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Fuck it, Blue Eyes White Dragon

(Skip right to the good stuff.)

I recently made a mistake. I clicked on a Youtube video about Yugioh.

I was into YGO in my youth as every scrappy young millennial with the world at her feet was, I was old enough to remember where I was on 9/11 but young enough to not feel a damn thing about it, the 2008 financial crash was still a while away, and you know what, it was shit! It was absolute dog shit but hey, I didn't care and the world dressing here isn't the point! But this is a stream of consciousness blog post more than anything, because I'm tired of talking about Homestuck and Homestuck^2 and bad writing and video games. Right now, all I give a shit about is the Blue-Eyes White Dragon.

So I clicked on a Youtube video from dzeeff, and that dude is... I dunno about this guy. He seems alright but he sure does use the word degenerate a lot and that puts me off, even though I've watched videos from him and adjacent Yugituber TheDuelLogs more than anything else the past few months. This ain't an endorsement video. I have failed to form a parasocial bond with either of these guys. All I give a shit about is the Blue-Eyes White Dragon.

I'm always kind of ambiently thinking about early Yugioh - I cite Catapult Turtle poisoning the Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon with Mammoth Graveyard, and then not being able to do that in the game itself, as a key moment in my growth as a game developer, and things like the labyrinth game and such from Duelist Kingdom are... peak, to me, even if when it came to representing the card game... it never stood a ghost of a chance. (I am booed off the stage.) But I've been thinking about Yugioh for like a month now, and it's been a hell of a time learning about what I missed since I dropped off at the start of the GX era. I got back into it for a month or two during high school - around the time that Number 69: Utopia or whatever was relevant. Utopia is one of the only XYZ cards I own, which tells you where I was at, with regards to YGO at the time. I was gifted a utopia by a friend, and I don't want to play it, because he was a dick. But this isn't about that. All I give a shit about is the Blue-Eyes White Dragon.

About 2 weeks ago I started doing a thing with a friend based on another Yugituber's idea, where they would draft decks from each YGO set - open 24 packs of Legend of the Blue Eyes White Dragon, make a deck, play a game, then open 24 packs of Metal Raiders, add those to your deck, play a game, and so on until you get bored. We got bored around the time we started Pharaonic Guardian and you know... it kinda whipped. There's a real choice aesthetic to the cards from early Yugioh, and how they progress from being weird things that only kind of look like monsters, like Nemuriko, Giant Soldier of Stone, and Curse of Dragon, into things like Shining Abyss and the Masked Beast. It's a great aesthetic and archetypes slowly growing more prevalent and making things more cohesive feels like a loss. But this isn't about that. All I give a shit about is the Blue-Eyes White Dragon.

I also just watched a bunch of dzeeff's card unboxing videos, despite him not being a pack opening channel, and I am nothing if not a whale for things, so I snatched an older structure deck off of Amazon and well, here I am now. Apparently the deck I bought isn't very good on its own and the typical move is to buy three copies of a structure deck to filter out all the shit cards, but I'm broke. So one copy of Saga of Blue Eyes it was.

I have nothing to say about the deck itself, other than... there's a lot of Yugioh cards out there, huh? Lots of cards I didn't know about, even after watching months of Yugituber backlogs and remembering cards from the main game. So... I'm just gonna talk about the Blue-Eyes White Dragon for a bit, because I think the Blue-Eyes White Dragon fucking rules. Doing research for this blog post also took me on a wild ride of things Yugioh could have been, and I'm eager to at least give you the same hooks I did.

Blue-Eyes White Dragon Rankings

NAME: Blue-Eyes White Dragon
SOURCE: "Labyrinth battle game"
DESCRIPTION: What the FUCK is going on here. This is from Yugioh Duelist, volume 4. Apparently in the manga, there were rules set up for a labyrinth game like this, and you could cut out and scan and print out cards to use in the labyrinth. That fucking whips so much ass. Yugioh not knowing what the fuck is going on with itself kicks so much ass. As far as this BEWD goes, the screentones look fucking sick, and it's got a great pose, and it looks like it's gonna fuck something up, and what it's gonna fuck up is my sensibilities in game design for years to come.
RATING: 10/10, THAT's a fucking Blue-Eyes White Dragon right there.

NAME: Blue-Eyes Toon Dragon
SOURCE: TCG
DESCRIPTION: What a little shit.
RATING: 10/10, put this guy on a T-shirt.

NAME: Blue-Eyes White Dragon
SOURCE: TCG, artwork #1
DESCRIPTION: The original TCG artwork. This guy kicks ass. The original Blue Eyes White Dragon card art is phenomenal. Specifically, this guy looks dead. Like, this is the expression of a fish you caught in Boy Scouts that you want to throw back into the water, but you can't, because it's swallowed the hook instead of just piercing its lips and maybe you can get it out but oh god oh god. What kind of texture does a Blue-Eyes have anyway? I look at it and cannot tell what its beautiful segmented body would feel like against my skin...
RATING: 9.5/10, I wonder if it'd be like salmon. A bagel with cream cheese and blue-eyes lox.

NAME: The Melody of Awakening Dragon
SOURCE: TCG
DESCRIPTION: Fuck yes. Fuck yes. Fuck yes. This kicks ass. I'm so fucking into this, on every level. Play a sick guitar solo to search some Blue-Eyes.
RATING: I play Free-Bird White Dragon/10

NAME: Blue-Eyes Solid Dragon
SOURCE: TCG
DESCRIPTION: Okay so this guy whips. This guy is VERY clearly metal, and its rainbow wing pattern kicks ass. This dude is a fucking bro. This might actually be my favorite adjusted Blue-Eyes design. Fuck yesssss.
RATING: Gay rights/10.

