting love now, instead of brushing everything to the side to support the new hallmark. In fact, even with more Pendulum specific archetypes being revealed, if anything, Pendulum Summoning seems to have mostly been created to be used as a means of support for the other, previous types of summons.
    • With the launch of Link Monsters and VRAINS, the Extra Monster Zone was introduced, putting a great damper on many a deck that spammed Pendulums and Extra Deck monsters, and essentially required the player to possess Link Monsters to get anywhere. On top of that, Pendulum Summons got gimped a little by forcing the Pendulum Zones into the backrow, restricting the amount of Spells and Traps that can be used to support Pendulums. Much like Pendulums, though, Link Monsters did not completely overshadow everything before them as the other Extra Deck types continued to get adequate attention.
    • Cyber Dragon was single-handedly responsible for doing this to the entire established metagame before Cybernetic Revolution. Not only did it raise the ATK standard to 2100 ATK, invalidating formerly useful monsters (including Tribute monsters) with less ATK, but since it could easily Special Summon itself, it accelerated the game's pace, which older cards couldn't keep up with.
  • Spider Tank: Launcher Spider takes this trope literally, being a massive mechanical spider with rocket launchers on its back.
  • Spooky Painting: There's a weak normal monster card called The Portrait's Secret that features a haunted painting possessed by a demonic spirit.
  • Starfish Aliens: The Alien archetype. Some of the bigger ones border on Eldritch Abomination. One of them is even a cosmic horror by name! Also, they are the true masters of turnabout. Zeta Reticulant and Greed Quasar are not technically of the Alien archetype, but are still in the same visual class. The Worms of the Worm archetype are even more Starfishy, ranging from hideous blobs to rampaging chitinous monstrosities. The only common feature they have is a toothy, vertical mouth.
  • Stone Wall: Most Rock type monsters are this, including a quite literal example in Labyrinth Wall which was actually the strongest defender in the whole game at one point. It required a tribute to play and didn't have any attack points... but at 3000 DEF it could tank even an attack from a Blue Eyes White Dragon.
  • Studded Shell:
    • "Steel Shell" is an equip-spell card that takes the form of a turtle's carapace covered in large spikes. It can only be equipped to WATER-attribute monster and while it increases attack points by 400, it decreases defense points by 200.
    • "Monsturtle" is an WATER-Attribute, Aqua-type monster portrayed as a giant turtle with sharp teeth and spikes on its shell.
  • Succubi and Incubi: There's an old normal monster card called Succubus Knight that features an attractive demonic woman with horns and extra arms. There was also the Ghostrick Succubus monster card that was changed for the English release into Ghostrick Socuteboss to avoid the creepy implications of a succubus that looks like a preteen girl.
  • Summon Bigger Fish: The gimmick of the Main Deck "Dragonmaid" cards is that they can "transform" into their dragon forms by returning their lower-level cards back to the hand at the start of the Battle Phase to Special Summon their high-level counterparts from the hand or Graveyard.
  • Super Mode: Several "boss monsters" of various decks or archetypes are given advanced forms that may require the original boss monster to Summon and are often much stronger than the original. The ace cards of the anime's protagonists (and some of their rivals) have a lot of advanced variations, most notably Blue-Eyes White Dragon and Red-Eyes Black Dragon.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Whenever a card is declared Forbidden for being too powerful, Konami tends to release a watered down version of it. A couple of straight examples would be "Rescue Rabbit" for "Rescue Cat", and "Tradetoad" for "Substitoad."
  • Symmetric Effect:
    • Field Spell cards tend to affect both players. However, quite a few of them only do anything for certain decks, or only shut down specific cards.
  • Take a Third Option: The two main ways to win a Duel are to either reduce the opponent's LP to 0 or deplete their Deck so that they cannot draw a card when required to. Apart from those, there are some cards that automatically win their controller the Duel if the conditions listed on them are fulfilled.
  • Take Me Instead: There are a few monsters that let you send them to the Graveyard to protect your other cards from being destroyed. Stardust Dragon is likely the most famous example of this.
  • Taking the Bullet: Absolute End and Astral Barrier have YOU doing this to protect your monsters, so to speak. This is also a recurring theme with the Six Samurai cards; each of the Six can destroy themselves to prevent another one on the field from being destroyed, or to protect Great Shogun Shien.
  • Taking You with Me: Several ways. Activating Self-Destruct Button is one. Playing Ring of Destruction on a monster whose attack is more than both player's Life Points is another. Flipping a Morphing Jar when both players have less than 5 cards in their deck? Indeed.
