Chapter Text
From the desk of Mr. Slifer, December 15th, 2036
Imagine your average game shop: it’s probably filled from floor to ceiling with posters, miniatures, rows upon rows of books, an open room in the back where actual tournaments are held. In Japan, the newer stores built in the 2020s and 2030s occasionally take up a whole city block as a result to certain stadium-sized upgrades to their infrastructure. For those stores that are home to ‘5Ds’ format duels, sometimes repurposed race tracks are retrofitted with multiple floors of arena if they don’t utilize the race track itself. By comparison, the storefront likely takes up a fraction of that space; it’d be easy to mistake such enterprises for museum gift shops.
The biggest offender in downtown Tokyo is the Kaiba Corporation stadium megaplex, looming over most of the city like a statement of ego and excess.
The Mutou Game Shop is on the other hand the kind of relic we still see in American strip malls and some European towns. It’s got a corner all of its own just down the street from a high school, and its second floor serves as a small apartment for its owner, the Mutou family. Granted, it was only two members in the beginnings of Duel Monsters’ rise in fame, but the name is kind of a relic now.
You wouldn’t assume that the current owner, Yugi Motou is a champion of three international Duel Monsters tournaments. Despite being in his thirties, his crazed, two-toned-died hair is taller than most of him, and if not for that you’d assume he had the proportions of a hobbit. He certainly had the smiles and cheeriness to him when I first walked into his game store. Of course, he pegged me for a foreigner immediately, but by then I had brushed up enough on Japanese to actually talk to him.
For a man with a notoriously private and humble life, he was rather proud to open up about how he started his career. The first thing he did was lead me upstairs into his apartment (that is, after I told him I wanted to write a comprehensive history of the game, for baffled people looking in).
In his living room, propped above his TV was a golden box with intricate carving along every surface. At the center of the face left pointing our way was an Eye of Ra, sculpted only by the lids and not with the famous almost-pi-shaped teardrop that you often see it.
”My grandfather was on Crawford’s expedition to Egypt with a number of other archaeologists,” he said. He then told a story about the expedition that most articles at the time only mention in passing:
Apparently, his grandfather, Suguroku, had gotten trapped in a cave-in with a close friend of his, a then-graduate student named Arthur Hawkins. While they were trapped, the two of them in their attempts to dig out of the burial chamber found this box. From what Yugi told me, Suguroku was the kind of pack rat and xenophobe who saw most gaijin (like myself, I’d imagine) as inherently greedy and malicious, and so he never turned the artifact over to Crawford, especially not since he and his friend believed they were going to die there. “Not over my dead shriveled body,” Yugi paraphrased. If I were him, I’d have thrown in a few more expletives, but perhaps the air of Egypt combined with impending doom stopped him. The two of them were running low on water.
So naturaly they decided to play-test Duel Monsters. Pegasus had given them a pair of decks earlier in the expedition, and the two of them had a wager only matched by a game of Russian Roulette: the last of the water would go to the winner of the Duel.
Now, unlike official reports of duels like the one I interviewed Yugi about later in the day, the exact process of the duel wasn’t exact in Yugi’s retelling, but the two of them already had a handle on the playstyle of the game:
”My grandfather’s deck was the same one I beat Kaiba with in my first professional match. At the time, the banlist wasn’t entirely formalized, so they sort of left it for after they got out of it alive.”
”So did your grandfather beat Hawkins as easily as you beat Kaiba?” I asked him. He burst out laughing.
”Fuck no. Hawkins played it like he was playing Magic, so he just spammed a Shadow Ghoul self-milling deck until turn twelve. If anything, grandpa was going easy on him.”
Shadow Ghoul, for the uninitiated, is a card in Duel Monsters whose attack rises directly proportionate to the number of monster cards in the graveyard. Hawkins’s deck, reportedly, had multiple self-milling cards that he just used to power up his Shadow Ghoul. Doing so for twelve consecutive turns in early Duel Monsters was like buffing a monster in MtG with trample. In that kind of situation, especially in the early period of Duel Monsters where other kinds of removal was hard to come by (even before accounting for the ban list), there was little recourse.
”...But grandpa pulled through.” Yugi wouldn’t elaborate how, other than it was the same strategy that he had in his Kaiba match. “...but he gave the rest of his water to Hawkins anyway. The two of them were lucky that the other diggers managed to pull them out in time.”
