Thoughts on Manga Rules

[MewMew3]

This is about the rules of the manga version of the Yugioh card game. (Specifically, the “Super Expert Rules” from Battle City onward.

In the manga, you can only activate/Set 1 Spell Card and 1 Trap Card directly from your hand per turn. All Spells are like Quick-Play Spells in the TCG. You can’t activate them the turn you Set them but other than that you can activate them whenever you want on either player’s turn. And you can activate as many Spells and Traps as you want once they’re already Set and you passed your turn.

Spells have a big advantage over Traps since you can activate them on either player’s turn, but most Spells (in the manga at least) cannot directly counter your opponent’s attacks/Summons/etc. Traps can block your opponent more effectively. I have yet to see any hand Traps in the manga but they probably work like Spells.

The manga rules seem to make the game more fun, because there is more back and forth, more battling, between you and your opponent. They make the game feel more like poker since you have to spend more time reading your opponent, figuring out which cards they Set are Spells or Traps. They also work as a natural floodgate, without the cumbersome Mana Cards or Energy Cards you see in Magic or Pokemon.

Yugioh as it is played today is cancer. You have to spend 5 hours spamming Link monsters and setting up a board, most of it on Summoning a billion monsters in one turn. The Main Phase 1 has swallowed up most of the game like a tumor, and makes it feel more like solitaire than an actual battle with your opponent. The TCG was always like this but it’s ludicrous now. I’m not suggesting we switch to manga rules or anything like that, but wanted to show how the game was first conceived.

I even flirted with the idea of writing my fanfics with manga rules but it is too late now. If you ever wanted to know why Yugi makes wacky plays in the anime, now you know, since the anime was carried over from the manga, which had different rules.

[Sleepy]

There's another thing about those rules. You see how in the anime, the Battle City Duel Disks have a backrow compartment? It doesn't seem to exist in the manga version. You get the 5 Zones the disk has.

Random Trivia but:
Also, they are called Duel Disks because they are a direct updated version of the Duelist Kingdom ones Kaiba planned to use against Pegasus, which were actual round disks they'd throw onto the field. Though the Duelist Kingdom ones made you slap your hand onto the field zones and only battle with whatever that was at the center zone of the disk, as a built-in mechanic to allow hand cards be sniped by the players to try to decrease the impact of the hand-reading Pegasus did. Battle City ones no longer needed that feature which was specifically made against Pegasus. Instead, he implemented the Tribute Summon rules (presumably to make potential God Card holders have a harder time bringing them out against him... but props to him that it gave more meaning to the Star Levels and that he nerfed his own Blue-Eyes harder than most other Tribute Monsters in the process but he's the type of character that liked taking up the challenge). Plus the direct attack rule because tbh stalling was pretty cheap before that to stay alive against overwhelming fields and because it is just like him to tell players to mercilessly keep pushing.

All in all the manga had pretty interesting mechanics. There's also the Fusion bit, which didn't have actual Fusion cards, it just kept poly + the materials on board occupying zones. Kaiba's Blue-Eyes Ultimate was the 3 Blue-Eyes + Poly occupying 4 of his 5 slots, and when he added Megamorph it was essentially a full field. The De-Fusion combo thrown in the mix afterward is something that could only exist in the anime and IRL ways of playing it.

All in all, playing by manga rules would be a fun experience actually. The IRL game I can get as a long time follower so I know what makes players like the current way of it, but I also actually like the oldest forms of the game and I think it allowed individual cards to get more weight and presence and impact overall. It also allowed for things to be easier to understand if you want newcomers to jump in and try it out. Celtic Guardian has outdated stats and no effect in his earliest form... and I don't recall it actually winning a battle xD  but I bet many people recall it better than most of the fodder monsters used by Yusaku's Link Summons. 

Umm thinking about it, Yugi's weak monsters were almost always recurring ones, while the bosses were the one-shots, but Yuya's and Yusaku's are the other way around where one can recall the bosses but the multitudes of small fry cards were a lot more dispensable, like one-time p-pals or random cyberse pack fillers... including some of the Link 1s. Point is, I think something is lacking there that the game didn't used to lack, even if in exchange of more sophisticated effects and interactions....


Sorry for the necrobump but hadn't visited the section in a long while and just stumbled upon it. 

 

[MewMew3]

Thanks for the necrobump. I even designed new experimental rules with the game based on the manga and Duel Links.

------------

This new version of Yugioh has new rules that revamp the game. These rules are floodgates designed to stop the Link Monster and Spell Card spamming that plague the game today. The new rules make the game longer, give it a more back-and-forth feel between players, and force players to plan ahead more like in chess or poker.

 

The Yugioh game in the manga had similar floodgates, allowing the game to be drawn out and have more strategy. This version of Yugioh, called Dimension Dueling, looks as if the game directly evolved from its more primitive manga version into something more like what we play today.

 

The 5 limits:

• Only 1 Normal Summon per turn (as usual).
• Only 1 Spell can be activated or Set from your hand per turn.
• Only 1 Trap can be activated or Set from your hand per turn.
• Only 1 Monster Effect can be activated from your hand per turn.
• Only 1 Special Summoning of monster(s) from the Extra Deck per turn.

The field:

• 3 Monster Zones.
• 3 Spell/Trap Zones.
• 2 Extra Monster Zones.
• Graveyard, Field Spell Zone, Banish Zone, Pendulum Zones (in the Spell/Trap Zones), Deck Zone, and Extra Deck Zone are the same.
• Extra Monster Zones can become unique spaces for Character Cards in special duels similar to Duel Links.

The Deck:

• Both players start with 5 cards.
• First turn player does not draw.
• Decks must be exactly 40 cards.