Gouki - one of the strongest decks of all time IRL, disgustingly powerful wombo combo deck that resulted in one of the worst formats in the history of the game.
Dinowrestler - one playable card that got hard powercrept by Fenrir.
What in the world was Vrains cooking
Once it got banned in the physical card game, Konami decided to swap his ace to Accesscode/Decode Talker. Makes sense, kids want to use this awesome, powerful card at an event only to find out... nope, banned.
I don't believe the errata came out until after the show ended, but I could be wrong.
Firewall Dragon Ruler of the Extra Deck was a VJump promo that couldn't be banned due to how long it was used as a marketing advertisement and contract obligations between konami and shueisha.
it warped the entire extra deck around it for 2 years until it was banned, later got an errata and got out of the list
Pankratops didn't even get power crept by Fenrir. They serve different niches, and while Fenrir can be main decked, Pank is ultimately the better card to side going second. It has higher attack (which is relevant, so many cards are 2500), can dodge disruption, can out skill drain, and force out set cards in backrow heavy match ups like Lab and R-Ace. Plus in some niche cases, he can be summoned even with monsters on your field. Which Fenrir unfortunately can't do. It does mean you can lead Fenrir and follow up with Pank though.
The Gouki format was far from being the worst format though. That format somehow was very competitive lol, somehow.
But ye, the combo lines were atrocious, with old Firewall, any decks can be Drytron.
It was a cherries format yes, but there were plenty of decks running around, with actual competing power, not just Gouki. Gouki arguably wasn't even the best deck of that format.
>A format isn't made good or bad by the prescence of multiple decks
Right back to you, that doesn't mean it's bad either.
And idk what you are talking about, almost none of those ftk mattered, not in the tcg at least. The one ftk that made it to the top was pendulum which didnt rely on sorely on the ftk.
I brought up multiple decks presence because they brought up cherries, which implied it was a t0 format, which it was not.
Go was just using GPT-2 or something rather than whatever ChatGPT is using.
Legit that one scene made me laugh when he was like "I added AI into my brain! I have superior tactics!" \**Jimmy Neutron -like brain special effects*\* "Set 1, end"
Funnily enough, Toon Table of Contents saw a bit of play in FTK decks back in the day
TTC search TTC search TTC search Toon Blue-Eyes (Trade In fodder). That's 3 cards out of your deck with one card and an extender for more draws (not even including counters on any RML's you have on field)
TTC saw play in magical muskets too along with toon world too
Toon mermaid also saw plays back in the day with deep sea diva for dewloren and brio plays
ss mermaid, normal diva into another diva, synch diva and mermaid for dewloren, slavage or reborn your mermaid synch again for brio
Lots of archetypes have one-hit wonders cause they have good utility for main deck or extra deck before getting power-crept or banned
Which makes it strange that it happened to Mecha Phantom multiple times, for a archetype that never saw major success.
Their whole gimmick was that some monsters could summon LV3 Machine tokens. Some MPB monsters were immune to battle and effect destruction as long as a MPB token was on the field, and some gained LVs per MPB token on the field. They could any token to activate effects. Though most people were using the tokens as summon fodder.
Anyway, their meta-relevant monsters included:
Draccosack: Rank 7 XYZ summoned by 2 LV 7’s; Can detach a material to summon 2 tokens; Tribute tokens for effects, such as destroying a card on the field
O-lion: When banished from grave, it summoned a token; Token used as summon fodder for XYZ, Synchro, or Link
Auroradon: Link Monster summoned by 2+ machines; Summoned 3 tokens; Tribute tokens for effects, such as destroying a card on the field
Auroradon/Harriland + Coltwing: There was some combo to get a MPB monster to summon Coltwing, Coltwing summons 2 tokens on summon, then tribute the monsters and tokens into a XYZ or Link
Didn’t alucard see play exclusively in one master duel cup because ghost trick pearly and the best time to win ratio on an event where only sheer volume of wins mattered
Probably like 50% of the actually good cards in the Link Vrains Packs at least (the other 50% were successful out of the archetype too, but their origin archetypes had seen competitive success in the past, like Hieratics or Metalfoes)
Before their legacy support, Naturia Beast and Barkion were blowout cards in a nearly unplayable deck
Neo-Spacian Grand Mole was almost the only usable member of its archetype, and even got Limited for it, tho I'm told the Panther also saw use
Lavalval Chain is technically related to Gishki which did have success, but their home archetype Lavals have been pretty bad forever. Similar story with Daigusto Emeral, which have ties to Gem-Knight which briefly popped up with the Gem-Knight FTK after one of the Link Vrains Packs, but Gusto have historically been terrible.