  • Tarot Motifs:
    • The Arcana Force monsters are based on tarot cards, including names and numbers, though not all 22 made the cut. There were also a couple of minor arcana thrown in: Ace of Cups, which randomly may let you or your opponent draw extra cards, and the anime-only Ten of Swords.
    • The Prophecy series (supported by the Spellbook archetype) is another archetype based on the Major Arcana.
  • Theme Naming: Many archetypes work this way. Those that don't just have common visual themes. Some examples: Dark World monsters have a warped version of a color for a name ("Gren," "Goldd," "Silva," "Broww,"). The Worms have names beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, from A ("Worm Apocalypse") to Z ("Worm Zero"). Gladiator Beasts all have Roman or Greek themed names.
  • Threatening Shark: Yu-Gi-Oh has a wide variety of dangerous shark monsters in just about any size or shape you can imagine. One thing they usually have in common is low DEF and high ATK which can make them a good assault creature to have in ocean themed decks.
  • Tiered by Name:
    • The game has many monsters that act as variants of the same base monster, though not always stronger, with the connection being signified by a partial name change, such as Dark Magician to Dark Sage or Dark Magician Knight. Played straightest with the Gagagigo family, Gagagigo's card lore tracing his evolution into Giga Gagagigo, then Gogiga Gagagigo.
    • There's also the LV monsters, which are more this trope combined with Power Levels and/or Character Level. Examples include Armed Dragon and its more powerful forms Armed Dragon LV3, Armed Dragon LV5, etc., or Silent Swordsman and its more powerful forms, among others.
    • The Chaos Xyz monsters (Including the Chaos Numbers) also follow this pattern. Examples of the first type include "Number 39: Utopia/Aspiring Emperor Hope" which becomes "Utopia Ray" or if Ranked up becomes "Utopia Ray V" or "Utopia Ray Victory". Example of the variation include "Norito the Moral Leader" becoming "CXyz: Simon the Great Moral Leader".
  • Time to Unlock More True Potential: The basis of the Gemini monsters, who must be Normal Summoned after already being on the field to gain their effects. There are cards to bypass this limitation, however, which may overlap with Eleventh Hour Super Power.
  • Transforming Mecha: The Morphtronics archetype, which involving robots that change into various appliances or devices.
  • Trap Master: Several archetypes focus on Trap cards, making the player running the deck this trope. There is a card literally named Trap Master, but he's more adept at disarming Traps than setting them.
  • Trickster Archetype:
    • The Jars. The majority of them have game-breaking effects that can turn entire strategies upside-down...and the artwork indicates that they do it all with a huge, goofy smile on their face.
    • Actual Trickstars have become an archetype, where they deal damage every time the opponent does something they normally do as well as disrupt opposing plays.
  • True Companions: The Six Samurai, who can sacrifice each other if another one would be destroyed.
  • Tsuchigumo and Jorogumo:
    • A Punny example in the card Jirai Gumo ("Landmine Spider"), which lurks underground and pops out to attack people who pass by.
    • Tsukahagi, the Poisonous Mayakashi is a Zombie-type monster from the Mayakashi Archetype, his design looking similar to a human samurai with eight astral spider-legs behind him. He has a Synchro-monster counterpart called Tsuchigumo, the Poisonous Mayakashi, a spider-taur with a more mechanized armored appearance.
  • Tsuchinoko: There are three Tsuchinoko cards; Danger!? Tsuchinoko?, Sinister Serpent and Terene Tootheed Tsuchinoko. All three monsters are weak, but have interesting effects.
  • The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Last Turn, which pits two monsters against one another to decide the winner of the duel.
  • Ultimate Universe: The Duel Terminal verse, with a cohesive storyline, (akin to Magic: The Gathering or Duel Masters) streamlined rules, and even an Ultimatum analogue.
  • Undead Abomination: Many of the more powerful Zombie-type monsters can be classified as this.
    • Pumpking the King of Ghosts is a Zombie-type monster resembling a cycloptic monstrous pumpkin with a crown. In the "Duelist Kingdom" arc of the anime, the card's effects would give a 10% power boost to all other zombie-types on the field, which is portrayed as its tentacle vines connected to their backs and literally pumping the power into them.
    • Vampire Genesis is a massive, muscular, purple-skinned creature with bat-like characteristics. Its name "Vampire Genesis" is a reference to some vampiric characters in fiction mutating into stronger, less human-looking forms through certain methods (such as dark magic, centuries of experience and skill, etc.), while gaining a more demonic appearance and stronger abilities than their previous states. It could even be considered the source of all vampires found in the Vampire archetype.
