The only explanation people came up with for Air Neos being MIA is that there is an Italian airline with a similar name (Neos Air) and EVEN THEN that is extremely unlikely grounds to erase a card from history for.

Remember that one guy a while back that had a multiple page theory on why the same players kept topping at events and just could not comprehend that good players will consistently do good.

The theories about why the 5ds/Vrains girls get shafted in the back half of those shows is extra funny because the guy who wrote those shows has openly gone on record stating that it's because he just doesn't really know how to write female characters

Such a shame that people expected 5G zombies and not 5Ds zombies. SMH.

GOATED thumbnail

Enough Air Neos, lets even put Shuttleroid to the side for a moment, WE WANT BASTIAN MISAWA'S FIRE DRAGON 😤 How did you give us Water Dragon legacy support (Cluster) and not add Fire it was literally free retail.

what's funny is that the original Carly-VA still did the character up to and including the Aesir-arc. The conspiracy depends on the anime staff knowing about the cult-stuff before it officially came out, rewriting the show to minimize Carly's and therefore the cultist's role, and then still hiring the actual cultist to do a few lines every couple of episodes.

7:58 It wasn't Accesscode Talker since he only appeared in one of the final episodes. It was Firewall eXceed Dragon, the XYZ monster. The time line is Firewall eXceed Dragon appears, Firewall Dragon gets banned, and we never see Firewall Dragon in the anime again

The Crow theory actually states that around episode 51-52 is when the change happened. He first appears in episode 30, yes. But then around episode 40 or so he duels Lazar due to his hatred of what the Dark Signers were doing to the Satellite, which results in Crow's supposed "Death". However, he returns in episode 51 without any explanation as to how he survived the explosion or the cave in or the area crumbling into a pit, so the theory is that he was meant to die in episode 40, then come back as a dark signer instead of Greiger, since to become a Dark Signer you have to die while in an emotionally dark space. My guess is, if the theory IS true, he was planned to die when the character was introduced, they changed their minds when Blackwings became popular, and changed episodes 52 or so, which was 10-20 episodes away after his introduction, so they'd have enough time to, especially with there being a 3-4 month gap between episodes directly when Crow comes back as himself and not a Dark Signer as well as Life Stream Dragon constantly being shown as the final Signer Dragon and not appearing for over 100 episodes, and Crow getting a signer mark for little reason or fanfare. Its still a theory without much evidence, but there is SOMETHING there.

Someday we’ll find the truth. Someday, A*r Neos’ erasure will be explained. Someday, we’ll get justice for the worst Neos fusion since Glow Neos. Someday.

I think a fun thread would be: which archetype showcases their lore through their playstyle/gimmick the best. I think storytelling through card design has been really interesting in yugioh esp in recent years and would love to hear what the community thinks

I'm not WRONG! I'm just...correct in a delayed fashion.

I remember reading somewhere that during the time Duel Links' servers were being exceptionally terrible, and the infamous "Microwave" incident happened, that Konami was actually going to try, and spin it by saying it was happening on purpose because they were planning on adding Zigfried, a character whose role in the anime involved him hacking into Kaiba Corp with the intention of making it look bad, into the game. Nothing of the sort of ever happened, and outside of the inclusion of some of his Valkyrie, and his brother's Fairy Tale cards, nothing pertaining to him has ever been added to Duel Links.

Ok here’s the thing about the Air Neos conspiracy: WE HAVE NO IDEA! Dude has literally been cut from everything to the point where Konami flipped him around backwards and covered parts of him that needed it in Instant Contact! You don’t think he’s there but he is! You can still see the wings but they’re the backs of the wings!

Air Neos is the biggest "why" of YGO people thought it was an issue with the artist claiming intellectual ownership - if that was true, konami could hire a new artist, even changing the entire design if needed and using that for all other cameos. others believed it was because Air Neos looked to much like a different superhero - if that was true, konami again could easily change the art. some also said it was the airline with the extremely similar name winning a suit - if that was true, Konami would easily errata the name and be done with it after. another group guessed TV Tokyo held the rights and refuse to let go - if that was true, they'd own the rights to all the Neo Space members, but we regularly see them. the only major theory that seems plausible, even if really dumb, is if the Air Neos artist had been secretly blacklisted, and Konami was both petty and stupid enough to refuse to associate with Air Neos at all afterwards.

