This is also a new(-ish) thing! In Goats, for example, you could discard your 3rd Thunder Dragon, say “whoops, all out of Thundra, guess he doesn’t search,” and that’s that.

In magic you can even do it on purpose tho there are not a lot of reasons to do so

Official YGO play has a lot of rules that just boil down to "Hope you have a good memory lol". Note taking is the same.

The worst offender is definitely the existence of crop circles a card that basically says "if you cant find any targets take 2k damage" but you cant even activate if you dont have cards at the first place?? Huh?

There's literally only 1 instance of "failing to find" in yugioh. Deal 3k damage, activate crop circles, opponent chains Inferno Tempest, all your targets are banished upon resolution, and you take 2k damage

Yeah, it's so stupid, that this can apply in some scenarios but not others.

Today I learned monsters being attached has an XYZ material does not count as leaving the field

Also the difference between discarding and sending from hand to grave? You’re performing the same physical action but they are different because? Differences between if and when effects really frustrate me too. Oh your monster effect has to activate last in a chain? Too bad, I’ll stop it with my own effect that doesn’t even negate. So dumb.

@@Infinite8blue Oh man that old can of worms. That hell of people trying to trigger sangan off of detaching when xyz first came out

Fair

100%. I have absolutely no idea why they don't only account for the monster(s) that would be on the field after a summon instead of still considering the monster(s) that would've already left the field by then.

One thing I fucking HATE about those floodgates is that they don’t make sense. You can’t make a monster with a type/attribute you already control when you literally SEND THE MATERIALS TO THE GY BEFORE TOU SUMMON IT????!!!!

The fact Gozen and Rivalry are legal in Edison and are ruled the exact opposite (you can attempt to summon a monster of a different type/attribute if the previous monster restricting you is gone) and see no play at all really goes to show how bad these cards are ruled otherwise.

@@soup2504 Because you can't attempt to control a monster that ignores the lock, simple as that. Same scenario as trying to tribute a Vanity's Fiend with a kaiju, even if it would leave the field before the kaiju hits the field, it's just a thing about you not being able to even "attempt" to special summon.

@@kuroneko687 Where on the card does it say that?

Branded fusion doesn't seem like a big deal if you don't know what the fusions can do on the field and materials in the GY

This is something I don't think about that much nowadays, but yeah, it's total bullshit that the player is pretty much required to have full knowledge of cards they don't even play to avoid getting screwed. Would be extremely new player friendly if you had to declare the card your searching/summoning, and the opponent had the opportunity to check it before committing to disrupting the play or not.

​@@superskrub4209branded fusion is one of the representatives for what's wrong with the game. 1 card snowball avalanches don't happen consistently in other games, yugioh though, generic incohesive decks can snowball in to unbreakable board.

Konami took the worst parts of interactive and noninteractive games. You have to have interruptions, but you don't know how well those interruptions will actually work.

Well that’s just knowing the meta. That’s not crazy

It's not so bad when playing simplified formats with all the obvious problematic stuff banned, and then from there you just level up one complicated ruling at a time if you want to get into modern yugioh bad enough. The thing about Master Duel is that it's the only official automatic duel simulator, yet it doesn't even have the main official yugioh format included, let alone other side formats that are arguably even better.

the problem about this is that master duel follows the OCG rulings, which sometimes are very different from TCG rulings

same

@@Salvare___000 Not a problem at all if you only play by the OCG rulings.

@@Salvare___000 understandable, but tbf if a player just wants to play and not get into paper it is kinda a moot point. but for someone like me who is curious about getting into paper this is a very good thing to bring up.

Trap monsters are fairly consistent with how they work. I'm not sure what nightmares they'd cause.

​@itsmetristan3671 they do cause some silly game states sometimes though

@@MrTweetumss00 like?

​@@itsmetristan3671then Book of Moon one.

@@EnderPryde If still treated as a trap, it goes back FD in the backrow as a trap If not, it's set in the monster zone, still as a monster.

