Greetings fellow duelists!

The Forbidden & Limited Card List has been updated by Konami and the new list is in effect since april 11th, 2016. The full list can be found here: http://www.yugioh-card.com/en/limited/

In this article I want to give you my thoughts on the most recent changes made by Konami in the TCG areas.
I will go through the changes made in order from top to bottom the way they appear on the list.

Newly Forbidden

Firstly Performage Damage Juggler and Performage Plushfire are now banned for the advanced format. This is a huge impact on the all so popular PePe-Deck that relied on Plushfire to start off a lot of its most powerful combos.
Plushfire is a ridiculous card, that bears extreme explosive power as it can both fill your extra deck and summon whichever Performage monster you want from your Deck or Hand. On top of that it has another effect while in your Pendulum Zone that allows you to survive your opponent’s turn and take advantage of Plushfire’s summoning effect as well.
It also is a scale 5 and searchable by Damage Juggler.

Performage Damage Juggler is just as versatile as Plushfire as it can both reduce damage to 0 during your opponent’s battlephase and thereby serve as a handtrap that lets your survive opponent’s plays and while in graveyard you can banish it to get just any Performage monster that you need at that time.
This versatility along with the sheer power of the Deck they were mostly played in justifies a ban in my eyes.

The next card on the list is Tellarknight Ptolemaeus. Ptolemaeus was mostly abused to summon Cyber Dragon Infinity easily or abuse other powerful and otherwise hard to summon XYZs such as Constellar Pleiades or Artifact Durendal.
Due to this capability and the fact that Ptolemaeus was only run in singles anyway Konami had no choice but to ban the card in order to prevent single strategies from abusing it.

Next card on the list is Chicken Game, this card was only used in degenerate strategies such as FTKs and just in general had no healthy effects on the game so Konami rightfully decided to take it out of the game again.

Lastly Wavering Eyes. This card was gamebreaking in the pendulum mirror match but also very powerful on its own in every Deck that relied on Pendulums. Its capability to fill up your extra deck while also searching an adequate scale to unleash an army of monsters when destroying 2 or more scales made it way too powerful to stick around, not to mention the ridiculous effects that it could have when destroying 3 or for 4 scales.

Newly Limited

Luster Pendulum, The Dracoslayer is the first card in this section. This card comboed up nicely with Performage Plushfire and one might think that after Plushfire has been hit Lust Pendulum could have remained untouched by the list. But that is wrong in my opinion since the card has more to offer than a neat combo along with Plushfire. It can fill up your extra and search for more scales thereby giving you access to more ressources every turn and it is a tuner which gives you access to Ignister Prominence, the Blasting Dracoslayer. This multitude of uses justifies its limitation to 1.

Performapal Monkeyboard is the next card newly limited to 1. The card searches any lv4 or lower Performapal monster for free the turn it was activated and basically gives you the corresponding scale so you can Pendulum summon all you want. Searchers that have too little cost or too many useful purposes should not remain at 3 and this offers both so a limitation makes sense.

Same goes for the next two cards: Performapal Skullcrobat Joker and Wisdom-Eye Magician. Both Search out practically any card of their theme without much effort and should therefore not be at 3.

Elder Entity Norden is now limited to 1 as well which is a little surprising to me. The card is very powerful – no question especially with instant fusion being able to summon it easily at the cost of just 1000 LP, but it has not seen too much play in triples lately and I wonder if limiting it to 1 will actually change much about the way it is being used.

Especially with our next card limited BACK to 1: Thousand-Eyes Restrict. This card is extremely powerful but with the meta accelerating further and further and Metamorphosis still being banned I don’t think this will see much play. Maybe in some Monarch builds using Instant Fusion to summon it steal a monster and then tribute it for something big… only time will show !

The next Extra-Deck card on the limited list is Ignister Prominence, the Blasting Dracoslayer. No questions asked this card is nuts and deserves to be limited. It can clear virtually any threat out of the way has huge stats and is rather easy to summon for a PePe deck, so it belongs on the limited list for sure.

Draco Face-Off is just another example for bad card design in my opinion. The card was too good at first glance as it fills your extra deck and summons or gives you a scale and on top of that it is a quickspell so it can serve defensive purposes if needed or be used to deal the final points of damage.

Reasoning has seen more play lately especially in Kozmo Builds and since Konami doesn’t like strategies to be able to dish out OTKs too easily and Reasoning helps doing just that they restricted it back to one for now, which is ok in my opinion.

Upstart Goblin is now limited to 1 which really doesn’t make too much sense to me. The card itself is very balanced and the fact that it thins out your deck and lets you play with a 37 card main deck if you run it in triples is not strong enough to warrant a restriction to 1. But Konami clearly wanted to make a statement against too stable and reliable strategies that can put together the pieces of their combos swiftly and constantly every game, so this makes sense in that context.

Newly Semi-Limited

Debris Dragon has seen literally no play since Dragon Rulers have died out, so there was no reason to keep it at 1. In my opinion it would also stay effectless at 3 if the meta doesn’t change around a lot.

Allure of Darkness is back at 2 which is interesting given the fact that Konami limited and banned a lot of draw and search cards on this list. This may be interpreted as a desperate attempt to push Blackwings yet again… but I doubt it will have much of an impact.

Emergency Teleport is now limited to 2. This is a good decision as it was way too easy to deal 4500 or even more damage with a single Emergency Teleport in Kozmo. Also with the new Kozmos from Breaker of Shadows its versatility has been further increased so 3 would just be too much.

Newly Unlimited

Dark Magician of Chaos, Tragoedia, Advanced Ritual Art and Crush Card Virus.

I think the only card we have to swiftly talk about here is Dark Magician of Chaos which has been crippled by the latest errata and will therefore do absolutely nothing regardless of whether it is at 3 or 5 or 10. Same goes for Crush Card Virus. Tragoedia and Advanced Ritual Art have not been played for a good handful of formats now and probably won’t make a difference at 3 either.

All in all I think this list is ok if it comes to competitive play as it clearly impacted the most dominant deck heavily, I would just like Konami to generally stop increasing the power level of new decks while desperately trying to make up for their dominance on each list afterwards. Also I don’t like the practice of errating forbidden cards to an extent where they become pointless and can go from 0 to 3 without seeing any play whatsoever ( I loved Crush Card Virus and Dark Magician of Chaos back in the days ;( )

That’s my opinion on the new list, if you want to share yours feel free to message us on our Facebook or comment below!

Merlin Schumacher

ABOUT MERLIN SCHUMACHER
Merlin Schumacher is an Economics and Business Administration student in Dortmund (Germany). Merlin has been a member of United Gosus since 2015, serving on our Player roster. To learn more about Merlin, please visit his member profile.