History
- October 2004. Chaos Emperor Dragon, Yata and other power cards were banned. This wasn’t Goat Format yet. We had what FormatLibary calls Warrior Format: beatdown decks with BLS.
- April 2005. Goat format started. Mirage of Nightmare, Confiscation and Magical Scientist were banned. Delinquent Duo was unbanned. But many decks still used 0-1 Metamorphosis. And most didn’t use Tsukuyomi.
- May 2005. A ruling that monsters set by card effects can be flip summoned the same turn, allowing Tsukuyomi to recycle Thousand-Eyes Restrict (TER) and flip effects. Then, players like Wilson Luc topped events with 3 Meta/3 Goat, Night Assailants + discard cost cards and Tsukuyomis.
The format shifted from beatdown to control. Decks took out a few LV4 beaters. Added flip effects and monsters with weaker ATK but utility. In modern goats, you need a balance of both face-up and face-down removal, but back then face-up monsters were more common so people used more cards to deal with them.
We may look at older deck lists from 2005, and see cards that are bad in today’s format, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they were overrated. They were good at the time.
|
Cards that were mained more back then |
Was it overrated (as a main deck card)? |
|
Lightning Vortex |
NO. Opponents often had 2 LV4 monsters on the field. Destroying them both without using a summon made you ahead on the summon. Anti-Jinzo. |
|
Bottomless Trap Hole |
NO.. Most decks had 8-9+ LV4 beaters. It was safe to main 1 back then. |
|
D.D. Assailant (DDA) |
NO. It was good into beaters. I wonder how today’s anti-beaters like Zombyra and Gorilla would’ve worked back then? But DDA is anti-Jinzo. |
|
Jinzo |
NO. Less TER and no Chaos Sorcerer to deal with it. More beaters and less flips/utility monsters meant it +1’d in battle more. |
|
Swords of Revealing Light |
KINDA. Potential -1. But it wasn’t as risky to main since most decks were beatdown. Today, there’s a high chance you’ll face a control deck that can forgo attacking. |
|
Enemy Controller. |
KINDA. Risky, situational, relies on other cards, potential -1. But you could switch a LV4 beater and then kill it with yours. Maybe 1 out of 10-15 games you could use the control effect for lethal damage. |
|
Sacred Phoenix / Vampire Lord |
IDK. There was less non-destruction removal (Chaos Sorc, TER, Phoenix WWB, Abyss Soldier). But also more DDA back then… |
|
Magic Cylinder |
YES. Not that the majority of decks mained it but even some using it is too many. Even if it may have been better back then (more beaters, less control), the same point applies to Sakuretsu Armor which was better. |
|
Ceasefire |
YES. Highly situational. -1. You need to draw 1 out of 4-5 settable non-flip flip monsters and Ceasefire while the opponent has Nobleman. Situational. It can stop a flip; what if the opponent sets Sangan/DDWL/DDA. |
Now, beatdown exists today in Warrior/Aggro decks which use a higher trap count to protect their monsters. So we’ve seen a lot of classic anti-beater cards (Vortex, Swords, Bottomless, Jinzo) in side decks. And a few tournament topping decks lately have used DDA and Smashing.
Cards we overlooked back then. There were definitely cards we plain overlooked back then. Gravekeeper’s Spy, Trap Dustshoot, Upstart Goblin, Jar of Greed. How were decks with 5 Warriors not even using 1 copy of ROTA? How were many decks not using a single Sakuretsu Armor against beatdown?
But some may have been a case of them getting better as the environment changed rather than oversight. Merchant got better as some decks used 3 Meta. Dekoichi got stats easily ran over by beatdown decks, but can now apply pressure against control decks. Solemn Judgment is used in tournaments now because the meta is more diverse than in ’05; it’s a catch-all that can help you against aggro, chaos and goat control alike. But back then that was a lot of life points to pay when you could just use standard traps to deal with cookie-cutter decks.
Why was Chaos Sorcerer avoided back then? It had poor synergy with Premature/Call. You banish graveyard targets and can’t revive CS if its discarded. Using Prem/Call + Sorcs + tributes makes you brick. It was a dillemma. Taking out Prem/Call meant less revival for your tributes and you can’t revive tribute fodder to summon tributes from your hand. Taking out Tributes meant Prem/Call had less targets. Nowadays many chaos control decks take out both Prem/Call and tributes. But back then, decks had more good revive targets (beaters) and less dead targets (flips/Tsuk). And in beatdown, being a summon ahead is huge. Chaos Turbo almost certainly would’ve been a top-tier deck in 2005, but I also can’t blame anyone at the time who felt like Prem/Call were too good to give up.