I struggled with this so much when I first picked up Witchcrafters. All of the spells have unique effects on activation OR can be brought from grave to hand, but the recursion effect can only happen if you didn't activate the card that turn, so you have to pay special attention to which cards are coming back that turn and which have to wait until your next turn, but they're all hard once-per-turns so even if one should be coming back that turn, it won't if you play another copy of it that turn.

Banding and Trample

They a reason mutate has only shown up in one set that shit was confusing. The newest set has Decend and descended as two different mechanics and it is annoying as shit but that more a shit name problem since they pretty simple mechanics

​@otterfire4712 see the problem with those keywords is that they actually force you to interact with the weirdly complex damege step rules you almost never think about otherwise

@@PrettierNPastel got into some keyboard fisticuffs a while ago, ignorant on why Trample fails against Banding and various users weren't quite explaining it right. This isn't helped by the fact that the printed text of Trample is poorly worded in the context of how it mechanically works in game. Tl;dw Trample only succeeds if ALL blocking creatures are dead by the resolution of damage. If Banding blocks and attempts to assign all damage to a 1/1 token, just pop the other blockers and Trample will resume.

@otterfire4712 i mean trample is not poorly worded its just the to properly explain it would require more than what you would want to put in remider text. Also the problem is most people dont understand "assigning damage" because its usually just one creature blocking another so it the fact you can do more or less damage to a creature than its toughness doesn't come up

This kind of thing also applies to Branded Lost. It can stop the opponent from using effects that negate the activation in response to Fusion Summons, but not those that negate effects which is why Branded Fusion can still be Ashed even if you have Branded Lost out.

That's not even the only two ways of negating something, there's also "negating a card's effects", like Imperm and Effect Veiler, and the very rare 'negate on resolution' type effect that doesn't need to be chained.

I remember coming back to Yugioh and came across Guru control deck. No one I know has been able to explain the 4th effect of final battle. What do you mean activated effect cannot be negated? Does that affect Ash or Baron or Judgement or Imperm.

​@@takodachi1239you forgot skill drain..... Yes the 4th effect of final battle makes Skill drain one-sided.

@@Skasaha_ How are Imperm and Effect Veiler any different to what you think OP has in mind when they mention negating an effect? That's exactly what Veiler and Imperm do. Even Vera, the Vernusylph Goddess, and other such negating effects still simply negate the effect of a card (instead of its activation).

As someone who has recently begun paper play, don't worry. The only difference is that instead of being kept up at night by unintuitive mechanical misplays, you experience fridge-horror moments where you realise you hard cheated completely out of your mind. What do you mean Cartesia can only fusion summon level 8 or higher fusion monsters?

I've played MD for about 2 years and I have playef Yugioh since the dawn of DL. I still can't figure out how half of the pendulum thingy works, I have about 25 decks in MD and non of them are pendulum.

@@SerpiaXermaTo be fair, it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the game if we lost all of the Duelist Kingdom era quirks. The misplays and cheats due to card text length make us all main characters.

One that really threw me is that an opponent's Black Garden forces *you* to summon a token to your opponent's field when you summon a monster, which means it immediately locks you out of all of your "you cannot summon except X this turn" effects

I'm still learning new things, and I've been playing since early XYZ era. The rules are always subject to change, and often are

That's because "hard" and "soft" are shitty ways to describe what the restriction is.

@@sunglasgaming635 They are not meant to describe it, they are just a simpler way to name them once you already know how they work. Its just part of the larger unofficial vernacular of the game like garnet and bricking.

It‘s pretty easy actually. If it says „Once per turn: do this“ it‘s soft. If it says „Do this. You can only do this once per turn.“ it‘s hard.

That sounds ridiculous

The introduction of Dark World's, is how I first learned the distinction of discarding for cost and for effect.

@@torakandwolf6786 well... no clear card text to see WHAT is a cost and what not really made some problems "back then"

Also niche cards like Rampage with Eyes of Blue because it has to banish everything else (including itself) so if it leaves the field, it doesn't resolve. MST can negate it.

Activated effects are marked by a (semi) colon, whether it’s a cost (like Super Polymerization making you discard a card to use it) or an effect that activates when the condition is met (like when Normal Summoning Aleister lets you get Invocation from the Deck). Non activated effects are continuous effects that lack colons; an example is The Fabled Unicore, whose one sided omni negate effect is a Continuous/non activated effect because it doesn’t have any colons.

