The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is an absolute treasure for more reasons than one. While it’s, in all honesty, a fantastic anime that ran for hundreds of episodes, it has also produced a lot of hilarious moments, for better or worse. The logic used in battle in the anime is sometimes completely devoid of any reasoning whatsoever and often differs from how the actual card game works in real life. Many times, cards gain new effects based on what the story requires, or completely new cards are just made up, which leads to some pretty ridiculous moments that have no business ever happening.
From cards that literally steal souls (and that actually isn’t the craziest effect), to the literal destruction of the moon, all the way to an entire season of this entire series that was completely inaccurate, we have 20 ridiculous times that Yu-Gi-Oh! broke its own rules. Before we get into it, I’m just gonna throw it out there. Mai Valentine deserved so much more. Anyway, enjoy!
20 First Season Summoning
The first season of Yu-Gi-Oh! was just completely ridiculous (a LOT more on that later).
Literally, no rules apply to any battles ever, everyone just kind of does whatever they want.
But one aspect that was really messed up was summoning. Ritual monsters just sometimes didn’t need to be ritual summoned, tributes truly just didn’t exist, and also sometimes Time Wizard would just, like, transform monsters into different monsters? I’m surprised anyone ever lost in the Duelist Kingdom because essentially anyone could make up any rule about any card and it just became a rule. Is this lazy writing or great writing? It’s hard to tell.
19 The Entire Labyrinth Arc
Does anyone want to tell me what exactly was going on here? The Paradox Brothers played a card that turned the entire Duel Monsters game into a completely different game with an entirely new set of rules and mechanics. Do you know what card it was that did this?
A non-effect card with 0 attack and 3,000 defense.
What? How even? Tell me this isn’t like that one time Zigfried hacked the system to add 400 abilities to the Golden Castle of Stromberg. Imagine playing your favorite video game and mastering all the mechanics and then suddenly a boss decides to just “change the game to something entirely different.” Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
18 Multiply Every Time It Was Used
The card Multiply, in real life, summons some tokens. In the anime, it summons several thousand Kuribohs that stop literally anything from touching you ever and you win the game automatically. Seriously though, anytime Yugi used this card, it seemed like he was deciding then and there what the card did in this specific instance that would save him from destruction. Oh, you summoned each Egyptian god card and I have no monsters on my side of the field? Let me play multiply, now I have 6,000! Yay! This was a seriously silly skill on the show but imagine how game-breaking it would be if the actual card behaved that way.
17 Mystical Elf’s Song
Did you know Mystical Elf has an ability that allows her to transfer her attack points to any monster her duelist chooses?
Well, forget the fact that she doesn’t have that ability at all, because she does!
Why? Because Yugi decided that she does in one random duel. Why did he decide that she has that power? Because it was convenient for the plot, duh. Why Yugi couldn’t have just drawn a card to give his monster 800 attack points rather than creating a new ability for Mystical Elf is truly beyond me. Then again, Yugi is always “creating” random new effects for all his cards.
16 Literally Every Harpie Mechanic
The Harpie Lady archetype in the anime is a bit different from its real-life equivalent. In the anime, the card used to summon the more powerful variant of the Harpie, Harpie Lady Sisters, actually triples the single Harpie Lady, along with any power-ups she currently has. Since this archetype is built around swarming the field, this essentially breaks the archetype and makes it super powerful. Yet, somehow Mai still loses 100% of her duels. Honestly, it’s pretty insane how Mai doesn’t manage to completely sweep the floor with these cards. What did she do to upset the writers this much?
15 Time Wizard’s Dark Sage
Okay, Joey is the King of Games and that’s that. You know why?
Because he beat Yugi in Duelist Kingdom.
Oh wait, he didn’t! Because Yugi pulled out his classic “little did you know I added an effect to my non-effect monster when it was convenient for me” move. What a guy. If the writers really wanted Yugi to beat Joey, they could have easily just, you know, have made Yugi win legitimately. Ya know, because they’re the writers. We know the show is supposed to be dramatic and the hero is supposed to prevail but Yugi has some of the thickest plot armor we have ever seen.
