Magic: The Gathering Pro Rates BROKEN Yu-Gi-Oh! Combos! ft.  

I love that Cimo didn't even show LSV Sangan for the Yatalock but he figured they both needed to be banned regardless

If LSV isn't shown a Synchro monster by the end of the year I will riot.

This explains so much. Cimo goes to his locals gets Magical Scientist OTKed and says he loves Yugioh 25 years later Cimo is making a masochist series.

You should take non-yugioh players and do a progression series with them, seeing how players at the time without future sight would build decks

Troop, Dupe, Scoop God I needed that hit dopamine for my peak times as an OG Yugioh player that hasn’t played in 15 years

I think it's time for @LSVargas to take a turn at hosting with Vintage cube staples.

I feel like it was worth noting that substitoad came off the banlist at the exact same time ronintoadin was put on, and frankly ronintoadin was probably always the actual problem card because without it there's a pretty hard limit on good things you can do with substitoad because frogs don't really have good graveyard effects

1:00:35 LSV perfectly described here why YGO is so difficult for new players - you can’t summarize most modern cards very well. Each individual effect of Swap Frog isn’t complicated, but there are so many of them that it’s overwhelming to process. Nearly every modern YGO card is like this. Meanwhile, Last Turn has a much more complicated effect but I would argue it’s actually easier for a new player to comprehend - it only does one thing and that thing is easy to explain. YGO is hard to learn because you have to keep track of 3 different simple effects on every card in play, which is much harder to process quickly and MUCH harder to remember. Once you know what Last Turn does, you’ll never forget, but remembering exactly how all the effects of Swap Frog work isn’t easy until you’ve played with the card a bunch. Obviously there are a million ruling issues with Last Turn specifically, but I just thought this was a good insight. When people say modern YGO is too complicated, they’re not talking about Last Turns, they’re talking about Swap Frogs.

As someone who has dipped their toes into both YuGiOh and Magic I think it's funny that both games have FTK as an acronym but it means two different things. OK, well, I'm a Magic boomer so yeah I remember FTK meaning "Flametounge Kavu"

One of the things not mentioned for the frog ftk was that you didnt need to hard draw mass driver. after going through your deck and getting rid of all the frogs you can put poison draw frogs on the field, use swap frogs to send it to the graveyard from the field to trigger the effect and draw a card(you have to do it this way because poison draw misses timing otherwise). The deck ran enough cantrips that you almost guarantee you draw into a mass driver this way

I love when you bring LSV to the channel. Its amazing to see how he can guess things correctly even without context. Like him calling a ban onm Yata without the knowledge of how to do the lock, just because that textline is so abusable and unfun it just shouldnt exist.

Out of all of the people you quiz that did not have extensive Yugioh experience, LSV seems to have the best knowledge of card play patterns. He is so spot on with things, when he said Ab-zero can use itself to re-summon another Ab-zero I was amazed thinking that he have never played Yugioh on his life and that the fact that; it's not a combo yugioh players thought at the time but a very sensible and potentially strong one but he still pieced it together, just goes to show how he can put two and two just out of card game experience.

Something ironic about Last Turn from a design perspective is that it came out in the set with Spirits, and the 2 big high end Spirit monsters are the ones fighting it out on the card. But Spirits can't BE Special Summoned. Which means the battle in Last Turn's art will never be a way Last Turn is resolved. It almost makes one wonder if earlier in the design process for the set, Spirits could be Special Summoned, because their return to hand clause would still be really annoying. But then they saw that special summoning things with some of their on-hit effects (I think Yamata no Orochi's was discarding the opponent's hand) was actually a really big gameplay issue, so they added that text to all the Spirit monsters... but Last Turn's art remained.

You should do an episode where you bring on someone and only show them "bad" cards. There have been plenty of "bad" cards that have been banned. I feel like making them try to parse out bad vs bad but with an abusable effect could be fun. Or even cards that were bad but got banned vs good ones that never saw play (and therefore never banned).

