After a few months of waiting, it’s finally time for a banlist. Some quick thoughts about the format:
I don’t think we’re in a terrible spot right now, the format is fine. MitsuYummy is an egregious deck, but other than that I don’t think there are any overt overperformers right now. I see Dracotail complaints starting to surface, but it’s the healthiest top deck we’ve had in the format in an entire year, or maybe even two years. However, Dracotail running away with the format might be a legitimate concern if we curb every other deck too much, so something probably needs to be made.
There is also K9, which provides some cool play patterns, but also some very frustrating ones, main one being its use as an engine to simply ignore interaction.
Lastly, we should address some cards that are just making general play experience worse, and making well-designed decks feel much worse than they would otherwise be.
Banned: Herald of the Arc Light
Probably the most obvious card on the chopping block. This is the most important card in making MitsuYummy a viable strategy. While I would like to see Habakiri specifically go, the chances of that are very low given his now-announced reprint (more on that later).
Herald of the Arc Light sits on this spot where I don’t think it’s a completely degenerate card nor an unreasonable endboard piece, packing two good effects and a decent amount of counterplay, but the only way it is being used now is to turn good boards into unbreakable ones and to turn a 1 card combo for one deck into a 1 card combo for 2 decks.
Pure Yummy doesn’t even need this card: its endboard provides good, layered disruptions without it, which is why I think this will be the only significant Yummy hit on the list, and the only one that should happen.
Banned: Princess Quinquery and Albion the Sanctifire Dragon
With the ever-increasing trend of Konami seemingly listening to the community and banning pseudoFTK cards, there is a good chance that Imperial Princess Quinquery goes too. While I don’t think the locks it enables are necessarily that efficient, it does promote a very boring play pattern, and is only ripe for abuse in the future; summoning monsters to your opponent’s side of the field is just something that has aged terribly and we will need to remove it from the game.
As for Sanctifire, while the chances are lower because of the Branded support in Burst Protocol, I wouldn’t put it at zero. Konami has started doing some bolder changes to the banlist, and it’s not like the Branded deck needs this card either. It would be good if it finally goes, and I am hoping that it will since it did not get a reprint in the structure deck and it doesn’t seem to have any other reprint in sight.
Banned: Maliss White Binder
I don’t care anymore, man. Red Ransom being banned was not enough in Master Duel, where Maliss is still seeing play, with 1 Dormouse, 1 Underground and 1 Chessy Cat. The TCG does have Link Decoder and Splash Mage, but I don’t care anymore, I don’t want to risk someone across my table playing this fucking go-fish, feast-or-famine deck that provides 0 interesting gameplay for both sides.
Anything that you want to do to curb consistency or extension for Maliss can just get replaced by other cards in the Cyberse lineup. Reduce consistency? They get Cynet Mining, Allure of Darkness or Small World; we already tried this with limiting Dormouse and semi-limiting Underground and White Rabbit. Reduce extension? There are billions of generic Cyberse monsters that can allow you to play through everything, and unless you kill March Hare directly (based) any way to get to her or banish her from the deck would nullify it. We already tried to stop its extension with Link Decoder and Splash Mage, it didn’t work.
Kill endboard pieces? How many do you want to kill? Allied Code Talker? Terahertz? Topologic monsters? And probably many more I can’t even think about, notwithstanding that their own in-engine cards can place a pretty decent board that draws them 3 or 4 cards, then 3 potentially 3 more draws on the crackback.
We just need to face that this deck is horribly designed and we need to kill it. In fact, I am concerned that White Binder might be too lenient of a hit, I would happily take Dormouse, March Hare and Red Ransom too just to be safe.
Limited: Habakiri and/or Preparation of Rites, Mitsurugi Prayers
Even if this card is about to get a reprint, I believe it will still see some sort of limitation. Personally, I think Mitsurugi is mostly a fine deck, but I hate how this asshole makes every board so much stronger and gives decks so many pushes. I find the lack of locks that this card has a horrible oversight, but it is what it is. Limiting would go a long way for decks to stop playing it as an engine, as the high amount of bricks it needs will make your good-to-bad-draw ratio a lot worse.
But it’s not the only way we can go towards this, and indeed I don’t think it should be the only one either. I think limiting or even banning Preparation of Rites would be a completely reasonable hit, as it further limits how many starters each Mitsurugi splash can have and how safe they are from handtraps, making it much less likely that players will be willing to sleeve Habakiri in their whatever decks.
Additionally, regardless of how they ago at solving the Mitsurugi splashes, limiting some amount of copies of Mitsurugi Prayers is also a good idea. I actually think that even semi-limiting this card would make a significant difference, as they actually do go over the 3 copies quite quickly. Even losing 1 Prayers would significantly hamper how easy it is to keep triggering your Mitsurugi Ritual Monsters and how difficult it is to remove them from the field.