For all the people who bought out Ancient Leaf, there is still hope! You will be very rich if Konami announces official support for tag duel tournaments.

5:01 In GoldenNova's defense, he had some decent reasoning, it needed to be fusion summoned and lost 100atk for each banished card; those are effects you use on a card you're worried will break the game, not the middest superpoly to ever exist. Turns out it was just an interesting filler pos with baffling effects that randomly fit the Albaz lore.

Still think the best consporacy theory was the carloncho store leaks of maximum gold. The reprints looked too good, and people cried fake, but in the end they were 100% true, and were somehow leaked like, half a year or more in advance

I think the crow one actually probably has a kernel of truth to it in that he probably wasn't meant to be a signer initially. Life Stream Dragon appears in the Dark Signers opening but then goes unsummoned for ONE HUNDRED EPISODES for no adequately explained reason, it'd make sense if putting Crow in over Leo was why.

Mention of the old SJC players just made me think how I still don't understand how that one Gladiator Beast player won the SJC where full-power TeleDAD debuted.

Konami is 100% in on the joke with Air Neos, there's no other reason that would make sense

Air Neos did make an appearance in Legacy of the Duelist, but that was the last time. Bro is like The Time Traveler's Wife of yugioh.

The Synchron mismatch at 7:55 reminds me of the Pokemon mismatch where you'd expect Venonat to evolve into Butterfree and Metapod into Venomoth instead of the other way around.

I'll admit, I didn't know that the "Crow was originally meant to be a Dark Signer" thing was actually misinformation. That said, the fact that he did eventually become a Signer, along with his own SIgner Dragon in Black-Winged Dragon (a monster that was not featured in the battle against the Earthbound Immortals) which effectively made 5Ds into "6Ds", does seem to suggest that the writers had a soft spot for the character, at the very least.

I have fond memories of being in the Arc V fandom while it was occurring before it got bad, not that I remember many theories that were circulating to explain the plot. I do remember one idea where the consensus was that after yosenju, Shingo Sawatari was going to settle in as the pilot in the anime of an igknight deck. This is because every time we saw him, he had a new deck with a new elemental attribute but the only one left was fire. Igknights were revealed if I recall correctly some time after his yosenju duel with Yuya but before he played again in the synchro dimension. Of course, we got abyss actors and are probably better off for it.

1:13 - 1:20 this but unironically. The rarity changes and card price difference from tcg to ocg has me convinced of it.

"Air"Neos is around us, always with us, you just can't see😂😂😂

Till this day, the biggest conspiracy is the farfa and cimo beef

My favorite conspiracy theory related to the game might be Shuttleroid. It's the same thing as air neos, but it's not only recently, the card was never imported, never on any video games, anything.

the three leading theories I hear about air neos are that it's plagiarized (from either a character that no one can provide or one that does not look any closer to air neos than like, star wars characters look to kozmos), that it's violating a neos air trademark (but then why not just rename it to bird neos or w/e? Also why would that effect OCG printings as well?), or that there is some kind of contract/rights issue with the artist (in which case it's odd that it only effected this one card and that the card was in legacy of the duelist). The last one is the most compelling imo, there's some other instances of that kind of thing happening with companies that mostly use work for hire contracts, where they just fuck up and accidentally give someone a fair agreement for their work and end up choosing to purge it completely rather than have to pay compensation. I think without knowing who the artist was that created air neos it's very difficult to really put forth a compelling theory

I can't believe Shuttleroid wasn't mentioned, it's in a Air Neos situation except it hasn't even been imported yet

The Firewall Dragon theory is definitely true to some extent

The Firewall Dragon thing is silly, if you looked up Yugioh Vrains at the time on Google Image search, every image of Playmaker was him featured with Decode Talker. He literally summoned Decode Talker in more episodes than Fire Wall Dragon. What kind of Ace Monster disappears for 9 episodes, then 8 episodes, then 17 episodes, then 18 episodes, then summoned the final time in the series on episode 82? The series went on for 38 episodes past that. I know Decode Talker also disappeared for 40 episodes at one point, but, he showed up more consistently than the so called Ace Monster of Playmaker. Who appeared in the final episode? Decode Talker. Who didn't? Firewall Dragon. Imagine if during Yugi and the Pharaoh duel the Pharaoh just didn't summon DM at all.

