Alternative Win Conditions - Failed Cards and Mechanics

In Yu-Gi-Oh there are three standard ways of winning a Duel; The most common and well known is reducing your opponent’s life points to zero, with the second being the opponent surrendering, and the third being deck out.

But as well as the game’s main win conditions, there are also a number of alternative win conditions caused by card effects that we’re going to explore today and discuss why they never really took off and the issues with Alternative Win Conditions as a whole.

Script by Cursed Eyes

-----------------------------------------
#yugioh #ygo

[novakrabby]

The worst alternate win condition for me growing up was *Dinner is ready*
Where any players mom would decide to interrupt the game in favour of a meal and call the winner depending on who had the most lifepoints at the moment
_this is true, my mom knew some rules and this prevented arguments between my brothers_

[SproingBoing]

I distinctly remember some years ago somebody asked a card designer "Why put bad cards in if you know nobody will play them?" and his response was something along the lines of "Not every card has to be for serious play, we print purposefully bad cards sometimes just for fun because if every card was 'the next must own' then the game wouldn't be able to sustain itself and burn out."

I'm paraphrasing, of course, but I'm inclined to agree since I love the goofy little cards they print out from time to time like the Normal Monster "Potato & Chips" which was made *_solely_* to promote a certain potato chip brand by including a copy with the promo snacks.

[darkhawk]

I love how the surrendering win condition is represented by floowandereze.

[anavaeru]

I always forfeit before I win to give my opponent the ultimate win condition… friendship.

[jaythephoenix]

Last turn really needed a "negate all effects in the field, then your opponent can special summon...."

[passaroquetzalcoatlus]

While talking about Angel of mischief, you could’ve mentioned Lyrilusc FTK, that by accident gave support to mischief’s win condition by attaching 10 materials to her

[geminimaxxim]

One of my favourite monsters is Number 88: Gimmick Puppet of Leo. It too has an alternate win condition. The fact that it got no mention in this video is a testament to how unremarkable it is. Poor Leo 😔

[nilly]

I don't know why but the line "...but inspire certain duelists into trying to make them work" for a short moment pulled me into a world where Yu Gi Oh was as big as in the anime.
The thought of people toying around with funny bad card effects being described as "Inspired duelists" just has this sense of seriousness that you'd only expect in a world where dueling is THE big thing.
Beautiful.

[bassicallyandre]

Haven't played Yugioh since high school (2009), but I got curious and started bingeing this channel.
Kinda got me back into Yugioh and I ended up buying Yugioh Legacy of the Duelist (Link Evolution) for PC.
Learning about Pendulum and Link summoning made my head spin at first, but it's not that complicated. Makes things interesting.

[kennydarmawan]

Ah yes. Alternate win conditions.
They're either WAY too good or WAY too bad.

[chengliu]

I feel like it is very difficult to make an alternate win condition card that is good enough to be playable but not so good that it is banned.

[sirswagabadha]

Watched coder play floo for a bit today and get back to back surrenders, so floo representing the surrender win condition is 100% accurate it seems

[DanTheMeek]

True story inbound about an alternate win condition. It was the early 2000s, and I was in a yugioh tournament with big cash prizes on the line. I'd won about 80% of the tournaments I'd entered weekly around the state over the past year, so I was admittedly feeling a bit cocky. It's the opening round of a single elimination tournament, and what I'd estimate was about a 10 year old sits across from me at the table, setting down a giant deck probably about 100 cards in total size (this tournament had no upper limit on deck size). He has a friend his age with him and they're both talking excitedly. I, late teens at this point, shuffle my deck as usual, not even paying attention to the way the kid is shuffling his deck, then offer it to him to cut, he declines, so when he offers his to me, I do the same. I win the coin toss to go first, we each draw our opening hand, and then my opponent reveals that he has just drawn all 5 pieces of exodia with his opening hand and thus won game 1.

Luckily it was a best 2 out of 3 format, so I made sure to both supervise his shuffling, and cut his deck in our next two games which I won easily, but obviously that memory has always stuck with me.

[illustriousspellcaster]

I wouldn’t say winning through alternative conditions to be a failure, just gimmicky at best. There is also a lot of community backlash and stigma when it comes to winning through alternative conditions as well, so there is also that to consider.

[larshoffmann]

I like alternative win conditions because a unique deck building is required to make it work. It's fun to see those decks in action (even counting D.D. Dynamite strategy as such.)

[midn]

I wouldn't even call these failed mechanics - alternate win conditions are bad on purpose, because if they're good they're oppressive

[laszlokaszas]

There is a card in MtG called Laboratory Maniac, with an effect that you win the game when you draw from an empty deck.
I wonder how a card like that would work in Yugioh

[Zetact_]

There are some interesting cases of alternate win cons in certain decks that are put on top of a card that you might want to run for a strategy anyway, or ones that are designed for alternate win con decks to give them a normal strategy to run along with the win con. Like Ghostrick Angel of Mischief or how Exodia Incarnate was designed to let you run a beatdown variant of a regular Exodia deck. The problem in those cases is that the win condition is either too inconvenient that it might as well not be there, or that playing an alt win con deck with a backup strategy like Exodia Incarnate doesn't work because in current Yu-Gi-Oh if Plan A fails then you've already lost.

[chrism]

Surrender definitely became more common when you get sick of the 8th negate or waiting 20mins to play

[TinyStranger]

I like to think these alternative win conditions are made and kept around mostly as markers for the game state. If an alternative win condition is actually viable and consistent in a meta, you know that the game is actually in a broken state. With Exodia it could show that finding 5 specific cards is becoming too easy, with Ghost trick it might be to show that it’s getting to easy to stack an XYZ monster with materials for broken effects, with spirit board it could be how consistent it is to stall or find certain spells and traps, and for final countdown for stall decks. But I do like the mechanics of these strategies and hope that the game produces more since they make the game more interesting overall.