Yugioh was designed to be a cinematic game. It’s easy to forget because the IRL game has such a life of its own, but we’re playing a spin-off. The card game was made up for the monster-of-the-week format of the manga,and is only with us and got developed because it resonated with fans and the author responded. The game was originally designed with drama in mind, and evolved within the story in ways that best suited the plot. Namely, the strategic power struggle between two foes. A TCG also had the advantage of numerous, varied game-pieces that would let Takahashi represent characters’ personalities and motivations through card typings and later archetypes. For instance, Yugi’s initial collection of various types of cards, and later spellcasters, represents his resourcefulness in dealing with multiple games and challenges (King of GameS. Plural.) Kaiba’s collection of rare, high-attack cards shows that he respects power and ambition.

Even in Duelist Kingdom it’s clear that self-expression is a thematic goal of the game, and if card types are self-expression, boss monsters are borderline self-inserts. Dark Magician’s morally dubious skill and power represent the anti-hero Yami well, and BEWD represents Kaiba’s ambition to be the single strongest there is (even if his high attack doesn’t have any other cards supporting it.) The show’s marketing reflects this, as well as the progression of the plot and game within it. In Battle City, people are fighting for the three best boss monsters, and having all three is treated as excessively powerful. But this presents a conflict: we can’t pair and market a character with multiple unrelated boss monsters representing their personality. Raphael was an attempt to explore this boss-monster-polygamy, and the point of his dueling was “having multiple boss monsters that I care about is hard, and because I deal with it I’m a better duelist.”

So the aesthetic of the Yugioh card game is cards that represent you, culminating in a boss monster that represents you best. Let’s skip ahead to the end of Arc V; Lots has happened to the game. For starters, naturally-occurring power-creep has moved VERY quickly here, so quickly that summoning a boss monster isn’t a capstone, but the beginning of a duelist’s strategy. The game was initially designed to give magicians a way to represent themselves by summoning magic creature(s) to fight on their behalf, but what we have now is boss-monster-philandering. We’re sluts for boss monsters. Porn-stars go “I can blow eight dicks in ten seconds.” Yugioh players go “I can summon 2 quasar and otk Turn 1.” The meta of the game post-pendulums is a middle finger to the extremely marketable thematic unity the original game was made for.

So Links. A lot of people knew that the power-creep and rules-complications were getting out of hand, but nobody wanted to say the thing we all knew deep down: In order for the game to slow down to the level we were nostalgic about, most of the modern strategies, cards, and design philosophies would have to be negated, banned, or rendered unplayable by a rule-change much, much bigger than a new summoning mechanic. Problem-solving-card-text or flood-gate archetypes can’t fix a turn-based game that never hits turn 5. Link Monsters themselves aren’t any more power-crept than we expected. so zones matter now. Big whoop. So Pendulums take S/T zones. A little overbearing but whatever. It’s the restriction on extra deck monsters, boss monsters, that’s controversial, because Konami is forcing us to play a game we haven’t really played in years.

Notice how you start with one extra zone? At the vanguard of your playing field? We’re so used to cheap whores of boss monsters that we see it as just the place to get started, but setting it apart from the other zones was an intentional, authoritarian message from Konami. “You see that zone? That’s where your Best ™ monster goes, and you can only have more if you buy our new cards.” I think Konami had many better ways of fixing the power-creep. Different formats, strategic ban-lists, and many better ideas that I’m sure collaboration with the community could have resulted in. Konami started making the game in archetypes instead of types because that was the next evolutionary step in the core appeal of their product, and they’re trying to bring the game back to the one-on-one boss battle Yugioh was always marketed as. A dramatic paradigm shift like Link summoning and its rule changes was the only way to accomplish this.