”Wait, hold up, are you saying that your xenophobic grandfather actually saved the life of a gaijin?”
”You say that word like an otaku.”
”Says the guy who owns a children’s card game store.”
”Hey, first off, just cause Grandpa didn’t like foreigners doesn’t mean he hated all foreigners. Second, didn’t Pegasus name a card after you?”
I gulped. It is a shame I will never live down. We moved on to the subject of the puzzle. He went into an antique cabinet and showed me a necklace looped through a freakishly-large upside-down pyramid. The same eye of Ra was on its forward face, but the rest of it assembled like this resembled a Christmas ornament.
”Grandpa gave me the puzzle box when I was thirteen, and I took a year to solve it.”
”So what does this have to do with your dueling career?”
He gestured to himself. “If you think I’m short now, you’d never believe how short I was in high school.”
He went into a short tangent about how he used to be bullied by a pair of kids who became his best friends: Honda and Jonouchi. These two would later become rather infamous duelists in the Japanese circuits, for plenty of horrible reasons; American media in particular often made fun Jonouchi of for the fact that he has a striking resemblance to Owen Wilson, despite having way more swagger and a far less bored demeanor. Japanese media would often remark that Honda’s voice never quite matched up to the size of his body, let alone his own unique overconfidence.
While the two of them were Yugi’s bullies, they eventually mellowed out over the course of the release of Duel Monsters, especially after Seto Kaiba transferred to their school.
It was like an alliance of convenience at first, the way Yugi puts it, but the affection he clearly had for them spelled out a relief as well.
If anything, it was like Yugi and what he’d generously dub his “nakama” — this also included childhood friend, Madolche deck player, and later national Duel Monsters champion Anzu, and transfer student Bakura — banded together to make sure Seto’s genius didn’t make him a shoe-in for class rep.
Japanese high school politics is, by not only Yugi’s account but many others, serious business.
”Wait, so you’re telling me that the puzzle did something around this time?”
”Uh Yeah, I was getting to that.”
I found it pretty easy at first to dismiss Yugi’s allegations about the Millenium Puzzle, but then he talked about the incident that lead to the two exhibition matches of late 1999.
One of the things Suguroku won from Arthur Hawkins other than a favor (one which Yugi alleges he milked all the way until his death in 2016) was a then-rare Card: the Blue Eyes White Dragon. In 1999, there were only four in circulation, and one can easily see why: before the advent of effect monsters that could counter it easily, it’s 3000 attack and 2700 defense points were the most daunting obstacle a duelist could face.
So in one afternoon after school, Yugi and his friends — a graduation from just ‘Nakama’ — visited the shop to see the card, safely locked in Suguroku’s personal collection.
Seto had followed them. Yugi recounted the brief, heated exchange by the thirteen-year-Old billionaire and his grandfather:
”So Grandfather tells him: ‘no, it’s not for sale,’ and Kaiba opens this briefcase.”
”Full of money, right?”
”No, Duel Monsters cards. Not even really rare ones, but the kind of stuff you just find in booster packs. Battle Ox, really?”
”You’re kidding me right?”
”Nope. As soon as grandpa rebutted him a second time, he just kind of stormed off. Grandpa insisted that he desperately needed to get laid.” Yugi’s face contorted. “Not that he minced words about ‘kids like him’ anyway.”
Now official reports about the scheduling of Suguroku v Seto are shrouded in mystery, some lost to a lack of documentation on Kaiba corp’s part, but if Yugi’s account is to be believed, Suguroku drove down to their headquarters that weekend, and was made an offer he couldn’t refuse: Duel Kaiba for the Blue Eyes; win, and Kaiba would set foot in his shop again. Lose, and Kaiba got his Blue Eyes. Now, the fact that Suguroku accepted these terms implies a literal gun was put to his head after it was presented. He wouldn’t have been coerced by nothing less; Yugi speaks of a man who could take a lead pipe to the knees and still truck on, especially if the Egyptian incident is to be believed.
Yugi was on his way there after receiving a phone call from Seto Kaiba later that evening, but by the time he received that call, Suguroku had suffered a humiliating loss not seen since Weevil vs Rex in the 2000 Australian regional finals.