Missing the timing is the weirdest shit. I *still* am not 100% sure how it works and avoid playing decks where it can as much as possible.

I'm just legitimately confused as to why exactly Konami decided to make this distinction between optional "if" and "when" effects in the first place. Like, could they not have just put "if" for optional effects and "when" for mandatory ones?

@@sushiroll3795 i believe the trigger timing missing started from some old FTK that Konami ruled illegal because some card would miss its activation timing due to the optional when. In regards to the optional mandatory thing, we do have both optional and mandatory Ifs/Whens and they have functional applications in the game so it's a hard ask

@dharcsynchro4436 I love this game to death, but dear god do I hate it sometimes.

That's because it's no longer where it resolves.

I always called the state as Summon Limbo

I liken it too a Train. You get off from the 'Hand' Train, and wait at the Train Station for the 'Field' Train to pull in, so you can get onto it. And cards negating your Summon, are like you being late and missing your Train.

That would have actually been pretty normal in 2005. Lightning Vortex was just a good card at the time the first Dark Worlds were printed.

O M G XD

O M G O_0

I understand why that interaction would happen that way (technically, you have no monsters on the field at that point), but that's just horrendously unintuitive

I get it, but only by applying Magic mechanics to understand and even then it's not something I ever would have considered before now. See, in Magic, when you cast a spell (the same thing as activating a spell or trap card or summoning a monster) the spell is still on the stack until it has resolved and does not count as being on the battlefield. The same is true of the summoning of monsters. You have to wait until your opponent has decided it can resolve before it even hits the field.

Yeah I completely forgot about that interaction, I did however remember that if you solemn a flip summoned Sangan, it doesn't get the search since it's in the mystery zone between face down on the field and face up on the field.

Technically the monster is not on the field, but on the field in a limbo summon sense. But yeah, pretty interesting to learn. Which makes no sense why you can't make a new monster from monsters on field with gozen up. Since that interact is a period where you control no monsters, allowing you to summon from the ed with monsters you already control would be the exact same sense.

​@@michaelgrey1503I definitely think the reason it's harder to understand in yugioh is because you have limited board space. Having to commit a spot on board but it still not being summoned is weird

I get it as a branded player I would remember at the beginning I would specifically only use material from my hand and then cue my surprise reaction when someone would ash it Then my indignant reaction when my buddy who is a judge for several years, explained it to me that even if you’re not using materials from your deck, you still can use materials, so therefore, ash blossom can be chained to it

Reminds me of that time I negated Macro Cosmos with Rulkallos lmao

@@frankyquilavafireblast895 I had the same issue with Shaddoll Fusion. To be fair, during the window when Ash can be activated, you *haven't* decided yet if you're gonna use material from the Deck or not.

Probably true I had tried other games earlier...

Oh DEAR...

It does. They're treated as Monsters everywhere except the Pendulum Zone but at least some pendulum cards are now saying "Pendulum Monster Cards"

It's like how if you Brain Control a Mystic Tomato and ram it into something, your opponent gets the search. The effect looks at the state of the card when it activates, not when the destruction happens.

Same XD

How does the last one work. I define un-outable as either unaffected or untargetable, neither of which Fog Blade works against.

But this isn't about yugioh being hard lol, this is literally everything in the world ever. Any game, even chess, requires some meta/background knowledge if you want to be better. Any job/occupation requires you to learn adjacent knowledge from your peers (current trend, new tools, etc.). Refusing to get to know the game but want to win in that said game is just whining

@@hirukashiro5995 As both a Magic player and a Yugioh player, Magic is WAY better at allowing you to intuit what exactly your opponent is trying to do and where the breakpoints are. The colour system inherently allows you to know approximately what your opponent is up to as soon as they play their first land. In Magic you don't need to memorize specifically where the chokepoint is in 20 different decks and even if you haven't seen a card before you don't need to read an essay to determine how you should interact with something. It's not about refusing to learn, its about the intuitiveness and readability when it comes to decks and archetypes you've never seen before.

