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A Guide to Common Terms for Yu-Gi-Oh!

Section 1: General Yugioh #

Locals #

Your local game store where you play. Typically tournaments at these are reasonably casual, though some can be quite competitive.

OTS Championship #

A bigger tournament that your locals may run a few times per year. You can earn an “invite” to the World Championship Qualifier.

Regionals #

An even larger, more competitive tournament. Often, finishing in the Top 8 or Top 16 will earn you an “invite” to the World Championship Qualifier.

YCS #

Yugioh Championship Series. These are much larger events, typically with thousands of players. Finishing in the Top 32 at one of these is seen as a huge achievement (and will also earn you an invite to the World Championship Qualifier).

WCQ (Nats / Nationals) #

World Championship Qualifier. You must earn an invite to attend one of these. There is one each year in Europe, North America, Central America, South America, Oceania, Asia, and Japan. Finishing in the top few at one of these will earn you a spot at the World Championship.

North American players refer to the North American WCQ as “Nationals” (Nats). For other players, “Nationals” refers to their National Championship. In most countries, these are like a large regionals. In a few countries, they can be much larger, though still not as large as a YCS. They are not WCQs.

Sneak Peek #

These are events the week before a new Booster Pack is released, where you can buy packs early.

(Sneak Peeks have been replaced by “Premiere! Events”, but many people still refer to them as “Sneak Peeks”.)

TCG / OCG #

Yugioh is split into two regions: OCG (Asia) and TCG (Rest of World). Cards are typically released in the OCG a few months before the TCG. Players will often talk about cards which are currently in the OCG, in anticipation of their release in the TCG. Some cards are exclusive to the OCG, and some to the TCG. The two regions have separate ban lists. You are not allowed to use cards from the OCG in the TCG, even if a TCG version exists.

Meta Decks #

The current best decks in the game. Players will also call these “competitive” decks. If you intend to do very well at a Regionals or higher event, you will need to be playing one of these. At locals you should be able to compete with non-meta decks.

Casual Deck / Casual Player #

A deck which is not “meta” or “competitive” is often called “casual”. A casual player is one who plays “casual” decks.

Different people draw the line in different places for what counts as “competitive”, and what counts as “casual”. It’s often a source of pointless arguments. Some players can be unpleasantly elitist about the fact that they only play “casual” decks, and look down on people who play the best decks. Similarly, there can be elitism in the opposite direction too.

Tier 0/1/2/3 and Rogue #

People often try to put the best decks into categories called “Tiers”. There is no agreement about what counts as “Tier 1”, “Tier 2”, etc., so it’s usually unhelpful to talk about. Two players might be in agreement about how good a deck is, but they will disagree about what “Tier” the deck is in, just because they have arbitrarily drawn the line on what counts as “Tier 1” in a different place.

The following is what the website Pojo used for its Tier Lists many years ago. It’s the closest to an agreed upon definition of “Tiers”, but again, most people will not stick to this definition. Still, it should give you a rough idea.

  • Tier 0: A deck which is taking more than 65% of the top spots at events. These rarely happen.
  • Tier 1: Decks which are taking more than 15% of the top spots at events. There are typically only two or three of these at any given time.
  • Tier 2: Decks which are taking more than 5% of tops. Again, there are usually only two or three of these.
  • Tier 3: Decks with more than 1% of tops. There are usually 5-10 of these at a time.
  • Rogue: Decks which have topped at least once recently.

Section 2: Kinds of cards #

Handtrap #

A card with an effect which can be activated from your hand during your opponent’s turn, to disrupt their play. These are especially useful when your opponent is going first, since they are the only way to disrupt their plays on their first turn.

Examples:

Floodgate #

An effect which continuously prevents players from doing something. These are typically played in your Side Deck, then brought in against a deck they would be particularly devastating to.

Examples:

  • Anti-Spell Fragrance prevents players from using Spells for a turn, and stops them from activating Pendulums as Spells at all.
  • Dimensional Barrier prevents players from Special Summoning Ritual / Fusion / Synchro / Xyz / Pendulum Monsters for a turn, and negates their effects if they already have some.
  • Rivalry of Warlords prevents players from having Monsters of different Types.

Floater #

A card which gains you another card when it has been destroyed, banished, etc.

