Editing Yu-Gi-Oh (section)

==Archetype==

Archetypes are series of cards of a similar theme or kind, often with a series of related monsters. Through their interwoven and complementary mechanics a deck can become greater than the sum of its parts. There are dozens upon dozens of archetypes in the game, with many of them having their own sub-archetypes. Also, there is fluff of sorts for many of them, but this tends to have no real bearing on the game. 

Archetypes were in the game since before the physical card game existed, with Toon and Harpy existing in the manga and anime before that and most duelist having themed decks even though the majority of their cards were ultimately generic. Despite that, it would take over five years, about the GX era, before making cards archetype centered really took off. Unfortunately, it would be even longer before Konami understood how to make archetypes actually work. Before the GX era proper, a few archetypes were released, but they were just sets of cards with some other cards of with abilities that worked with other cards of specific names (e.g., “Yellow Gadget” adds a “Green Gadget” to your hand, “Green Gadget” adds “Red Gadget” which adds “Yellow Gadget”) or a series of cards with related effects and names but no requirement to run them together (e.g., Early Monarchs all had “Monarch” in the name and effects that destroyed cards when they were tribute summoned, but no interactivity between each Monarch). GX brought with it archetypes like we have now, except Konami had no idea what they were doing and most early ones suffered from having no real synergy, lacking a consistent strategy, being horribly gimmicky, and/or being worse than the generic options (Two of the most prominent archetypes of the era, Neos and -roids are still considered some of the worst in the game despite disproportionately high support). Still, Konami ''eventually'' figured things out and archetypes are a well regarded part of the game.

Unlike a lot of other card games 'archtype' is often tied into the name of the card rather then some mechanical aspect of the card. As an example: [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Madolche_Magileine Madolche Magileine] is a member of the Madolche archtype due to it's name, but it's monster type is spellcaster effect, it's level (the stars along the top) is 4 and it's attribute is earth. This means that cards that affect Madolche, Spellcasters, effect monsters, level 4 monsters and earth attribute monsters all can interact with Magileine. This design tendency has a couple advantages and draw backs. First it's easy to add support for a set of cards just by adding more cards the key off the name, which is what they have done with Dark Magician, Blues Eyes White dragon and Red Eyes Black Dragon. Additionally it also allows decks to splash multiple Archtypes together by using synergy for the things they have in common, such as type or attribute to help hold the deck together.  But it also means that on occasion yugioh can run into the Scunthorpe problem and accidentally add support for a random card. For example this noticeable happened with the Ciper Archtype of monster which ended up giving support to a card known as Cipher Soldier, released almost a decade earlier. It also runs into issues with translations, as English (ect.) names that seem normal at the time can give a card the name of an archetype it’s not actually part of years later, which results in bits of rules one just has to know or get a reprinted version of the card with a new name or says it isn't an X card. Cipher Solider is another example because in it's initial release in english it was called "Kinetic solider", and when the Cipher archetype was released the english version of the card had to be Errata to be called "ciper soldier": and again Cipeher solider was an almost decade old card that was not even played when it was new. This also works in reverse, where cards that were linked in Japanese aren’t in English and it matters when their archetype gains cards or was created. Tons of early cards, like Summoned Skull, have デーモン/Daemon in them which was never translated in a consistent way before then, creating a big mess when it was turned into an archetype with at least 9 different cards needing to be errated to count as as Archfiends in english.


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Some of the archetypes are:
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* '''Adamancipator''' - A bunch of Rock monsters that's Tuners are miners that try and Excavate their non-Tuner crystals to Synchro summon giant crystal monsters. As an actually decent Rock deck they make excellent use of the plethora of good Rock support including the Rock type Koa'ki Meirus.

* '''Ally of Justice''' - A series of cards that shut down LIGHT monsters and suck at absolutely everything else despite not being any good at fighting LIGHT monsters either. If you're wondering how why allies of justice hate light monsters, its because in lore they're robots built to fight invading aliens who happen to be LIGHT. Their only good card (to the point one can forget there is an archetype at all) is Ally of Justice - Catastor: An easily splashed Synchro monster that's a good toolbox option for removing any non-DARK monster that can be targeted for a battle.

* '''Altergeist''' - 

* '''Ancient Gear''' - Ancient Clockwork automatons beat your face in.

