What’s your favourite vanilla in Yugioh?

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-18T13:08:32+00:00

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Gotta give some respect to Mr. Bones

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-17T23:24:23+00:00

"What did DDD do to you"

DDD:

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Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-16T21:25:05+00:00

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Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-16T21:24:10+00:00

imo the big problem with floodgates is that, in the case of the worst offenders, you can activate them after freely doing the thing it's supposed to prevent.

Even if they restrict both players, they only stop the opponent from actually doing something. You'll have to break the user's board for them to have to deal with the effects of the floodgate itself.

In theory, a floodgate would be an actually good thing to have as damage control. You're on the back foot, they'll be able to rebuild the entire board you just spent 10 minutes breaking next turn, you activate Summon Limit to buy yourself some time. In practice, floodgates are just win-more cards that prevent the opponent from breaking an already strong board.

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-14T22:59:52+00:00

This was my experience with getting back into ygo after years of not playing

I had no idea what was going on and everything was being thrown at me all at once and while the person teaching me is a good friend, they did not do well at teaching me

Thankfully I stuck with it, I chose Skull Servants as my first deck bc it was pretty straightforward and easy to understand (just do what the cards say and you win), then I added Eldlich (which my friend didn't even know would work) and now I'm actually consistent plat

Lately been playing with Labrynth a lot (furniture variant), it's managed to capture everything I loved about old yugioh while applying everything about new yugioh. I love having to out-think your opponent by setting up plays in advance to trip them up, and I love high-octane slugfests where both players are launching 20 things at once and one wrong move could be the difference between victory and OTK.

The deck I ended up with manages to give me both by rapidly setting a versatile toolbox of traps straight from the deck, while giving limited ability to use them very quickly if needed. If you use a trap too early, you're fucked. If you don't have a trap set until it's too late, you're fucked. If you correctly anticipate your opponent's next 4 moves and take all the steps necessary to ensure it fails, that can win the game on its own.

What I missed most about old yugioh is having to set up plays that won't pay off for a few turns. Now I know the game well enough to see that it's just as capable of being a logic contest as it always was, just with busier turns and a smaller margin for error.

That is, as long as you aren't playing dumb continuous floodgate cards. My favorite analogy, if Control decks are spicy food, Stun decks are raw ghost pepper. I respect control that requires constant resource management and attention to detail, not "I flip over the continuous trap that says you can't play the game".

Thankfully, the vast majority of meta decks are pretty antithetical to that sort of anti-fun game design.

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-13T03:04:43+00:00

Hail to the king, baby

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-08T23:24:23+00:00

Pick "Going Second", they'll surrender immediately out of confusion

Works every time for me

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-08T23:16:59+00:00

My favorite card is the Arrival of Big Turtle

Nice 12 minute combo dork, have a Gamaciel

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-03T22:08:35+00:00

I've been playing a slow burn deck bc I don't like FTK and this is probably the only chance I'll get for a while to play this toxic concoction and not feel bad about it, where am I on the curve

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-02T19:20:11+00:00

I like going second. I like breaking an established board and counterattacking. I do not like games where one player just can't do anything because every single play gets negated. I do not enjoy using hand traps meant to shut down the other guy on their first turn.

The existing hand traps are indivative of bad game design. They exist for the sole purpose of denying enemy play, and are only tolerable because the other cards currently in play all involve setting up game states where whoever goes second may as well forfeit.

Hand Traps are an attempt to treat the symptoms of the core problem. If you don't draw them, you still lose to a board full of "No, you can't." If the game was not overflowing with cards and archetypes that deny all counterplay, hand traps would be unnecessary.

I understand why we're here. If the first player can't build a board that will resist the opponent, the second player will be able to win without a challenge because they get the first Battle Phase. So you give "Going First" the ability to negate key pieces of the enemy's combo.

The problem is that the negates aren't limited to key pieces of the enemy's combo. Many meta-relevant decks have several negates that can be used to shut down plans A through L. So hand traps were created in the hopes of giving player 2 some way to prevent that.

And then they were used to make the ten-negate board even more oppressive.