@armitroner To be fair you can also use your intuition in YGO as well. Of course the exact optimal choke point for every deck is different, but you can still use your intuition even for new decks. Like when a card read +1 or +2 (pot cards, demise, etc.) you probably need to Ash that most of the time. Or when a card says "special from deck", your YGO intuition immediately tells you that it's probably very strong (most of "special from deck" cards in YGO lead to insane combo) so you also probably need to Ash that. My point is that, you need to study the surrounding meta/background if you want to get better, even in a job, not only in games. There is also intuition taking part in YGO, but there is no other way to be even better w/o learning.

I think this is by far the biggest beginner challenge in YGO. It's far harder to intuit exactly what a deck's wincon is, especially when a lot of decks use generic wincons eg Accesscode.

@@samuelheddle This is however a problem that is solved by just playing the game. As you see people go for win cons you will be able to see the points at which the win con is on the line.

chain blocking is what makes in complicated/frustrating. Also, I once was told I wasn't allowed to "chain" my torrential tribute to someone's monster summon because summoning a monster doesn't start a chain, yet torrential tribute says I have to activate it when a monster is summoned. To this day I'm still confused as to what they were trying to get at.

@@codyhanson1344 yeah that's a different issue than chain blocking that's because TT is a "when" effect and so if for whatever reason the monster summoning itself isn't the last thing to happen in its effect, TT misses it's opportunity to activate. Super obtuse and almost always a weird one when it comes up. Chain Blocking is rather if I have 2 effects that activate at the same time I can choose the order they go in(example in one of my decks Nephtys, i have Disciple and Sacred Pheonix's floating effects both happening in the standby phase and you cant respond to whatever is Chain 1 because its already being 'responded to' by the Chain 2 effect(say I CL 1 Disciple CL2 Phoenix, you wouldn't be able to use Ash on Disciple's effect)

Yea, having too used to ygo's chains, mtg's stack sounds trippy as hell

@@dhanyl2725 I distinctly recall playing a game of magic where they were trying to explain the stack to me and because I had a monster with an on destruction effect after a board wipe naturally that would be a second stack but apparently not. Doesn't help that for some ungodly reason the only way people around me play Magic are massive 6 person duels where I can't see anyone's cards.

My definition is: The Stack is like the Chain, BUT while there are "Chain Links" on The Stack, EVEN AFTER SOME CHAIN LINKS HAVE RESOLVED OR WAITING TO BE RESOLVED, other spells and abilities can still enter the stack/trigger. Absurd Example: Imagine a full power Tear mirror where Agido is like Chain Link 6 (just to say anything). Agido resolves and you mill Fairy Tail Snow.... NOW YOU CAN ACTIVATE SAID SNOW WHILE THE OTHER 5 CHAIN LINKS ARE WAITING TO RESOLVE. That's what The Stack would be.

Synchro Summons are almost like Rituals; Synchro Monsters don't need specific cards to Summon, but the materials' Levels must exactly add up to the Level monster you're trying to Summon and at least 1 of them must be a Tuner monster (although Red Nova Dragon, Red Supernova Dragon and the Mannadium Synchros need multiple Tuners to bring them out).

@@chaosgallade2331literally the entire point of the comment you’re replying to is that Ritual summons are NOT like Synchros, because you’re generally allowed to exceed the level requirement for a Ritual summon instead of needing it to be exact like with Synchro summoning

@@porgeporgeporge only for a lot of older ones, a lot of the newer ones require specific counts. when synchros came out, it was pretty easy to understand as you add the levels together and have a specific monster type, then you can summon the monster if those monsters meet the requirements and the total levels match, its not a difficult concept to understand if you played blackjack before, except youre going backwards basically

Isn’t another ritual rule that if you have the exact level required in hand you have to tribute that card?

