Who Let Him Play Yu-Gi-Oh!? [2]

Yūgen logged into both KaibaCorp’s and Industrial Illusions’ card lookup sites and searched the pools of cards currently available for direct purchase on the market.

The first thing—something any card nerd who transmigrated here would go looking for as long as they had a working brain—was, without question, that card…

Pot of Greed.

Or rather, the absurd early-anime-era draw engines Pot of Greed represented.

POT OF GREED
SPELL CARD
Draw 2 cards from your Deck.

That simple, brutal effect is exactly why, in the real-life game, it’s been a forever-banned card—in prison for life, and in any foreseeable lifetime, basically never getting out.

Its fellow inmate was “Graceful Charity,” which not only let you draw three, but then choose two cards from your hand to send to the Graveyard. Once Yu-Gi-Oh evolved into an era where the hand and the Graveyard were basically interchangeable resources, a draw-three that also dumped two was even more outrageous than Pot of Greed.

In the DM-era anime, duelists didn’t really treat these cards as a big deal. By the time of GX, though, it seemed the duelists in the anime world had finally started to notice how busted they were. After all, in GX you could already see the main cast packing at least one Pot of Greed and one Graceful Charity each—and in a duel with the heroine Asuka, you could even see Pot of Greed going into another Pot of Greed. Absolutely crazy.

However when it came to monsters, Yūgen started running into a real dilemma.

Because after scrolling the entire pool, he couldn’t find a single one he actually liked. As a transmigrated fan, he just couldn’t bring himself to use monsters that required you to obediently tribute-summon them, only for them to come out as some 2000-something ATK vanilla.

It wasn’t like there were no decent monsters—but a lot of them were more or less impossible to buy.

The first one that came to mind was Jinzo, one of Katsuya Jōnouchi’s signature monsters from the previous generation’s protagonist group. A Level 6 that only needed one Tribute, had a respectable 2400 ATK, and carried a trap-shutdown effect that was wildly over-tuned for early formats—so long as it stayed on the field, Trap Cards couldn’t be activated.

Yūgen remembered that even in the real-life game around this era, it was a high-quality standalone card and a common staple in top-cut lists.

But when he searched it up… it was out of stock.

Jinzo was a highly rare card, perpetually unavailable, straight-up impossible to buy.

That put Yūgen in a bad mood. He quickly realized another major difference between the anime environment and the real-life game: card accessibility wasn’t the same.

In reality, you could always look up the full card pool for the current format and use almost any card to build almost anything. Duelists in the Yu-Gi-Oh world didn’t have that convenience.

There were other cards he wanted too—but the moment he glanced at the price tag, he sucked in a sharp breath.

Yeah, no.

Yūgen understood perfectly well that in this world, cards were practically the same thing as weapons and power, so he’d already prepared himself to bleed money for anything essential.

But even so, staring at the downright criminal pricing on certain rare cards, he figured that even if he sold himself, he still probably couldn’t afford them.

And that wasn’t an exaggeration. He meant it literally.

Sure enough, the price gap between common cards and rare cards in this world was insane. Regular cards and normal packs were priced about the same as in his previous life—affordable for anyone. But for certain rare cards, saying “one card costs one house” wasn’t an overstatement.

And that was for the rare cards you could actually buy. As for the famously one-of-a-kind set—three Blue-Eyes White Dragon cards, all in Seto Kaiba’s hands—that was completely out of the question.

As he kept digging, he discovered that in this world, besides car loans and mortgages, there was even something called a “card loan.” As the name implied, you could take out a loan to buy cards.

“So this is what it feels like to have no cards,” Yūgen clicked his tongue.

Still, even with all these limitations, he managed to scrape together a workable deck concept using what he could get.

The original template for this concept was the milestone deck in competitive Yu-Gi-Oh history: the very first World Championship-winning deck.

Hand Destruction.

Maybe every new duelist who got into the game through the anime had a few unrealistic fantasies—face-offs between high-ATK boss monsters, fierce back-and-forth trades, clean frontal clashes, and a satisfying brawl that ended in GG.

But that was the fake Yu-Gi-Oh.

Real Yu-Gi-Oh is: at this table of two people, only one person gets to play Yu-Gi-Oh.