Example: Graff, Malebranche of the Burning Abyss

Win More Card #

A card which is only good when you already have the upper hand. You should generally avoid including these in your Deck.

Example: Supreme King Z-ARC. This card is quite powerful if you can manage to summon it. However, if you’re able to summon it, you must already be in a winning position. This card doesn’t actually help you to win the game, it just helps you to blow your opponent out of the water in situations where you were going to win anyway.

Staple #

A card which is good in a wide variety of decks. You can find a list of current ones here: List of Staple Cards.

Starter #

A card which begins your plays, not needing to be set up by other cards.

Example: Snake-Eye Ash can start your Snake-Eye combo by adding Snake-Eyes Poplar from your Deck to your hand, which can then Special Summon itself from your hand, and the combo continues from there.

One of the keys to building a good deck is to make sure that you have a high probability of drawing one of your starter cards, or drawing a way to get to them.

Extender #

A card which allows you to extend the plays you can make, either by allowing you to do a bigger combo than you otherwise could have done, or by allowing you to recover and continue your combo after it has been stopped.

Garnet #

A card which you don’t want to draw, because it’s useless in your hand, but needs to be in your deck to use another one of your cards. The term originates from Gem-Knight Garnet which needs to be in your deck to activate Brilliant Fusion, to summon Gem-Knight Seraphinite.

Boss Monster #

A stand-out powerful monster for your deck which requires some setup for you to summon, and will be difficult for your opponent to deal with. It will have a very powerful effect, and typically high ATK too.

Example: Ultimate Conductor Tyranno

Section 3: General Game Concepts #

Archetype #

An archetype is a group of cards which share part of their name, and are designed to be played together. Yu-Gi-Oh! decks are almost all built around an archetype.

Example: “Trickstar”

Card Advantage ( +1 / -1 ) #

Count how many cards you have on your field and in your hand. Count how many your opponent does. If you have 7, and they have 5, that means you have a card advantage of 2. Doing something which makes your card advantage increase by 1 is referred to as being a “+1”. Destroying an opponent’s card on the field is a +1. Drawing a card is a +1. But don’t forget what it cost you to draw that card.

  • Upstart Goblin is a “+0”, as you are drawing a card but you’re also losing Upstart Goblin itself.
  • Allure of Darkness is also a “+0”, as you’re drawing 2 cards, but losing the card itself and the card you have to banish from your hand.
  • Pot Of Desires is a “+1”, as you’re drawing 2 cards and only losing 1: Pot Of Desires itself. Cards in your deck do not factor into card advantage.

Increasing your card advantage is not everything, but it is one of the most important things to keep in mind while playing and building your deck.

Toolbox #

A group of cards where each is useful in a different circumstance, and can easily be summoned or added to your hand depending on which is needed.

Extra Deck Toolbox examples

Runick Toolbox examples

Engine #

A group of cards you can put into a deck to allow you to do a particular combo. For example:

Brilliant Fusion engine

Note that Brilliant Fusion is now banned, but it’s still useful as an example.

Brilliant Fusion sends Trick Clown and Garnet from the deck to the grave, and summons Seraphinite. Then Trick Clown’s effect summons itself from the grave.

This provides you with an extra Normal Summon for the turn (by Seraphinite’s effect), and 2 Monsters on the field to use for Link / Xyz / Synchro material. This is often played by decks which can strongly benefit from having a 2nd Normal Summon.

Brick #

A bad hand. It also means a card which tends to cause a bad hand when you draw it. There are some cards which you want to be in your deck so that you can get them from the deck with an effect at the right time. If you draw them at other times, they can be useless. If you find that a card in your deck is often being a “brick”, it may be a good idea to stop using that card.

A deck may be called “bricky” if it is using lots of cards like these, and so often has bad hands.

Consistent #

The opposite of “bricky”. A deck which rarely gets bad hands, so that you can consistently do the combos it is designed to do. A deck which can consistently do good things is usually better than one which can sometimes do great things. Making your deck as consistent as possible is one of the main skills in deckbuilding.

OTK / FTK #

An OTK (One Turn Kill) is taking your opponent from 8000 LP to 0 LP all in the same turn. An FTK (First Turn Kill) means to win the game on the very first turn of the duel, before your opponent even gets a turn. FTK’s are rare. If a deck able to FTK consistently shows up in tournaments, it usually causes one of its cards to get banned.