14 The PaniK Duel
Ah, this is peak “literally what” moments of the anime. In his duel with eliminator PaniK, Yugi targets his Castle of Dark Illusion with Catapult Turtle to win the duel. While Catapult Turtle can’t usually target monsters, it’s not that big of a deal in terms of rule breaking. That is, until we learn that Yugi actually used the effect to hit the castle’s floatation device (???), which causes the castle to fall and crush all of PaniK’s other monsters.
I truly, truly cannot deal with the entire first season because of this moment alone.
This is convoluted to the point of actual insanity, and I’m mainly confused about who went through the effort to make such a ridiculous plot point. Who needs rules when you can… not have rules?
13 Trap Card Activation
One little rule bend that continued to be used through the anime’s entirety is trap cards just kind of… being quick play spell cards. In the anime, you could just kind of activate traps whenever you wanted to, unlike the trap cards in the actual card game, that have certain times they’re allowed to be played. I mean, considering that season 4 of this show was an actual thing that happened, this is truly the least of our concerns though. In the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, trap cards and spell cards are apparently the same thing. Is it really that hard to not break the rules for one episode?
12 Dark Magician Girl’s Arrival
The entire crux of Yugi winning his duel with Arkana was the Dark Magician Master’s use of Dark Magic Curtain. What Arkana didn’t know was that Dark Magic Curtain has another effect (wrong). The card allows both players to use its summoning abilities (nope) in order to summon any Dark Magician monster in their deck (still no). If this duel had been played in real life, Arkana would have destroyed Yugi in that turn, but plot armor would never allow for something as plausible as that. The card game would be a lot easier to conquer if you could simply pull a powerful monster card from thin air.
11 Attack The Moon
Remember that one time that Yugi used his Giant Soldier of Stone to literally attack the moon so the tide would dry up and allow him to go after Mako’s water monsters?
Because I do. I will never forget that memory.
This move was so baffling that it actually caused a card called “Attack the Moon!” to be made for the TCG, because literally who thought that any of that was a good idea and why? Honestl,y this is one of the weirdest moves in the entire anime. Thank goodness the cards in the real world don’t have the same effects. We love our Moon.
10 Shinato’s Ark
Noah Kaiba and his strange little deck hosted a card called Shinato’s Ark. This card allowed Noah to control every monster that has been sent to the graveyard, and either completely destroy them to gain 500 life points for each, or summon them in defense position every time Yugi/Kaiba attacked. When that card left the field, he got to summon the real Shinato, which would drain Yugi’s life points every turn, while adding to Noah’s. He also just like, turned everyone to stone during the duel so okay that’s fine I guess. Noah Kaiba was like that one kid in school that kept making up rules so he was guaranteed to win.
9 Kaiba Beat Yugi
Remember that one time when Kaiba’s entire life was bent on Yugi’s destruction? Well, he would have beat him in Pyramid of Light, if anyone in that mess of a movie knew how to count! The effect of Kaiba’s shiny new Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon is granted 300 attack points for each dragon in Kaiba’s graveyard. When the dragon attacked Yugi with 6 dragons in his graveyard, it left Yugi with 200 life points, except, one dragon wasn’t counted, adding only 5 to Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon’s attack. This means that technically, Kaiba won that odd duel. That movie was such a mess. I love it.
8 Skull And Graceful Dice
One of Joey’s most used set of cards, Graceful and Skull Dice, multiply and cut the target’s attack power respectively. However, the actual card just adds to or lowers the attack points of the target by 100 x the dice roll. While this ability isn’t super bad, it nowhere near compares to the anime ability of the cards. I mean, imagine using this on some sort of powerhouse like Blue-Eyes White Dragon or The Unhappy Maiden! Truly a spooky thought. There seems to be a recurring them of taking “normal card effects” and cranking them up to eleven in the anime.
