- Introduction
- First 27 archetypes on the list
- (Dis)honorable mentions
- Last 3 archetypes on the list
Introduction
Now that the January 2024 TCG banlist has been revealed, I decided to make a list of at least 30 archetypes I consider the most poorly designed so far.
This list was inspired by:
- Futuregamer's TCG Archetype Design, from Terrible to Great blog post
- TheDuelLogs's Failed Cards and Mechanics series
- as well as Dzeeff's Why Nobody Plays... series
For an archetype to have a chance at being included on this list, it must be listed here https://www.yugiohcardguide.com/yugioh-archetypes.html, must not contain too few or too many cards, and must have at least 2 horribly designed cards. I decided to allow about 2 exceptions to these rules, but only for the (dis)honorable mentions section.
Also, whether or not an archetype is poorly designed isn't based on how competitively viable it is. Competitive viability does play a small role in how well designed an archetype is, but most of the time it's not gonna be the deciding factor. Many archetypes exist that are decently designed, or at least not horribly designed, despite not being meta relevant. Likewise, an archetype being meta doesn't automatically make it poorly designed.
The (dis)honorable mentions are archetypes that part of me really wanted to include, while the other part of me really didn't want to include. These are archetypes where I just couldn't make up my mind as to whether I'd include them or not.
With this list, I hope to give custom card makers a better idea how not to design an archetype.
First 27 archetypes on the list
30. Armed Dragon
The first members of this archetype were a level 3 that required you to put it on the field then wait until your next standby phase to use its mediocre effect, along with 3 super bricky monsters in the form of Armed Dragons LV5, LV7, and LV10.
In 2008, Konami introduced a new powerful member of this archetype in the form of Dark Armed Dragon which... didn't actually support the archetype since the card requires dark monsters while the archetype was wind.
In 2009, Konami introduced another member to the archetype that, once again, didn't actually support it: Hardened Armed Dragon, a monster that granted basic protection to any level 7 and above monster that tributed it for a summon, even though the level 7 and above Armed Dragons had a restriction saying they couldn't be normal summoned. No one bothered playing this in Armed Dragon decks.
It took Konami 5 years to realize their cock-up, and in 2014 they finally fixed that by giving Armed Dragons a level 7 that could be normal summoned, allowing them to finally take advantage of that protection Harden Armed Dragon offered.
Too bad this level 7 was a mere... vanilla. https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Metaphys_Armed_Dragon
To make matters worse, Hardened Armed Dragon decided in April of 2017 that it didn't want to be part of this dumb little archetype anymore. So it went and got itself a "not treated as an "Armed Dragon" card" errata, even though, again, no Armed Dragon player was ever running it.
Then in 2018, as if things couldn't get even more ridiculous, Konami gave Armed Dragons a fusion monster! https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Armed_Dragon_Catapult_Cannon
What's ridiculous isn't that they wanted to give the archetype a fusion but rather the materials and summoning condition they decided to require for it. You would think they'd make this fusion monster not too hard to summon, and that its materials would be something basic, like, I don't know...
1 Armed Dragon monster plus 2... uhhh... Wind-Attribute Dragon-Type monsters or something, right?
Well, when we look at this fusion, we see that one of its needed materials is Armed Dragon LV7.
Okay, fine. That's not so bad... I guess? What about the other material required...
VWXYZ-Dragon Catapult Cannon??? What kind of sick joke is this?
Konami really wanted us to combine Armed Dragons, an already very bricky and slow archetype, with the very bricky and slow VWXYZ cards, all to make these decks even brickier than they already were.
Also it wasn't like you could cheat this fusion out by substituting Beastking of the Swamps or something for one of the materials, or by filling the graveyard with the materials with an effect like Extra-Foolish Burial. You first have to actually summon both its materials successfully.
So this archetype continues to remain unplayable, and in 2021, Konami I guess got their act together and gave Armed Dragon 2 new good cards in the form of Armed Dragon Flash and Armed Dragon Thunder LV7. Flash was great because you could now not only search Armed Dragon LV3 but immediately access its effect to bring out Armed Dragon LV5 without having to wait a turn, while Armed Dragon Thunder LV7 was nice since it treated itself as Armed Dragon LV7 on the field and graveyard. Not to mention the ruling where special summoning it counts as successfully summoning Armed Dragon LV7, meaning Armed Dragon Thunder LV7 could help fulfill that fusion monster's summoning requirement and be banished for that monster's eventual summon without needing the original Armed Dragon LV7.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Armed Dragon support turned out to be garbage, too bricky, or both, with the archetype now having to rely on crashing Ojama Blue in the battle phase in order to access the cards needed to get that fusion out. I'm especially disappointed in Armed Dragon LV10 White. That should've been able to also banish from the hand for its summon instead of only from the field and graveyard.