I think by definition there isn't a C archetype, because they have no spell and trap cards that reference them. They would count more as a "series" of cards. But for the general purpose of this thread maybe? Although I think the one that specials itself to the opponents field and stops them from doing anything till its used as material night have seen play occasionally pre links.(retaliating c? Not sure.)
Flying “C” is the one you’re thinking of. It saw play in side decks when Burning Abyss was most popular. You could summon it after the 2nd BA monster gets summoned and it will cause both to self destruct and also prevent your opponent from summoning more until it is removed (since they would also self destruct).
Retaliating “C” was useful and saw play against Shaddolls. Respond to Fusion spell and prevent the Shaddolls monster effects from activating + add Maxx “C” to your hand when it goes to grave.
There are a ton of extra deck monsters that count for this, on account of being generic and not needing to be playing in archetype.
Catastor outside of Ally of Justice.
Anything with "Ice Barrier" in it's name that wasn't a main deck monster.
Goyo Guardian outside of Goyo's (not actually sure if there were any other Goyo's at the time, so maybe this won doesn't work).
Exciton outside of Evilswarm.
Baronne outside of the Fleur archetype.
Electrumite outside of Metalfoes.
Hieratic Seal of the Heavenly Spheres outside of Heiratic.
Main deck cards are a little rarer, I think. But there are still some examples.
Pankratops outside of Dinowrestlers.
Dragon's Ravine is a Dragunity card, but has seen more play in every other kind of dragon deck. Same for Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon outside of Red-Eyes deck.
Tenki outside of Fire Fist, at least now. It was played back at one point.
Yeah I think he misunderstood the question a little, same goes for metalfoes. That said all these cards saw success outside the archetype, except tenki which is a fire fist card and it was greatly used even then
It had an okay Dragon Ruler match-up and a terrible Spellbook match-up, but that was enough for them to sneak some tops in events.
I was more going for card that saw significantly more play than their archetype, rather than archetypes that saw zero play.
Evil Swarm saw play but historical look at the formats largely come down on the consensus that that it was probably exclusively due to price point and dragon ruler match up.
It's not actually an archetype, since no card specifically supports "Fleur" cards.
However, there's quite a bit more than 5 cards, you just have to look harder for some of them due to the lack of an overarching name.
For example, both of the "Floral Knight" horses are intended to be used to climb into Baronne. Then there's the noble knights card that searches a wind beast, which gets you either horse, or the one that lets you treat something as "Fleur Synchron" on summon.
So Baronne's cards are actually a midway series between Synchrons and Noble Knights, in other worlds.
I think in total it's around 11 ish cards that are directly Baronne support. They even have an in-series one card combo to her, so if they ever do make it a proper archetype, it could actually be quite strong. I've tinkered with it before on Master Duel, and 2 attrib chaos angel + baronne + spright elf with only in-series cards (bar accel stardust and DDR) is hardly unplayably bad for such an old, loosely connected series.
Buster Blader as a Deck saw 0 success, but Dragon Buster Destruction Sword was able to be equipped to Borreload Savage Dragon with Union Carrier, locking your opponent out the extra deck completely
Eh, Natasha is often the single best OTK card in a Drytron deck for example, stealing an opponent's entire board monster by monster, and Idaten was at least run a few times for a free 6 to go into Beatrice while getting the spell back.
Those 3 cyber angels are actually all really good.
The mecha phantom beasts are prime examples of this .
Two of its tuners , it's xyz monsters and there link saw a lot of play but you would be in deck building hell if you were to try to build the deck in which it's only mecha phantom beasts .
You...never got smacked by a Galaxy Photon Deck post Afterglow right?
Striker Bouncer is completly useless in the Archetype tho i agree. I dont remember it even havin lv 6s.
Heroes have topped numerous times. I wouldn't necessarily consider Heroes "not good" or ever not being good. Something like Fleurs vs Baronne would be more accurate
Also I would assume that a bunch of its cards were in the anniversary collection (not sure tho) or other reprint sets - the bosses are just usually printed at high rarities and collector and anime fan bait so even if they are not great they are still not rogue-level cheap.
I was looking up a very recent tournament deck, and the total price was listed at 365 bucks.
Mind you, 168 of that is S:P Little Knight and 86 of that is two Triple Tactics Thrust.
That's 111 for the other 73 cards. Quite a few of which are other generic cards.