The final score: 8000 to 0 Life Points. The duration of the game: two turns. The game ended on Kaiba’s second turn.
Turn one was a shoe-in. Suguroku’s strategy was similar in his match against Hawkins, if his hand was any indication: the win condition for his deck was to draw Exodia.
In MtG there are ‘no players may win’ conditions on cards. There are ‘this specific player may not win’ cards. Duel Monsters already had a rare instant-win condition: Exodia. Headed by Exodia: The Forbidden One, an otherwise completely garbage card with 1000 attack and defense points, the combo was hard to pull off but not unheard of (before its unceremonious banning in 2009). Exodia’s effect states that if a duelist has the arms and legs of as well as Exodia itself, then they win the duel.
Sugoroku’s deck was a rare 60-Card deck mainly built around spellcasters, but a good chunk of it was built around draw cards — three Pot of Greeds (again, before their ultimate banning very soon after Yugi’s match), three Graceful Charities (also banned, as of 2009, because of this exact style of deck), to name a couple. While Graceful Charity milled two cards for every three they drew, Pot of Greed, whose effect is otherwise a mysterious enigma, allowed two draws from the deck for free. At the time, this was a deck with few weaknesses, especially if the player won the coin toss to go first.
Kaiba had one thing going for him even on turn one that would prove to be a pain for those emulating his playstyle: a deck based around Blue Eyes White Dragon.
In MtG, you have mana. You play lands, and use mana to summon monsters and cast spells. In Duel Monsters, your limits on power are tributes—for a monster like Blue Eyes White Dragon, one normally needed to sacrifice two monsters to put one on the field. Even back in the earliest days of the game there were tools to get around this. Kaiba happened to have a deck with the remaining three Blue Eyes, and a deck he tailor-made to get them out onto the field as soon as possible, to beat down an opponent as quickly as possible.
His deck, in contrast to Suguroku’s, had 40 cards, a far more standard size because it meant drawing into needed cards — or combo pieces as players called them — faster.
At the beginning, both players draw five cards. Every turn they draw one. It’s like MtG with a faster pace. Each turn they can ‘normal summon’ one monster, but they can play as many magic cards or trap cards as they have in their hands. This includes any cards which can summon a monster outside of the limited one normal summon — that’s called a ‘special summon.’
The goal is to make your opponent’s life points zero by dealing damage to them either by attacking a weaker monster on the board or by attacking them directly.
Perfect. Now you know how to follow your average game of Duel Monsters. It’s not as hard as some news outlets want you to believe — such as the Sean Hannity podcast episode where the Fox News host famously said that Duel Monsters would never catch on because it was filled with ‘Liberal voodoo.’
Kaiba wins the coin toss to go first, which is not the worst thing to happen to Suguroku, but it’s not good either. It gives Kaiba time to build the board up that he wouldn’t have had. Kaiba seizes the chance — he plays Kaibaman (700 Atk, 600 Def), a card that can tribute itself to summon a Blue Eyes from the hand without needing another one. He takes full advantage of that.
On a sad note: his deck had three of those in there too, each one made by Pegasus personally in the initial print run of Duel Monsters; hence why they were called ‘Kaibaman.’ Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does screw the rules. He sets two face-down cards: two Magic Jammers, which negate magic cards at the cost of a discard from the hand for each one.
On the first turn, the player going first cannot attack. This leaves Suguroku with one decisive chance to humble Kaiba.
His hand has three Exodia pieces, including the ‘head,’ and an arm and a leg. He has two Pot of Greeds, and his first turn of the game allows him to draw a Graceful Charity.
The only flaw in Suguroku’s strategy is pure probability. In competitive poker, one does not get ‘better’ at drawing cards. In trading card games like Duel Monsters, you can construct a deck with as intricate and effective a combo as you can, but you still can’t get better at drawing cards, even when you have cards that make you draw more cards. This clash of probability versus skill had allowed people like the infamous ‘Bandit’ Keith of the small United States’ league to win through various slight-of-hand tricks that later got him blacklisted. But in this duel, slight of hand was no legitimate technique.
