This week’s cards are pretty poor unless there’s some obscure combo I don’t know.  So, to hopefully make this a more interesting read, I’ll be making suggestions on how the concept could have been properly executed to make the cards at least moderately playable.

Today we look at the Spell Card Hieroglyph Lithograph.  Here we have a good example of the designers being on the right track, at least for an obscure niche card, but blowing it at the last minute.  First, let me point out the obvious: rarely does your maximum hand size matter for Yu-Gi-Oh.  I personally have always found that a cap on hand size is indicative of what I consider a design flaw: there must be some combo that allows you a hand size in excess of the maximum, and hitting that size must be broken.  This may stem from my first real TCG being Pokémon, but I think it may be more than just my opinion: in Pokémon, the game originally was pretty broken due to the abundant, easy to use draw power.  But eventually, the designers figured out how to pace the draw power and keep hand size reasonable.  Part of what helped there was that there was a built in game mechanic that meant the cards that were later Stages of Pokémon had to wait until their lower Stages had been in play a turn before you could “Evolve” into them (sort of like how the LV Monsters work in this game).  Additionally, attacking required “Energy”, which was provided by Energy cards… which is a one-per-turn thing, like mana in Duel Masters (sorry, I don’t know Magic: the Gathering to compare to it).  So in short, I find a limit on hand size to a “patch” for some poor game design.  Much like in some of the Mortal Kombat fighting games: many characters were horribly unbalanced, and capable of huge, sometimes “endless” combos (or at least able to completely wipe out the opponents health before they ended).  Instead of tweaking the characters speed, or their moves, etc. to make such problematic combos, they created “Damage Kontrol”… which just meant that after you broke 50% damage, both fighters were knocked back from each other, forcing you to end the combo.

-_-

To get back to the matter at hand, Infinite Cards was out before Hieroglyph Lithograph, but it had a problem.  It was a Continuous Spell, and it affected both players.  Right, it was pretty bad.  Even if you wanted to use it in the modern game, all an opponent would do is wait until you enter your End Phase, then activate a Set Dust Tornado to nuke Infinite Cards… forcing you to discard down anyway.  Hieroglyph Lithograph solved this problem by being a Normal Spell that just sort of placed an effect on the field, increasing your maximum hand size (and not your opponent’s).

So where did it go wrong?  First, it just increases it to 7 cards.  That wouldn’t be worth it if it were “free”.  If it said “Increase your maximum hand size by one”, then at least it might be worth it for a few decks, since you could run three and actually make use of them.  Instead, if one is successful, the other two become dead draws.  Finally, it costs 1000 LP, and remember, if you had 7 cards in hand, now you’re down to six.

Basically, this should have either increased your hand size by one so it could stack, eliminate any cap for you and just you so it was worth the wasted space in some specialty deck… or best of all, don’t design cards that can abuse a limitless hand size.  No, I am not talking about Muka Muka: I mean broken cards you can keep playing one after the other, like Pot of Greed, Graceful Charity, Raigeki, Harpie’s Feather Duster, etc.  That is where the problem really lies.

Rating: 1/5