The Next Yu-Gi-Oh! Banlist: How to Fix the Format?

Yugioh is on something of a precipice, where competitive players are feeling burnt-out on the current Snake-Eye dominated players, and more casual enjoyers of the game are unable to justify spending a small fortune on a Fiendsmith package, the only thing propping up Tier 2 or rogue decks like Yubel or Memento.  The game has devolved into fighting through a number of handtraps in order to resolve a 1-card combo, and seeing how far you can take it after having been stripped for resources, rather than the back-and-forth of mingled 2-card combos we saw from around 2020-2023.  To put it bluntly: Yugioh needs a change, and needs it soon.

That said, we’re due for a banlist dropping soon, and even as I’m writing this there’s a world where I wake up to the list dropping.  That said, the game’s fundamental flaws have now reached an acceleration of magnitude we’ve yet to see, and I want to shine a light on some alterations that we’re due for.

The absolute first thing I want to mention about modern Yugioh is the transience of resources where in prior sets, cards required specific pieces in specific places.  Nearly everything in the broader Diabellstar universe opts to send cards from the hand or field to the GY, either generically or semi-generically, meaning any assorted leftovers have a purpose as potential cost.  This is great in theory, but in practice, a critical mass of this ability to use overflowing advantage means the best deck in the room’s goal is to find some assortment of starters, and quite literally any secondary pieces to make those starters tick.  This is true of anything with Fiendsmith, Diabellestar, Snake-Eye, or even the upcoming Azamina, as well as mostly for White Woods.  Coupled with floodgates, modern decks can break parity like never before, and we’ve seen Maindecked Anti-Spell Fragrance as a countermeasure to opposing decks, but refusing to play under it, or via its opportunity cost, by simply ditching the onboard floodgate next turn with Diabellstar the Black Witch.

Opportunity cost is the key phrase there, as now, it’s alright if you soft brick, or open too many extraneous pieces, as the ability to ditch spare cards of any type is easier now than ever.  Of course, from a game-feel perspective this is a positive, as you’re never sitting across the table from a built-up board looking at a hand of soft garnets and extenders, wondering where you went wrong.

Yet, much like lands in Magic: The Gathering, these soft garnets and necessity to play suboptimal hands led to perhaps more interesting games, than if the turn 1 player had the ability to do their mainline combo each time.  Imperfections showcased the skill of the duelist, not to simply go through the standard line by memory, but innovate, iterate, and otherwise deviate from standard practices.  If we get a banlist that doesn’t gut the ability to use these assorted spare pieces as part of a 1-card combo, the necessity to perform else but the normal lines is diminished.

Of course, everyone knows about the issues concerning 1-card starters, as that’s been expounded upon over and over by the best players in the community, but I’d counter that in the mentioning of the fabled 1.5 card combo, and I’m not talking about Fabled Lurrie…directly, anyway.  Snake-Eye Ash is perhaps the most obvious ban we’ve had in a while, but my argument is that the Snake-Eye effect to ditch any other 1 card from hand or field to resolve its effect is more-so the game design issue, and not the fact that the card’s able to do that on its own, by routing through Poplar, Oak, and Flamberge Dragon.  The amount of genuine 1-card combos, and their ceiling in the game, remains decidedly low, but there’s these pseudo-single-piece lines that begin by ditching another card, period.  This has always been the case since the end of the VRAINs era, such as in the case with Tri-Brigade dumping 3 names in the Graveyard and landing a Tri-Brigade Kerass in hand; the difference there is the necessity to then discard a specific card, being a monster of tri-type, to then extend with Kerass.  Even if your GY was wholly set-up, Tri felt fair to face because they were telegraphed largely by the number of cards in their hand.  You knew they couldn’t extend if there was a lack of monster density, and the density of those monsters ran counter to the types shared by handtraps (not many handtraps are Beast, Beast-Warrior, or Winged Beast).

All that’s to say, my ethos on the game moving forward largely concerns a need to return to resources that can’t come from anywhere.  It’s more skill testing for both players when the cards in a given zone matter, and hitting an opponent at specific points can genuinely cripple them if they’ve been too greedy.  Virtual World, also from the same set as Tri-Brigade, have that concept down beautifully.  If they go first, they need to land an archetypal name in order to resolve future effects, so disrupting either their Normal Summon, or Virtual World Gate - Qinglong play, can practically end the turn; however, they get better if the thing you’re targeting is a Trap, meaning on turn 3, even if they were disrupted turn 1, if they’re allowed to bounce back they do so with unmatched vigor.  This outlines a second point of my ethos: Players should be rewarded for waiting, or being able to make it to turn 3, not punished.  This of course paints a massive target on both Tenpai and Gimmick Puppet, for whom my issues differ.

In as fast a format as this, the best handtraps should be more punishing than those which trade 1-for-1.  There’s an excellent adage by Gage Poljak, that a format’s health can be defined by how good Droll & Lock Bird is within it.  It is therefore startling that some decks aren’t even bothering.

I actually blame this on two specific cards, and their design: WANTED: Seeker of Sinful Spoils and Sangen Kaimen.  Each of these cards explicitly plays around Droll as your first search, because they can be activated in the Draw Phase — there’s no world where that’s healthy.  If I’m taking one hit on Tenpai, contrary to the popular wisdom I actually believe Kaimen is the problem card.  The ability to do the important initial searching in the Draw Phase, so it’s okay to be Drolled, is simply not how a search-heavy deck should be allowed to play around typical countermeasures.  I actually think Gimmick Puppet also is fine with its Field Spell, another classic problem piece that players want gone.  If the deck wasn’t able to FTK, or first-turn-kill, it would be a fine midrange deck, and even in the OCG following their Limit on Number 40: Gimmick Puppet of Strings the deck has morphed into an Orcust hybrid that plays midrange.  That sounds absolutely like something we need in the TCG.

I have always said that floodgates are fine so long as everyone is affected by them, and yes, while a deck can be designed around breaking parity with those effects, the opportunity cost is precisely what keeps control alive in such a fast game.  Control is dead, now, because the worst they can do is trade with a deck that’s already gained too much advantage, or be stunned out only to have those opposing control pieces ditched next turn.  Labrynth, Dinomorphia, Altergeist, Eldlich — these are decks that can only exist with Floodgates around like Gozen Match or its ilk.  It forces players to run backrow removal, be cognizant of where they might be stopped off of using a specific type or attribute, and broadly slows the game down.  A set of bad actors able to get rid of these cards too easily does not justify their removal, and in fact, following a slaughter list like we expect, I would want some of these pieces slowly pushed back to Unlimited.

As you can see, this is less of a wishlist, and more of a format analysis by way of game design principles.  Crossover Breakers is coming out in December, and it brings with it, for the first time in a while, 3 new archetypes from a deck building set that actually have a shot at meta, especially in the form of Maliss & Ryzeal.  In order for things to get better, however, and for the format to feel more healthy, counterplay and tools which actively slow down the game need to return, and actually matter.  Droll, Shifter, and Floodgates aren’t beloved cards, but they’re just as critical to this game’s environment as mosquitos or flies are to the real world, because without those pieces, the proverbial food web collapses.

I’m extremely interested to know what you think about the upcoming banlist!  Do you agree with my points, or if not, where do yours differ?  What was your favorite format in recent memory?   I’d love to hear what you’ve been thinking in the comments below!