As the metagame adjusted to the loss of the Trinity (Pot of Greed, Graceful Charity and Delinquent Duo), as well as the crushing loss of Black Luster Soldier-Envoy of the Beginning, people were wondering what they could run that would replace their precious cards. Goat Control was destroyed, as UDE and Konami restricted each part of the combo (Scapegoat, Metamorphosis, Thousand-Eyes Restrict, Tsukuyomi), thus rendering it completely ineffective. The higher-ups had taken the best parts of virtually every deck that did well during the format and obliterated it, sending it sky-high with limitations, restrictions and full-out bans.

This era in Yu-Gi-Oh! was the most confusing in history, in my humble opinion. There were no decks that seemed capable of making Top-8 at any Jump Championship, and yet several different builds took to day two at each event. What’s odd about this era is that there really was no dominant deck of the format, save for maybe Chaos (in the form of Chaos Sorcerer, a watered-down version of Black Luster Soldier-Envoy of the Beginning).

Scratch that. Bazoo Return was introduced in this format.

Bazoo Return had more impact on the game than any other deck in history, except for maybe Chaos. Its explosiveness in the mid-to-late game essentially coined the term “momentum shift,” and that’s exactly what it did: it shifted momentum. You could be down 8000-200 in terms of Life Points, but if you pull off a large enough Return from the Different Dimension, you could win with that play alone. Bazoo Return was the largest, fastest and most volatile deck on the circuit.

There was a reason why it faded so quickly.

There were many, many other decks during this format that, while not necessarily being faster than Bazoo Return, were nonetheless more stable than Paul Levitin’s game-changing deck. Bazoo Return had several problems, mainly in terms of consistency. More often than not, the Returns were stopped by Royal Decree or Jinzo, and while Bazoo can become a 2500-ATK monster, getting monsters to the graveyard was a much tougher job. While explosive, it couldn’t hold its own in a 1-on-1, no-Return situation, and often lost to decks that were ready and prepared for it. Its lack of flexibility doomed it to failure, but it did have a lasting impression on the game as a whole: Return from the Different Dimension would never be viewed in the same light again.

Return from the Different Dimension was a common put out in a pack to promote the first full-length Yu-Gi-Oh! Movie and it was sold at movie theaters to kids who played the TCG but really didn’t grasp it fully, while others still saw nothing in the packs that interested them and sold them to kids who played the TCG but didn’t understand it fully. For years, it was put off as a card that was only good in “casual” decks, never able to be game-breaking and changing the way that other, more stable cards were. But instead, we are introduced to a game mechanic that has become engrained in our minds: the removed-from-play pile is just as viable a place to play cards from than the deck or graveyard.

Think about it: what cards we use today that rely on the RFP (or RFG, for removed-from-game) pile? D.D. Survivor and D.D. Scout Plane come to mind, as well as Macro Cosmos-based decks. Virtually any deck utilizing the RFP pile traces its roots back to this format and, more specifically, the Bazoo-Return build.

Another deck that made its debut during this format was Monarch-Control. First seen in its entirety during Shonen Jump Atlanta (utilizing Soul Exchange in a variant of Evan Vargas’s Soul Control build), it made short work of many decks, but didn’t come to its full potential until further down the line.

Any way you look at this format, one word can sum it up: random. From SJC to SJC, there was no consistent build. What would win at one tournament would get dominated at the next, and what people expected to be trounced ended up making Top-8. It was topsy-turvy, but what no one expected was that the “Nothing” format ended up being one of the most crucial for players later on. During the 2007 and early 2008 seasons, many top decks relied on concepts forged during this format to pull out Top-8 finishes.

And we saw another evolution: speed. With the advent of Bazoo-Return, decks became faster, and to keep up people had to find faster and faster ways to win the game. This was one of the fastest formats we had seen in quite some time, and to say that it changed the metagame permanently is an understatement.

Some of the best duelists in the world have played through this format and have come out the other side. From Adam Corn, Hugo Adame, Jermol Jupiter, Robert Ackerman, Lazaro Bellido – they all fought through this format, and have taken away the most valuable lesson they could have: speed. During this format, speed and consistency played huge mitigating factors in determining the best decks; the only problem was, with the randomness of the format, it was hard to get a jump on what decks would be tough to beat and which ones weren’t. We saw the rise of Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive as a near-staple, Brain Control and Mobius the Frost Monarch running in packs, and the versatility of Sakuretsu Armor.

Next time, we’ll be exploring further this “Nothing Format,” because believe it or not it did spill over into the April 2006 format – at the beginning, anyway. During the April 2006 format, we’ll see two separate concepts merge together to form what some have called the most powerful deck since the initial banlist.

Thanks for reading, and as always you can drop me a line at anteaus44@hotmail.com.