How Good are Board Clears in Every Card Game?

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Let me know about your favorite board wipes in the comments

#magicthegathering
#yugioh
#hearthstone
#pokemontcg

[Defenestration]

The scariest board wipe is when your opponent goes straight to the battle phase

[ggwpBC]

I think it's important to note that in Yugioh board wipes aren't all made the same. A card that "destroys" all monster is different from a card that "removes" all monsters or "send all monster to the GY", and better yet are those that banish or send cards back to the deck. This is because YGO has a ton of floating effects, so getting rid of a full board tends to really be a temporary set back, rather than a decisive blow.

[flockinify]

I wonder what Magic players think when they hear Yugioh has a costless Plague Wind and still nobody except a few archetypes uses it.

[bad-temis]

The thing to note in Yugioh is that there are lots of archetypes that either love to have their cards destroyed/leave the field or simply cannot be destroyed by card effects, which means that board cleaners could either give them an advantage or not affect them at all.
Because of that there are other types of removal that are often considered more disruptive for the majority of decks, such as returning cards to the deck or removing them from play, but at the same time, cards that can accomplish those things are not as easy to come by than a simple raigeki or dark hole.

[HTheHunter]

Theses days in Yugioh it can be more powerfull to negate all your opponents monster effects (like "Dark Ruler No More" or "Forbidden Droplet") rather the blow up their board directly.
Because monster that can negate spells or can't be destroyed, got more common. But that depends on the current meta and deck, like Tenpai right now, they play a lot more direct board whipes then usual.

[neveralive]

The most generic board clear in LoR is Ruination - 9 mana slow from Si that simply states "kill all units". It was sometimes used back in the day, as long as it used to be a region exclusive. But with the rotation Si's balance had changed (it lost most units that benefited from dying), and the card saw small play. With time passing more alternatives were printed, that had occasional success.
Berries in ice is a 9 mana slow from Freljord that removes all enemies for 2 turns, putting them into landmarks. This saw play in almost every non-specific Freljord deck, especially considering it could be paired with It-that-stares (8 mana 8|8 destroy all landmarks).
Castigate - 7 mana slow from Shurima that kills all followers. Saw some play in Senna-Nasus but was never top-tier.
Utter devastation - 11 mana slow cultist "kill all units except for allied darkins and allied equipped units". Seen 0 play because cultists were a super strong midrange deck, and by the time you had mana to play this card the game was already won.
You are going to Brazil - 10 mana slow from Si "An ally starts a free atack, challenging the strongest enemy. Kill all other units". Seen 0 maindeck play, but is often used as Mordekaiser's champion spell.
That-card-from-ionia. 10 mana slow "pick an ally. Recall all other units". Not really bad, but Ionia don't have strong units that can win by this. You could easilly stall to play this card, but Ionia itself is a stall region, so when you pick it you already have a powerfull thing in mind, that you want stalling for. It just was a worse alternative for many cool things.

[dt]

Adding onto Pokémon TCG - there was previous a supporter card called Avery which let you draw 3 and force your opponent to discard Pokémon from their bench until they only had 3 left (discard isn't a knock out so no prize cards). Draw 3 effects are one of the worst supporter effects and the least used but Avery saw a lot of play because it was nearly always disruptive against a full bench making the draw 3 worth it. Messing with the bench size is a similar effect as it can cause Pokémon to be discarded too and while it doesn't see a lot of play (it isn't overly popular on cards tbf) it can be very disruptive and is similar to board wiping (just not as strong as Dusknoir ofc).

There's also another kind of board wipe in Pokémon called Devolution which is a tool card that give a Pokémon an attack to devolve all the opponent's Pokémon. It can effectively one shot a Stage 2 evolution deck as they tend to use an item called Rare Candy to skip an evolution stage but it's incredibly hard to get items from the discard pile and Rare Candy decks don't run very many copies of their necessary Stage 1 Pokémon.

[Chex_Mex]

I love this channel so much. I've been developing my own card game and it's great to see some summaries of different effects in different card games in such a quick format!

[fugue]

11:35 I always feel the "week" effect on monday. Great video though !

[dsproductions]

For Yu-Gi-Oh, you can't talk about board wipes without mentioning weird ones like Linear Equation Cannon and Simultaneous Equation Cannon.
Not only are they perfect examples of how ridiculous YGO effects get (you have to do middle school math), but they are also quite strong because they don't "destroy" (which often benefits many decks). Instead, they are non-targeting effects that either returns cards to the deck or banishes the opponent's board, both of which are effects that are very rare for anything to be immune to.

[Rak]

imo in yugioh the most devastating form of board breaking is face-down banished, u know something "evenly matched" card. most of the time, face-down banished cards cant be recovered for the rest of duel

[maartenboy]

Nobody calls them Dark Holes. Just Board Wipes. Also destruction effects are bad in modern YGO (against monsters). Cards like Evenly Matched or Nibiru are far more popular. Something like Bystial Druiswurm and Kastira Fenrir is also great removal cause it's also a body.

[misteltein]

Gwent is interesting. The game has no actual "destroy all" boardclears, because it would fundamentally break the game, considering how important are card management and card advantage. However, history knows some precedents of boardclears.
Schirru - 3 power, Zeal, Order - destroy all other units with the same power as mine. Sounds absurdly bad for 10 provision, but Scoiataeli as a region has a lot of pings, buffs and ways to turn Schirru into actual boardwipe. There were some no-unit decks that used to win by setting up one big turn, equalising all enemy units and dropping the bomb. It wasn't consistent at all, but when everything worked fine it felt like one of the most toxic decks to play against.
Salamader - the card most gwent players think about, when they hear "boardclear". Salamader's ability is to give poison (when a unit with poison gets another poison, it dies) to all other units, but there are some ways to make this ability trigger twice. It is sort of meme-underdog deck currently.

[gallowshumor]

1:42 MOM came out like 6 months ago, how long have u been sitting on this video for lol

[deltaray]

To be fair, in yugioh, we just generally call board wipes "Nuke Effect". However, depending on if it specifically wipes monsters or spells and traps, it'll be called a "Dark Hole" or "Heavy Storm" respectively

[alexrivera]

In Pokemon, I think the closest thing to a board wipe is a Pokémon that attacks all the opponent's Pokémon at once, such as Amazing Rare Kyogre. It does take several cards and some luck, but you can get games where your opponent has a full bench and you attack with Kyogre to KO all of them instantly winning.

[javahikage]

I'm surprised you didn't mention Toxic Deluge for a Black boardwipe in MTG. It's Black at its finest: it does -X/-X depending on how much life you pay, which makes it super flexible in Commander where you start at 40 Life and it goes around Indestructible creatures.

[Asurendra]

You need to add digimon, one piece and the old broken dbz tcg in these videos

[PolishSasquatch]

Hell, I never played the Pokemon TGC, but going off of the RPGs where you can only have up to 6 Pokemon, you know right off the bat that a board wipe card just is not allowable. We're talking about a game where the objective is to wipe out your opponent's team of six, not the opponent themself. So a board wipe card, in the context of Pokemon, would wipe out not just the active pokemon, but also the benched Pokemon. It would get you too many prize cards, and just is not allowable in this game in particular.

[Ishogamble]

As a Yugioh player that has experienced Black Rose Dragon and Z Arc, never use board brakers against me, I'll probably have Starlight Road down