How Do We Hit Dracotail?
I don’t want to do a lot to Dracotail, as it is a very healthy deck to be at the top. All of its cards have some degree of counterplay, it is good both going 1st and 2nd, doesn’t have any absurdly overpowered monster, breakers hurt it but are not totally polarizing, and its gameplay is more about outgrinding your opponent than putting so much disruption that they are unable to play the game.
There is a legitimate concern, however, that Dracotail could become too dominant if other decks are reined in too much, without giving anyone else a chance to compete with its raw resource generation. I’m not sure how we should go about it, though—I don’t want to hit any of the maindeck Monsters, as they are all well-designed cards that I want to keep in the game. The same goes for the Spells, though there could be a decent argument to be made that limiting one of them would force them to commit more of their recursion into returning the Spells into the deck instead of recovering Banished resources or just random Monster GY.
Another one that comes to mind, then, is limiting Arthallion to one or even two copies. In either number, it would leave Dracotail be a completely viable deck, but it would need to be more careful with its resources as it can’t infinitely summon Arthallion with no setup. I am confident that even 1 copy would be enough, as they can recycle it with its trap cards.
I am not too sure of what route we should take. I personally don’t want them to hit Ketu, as these are the types of cards we want to see in the game more (good going first, better going second), so I’m gonna go on a limb and say it’s gonna be Arthallion or Rahu.
Could We Ban the Trap Cards Instead?
There way to go towards these decks, which would be capping its endboards through its Trap Cards.
In the case of Mitsurugi, banning Purification and leaving everything else untouched (given that we solve how to stop decks from just splashing Habakiri, of course) would also be a completely reasonable move, as it would severely cut the ceiling as to what decks can do with it and what its own engine can do, while leaving room for its other advantages to shine, such as highly recursive monsters, great generation of advantage and excellent resource loop. It would also eliminate how the GY effect of Purification makes the Mitsurugi Rituals so hard to interact with if you even survive their board, despite Mitsurugi Prayers already making them pretty hard to interact with on both the GY and the field.
Likewise, banning one of the Dracotail traps would reduce the amount of recursion and draws it gets, limiting its ceiling without hitting its consistency. Any of the three Trap Cards would do the job here, but Dracotail Sting is the most egregious one, since it gives Dracotail a complete new tool that it was otherwise hard for it to access: GY disruption, a very pronounced weakness that it had before it got printed. It is also the hardest one to play around, as anything you do will turn it out, unlike Flame and especially Horn having a lot of built-in counterplay, and it would let Dracotail keep its main strengths online.
However, banning 1-ofs, especially banlists, is not usually how Konami does banlists, so I doubt it will happen.
Limited: Liger Dancer
It has happened before that decks can maybe deal with one copy of a card, but trying to deal with 2 is impossible. Liger Dancer is precisely in this spot: it’s frustrating enough to remove one from the field, but seeing two on the board makes the game essentially unwinnable. I think that 1 Liger Dancer is enough to keep Lunalight as a meta threat, while still giving opponents enough chances to respond to it without needing a million outs to unaffected monsters.
Limited: K9 Jokul
Do I think this is the best way to take care of K9? No, I’d much rather see K9 Ripper go, as it provides the most amount of ignorant gameplay, or kill Noroi due to how horrible hand-peeking feels. However, they are getting support soon, and Ripper is an integral part of the strategy, so my guess is that they’re just gonna curb its consistency and call it a day.
Unbanned: Droll & Lock Bird
This is the new controversial card in the YGO community. Personally, I don’t think it’s that big of a problem. Of the top decks right now, it’s only one of them that completely dies to Droll—Mitsurugi and its variants—while the other decks have clean or at least decent answers to it. Yummy, for example, can do most of its gameplan under Droll, it’s virtually a blank card against Dracotail, and while K9 can get hampered a lot, it can also negate it through Ripper or just pass on Ripper + Forced Release (and even an extra Rank 5 if they hard draw Izuna), which is a very respectable board given your opponent needed to commit a hard minus. It’s just not a huge issue for most decks.
Where it is becoming an issue, however, is when playing against it going 2nd. It greatly simplifies the decision tree of the player going 1st, as they know that they pretty much only have to deal with whatever is left on the board.
But honestly? I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Handtraps do this already when going 1st, and with Droll just hurting certain decks specifically, I don’t really understand where the hate for this card is coming from, not to mention it doesn’t really overperform over other going-1st cards such as Solemn Strike. In my opinion it is a completely overhyped card that, as usual, comes and goes from formats, and I would like to keep the band-aid on rather than risk a format being completely unplayable because Droll is not on the game.