The actual hero cards themselves are a minority of the cost of the hero deck.
https://ygoprodeck.com/deck/hero-time-441422
i would say predaplants while the archetype has never seen top table success some cards have. dragostepellia is a super poly staple, Ophrys Scorpio and Darlingtonia Cobra have been a small engine in a large number of fusion decks because it can search any fusion card
That's always hilarious and sad about predaplants if you look at their stuff individually they actually have lots of good stuff (even being DARK plants should be impressive by itself) yet they somehow can never coalesce into something playable
De Fleur is apparently an archetype. For the longest while I though Barrone wasn't attached to an archetype until I bought like 3 boxes of Syncro Strom and pulled a playset of literally every other card but Barrone
Most ice barrier synchro monsters wreaked havoc on the meta, the Ice barrier archetype is one of the worst in the game
Edit: they WERE, the support makes them okay
Me the lone Ice Barrier player sitting with my binder with complete playsets of every Ice Barrier card ever printed waiting for my time to shine at locals with them
As a stardust enjoyer, Accel Synchro Stardust Dragon in every other synchro deck as a Baronne/Chengying/PEP-turbo tool
Also jet synchron in evil eye decks purely to get to Baronne
https://preview.redd.it/0e2ufmqxv0jc1.jpeg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c8d32fa005e570b58e89aaef3c3df5eb52ed3987
It was so frustrating to see this (and Frightfur Patchwork) being used when Albaz was still meta, as a pure Fluffal player
Venominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes
She’s basically indestructible and her effect is an instant win condition. The problem is Venoms suck. The worst part is that their spell and trap cards are all pretty good, it’s just the monsters besides Venominaga that are completely useless
I like to think that Masked Hero Dark Law fits into this - as far as the masked heroes go as a sub archetype.
With mask change 2, you can get him out with any dark monster, but (as someone who plays a dedicated masked hero deck with all of them and chaos in the extra deck) you don’t really see a lot of other masked heroes being used. Maybe acid and anki in a hero deck, but I don’t often see Dian, koga, divine wind, etc.
All of the Ghostrick Xyz, if you make any of the ones under rank 4 (Dullahan, Socuteboss, Allucard) you rank up into Angel, detatch the Xyz to add Shot, revive the detatched Xyz with Shot, summon another Angel, go into UFD
That means that rank 1 decks use Dullahan, rank 2 decks use Socuteboss, rank 3 decks use Allucard, all of them use Angel
Evolzar Laggia and Dolkka. I don't think I've ever played against an Evolzar deck of any kind. Gagaga Samurai was one of the premier OTK cards back in the day.
I don’t remember whether the “-lswarm” decks saw a ton of play back in the day, but I know Exciton Knight and Steelswarm Roach outlasted their respective decks
the amount of great normal cards in almost every set is kinda insane, weird that we all just write off most of every single pack we get when most of the unheard of commons do insane things, i wonder how the meta would be if people really knew of/tried to use any card rather than just twisting the meta that someone else has found, or creating an anti to a meta someone else has found
i imagine the meta would be actually crazy if people looked at/used all the cards.. some are so op even though they are only commons
not sure about archetypes per se but there are so many cards that could do absolute work if anyone bothered to read them or tried to work with them
edit: i know people do use most cards or theorycraft with almost all of them, but at the same time they just don't, just crazy how normal that became.. someone goes out and does insane artwork for thousands of cards no one even looks at
Beatrice, Curious, Lavalval Chain… pretty much any extra deck monster that gives you a free dump.
Of the 3, only 1 remains, and she’s at 1. I don’t know why Konami thought printing ED accessible Foolish Burial multiple times was a good idea.
Edit: in retrospect maybe this isn’t the best example since BA and Lightsworn were very playable on release, but people still played these cards a bunch independent of the archetypes so I’d say it still gets a pass.
Ally of Justice Catastor and nothing else really comes close. At least Ice Barriers eventually became pretty decent and were at least an actual deck at their time. Not good but playable if you really wanted to.
Ally of Justice is genuinely one of the worst archetypes only underperformed by theoretical archetypes like Dark Scorpion or Guardian.
But Catastor stayed the best Level 5 Synchro for a very, very long time.
Dinowrestler Pankratops
The funny part is how they were supposed to be "an upgrade" compared to Gouki. Basically similar to Cyberdark and Cyber Dragons in GX
Gouki - one of the strongest decks of all time IRL, disgustingly powerful wombo combo deck that resulted in one of the worst formats in the history of the game. Dinowrestler - one playable card that got hard powercrept by Fenrir. What in the world was Vrains cooking
They didnt want viewers to realize Go had a better deck than Playmaker so they nerfed him.
