I adore Yu-Gi-Oh. I was in elementary school when the YGO anime and TCG first hit stateside, and it took my school by storm. We were all buying the cards and actually playing the game, which was notable for the people in my area. We had never really had a proper TCG boom in my lifetime before then, Magic is as old as I am so our elementary school had zero chance of latching onto that game and while I was alive for Pokemania and basically everyone I knew bought the cards, we didn't know what to do with them. We mostly just bought them to look at the art and if we did ever "play", we would basically just play the game like War with an HP number. Flip up cards and be like "my Pokemon deals x damage to yours". YGO though really caught on with my playground, primarily because we learned how to actually play it thanks to the anime. We also didn't learn how to play it thanks to the anime but you know, what can you do. I distinctly remember us being mad when Battle City introduced tribute summons and stuff because it "ruined the game", not realizing that was just closer to how the game was played.
As with most things you play with when you're a kid, though, the winds changed and a new thing overtook YGO. In a matter of months, the hot new thing became... I wanna say Beyblades? That sounds right. Anyways, very quickly my school stop playing YGO and I was kind of left behind the trends because I still loved YGO. I didn't bring it to school anymore because obviously no one wanted to play, but I held onto my cards for a few years after that. I moved not too long after that, found new friends to play YGO with, those friends all moved away because it was an apartment complex of primarily young adults who didn't have kids and so their parents wanted to move to a place better suited for raising a family, and then eventually I sold all my cards to my cousin for $38. I never saw that $38. For many years, that was kind of where my YGO journey ended. I played some of the video games from time to time but I was not really interested in playing the game even casually in the meantime.
Fast forward to 2012/2013, right after I had gotten my first job. I had recently reconnected with and gotten very close to a couple friends I had from elementary school and, to my surprise, a lot of them were interested in TCG again. Entirely in a "kitchen table" sense, mind you, we weren't going to be driving to regionals together, but we did buy precons and played some Magic, technically played Pokemon if you can call what you do in Pokemon playing and not just "solitaire with eye contact", and, of course, we played YGO. Of those three games, YGO is the one that has stuck with me long term, I have more or less been playing it in some capacity since I picked it back up in 2013-ish. Either playing paper, playing video games with genuine vs. elements or, how I spend most of my playtime now, playing Master Duel. And my play has evolved from simple kitchen table fair, to casual competency, to actually building a real deck and having it win on ladder in MD to finally getting into competitive. I have played a lot of decks across that time, experimented with a lot of archetypes that I love, but the following five decks are what I would consider the ones that encapsulate my arc with playing YGO. These are the five decks that brought me back into the game.
The Deck That LITERALLY Brought Me Back - Six Samurai
We may as well start with the deck I played in those early kitchen table games: the Six Samurai. I think me picking this up over any other deck really highlights the kind of person I was in 2013. Like, if me from only a couple years after had been buying a deck in 2013, I would probably gravitate towards the deck with the big sea serpent on it that came out after this one, but no, 2013 me HAD to pick the deck themed after Samurai. What a nerd. Although, who can really blame me with card art as cool as Shadow of the Six Samurai - Shien as your cover art. Such a cool card, it's a shame it's like actually the worst card in the deck. You literally have to go find a good Extra Deck monster in other products despite the deck giving you the materials to make it natively. These are all words that mean nothing to like half the people reading this.
The Six Samurai deck is sort of a science fantasy retelling of the unification of Japan by Oda Nobunaga in the 16th century. Taking place in an alternate version of feudal Japan that both has supernatural elements and sci-fi technology like teleporters, the deck tells the story of the Great Shogun Shien (formerly Shi En) and his quest to unify Japan under his rule. The entire scope of the deck tells an ongoing epic, beginning in the midst of a Civil War in Japan, with Shi En unifying five warlords behind him for an epic battle, to delving into the politics of the court afterwards as the warlords try to find life in peace times, the foundation of a new order of Six Samurai, and so on and so on. It is a story with many twists and turns, including dead lovers returning as wandering spirits, body doubles claiming to be the original and attempting take the throne, and a possible deal with a demon that makes the Great Shogun an undying leader whose influence over his men is more than just being a great leader. It's the kind of deck that makes you wish YGO would do full anime series on their lore, it's a truly insane story.
This larger storyline translates into the gameplay of the deck very effectively. The Six Samurai archetype is an archetype built around unity and team work, the warlords that Shien has recruited to his side stand together as a unit and this is more or less how the deck functions. The Six Samurai, in their earliest form, were a deck where each individual member struggled if left alone. Together, however, they stood as a force to be reckoned with. The Six Samurai are basically Normal Monsters by themselves, but when on the field with another Six Samurai, they unlock powerful effects. They are stronger when they stand together. However, the shifting politics and uneasy alliances that come with a story of warlords forming a singular army to unify Japan are present within the original batch's design, as they all willingly sacrifice other Six Samurai to save their own skin.