I remember there was a conspiracy idea back in 2005 or 2006 when ude started the pre release events, giving away a special card from the set. There were many rumors that people were getting sjc crush cards as there card. I remember St Clair being behind it.

My conspiracy theory is that the last card you add to a deck in MD will appear in your hand way more often than the statistical average.

Carly was removed because she was supposed to stay dead after the events that occurred, they just brought her back to life because they wanted a good ending

I mean with Crow it explains why his dragon conflict with Blackwings so much.

I have this theory that Konami only prints cards to make money.

people always cite the ending theme of that time using Life Stream Dragon as evidence that plans were changed, but the same ending theme also features Crow prominently with Jack and Yusei all the way through, even driving into the sunset with their ace-monsters out. The same ending also shows Leo and Luna confronting a hooded figure together, which goes against the theory that Leo was supposed to duel Greiger and was shoved into the Devack duel after Crow stole his spot. My theory is that a little was changed, but nothing much. I suspect the three-on-one-duel against Rex was always planned, only difference being that Leo would have gotten Yusei's mark instead of Crow, and that the King of the Underworld would have turned out to be a corrupted Life-Stream Dragon for Leo to receive. I also think Greiger was a late addition to give Crow something to establish his credences, cause he's the only Dark Signer not even remotely hinted at in the endings and openings. Even his Earthbound-monster was missing in previous flashbacks, even though those same flashbacks featured other Earthbounds who weren't officially revealed yet at the time.

I have a collection of all the Yugioh R cards. Im so happy they made the puppet cards etc lately.

Accesscode Talker was like 6 to 9 months after Firewall got banned

Here's a better Prog conspiracy theory: Both of them were cheating the winner's wheel in season 1. At least during the time period when I decided to keep track, they both landed on the tournament pack slice a lot more frequently when the tournament packs were any good.

the past behavior he's talking about is probably them increasing rarities for the tcg, making cards more expensive than they otherwise would be

‘Did they just scrap the plans for Crow’ Would explain the random fridge he survived in that was nowhere to be seen when he got consumed by darkness. And him taking Rua’s fight against Bomber

My conspiracy as a kid was that we would get a despair from the darks alive version before he was a zombie as there are a couple of cards in which he a huge looking creature with legs but we sadly never got him :(

3:05 I’ve heard this theory countless times. Apparently he was basically never gonna be more than a recurring character hence him becoming a dark signer but he was so popular he got Daniel Bryan’d into the main cast

that one about erratas... if you're googling erratas, you're already going crazy, no govenment involvement needed

On the 5Ds one, while still unsubstantiated, there were a couple factors that might have lead to them to be more believable because they at least seemed like sound logic on the surface. 1) Carly being written out due to the VA being in the Roma Sophie cult also often included the explanation that this was why the show suddenly veered Yliaster away from anything involving the occult and being a cultish secret society to the Sci fi "oh no it's actually time travellers from the future pretending to be a cult like secret organization." The fact that yugioh veered away from the overtly supernatural and into more Sci fi stuff in almost every series afterward helped fueled the flames because it seemed to line up with that (off topic, but I kind of miss the supernatural bend yugioh used to have. It was always supernatural AND sci-fi, but it used to lean more supernatural) 2) Crow being a Dark Signer and even the final boss may be a combination of a few things. I don't have the source, so maybe it's just another rumor, but iirc he was originally imagined as an antagonist. Not a dark signer though, and more of team rocket "let's steal yusei's duel runner" type. His blackwing's are dark winged beasts like Rex's Earthbound Immortal. Finally (this is really weak, even by bad conspiracy standards), his criminal marks look like they would fit as dark signer markings ( although tbf, this happened with kallen). So I think all of these just got rolled into antagonist±matches the big bad's type/attribute±criminal mark kind of looks like dark signer mark= final big bad dark signer

The predaplant makes no sense. They were maining Predapractice, which was the card that got bought out, and Predapractice still sees play in Predaplants.

