In any given format, there are only 200 or so cards that see active competitive play.
If you were to look at data from the current format, and count the number of cards with a greater than 0.01% chance of appearing in a tournament match, you’d find 184 cards. And in Yu-Gi-Oh, you can only play a maximum of 90 different cards in one deck. So if we’re speaking objectively, even if the best deck in competition and the best deck to beat it both played 90 totally unique cards, there would still be 4 cards in that 184 that really aren’t justified in an objective format.
But Yu-Gi-Oh’s a game, and its formats are never objective. Most decks run closer to 30 unique cards rather than 90, and most formats have 30 decks that see play, not 2. There’s 37 right now for the curious. Most of them are terrible, and a big reason for that is the common use of over-hyped or misunderstood cards.
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