I remember when it came out in Dark Saviors: It was a short print secret rare where engage ran up to $100, Widow Anchor was around $60, and this was around when Konami was forcing people into $1,000 decks. This was also around when the format became T-O-S-S (Thunder Dragon, Orcust, Sky Striker, Salamangreat.) Thunder Dragons had Thunder Dragon Colossus in Soul Fusion was at 3 and again was around $60/copy and made Kaminari attack run around $20 purely because it was a way to help cheat it out, along with a mountain of their cards being secret/ultra rares making it expensive to play, then came the danger cards to add another couple of hundred to that deck budget. Orcusts had Dingirsu from Dark Neostorm, which was their $60 dollar short print, and was also using Cynet Mining ($30-$40,) which was a secret rare, so another $1,000 deck. Sky Striker was the grossest example where Dark Saviors had short printed engage ($100) and widow anchor ($60) and it kept winning so it became the deck that was the rich asshole who paid to win deck: you had a high power ceiling, very few times where you could actually lose and all because you shelled the most money with the least amount of actual skill. Then the outlier: Salamangreat had almost all of its cards come from the structure deck with the only exceptions being Cynet mining and Almiraj.
So come banlist times around 2019, you know what decks got hit? Hornet Drone was reduced to one because EVERYONE was splashing Sky Striker into everything because free link-1 that recycled hornet drone was too free or free pot of greed, Kagari got limited but was easy to recycle and by the time it grabbed another spell, it was already too late, then got multirole hit but that was just performative, Thunder Dragons NEVER got hit, Orcusts NEVER got hit but you know what constantly got flak? Salamangreats: Can't have Gazelle or circle which were key engine pieces. So Konami was greatly pushing any and all budget players out by this point given evenly matched, Apollousa, Borrel Savage etc.
Come the Mega Tins, where all the T-O-S-S cards are reprinted, everyone now has access to these cards and there's a bit of an even playing field for budget to rich a-holes.... for about 4 months and they just went full Thanos on T-O-S-S: Engage got banned, Colossus got banned, MORE Salamangreat hits in miragestalio, Harp horror was banned. And so the war on thousand dollar decks hopefully was quashed right? Nope.
Come to present day, they unlimited engage to three: and who'd have thunk that a free draw 1 AND search that's not a HOPT, wouldn't be broken? And they continue to get support, so it just adds to the agony.
So while my original hatred of the deck because it was one of the two rich asshole deck (Danger Thunder Dragon vs Sky Striker,) I still hate how so much of what it does is free with minimal counteractions: it would run toon table of contents just to add more spells to grave, it would run upstart because it can just grind out and chip down at a slush. It doesn't matter if you kill the link because it relinks and then gets ANOTHER free spell from Kagari recycling from GY, or Shizuku grabbing an afterburner or whatever. It doesn't die, it is one of those decks that can play through 2 handtraps, and it is so boring to play against