Also read: Part 3: The Raigeki Economy or click here to jump to part 1

The Design of Yu-Gi-Oh 4: Why You Shouldn't Want To Draw The Out

This is part 4 of a series about the game design of Yu-Gi-Oh. If you haven't checked the previous parts, they provide more context for what this article is about. Last part, we discussed the Raigeki and negate economy in Yu-Gi-Oh and how skill is expressed in most decks. Today we'll discuss the inversion of that concept: the floodgate and the "out."

Paragraph 1: The Anatomy of the Floodgate

 
You've probably heard it a few times by now - "To beat Kashtira you just have to draw the Book of Eclipse." "To beat Anti-Spell Fragrance, you just have to draw the Mystical Space Typhoon", etc. "To out the problem card, just draw the out." Many will say that a card having counters means it's a balanced card, with interplay. But is that true? 

In the last part, we discussed the concept of the disruption economy, where one player has a number of disruptions and the other player has a number of combo starters and extenders and has to somehow chew through all of the other player's disruptions. This is where most of the skill expression in Yu-Gi-Oh appears: choosing which card to negate, in what order to play your cards to bait the opponent's disruptions, and predicting their face-down disruption.

Floodgates completely disrupt this dynamic. When a floodgate hits the field, none of that matters anymore. How many extenders and starters you have doesn't matter anymore; the opponent having to time the negates is irrelevant. All that matters is if the opponent drew the out.

Paragraph 2: Drawing "The Out"

In a floodgate-less game, the winner is whoever manages the disruption economy to their advantage, managing to land critical combos or spreading out your interaction in a smart and effective way. 

In a game with floodgates, the game devolves towards the out: Either you have the out and thus win the game or you don't have the out and lose the game. The skill expression is lost; it's merely a game about luck. There is no interplay or dynamic in a floodgated game. 

This is why the argument of "just draw the out" isn't good when talking about floodgate effects like Kashtira Arise-Heart; it is a beatable card but it's not a fun card to beat. Furthermore, defending arguments towards floodgates gives the community managers at Konami the wrong impression; they see so many people defending floodgates with this argument and think it's fine to keep them in the game, making floodgates not be hit and for them to keep making them. 

Paragraph 3: Floodgates in Legacy Supports

Over the past year or so floodgates started popping up more and more on a seemingly unexpected place: Legacy support.

Cards like Ocean Dragon Lord - Kairyu-Shin  and Ghost Meets Girl - A Masterful Mayakashi Shiranui Saga are the poster child of this theme of shoving floodgates into old decks that didn't have them. There is a reason for this - it allows these decks to compete in the modern environment by bypassing the disruption economy.

As shown in the previous The Design of Yu-Gi-Oh, the modern game runs in the disruption economy; you need to be able to play through many disruptions and put out many disruptions in order to compete. Legacy decks cannot play through interactions and can only put out one or two disruptions, if that. In order to make an old deck viable they need to up these numbers up but often only have 2-3 new cards to do so.

This is where the floodgates come into play. Rather than finding a way to make the legacy deck put out 3-4 interactions, they can simply give it a floodgate, completely undermining this aspect of the game but giving the deck free wins vs opponents who don't have or didn't draw the out. The rest of the support then can be routed towards searching the floodgate in repeatable and redundant ways in order to both solve consistency problems and increase the number of disruptions the deck can play through.

This style of legacy support does wonders in increasing the viability of the old decks. However, it sacrifices everything else - it makes the deck boring to play with and against due to bypassing the disruption economy and removing all the mechanical uniqueness of the deck by removing its gimmicks and turning the deck into another floodgate turbo strategy.

Conclusion

Floodgates occupy a dangerous and harmful niche in Yu-Gi-Oh's design; they simplify the gamestate, reduce the skill expression, and are a chokehold on legacy support. The main argument in defense of them - drawing the out - is harmful to the game.

However, they are an interesting case study on the mechanics of Yu-Gi-Oh - their presence strips the game out of the disruption economy, highlighting how important that dynamic is to the game's health and fun. 

With all that said, join us next time as we'll be tackling Archetype Design in part 5; how archetypes are structured, the roles of cards in decks, and more. See you next time!