This was Suguroku’s downfall here. If he had forty cards in his deck, he would have had a significantly greater chance — the difference between a 2/35 chance and a 2/55 chance is already astronomical before you account for the chances of drawing two different cards in two consecutive turns (1/35 * 1/34 compared to 1/55 * 1/54) is already an astronomical difference. Cards like Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity make this process easier by accelerating consecutive draws instead of going turn-by-turn, but even then, Card Games just don’t care.
So Suguroku plays both Pots of Greed. He draws four cards, and only gets one more Exodia piece — the other arm — and the Dark Magician (2500 attack, 1700 defense. Requires two tributes). He plays Graceful Charity, but he draws a Kuriboh (300 attack, 0 defense; can be discarded to take no battle damage) and two other nonessential cards, discarding the Kuriboh with Graceful Charity. Because Exodia parts are garbage by themselves, his hand as a whole is garbage. He passes; Kaiba couldn’t possibly kill him next turn, he thinks; both players have 8000 life points to chew through, which means three turns from a single Blue Eyes White Dragon. He hopes he can get one more turn to draw into the other leg of Exodia.
Kaiba’s turn begins with his draw—and the thing that enables the first documented One Turn Kill strategy in the game:
He draws Lord of Dragons (1200 attack, 1100 defense; prevents spell cards from affecting dragon type monsters on the field). He has the two other Blue Eyes, and Horn of Dragon Summoning in his hand — that’s a spell card meant only for the Lord of Dragons which ‘special summons’ two dragon-type monsters from the hand.
There are three guesses as to what Seto Kaiba, spoiled rich kid with a dragon fetish that lasted well into his forties, does.
And so Kaiba Summons Lord of Dragons, plays the Horn of Dragon Summoning, and sweeps away Suguroku’s life points for game. Nine thousand points of battle damage in a single game became the recipe for the first One Turn Kill deck as we know it today — and Kaiba hadn’t entirely stumbled into it on accident. After all, his connection with Crawford through Kaiba Corp allowed him what amounted to ‘first dibs’ on a wealth of support that other regional let alone world champions had to build from scratch.
“When we got to Kaiba Corp, Grandpa had been really beat up,” Yugi said. “I sent the others to the hospital; I guess I felt kind of compelled to beat Kaiba at his own game. I just couldn’t stand his smug face.”
Now, Yugi went into a little digression about the Millenium Puzzle here that still baffles me. He told me that it just kind of gave him a confidence boost. At least that’s what I took from what he said, but at the same time it’s hard to believe his literal words:
”There’s a different side to me when I sit down and play any game with anyone. It’s always been there, but the Puzzle had something inside it that reinforced it.”
I later chased down testimony from Anzu, Jonouchi, and Honda about this, and they all seemed to have the completely ludicrous consensus that there was a spirit inside the puzzle that possessed Yugi and gave him not only a lot more courage to do stuff he wouldn’t have normally done, or at least strategic advice that might have been hiding in the back of his mind. Either way, at the time I interviewed Yugi, he either gave me the impression that either all four-foot-six of him just ran up to Kaiba and punched him in the mouth until they could duel, or he laid down the gauntlet right then and there with a few choice words about rich people.
Yugi v Kaiba was a more public exhibition match, but its audience was at first more consisted of Kaiba Corp’s other board members, Pegasus Crawford himself, and their classmates who actually had any interest (who could have been counted on one’s fingers and toes). Yet, the footage and play-by-play were seminal and often studied by later designers of Duel Monsters, especially when it came to its Ban List.
Yugi dueled Kaiba with a 40-card version of Suguroku’s deck, a change he made very quickly before their duel. It was the same Exodia deck, with some paring down, and the decisive difference between this duel and Suguroku v Kaiba.
Turn One starts off with Kaiba drawing into one of the best hands he could ever manage on turn one: Double Summon (a spell card that when played allows a player to conduct two normal summons that turn), Pot of Greed, Kaibaman, and two Blue Eyes White Dragons.
Yugi on the other hand looks at first like a complete dead draw: Kuriboh, The Dark Magician (2500 Atk, 1700 def, requires two tributes to summon), and all three Pots of Greed.
Now, the duel also begins very similarly to how Suguroku lost; Yugi loses the coin toss, but in both the video footage and in written reports Yugi seems calm, almost cold and distant at this, despite Kaiba taunting him: “Your deck is just a rehash of your old man’s isn’t it? None of his pathetic cards can beat my deck.”
