Uncovering Yu-Gi-Oh's Weirdest Cards #5

It's time once again to talk about the strangest cards that exist in the game of Yu-Gi-Oh. It's kinda hard to believe that I've already done 5 of these for Yu-Gi-Oh and 2 for Magic, but this topic is incredibly fun to talk about and there's always lots of material to cover. I'm not sure how far I'll end up going with this series, but until I reach a rut, it's more fun content for you to read and for me to write.

Let's go!

Tainted Wisdom

Tainted Wisdom is the oldest card to make this article, being originally released in 2002, and has quite possibly one of the most situational and useless effects that is possible to print on a trading card. When the card is changed from Attack Position to Defense Position (but not the other way around), you get to... shuffle your deck... and do absolutely nothing else.

I saw this card for the very first time when I was maybe about 5 or 6 years old in one of Yu-Gi-Oh games for the Game Boy Advance. If you can think of a noob mistake that a little kid could make (running 60 card decks, prioritizing Life Points too heavily, or running cards that are too hard to use), then the chances are I've probably done that when I was that young. And yet, even I knew exactly how useless this effect was and how difficult it was to achieve an effect that ultimately does absolutely nothing.

What exactly can you do with the card? Well, if you know what the top card of your deck is, then you can theoretically use this card to shuffle your deck for a chance to draw something better instead. That Horn of the Unicorn won't brick you anymore! Beyond that, you can fuse it with Ancient Brain to create Skull Knight. Neither of these are things you would actually want to do, but that's just the nature of trying to find things to do with cards with effects like this.

Time Magic Hammer

Time Magic Hammer is the very first Extra Deck Monster to appear in one of these weirdest cards articles for Yu-Gi-Oh (and spoiler alert, it isn't the last one). Time Magic Hammer is a card with a cool and very unique design. While it's a Fusion Monster by card type, its effect equips itself to a Monster as soon as you summon it, effectively making it an Equip Spell card that you need to fuse to use. Even though it has no effects it can use while it's not equipped to a Monster, you can still use it as a Monster should it be needed (although this should very rarely be necessary).

In addition to being basically a Fusion-Equip-Spell Card, the card also has a die roll effect where when the Monster it's equipped to battles another, you roll a 6-sided die and your opponent's Monster will be banished for that many of your opponent's turns until the first Standby Phase after the last turn of the effect. What is unique about this card is the way that this effect is phrased as the "Nth" turn and "N = the result", and it's the only card in the entire game to use wording like this. The effect is even double-sided too, working when the equipped Monster attacks or is attacked, making battle against it quite a challenge.

Since it can destroy multiple Monsters and keep them banished for different amounts of times, you can eventually run into having to keep track of multiple different timers at once, which can be quite overwhelming. Time to bust out that pencil and paper. A cute little trick you can do is that you can use effects that skip Standby Phases to entirely skip the window in which a banished Monster can be summoned.

A little piece of trivia is that its Attribute, Level, and stats all match Time Wizard, who's silhouette can be seen behind the hammer in the artwork. This references Joey Wheeler using Time Wizard as material to create the card in the anime.

F.A. Motorhome Transport

F.A. Motorhome Transport is a card with a specific quality quite unlike any other. The archetype has card effects that modulate Monster Levels which is important for both of its effects. The Monster's original level is 9, but it has effects that change based on what Level it's currently treated as, and you use card effects to change its Level. None of the effects themselves are really what lands this card in this article, but rather some other details about them in relation to the game. It can't be destroyed by battle or card effects when it's at Level 11, but it also has an effect when it's at Level 13.

That might sound a little bit weird since the highest Level that a Monster can naturally be is 12. This detail is basically why the card makes this article. Even though the effect itself may be fairly standard, and it makes sense in the context of the archetype, this is the only card in the entire game that mentions any Level higher than 12 on the card text and for this reason alone, I think it cements its spot in the list of cards that break the rules in strange ways.

Get Your Game On!

Perhaps this may feel cheat-y as the card is obviously promotional and not intended to be a real card to be played in a deck, but as far as I'm aware, it's a card that exists and saw print, so it counts. There's also some things about the card that I can talk about.

This card was given away at the 2007 Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship as a prize. Its not legal to use in a competitive duel, but you're still more than welcome to use it in an unranked environment should everyone else you're playing with agree to allow its use. Its name is a reference to the theme song of the Yu-Gi-Oh GX anime in which the card name are prominent lyrics of the opening.

What's particularly funny about this card is that unless your opponent just already knows, it's not technically possible for them to know whether or not you actually meet the conditions. Who's to say that your mother wasn't pregnant with you while she was attending the championship?

Aitsu

When I started this series of weird Yu-Gi-Oh cards, I had one specific rule in mind that I always followed: There wouldn't be any Normal Monsters, with one exception: Aitsu. If I really wanted to, I could talk about the plethora of Level 5 Normal Monsters with really low stats like Doma The Angel of Silence or Sand Stone, but let's be honest with ourselves. Would that be any fun?