57:33 “There is a *way,* then to get Yata-Garasu” Sangan/Witch are vital to this combo; it’s no wonder he missed out on guessing the consistency when that context was withheld.

You showed him exchange of the spirit, swamp, frog, and magical scientist combos that is a sick introduction to what makes yugioh crazy

Where Raigeki + Silver Fang?

Put a progression series with LSV and CGB!

I only have played HS/Runeterra/Snap. I've never played a match of Yu-Gi-Oh in my life, and I've barely played MTG, but for some reason I really love LSV's content and this kind of card game cross analysis.

You missed the witch of the black forest / Sangan for the yata lock.

Oh man, hearing LSV liking combos and I can imagine him breaking the game in a few years lol

Probably my favorite instance of the "Get player from TCG X to rate cards from TCG Y" video format. Please continue with this as an ongoing series through the different yugioh eras and summoning mechanics.

I'm addicted to this series now! 😅🤭 And this title promises to be something, I've suggested a couple of times now. I'm extra hyped now.

I occasionally play YGO Legacy of the Duelist for fun. It lets you put banned cards in your deck. I can confirm that Magical Scientist combined with XYZ monsters lets you OTK your opponent. It is still just as broken today.

Cimo: "DNA Surgery wasnt that good" Buster Blader: "And I took that personally"

frog otk, ruining kid's dreams at locals on a shoe string budget with how many commons make up the deck

Technically there’s a cheesey way to use exhange of the spirit still by using mega zaborg or something similar to mill the extra deck. Also some of the unoptimized tear ishizu decks topped with exchange of the spirit .

catapult tutle was banned twice after it got an erata because u can summon a 16k atk monster on turn one and still ftk

29:37 I never thought of it that way, but it's definitely on point assessment by LSV that Magical Scientist is just "TCG Red Flags" personified lol

surprised you didnt mention library ftk which was the best thing you could be doing in goat format technically

United we stand with toon black luster soldier was always my favorite combo to use.

LSV calling out YGO for its shitty text boxes lol I love it. It is SUPER confusing and hard to parse YGO cards

My favourite part out of all these videos that Cimo has been doing is the "does it say that it cant?" And look into the camera

The worst part about the Gearfried + Elma combo was just how versatile it was even in classic formats. Magical Marionette with this combo was also an OTK. The combo with Spell Absorption would give you effectively infinite life points so that you're opponent would deck out before they could lower you to zero, or you could add Fire Princess to make it an OTK (but that's a tough 4 card combo to pull off). I'm sure there are others, but the Royal Magical Library gets all the attention because of the FTK potential despite there being other degenerate combos that it enables as well.

these videos are such gold. i played both mtg and yugioh as a kid, but ended up going down the mtg path. im having just as much fun as lsv guessing at the strength of these cards and then having cimooo guide me down yugioh's memory lane

Congrats to LSV on having twins! They can play each other in their TCG of choice, if they decide to play anything. lol

Probably should have showed/reminded lsv about witch or sangan with the chaos data lock combo. Love the vids.

I haven't played YGO in years, but you sparked my interest again in these videos. I remember seeing cards like frogs, Elma and Makyura being banned and not understanding why as a kid. It's really fun to look back now with a better understanding of card game design why they deserve(d) their spot on the ban list. Opposite to that, my absolute favorite cards back then were Yubel and I'd love to see someone evaluating them!

I used to play “DNA SURGERY” in my Cyber Dragon Deck, declare Machine and just keep fusing all my enemy’s monsters into “CHIMERATECH FORTRESS DRAGON” 😂 still my alltime favourite troll play haha

Maybe a bit too in the weeds, but potentially worth noting that Jowgen just got the ban hammer in Master Duel for being abused by Sanctifier and (to a lesser extent) stun decks in general.

I love how LSV analyzes cards. You can see how much experience and knowledge he's got on card games.