All the Armed Dragon archetype's level 10 monsters are win-more cards at best, where if you reach a point where you're able to bring any of them out, you're most likely already in a completely winning position. That's the worst part about this archetype, and the main reason it ended up making this list. This archetype isn't just garbage. It's forced to stay garbage. Being able to quick effect banish entire fields and graveyards on a whim, while also locking opponents out of any effects sharing any banish card name, is stupidly and enormously overpowered for a fusion monster. So to balance it out, said monster must remain stupidly and enormously difficult to summon. If Konami releases any further support that makes it easier to summon, Armed Dragons will become toxic and degenerate to the point where the archetype will have to get hit hard on the banlist. You'll see several other archetypes on this list also following this same pattern.
I won't bother commenting on the rest of the useless garbage, that Konami released in an attempt to further support this archetype such as Armed Neos, Pile Armed Dragon, and Armed Dragon, the Armored Dragon.
29. Jinzo
To be clear, I'm talking about Jinzo as an archetype, not the level 6 Jinzo monster itself: https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Jinzo
The Jinzo monster was great. It saw tons of competitive play in early yugioh. The problem, however, is the "support" Konami released in order to try and make Jinzo into an archetype. I don't know where Konami was trying to go with this. Literally all the Jinzo support cards are utter garbage. It was, and still is, far better to just splash the Jinzo monster into various decks, or have it as a side deck option or something, as opposed to trying to build and pilot a "Jinzo deck".
Jinzo #7 has an effect that lets it attack directly and nothing else. Freaking Wattgiraffe has the same effect while having not only more than twice the ATK but also an effect locking opponents out of activations for the turn.
In 2008, Konami gave us Jinzo - Lord and Jinzo - Returner. Returner was another worse Wattgiraffe, while Lord's effect made no sense. Lord can only be summoned from the hand, and to do so, you need to send a face-up Jinzo you control to the graveyard. Also, like Jinzo, Lord has the same effect shutting down traps.
Lord wasn't worth summoning at all. It was always better to just get regular old Jinzo out and use that for stopping traps. There was no good reason to ever sacrifice a perfectly good Jinzo, and go -1 in card advantage, all for another monster whose effect did the exact same thing. It didn't help that Lord required Jinzo itself and couldn't use at least any of the other monsters with Jinzo in their name.
Jinzo - Jector came out in 2015, and would've been amazing if were a spell card, or at least didn't eat up your normal summon. Jinzo the Machine Menace, along with a rank 6 in the form of Jinzo - Layered, came out in 2020. Menace requires a trap already on the field or graveyard, which makes no sense since you yourself wouldn't really play traps in a Jinzo deck due to Jinzo's effect conflicting with traps. So you'd likely rely on the opponent running traps, and even then, Menace also requires Jinzo in the hand or graveyard to summon itself, further hurting consistency, while Layered had absolutely no synergy with the archetype and didn't share any of Jinzo's negation capabilities.
The archetype also received several spells, with one of them being Amplifier, but playing Amplifier is extremely risky due to its abnormally high potential to cause infinite loops that would lead to Amplifier being ruled as the main cause of them and then destroyed by game mechanics. The rest of the spells were either too weak or too restrictive, with Law of the Cosmos being both. That spell should've let the player choose whether to add or special summon, whether or not the opponent agreed to set a trap.
Konami also released Psychic Bounder and Psychic Megacyber to support the archetype but didn't bother making these part of the Jinzo archetype. So they're unsearchable by Jector, while Megacyber's excessive restrictions ruined any remaining potential synergy it might've had with the archetype, as it relied on the opponent controlling more spells/traps for its first effect, and on having Jinzo already present on the field for its second. Not to mention neither of those effects were anywhere near powerful enough to warrant them being hard once per turn.
28. Chrysalis
This is an archetype of level 2s that can tribute themselves to summon Neo-Spacians straight from the hand or deck. This would be great... if only it didn't require that stupid useless field spell that doesn't even in any way synergize with or support Chrysalis! Nothing else to say about Chrysalis, so, moving on...
27. ZW -
ZW is short for Zexal Weapon. This archetype focuses on equipping to specific Utopia xyz monsters in order to grant powerful bonuses. The first glaring problem is the stupid "highlander clause" on all the archetype's main deck cards. Highlander Clause is an unofficial term that refers to a effect restricting a player from controlling more than 1 copy of, or refers to an effect restricting the field from having more than 1 copy of, a specific card or archetype of card. Highlander clauses are okay if and only if the cards in question are powerful enough to warrant them, like in the case of Kaijus. This isn't the case with ZW. Literally the only powerful card in the archetype is ZW - Pegasus Twin Saber, with everything else being mediocre or garbage. Several of the archetype's cards including said Pegasus even want stupid annoying conditions to be fulfilled such as having far fewer life points than the opponent, even though neither the "ZW -" nor Utopia archetypes have any reliable way of getting your life points low enough to meet that condition.
All the archetype's spells also have restrictions that are completely unwarranted, excessive, or both.