I got one for you, and you're welcome test this shit yourself if you don't believe me: Master Duel only allows you to draw a good hand a certain number of times in a row. After you do your full combo several games in a row, it will force you to brick in a fairly regular and predictable pattern. The game recognizes what cards you activate and resolve most often, and then does everything it can to hinder your ability to access those cards for a few games. This is likely a method by which Konami actively slows your progress up the ladder, to keep you playing for longer. I swear on my life, when I was playing master duel religiously not long after it released, I would full mermail combo for exactly 4 games in a row, and then brick like hell for exactly 2 games, then draw full combo again for exactly 4 games. Now whether or not these are the exact numbers for everyone, I don't know. But that's what it was for me. I haven't played enough master duel in a long time, so I can't confirm if this still happens. We'd need a shit load of people doing a shitload of testing.

errata was such a fun little horror ARG a few years back, lol

In the Italian dub of Arc-V, Sylvio Sawatari is named Shingo, like In the original (all the other names are the same as in english), my conspiracy theory is that they changed the name to avoid similarities with controversial politician Silvio Berlusconi. Of all the theories, this is the one I feel is closer to being true

Master Duel conspiracy theory: You have a higher chance of drawing your garnets in your opening hand.

The Predaplant thing reminds me of the UG Karn fracas from Magic. A team of (very good!) pros thought they had cracked the meta, and then WotC published their decklists early. They were pretty miffed, but then it turned out the deck was very bad, actually.

The change of Yliaster in Season 3 could be explained by the fact that the anniversary movie that was being produced at the time had to fit in with the current narrative. Regarding Dark Signer Crow's conspiracy, Goodwin sports the crow glyph on his jacket from his very debut as a massive foreshadowing sign, the Earthbound Immortal couldn't have been intended for Crow.

So glad someone brought up the errata one…too damn funny

My conspiracy is: After Danger?! released and basically broke the game, Konami Japan decided that the power level of World Premier themes was too high, so now the make sure every new one is kept at a low power level. As seen in Beetroopers, whose first wave was a bit too strong, so the 2nd wave had to suck hard.

Spectre in VRAINS being sidelined in the last season. He was one of VRAINS most interesting characters. An Orphan raised by a tree then kidnapped for the Lost Incident who joined Revolver, as his second in command. He had a great personalty, deck and all his duels were very fun to watch. Yet he didn't do anything in the last season. He appears in scenes with the rest of the gang but never says anything. Then he gets offscreen defeated alongside the other 3 Knights of Hanoi, which is a shameful way to go. People theorised that the VA was tired of playing the role. Though, now it's clear VRAINS was extremely rushed and they didn't have time for anything in the last season.

Dire, your openings keep getting better and better. Pat on your back for the hard work

Fun Fact: Judai/Jaden actually have a line with Air Neos but he's not in the game for some reason

Surprised no one brought up the That Grass is Greener conspiracy in which Grass only got printed because card sleeve companies coluded with konami to make yugioh plahers need to by more packs of card sleeves

Will never forgive what happened with Carly.

im surprised that the "YCS' are rigged" theory didnt show up

My YGO conspiracy theory is Monstergate.

I thought the air neos thing was due to an Italian airline of a similar name...

That first guy has a point. Konami does hate Americans, as well as every other consumer they have considering their treatment of franchises like Castlevania, Metal Gear, Suikoden, Silent Hill, Goemon, Contra, Frogger, Zone of the Enders, Rocket Knight Adventures... christ they do actually hate us this was supposed to be a joke.

Where's that French Yusei pfp guy that went on and on about how every single YCS is somehow rigged in favor of the "famous" players and that pro yugioh isn't real

My favorite is: Konami's Yugioh TCG division is being run by monkeys. Oh wait, that's actually a fact.