    • Cards like Archfiend Zombie-Skull and Revived King Ha Des are Zombie Synchro Monsters similar in appearance to the popular Fiend-type monsters Summoned Skull and Dark Ruler Ha Des, effectively making such monsters the reanimated corpses of demons.
    • Doomking Balerdroch is a giant creature that appears to be made from the bones of several different creatures. It also seems to be the king of Zombie World, and zombies as a whole.
  • Undead Counterpart: There are various Zombie monster, Trap and Spell cards who are made-out to be the undead versions of preexisting cards. Examples include "Armored Zombie" to "Zanki", "Dragon Zombie" to "Crawling Dragon", "Clown Zombie" to "Crass Clown", "Archfiend Zombie-Skull" to "Skull Archiefiend of Lightning", "Hard-sellin' Zombie" to "Hard-sellin' Goblin" and so on.
  • Underground Monkey: In the early days of the game, it was common to find multiple cards with the same monster design, but drawn and colored differently and with different stats. Compare, for instance, Sonic Maid to Hibikime.
  • Undying Loyalty: "Skull Dog Marron" is an animated skeletal dog which wandered off 1,000 years ago, and has been waiting for its master to come looking for it.
    • The's also the Blindly Loyal Goblin which has the ability to prevent the opponent from taking control of it.
  • Uniqueness Rule:
    • Limited cards. You can only have one copy of each limited card in your deck. This is the harshest restriction a card can get before it's outright banned.
    • Players are limited to having one Field Spell each in play. Early in the game, when Field Spells were Symmetric Effects representing mutually exclusive Geo Effects, it was only possible to have a single Field Spell Card active on either side of the field.
    • Malefic monsters have the effect that you can only have one Malefic in total on your field. The field spell Malefic Territory changes it to "you can only have one Malefic of each name", however.
    • Some effects are limited to only being usable "once per duel", or, less severely, "once per turn". The former limits powerful effect. The latter does that as well, and is often used as a way of avoiding infinite loops.
    • There's a Continuous Trap called There Can Be Only One which prevents both players from controlling more than one monster of each type on the field. There are also other similarly restrictive Continuous Traps like Rivalry of Warlords and Gozen Match, although the latter focuses more on the monsters' attributes rather than their types.
  • Unrealistic Black Hole: Dark Hole, which only destroys monsters rather than everything in the immediate game.
  • Unskilled, but Strong: A well-built deck that resolves around normal monsters are rather powerful at the cost of having no effects. They are also immune to cards that affect Effect Monsters.
  • Unusual Halo: Morningstar had a yellow halo with protrusions that resemble spikes. After he became a Darklord, his halo turned red, and became a symbol of his rebellion, being granted to other fallen angels who serve his cause.
  • Updated Re-release: The 25th Anniversary reprints of classic DM era sets update the cards with their modern names and errata, Problem-Solving Card Text, foiled Level stars on higher rarities, and even copyright info.
  • Useless Useful Spell: As a result of some cards being banned, there are quite a few cards that are just non-functional right now due to requiring said banned cards. Namely: Avatar of the Pot, Call of Darkness, Call of the Grave, Dedication through Light and Darkness, Elemental HERO Neo Bubbleman, Gryphon Wing, Guardian Elma, Jar Robber, Musician King, Mystical Beast of Serket, Sanwitch, and Spirit of the Pot of Greed.
  • Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: The game has a long list of cards that allow you to take control of your opponent's cards and use them for yourself in some way.
    • Aliens are an archetype of Reptile-type Monsters that rely on distributing "A-Counters" on monsters to activate their effects, many of which allow them to seize control of enemy monsters or lower their stats.
    • If Amazoness Chain Master is destroyed by battle and sent to the graveyard, the user can pay 1500 life points to take a monster card from the opponent's hand.
    • Change of Heart allows you to take control of an opponent's monster until the End Phase. Brain Control is a downgraded version.
    • Destiny Hero - Plasma can equip one monster per turn your opponent controls and gain attack points equal to half that monster's original attack points.
    • Double Spell allows you to use a Spell Card in your opponent's Graveyard by discarding a Spell Card from your hand.
    • Graverobber allows you to use a Spell Card in your opponent's Graveyard at the cost of 2000 Life Points.
    • Graydles are an archetype of Aqua-type alien parasites that possess the opponent's monsters when they're destroyed.
    • Red-Eyes Fang with Chain can be sent to the graveyard to allow you to equip an opponent's monster to one of your own that was equipped with REFWC.