The second wave of Six Samurai, which are the ones that served directly under Shi En during unification, make this dynamic that much more interesting. They work even better as a unit, special summoning themselves or each other to the field to bolster their forces and build on field advantage. These "Legendary" Six Samurai tend to focus on literally standing together strong, with them usually getting attack modifications from being on the field at the same time as one of their compatriots. Unlike the future force of Six Samurai, the Legendary Six Samurai do not attempt to sacrifice one another to maintain their position. Except for one. Enishi, who would later become the cunning and devious political advisor to Shien, attempts to use his brethren as fodder to enact his strategies. The later conflict between Enishi and the others coming to the forefront early, as he alone is willing to use his brethren for his own goals. As an aside, all the Legendary Six become different cards later on in the storyline. It's super cool.
There are other facets of the Six Samurai too. Their numerous spells and traps which both show events that occur within the story of Six Samurai and give flavor to those events happening, the later support waves that add more interesting gameplay nuances to the archetype, the various non-Six Samurai cards which further communicate facets of the Six Samurai story and incorporate it into gameplay. This is one of the largest decks in the game, there are a lot nuances to it. But this is the point in which I stopped playing the deck and so I think this is where we're going to jump off. Still, you can see how much care and attention was put into this archetype to tell a story through their own gameplay, which is one of the most wonderful things that YGO can do that other card games really can't in the same way. I did not know it at the time, again I just picked up a random deck, but the Six Samurai archetype would actually inform a lot of what I love about this game. Which is good, because the other reason to like Six Samurai is because you like infinite loops that win the game on turn one. Why did they let Gateway go to three?
The First Deck I Built In Full - Ritual Beast
Fast forward a couple years of playing kitchen table and I wanted to actually build a proper deck. No more just playing out of precons, I wanted to actually build a deck and play with it, even knowing it would probably be bad. It was, in fact, bad. I basically settled on a WIND pile which was made up of random WIND support with my core being the deck we're talking about in this entry, Ritual Beast. I say settled on, there was a friend I played YGO with and we would often find decks that had "contrasting themes" and choose the other one to duel with. So like, he picked Noble Knights because I picked Six Samurai, for example. Well, he picked Gladiator Beasts and since Ritual Beasts were the other "______ Beast" deck, I picked them to counter his deck. If you know anything about Ritual Beasts and Gladiator Beasts, even my vague pile of WIND garbage was still enough to overtake his deck. And I played it really badly. I digress. These are the Ritual Beasts.
Okay, I promise I'm not doing this on purpose and that this series will not just be decks with complicated lore throughout, the majority of the decks I will be talking about will in fact be pretty self-contained. But this one is another one with mountains of lore behind it. Not because of anything it did, rather Ritual Beasts are one of the many archetypes included in the wide reaching "Duel Terminal" lore. Duel Terminal was basically Konami's unsuccessful first attempt to cultivate a fanbase akin to the one Magic has where there are entire swaths of the audience who are only invested in the wider storyline of the card game and playing it is secondary. Duel Terminal lasted for like 7 years or some nonsense and incorporated every pack filler deck in the game into one continuous lore that was impossible to follow and kind of reboots halfway through the story, it was bad, unlike Six Sam, I do not recommend looking into the Duel Terminal lore. One of the worst stories ever told.
We will instead just be focusing on the Ritual Beast archetype's place within it. At the center of the Duel Terminal world exists a giant tree that is also a computer, don't ask, it doesn't make sense if you know what's happening. At the foot of that tree sits the Spiritual Forest, a place where mystical animals of untold power roam, the Spiritual Beasts. The Spiritual Beasts normally take the appearance of small, adorable animals who just roam the sacred forest. However, they have a symbiotic relationship with a mystical tribe known as the Ritual Beast Tamers. The tamers are a people who master the magical prowess of the Spiritual forest and become one with its fauna, creating spiritual links between themselves and the beasts. When the beasts meet with their tamers, their power is unleashed, and they become the powerful Ritual Beasts. Tamer and steed united in a common goal, to protect the mighty tree at the center of the world from the threats that would rise up to destroy it.