- Zexal Entrust and Zexal Catapult each needed both a hard once per turn restriction, and an "except the turn this card was sent to the GY" restriction, on their graveyard effects for some reason
- Shining Draw required a hard draw in the draw phase, and reveal in hand, to be used. It also could only equip from the deck and extra deck, when it should've be able to also equip from among the field and graveyard
- Rank-Up-Magic Zexal Force should've made it optional to put a monster on top of the deck after resolving it, not mandatory. It also should've let you choose a monster from between the deck and graveyard to put on top of the deck, instead of just from the deck
- Similarly, Zexal Construction should've made it optional to shuffle back the card it reveals, not mandatory. Alternatively, if it was going to include that mandatory shuffling of the revealed card, it should've given the option of drawing a new card afterwards. Better yet, it should've worked like Onomatopaira where you can choose 2 of its listed categories and add up to 1 card from each, while shuffling back the revealed card
26. Abyss Actor
It wasn't really 1 or 2 issues with this archetype that led to it making this list but rather a combination of several different issues that, for years, ruined the archetype and its cards' ability to synergize with each other.
Prior to 2023's Photon Hypernova, the archetype struggled like crazy to pendulum summon due to its pendulum scales and levels being all over the place with no reliable way to adjust them. The archetype's pendulum scales include 9, 8, 7, 3, 2, 1, and 0, while its levels include 8, 7, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Also, only 1 of the archetype's monsters has a pendulum scale of 9 while only 1 of them has a pendulum scale of 0, so you can't even try to run only scale 0s and scale 9s in order to maximize consistency, and even though the archetype had Abyss Actor - Wild Hope which can change a pendulum scale to 9, that wasn't even close to being enough. Yet despite the archetype having such difficulty pendulum summoning, some of their pendulum effects were still given xeno-locks, such as their scale 9 Abyss Actor - Twinkle Little Star preventing pendulum summoning of monsters not part of the archetype even though cards like Kuro-Obi Karate Spirit and Kai-Den Kendo Spirit proved that such restrictions on scale 9s are no longer necessary.
Some of the archetype's cards, such as Abyss Actor - Mellow Madonna, instead had an even worse restriction that locked them into the pendulum monsters specifically, cutting off access to the archetype's non-pendulums such as its link monsters, while the archetype's monsters also lacked any sort of common mechanic to help keep it together.
So because of the archetype's weakness, inconsistency, sluggishness, and lack of synergy due to its horrible pendulum scales, excessive restrictions, and lack of a decent common mechanic, Konami had to give Abyss Actor ridiculous consistency boosters and searchers out of Photon Hypernova, and this is on top of the ridiculous consistency boosters and searchers they already had prior. As a result, Abyss Actor now has a whopping 14 easily accessible search / draw cards:
- Abyss Actor - Extras
- Abyss Actor - Hyper Director
- Abyss Actor - Liberty Dramatist
- Abyss Actor - Mellow Madonna
- Abyss Actor - Super Producer
- Abyss Actor - Superstar
- Abyss Actor - Wild Hope
- Abyss Actors' Dress Rehearsal
- Abyss Playhouse - Fantastic Theater
- Abyss Script - Abysstainment
- Abyss Script - Dramatic Story
- Abyss Script - Opening Ceremony
- Abyss Script - Rise of the Abyss King
- Abyss Script - Romantic Terror
25. Malefic
Konami indirectly admitted they went overboard with this archetype's restrictions once they showed us Malefic Territory, a continuous spell that temporarily removes some of said restrictions. They could've just, you know, errata'd the Malefic monsters themselves to remove said restriction so they wouldn't have to rely on this unsearchable continuous spell for that, on top of the archetype still having to rely on a field spell being present. Better yet, they could've just not had such a stupid restriction on those cards to begin with.
Seriously, they should have had no such restriction! Nothing else to say about this archetype.
24. Cloudian
This archetype relies too heavily on generating Fog counters off of normal summons despite having no means of performing multiple normal summons in a turn to generate those counters. Other normal summon-dependent archetypes like Floowandereeze, True Draco, and Monarch all have reliable ways to normal summon multiple times a turn. Also, Cloudian wants to place counters on opponents' cards too, making the archetype even harder to play when you place those counters on opponents' cards when said opponents are trying to place their own counters on those cards same. Keeping track of which counters are which becomes a nightmare outside of automatic simulators such as EDOpro.
The archetype got some spell and trap cards meant to help speed up the production of Fog counters, but they are either too slow in the case of Raging Cloudian, or require you to go -2 in card advantage in the case of Fog Control and Cloudian Aerosol.
23. Naturia
Naturia has way too many easily accessible in-archetype negations and floodgates with none of them being once per turn or anything, including monsters that lock out spells, traps, and both. They focus too much on floodgating and restricting opponents in order to be as uninteractive and annoying as they can. Naturia Exterio was also one of the main cards players were summoning off of Cyber-Stein, which greatly contributed to that card's ban on the June 2023 banlist.
