Top 20 Favorite ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ Archetypes (Part 2)

1. Lightsworn

Generally speaking, a typical deck in any card game wants to avoid “deck destruction.” Losing cards from your deck can prove disastrous under normal circumstances. You could lose the cards you may need to play out the game properly. But in the Lightsworn archetype, self-deck destruction is the main mechanic of this archetype’s strategy.

Though it may sound a bit odd, this archetype utilizes this mechanic quite well. In fact, this was a dominant archetype in its heyday.

An archetype that focuses on Fusion Summons and those Fusion Summons are pretty and powerful cat creatures? Sign me up! At face value, this archetype is rather straightforward. You try to Fusion Summon into stronger versions of your main “boss” monster. Afterward, the archetype just tries to beat down your opponent with cats.

Then again, I don’t mind simple archetypes from time to time. Simple does not necessarily mean a lack of depth. I just think of this particular strategy as trying to find ingredients to work toward your recipe for success. Meow!

3. Infernity

This archetype does this in reverse. You want to have ZERO cards in your hand. The monsters gain their special effects when you are handless! What would normally be a big no-no with any other deck suddenly becomes the main tactic for victory. How interesting!

4. Dark Scorpion

Many of the cards themselves, though potentially decent, needed a lot of support cards to function. And because you needed so many support cards, it was difficult to play against any semi-decent deck back then unless they were playing casually as well.

Regardless, I liked the idea of being able to play a gang of thieves in a card game. Though the execution of the archetype was questionable, the concept was cool.

5. Dark World

Yu-Gi-Oh! really did experiment with all kinds of unique mechanics back then. Heck, the current game is full of innovation/looney ideas in card game form. The entire Dark World archetype is crazy, but it fits the theme. This deck’s whole strategy is to discard cards from the player’s own hand.

By doing so, the monsters from this archetype trigger their effects, and these effects packed a wallop. Also, these effects got even stronger if your opponent caused you to discard instead.