7 Banned Cards Just Aren’t Banned
Can we talk about how cards just kind of weren’t banned in the anime? Ever? If it was printed, it was legal. That seems to be the methodology of the anime. This was seen with cards that were often used such as Graceful Charity and Monster Reborn. Cards such as Chaos Emperor Dragon were also used regularly. I just wish we knew what the effect of Pot of Greed was so we could know why it was banned. There’s just no way to tell. We can kind of give this one a pass but it still irks us.
6 All Of The Waking The Dragons Arc
Season 4 was an absolute trainwreck of a season that actually featured an entire trainwreck.
Like, an actual train got in a wreck.
This was the season of literally nobody having any real cards, and every duel sounding like it was being made up by the second. I’m still bitter the Kuriboh Brothers don’t exist. We’ll go into more instances of some of the nonsense that went on in this season in a bit, however, just go into it knowing the whole season is a complete disaster. That’s saying a lot too, based on some of the other wild and wacky things we’ve seen on this list.
5 The Seal Of Orichalcos
And let’s get into it right now!
The seal of Orichalcos provides a ton of stupid effects for the user, and honestly, stealing the loser’s soul isn’t even the most ridiculous one.
Every monster you control gets 500 additional attack, you can have a back row of monsters that can’t be destroyed, the seal can’t be destroyed, you can add additional field cards to it that allows for even more abilities—and in case I forgot to mention, the loser you know, just loses their soul. This is definitely something we’re glad doesn’t exist in the real world version of the card game.
4 Yugi Attacks The Ground
In the final duel between Yugi and the Pharaoh, Yugi manages to take down all of the god cards, no small feat.
His method of taking down Obelisk was… I mean he sure did do it, I’ll tell you that.
His method was using the card Ground Erosion to target not Obelisk, but the ground! Yeah, you can do that. No, stop using evidence to refute me you can totally do that. It’s a totally plausible strategy that anyone would come up with, obviously. Just another prime example of the anime completely ignoring the card game and giving Yugi a victory he probably doesn’t deserve.
3 Revival Jam And Slifer’s Defeat
Yugi’s defeat of Slifer the Sky Dragon was cool, but also, well, not really plausible in real life. Essentially, Strings, Yugi’s opponent, uses a 5 card combo that allows nothing to hit Slifer due to his use of Revival Jam, and using a few more cards he’s allowed to draw tons of cards to get Slifer to incredibly high power. In the end, though, Yugi uses Brain Control on Revival Jam, and using this combo, forces Strings to deck out. Considering that Brain Control would return Revival Jam to Strings is kind of… disappointing though.
2 Defeating Leviathan
Do you know what was stupid? Season 4… oh sorry I already did that. Let’s talk about one detail of season 4 though. Dartz summons a monster with infinite attack, and that’s not even the dumb part. Yugi summons a bunch of weird DeviantArt monsters to, get this, bounce their attacks off of each other to destroy a monster with infinite attack. I’m sorry, what? Oh, I only have two Kuriboh against this Blue-Eyes? Well, I’ll give ‘em the ol razzle-dazzle and have the Kuriboh bounce their attacks off of each other to destroy the Blue-Eyes because that’s a thing we can all just do now, I guess!
1 Maiku, The Magical Mist Could Do Literally Anything
Does anyone else remember the entire plot device that was Maiku, the Magical Mist?
This card could literally do anything in the first season before it was retired forever.
This card was often paired with Summoned Skull to raise its attack by ??? since it was different every time, and it would do other things such as dispelling poison, depending on what Yugi needed it to do. I’m pretty sure that this card’s text just said: “refer to Yugi.” Sure, Maiku, The Magical Mist isn’t the only card in Yugi’s arsenal that comes jam-packed with “made up” effects, but it’s certainly one of the biggest offenders.