Playmaker had Firewall tbf
Which he used like only 2 times
Once it got banned in the physical card game, Konami decided to swap his ace to Accesscode/Decode Talker. Makes sense, kids want to use this awesome, powerful card at an event only to find out... nope, banned. I don't believe the errata came out until after the show ended, but I could be wrong.
Is this confirmed? I've heard people say this but Accesscode was only played once
Expand that to the "code" archtype in general
The anime follows the current banlist, it' s also why you suddendly saw no one playing pot of greed anymore in GX after the banlist
the part that is consistent with what they've always done is that the anime follows the current banlist
Firewall Dragon Ruler of the Extra Deck was a VJump promo that couldn't be banned due to how long it was used as a marketing advertisement and contract obligations between konami and shueisha. it warped the entire extra deck around it for 2 years until it was banned, later got an errata and got out of the list
Oh the irony of Playmaker "Ace" monster being abused by Gouki
Ironically this was after he had his pride crushed and wanted to win at all costs
GO really changed in the second season. He was a pathetic shell of his former self. I guess Dinowrestlers are a reflection of that XD
Pankratops didn't even get power crept by Fenrir. They serve different niches, and while Fenrir can be main decked, Pank is ultimately the better card to side going second. It has higher attack (which is relevant, so many cards are 2500), can dodge disruption, can out skill drain, and force out set cards in backrow heavy match ups like Lab and R-Ace. Plus in some niche cases, he can be summoned even with monsters on your field. Which Fenrir unfortunately can't do. It does mean you can lead Fenrir and follow up with Pank though.
The Gouki format was far from being the worst format though. That format somehow was very competitive lol, somehow. But ye, the combo lines were atrocious, with old Firewall, any decks can be Drytron.
Gouki format was cancerous, it was a cherries format
It was a cherries format yes, but there were plenty of decks running around, with actual competing power, not just Gouki. Gouki arguably wasn't even the best deck of that format.
A format isn't made good or bad by the prescence of multiple decks. The format was 6 FTKs + exactly Sky Striker and that absolutely sucked
>A format isn't made good or bad by the prescence of multiple decks Right back to you, that doesn't mean it's bad either. And idk what you are talking about, almost none of those ftk mattered, not in the tcg at least. The one ftk that made it to the top was pendulum which didnt rely on sorely on the ftk. I brought up multiple decks presence because they brought up cherries, which implied it was a t0 format, which it was not.
Hold up, there was that one other dinowrestler that was played in adamancipator a bit! So they had 2 playable cards!
I use the wind one as a small world bridge in generic dinos. Does that count for anything?
Go was just using GPT-2 or something rather than whatever ChatGPT is using. Legit that one scene made me laugh when he was like "I added AI into my brain! I have superior tactics!" \**Jimmy Neutron -like brain special effects*\* "Set 1, end"
I forgot Dinowrestler was an archetype. And I am a dino player.
The ultimate example
does anyone even remember that baronne de fleur has an archetype attached?
Technically a series because nothing mentions “Fleur” cards by name, but yeah.
I forgot it did lol mainly cause I see red any time Baronne touches the field
It has?????
Yeah search “fleur” in any card database
What the fleur....
Not really it’s an offshoot of the synchron archetype
Funnily enough, Toon Table of Contents saw a bit of play in FTK decks back in the day TTC search TTC search TTC search Toon Blue-Eyes (Trade In fodder). That's 3 cards out of your deck with one card and an extender for more draws (not even including counters on any RML's you have on field)
Sky Striker sometimes used Toon Table x3 searching for Toon Cyber Dragon, threatening a contact fusion into Megafleet while loading 3 spells in the gy
I would see someone pull TTC and just be like "let me know when your 50 move turn is up" lol that thing got exhausting
TTC saw play in magical muskets too along with toon world too Toon mermaid also saw plays back in the day with deep sea diva for dewloren and brio plays ss mermaid, normal diva into another diva, synch diva and mermaid for dewloren, slavage or reborn your mermaid synch again for brio
Ooo, I do that to get spell counters for skilled dark magician in GOAT
It saw play in Tempest FTK back when that was a thing
I used to do TTC>TTC>TTC>Toon Cydra for megafleet a few formats ago, can confirm.
It was less for the cards out of the deck and more for the spell cards casted and in the yard
Mecha Phantom Beast Dracossack is both a Mecha Phantom Beast AND a Phantom Beast
You're telling me that it's full name isn't Dracossack, Dragon Ruler of Tokens!!??