The branded predap one is so funny to me, cause I've seen so many people act like it was obviously terrible when in reality it was still good, just not quite better than regular branded despia.

On MD, if you see a three kanji name as your opponent, 9 times out of ten its an North American player using a bot, or someone that believes this conspiracy 0:43

Dire's editing is perfect for this series. Thank you for making me go start a rewatch of Adventure Time.

The Carly thing is interesting because 5ds had some writing issues outside of her being in a cult. Though if true would add negative connotations to the show. I personally think that they simply had the road map for dark signers practically pre written for how well it flows and the second half winged it so they could finish up the WRGP stuff with as little issue as possible.

The firewall conspiracy is only half right. I personally do believe that being the Ace monster was influential to why it did not receive the hammer until orcust truly became the bane of everyone. But it wasn't banned until acesscode came along. It was actually much earlier with its XYZ counterpart firewall Exceed dragon. As I remember that card being hyped in articles as Yusaku's new ace leading up to his fight against cyber gou, and the fact that while the code talkers were far more prominent as Yusaku"s ace than firewall ever did. Acesscode didnt made its debut until the very last episode of Vrains and its final release pack related to the anime.

Wait did no one mention the Farfa and Cimooo conspiracy theory. Why does Cimoooo not interact with Farfa at all. We never see those two together. Is there some bad blood between the two people?

7:50 got that Butterfree/Venomoth and Salamence/Flygon logic

5:01 to be fair the theory was like "it's probably related to maximus", and the card has inverted maximus stats, a similar color scheme, is a spellcaster+dragon fusion, and can't be used as fusion material (showing that he can like resist albaz now or something)

someone at YCS dortmund had a Tshirt which had a missing poster of Air Neos, it was so funny

Konami, give us Air Neos 2 please. Change the art, make a new hummingbird. I don’t care. WE NEED THE BIRD PERSON.

Reason why kosmos doesn't have support is because Konami is afraid of Disney

While the "Crow was supposed to be a Dark Signer" is kinda wack, the "Crow took Leo's position as 5th Signer" has some merit, especially since he didn't get Black-Winged Dragon until over 60 episodes after Life-Stream Dragon appeared, meaning they absolutely had time to make that change. Hell, the "popularity" of Blackwings could've even mattered there.

"People just thought it sounded like it would be cool if it was true, so they decided that's the same thing as it being true". He just explained like 90% of conspiracy theories.

The Golden Nova shade; I love it!

The turbo/nitro theory reminds me of Pokemon's Butterfree/Venomoth theory

ah yes, the only nationalities that plays yugioh, American and Japanese

The fact that I never knew there was a Wind attribute DT "misprint" for Nitro Warrior, one of my favorite cards, from my favorite series, blows my damn mind lmao. THAT was super interesting to find out

They could just change the air neos art and reprint him. So its not the art, its the name

Two conspiracy theories I found hilarious, both related to UDE: 1. Back when the Near-Apocalypse of 2009 happened, when UDE was caught printing counterfeit cards for Vintage Cards to release in those weird blister packs, they posited a theory that they had found secret Chinese counterfeiting businesses run by Konami to "prove" that Konami was the one printing the counterfeits and that Vintage was lying. Like, yeah, nice way of trying to save your ass there, UDE... 2. That UDE had secret exclusive legal printed versions of various anime cards - including an original version of The Seal of Orichalcos, of which there were like 15 that were handed out to specific employees - that were played by said employees at various tournaments in a "beat the master" style duel, and they had to give them up to Konami when they lost the license (but some of them didn't, and are still out there to this day). I keep on hearing this is true, especially the one with The Seal of Orichalcos, but the thing is, even back then, there should've been some video evidence of the matches to show off the cards, like a photo or something, but to this day, no one I know of has been able to find such evidence to corroborate it.