Last turn is such a COOL card. Old yugioh was broken as fuck, but sometimes they cooked hard on those cards. The art is sometal too.

at my LGS, my friend was the first one to actually bring a Magical Scientist deck to the tournaments. And the two of us were basically the only two people there that realized just how much of a problem the card was until everyone started losing on turn 1-3. Some of the reactions were pretty funny, the deck actually caused one person to throw their cards in the trash and storm out. I also ran Last Turn/Jowgen before they erratad it to not prevent the opponent from special summoning. Admittedly the weekend before that I got banned for throwing my deck in a judges face for disqualifying me for "Using an illegal combo" that he and another judge approved at the start of the tournament.

Im suprised Library wasn't LSV's favourite card since hes a storm enthusiast

Young Cimo at the locals for the very first time: Wait you can use the effect of the scientist again? Antagonist: Does it say you can't? Young Cimo: Wait you can activate catapult turtle again? Antagonist: Does it say you can't? Young Cimo: Wait you can tribute catapult turtle itself? Antagonist: Does it say you can't?

next time you gotta show him Pole Position, Amplifier and Jinzo

I love this series. I always liked the „evaluating cards of other games“-videos, but sometimes the way people judged them was too arbitrary (eg. Judging old cards with modern standards). Cimo does a very good job of giving enough context that the guests can evaluate them decently. And LSV is my favorite guest in this series ever. I feel like listening to him, you can learn a lot about card games and game design in general. I feel like „MTG Professional“ isn’t enough of a title for this man, and not just because the trophies on the wall behind him speak a story themselves. I look forward to the next video every time.

As soon as I saw Gearfried, I knew it was going to be the Elma dagger - Library, one turn Exodia combo. This was my favorite deck back in highschool lol.

Hey! Long-time MTG player here, I started playing Master Duel because of this video series. Absolutely love it, great content!

I'm liking this series and I'm interested in the next video. I'm hoping we get into all the summoning types. But Cimo's doing well explaining the combos; And with LSV's understanding of mechanics, it's not necessary to know them to rate how well a combo works. However I like to explain things, so I'll give a rundown on they work. LSV, skip this post if you see this and want to continue evaluating cards completely blind. Summoning is placing a monster on the field. Normal - you can normal summon once per turn, unless stated otherwise by an effect. Tribute - a tribute summon is a normal summon but it requires sacrificing monsters on the field. 1 monster for a level 5-6 monster. 2 monsters for a level 7 or higher. Special - you can special summon as many times as you want in a turn. A special summon simply requires a certain condition to be met. Everything that isn't a normal summon is a special summon, except tribute and I believe gemini. Fusion - a summon done by combining multiple monsters, usually with a fusion spell. Usually it's done with 2 specific monsters, but some requirements are more generic Ritual - a summon that requires a ritual spell and sacrificing enough monsters whose total levels are equal to or greater than the ritual monster's level. Gemini - gemini summoning only applies to gemini monsters. They're effect monsters who are normal monsters with no effect until you summon them a second time or have something that immediately gemini summons it Synchro - synchro is like ritual except instead of a ritual spell, you need a tuner monster. Also the levels have to be exact and synchro monsters sit in the extra deck. Making them easier to summon. Xyz - an xyz monster requires monsters of the same level to be summoned. So a rank 4 might require 2 level 4 monsters to be summoned. Pendulum - pendulum monsters have 2 numbers on each side of the card. During the main phase you can set a monster on each side of the scale and you can special summon any number of monsters from your hand, or pendulum monsters from the extra deck, whose levels are between the numbers of the scale; Once per turn. Link - link monsters have a link number and simply require tributing enough monsters equal to the link number, and any other specific condition. The link number is also how many monsters a link monster counts as in certain circumstances.

