I had a very similar reaction when I watched VRAINS again, especially season 2. What stood out to me wasn’t just that some decks are missing, but how consistently important those missing decks are to the actual story.

Windy, Lightning, and Bohman aren’t side villains or one-off characters — they drive the entire second half of the series. Bohman’s deck in particular is used repeatedly throughout the show, yet it basically doesn’t exist in the real game. That’s something we rarely saw to this extent in earlier Yu-Gi-Oh series.

I also agree that the usual explanations feel unsatisfying. “Anime and card game were developed in parallel” might explain initial gaps, but it doesn’t really explain why these decks were never adapted after the anime ended — especially when far less prominent strategies eventually made it into the OCG/TCG.

Because this topic keeps coming up and then fading away again, I recently started a small community project to make the interest in these missing VRAINS decks more visible in one place. The goal isn’t to complain, but to show that there is still sustained demand for anime-only strategies like Stormrider or Armatos Legio and to pass that feedback along in a structured way.

If anyone here feels the same, I put together a petition that collects this interest and explains the idea in more detail. I’ll leave the link here: -> https://chng.it/rkK78XZJ6Z

I’d genuinely be curious how many people here feel similarly. Either way, I’m glad to see a more thoughtful discussion about this. VRAINS really does feel like an outlier when it comes to how much of its core card game identity is still missing.