Aitsu is particularly notable, not just because of its horrible stats for a Normal Monster that you need a tribute for, but also the way that they encourage you to play it and also their appearances in other places in the card game. This card goes alongside Koitsu, Soitsu, and Doitsu thematically and mechanically. These little guys are actually a bigger part of the game then you may realize as they all actually appear in the artworks of cards like A-Team: Trap Disposal Unit and Fossil Excavation.

The card is specifically synergistic with Koitsu, which attaches itself to Aitsu to give it 3000 ATK and piercing damage when it attacks a Defense Position Monster. This can be made easier by cheating the cards out somehow, but the way the card was intended to be used when the cards were made was that you would Normal Summon Aitsu, a Level 5 Normal Monster with 100 ATK and DEF, protect it enough until you could tribute 2 more Monsters to summon Koitsu and then attach Koitsu to Aitsu. This idea is done again with Soitsu and Doitsu, where the latter can be equipped to the former to give it a 2500 ATK boost. In exchange for 500 less ATK and no piercing damage, you don't need any tributes!

Aitsu, Koitsu, Soitsu, and Doitsu translate to "This Guy", "That Guy", "That Other Guy", and "Which Guy?" respectively. I take this to be a further indication that the cards are not intended to be playable, but rather are just meant to be charming in their own way. The characters themselves have also appeared in many other Konami media.

Gift Card

Imagine being a person still relatively new to the game, and perhaps even card games in general. They will perhaps take a look at this card and be incredibly confused since all the card seems to do is just give your opponent Life Points which is counter-intuitive to the objective of the game. Isn't it?

To a player more versed in how card games work though, only a single look at this card is all that is required to figure out that this card is obviously meant to be part of some wacky combo. Sure enough, that's what the card is used for. While on its own, it only gives the opponent 3000 Life Points, it can be combined with Bad Reaction to Simochi or Darklord Nurse Reficule which both have effects that convert Life Point gain into direct damage of equal amount. 3000 Life Points is a pretty significant chunk, and as such, 3000 burn damage from a single card is incredibly strong. Depending on your decklist and opening hand, this can possibly even be an FTK.

Gift Card is an example of a card that looks like it shouldn't be good, but because of the way cards in card games can perform basically anything, something can come by and make just about anything usable. Well, maybe not anything, but possibilities are never out the window.

Berserker Soul

Duro! Monsta Cardo!

If you're a Yu-Gi-Oh fanatic, then the chances are, this card needs no introduction. Not so much for the card in the actual game, but for Yugi Muto's duel against Weevil Underwood in the anime in which Yugi uses the card against Weevil to draw a bunch of Monsters, which is one of the most savage (and satisfying) overkill moments in... anything. While the Japanese version is arguably the most popular version, the English version is just as satisfying and no less dark (I'd post a hyperlink there, but that version of the scene seems to have been removed from YouTube).

The card in the actual game doesn't work the same way as the card in the anime though. In the anime, it allows a Monster with 1500 or less ATK (the scene in the anime specifically uses Breaker the Magical Warrior with its ATK reduced via Weevil's Infestation card) to attack again after drawing a Monster card. In the actual game though, it just simply deals 500 burn damage, resulting in much less damage potential. As of 2015, overkilling your opponent with the card effect just like in the scene is also no longer possible due to ruling changes as to when a duel is considered to be over.

The idea of drawing a bunch of Monsters in a row to kill your opponent through this card is incredibly awesome, but while Yugi had the "heart of the cards" and the power of convenient story writing at his disposal, people in the real world are not as fortunate. Let's try to analyze how you'd resolve this situation in the real game.

Activating the card requires you to declare a direct attack with a Monster with 1500 or less ATK, and then you discard your entire hand (which thankfully is allowed to be as little as 1 card), then excavate the top card of your deck and inflict 500 damage if it's a Monster and then you can repeat this up to 7 more times as long as you keep excavating Monsters. This cap of 8 total cards appears to reference the scene in the anime where Yugi drew exactly 8 cards with the effect (though Tea intervened and stopped Yugi before he could finish resolving the eighth card) as well as the fact that drawing this amount would equate to exactly 4000 damage, which is a typical amount for players to start with.

In order for this effect to resolve, your deck would have to be almost entirely Monster cards. You'd presumably be running multiple copies of this for consistency, but you would always run the risk of drawing one of your other copies while the effect is resolving, even as the first card. And since you're discarding your entire hand to activate the card, you better be really confident that this plan will work. This will be incredibly cool to pull off if you kill your opponent with it, but as humans are bound to the laws of probability (and also because the card was changed for the real game), it's not going to be the smasher that it was in the anime, as there's just a hell of a lot of factors that need to work out in your favor. At the very least, we'll always have that scene in the anime.