Unbanned: Zombie Vampire
This is a very cool card that is pretty well-designed, as you need to risk giving your opponent advantage to use it, and 2 level 8 monsters are usually not easy to come by.
…Well, at least not without Habakiri, but we have (allegedly) already addresses this above.
We already know that we would not be playing Zombie Vampire on pure strength alone because it’s been much easier to summon him before through Horus cards and no one has batted an eye towards it.
Also, it just got announced for a reprint, so it’s kind of a moot point; this card is going nowhere.
Unlimited Cards
As for the cards that will be limited, I’m calling Mirage of Nightmare as the old-school card that we are getting back This would shock lots of people, they would try them out, and instantly realize how garbage this card is outside of gimmicky pile decks that somehow are okay with waiting for two entire turns for milling 4 cards.
Premature Burial and Return from a Different Dimension would see also zero play. Premature Burial is just a gimped version of Monster Reborn, which is already not seeing play. Yes, it has Equip support, but realistically no one is going to play Hidden Armory or something just to search Premature Burial, and we already have Isolde banned.
My guess is that it will be Mirage, though, since it just got pointed to 0 in Genesys.
Lastly, for some cleanup hits, Linkuriboh, Purrely Sleepy Memory, White Dragon Wyverbuster, Black Dragon Collapserpent and Runick Fountain are all probably going to come back to 3 and make no impact on the game. Branded Fusion is almost certainly coming back to 3 to sell Burst Protocol, and maybe the Konami intern will remember to unlimit Unchained Soul of Sharvara this time.
As for the Vanquish Soul deck, maybe they’ll let us have Razen back if they take some other piece like Hollie Sue, who knows.
Do I Have Any Wishlist hits?
One that I absolutely don’t think will happen is banning Called by the Grave, although I would be overjoyed if it happened. This is a bullshit card that just gives the W to the player going first, it has no place in the game and should never have been printed. They have limited it in both the OCG and Master Duel, which gives me hope, but it’s still a stupidly ignorant card that only serves to create unwinnable game states and nullify any chance you might have to play going second.
As for where I stand in the floodgate discussion, while I do think that the big three floodgates should probably go (so There Can Be Only One, Rivalry of the Warlords and Gozen Match), I am generally less aggressive on floodgates as people tend to be; my issue is always with power level and risk-reward, not necessarily with labeling something as bad automatically just because of the way it influences the game. Still, these were arbitrarily put to 1 with no further notice, so I don’t think Konami is going to do anything more about it.
Perhaps the hottest take here (and incoming “Labrynth player spotted” retorts), I think we should start talking about removing Ash Blossom for the game. For the record, if everyone started with a card that auto-negated the first Welcome trap that I tried to resolve, that’d be fine. I have much more of a problem with how Ash is being used in the modern days: essentially just extra copies of Called by the Grave that sometimes function as actual disruption.
This is because Ash can randomly negate many cards that make the player going 2nd try to catch up. Notably, the Mulcharmies are the biggest offenders, with it being the most stressing go-fish minigame that one could imagine, but there are tons of random carts that are much worse just because they randomly can get negated by Ash. Think cards staple cards like Phantastical Dragon Phantazmay, Book of Eclipse, and Songs of the Dominators or even engine cards like Rescue-Ace Impulse and Absolute King Back Jack just randomly lose to Ash for no reason, which makes playing them always feel pretty bad as you are always at risk of being instantly cut short of trying to play the game.
I know that we are all scared about seeming out-of-touch Yugiboomers that complain about handtraps when we talk about Ash, but we can print a replacement or something for it or just accept that there will eventually be more handtraps that can replace it (and in fact we already have a couple with the Dominus cards). I just hate seeing good going 2nd cards getting constantly checked by Ash when she is a pretty decent card independently of that. The OCG seems to start agreeing with me, as they have just semi-limited Ash Blossom, so I guess we’ll see.
Conclusions
Konami in 2025 has done a much better job at designing decks. All of them have clear weaknesses and strengths, and usually want to play out games instead of shutting out their opponent wholesale. However, they have been too lenient with restrictions, making some combinations of cards too powerful without an adequate trade-off.
With a few more cards gone, and the general trend of deck design going upwards, we are probably headed for a great year of YGO for 2026. Me? I’m going to wait for the banlist to drop to start testing YCS Guadalajara and commit to a deck, though I am probably going to take Labrynth again.
What about you? Do you think I missed any cards, or disagree with some of the things I proposed? Let me know down in the comments.