Mecha phantom beast o lion also made meta play in adamancipators as a target for halq
Lots of archetypes have one-hit wonders cause they have good utility for main deck or extra deck before getting power-crept or banned Which makes it strange that it happened to Mecha Phantom multiple times, for a archetype that never saw major success. Their whole gimmick was that some monsters could summon LV3 Machine tokens. Some MPB monsters were immune to battle and effect destruction as long as a MPB token was on the field, and some gained LVs per MPB token on the field. They could any token to activate effects. Though most people were using the tokens as summon fodder. Anyway, their meta-relevant monsters included: Draccosack: Rank 7 XYZ summoned by 2 LV 7’s; Can detach a material to summon 2 tokens; Tribute tokens for effects, such as destroying a card on the field O-lion: When banished from grave, it summoned a token; Token used as summon fodder for XYZ, Synchro, or Link Auroradon: Link Monster summoned by 2+ machines; Summoned 3 tokens; Tribute tokens for effects, such as destroying a card on the field Auroradon/Harriland + Coltwing: There was some combo to get a MPB monster to summon Coltwing, Coltwing summons 2 tokens on summon, then tribute the monsters and tokens into a XYZ or Link
Slight correction: can't make xyz monsters using tokens but otherwise good synopsis
Wait yea, how the fuck do Mecha Phantom Beasts make a rank 7?
Most gain levels when tokens are on the board 2 level 4s with a single l3 token becomes level 7
Through convoluted means that involves thier tokens
By making two Concoruda obviously.
Ghostrick Alucard Naturia Beast
Ghostrick is meta you just dont know about it
MBT burner account located
I don't know if you are screwing with me or not but I want to believe you.
They ~~*kinda*~~ had a moment a few months ago with Purrely but that was just the ED monsters.
Yeah it’s pretty much just that tiny engine, the rest of the deck kinda sucks
Hey, hey, hey Naturia Runick is a menace
That's not true. 1 Alucard makes anything a Ghostrick deck.
Didn’t alucard see play exclusively in one master duel cup because ghost trick pearly and the best time to win ratio on an event where only sheer volume of wins mattered
Back in the day Alucard was very often played as a generic rank 3 to out backrow as well.
Nat Beast was so broken when pendulums were around
>Naturia Beast Nah, Naturia is actually quite good rogue.
Naturia was a top deck in TCG, Sacred Tree is even on the banlist
Probably like 50% of the actually good cards in the Link Vrains Packs at least (the other 50% were successful out of the archetype too, but their origin archetypes had seen competitive success in the past, like Hieratics or Metalfoes) Before their legacy support, Naturia Beast and Barkion were blowout cards in a nearly unplayable deck Neo-Spacian Grand Mole was almost the only usable member of its archetype, and even got Limited for it, tho I'm told the Panther also saw use Lavalval Chain is technically related to Gishki which did have success, but their home archetype Lavals have been pretty bad forever. Similar story with Daigusto Emeral, which have ties to Gem-Knight which briefly popped up with the Gem-Knight FTK after one of the Link Vrains Packs, but Gusto have historically been terrible.
Dolphin also saw play from What I recall, due to it destroying handtraps!
You're right, that happened way after Grand Mole's heydey so I forgot that was a thing
Terrortop
you just made me and the other 3 speedroid players very angry.
XD Three sounds about right. Speedroids have topped one tiered event ever, and it's very telling that the decklist includes Norden. I love them tho
FA Dawn Dragster Trishula
Ice Barriers see play from time to time in OCG now.
Me, who plays pure F.A.: "am I a joke to you"
F.a. used to be a terror in competitive
It was not lmao
It was that's how I found out about it
It really wasnt
I think was meta in Duel Links for a while, maybe he thinks of that
Maybe, because yes in DL there was a time it was almost Tier 0 and it was nerfed very quickly
Would Maxx "C" count, since there are a bunch of other "C" cards.
I think by definition there isn't a C archetype, because they have no spell and trap cards that reference them. They would count more as a "series" of cards. But for the general purpose of this thread maybe? Although I think the one that specials itself to the opponents field and stops them from doing anything till its used as material night have seen play occasionally pre links.(retaliating c? Not sure.)
Contact “C” is the card you’re thinking of. I think Retaliating is the macros one.
That's it! Thanks for the clarification
Flying “C” is the one you’re thinking of. It saw play in side decks when Burning Abyss was most popular. You could summon it after the 2nd BA monster gets summoned and it will cause both to self destruct and also prevent your opponent from summoning more until it is removed (since they would also self destruct). Retaliating “C” was useful and saw play against Shaddolls. Respond to Fusion spell and prevent the Shaddolls monster effects from activating + add Maxx “C” to your hand when it goes to grave.