The way that the Ritual Beast theming is incorporated into the gameplay is very simple compared to most decks. Ritual Beasts are a "contact fusion" deck, which is a deck that gets around the normal fusion summon requirements of needing the monsters listed as fusion material on the Fusion monster and a spell card to conduct said fusion summon with by instead having both materials on board and just fusion summoning by sending them where the Fusion monster says to send them It is, therefore, incredibly obvious. You get a Tamer on the board, you get a Spiritual Beast on the board, you Fusion summon them into a Ritual Beast. It's clean, it's self-explanatory, it's a really fun take on fusion summoning. It's not the most unique mechanic in the game's history, many decks contact fuse like this, but the Ritual Beasts are probably the ones that make it work the best for their lore.
This is also the part where I was bad at playing the deck. For the most part, every Ritual Beast fusion (especially when I was playing) have the same materials: one Ritual Beast Tamer and one Spiritual Beast monster. It can be any two, they don't have to necessarily match the card in question, just so long as it's one and one. I looked at this freedom to make the correct play every single time and went "what about no". I tried way too hard to only summon the Ritual Beast that had the materials I had available to me in the card art. It was equal parts me being cheeky and equal parts me being incompetent, with maybe just a touch of nostalgia guiding my actions. Back in my day, Fusion monsters were always made with specific materials, and summoning them was always the wrong play. I didn't get a lot of mileage out of Ritual Beasts, a shame really because outside of the last archetype in this list, this one is probably my favorite.
The First Deck I Was Competent With - Dragonmaid
There's no excuse for this one. You can make fun of me for playing Dragonmaid. I could just say "no, I really liked the gameplay loop" but like. That would be at best a half truth. For what is perhaps the only time in my history with the game, I bought into a waifu deck specifically BECAUSE it was a waifu deck. For what it's worth, Nurse is my favorite, she's so cute. The Dragonmaid archetype was the first deck I played in the game's history that I felt actually competent with. I want to be clear here for those who may know Dragonmaid in the modern day, I was not playing the version of the deck that you see now where they just summon Chamber Dragonmaid and if you don't stop it they just win the duel. No, I played the deck during its initial release, when it didn't even have a proper boss monster and a lot of people were just labbing out lines with the only legal Dragon Ruler at the time. I was on this deck EARLY. But it was the first deck I actually felt competent playing.
The Dragonmaids are, as you might imagine, Dragon-maids. Sort of in the vein of that one anime that everyone was watching until it just became a fan-service worker show. They are each powerful dragons who take on the appearance of women with dragonesque features to serve an as of yet unrevealed lady of the house. Each dragon has a specific role within the house, one does the house's Laundry, one tends to the Nursery, one the Parlor, one the Kitchen, one the Chambers, and then there is their leader, the House Dragonmaid, who is the head of house/head of staff. Chamber Dragonmaid had not yet released when I was playing the deck so I only had access to the first five. There is also the Lady's Dragonmaid, who is the personal maid to the mysterious lady of the house, as you would expect. While these dragons normally take on the appearance of women, when it comes time to defend the household, they shapeshift back into their true Dragon forms, becoming raw powerhouses in the process. Once the threat is cleared, they shapeshift back into their Maid forms where they continue to provide their various services.
With such an interesting dichotomy between the maids and the dragons, you may be wondering how they managed to incorporate this into gameplay. The primary forms the Dragonmaids take are the maid forms themselves. The maids are all readily summonable monsters who are meant to take point on the field during your Main Phases. They all have effects which exist to aid the player in getting more maids on the field, except for Laundry who does not have an effect to support the Dragonmaids really but that's cool, she's best pals with a sassy gay Mayan dictator. Nurse heals injured Dragonmaids, Parlor guides the Dragonmaids to other locations (namely the GY), Kitchen brings Dragonmaids to her and then sends others away, it's a lot of fun. These are the primary effects that you will be taking advantage of during your turn, the maids "tending house", bolstering your resources and setting up your advantage. I'm sure you're probably wondering, though, "what about the Dragon half".
Well, the Dragons themselves are what we would call "hand traps". A hand trap in YGO is a monster card with a "Quick Effect", meaning it can be chained to other effects at the same timing as a Trap would be, that discards to either respond to or apply a specific effect. This sort of references the inherent power hidden within the maids, the dragons are always lying beneath the surface and while the maids are out, the dragons exist to support them. That is until combat. When you enter your Battle Phase, all of your Dragonmaids on your side of the field trigger. Why? Because the Dragonmaid archetype's main gimmick is switching in and out of their Dragon forms as the need arises. At the start of your Battle Phase, you will switch all your maids into their powerful dragon forms which you have sent to the GY already for their hand trap effects, at which point they are ready to destroy your opponent's board and/or hit them for as much damage as possible, and then at the end of the Battle Phase the dragons will switch back into the maids, returning to the hand to activate their hand trap effects again. Is the Dragonmaid deck sus? Absolutely. Is it cool in spite of this fact? Yes, absolutely, no question.
