Editing Yu-Gi-Oh (section)

=== Master Rules 4 ===
{{Topquote|If you look at Firewall Dragon’s effect and see nothing wrong you’re either mentally deficient, or a very money hungry company[...] the first wave of Cyberse and Link Monsters was like witnessing 20 different FTK engines suddenly spawning into existence with no foresight by the developers whatsoever.|Rank10YGO}}
Introduced in 2017, Master Rules 4 (or "New Master Rules") made big changes to the game. The most obvious being the introduction of Link Monsters and there's an extra monster zone for extra deck monsters (which you can only have one of without work). This change would be widely despised due to its massive balance problems: Every existing deck type was screwed massively and needed to buy new link monsters to even have a remote chance of working '''except''' the ones that were ''already'' OP as shit anyways. Several early Link Monsters were stupidly broken, with anime ace monster Firewall Dragon alone getting half a dozen other cards banned, while most other Link Monsters were total garbage except for their arrows, a stark contrast with early Synchros offering plenty of good and generic options. Link Monsters lacking face down position, defense position or levels made a lot of older cards that changed cards to those positions or did things based on level completely and utterly useless. High level Yu-Gi-Oh already was heavy into board wipes where monsters never really fought each other that much, and MR4 made it far worse since link monsters were ''all'' about summoning a bunch of monsters in one turn and sacking them for OP shit before your opponent could really do anything to counter it. Problems were further compounded by Konami taking years to support a lot of "lesser" archetypes or generic support (The [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Attribute_Booster Attribute Booster Link Monster] cycle is frequently highlighted here for Missus Radiant being decent generic support among the first set of Link Monsters but Konami taking a full year to provide a version for every other attribute, even though its predecessors were all within a single booster). So widely despised was MR4 that MR3 was still widely played on unofficial simulators.

====Master Rules 5====
In December of 2019 it was announced they'd '''finally''' be ending MR4 after years of that shit. Starting April 1st 2020 (with unofficial simulators moving over almost entirely as soon as it was announced), "Master Rules (April 1st 2020 Revision)", which everyone will just call Master Rules 5, were implemented. Now Fusion, Synchro, and Xyz monsters may be placed in either the Main Monster Zones or in the Extra Monster Zone, while Link Monsters and Pendulum Summoning from the Extra Deck are still dependent on summoning in either the Extra Monster Zone or link arrows pointing to their Main Monster Zones. Also a bunch of other minor rules changes, mostly just clearing up a bunch of crap.

Master Rules 5 unfortunately coincided with the outbreak of the [[Wikipedia:Coronavirus_disease_2019|Nurgle's latest blessing]]. See, Konami bases banlist changes largely on tournament results and utterly refuses to acknowledge simulator play, so with most tournaments being canceled Konami had nothing to base a new banlist on. As a result the June 2020 TCG banlist (which set Altergeist Multifaker, Nekroz of Unicore, and Ritual Beast Ulti-Cannahawk from Limited to Unlimited while doing nothing else) was the smallest change to the banlist in TCG history, and is tied in size only with the very first OCG banlist (which put Dark Hole, Raigeki and Trap Hole to Limited). This wouldn’t be too bad if this didn’t leave the TCG stuck in a fairly degenerate format for five months. Even the September 2020 banlist did the bare minimum in banning 3 problem cards and reducing restrictions on cards that had been unrestricted on the OCG side for years.