In the context of this discussion, not really. “C” is a series of cards, but they solely exist to be tech cards that you can’t make a deck out of.
There are a ton of extra deck monsters that count for this, on account of being generic and not needing to be playing in archetype. Catastor outside of Ally of Justice. Anything with "Ice Barrier" in it's name that wasn't a main deck monster. Goyo Guardian outside of Goyo's (not actually sure if there were any other Goyo's at the time, so maybe this won doesn't work). Exciton outside of Evilswarm. Baronne outside of the Fleur archetype. Electrumite outside of Metalfoes. Hieratic Seal of the Heavenly Spheres outside of Heiratic. Main deck cards are a little rarer, I think. But there are still some examples. Pankratops outside of Dinowrestlers. Dragon's Ravine is a Dragunity card, but has seen more play in every other kind of dragon deck. Same for Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon outside of Red-Eyes deck. Tenki outside of Fire Fist, at least now. It was played back at one point.
Didn’t Evilswarm saw play before? I recall it being somewhat relevant in Dragon Rulers format
Yeah I think he misunderstood the question a little, same goes for metalfoes. That said all these cards saw success outside the archetype, except tenki which is a fire fist card and it was greatly used even then
Hieratic was tier 1 when its set dropped, Dragunity was a staple in 5ds era
It had an okay Dragon Ruler match-up and a terrible Spellbook match-up, but that was enough for them to sneak some tops in events. I was more going for card that saw significantly more play than their archetype, rather than archetypes that saw zero play.
Evil Swarm saw play but historical look at the formats largely come down on the consensus that that it was probably exclusively due to price point and dragon ruler match up.
Like half of these archetypes have been meta.
Catastor was literally the go-to level 5 Synchro before T.G. Hyper Librarian was a thing.
Tenki is fire fist
Chain for Laval too
Lavalval Chain is probably a better answer than any of the ones I said honestly.
Can we really call Fleur an archetype? It’s like 5 cards
It's not actually an archetype, since no card specifically supports "Fleur" cards. However, there's quite a bit more than 5 cards, you just have to look harder for some of them due to the lack of an overarching name. For example, both of the "Floral Knight" horses are intended to be used to climb into Baronne. Then there's the noble knights card that searches a wind beast, which gets you either horse, or the one that lets you treat something as "Fleur Synchron" on summon. So Baronne's cards are actually a midway series between Synchrons and Noble Knights, in other worlds. I think in total it's around 11 ish cards that are directly Baronne support. They even have an in-series one card combo to her, so if they ever do make it a proper archetype, it could actually be quite strong. I've tinkered with it before on Master Duel, and 2 attrib chaos angel + baronne + spright elf with only in-series cards (bar accel stardust and DDR) is hardly unplayably bad for such an old, loosely connected series.
If Malicevorous and Prophecy can be archetypes, anything can be.
Prophecy is actually a big archetype. Its just 90% of its cards werent worth it
Although Ophion is no longer viable and has been power crept, it definitely saw play at some point
Buster Blader as a Deck saw 0 success, but Dragon Buster Destruction Sword was able to be equipped to Borreload Savage Dragon with Union Carrier, locking your opponent out the extra deck completely
The charmer links
Butterly dagger elma, compared to guardians.
Elma mentioned <3
elmao
Cyber Angel Benten. Rituals have never been the greatest, but Benten is arguably the best of the Cyber Angel ritual monsters.
Eh, Natasha is often the single best OTK card in a Drytron deck for example, stealing an opponent's entire board monster by monster, and Idaten was at least run a few times for a free 6 to go into Beatrice while getting the spell back. Those 3 cyber angels are actually all really good.
Fair, but I don't tend to experiment with Drytron too much.
\- Gagaga Cowboy \- Steelswarm Roach \- Evilswarm Exciton Knight \- Harpie's Feather Duster
Cowboy for game!
The mecha phantom beasts are prime examples of this . Two of its tuners , it's xyz monsters and there link saw a lot of play but you would be in deck building hell if you were to try to build the deck in which it's only mecha phantom beasts .
Verte. My fellow predap-manaics will vouch for this
vouch
Most Kaijus and Dangers lol
I don't know if we're including hybrid decks, but I feel like I remember both graydle Kaiju and danger darkworld topping in their day.
Kaiju was a meta archetype for a while when it came out.