The First Deck I Was Good With - Shiranui
I am actually not going to talk too much about Shiranui. To talk about Shiranui in-depth is to also talk about its sibling archetype, Mayakashi, and I don't think this post is the right place to do that. I wanted to focus in on the Shiranui archetype specifically because this deck is the first deck where I was actually good with it to like seriously win games against like. Decks people actually played. Not substantially good mind you, I wasn't finding the secret sauce of Shiranui and dominating competitive circles. Mostly because I wasn't playing Duel Links format. But I made one or two good runs with it and actually made it to Plat in MD before I switched it up with a deck I'm better with (we'll talk about Megalith some other time). So, just know that the following is only part of a story and that someday I will talk about the Shiranui archetype way more in-depth than I am doing in this post. Cool? Cool.
The Shiranui archetype is a series of monster hunting samurai (I swear, this is the last samurai archetype, don't judge me) who are essentially separated into two halves: living humans and cursed swords. Yes, I realize the entire archetype says "Zombie", trust me, the humans are alive. Long ago, there were Yokai hunting samurai who roamed the countryside of Japan battling the various monsters that were terrorizing the land, along with the humans who aided them (which is the Mayakashi clan). These samurai would fall in battle, with their souls becoming tied to their blades for all eternity. Years pass, and the Yokai have once again arrived to terrorize humanity and bring about an endless darkness. A group of Samurai, wanting to protect humanity, come into contact with the cursed swords of the original samurai who battled the Mayakashi clan and have fused their powers, becoming the mighty Shiranui Spectral Samurai. They vow to bring an end to the Mayakashi's reign of terror, and bring back the Sun to the people.
So, working within the very brief overview of the lore as listed above, how does Shiranui incorporate this into their playstyle. Shiranui is a Synchro deck, part of the larger play style known as "Zombie Synchro". For those who don't know YGO, a Synchro summon is basically a much easier way to extra deck summon, simply requiring you to have a catalyst (a tuner monster) and a material to catalyze (a non-tuner monster), and for you to be able to do simple addition. With Shiranui, the tuners are the spirits within the swords. You just Synchro summon using the spirits and the warriors to summon their suite of Synchro monsters. More than that, the main tuner actually works in the GY, allowing the Shiranuis to come back to life as even stronger Synchros. Again, there's a much grander story here with a lot more fun notes, so stay tuned for whenever I talk about Mayakashi and talk about the Shien's Squire saga, but like. Shiranuis are a fun deck, I like em. I should've played Duel Links, where they were broken.
The Deck That Got Me Into Competitive - Yubel
Throughout my YGO journey, even as I got better at the game, I was hesitant to touch competitive YGO. I've always held a lot of respect for competitive, I'm not one of those people who shakes my fist at competitive players for "ruining the game" like so many returning YGO players are. It's frankly foolish to assume a game like this won't have a competitive aspect just because it seemingly didn't when you were playing it with your friends on the playground. But I just always felt like I wasn't "good enough" to play competitive Yu-Gi-Oh, you know? Like it was just not a skillset I had available to me, and that was okay. It didn't help that I wasn't S U P E R into the deck(s) that were competitive at the time I was fully back into YGO (though in hindsight I do love the goth alien mermaids, I'll talk about them some other time). All it took, though, was one really cool deck. A deck that defied all odds and made me go "man, I want to get into competitive YGO just to play this to the best of my ability". And that deck is, of course, our final subject for today's entry: Yubel.
Now, Yubel is not an archetype with a very self-contained lore and specific playstyle like the others on this list. Rather, Yubel is what we would call an "anime nostalgia" deck. The Yubel archetype has existed in the game for a long time, it is an adaptation of the deck wielded by the main antagonist of Yu-Gi-Oh GX's third season, Yubel. Yubel is, effectively, the non-binary yandere partner to series protagonist Jaden Yuki. Long ago, Yubel was Jaden's closest friend, the spirit contained within "Yubel", which was his favorite card as a child. Yubel was sent away, however, for making Jaden a pariah due to their overenthusiastic way of protecting Jaden and in that time became corrupted by what is the overarching antagonist of the first three seasons of GX: the Light of Destruction. This turned Yubel malevolent, their friendship with Jaden turning into obsession, eventually leading to them to develop a plan. They want to be with Jaden forever. But there are too many obstacles in the way, too many other people whose existence is preventing them from being with him. So let's destroy all known universes, fusing them together into one ultimate universe where there is only Yubel and Jaden. Then they can be together forever.