I don't think it was just that people "got it in their heads" crow was going to be a DS it was because there was a scene in 5ds where it showed the 5 signer dragons attacking an Earthbound immortal, and specifically one of them was life stream dragon while black-winged dragon was nowhere to be found until they had to make a signer dragon for him in season 2. That along with how all of the dark signers have a connection to another main character EXCEPT Devak. And Devak is the only one they don't explain a backstory for, which all this leads people to think either they were lazy with writing a reason for him to exist or they had other plans initially and changed their minds. There's also just the fact that blackwing armor master has the Earthbound lines on its body which could've implied it was meant to be his "dark synchro" monster in having a specific tuner as well like the rest at the time and yet it's all chalked up as a design choice. Also crows in general never really signified good things in media and literature. But no he just is a bog standard quirky nice guy with seemingly everything under the sun pointing against him.

The thing that bugs me about the Crow theory is that a having a beloved character deck and a character’s alliance to good or evil don’t always align. If they supposedly ssved Crow from being a dark signer because of blackwings being popular, wouldn’t they have done the same thing for some like Kalin/Kiryu? Infernity was (and still is) a popular fan favorite deck, so why couldn’t they do the same thing? TL;DR - the crow theory makes no sense because being a fan favorite deck and a character’s alliance to good or evil also makes no sense.

Firewall actually was not ever really presented as the ace. From the beginning marketing of Vrains through the entire first season, the ace has been treated as Decode Talker. Firewall's ban happened way, WAY earlier than Accesscode Talker's debut (Accesscode was literally the final duel of the series). Yusaku's Decode Talker thematically is tied to his character and it or another Code Talker is what he uses to end his duels most often. The actual conspiracy is people claiming Firewall was the "planned" ace when nothing in the marketing or the series itself really implies that. The problem with a bunch of theories is that multiple theories can get clustered together and combine some things that are known to be true with some things that are plausible and some things that are total stab in the dark theories. Crow is the perfect example. The verifiably true part is that he had an expanded role mid-development of the first season. He wasn't planned to be a Signer. The flashbacks involving Life Stream Dragon in the first season while NOT showing or even implying the existence of Black-Winged Dragon should be proof of this. The semi-plausible part is his expanded role being due to Blackwing's popularity. Most TV anime are made about two months in advance, so basically anything in the anime that has an event that could have lined up to an event about 2 months prior would be in-line with a typical production schedule. In something like Yu-Gi-Oh it's even possible that the production is more rushed, but I don't know how it stacks up compared to other anime series. I don't really think that he was planned to be a Dark Signer but his expanded role in the plot of 5D's DOES coincidentally start around the episodes in the 40s... which was two months after the first Blackwing monsters were printed. [But after Arc-V where you have "the director loves Crow so much he put three Crows in the show" it's most likely just, you know, the director's favoritism.] The stab in the dark theory is that Crow might have been planned to be a Dark Signer, which is based on circumstantial evidence such as his criminal marks or aesthetics of Earthbound Immortals that are in-line with his deck. Possible? Yeah, but it's all circumstantial. He COULD have been a Dark Signer, but it was scrapped early enough in the development that there really isn't evidence of that being planned.

I heard the air neos thing was because they had trouble with the rights to the design of the monster

Australian wcq 2020 is the best one not spoken about

this video was way more fun than i think it would've been

More of this please, they are really fun xD

Wait hang on, Turbo Synchron has an effect about changing things to defense position too. I actually believe that one now.

i remember a theory floating around that Arc-V being about different timelines/dimensions was going to have the debut of konami-kun/vagabond from tag force/duel links, he already appeared on zexal, so some fans speculated that konami was going to put him in the anime soon. Sadly it never happened but tag force special did echo this theory in the story mode.

4:49 I know this theory about Air Neos is a little far-fetched, but the thoery suggests that the background behind the monster is very similar to a card from a different card game (I can’t recall the card).

"Cimo cheated his pulls" has major Pepe Silvia energy

I remember the stuff about Crow and NOBODY could ever provide conclusive proof that he wasn't supposed to be a main character/not supposed to exist/supposed to be a Dark Signer. 5Ds had some copium among some of its fanbase, but it's still my favorite series of the franchise.

My personal theory is that prior to Master Duel's release, Konami didn't see it as profitable to make a card game simulator since that would pull players away from the TCG and sales of cards were still profitable. Only when links got introduced and sales numbers for the TCG began going down did they release Master Duel to make the game "more accessible" to players.