For ritual, it depends on the ritual spell card. One might ask for an exact level, another might forgive you going beyond

O M G XD

So put MTG rules into Yugioh, making cards like Ash and Gamma effectively like the ZW from the Utopia support? Yeah no

@@SuperSayianWarrior nobody's forcing you to play dumb community alt formats

@@DeityofDestiny i am.

activating a card is playing the card, activating an effect is the effect of the card, when you play a normal spell, you activate the card and the effect simultaneously, this is where card vs effect clauses are important to note for cont and field spells when using a negate; for example ursarctic radiation, its on play effect is put 7 counters on it, the continuous effect is to draw 1 card at the cost of removing a counter each time you special summon from hand or ed, you can only ash if the you try to remove a counter to draw a card, not when the card is activated and not with its end phase effect. you can also negate continuous cards with a search effect by destroying in a chain, like mst can negate heavy forwards effect to search an infintitrack monster when activated, because it is no longer on the field

@@nuhrii3449 It's not a continuous effect, it's an activated trigger effect, it's just not a card activation. A continuous effect would draw you a card without starting a chain. Radiation starts a chain both on its card activation and effect activation. Also continuous spell/trap/field spells need to remain on the field to resolve, they aren't negated if you pop them. Negate is a special keyword that only occurs when you use a card that says "negate". Failing to resolve doesn't mean something is negated.

Well, there was, but the waters got muddled due to Pend ED monsters like Odd-Eyes Rebellion Dragon

At the time of Synchro Sneak Preview, a guy with Synchro cards basically TRIED TO RITUAL SUMMON A SYNCHRO at us. He was promptly corrected after we read the Synchro Materials to him. Didn't see him again until after the pack was on sale... XD

I HATE functional errata. Please Konami, stop changing how cards work I beg of you. Especially the old iconic cards for power level and banlist stuff. Especially when half the time they could just print a new card with a weakened effect and a referential name or something.

@@sternguard77They actually used to make weaker retrains for that reason at one point, Tradetoad being a weaker Substitoad. Well, they stopped because they figured they had better means of pack filler anyway, and to top it off, the banned cards would get retrains anyway, errata or not, if they were iconic enough (see also: Chaos Emperor Dragon)

A lot of things in mtg are not 1 per turn so you can sometimes just reactivate in response ( this is highly dependent on situation) so its very different. I find the opposite true coming from mtg where I want to respond to something and can't and lose.

So true. I started playing MTG and it makes the game so much more of a headache than the chain system. Even having the equivalent of 3 chain links is immediately a pain to keep track of if someone reacts to the stack as it resolves

@@itsyaroy5614 As someone else who went from YGO to MTG, I honestly can't disagree more. the easiest way to keep it clear in your head is literally thinking of it as a stack of cards, which is incredibly intuitive. Sure, you can have long stack interactions, but if you keep that in mind, or literally do it on the table if you are playing locally, it should help.

I come from the opposite position having played both games chain blocking can just feel so awkward and i found being able to respond to and interact with the middle or bottom of a stack to be quite intuitive

@@itsyaroy5614 it also allows for infinites that create an “infinity+1” stack count. For example, using a spell that copies other spells, on another of the same spell, that’s targeting another copy spell. What happens is copy spell A targets something, copy spell B targets copy spell A, because it copied a spell that copies another spell, thus creating another copy adding 1 to the stack. This means that if you have effects that care about copying spells, you now have infinite copies that create an infinite stack that never finishes resolving, but never actually grows in size because the last spell in the stack is repeatedly resolving constantly.

This is a really common misconception, and I think part of that is because Konami REFUSES to actually explain what you can and cannot do in layduelist's terms. In order to know any of this, you have to go through the policy documentation. Konami is so allergic to working with Yugitubers that you're lucky if this is ever explained to you. For years, the lay explanation was "You're not allowed to take notes" and Konami never elaborated on this in a expanded public space. So, to clarify, the above is true, what you are not allowed to keep notes on is information non-critical to maintaining a legal game state. That's private information, as above, but it's also optional triggers like the end phase effect of Ruffian Railcar. And there are a lot of optional triggers to keep track of.