22. PSY-Frame
Like Naturia, this archetype also focuses on heavily discouraging healthy interaction in order to instead be as annoying as it can. Unlike Naturia, however, this archetype relies heavily — too heavily in fact — on specific opponent plays in order to be able to start making plays itself. None of the archetype's monsters can be summoned on their own without the opponent making the first move, and that move must correspond with the PSY-Framegear in hand during that moment, meaning you can't do anything when your opponent's relying heavily on monster effects while your hand lacks PSY-Framegear Gamma, relying heavily on spells while your hand lacks PSY-Framegear Delta, or relying heavily on traps while your hand lacks PSY-Framegear Epsilon. This meant opponents could simply bide their time, setting cards while drawing new ones each draw phase until they've amassed enough cards to start overwhelming you. Players had to rely on dumb stuff like Wind-Up Rabbit and Cardcar D just to be able to pressure opponents into making a move they can respond to.
The archetype also severely hurt itself with its excessive mandatory banishing of its own cards despite having no reliable or consistent way of recovering them once banished, meaning you'll run out of PSY-Frame Drivers very quickly despite the archetype's extreme reliance on that card. Konami did try to give us 3 more copies of it in the form of PSY-Frame Multi-Threader, but that card sucked since it needed to already be in the hand or graveyard in order for the PSY-Framegears to be able to use it, since it isn't treated as PSY-Frame Driver in the deck. This makes PSY-Frame Multi-Threader an even worse brick in PSY-Frames than the actual PSY-Frame Driver itself.
PSY-Framelord Omega and PSY-Framegear Gamma ended up being far more powerful in other decks than in PSY-Frame, resulting in them getting limited on the September 2018 and June 2023 banlists respectively.
Also, like the Malefic archetype, Konami tried to give PSY-Frames a card whose sole purpose was to reverse one of the archetype's main restrictions, even though that restriction at that point should've just been errata'd away entirely. What's even stupider is, the restriction PSY-Framelord Lambda was intended to reverse was the wrong one. PSY-Framegears didn't need to be granted the ability to "activate monster effects even if they control a monster". What they needed was to no longer automatically banish their precious PSY-Framegears and copies of PSY-Frame Driver in the end phase, or to simply send them to the graveyard instead of banishing them. Then other PSY-Framegears would get to access that copy of PSY-Frame Driver for their effects as well.
21. Venom
By "Venom," I'm referring to the Reptile-Type ones and their spell and trap cards, not the Dragon-Type "Starving Venom" sub-archetype.
What's there to say about the Venom archetype? The monsters are utter garbage, their field spell is utter garbage, their traps are utter garbage, the Venom Counter mechanic itself is utter garbage, Vennominon the King of Poisonous Snakes is utter garbage, and the archetype's best card is Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes that's forced to remain atrociously difficult to summon because of its excessive built-in immunities, ability to reach several thousand ATK with ease, self-revival it can use almost as many times as it wants, and alternate victory condition that ended up not being too hard to achieve thanks to its aforementioned safety from most attacks and effects.
For this archetype to be better, the Venom Counter mechanic should've been much stronger. Venom Swamp's effect should've been:
If this card is activated: You can add up to 1 of your "Venom" monsters each that are in your Deck, GY, and banished to your hand. During each End Phase: Put 1 Venom Counter on each face-up monster that is neither a "Venom" monster nor a "Vennomin" monster. The ATK of monsters with Venom Counters become 0. The effects of monsters with 2 or more Venom Counters are negated. Destroy any card with 3 or more Venom Counters, also if there are 6 or more Venom Counters on your opponent's field, you win the Duel.
Also, Venom Snake's effect should've been a quick effect in order to compensate for the fact that it can't attack the turn its effect is used.
Finally, Venom Boa, Venom Snake, and Venom Serpent should've also had these set of continuous effects:
The ATK of opponent's monsters with Venom Counters become 0. The effects of opponent's monsters with 2 or more Venom Counters are negated. Destroy any monster with 3 or more Venom Counters.
20. Alien
Like with Venom and Cloudian, placing counters on specifically opponents' cards proved to be a bad common mechanic for this archetype. Also, Konami decided and ruled that the Alien archetype's effect, that reduces a monster's ATK and DEF by 300 for each of said monster's A-Counters, only applies while there's an Alien monster present with that specific effect, meaning this ATK and DEF reduction is not an inherent ability of A-Counters. This means if a monster with an A-Counter battles an Alien monster, but no monsters on the field have that effect making those counter-wielding monsters lose ATK and DEF, then no ATK or DEF will be lost during that damage calculation. This is different from cards like Number 2: Ninja Shadow Mosquito and Ninjitsu Art of Mosquito Marching which will continue to negate Hallucination Counter-wielding monsters' effects even when those 2 Mosquito cards are no longer face-up on the field.
The archetype's monsters would've been better off not having to remove any A-Counters to activate their effects.
19. Infernoid
This is an archetype of monsters that can't be normal summoned and must instead be special summoned by banishing other Infernoids, with the high level Infernoids being able to special summon from the hand or graveyard, the rest being summonable only from the hand, and Infernoid Decatron being the archetype's only normal summonable monster.
With no reliable in-archetype means of getting any significant number of Infernoids out of the deck and into the hand or graveyard in order to fuel the Infernoids' summoning requirement, players had to rely on That Grass Looks Greener, Left Arm Offering (for searching out said Grass), Reasoning, and Monster Gate, until Grass got banned on our May 2018 banlist, leaving players with just 3 of those 4 cards.