The safest path to victory has always been to erase every possibility in your opponent’s strategy, to the point they can’t even make plays. That idea runs through the game from start to finish—true today, and just as true in early formats.

Hand Destruction was a deck built on exactly that philosophy. As the name suggests, its tactic was to destroy the opponent’s hand so they had no cards to play. From the moment they sat down, all they could do was stare blankly and sit there AFK. You could call it the founding ancestor of underworld decks.

Anyone who faced it would have their entire understanding of dueling turned upside down. That poor bastard would go through a rapid-fire sequence of “blood pressure skyrocketing,” “why am I even playing,” and “I summon my fist in Attack Position” in just a few minutes.

So if you had to name the biggest flaw of this kind of deck, it was probably that the user’s personal safety was hard to guarantee.

Of course, Yūgen couldn’t possibly remember the full list for an ancient championship deck like that, and there were rare cards he had no way of acquiring anyway. So he only borrowed the core idea and built a new list of his own.

As for the empty slots in the Deck… for now, he’d just stuff in more Trap Cards with decent individual quality.

Honestly, by Yūgen’s standards, some of those Traps weren’t even necessarily valuable. They might not be that good. It was just that the more backrow you had, the easier it was to break your opponent’s mentality.

It wasn’t like he was some kind of devil who got off on ruining people’s day. It was just that psychological warfare was part of dueling too. Sometimes, breaking their mental before you zeroed out their LP was a very effective tactic.

Yeah. Believe it!

As he kept idly browsing, his eyes swept across a page—and suddenly, he lit up.

[Jinzo]
[Stock: 1]

Yūgen immediately scrolled back and clicked to check. But the site rejected him almost at once.

[Access Denied.]

[Academy Division Exclusive Card.]

Yūgen froze.

Academy Division? What was that supposed to be?

After another round of surfing, it finally clicked.

The so-called Academy Division referred to Duel Academy—the world’s largest dueling school, founded and run personally by Seto Kaiba. He’d bought an entire island as the academy’s headquarters and poured resources into it without restraint.

Students on the island had priority access to newly released packs, and they had channels to purchase rare cards that the outside world couldn’t get at all—plus, when they bought them, they received discounts so steep they were basically robbery.

Even ignoring the academy’s facilities and teaching staff, the rare cards and discount alone were enough to make anyone drool.

For students with strong enough grades, they could even exchange their performance and credits for cards. In a world where a single card could sell for a sky-high price, that could save a student an enormous amount of deckbuilding budget.

Not to mention: graduates of Duel Academy held the most ironclad diploma the dueling world had to offer. Whether you wanted to go pro or take a job at KaibaCorp or Industrial Illusions, you’d get priority referrals.

Scrolling down further at random, Yūgen even caught sight of Chaos Sorcerer!

CHAOS SORCERER | DARK | LEVEL 6
MONSTER | SPELLCASTER/EFFECT
Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must first be Special Summoned (from your hand) by banishing 1 LIGHT and 1 DARK monster from your GY. Once per turn: You can target 1 face-up monster on the field; banish that target. This card cannot attack the turn you activate this effect.
2300 ATK | 2000 DEF

Because it shared similar summoning conditions and effects with the more famous “Black Luster Soldier – Envoy of the Beginning,” after Black Luster Soldier was put on the Forbidden List, it became the lower-tier substitute. Card nerds even joked and called it “Little Envoy,” and it was a frontline threat in the current format.

In this world, Black Luster Soldier was an ultra-rare card. In the anime, the only known copy was in the hands of the King of Games, Yūgi Mutō. In GX, there was also an exhibition copy in Yūgi Mutō’s replica deck on display. Other than that, it had never been seen again.

So getting your hands on “Big Envoy” was almost impossible. But if he could buy a Chaos Sorcerer, that would already be huge.

Besides that, there were other decent rare cards too—also things you’d rarely ever see on the open market, and the prices compared to market value really were slashed to the bone.

Seeing all that, Yūgen took a deep breath.

Alright, decision made.

He’d get into Duel Academy first.

And if he didn’t make it…

He’d just try again!

—

This is a fan translation of 谁让他玩游戏王的！by 名称被占用 Rights to the original work belong to the creator. Please support them by exploring their original work or sharing it with others if you can. Thank you for reading and supporting my efforts to bring this story to a wider audience!