Yata-Garasu – #LOD-000
This card cannot be Special Summoned. This card returns to its owner’s hand during the End Phase of the turn it is Normal Summoned or flipped face-up. When this card inflicts Battle Damage to your opponent, they skip their next Draw Phase.
Date Reviewed: January 6th, 2022
Rating: 3.75
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is awful. 3 is average. 5 is excellent.
Reviews Below:
King of
Lullaby
Hello Pojo Fans,
Yata-Garasu…this damn bird. Throwback Thursday choice.
I’m an old man of Yu-Gi-Oh and a repeat victim of the “Yata Lock”. For those of you who weren’t around before errata and even really a ban list, this is what happened: Special Summon Sangan/Witch > Special Summon Chaos Emperor Dragon > Blow up field and hand, dealing LP damage > Search Yata > Summon Yata and attack, and that’s GG. I’ve used Waboku to stop that bird from pecking my LP! Nowadays I think you could let Yata off the list and be okay now that so much has happened since then.
Small ATK/DEF, Spirit monsters aren’t the best, can’t be Special Summoned, can’t be immediately used when searched by Witch of the Black Forest or Sangan, yeah, I think it’d be okay to be off the list for a format. Yowie does this once per Duel, but doesn’t need to deal damage like Yata has to. Even if you clear the field and summon Yata, Impermanence exists and nowadays the graveyard can function as your hand depending on the archetype, so losing out on your Draw Phase may not even slow you down. The reason the “Yata Lock” was so devastating was because it ended the game. If you have cards when Yata hits you, you aren’t dead.
Advanced-2/5- Not even close to what it was as a piece of a game-ending combo, and while you could probably still activate cards to achieve it, it’s not as easy as it once was.
Art-4/5- Nevermore will this bird be the bane of duelist existence.
Until Next Time
KingofLullaby
Crunch$G
Here we go, one of the biggest reasons the Forbidden section of the list exists today and the only card that was part of the first Forbidden section that never returned to the game at any point: Yata-Garasu.
Yata-Garasu is a Level 2 WIND Fiend Spirit with 200 ATK and 100 DEF. The stats are weak and it has a strange Type and Attribute combination, but that didn’t stop this from being what was once one of the most degenerate cards in the game. Being a Spirit, this does return to your hand during the End Phase of the turn it was Normal Summoned or flipped face-up and it cannot be Special Summoned like most of the early Spirit Monsters, but that basically just gets this out of harms way if the opponent might summon something stronger. If you clear your opponent’s board and get this to direct attack and deal battle damage, your opponent skips their next Draw Phase. So again, like Yowie, you empty the opponent’s hand and try to get rid of all their resources, then use this. Only now we don’t have a once per Duel clause, so you could keep swinging with this to never let the opponent Draw unless they get something on board to protect them, which is difficult when you likely got rid of all the opponent’s cards with a pre-errata Chaos Emperor Dragon and you didn’t have graveyard effects back then. Now, in 2022, the enviroment is more hostile to trying to pull off the Yata Lock. Graveyard effects exist to generate advantage and it’s harder to get rid of every single resource the opponent has, especially when they errataed CED to where even if Yata was legal, you couldn’t Yata Lock after resolving the field and hand nuke. It’s a deadly combo if you pull the Yata Lock off, but it’s harder to do such if your opponent can generate advantage. It would need to be experiemented with to see if it could come back to see how easy the Yata Lock is or how devastating it could be to lock the opponent from drawing if you already cleared a ton of their resources. I could also see this never coming back, one due to its potential power and two for the legacy of the Forbidden section and this being the lone card that never moved from that first list after being banned.
Advanced Rating: Really need to see results to see how easy we can do the Yata Lock, but I’ll say 4/5 for now.
Art: 5/5 Dunno why, just a cool bird.
Alex
Searcy
(In my Obi-Wan Kenobi voice):
Yata-Garasu is a name I haven’t heard in a long time…a long time. Kind of fitting with our Monday card for Throwback Thursday. Some cards that are insanely powerful and spent time in Ban Land received an Errata (or sometimes several; CED comes to mind) to make them less broken and able to return to the game. Yata…I’m not sure what you could do with this, as despite the paltry 200 attack, all it has to do is deal Damage, and your opponent skips their next Draw Phase. Maybe it they added a clause the skip could only happen once a Duel, but that seems like overkill…yet this card wrecked the game for a long time, so I have mixed feelings. In the now, I feel this is probably one of those cards that just can’t ever come back, fun and devastating as it is/was to use.
Rating: 5/5 if ever legal again
Art: 5/5 Even the art on this is pretty epic. The bird is fairly bland, but the background and the crystal (?) it’s perched on is rather cool
Mighty
Vee
We haven’t done a Throwback Thursday since last year (haha), and today brings us one of the most controversial cards of all time, Yata-Garasu. Given a spiritual successor in the form of Monday’s Yowie, Yata-Garasu was released way back in 2003. It’s a level 2 WIND fiend spirit monster, and it has a paltry 200 attack and 100 defense. Thanks to being a WIND monster with less than 1500 defense, you can search it with Wynn the Wind Channeler…if it weren’t forbidden!
If you’ve been into competitive Yugioh for a while, you’ll probably hear about Yata-Garasu at some point; this seemingly benign card was responsible for Yugioh’s first “pseudo OTK” and, consequently, the formation of the banlist, with Yata being among the first victims. You can’t special summon it, so it can only be normal summoned, and as a spirit monster, it returns to your hand at the end of turn when it’s normal or flip summoned. If it manages to inflict battle damage to your opponent, they skip their next draw phase. This might not seem very threatening, but the infamous Yata-lock was what made it potent. By comboing with Sangan and Chaos Emperor Dragon (which wasn’t too difficult back in the day when the game was much slower and setting up boards over multiple turns was more plausible), you could destroy all cards on your opponent’s field and in their hand while searching for Yata for yourself and leaving it the only “live” card. You could then normal summon Yata and continuously attack your opponent, locking them into an empty hand and board until their life points slowly but surely dwindled to zero. Nowadays, with Sangan and Chaos Emperor Dragon receiving errata to be less abusable, the Yata-lock is much weaker, though with the magic of modern combos, I have no doubt that someone would find a way to abuse Yata in the modern era. While I think the card could return, especially with an erratum, the recent release of Yowie is possible evidence that we won’t see this little bird again any time soon.
Advanced: 4/5 (assuming no errata)
Art: 3.5/5 Truly a sinister bird that terrorized early Yugioh!
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