I always feel like, after the second or so time on the show, like an episode you could do is showing them like a battle between two original like yugi and kaiba starting decks, then show them like a standard competitive match now just to let them see the true context of every time you say “classic yugioh” or “by todays standards”

47:02 this made me realize how I need you to explain to someone whose never played Yu-Gi-Oh how careful they need to be since if they name a card a bit too close to an archetype then they're in that archetype even if they aren't supposed to be

My DNA Surgery deck was a gravity bind/kinetic warrior deck. It was hilarious, fairly oppressive with other cards I ran, and around half the deck was either defending the combo or fetching cards lmao. I ran marauding captains and the big bomb was a Guardian Sphinx to reset the opponents field. You would reverse the flipping and summoning to keep it face up with DNA Surgery and marauding captains so the opponent couldn't attack the Sphinx on their turn, and it could still flip itself back down, then back up again, on your turn (at least as far as we understood the rules) as a soft board clear. It was not amazing, but could actually beat some good decks, as it packed a ton of answers in general. Oh, I HAD to bling the deck out too, as at that point you could only get Kinetic soldier as the game promo. It sucked tracking down 3 copies, but god damn it was hilarious to surprise someone with.

For the DNA Surgery + Insect Barrier combo, not only was this a playground combo, it was published for all kids to see in Beckett magazine. "They wrote an article about it, it must be good."

This is why LSV is one of the GOATs, he's so good at picking out interactions and play patterns even with minimal context and experience. Next time I want to see him rate the ultimate combo: Raigeki + Silver Fang.

19:45 "i must apologize i wasn't familiar with your game" xD

That first combo is from the only time I remember playing yugioh as a kid where my friend did that to me. Maybe it was a good thing because I literally never touched the game again lol.

The analogy of nadu mirrors with force of wills is hilarious

18:04 to be fair both the cards had to pay the price of having unbalanced spells around during Goat Format (2005). For those who dont know, I'm referring to Graceful Charity, Delinquent Duo and of course Pot of Greed. There is nothing inherently broken within both Tsukuyomi and MoF. Setting a monster and passing, resetting a monster and then having Tsuk back to your hand (basically wasting your normal summon doing so) was kinda slow even by old ygo standards. And of course they had to make some flip monster really good (effect wise and/or stat wise) in order to justify the commitment,but thats only fair. There are also many counters to this strategy (being monsters or spell cards) thus overall this combo is beloved by most of the player and creates a dynamic which is one of the major selling points of Goat Format. Let's be honest: if Konami just banned the Trinity (those 3 broken spells) leaving Tsuk and MoF limited no one would have perceived it as problematic. But in that period they wanted some kind of meta shift so they did slaughter goat format.

I love this series. I can't wait to see LSV get to more of the modern yugioh stuff

Great video, really enjoyed it, go LSV, you did great! Card Trooper is one of my favourite cards of all time, glad to see you enjoyed it.

Wall can be replaced by enough of the Solemn Brigade to stop a lot of things, and Jowgen can be replaced with a Barrier Statue of choice - usually Wind, but Fire and Water were reasonable too - but Last Turn is what was the centerpiece for the alternate win-con or draw-con.

That was fun. Dude is very likeable. Wishing him and his family to be good health and happiness.

LSV’s intuition for analyzing these things is so impressive

love hearing LSV go through these cards, very insightful

I love how he saw roanin and very carefully asked why it changes its name on the field.

@Cimo I think there were few cars which could combo play the Gearfried and Royal Magical Library for the person going second. Normal summon Gearfried Tribute to the doomed, target the opponent's monster discard RML and Monster Reborn the RML then play the quip spell. For turn-1 we would not use Tribute to the doomed instead we would play Cheerful coffin which just says the effect of discarding card(s) is the effect.