    • Relinquished is built around this trope. Powerless on its own, it was the first monster capable of absorbing other monsters, and it copied that monster's ATK and DEF. If the opponent attacks it, they lose as many Life Points as the controller does and the equipped monster is destroyed instead of Relinquished. Its superior form Thousand-Eyes Restrict trades the damage duplication effect for banning all other monsters from attacking, and its perfected form released years later, Millennium-Eyes Restrict, can equip multiple monsters at a time, taking on their ATK and DEF and barring all monsters with that name from attacking or using their effects.
    • Soul Exchange allows you to Tribute a monster your opponent controls as if it were your own at the cost of not conducting your Battle Phase that turn.
    • Number 11: Big Eye can detach a card to take control of an opponent's monster, at the cost of not being able to attack itself that turn.
  • Vanilla Unit: Normal Monsters are characterized by having no card text that impacts gameplay (with the exception of archetype conditions). There are numerous cards that synergize with them, however.
  • Vengeful Ghost: Quite a large chunk of the Zombie type cards are made up of this kind of monster, especially ones from the older sets that had stronger ties to more dark and occultic themes than the modern game. These grim spirits could commonly be found on monster, magic and even trap cards extremely regularly and although they're not quite as numerous nowadays they still seem to show up from time to time.
  • Villainous Rescue: When your opponent attacks one of your Fiend-type monsters, you can send that Fiend to the graveyard, as well as one in your hand, to bring out Darkness Neosphere, a monster with 4000 attack and defense that can't be destroyed in battle!
  • The Virus:
    • Ekibyo Drakmord returns to its owner's hand (so long as it's not destroyed or the equipped monster is removed from the field), allowing it to spread to other monsters.
    • "DNA Surgery" can be seen as this, too, as its effect changes all monsters on the field to a single type (chosen by the cards activator). "DNA Transplant" does the same thing, but with Attribute in place of type.
    • This little bugger turns all of its controller's monsters into insects.
    • The Alien Archetype is based largely on using this to weaken monsters.
    • The Evilswarm Archetype is entirely composed of previous monsters from the Duel Terminal world corrupted by some kind of virus, leaving the infected as mindless beasts of destruction.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifter: Quite a few:
    • Mimicat can mimic any card in the opponent's Graveyard. The manga and anime depicted this as it transforming into a copy of the card, but the printed version instead has you take the card from their Graveyard.
    • Metal Reflect Slime in the manga and anime copies the appearance of the attacking monster, and gains DEF equal to 3/4 of its attack. This aspect was removed from the printed version, where instead it has 3000 DEF by default (since it copied Obelisk the Tormentor who has 4000 ATK).
    • Wicked Avatar's effect makes it so its ATK it's always the highest other ATK on the field +100 (+1 in the manga), which the manga depicts as it transforming into a dark form of that monster. Notably, when it copied Metal Fiend Token, it turned into Yugi because that Token reflects the opponent's Life.
    • Neo-Spacian Black Panther can copy the name, stats and effect of an opponent's monster, and Phantom of Chaos can do the same with a monster in your Graveyard. The anime depicts both as shapeshifting into the copied monster.
    • Elemental HERO Prisma can adopt the name of the Fusion Material it mills, which again it's depicted as shapeshifting in the anime. The same is probably true of Fusion Substitutes such as King of the Swamp, or any monster that changes its own name for Fusion purposes.
    • Copy Knight is a Trap that turns, as the name implies, into a copy of a Warrior when summoned.
    • Morph King Stygi-Gel can copy the level of another monster, which the manga depicts as it morphing into that monster.
    • Jester Puppet Pantomime King transforms into the Synchro monster it battles, copying its attack (and it can't be destroyed by battle against them).
    • Number 8: Heraldic King Genom-Heritage not only steals an Xyz's monster ATK and effects, in the anime it also steals the monster's very name, leaving them as "Unknown".
    • Number 69: Heraldic Crest (also used by Byron) takes different forms depending on which monster it's copying (it doesn't copy the monster's appearance however).
    • Unformed Void absorbs the attack of Xyz monsters, which the anime depicts as it creating shadow copies of those monsters from itself.
    • Performapal Bot-Eyes Lizard can transform into any Odd-Eyes monster.
    • Mimiclay is another slime monster that shapeshifts into a copy of a monster you control. In the anime, it summons itself as a monster, but its printed form instead summons another copy of the target from your Deck (as the TCG/OCG is averse to the idea of Spell Monsters.).