@@michaelgrey1503I’ve never played a card game in a public space such as locals and never in a tournament either. 1 day I want to but I have terrible memory so if at all possible I want to have a notebook and pencil/eraser with me to quickly shorthand jot down thinks. I tend to use automatic simulators like duel nexus and master duel so that my memory issue can be “resolved”. If not for that shit I wud forget if I even NS that turn, and if so who?. Sense I haven’t read the entire policy document in great detail and even then I’d probably misinterpret some of wat it says I wud like to ask if the following notetaking is allowed, it’s only short but is a possible example of wat I may do if I entered a tournament: M: NS vyon: act eff on NS O: CL2 ash Res: vyon no eff M: act foolish: dump shadowmist M: CL2 shadowmist search mali M: act vyon eff: banish shadowmist-> search poly So wud notetaking this short exchange be allowed?

​@michaelgrey1503 the funny part is it's in the policy docs that all players are expected to have read the policy docs prior to entering tournaments.

@@sunglasgaming635 which Konami knows isn't feasible since children enter local tournaments all the time.

I believe the rules tend to be deliberately vague in YGO because the philosophy is to give judges more latitude to determine when someone is being unfair, versus games with "harder" rules where the emphasis is on consistency

Cards NOT remembering things is confusing in general.

"Kashtiratheosis? Thats a weird card name. Probably don't need it in this deck."

Imagine when that effect was newish and there were a lot of pre psct cards that hadn't been reprinted so you didn't know what cards targeted and which ones didn't

To elaborate (this one's gonna be a bit more of a wall of text, sorry): it's a legitimately true story that's imprinted into my psyche, an Inside-Out-style core memory. This was at my locals in the reaper format era, and it was the first time I'd encountered anyone playing burn at all. I was playing "$5/week allowance goodstuff pile" and my opponent was a mid-20s gentleman with disposable income playing legitimate constructed stall burn. I played what I thought was pretty well for most of the deciding game 3, and had thought I'd finally gotten the out when I drew the jammer a couple turns before the cannon clock struck midnight. When he insisted that that wasn't how it worked and the judge (naturally) agreed, I was understandably apoplectic. I still legitimately didn't understand the interaction that day, even after the judge tried his hardest to explain it to me. I was too busy seeing red to follow any logical train of thought, to be honest. I walked away from the shop (okay, "rode home in my dad's Civic" away from the shop) that night thinking that Wave-Motion Cannon was surely one of the best cards ever printed. Played a bad facsimile stall burn deck at the playground for a few months after that, but more importantly: I ended up reading as much as I could about the actual rules of the game and its nuanced interactions with pretty much all of my internet time throughout the calendar year 2006. That studiousness was kicked into overdrive after I got extra inspired to "git gud" when Austin Kulman won US Nats in '06, because it was like "there ARE resources by which I can actually figure out what's going on and how the components of the game interact with each other, and there's even an argument that my youth is an advantage because I think about this game while the teacher's droning on about the legislative branch or whatever in social studies class, while the other guys at my shop all seem to have some sort of job." That one duel taught me a lot about diving into complex systems (I'm a software engineer now), the value of hard work, and the coolness of the interactions that keep us all coming back to this game. It was one of the major driving forces in me falling in love with Yu-Gi-Oh and card games in general. Like a long-term relationship, there're of course reasons you fall in love at the start, but sometimes you have that one unforgettable date a year or two in that defines the next chapter, y'know? So, "yes", it did have that much of an impact on me, but no, I'm not "whining" about Wave-Motion Cannon (at least, not anymore. I sure was whining about it that day). Thanks for the twitter thread (and the subsequent highlighting in the KZfaq version) that gave me the opportunity to take a couple trips down memory lane! (thanks for reading my livejournal)

YGO just really hates the idea of being implicit, only to end up having implicit rulings due to Konami's lack of hindsight

It's not an arbitrary difference. The difference is when it comes to paying costs, you MUST be ABLE to pay the cost to even attempt to activate a card. If you cannot pay the cost, you don't get to attempt to activate. With card effects, you activate them assuming the costs are accounted for or there is none, and then you apply the effect as much as possible accounting for other variables such as macro cosmos banishing things that normally would be sent to gy.

Yes and no, it's using "set" as a verb (put, lay, or stand (something) in a specified place or position.) Thats why in the animes not only arc v they usually say "I set 3 facedowns and end my turn"

“Could you set the table?” So I put the table face down…