Win Condition #

Your “Win Condition” is what you need to achieve to actually win the game. Of course you need to reduce your opponent’s LP to zero, but what do you actually do to make that happen?

Maybe your win condition is to go first, do a huge combo on the first turn, and end up with four high-ATK monsters each with an effect to negate something from the opponent. If you can manage that, then your opponent will not be able to do enough once their turn comes, and then you can just attack them next turn with your bunch of monsters.

Maybe your win condition is to gradually gain more cards available to you than your opponent, by interrupting their plays at key moments, making them lose out on more cards than you did. Eventually you reach a point where you have enough resources that your opponent just can’t do anything without you shutting it down, and you attack them until they run out of LP.

It’s important to think about what your win condition actually is, and to plan towards achieving it, rather than just “doing stuff”.

An “Out” #

The card you need in order to deal with a specific scenario.

  • If your opponent has a Spell / Trap which is shutting you down, your “out” to that could be Cosmic Cyclone.
  • If your opponent has a high-ATK monster which is unaffected by card effects, your “out” to that could be tributing it with a Kaiju monster.
  • If your opponent has a few monsters whose effects are going to be too difficult to deal with, your “out” to that could be Dark Ruler No More.

It’s vital to know what popular decks can do to shut you down, and to include in your deck an appropriate number of ways to “out” them. Your Side Deck will be crucial for this.

Interruptions / Disruptions #

Ways you have to interrupt your opponent’s plays. For example, if you ended your turn with a Cyber Dragon Infinity on the field, a set Solemn Judgment, and an Ash Blossom in your hand, you would have three “interruptions” for your opponent’s turn.

Overextending #

Going too far with your plays, in a way that actually harms you rather than helps you, or is at least very risky. This could be by using up too many of your cards or effects to further your plays, in a way which your opponent could ruin without using up many of theirs. It could be by wasting your resources to summon extra monsters, when those monsters don’t actually help you much.

Power Creep #

On average, newer cards are made to be more powerful than older cards, so that people will want to buy new cards. This has been happening continuously since the game began. As a result, once you compare cards which were released a few years apart, you will notice a significant difference. This is called “power creep”.

It’s important to note that this is only on average. Many cards coming out today will still be worse than some from five years ago.

Section 4: Some More Slang Terms: #

  • Backrow: Spells and Traps on the field.
  • Beater / Beatstick: A monster with high ATK, particularly one where its ATK is its main feature.
  • Board: The field, or the cards on your field.
  • Bounce: Return to hand.
  • Burn: To deal LP damage with effects instead of attacks.
  • Crash: To attack an opponent’s monster which has the same ATK or higher, so that yours is destroyed.
  • Dead card: A card which is useless at that point in the game.
  • Dump: To send a specific card from the Deck to the GY.
  • Hate: “Spell & Trap Hate”, for example, means cards which deal with your opponent’s Spells and Traps.
  • Mill: Send from the top of the Deck to the GY.
  • Mirror: A game where both players are using the same deck.
  • Netdeck: To copy somebody else’s deck, usually from someone who has done well at a large tournament.
  • Nuke: To destroy all monsters on the field, all Spells & Traps, or both.
  • Overpowered (OP) / Broken / Degenerate: It’s too powerful, in a way that (some) people don’t like, or is just unpleasant.
  • Pitch: Send from Hand to GY
  • Pop: Destroy.
  • Scoop: Surrender.
  • Search: To add a specific card to your hand using an effect. A “searcher” is a card which does this.
  • Shark: “Rule sharking”. To abuse the game’s tournament policy in some way to gain an advantage.
  • Spin: Return to Deck.
  • Stack: To put a particular card on top of the deck. This can refer to doing so using an effect during the game, or to cheating.
  • Swing: Attack.
  • Tech card: An unconventional card choice included in your deck.
  • Top Deck: When you’re in a situation where you’re really depending on your next draw to be good, that draw is a “top deck”.
  • Vanilla: A Normal Monster.
  • Wall: A monster which is difficult to get rid of due to high ATK/DEF, an effect which protects it, or a combination of the two.

 

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