I have, in the past, posted the small handful of Yu-Gi-Oh themed open threads. But the truth is, I was simply reliving glory days. I have not played Yu-Gi-Oh since fall of 2015, almost a full decade ago. The game simply passed me by. Yu-Gi-Oh is somewhat unique amongst creatures & combat style TCGs1The “won’t start a fight” way of saying “Magic The Gathering clones, broadly defined” in that there is no hard resource system. No lands or mana crystals or anything of the sort. YGO’s gating and resources are more softly defined than that, and when you pour in a couple decades of power creep, you have decks capable of making very long and complicated combo plays on turn 1 consistently, and you have so many of these decks that they go from defining a metagame to simply being the way YGO is played. If you want to play YGO in any meaningful way, you have, for at least the past ~decade, needed to spend time practicing your bread and butter combos, learning the possible outcomes of your deck’s most common openings and interactions. It’s similar to fighting video games. And, no disrespect to either fighting games or Yu-Gi-Oh, but I’m just not built for that. I don’t wanna study before I get to have fun.
As it turns out, I’m not the only person who felt this way. Yu-Gi-Oh has changed pretty massively since its debut circa 200221999 if you’re Japanese and plenty of people who used to play heavily would still be interested in playing the game YGO used to be. So many so that they actually did that! Since ~2012, there has been an active fan-run scene playing older YGO formats, picking specific points in time that, in retrospect, were especially fun or interesting and building decks out of that card pool/banlist/rules. And recently, it seems Konami has accepted the inevitable and begun officially sponsoring past format tournaments, under the “Time Wizard Format” branding. One of the most popular of these is the “Edison” format.
Edison format is named for SJC3Shonen Jump Championship Edison, a tournament held in April of 2010. There’s a specific dynamic to Yu-Gi-Oh metagames worth defining here. Prior to September 2013, the TCG and the OCG shared the same banlist. As long-time YGO thread readers will know, the TCG and OCG are technically different games, with different card pools. Most notably, core sets release about 3 months earlier in the OCG compared to the TCG. Now, YGO doesn’t have a rotating format; the main/only competitive format lets you use every card ever printed, except for cards on the banlist. YGO has relied on regular banlist updates, combined with power creep, to soft rotate instead, requiring players to keep buying new cards to stay competitive. Combined with the OCG getting sets earlier, this would create a bit of a disconnect in the TCG, where the banlist would nerf the best decks of the previous format, but the new hotness was still a month or so out from release. These periods were frequently the most fun metagames, the only times Yu-Gi-Oh felt intentionally designed to be enjoyable to players first and foremost4Capitalism is a corrupting and corrosive influence, in matters big and small.
All this to say, SJC Edison was held during one of these periods, after the March 2010 lists nerfed the best decks of the pervious format but before The Shining Darkness released to redefine the metagame. It’s wide-open, allowing dozens of decks to find success if piloted and built well, and most importantly for me, it has those smaller and more immediate decision trees that mean I don’t have to practice. So it has become my latest obsession, and even though I kinda wish I wasn’t I am still hooked months after learning this was a thing. So I’m gonna make it everyone’s problem. Look forward to many more threads explaining the various engines and archetypes that power Edison format.