Yugi Muto of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime might be considered the King of Games, but he didn’t always earn that title in the most legitimate of ways. Sometimes, his logic was a bit off.
Trying to save the world from destruction day in and day out can be hard, as such, sometimes, liberties must be taken in order to win. Plenty of times throughout the series, Yugi invented a rule or two in order to give himself an advantage or to just straight up win a duel at times. He used it to defeat the Egyptian Gods once, too.
Being Able To Attack The Ground
During the ceremonial duel between Yugi and Atem, Yugi activates a card called Ground Erosion to weaken Obelisk the Tormentor, and Atem mentions that spell and trap cards don’t effect the God cards. Despite this, Yugi claims that it will work because he is attacking the ground, not the actual monster. And this works, Obelisk starts losing 500 attack points per turn because of this.
Attacking The Moon, Too
During his duel with Mako Tsunami in Duelist Kingdom, Yugi needed to find a way to drain the sea that had been created around his monsters. As such, he did the only reasonable thing that he could think to do and attacked the moon. Not a monster, but the moon, in order to weaken the tide and Mako’s monsters. There are all sorts of logical problems here, but how Yugi was able to do this at all is the biggest question.
Rolling With Complete And Utter Cheating
This isn’t exactly creating a new rule, but it’s a flagrant violation of the rules, nonetheless. During Yugi’s strange duel with Kaiba’s bad side, he had no way to defeat Blue-Eyes White Dragon… until he did. Kaiba hacked into the system and started draining its attack points.
Yugi just rolled with this. Despite this being complete and utter cheating, Yugi allowed it to happen and used the advantage to get ahead and eventually win the entire duel.
Being Able To Fuse Monsters With Spell Cards
Once upon a time in Duelist Kingdom, Kaiba summoned Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon. This, of course, spurred Yugi to combine his Living Arrow and Mammoth Graveyard to fuse with Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon. As duelists know, as Mammoth Graveyard is an undead card, the monsters can’t fuse properly, and Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon starts slowly losing attack points and melting as the duel progresses. Yup, this checks out.
Monsters Bouncing Their Attacks Off Of Each Other
When Dartz and Yugi had their grand face-off, Yugi was faced with a pretty big problem. Dartz had summoned a monster with infinite attack points! This was bad, and Yugi needed a way out. His solution to this was having his Legendary Knights bounce their attacks off of one another until their power equaled infinity. You cannot do this, but that did not stop Yugi from, in fact, doing it.
Multiply Being An Absolute Wall
Yugi doesn’t use Multiply all too often in the anime, but when he does, it grants him blanket immunity from everything.
Multiply basically just stops anything bad from happening to Yugi while its effect is still on the field. Every time he uses it, his opponents basically just have to wait for its effect to wear off. Talk about an overpowered card… or Yugi changing its effect just a bit.
Mystical Refpanel’s Attack
When Joey and Yugi dueled while Joey was under mind control, Yugi activated Mystical Refpanel to bounce Joey’s effect back onto Joey. Except, he uses it to show Joey how much he cares, and reflects the attack… back to himself, the original target. Mystical Refpanel cannot do this, it has to be transferred to the other opponent. At the very least, it works, and Joey is freed from his mind control. That sort of grants Yugi a pass here.
Berserker Soul’s Effect
Berseker Soul is a card that, to make a long story short, allows the player to keep inflicting 500 points of damage to their opponent every time they summon a monster after they attack. In Yugi’s case, using this card allowed his monster to just continue attacking over and over, not just inflicting 500 points of damage. It was iconic though, so another pass here feels right.
Makiu
Makiu does have a real effect in the actual card game. However, when Yugi used it in the anime, it basically just let him do whatever he felt like he needed to at the time with Summoned Skull. Sometimes it did similar things to what it should have done. Other times? Not at all.
Dark Magic Curtain
Arkana was very close to beating Yugi in their Battle City duel. However, he lost because Yugi was able to use Arkana’s own Dark Magic Curtain when it was activated. Except for the fact that this is not true. In addition, he used it to summon a monster that it is not able to, Dark Magician Girl. He really pulled a double whammy of things that are not allowed with this little move. At least he saved the world later on in the season.