This was a massive problem because, when building an Infernoid deck, you usually run 2 to 3 copies of every main deck Infernoid monster while maxing out on Void Vanishment, Void Imagination, Void Feast, Left Arm Offering, Reasoning, and Monster Gate. Maxing out on main deck Infernoids maximizes your chances of milling a large number of them off of Reasoning or Monster Gate before you reach Decatron and then have to stop. Infernoids also want to run other cards to help with consistency such as Pot of Prosperity and One for One. This means your main deck size is gonna be well over 40 cards, if not 50, even though it'll then be harder to see your Left Arm Offerings, Reasoning, Void Imaginations, and Monster Gate as often as possible, especially with Reasoning and Monster Gate having been limited on the April 2016 and February 2022 banlists respectively.
In November 2023, Konami gave the OCG a level 1 Infernoid fusion who can not only mill 10 Infernoids into the graveyard by banishing a single copy of Infernoid Onuncu from it, but also search any Void spell/trap upon being either sent there or banished itself. In that same set, Infernoids also received a spell with a once-per-duel effect that could return up to 11 banished Infernoids to the graveyard. These two cards single-handedly made Infernoids able to compete in the OCG's meta, but have now made Infernoids a cheesy glass cannon deck that very easily wins if it resolves this level 1 fusion's mass milling effect or gets super lucky with either Reasoning or Monster Gate, and very easily loses if it doesn't.
As of January 2024, we in the TCG have no information on if or when we'll get these Infernoid cards, but even if we do, they're not as likely to make Infernoids competitively viable since Grass is still banned here, while it was merely semi-limited on the OCG's October 2018 banlist.
18. Dark Magician
From what I've heard, the Dark Magician archetype was at least a rogue contender at some points in the game's history, but this was only because of crazy powerful tech cards like Predaplant Verte Anaconda (for turboing out Red-Eyes Dark Dragoon) and Mystic Mine (for slowing all the meta decks down to Dark Magician's speed) which were banned on the May 2022 and December 2022 banlists respectively. Other than that, every card in the Dark Magician archetype except a select few is either too slow, too bricky, too situational, or all of these, with the other major issue being the archetype wanting the bricky Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl in too many different places at once. Stuff like Bond Between Teacher and Student wanted Dark Magician on the field and wouldn't allow it to be anywhere else, Magician of Dark Illusion wanted Dark Magician in the graveyard and wouldn't allow it to be anywhere else, Magician Navigation wanted Dark Magician in the hand and wouldn't allow it to be anywhere else, while Dark Magic Curtain wanted Dark Magician in the deck and wouldn't allow it to be anywhere else.
Having your archetype revolve around not 1 but 2 bricky high level cards is bad enough, but the archetype's lack of location flexibility destroyed any remaining hope it had of being competitively viable.
Location flexibility is a term used in the workforce to describe an employee being able to choose and alternate between multiple locations to work from, such as working from either home or in a designated corporate office building of some sort. I like to use this term in yugioh to refer to how much an archetype that relies on some very specific card allows that card to exist in one of multiple locations, versus how picky that archetype is about where that specific card must be. For example, Palladium Oracle Mana is a highly location-flexible card, as its first effect can trigger from either the hand or graveyard, while its second effect can bring Dark Magician Girl out from either the hand, deck, or graveyard, making Palladium Oracle Mana not picky about where itself or Dark Magician Girl must be. The Dark Magician archetype needs more location-flexible cards like this. If an archetype's gonna be slow, and heavily reliant on a specific and super bricky card, said archetype can't afford to then be so picky and inconsistent about where that card must be.
17. Blue-Eyes
Blue-Eyes suffers the same problems as the Dark Magician archetype. It relies on a bricky vanilla yet is too picky and inconsistent about where said vanilla must be. Blue-Eyes however did see far more competitive play, especially in 2016 when the vast majority of players were playing decks that were either graveyard-reliant, pendulum-reliant, or both, making Blue-Eyes, or rather Blue-Eyes Spirit Dragon specifically, an amazing counter to these decks.
16. Mecha Phantom Beast
This archetype's gimmick is generating level 3 tokens in order to fuel various effects, with several of the main deck monsters themselves increasing their own levels by the combined levels of these tokens. This gimmick itself wasn't the issue but rather how it did an awful job synergizing with the archetype as a whole. The archetype also had a rank 7 yet still had several of its main deck members be level 3 and below. This meant Mecha Phantom Beast Kalgriffin and the level 4s were the only main deck members that could end up being used to make that rank 7, as the level 4s would increase their levels up to 7 with the presence of a token, while the level 3s on the other hand would only increase their levels to 6 with the presence of a token and would overshoot level 7 to go to level 9 with the presence of an additional token. The level 2 Mecha Phantom Beast O-Lion had no level-increasing effect, while the level 1 Mecha Phantom Beast Warbluran did but could only increase it by 1.