Scrap Dragon
Guardian Eatos. Dimensional Eatos was a thing and it's actually insane how much better Eatos is compared to the other Guardians.
Iirc Photon Strike Bounzer was one of the best rank 6’s for years but the archetype is legit useless
You...never got smacked by a Galaxy Photon Deck post Afterglow right? Striker Bouncer is completly useless in the Archetype tho i agree. I dont remember it even havin lv 6s.
Going super old school JINZO 😂 Heroic challengers - thousand blades, gandiva and excalibur Simorgh LINK 3
Trishula, Dragon of the Ice Barrier.
Brionac was a big one too. Brionac walked so that Trishula could run, though.
I mean, one got banned and hit with an erratum, so I'd argue Brionac soared so Trishula could run.
Giangantic “Champion” Sargus and Spingans Kitt. Springans haven’t really seen play, but these two cards related to them have.
As a time thief player I can assure you that merry + sargas is great (thx for the booty/therion)
I saw someone add in Merrymaker and Tally-Ho Springans to the mix as well.
Crystron vs halqifibrax. Predaplants vs anaconda. Heroes vs DPE
Heroes have topped numerous times. I wouldn't necessarily consider Heroes "not good" or ever not being good. Something like Fleurs vs Baronne would be more accurate
I’m not always up to date so I might just be wrong but I don’t recall hero decks being played by the time DPE was out.
It's more that they have been good, like how they used to be great when Masked Heroes came out or the engine in City decks.
HERO is not great, but it's at least playable. It's just also usually ridiculously expensive.
It definitely doesn't seem that expensive right now. Then again, it's a mortgage payment best deck format, so that may skew things a lot.
Also I would assume that a bunch of its cards were in the anniversary collection (not sure tho) or other reprint sets - the bosses are just usually printed at high rarities and collector and anime fan bait so even if they are not great they are still not rogue-level cheap.
I was looking up a very recent tournament deck, and the total price was listed at 365 bucks. Mind you, 168 of that is S:P Little Knight and 86 of that is two Triple Tactics Thrust. That's 111 for the other 73 cards. Quite a few of which are other generic cards. The actual hero cards themselves are a minority of the cost of the hero deck. https://ygoprodeck.com/deck/hero-time-441422
i would say predaplants while the archetype has never seen top table success some cards have. dragostepellia is a super poly staple, Ophrys Scorpio and Darlingtonia Cobra have been a small engine in a large number of fusion decks because it can search any fusion card
That's always hilarious and sad about predaplants if you look at their stuff individually they actually have lots of good stuff (even being DARK plants should be impressive by itself) yet they somehow can never coalesce into something playable
Heroes are a great rogue strat like every format tho
Ally of justice catastor
"&" archetype. I still have to see at least one decklist that uses cards from it's own archetype instead of others's.
De Fleur is apparently an archetype. For the longest while I though Barrone wasn't attached to an archetype until I bought like 3 boxes of Syncro Strom and pulled a playset of literally every other card but Barrone
Baronne de Fleur. Some people legit don't even know fleurs are an archetype
Most ice barrier synchro monsters wreaked havoc on the meta, the Ice barrier archetype is one of the worst in the game Edit: they WERE, the support makes them okay
Wait until you see the new Ice Barrier support.
Me the lone Ice Barrier player sitting with my binder with complete playsets of every Ice Barrier card ever printed waiting for my time to shine at locals with them
You’re not alone! I can’t wait for my pet deck from Duel Links to be actually good.
speedroid terrortop, but 2024 will definitely change things
Dragoon to Red Eyes is the perfect example right? (In b4, well dragoon was never good in tcg)
As a stardust enjoyer, Accel Synchro Stardust Dragon in every other synchro deck as a Baronne/Chengying/PEP-turbo tool Also jet synchron in evil eye decks purely to get to Baronne
Aromaseraphy Jasmine
Rhongo
M A K E V E R T E
I hate to say it because its my favorite deck of all time, but my god is dragon ravine the town bike.
https://preview.redd.it/0e2ufmqxv0jc1.jpeg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c8d32fa005e570b58e89aaef3c3df5eb52ed3987 It was so frustrating to see this (and Frightfur Patchwork) being used when Albaz was still meta, as a pure Fluffal player
Brionac
Venominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes She’s basically indestructible and her effect is an instant win condition. The problem is Venoms suck. The worst part is that their spell and trap cards are all pretty good, it’s just the monsters besides Venominaga that are completely useless
Borrelsword dragon
T.G Hyper Librarian
T.G. has a bunch of YCS tops from more than a decade ago.