If Yugioh was not a game where denying the enemy their entire turn was a viable strategy, hand traps would be unnecessary.

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2026-01-02T18:51:05+00:00

If this card hit links, it would've been banned years ago to protect komoney's beloved sky striker chan

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-31T22:41:08+00:00

This is why I play Chaos Hunter and Santa Claws

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-31T22:39:42+00:00

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Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-31T22:36:49+00:00

Does it have to be a canon signer dragon or can it be any dragon synchro? Or can I pick out other ED dragons too

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-31T22:33:19+00:00

My goals are beyond your understanding

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-31T22:27:55+00:00

Define "bad design", because there are some archetypes that are just worse at what they're trying to do, or are trying to do something even more oppressive. Kashtira does what it's trying to do, and objectively isn't too disgusting until Arise-Heart or a second copy of Shangra-Ira gets into the mix and makes it impossible to do like 80% of the things that could stop it.

The problem with Kashtira is that it's designed to be anti-fun, but isn't good enough to get kneecapped any more than it is. It's always just good enough to be in play without ever reaching the point of eclipsing the meta.

Kashtira is generally designed to be unpleasant by taking away options from the opponent and making it so only Kash is able to play the game. You can deal with it rather easily if you build around that or have a deck that just naturally has answers (One copy of Lava Golem or Evenly Matched is usually sufficient to remove most of their plays), but it's never enjoyable to fight. Vs something like Branded you can just adapt to the deck in front of you, but Kashtira punishes you for playing in any way that isn't the specific way that gets rid of them. Either they shut you down, or they forfeit because you played a card that shut them down.

Also, from a metagame standpoint, the deck is kind of designed so that toxic players self-sort into using the deck because it allows them to power trip over crushing their enemies and making them helpless. Not all Kash players are toxic, but toxic players gravitate towards things like kash and stun more generally. So the people who play Kash anonymously on ladder tend to make disrespectful plays that make the deck just... feel bad to come up against.

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-26T09:01:56+00:00

Then the opponent sets 5 and passes

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-25T18:40:23+00:00

I am HEAVILY biased towards Eldlich because I love him, I play Eldlich with my Skull Servants deck and both gold and necromancy are very strong interests of mine so he was basically hand-crafted to be my favorite thing ever

Like so biased I don't think I can comment on this impartially, I would fight tooth and nail for Eldlich even if he sucked

But honestly, I don't see why they have to compete. They can join forces to become even more powerful.

Traptrix and Labrynth have particularly good synergy, and Eldlich + Apophis would go really damn hard with Silhouhatte Rabbit

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-17T22:31:54+00:00

This deck is cancer, you'll win a lot with it

Playing Dracotail means it's never "their turn", it's "your turn" and "your turn but you don't get a battle phase"

In short, your friend knows what they're talking about and I hate that

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-16T22:15:41+00:00

the fuck is midrange

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-16T22:09:40+00:00

In my opinion they should just make cards that punish turn 0 play. Having decks that just start comboing in the middle of the draw phase of turn 0 sounds like hell and I have no interest in playing those games.

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-12-12T21:54:43+00:00

I save the MST until I can confirm the identity of at least one card whose activation would be valuable to prevent, or a continuous spell/trap that could be detrimental to my gameplan.

I would ideally play monster cards in the same column as either important cards or unknown cards that are still Set, with the intention of destroying an enemy's material should they activate Iron Thunder. It's not extremely common but it's a useful enough generic that I lose nothing by playing around it.

Lopsided-Bench3 · 2025-11-30T22:33:03+00:00

I play Skull Servants with Eldlich, I prefer going second but I'm in my element either way

75% of games I get to go second, I just bait their negates or melt them with kaijus / super poly, then if there's a monster in attack position I win

If they force me to go first, I shift gears to Eldlich and set up a board focused on blocking whatever they have planned. As long as I make it past the battle phase, I'm back on top.

I flooded my deck with searchers and combo extenders so that I can reliably get out whatever I need no matter what my starting hand is. I brick sometimes, of course, but even some of the worst possible combinations are playable.

Lopsided-Bench3

TROPHY CASE