NAME: Blue-Eyes White Dragon
SOURCE: Rush duels
DESCRIPTION: Also in A tier is its incarnation in rush duels. I don't know what those are. Maybe it's like... a sealed draft? That's what I'd think it is, but I've been told I'm wrong. I still don't know what it is though. I'm out of the loop. I'm out of touch, and I'm out of time, but this does bring us a little bit closer into understanding what a Blue-Eyes might feel like to touch. Specifically, inflatable obstacle course run by a military recruiter at your high school that you fuck up, really badly, because you're depressed and participating in imperialism has never sounded like a good idea before, and this shitty obstacle course isn't gonna help.
RATING: 9.2/10

NAME: Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon
SOURCE: TCG
DESCRIPTION: This guy's got three heads. This guy was like... the white whale of my early Yugioh career. "Career." Truly unattainable, since I didn't know how to buy cards online and I only got packs off my allowance. That's just how it went when you're poor! Anyway, this guy's kinda cool.
RANKING: Check out the next guy/10

NAME: Dragon Master Knight
SOURCE: Anime
DESCRIPTION: NOW we're talking. This guy is objectively less good than any other card on this list but he also fucks so goddamn hard. This is a knight riding a dragon with three heads, and not just any knight, THE knight, riding THE dragon. I think this card only showed up in the anime once, at the end of the Virtual World arc, and that's all I care about, because like I said. Card sucks. So instead he's gonna be cool in the anime.
RANKING: Fuck yessssssss/10

NAME: Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon
SOURCE: TCG, Yugioh The Movie: Pyramid of Light
DESCRIPTION: I have kind of a soft spot for this dumpy design. Against my better instincts, I am very distinctly nostalgic for the first Yugioh movie. To this day it's the only movie I've seen in theaters more than once, and Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon is one of those cards that I thought was so cool. It kinda changed the game for me, not because it was a good card according to the rules, but because... who gave a shit about the rules in 2003? 2004? This guy is dumpy and dweeby and I love him so much. He looks like a hammerhead shark tried to cosplay Blue-Eyes. It's so wonderful, I love his dumb chest orb. However. It is still a dumpy design.
RATING: 7.5/10, why are you so wide.

NAME: Rage with Eyes of Blue
SOURCE: TCG
DESCRIPTION: Did you just summon a bunch of monsters in one turn? That's against the rules you know.
RATING: I learned the T slur from LittleKuriboh/10.

NAME: Blue-Eyes White Dragon
ORIGINAL NAME: Blue-Eyes Alternative White Dragon
SOURCE: TCG
DESCRIPTION: What is going on here... this is a wack recolor. Why did they recolor this Blue-Eyes to be the color of the Homestuck Epilogues? What's the fucking deal, actually. It looks alright but... I dunno about this one, is all, I just dunno! This one seems like it might be a little bit ill-advised! It's just a standard Blue Eyes, but with dipshit name mechanics attached, and a removal effect. This one seems like a bad idea, guys!
RATING: 6.9/10, Blue-Eyes Progressive White Dragon is better

NAME: Blue-Eyes White Dragon
SOURCE: Dungeon Dice Monsters
DESCRIPTION: Hey, Yugioh's been a lot of things, huh? This is the spinoff I'm most familiar with, I had a single set of Dungeon Dice Monsters, and eventually I lost everything except for the silly counter rack they used for games and a figure of Gearfried the Iron Knight, because I was 9 and didn't care for putting things away. All the card art for Dungeon Dice Monsters was done in 3D, and it's a strange decision, because it looks like shit, for sure.
RATING: Uncanny/10, put this guy on a Petscop loading screen.

NAME: Blue-Eyes Ultimate Alternative Dragon
SOURCE: TCG
DESCRIPTION: This guy just looks like plain dogshit. He's got fucking lumps about him. He's got pustules. He's a Hollow Knight character and he's got the fucking Hollow Knight brainrot. He looks like he's a tragic Souls boss that used to be grand and magnificent but now just carries around his big 4500 ATK stat and walks in circles! It's tragic. Truly tragic.
RATING: Sad orchestral music/10.

NAME: Blue-Eyes Twin Burst Dragon
SOURCE: TCG, as always
DESCRIPTION: This is just... what every Yugioh dragon looks like.
RATING: 4/10.

LIGHTNING ROUND:

  • Dragon Spirit of White: Looks fucking, dead. Like I'm looking at a corpse. Snuff/10.
  • Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon: It's got those pedipalp-looking things on its WINGS now, that's not good spec-bio, which we all come to Yugioh for! Banning you from /r/worldbuilding/10.
  • Malefic Blue-Eyes White Dragon: This archetype might kick ass. It's just evil twins. The colors on the wings are really good, too. This is like, a solid "Evil Blue-Eyes" design.
  • Burst Stream of Destruction: I'm not going to say I'm a-firing my lazor but. It is tempting. I'm gonna couch it in parentheticals instead.
  • Blue-Eyes Solid Dragon: Oh this guy rules. Hold on I'm going to go back up and edit him into B tier.

NAME: Blue-Eyes White Dragon
SOURCE: Bandai's Duel Monsters
DESCRIPTION: This thing is fucking haunted.

NAME: Deep-Eyes White Dragon
SOURCE: TCG
DESCRIPTION: God weeps for her creations.
RATING: Put the pencil down.

NAME: Deep of Blue-Eyes
SOURCE: OCG
DESCRIPTION: YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ME, THIS IS THAT BITCH FROM XENOBLADE 2.
RATING: WHY'S IT GOT TITS, KONAMI/10