    • The anime-only cards Doppler Shark and Duplicate Drone also have shapeshifting effects.
  • Walking Ossuary: Miscellaneousaurus, a monster that visually is a dinosaur skeleton comprised of the bones of various species such as a Triceratops, a T. rex and a Stegosaurus.
  • Wall of Text: So many, many cards. Having a tiny text box and a lack of keywords to abbreviate common functions means that, unlike Magic: The Gathering and other games, there is absolutely no room for paragraph breaks, leading to many players not realizing that many cards have 2-3 distinct effects. The microscopic text size really doesn't help.
    • Increasingly complex cards on top of tighter activation requirements to avoid loops and abuse can lead to some incredibly cramped text boxes. More recent cards have begun abbreviating several terms (e.g. Life Points to LP, Graveyard to GY) just to be able to fit everything.
    • Because Pendulum cards have two text boxes, they can get even more verbose than most other cards, especially when both the monster and Pendulum effects have their share of restriction text. The Pendulum monster most infamous for this is Endymion, the Mighty Master of Magic.
    • Think normal monster cards might be immune to this because they have no effects? Well, think again!
    Gunkan Suship Shari: Finally got to visit that harbor specializing in Gunkan Suships that I've been curious about for a while! The premium "Shari" here is limited to 2000 Suships a year, and uses specially developed smooth aged rice, giving it extra boldness not found anywhere else. The classy atmosphere made my heart sing, too. The Gunkan Suship served had a perfect balance of vinegar, nigiri, shine, and shape, demonstrating exquisite artisanship. The owner told me, "We are introducing rich yet mellow scented EDO-FRONT red vinegar in the near future," which I'm really looking forward to. However, I was disappointed the surrounding seas were a little noisy... so, giving it 4 stars with hope for improvements in the future.
  • Warrior Undead: Headless Knight is the spirit of a knight who was falsely accused and executed. It's appearance is that of a headless suit of armor.
  • Wave-Motion Gun: There have been a few examples of these over the years:
    • The Wave Motion Cannon can deal massive amounts of direct damage to the opponent but must be protected for several turns while it powers up to get the maximum effect.
    • The Mega Ton Magical Cannon can nuke the opponent's entire field in one go... but requires a huge 10 spell counters to activate. (Meaning a minimum of 10 spell cards need to be played before it can fire.)
  • Weak, but Skilled: In general, there are a lot of cards with low attack and defense points that have powerful effects. There's even a few archetypes based around Weak, but Skilled cards, like the Frogs, the Watt monsters, Ojamas, and so on.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The only possible explanation for how Konami thought changing the human torture victim to a goblin made Nightmare Wheel more acceptable.
  • Will-o'-the-Wisp: In mythology, Will-o'-the-wisps are considered to be ghostly lights that lure travelers to their doom. "Umbral Horror Will-o'-the-Wisp"'s art and effect reference that.
  • The Worf Effect:
    • The Millennium Shield's flavor text states that it is rumored to be able to block any kind of attack. Despite this, all of the other cards that depict the shield show it in the process of shattering.
    • Just about every Normal monster from the game's debut year has had their reputation as potent threats completely crushed by new monsters with higher attack and defense points and serious effects. For instance, Battle Ox was originally the most powerful Level 4 Beast-Warrior in the game, but has since been overshadowed by Vorse Raider, who in turn was overshadowed by Gene-Warped Warwolf.
    • Behemoth the King of All Animals practically reaches Running Gag level in that regard. Its threatening appearance makes it prime David Versus Goliath fodder: it shows up on a lot of spell and trap cards, and on all of them it's getting beaten up by a wide variety of foes, to the point that it developed a phobia of Rescue Rabbit after the unlikely events of Lucky Punch.
X Meets Y: the "Kozmo" set is a fusion of The Wizard of Oz with Star Wars
  • Xanatos Speed Chess: "Toolbox" decks that are designed to be as adaptable as possible fall under this trope. Certain archetypes or well-built custom decks allow the user to Summon a Monster that they need at will to respond to whatever the opponent has out. "Legendary Six Samurai" and "Gladiator Beast" decks are particularly good at this.
  • Xtreme Kool Letterz: Invoked by the Xyz Monsters. The original Japanese literally didn't correspond to any actual word known, aside from a term from a completely unrelated ATLUS game, and that term literally spawned a response of "it couldn't POSSIBLY BE THAT" out of the fanlators. That situation, combined with how Konami has made text errors in its printings before (re: the Zombie-type's OCG name being "Undeat" rather than Undead thanks to such a mistake), made folks think of "Exceed" as a term that not only fit thematically but suffered from a hearty amount of Ascended Fanon. Cue the TCG release in which the very Konami article on the first ZeXal structure Deck included the name and the following line:
