this banlist was insane if KT is able to do ANYTHING in this format lmao

i’m just stating facts liberal

the lock city version of yugioh where i can only stick to the exact shit right in front of me all the time

yeah to me the fun part of yugioh is finding a line nobody can imagine. the best players from my locals described my play style as making a bunch of shitty plays and then suddenly finding a brilliant move that recontextualizes everything and i don’t think id be able to do that in

then i add the fiendsmith cards and now we got some yugioh going. imagine if i couldn’t link summon even with ice ryzeal effect this sick deck wouldn’t exist. fuck locks bro

and every hand was the exact same because Sword Ice and Ext led to relatively similar end boards. add in the bonfires and the desires and it’s like sure ok i guess im playing kashtira

i hated pure ryzeal which was exactly this. i could add consistency and all that but overall the deck felt like shit before seventh tachyon and mitsurugi cards it was cool i could occasionally shifter and do rank 4 toolbox things but like overall deck had no grind game

the synergy these days has to be that every starter has to get me into everything absolutely all the time and it makes it feel like every hand is to be played the exact same way and this is something annoying about totally locked archetypal decks too

and then the rest of the starters are super variable like having a hand that opens ext and engraver and so you have to normal ext then go into fiendsmith combo

i like it when decks are able to have synergy because they lack locks or the locks are weak enough to include synergy but bridges are kept to a few strong starters such as when bonfire and ice ryzeal were the 6 best starters but also played into droll and required a normal summon

you don’t have to think much when you play yugioh, can play through more hand traps, and always end on the same shit. i loved ryzeal fiendsmith where every hand mattered and had to be played differently because sometimes i have 0 fiendsmith access sometimes i have 0 ryzeal access

basically the larger problem of these big decks is not actually the lack of locks but starters all having the same quality. there’s been ups and downs over time but like having bridges such that you can play several 1 card starters that also act as extenders makes it so that

always bridge into the other half making it weaker starters so that the deck wasn’t explosive all the time. i think having archetypal locks and the like prevent this type of synergy when they could instead focus on giving variable quality

the way the deck worked specifically the locks basically were not locks that actually prevented archetype synergy and there have been many ryzeal piles. i played a whole mitsu ryzeal fiendsmith pile at one point for example. but what made it good is that fiendsmith didn’t

ryzeal fiendsmith is one of my all time favorite decks. that deck had a single 1 way bridge from ryzeal into fiendsmith but only had 6 cards to do that. so you usually wanted to hard draw a mixture of fiendsmith and ryzeal cards. i can grant that ryzeal had its locks but

but that wasn’t cuz of lack of locks it was cuz of bridges. go burn the bridges. lack of locks and bridges promotes multi card combo and synergy rather than every card being an equal starter

for piles more generally, they usually don’t get to be as good because they’re usually go first glass cannon combos but that deck in particular was what was notable and even then it used all that synergy and game actions to do like 1/4th snake the fiendsmith full combo board

that was never the problem with rolad pile. boards are not that hard to beat with a couple of breakers together. the problem is that in a meta with hand traps the deck with all that gas was both good into hand traps and into boards as it combined a strong main and extra deck

you can always rent me because i’m broke i need the money

yeah and who cares? they’re rarely that crazy outside of some youtube combos but of course i mentioned rolad pile because it is legitimately one of the only great 3+ archetype piles. if you consider a 2 archetype deck a pile then idk what to tell you