What I find really funny about the Last Turn combo is that, if the whole thing were legal today, I don't think the combo would even be functional based on what we know about how effects that want to summon cards mesh with cards that dictate the ability to summon. Since Last Turn is a card that Special Summons a monster, I'm pretty sure that it would not even be legal to activate it while Jowgen the Spiritualist is on the field, since you can't activate effects that Special Summon monsters(like Monster Reborn) while she's in play. Also, while Wall of Revealing Light's ability to stop attacks was kind of annoying, it wasn't the reason why it was on the Limited list for so long; it's just as easy to get rid of as it is to get rid of any attack-blocking floodgate. The real reason why it was Limited was because of its power to let you pay arbitrary numbers of Life Points, which they might have seen as a limiter on future design space.

I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure every video game in which the Yata-Lock is possible they are programmed to automatically surrender when the lock is achieved.

Insect Barrier and DNA Surgery back in the day was pretty good, and I cannot tell you how many times I got my butt handed to me with that combo in Tag Force GX

I would like to see some of these guys actually try playing a few games. It could be a "development series" where they start with a retro starter deck, then use a structure deck, then maybe that Arena draft with Battle Pack, Goat, or Edison. Then maybe they could try some simpler decks from later eras to experience all the summoning mechanics and more modern game. I'm just curious to see what they think of actually playing the game since it's so interesting hearing their evaluations of cards.

As a rabid devourer of card review videos, the love LSV’s quickness, conciseness and accuracy

I can't wait for the obligatory "Modern Yu-Gi-Ho! 20 minute long first turn setup combo video.".

Elma is one of those cards that you just need to instinctively understand: If something can be infinitely looped during a turn, it will cause problems later on. The less cards it would take to cause a loop, and have some kinda benefit come out of that loop the more of a problem it will be. Elma only needs 1 card to loop, and its not too difficult to imagine a card that can cause it's loop would cause some kinda benefit.

I never played Yu-Gi-Oh, I watched every episode with LSV, all of them great! =) Thanks!

I was hoping LSV would get a combo video like this didn’t disappoint!

I've watched the last video and only now I realized this is the legendary L. Scott Vargas!! Holy crap lmao

Would love to see junk speeder on an episode, one of the most broken cards that has never been meta

I think it would be cool to make a series where you make two forty-card decks with say three or four FTKs in each of them, and give them to two MtG or Hearthstone players, explain the basic rules of the game to them and let them see if they can figure what their win cons are and the correct way to play them

13:50 I see LSV has caught up with the rest of the Yugioh community in his understanding of Konami's ban philosophy.

Probably should have included Sangan in the Yata-Lock Combo. As without Sangan/Witch the consistency of this combo becomes non existent.

If LSV was shown Recycle, Dupe Frog, Inferno Reckless Summon and Des Frog that were all key cards to the Frog Loop, he would start to understand just how broken this combo was. Then, just for the icing on the cake, Pot of Avarice, Hidden Book of Spell and Royal Magical Library get thrown into a Frog Deck.

8:59 They did ban all that glitters in Pauper, though.

Nowadays, in a no-banlist format, Magical Scientist doesn't even need pre-errata Catapult Turtle to FTK; it can FTK by itself. Use it to summon Independent Nightingale, then summon 4 dark pendulum monsters (summon 3 Patissciel Couvertures then summon Sea Monster of Theseus and make Halqifibrax summoning Performapal Odd-Eyes Synchron), then use those to make 2 Supreme King Dragon Starving Venom and burn the opponent for 8500 damage. You can also protect this combo by summoning the Azamina omni-negate with Magical Scientist, so that even Nibiru or Ash Blossom won't stop it.

I think my favorite thing about the Magical Scientist FTK/OTK is that the original version that had Magical Scientist at 3 wasn't even tje best version of the FTK because later on the deck got Mother Grizzly & Mystic Tomato (for games in which you couldn't win on the first turn but got you to the turtle or the Scientist on turn 3 or 4) and Magical Mallet. As it turns out, two fewer copies of Scientist do not impact the deck's consistency negatively enough to counteract adding three more mulligan cards and six more recruiters. So this FTK ruined the game at two different points in Yugioh's history.