The levels 3 and below should've been level 4, while the level 9 Mecha Phantom Beast Jaculuslan synchro should've been a level 10 or 13. That way, a level 4 Mecha Phantom Beast tuner along with 1 or 2 tokens could make this, as the level 4 would become level 7 with one token, making 7 + 3 = level 10, or, the level 4 would become level 10 with two tokens, making 10 + 3 = level 13. Instead, the archetype was given awkward and nonsensical levels, severely damaging the synergy its cards might've had. It also didn't help that the archetype's spell and trap cards were pure garbage.
In a last ditch effort to fix this clunky cocked-up mess of an archetype, Konami gave the archetype the link monster Mecha Phantom Beast Auroradon, a link monster that the archetype itself couldn't even reliably bring out since the archetype struggled way too much to get 3 monsters out. So this link monster ended up banned on the May 2022 banlist due to excessive abuse in other archetypes and synergizing too well with Deskbot 001.
15. Zefra
This archetype went overboard with its negate-proof restrictions, and its cards have little to no synergy. It wants to make use of the ritual, fusion, synchro, xyz, and pendulum mechanics all at once yet lacks the means to reliably or consistently make use of at least 2 of them. Its synergy is also further ruined by their pendulum effects' restrictions conflicting with each other, resulting in them locking themselves out of each other's corresponding monsters. If you have, for example, Satellarknight Zefrathuban and Shaddoll Zefracore in your pendulum zones, Zefrathuban will lock you out of Shaddolls while Zefracore will lock you out of Tellarknights. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to incorporate consistency cards like Satellarknight Deneb, even though Tellarknights and Shaddolls are, lore-wise, supposed to be part of the same "alliance".
Zefra Metaltron is a garbage link monster. Requiring all 2+ materials to have been summoned from the extra deck turned out to be too strict for a summoning requirement. This summoning requirement is better for a link-4 such as Mekk-Knight Crusadia Avramax, because at least then, I can freely turn 4 monsters summoned from the hand, deck, or graveyard into 2+ monsters summoned from the extra deck by simply linking 2 of each of them off for link-2s.
Zefraath desperately needs an errata so its monster effect can function again. It tributes all monsters to special summon from the extra deck, but when you tribute away all of them including your link monsters, Zefraath will have to go to the extra monster zone, meaning it then can't even use its effect to give you an extra pendulum summon since that one and only available zone you could pendulum summon to is now taken up by Zefraath itself.
14. Arcana Force
Aside from maybe Arcana Force XXI - The World, every member of this archetype could get an errata that lets the player always manually choose which of their 2 effects to apply, and the archetype would still be utter garbage. Hell, that's exactly what happened with their Light Barrier field spell. That card let those monsters choose their effects without any coin toss and the archetype was still utter garbage. Arcana Force 0 - The Fool was the only Arcana Force card that saw some competitive play in early yugioh, and that was only because it had a bonus battle protection effect that didn't depend on any coin toss.
13. Harpie
I personally hated this archetype with a passion, and I still despise it more than the other poorly designed archetypes on this 30-archetype list. The Harpie archetype's got a 2000 ATK rank 4 with targeting protection (from both attacks and effects) and the ability to attack directly, a trap that can activate from the hand and completely shut down activated monster effects, 2 powerful backrow removal cards, a continuous spell letting them go +3 in card advantage, and the ability to spam level 7s for rank 7 plays, all of which were, when put together, too excessive at the time. Eventually we got more ways of dealing with target-immune monsters, thus weakening Harpie's Pet Phantasmal Dragon's power and influence. Also, decks became way, and I mean way, less dependent on backrow as the years went by, severely weakening Harpies' Hunting Ground's power and allowing Harpie's Feather Duster to finally get unbanned on the September 2020 banlist after being banned way back in 2004.
12. Assault Mode
The concept of using a trap card to "evolve" specific synchro monsters into more powerful versions is a cool and fun concept but was executed in an atrociously disastrous manner. First off, like the Dark Magician and Blue-Eyes archetypes, this archetype's main spell and trap cards lacked the location flexibility they desperately needed. The Assault Mode monsters themselves are complete bricks you never want to draw, because the archetype's main trap, Assault Mode Activate, requires those monsters to stay in the deck to special summon them, and has no option of letting you special summon them from the hand should you end up drawing them, meaning you had to either run 2 or 3 copies of the Assault Mode monster(s) you wanted to summon in order to maximize your chances of still having at least 1 of them in your deck by the time you were ready to play Assault Mode Activate, or run silly nonsense like Magical Mallet or Assault Teleport to try and get those bricks back in the deck where they belonged. Assault Teleport also desperately needed some location flexibility such as letting you choose from between the hand, field, graveyard, and face-up banished cards or something instead of only the hand, and it probably also needed to put said monster back on the bottom of the deck specifically, so you wouldn't have to worry about redrawing that same brick. Likewise, Assault Revival should've let you choose between the hand, field, and graveyard to banish from instead of letting you banish from only the graveyard, it should've been able to special summon any monster instead of only an Assault Mode monster, and Assault Slash's activation requirement should've let its required Assault Mode monster exist on the field, in the graveyard, or among the face-up banished cards, instead of only the field.