Unfortunately the original release of Yubel in the card game was pretty terrible. It was a very small archetype, comprised exclusively of Yubel's three forms from the anime, and to explain why the deck was bad, let me just put in Yubel's effect text.
Cannot be destroyed by battle. You take no battle damage from battles involving this card. Before damage calculation, if this face-up Attack Position card is targeted for an attack: Inflict damage to your opponent equal to that attacking monster's ATK. Once per turn, during your End Phase: Tribute 1 other monster or destroy this card. When this card is destroyed, except by its own effect: Its owner can Special Summon 1 "Yubel - Terror Incarnate" from their hand, Deck, or GY.
Yeah, you read that right. It cannot be destroyed but needs to be destroyed. It destroys itself but cannot activate off of its own destruction. Just a very confusingly designed card. The problem with anime-specific cards is often that they are designed for a format where players do not have access to the otherwise public knowledge of what their opponent's cards do and/or will make suboptimal plays just to keep the story going. In the real game, the opponent will just simply not play ball until Yubel outs itself. Konami had this problem with card design for a very long time, there are so many old decks that are entirely dependent on your opponent just playing into them when they have the autonomy not to do anything until they can find a better out for your cards.
Now, I want to be clear before I get into how the archetype changed with the modern support: I am not a huge fan of anime nostalgia decks. I find it amusing how thorough Konami is with mining the anime for card ideas, we are rapidly reaching a point where you can recreate the entirety of Duelist Kingdom and Battle City just through card art which is hilarious. But I don't LOVE decks whose whole thing is "this is that thing you loved from the anime but now it's not the worst deck you've ever seen in your life". I'm the only person I know who has exactly 0 love for Blue-Eyes or Dark Magician. Moreover, I've never even seen GX Season 3. I was already kind of too old for the anime when GX was airing, I was like 12 when it started and would've been 14 when the Yubel arc aired. So this is a lot more than just "my favorite character getting a cool new deck", because my favorite character is actually Rebecca Hawkins because it's hilarious that this eight year old girl is indisputably the best duelist in DM and every appearance is just her friends trying to gaslight her into being a worse duelist.
So what drew me to the deck? How they chose to solve the Yubel problem. Yubel's main issue is, obviously, the fact that you need your opponent to intentionally fumble to make any progress with Yubel. So the new support makes it so they have no choice. The new Yubel stuff has a shared effect where if your opponent activates an effect, you can respond to it and change that effect to "destroy a Yubel card". Just literally forces your opponent to play into your deck's end goal of summoning Yubel and triggering its effects. It's such a fun way to fix the problem of Yubel and gives it a very unique flavor in a game that so often works under adding "negate and destroy" as a way of buffing decks. Yubel is technically negating your opponents effects, mind you, but it does so in such an interesting way that it drew me to the deck back on launch.
But the thing that really made this deck a must-play was its boss monster. So, as previously stated, the story of Yubel is that they were Jaden's childhood friend, they got sent away due to their way of protecting Jaden, and while they were away they got corrupted by the Light of Destruction and became an obsessive world ender who wants to be with Jaden forever. The way they wanted to bring about their multiverse ending plans was through the use of the card "Super Polymerization", a card that allows you to fuse with any materials present in the game to summon a relevant fusion monster. Yubel's goal was to summon forth the "Super Fusion God", a being that would allow them to reshape reality to their whims. Jaden, however, pulls a gotcha: swiping Super Poly before Yubel can use it and using the card himself to fuse his soul with Yubel's. Fulfilling their goal of being together forever. This action not only gives Yubel everything they always wanted, but it purifies their soul, ending the influence of the Light of Destruction.
The card they intended to be the boss monster of the Yubel archetype, which unfortunately doesn't see a lot of play in the competitive builds but you do still run it, is Yubel - The Loving Defender Forever. It is a Fusion monster whose materials one "Yubel" monster and any number of other monsters on the field. Meaning you can Super Poly it using your opponent's card as material, the same conditions as the mysterious Super Fusion God. But, this being Yubel after they have been purified, they manifest not as a destroyer, but as a hero. Being a hybrid between Yubel and Jaden's favorite card, Elemental HERO Flame Wingman. Finally being the hero that Jaden always knew Yubel could be. Again, I am not a big Yubel fan, I hardly know anything about the arc and had to look up many of the plot points in this section to summarize them properly. But you know what, this got to me. This story arc having such a fantastic conclusion in the cards themselves made me get on board with this deck. Made me try a competitive YGO deck and fall in love with competitive YGO. More than any deck talked about in this post, Yubel is why I love YGO.
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