Out of absolutely nowhere Konami announced a brand-new alternate game format, which has been worked on for over 2 years, according to them. In the Genesys format, all cards are legal, except for Links and Pendulums, kind of proving the yugiboomers right. The rest of the cards follow a points system, where deckbuilders have a limit of points (usually 100) to make the best deck they can. Most banned cards conveniently add up to over 100 with most cards they could be abused with, while most cards that never had a place on the banlist are not scored at all. Unless they are Mikanko. Screw Mikanko in particular.
The 505 cards on the list can simply be separated into:
- a) currently forbidden/restricted cards;
- b) cards that would abuse cards from a);
- c) 1 card starters and consistency pieces for an archetype;
- d) generally powerful handtraps, board breakers or floodgates;
- e) cards that Konami hates for some reason.
Very few popular decks were unhit at all. Favorites from the past few years like Branded, Floo or Swordsoul still got hit, while decks that could reliably play control in a no-Link format like Labrynth or Dynomorphia were absolutely gutted. In fact, even the ancient, Edison era decks like HERO, Gladiator Beast and Lightsworn were hit. Unsurprisingly, out of all currently played decks, the ones that got the lightest slap on the wrist are the strongest ones – K9 Vanquish Soul can be played basically full power, or compared to the harsh restrictions placed on the VS engine in the last banlist, fuller power. Meanwhile Dracotail can swap a single copy of Faimena for a few handtraps that other decks would have to run for a premium.
On the topic of handtraps, the wild point allocations continue, with Maxx “C” being worth a whopping 50 points. That’s still twice cheaper than it’s cousin Contact “C” priced at 100 points. While an Ash Blossom or Imperm are a strong 15, Nibiru is just 10 and no Mulcharmy costs more than that. Droll is a cheap 7 and bewilderingly Dimension Shifter is only 5 points. This does mean that a deck that somehow avoided Konami’s gaze, like Exosister, can be the only deck in the room with multiple sets of handtraps including 3 Shifters. Aw shift…
We asked Konami for a comment on this new alternate style of game, that’s named disturbingly close to the worst Terminator film. Specifically, why this format took 2 years to make when TCG players have been asking for new ways to play (like Rush) for a long time.
“It started when the great YouTuber The Act Man opened our eyes to how the casual audience viewed the game. Turns out people dislike Links and Pendulums, because they dislike the color of the cards and the amount of words on them. We asked a recently-released language model for ideas and among them was a format that would remove those cards and assign points to the rest. As work began, we heard that even the president of the United States used a chatbot to assign points to other countries in the form of tariffs, validating our choice in front of everyone in the company who doubted this plan.
As you can imagine, giving cards points took up a lot of time. Not to mention the time spent getting the AI to understand what Yugioh was, what the banlist meant, as well as why ‘pop the baby’ was so funny. The final three months had us tinkering with the table formatting and removing Grok’s offensive additions to the Rescue-ACE card names. Now that the model has been trained, we can use it on other projects, like the widely-acclaimed World’s AI commentator!”
Be sure to visit the official Genesys announcement for tips or something and don’t forget to ask Grok for great advice and crime statistics during your Genesys journey!