LSV: the Japanese game (OCG) has like a 1% improvement on text readability. Each effect is separated by a number. So even though there's no line break, you can at least know you stop reading and process one thing at a time. Whereas English cards have a huge paragraph and you have to read everything and then mentally separate what you read into different things.

We need a crossover where LSV shows Cimo how to draft vintage cube

Congrats to LSV! It would be really cool to see his takes on modern yugioh when he gets there 😂 seeing his progression thru the history of yugioh has been really cool. Looking back, what happened to yugioh 😮‍💨

Tell Vargas to get the twins going with some oldschool yu gi oh. There’s tons of old ds games and stuff that are accessible Playing Yu-gi-oh as a 6 year old with my Dad who was just trying his best, taught me both 4th grade arithmetic and gave me great time spending memories

I'm happy that my first reaction to trooper dupe was "trooper limited to 1"

I think that LSV could start topping goat format tournaments in like 2 weeks if he tried. I think he would crack such a small and highly refined format

I remember magical scientist from my childhood. A friend invited me over to his house and we built decks by picking up random cards from his floor. I drew magical scientist, but we didn't build extra decks, so he was just a level 1 300/300. The only other thing about that game I remember was that he summoned blue eyes and I was mad that I couldn't attack it because it was "home"

*Insect barrier* with *Dna surgery* - I so thought of that combo when I first saw the card(s), but yea playing 3 of's of both cards simply aint worth it for the trade off of them not attacking, definitely a niche strategy. Very interesting if you can pull it off and consistently but yea novel cards especially in this era of yugioh. *United we stand* and *Scapegoat* - Not going to lie, figured you'd show it with *Maha valio* and/or *Mage power* ~ Niche scenario, but yea there is at least some potential for crazy damage. *Magician of Faith* and *Tsukiyomi* - I was honestly thinking *book of moon* when you first revealed MOF. *Magicial Scientist* and *Catapult Soldier* ~ -COUGH- Cannon Soldier.

These videos with LVS have got to be among my favorite Yugioh videos in a long time! Two of my favorite content creators talking about a card game that one knows nothing about but taking their knowledge from another game and applying it in such a smart way has been so much fun!

While the card text size can seem silly especially on cards with little text, but that has kinda acted as a balancing mechanic along with pushing for format improvements and additional keywords, because the text size kinda caps what a card can do. now they have played around with text sizes to squeeze in an additional line but even now it still acts as kinda a cap, which for monsters is usually 6 lines of actual effect, and spells and traps at around 8-9 since they don't need to have keywords like a monster type or summoning requirements.

I am playing a Progression series with 9 other people, aka the usual adding the next packs to the pool, play with decks built using that pool, then add the next. We also vote on the banlist and we have decided, instead of banning Elma, to limit Royal Magical Library to 1 and not touch Elma at all. This surprisingly made any Elma combo very inconsistent. Inconsistent enough that it's just a niche FTK with no actual competitive relevance. It also solved a bunch of other FTKs like the Library FTK and some yet to come. I am surprised that the card was never touched in actual yu-gi-oh tbh.

Been playing for a long time. Never thought of the card trooper + machine dup combo 😂

Card trooper saying "this card you control, is sent to your graveyard" is not as weird as it sounds. It means that unlike a lot of other destruction effect monsters, card trooper must be on your side of the field to even resolve that effect. Other cards like the attribute floaters, the turtles, sangan, witch of the black forest... all activate regardless of where they came from, as long as they were sent to "your" graveyard via the way their effect states they will activate. Card Trooper's weird text solves that problem.

Quick question How do you play scapegoat in the tcg? Do you have like 4 seperate cards on hand handdrawn in case you play it or were there 4 little guys in the pack you bought?

I can't wait to see Cimo show someone Sanctifire + Nightmare. That'll be fun to see non-YGO players analyze it.