When the Yugioh World final was a Blue-Eyes mirror match

Blue-Eyes winning a World Championship sounds like a RETVRN moment. But it wasn't as pretty in practice as it was in a headline. Let me recap.

Worlds is the biggest Yugioh tournament. You qualify for the event by winning enough points in other events. But it doesn't define the meta as much as regionals or nationals, because it has its own card pool and banlist.

Yugioh has two main formats, OCG and TCG. OCG is the original format played in Japan and other Asian countries. TCG is the USA import, which the rest of the world follows -LATAM and Europe-. Sets, card pools, bans and some rulings diverted here, and are still different today.

Worlds participants are taken from all regions, so it follows a hybrid ruling. Only cards that are in both formats can be played, and banlists are fused and rounded down. If a card is limited to 1 copy in America and unlimited in Japan, it will be limited to 1 in the Worlds.

In mid 2016, Pendulum wasn't just a trigger word for boomers, the dedicated players were sick of the mechanic as well. This wasn't long after a tier 0 Pendulum format and Konami had 2 big projects coming up both banking on original anime nostalgia. First a movie and then a mobile game. So they gave Kaiba shiny new cards then printed them for the game.

So they banned cards for every top contender, Majespecter, Phantom Knights, Burning Abyss and Monarchs. All the while Blue-Eyes were given busted support, none of which were banned.

One of them is noteworthy for being the most pushed card in the game's history, Blue-Eyes Spirit Dragon.

This card has two effects, each just targeted hate for the current meta. The effect to disable multiple summons at once is only relevant against Pendulums, and the graveyard lock was to stop Burning Abyss and Phantom Knights.

Konami was trying to prop up Blue-Eyes for positive media attention and shill their new movie. And it worked. As torturous as it was Blue-Eyes was played by 7 out of 22 participants and won.

The ensuing mirror match wasnt fun

first game the mutt has only a single playable card in his hand and the jap cucks it out with a hand trap. he spends the following 3 turns holding his limp peepee in hand then dies.

second game the mutt barely draws any monsters and sits on 4 set spells and traps for 3 turns. after he doesn't draw anything good he kamikazes his monster to activate its graveyard effect but the jap banishes it. then he dies.

While the stars aligned to make Blue-Eyes playable in this instance, its still a very top heavy deck suspectible to bricking. Most cards work in tandem with each other so there are no single card starters, you need to draw in pairs. no summoning a bunch of monsters in 1 turn shenanigans either.

I tried to keep this concise because i just wanted to show a funny moment in history. I dont want to make effortposts like the last time but this required some context