On Kaiba’s first turn, he draws his Lord of Dragons, then plays Pot of Greed, getting both his third Blue Eyes and his Horn of Dragon Summoning. So Kaiba plays his combo from the previous match, with the important difference that he set it up in one turn instead of two. He plays Kaibaman, activates it’s effect, summons one Blue Eyes, plays Double Summon, and summons his Lord of Dragons, plays Horn of Dragon Summoning, and Special Summons both his other Blue Eyes White Dragons onto the field.
All the while, despite Kaiba gloating, Yugi remains really calm for a guy who looks like he might lose.
I asked him why:
”Well, Kaiba won the coin toss, so I had one more turn, and that’s all I needed to win.”
You may have noticed that Kaiba emptied his hand in his combo. Yugi’s strategy would seem just as reckless if not more so.
On his turn one, he draws into Exodia’s left leg. It’s a start, but he has no breathing room here, except for a Kuriboh, but even that leaves him open to 7200 damage on the following turn. No, he needs to draw into Exodia right this turn, or at least four out of five pieces in one turn if he wants even the slightest chance of winning right now.
His first Pot of Greed draws the right arm and a Graceful Charity. His second gives him the right leg and Summoned Skull (2500 Atk, 1500 Def, requires one tribute to summon). His third gives him the left arm and a trap card, Dark Bribe (negates the activation of a trap card at the cost of a discard). He plays Graceful Charity, and by now he has either drawn or milled a grand total of nine cards from his deck, and Kaiba is getting visibly impatient.
”Just draw your last pathetic card, Yugi!” He says, minutes away from flipping the table.
On the footage, Yugi only laughs. His poker face had been inassailable until now; his hand is now a bloated mess, but he slowly starts putting cards face down in front of him in a neat stack, but not on the field, until there are only five in his hand.
”I wanted Kaiba to really feel that sting of defeat,” Yugi told me. “So I laid it on him.”
On the footage, we can see Yugi just splash out all five pieces of Exodia in front of him, for Kaiba to stare at. While the footage cuts out there with the coverage declaring Yugi the victor, Yugi himself seemed to remember things slightly differently.
”He felt stung alright, just not in the way I thought he would.” He shook his head. “I guess he never really felt a loss like that before, but it really threw him for a loop. He even tore up my grandpa’s Blue Eyes after he raved that there was no way I’d beat him.”
Yugi had executed a move that’s slightly different from a One Turn Kill: a First Turn Kill. On either player’s first turn, a combo of this sort is usually one has to be either extremely lucky to pull off, or they have to specifically design their deck to do it. Both Kaiba and Yugi had decks designed for One Turn Kills, but Yugi’s was the first one where half of it’s cards would be banned for it.
Pot of Greed was put on the Ban List not even twenty four hours after their duel. All the Exodia Pieces were ‘limited’, or proclaimed to be so powerful that players could only have one of each in their decks, and Graceful Charity was much the same, limited to One.
Let’s not forget that Yugi’s deck only had one of each Exodia piece in it already, but those drafting tournament and exhibition match rules in Konami and Industrial Illusions knew from there that Yugi’s strategy would be potentially copied by every player in the game if they didn’t lay the hammer down.
”Grandpa made a good recovery, but he never wanted to press charges,” Yugi said. “I mean, if I were in his spot, I’d totally want to see Kaiba in jail, but, well, he was probably watching the stock market in the hospital.”
Yugi was in fact referring to a declining period in Kaiba Corp’s stock. After Kaiba’s first turn defeat, the stock fell to as low as 2 USD a share. The initial slump was alarming enough, but it would take a whole year and a half, and a pair of Duel Monsters tournaments to avoid a hostile takeover by Industrial Illusions. A gaming company. Taking over a military arms manufacturer.
Analysts across the world had to pick their jaws up from the floor when that almost happened.
My interview with Yugi was far from over after covering that duel, if only because I had to find out why he had the drive to become champion of the Battle City tournament, and why he, instead of letting the fame carry him to success, decided to stay in his family business.
I also had to wonder if he had Kaiba on speed dial still.
The answer to that was yes, and that he still had a dragon fetish.