Konami didn't learn their lesson unfortunately, because in 2019 they made the same asinine decision, to give us Assault Mode Zero and Assault Reboot, again without any sort of location flexibility.
The second major problem with the archetype is about the Assault Mode monsters themselves. Their effects are meant to be much stronger versions of their synchro counterparts', but this is only the case with Stardust Dragon/Assault Mode. The rest of the Assault Mode monsters had either worse effects, or effects that were slightly better in one way but far worse in some other way.
- Arcanite Magician/Assault Mode shouldn't have needed more than 1 spell counter for its effect like the original Arcanite Magician. Alternatively, if it was going to require 2 spell counters, its effect should've been a quick effect
- Colossal Fighter/Assault Mode, the so-called upgrade of Colossal Fighter, turned out to be a completely worse version of it. Colossal Fighter could actually work with Armory Arm to create infinite damage combos, while its Assault Mode counterpart... merely milled a warrior or two from the deck while very slightly reducing monsters' ATK. I was hoping that, as an "upgrade" of Colossal Fighter, this Assault Mode monster would have the effect where if it's destroyed by any means, it could special summon a monster from either graveyard including itself, ignoring the summoning conditions. That way, Colossal Fighter would trigger only from battle destruction and wouldn't ignore summoning conditions, while this upgrade would get to trigger from either battle or effect destruction and would ignore summoning conditions
- Doomkaiser Dragon/Assault Mode should've been able to special summon any monster(s) regardless of Type
- Hyper Psychic Blaster/Assault Mode should've kept the ability to inflict piercing damage in addition to its effect, or maybe even had it upgraded to double piercing damage or something
- Red Dragon Archfiend/Assault Mode is also worse than its synchro counterpart, as its battle phase effect destroys also your monsters instead of only opponents'
- Assault Mode shouldn't have been given T.G. Halberd Cannon/Assault Mode. The Assault Mode archetype can't reliably or consistently bring out the tuner synchro and 2 non-tuner synchros needed to make the T.G. Halberd Cannon needed to make this. I suppose it can be sort of cheated out with Assault Reboot, but that still requires 4 specific cards minimum — the tuner and non-tuner for making one of the easier-to-make synchros, Assault Reboot, along with Assault Mode Activate. Plus, you'd also have to double the number of bricks you ran
Finally, something about Stardust Dragon/Assault Mode that pissed me off: It can technically be cheated out with A Wild Monster Appears, and, prior to 2019, it could use its on-field effect like normal then summon itself back in the end phase since it originally said:
This card cannot be Special Summoned except with its own effect or with "Assault Mode Activate".
However, in 2019, it got an errata changing that to "Must first be Special Summoned with "Assault Mode Activate" and cannot be Special Summoned by other ways except by its own effect."
This meant that combo no longer worked. It has to have first been properly summoned with Assault Mode Activate, or with one of those effects treating the summon as being done with Assault Mode Activate, before it could summon itself back from the graveyard. So despite the entire archetype being garbage already, Konami still felt the need to nerf it like this.
11. Red-Eyes
TheDuelLogs (one of the folks that inspired this list) already did a full video back in August 2023, explaining most of the Red-Eyes cards and their issues. The video's in his playlist I cited at the beginning of this thread, so I'll list a few more issues of my own with the archetype then move on:
- Black Dragon's Chick and Hundred Eyes Dragon used to have Red-Eyes in their names before they were errata'd out, even though there was no harm in letting them keep Red-Eyes in their names since the former directly supported Red-Eyes anyway, while the latter never had anyone even attempt to play it in Red-Eyes
- An archetype shouldn't have 2 different ritual monsters, with each of them having its own ritual spell that can't be used to also ritual summon the other
- The archetype had no level 6 Archfiend normal monster it could use for Archfiend Black Skull Dragon, meaning it had to incorporate the bricky Summoned Skull or Beast of Talwar since those were given erratas treating them always as Archfiend cards. Dragon should've required that material to just be a level 6 Archfiend without requiring it to also be a vanilla on top of that
10. Artifact
Every card in this archetype ended up being complete garbage aside from Artifact Scythe, Artifact Moralltach, Artifact Sanctum, Artifact Durendal, and Artifact Dagda — cards that were massively more useful in completely separate archetypes and abused as part of various engines. Being able to trigger this archetype's special summoning and on-summon effects only on the opponent's turn instead of either player's turn also severely hurt.
The archetype benefitted off of the opponent destroying its set cards, but then opponents simply stopped destroying them, or continued to destroy them but only on the Artifact player's turn so as to not trigger any effects. So the archetype had to incorporate plenty of traps and quick-play spells it could use on the opponent's turn to destroy them, but this only drastically increased the archetype's tendency to brick, as players would then often open with Artifacts but not enough spell/trap cards they could use to destroy them, or open with spell/trap cards but not enough Artifacts to set and destroy. Good old Stardust Dragon was a generic and decent counter to Artifacts, as it not only could keep negating destruction effects every turn, making it harder for Artifacts to destroy their own cards, but also had enough ATK to beat over every Artifact in battle.