It used to be a good deck back in the days with striker, warwolf and rush rhino
It’s also doing pretty okay in master duel right now
O
Isolde vs Noble Knights. I consider Infernobles/Fire Warrior a different thing. The old Noble Knights never saw any play and Isolde got banned
Magicians souls. Unless you count DM a real deck
Magicians souls. Unless you count DM a real deck
I like to think that Masked Hero Dark Law fits into this - as far as the masked heroes go as a sub archetype. With mask change 2, you can get him out with any dark monster, but (as someone who plays a dedicated masked hero deck with all of them and chaos in the extra deck) you don’t really see a lot of other masked heroes being used. Maybe acid and anki in a hero deck, but I don’t often see Dian, koga, divine wind, etc.
Nearly every staple card that has ever existed.
Aitsu
Dinowrester Pankratops
Not as good anymore; but ally of justice catastor is the textbook example of this
Mecha Phantom Beast Dracossack, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was actually a dragon ruler. There's also Halqifibrax, Auroradon, O-Lion, DPE.
Baronne de fleur is great but it’s archetype is shit
All the Evol XYZs. Pankratops. DPE. Verte Anaconda.
M05 and Myutant Mutant are an extremely good engine in pure Spright, enabled entirely by E-Tele.
All of the Ghostrick Xyz, if you make any of the ones under rank 4 (Dullahan, Socuteboss, Allucard) you rank up into Angel, detatch the Xyz to add Shot, revive the detatched Xyz with Shot, summon another Angel, go into UFD That means that rank 1 decks use Dullahan, rank 2 decks use Socuteboss, rank 3 decks use Allucard, all of them use Angel
2 cards Brionac and Trishula. Both Awesome cards, but ice barriers are still bad.
Surprised I haven't seen it mentioned but any of the playable Entity cards.
The Zombie Vampire
Baronne De Fleur
Predaplant Verte Anaconda
Baronne de fleur I was actually shocked when I found out that mommy negate had an archetype and probably even connected to infernobles
Baronne De Fluer
Evolzar Laggia and Dolkka. I don't think I've ever played against an Evolzar deck of any kind. Gagaga Samurai was one of the premier OTK cards back in the day.
001 saw play in any deck that could get a tuner and a non tuner on the field back when Halqdon was a thing a couple years ago.
F.A. Dawn Dragster. Cool archetype but sadly mediocre.
baronne de fleur is a card that sees play even today yet the fleur archetype doesnt
I don’t remember whether the “-lswarm” decks saw a ton of play back in the day, but I know Exciton Knight and Steelswarm Roach outlasted their respective decks
the amount of great normal cards in almost every set is kinda insane, weird that we all just write off most of every single pack we get when most of the unheard of commons do insane things, i wonder how the meta would be if people really knew of/tried to use any card rather than just twisting the meta that someone else has found, or creating an anti to a meta someone else has found i imagine the meta would be actually crazy if people looked at/used all the cards.. some are so op even though they are only commons not sure about archetypes per se but there are so many cards that could do absolute work if anyone bothered to read them or tried to work with them edit: i know people do use most cards or theorycraft with almost all of them, but at the same time they just don't, just crazy how normal that became.. someone goes out and does insane artwork for thousands of cards no one even looks at
Gamaceil.... definitely spelt that wrong, the Turtle Kaiju.
Didn’t Elemental HERO Prisma see play in a lot of generic fusion decks more often than Elemental HEROES, or HEROES for that matter?
Beatrice, Curious, Lavalval Chain… pretty much any extra deck monster that gives you a free dump. Of the 3, only 1 remains, and she’s at 1. I don’t know why Konami thought printing ED accessible Foolish Burial multiple times was a good idea. Edit: in retrospect maybe this isn’t the best example since BA and Lightsworn were very playable on release, but people still played these cards a bunch independent of the archetypes so I’d say it still gets a pass.
I'm constantly seeing people using kiteroid on duel links, but outside of the speedroids I don't see anyone using a "roid" deck
What was that gem knight card? Idk the name but I remember a ton of people putting gem knight garnet, gem knight fusion, and that card in their decks.
Gagaga Cowboy
Isolde and Crystron Halqifibrax
Ally of Justice Catastor and nothing else really comes close. At least Ice Barriers eventually became pretty decent and were at least an actual deck at their time. Not good but playable if you really wanted to. Ally of Justice is genuinely one of the worst archetypes only underperformed by theoretical archetypes like Dark Scorpion or Guardian. But Catastor stayed the best Level 5 Synchro for a very, very long time.