    'It's pronounced ik-seez'
    • Apparently the name is a reference to spatial coordinates, which would fit the backstory in which the Xyz monsters came through a black hole, originating from a dimension of reverse-time.
    • If you're curious, the initial fan translation (which is so ubiquitous that it is still in use by most fansubbers and lots of fans) was "Exceed Monster". This transliteration was supported by the end of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, where characters "exceeded their limits" roughly once an episode, coupled with the hypothesis that in-universe the Exceed (Xyz) Monsters were an alternative to Synchro Monsters.
  • Yin-Yang Bomb:
    • Chaos monsters, which are generally Game Breakers. To Summon them, you merely have to remove from play one Light and one Dark monster out of your graveyard. A nerfed version of them, the Sky Scourges, require a much heftier and more specific version of the same cost (three dark fiends and one light fairy, or three fairies and one fiend).
    • Later, there were also other Monsters also released with the word "Chaos" in their name; most of them involve some sort of combination of a Light and Dark monster. Chaos Goddess and Elemental HERO Chaos Neos are a couple of them.
    • There's also "Light and Darkness Dragon," which counts as both a light and dark monster; its main deal is that it blocks ALL card effects from happening, but becomes weaker each time it does; when it inevitably gets destroyed, you can choose any other monster in your graveyard to resurrect (and then blow up all OTHER cards you control). So it's protection, destruction, sacrifice and rebirth all at once—perfect for a creature of both light and darkness.
    • "Elemental HERO Darkbright," a Fusion of Light-attribute Elemental HERO Sparkman and Dark-attribute Elemental HERO Necroshade. It can inflict piercing battle damage, but if it attacks, also makes itself vulnerable immediately afterwards by shifting to defense position, and its defense at 1000 isn't very good. If it gets destroyed, though, you get to target and destroy an opposing monster, too.
  • You Are Already Dead: Earlier packs had a small handful of cards with extremely low stats that had the special ability to automatically kill any card that battled with them several turns later. Probably the straightest example is the Swordsman from a Distant Land. His ATK power is so low he dies to Kuriboh in a straightforward battle but his effect kicks in a whopping five turns later to finish off whatever killed him.
  • You're Nothing Without Your Phlebotinum: Some cards have variable ATK and DEF, represented with a "?" instead of numbers. If they get hit with something that negates their effect, their ATK and DEF become 0, so they are literally nothing without their powers. Even worse for some of these cards, if their effects are negated temporarily, their ATK and DEF become 0 permanently.
  • Zerg Rush: While there are plenty of card effects that let you 'swarm' the field with monsters, this is what the Pendulum Summoning mechanic is mostly based around. You can summon as many monsters as you have in your hand (or Pendulum cards in the Extra Deck) as long as those monsters' levels fall between your two Pendulum Scales.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: Zombie World invokes this, as it changes every monster on the field and in both graveyards to Zombie-type.

 
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"It's the first line of text."

In episode 39 of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Progression Series, Nyhmnim attempts to use Ronintoadin as Synchro material, completely ignoring how its first line of text states that it can't be used as such, something that Cimo immediately points out to him. To rub salt into the wound, Nyhmnim reveals that while playtesting his deck he genuinely didn't know about this stipulation, meaning that his Synchro strategies involving Ronintoadin are now impossible.

Example of:
Failed a Spot Check

Old Fusion Mons...

Alternative Title(s): Yu Gi Oh Card Game

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"It's the first line of text."

In episode 39 of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Progression Series, Nyhmnim attempts to use Ronintoadin as Synchro material, completely ignoring how its first line of text states that it can't be used as such, something that Cimo immediately points out to him. To rub salt into the wound, Nyhmnim reveals that while playtesting his deck he genuinely didn't know about this stipulation, meaning that his Synchro strategies involving Ronintoadin are now impossible.

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5 (4 votes)

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Main / FailedASpotCheck

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"It's the first...

Old Fusion Mons...