Summary
TheYu-Gi-Oh!Anime will lie to your face time and time again. The first season had plenty of rules that were implemented simply because the official rules hadn’t been figured out yet. During the Battle City arc, everything from tributing monsters to having them use specific abilities lines up with the way the real card game works.
So, which are the biggest lies in the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime? While most lies are reserved for that first season of the Duel Monsters era, the biggest lie might surprise you. From fake rules to tonal whiplash, here are ten times the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime lied to you.
10Monster Types Have Pokemon Style Advantages
Thunder Can Beat Wet Moths
One of the silliest rules only exists in the anime to create tension between specific types of monsters. This is that monster types have natural advantages against each other. In some duels, earth monsters can’t touch flying monsters. In other duels, dinosaur monsters are weak against fire.
Monster-type advantages are the show’s attempts to be a bit more like Pokemon. While this rule didn’t move past the first season, it didn’t stop young players from enforcing this rule on the playground, making it a surprise when they didn’t exist in competitive Yu-Gi-Oh!
9Mirror Force Can Damage Your Opponent
It Works Like A Mirror
There are plenty of cards that can send damage back to your opponent, which can be a great way to protect yourself during the old days of Yu-Gi-Oh! The most iconic of these is Magic Cylinder, but in the anime, another card has that same effect.
During the first season of the anime, Yugi uses Mirror Force against Weevil Underwood and, surprisingly, it deals the damage right back to the bug duelist. Mirror Force destroys all your opponent’s monsters when they try to attack. However, that doesn’t deal any burn damage to your opponent.
8Polymerization Does Not Work That Way
Fuse Anything, Even Spells
Polymerization and Fusion have some of the most misinterpreted rules in the anime. For starters, not every monster can fuse together, and slapping two cards on top of each other does not make a brand-new monster with a combined attack.
The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime made fusion seem easy with monsters such as Red-Eyes Skull Dragon and Gaia the Dragon Champion, looking like the combination of both monsters used to make it. Furthermore, the anime told viewers that fusing spells and monsters was possible during Yugi’s secondduel with his rival, Kaiba.
7Blue Eyes White Dragon Is A Rare And Powerful Card
A Two Tribute Vanilla Beatstick
The first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! establishes that Blue Eyes White Dragon is the rarest card in the world, with only four copies made. This drives Kaiba to hunt down their original owners to add their copies to his collection. The only rule that is followed is that you can only have three copies in your deck, leading to him ripping Solomon’s copy.
Little did players know that Blue Eyes is actually not that rare with everyKaiba starter deckhaving one. It also isn’t as powerful as it looks, with it requiring two tributes to summon for a vanilla beat stick. It also isn’t that difficult to get rid of with spells or traps.
No Prizes Here
One of the fundamental themes of the original Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is that friendship conquers all and that you must duel for the sake of others. So what if you want to win for the sake of becoming the best or getting a taste of that prize money?
If this sounds like you, then you are a bad person according to Yugi standards. However, the biggest lie is the prizing. Winning a tournament could get you a Nintendo Switch and a playmat. If you’re looking for riches at the end of the rainbow,try Pokemon.
5Time Wizard’s Shenanigans
Turning Your Opponent Old
Time Wizard has plenty of unique abilities that are only ever seen in the anime. First off, the entire gimmick revolves around spinning a wheel to determine what happens next while the official card has you flipping a coin.
Getting a good spin means your opponent’s monsters will age terribly while your own monster will become more powerful. This is what happens with Baby Dragon, who becomes Thousand Dragon. It also allows Dark Magician to become Dark Sage because he spends those thousand years studying magic.
4How Castle Of Dark Illusions Works
It Can’t Hide Your Monsters
The Duel with Panik is one of the highest-stakes duels in the first season of Yu-Gi-Oh! Not only does Yugi get electrocuted each time he takes damage in the game, but trying to escape results in getting torched by a flamethrower.
The Castle of Dark Illusions makes things even worse by hiding Panik’s monsters behind a veil of shadows. This isn’t actually what The Castle of Dark Illusions does. Also, there is no such thing as a floatation ring that keeps it suspended in the air.
3Decks That Don’t Belong To You Won’t Win
The Decks Are Alive
Like the previous rule about only those with noble intentions having the right to win a children’s trading card game, decks that don’t belong to you also can’t win. This is stated as a fact when Mokuba steals a competitor’s deck to get revenge on Yugi.
Because the cards don’t belong to him, the monsters become weak and apparently won’t work as well because they aren’t loyal to him. Looks like lending your cards to a friend is not a viable thing to do in the anime world.
2Great Moth Levels Up Automatically
The Most Difficult Monster To Summon
There are plenty of monsters that level up naturally. Great Moth is not one of those cards. It requires a convoluted setup of equipping Petite Moth with Cocoon of Evolution, then waiting six full turns before becoming Ultimately Great Moth.
The catch here is that Yugi destroys the cocoon before Weevil can bring out his Moth card. Instead, it is forced to hatch early. This should not be possible since the cocoon was destroyed before a monster was played. Weevil needs to have had it in hand and would not be able to use it during Yugi’s turn.
1Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Will Be Chill
Nothing Will Go Wrong, Right?
By the time Yu-Gi-Oh! Ends and moves on to its next series, the game has been drastically changed to the point where everything makes sense. However, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX houses the greatest lie in the anime’s history.
At the start of every episode, the intro promises you that the show is all about chilling out and never working too hard. Yet GX has some of the highest stakes. The school is invaded by ghosts, zombies, evil tycoons, and even eldritch beings. This results in Jaden losing his positive attitude, becoming depressed, and requiring a trip to the past to help him recover his joy for dueling.