The archetype also has no reliable or consistent way of generating card advantage and replenishing resources. Artifact Caduceus can draw a card for every Artifact summon while itself is in the monster zone, but this is too slow, especially since it also has a completely unnecessary Highlander clause so you can't even combine multiple of them for multiple draws per summon.
9. Knightmare
Really liked this archetype's original names "Troymare" and "Destroymare". Instead we got "Knightmare" which is lame.
All 6 of this archetype's link monsters saw extreme varying amounts of competitive play in numerous archetypes, with 2 of them, Knightmare Goblin and Knightmare Mermaid, being banned on the September 2018 and October 2019 banlists respectively, and another 2 of them, Knightmare Phoenix and Knightmare Unicorn, both being huge staples right up until S:P Little Knight came and powercrept them both out of the meta. Knightmare Gryphon got Curious, the Lightsworn Dominion banned, while even Knightmare Cerberus, the least powerful and impactful of the bunch, was abused in extra link combos in the early Link era.
8. Raidraptor
Waaaay too many super high ATK easy-to-summon "unaffected by card effect" boss monsters. Waaaay too many easily-accessible Rank-Up-Magic spells. Waaaay too many different ranks of xyz monsters (13, 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, and 3). No common mechanic to keep the archetype together, so to make up for this they end up with... waaaay to many +es and specials from the deck.
7. Qli
This archetype gave birth to the popular nickname "Towers," which refers to, according to Yugipedia:
A boss monster with unusually strong protection, traditionally one that is unaffected by at least one major category of effects. Named after "Apoqliphort Towers", a monster that is unaffected by most card effects.
The archetype became all about turboing out this Towers and dominated the hell out of the game. Qliphort Scout got limited on the November 2015 banlist, which was the first time since Exodia's limbs' limitation that a vanilla was hit on the banlist. Apoqliphort Towers itself was banned on that same list. Players had to tech in freaking Number 52: Diamond Crab King just for dealing with the Towers, as that xyz monster could change its own ATK to match Towers's without said ATK being re-lowered by Towers's ATK-lowering effect.
Towers and Scout got unbanned on the September 2018 and July 2019 banlists respectively after Master Rule 4 killed the archetype for good. The archetype couldn't make use of any of the link monsters to open up zones since its pendulum cards all have a negate-proof restriction locking them out of special summoning outside-archetype monsters. The archetype did get a link monster in the form of Qliphort Genius but it was too awful to help the archetype in any way, so the card ended up being abused infinitely more in other machine archetypes.
6. Gem-Knight
This archetype is super infamous for 3 things: degenerate FTKs, the Brilliant Fusion engine, as well as the nickname "Garnet," which refers to, according to Yugipedia:
A card that is crucial to a Deck's strategy, but can become less useful, or even useless, when drawn into. Named after "Gem-Knight Garnet", a commonly played card played as a one-off in the "Brilliant Fusion" engine, who, if drawn into, disables "Brilliant Fusion".
Limiting Gem-Knight Master Diamond (one of the main cards used in the FTKs) on the May 2018 banlist did nothing, as players would simply summon it, use its effect, then return it back to the extra deck with Knightmare Unicorn so they could summon it back a second time and access the effect again.
Limiting Brilliant Fusion on the January 2020 banlist also did nothing, as players could search it by using Predaplant Ophrys Scorpio (which itself was searchable off of Lonefire Blossom) to fetch Predaplant Darlingtonia Cobra which could fetch this spell.
Banning the spell, on the January 2020 banlist, also did nothing, as players ended up... not really needing it for the FTKs anyway! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJkdxFIGdhs
5. Spright
This archetype proved to be too strong the moment it came out. It got Ronintoadin banned on the October 2022 banlist, while Spright Elf was banned on the February 2023 list. Even then, the archetype still continues to be crazy strong, incorporating engines such as Adventurer, Runick, as well as the Nimble cards Nimble Angler and Nimble Beaver. Many other level 2s that saw absolutely no play in the game's history suddenly started being abused like crazy thanks to Gigantic Spright, such as Sonic Jammer. Players can 1-card combo off of Superheavy Samurai Prodigy Wakaushi, end on Gigantic Spright, Baronne De Fleur, and Wind-Up Zenmaister, use Gigantic Spright's effect to fetch the Sonic Jammer, then use Zenmaister to double-flip the Sonic Jammer and lock the opponent out of spells. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBqBhavMCDw
Lastly, not only did the archetype barely do any deck-to-hand searching, but Gigantic Spright can also be very easily and consistently made before the archetype's 5th summon, as well as lock both players out of summoning non-level 2 monsters for the turn, allowing the archetype to ignore two of the most powerful hand traps in the game, Droll & Lock Bird and Nibiru, the Primal Being.
4. Madolche
Futuregamer already summed up in his blog post — the one I cited at the start of this thread — what makes Madolche such a poorly designed archetype, and I have nothing else to add to that at this time... so... on to (dis)honorable mentions and the last 3 archetypes on the list!
