“Judgment Of The Pharaoh” is a blog dedicated to reviews of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. However, tries to be different from others by giving a more friendly pointview on each card.
The real fun part of this game is often in casual play. You can build any Deck you can think of due this game doesn’t rely on resources like mana in Magic: The Gathering, and as long you find a strategy to play your cards, everything works. You can either play a pure-themed build, or mix two or more together to create something unique and/or sharing sinergy.
However and as many other games, casual play ends most of the time bashed by the competitive play. Konami knows the big bucks comes from the tournaments, so prints the cards which becomes popular in the OCG (Japan) on high rarities or in special products where their pull rating is very low. With clearly strong archetypes or supporting effects releasing in each set, is easy to notice this pattern in every booster.
In each set, there’s always a new group of monsters which as soon are out they’ll immediately become part of the metagame, while the rest is an archetype which will be highly supported in future expansions. The rest of the set are cards coming out from the series and/or cards you will never see any play, sometimes called as filler. On the good side, non-competitive players get more solid decks to play even after they are out of the metagame and at low value.
So basically, Konami releases a 100-card booster, when maybe only 5 of said set or certain archetype cards we see them played, and the rest are treated like garbage unless someone finds out a powerful combo or Konami decides to release support to make them the new competitive Deck. In the end, the tourney metagame ends with 4-5 decks being played over and over, sometimes even on casual play.
And then Konami makes a new banlist. Meta decks loses their potential, their ace cards become reprinted in lower rarities, and now to wait for Konami to release another powerful archetype to spend maybe $1000 minimum in a new deck. If we ignore the fun decks which makes this game entertaining, the game mostly goes arround 5-6 decks rotating banlist after banlist.
Yet, the gameplay outside of said Tourney hell is absolutely fun. You see a big number of original, yet powerful decks by their own merits. With unusual combos which can easily beat even the most expensive Deck in a glimpse. Even old rulers of the Metagame gets another chance to shine among the diversity of decks to pick and create. While competitive is too serious for creativity and second chances as they empty wallets, everything goes in casual once you have a deck.
This blog wants to proof no matter what competitive players makes you think, you can play any card as well as the $100 cards people runs. Most reviews in “profesional” sites always goes for the worst case scenarios, and comparing the cards against high tier decks and the most recent metagame. Basically, they don’t see the card outside of a competitive environment or in a situation with everything against your favor. Every card and setup pretty much can be negated or chained and there are several situations where a powerful deck can be devastated by a counterstrategy. So making an underrated card look bad because is affected to common hazards is quite pointless.
Wanna play a deck with “Morinphen”. Sure, we will give you ideas about how to beat “Evolzar Laggia” with said monster. You can request a review of any cards you think of. No matter if are obscure, obsolete, metagame, or just because your favorite character uses it. We will think positive and show you what uses and combos you can get with it, the difficulty to play it, or even the reasons why certain cards are forbidden.
As personal preference of the blog, we will also try to post the OCG version of certain cards to show their original artwork rather any heavy edits during localization (Or in a few cases the TCG scan being of poor quality, normally Secret Rares).
Judgment of the Pharaoh 