* '''Arcana Force''' - A series of cards based on the Major Arcana of [[Tarot]] decks. Unfortunately, all of there coin flip effects that at best give you a meh monster at best and backfire horribly on you at worst. Many Years later Konomi surprisingly gave Arcana Force a card for searching coin flip cards. It didn't help the archetype as a whole but made the turn skipping shenanigans of [[JoJo's Bizarre Adventure|The World]], their best card, more consistent for gimmick decks. 

* '''Artifact''' - 

* '''Blackwing''' - A bunch of birds focused on summoning a bunch of monsters quickly, then using them as synchro fuel or transferring their attack power of the member that can attack the opponent's life points directly. Was broken when it came out (and still can be) so it quickly became a tournament staple and actually resulted in executives forcing rewrites to the anime so that a minor recurring character who used it joined the main cast to promote it further. Even Tag Force, an official video game, openly calls it broken.

* '''Blue-Eyes''' - Based on the famous [[Blue Eyes White Dragon|Blue-Eyes White Dragon]] used by Seto Kaiba in the first series, the Blue-Eyes White Dragon itself has the distinction of being the most powerful main deck Normal Monster in the game at 3000/2500. With its plentiful support a well-built Blue-Eyes deck can [[meme|summon a bunch of monsters in one turn]] and lay a massive smackdown through regular monsters and powerful Rank-8 Xyz monsters and do it well enough to win high level tournaments. This archetype is very old, so it includes a lot of awesome but impractical cards such as "Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon". Its normally impractical ace monster "Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon", is and has been a popular monster to cheat out of the extra deck. With its light scales and disintegrating breath the Blue-Eyes is based on [[Bahamut]] from [[D&D]].

* '''Bujin''' - Living stone & glass creatures based on Japanese Mythology (and the main characters of Yugioh GX).

* '''Burning Abyss''' - Taking its inspiration from the Inferno part of Dante's Divine Comedy, the Burning Abyss archetype is based around swarming the field, then summoning its Xyz, Synchro, Fusion and Ritual boss monsters. On their own the Burning Abyss monsters (called Malebranches) are not very strong: except for the boss monsters they are all Level 3 and top at 1700 ATK and 2000 DEF. On top of that, if you control a non-Burning Abyss monster all of them go to the graveyard, and if you don't have a spell or trap card on the field you can special summon them. The Malebranches have a variety of effects to help them not immediately crumble come your opponent's battle phase.
** '''PK-Fire:''' a powerful combo of Burning Abyss and Phantom Knights as they're both Level 3 centric archetypes that like sending their own cards to the GY.

* '''Chaos''' - Uses a lot of LIGHT and DARK monsters and revolves around banishing cards (like destroying them, but they will super duper never come back, totally, unless you play this or several other banish-based archetypes). Technically only an archetype because of one card which only works for Rituals, given the number of cards in Japanese that don't have the name of the archetype in English. Just UDE things. The Black Luster Solder monster, another of Yugi's favorites, is part of this. Home to a shit tonne of previously broken cards, including an upgraded version of Black Luster Soldier, and Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End, a broken card which [[Exterminatus|blows up everything]] and is half the reason (with Yatagarasu being the other) Konami started banning cards instead of just limiting them to one and would ''still'' be OP today if it weren't errataed to death. Even the nerfed version of these two cards, Chaos Sorcerer, spent a decade on the ban list.

* '''Charmer''' - Cute elemental themed magical girls with partner monsters that focus on stealing your opponent's monsters of the correct attribute and using it to fuel effects. Unfortunately, while cute and a relatively early release, they were never very good at any point in the game's history due requiring your opponent be running a particular attribute and being exceptionally fragile even if you did correctly match them. The most notable thing about them aside from being cute girls is that several of their support cards can summon themselves directly from the main deck, being home to two thirds of the cards capable of doing that. A structure deck with some really powerful support has been released, but its only been sufficient to make them an OK archetype and not a great one.

* '''Cyber Angel''' - The first prominent Ritual Archetype to come into fruition, Relinquished doesn't count because it STILL hasn't gotten any support yet, it's one of the first decks that come into peoples minds when they think of ritual. This has more to do with the fact that there's only two other ritual deck that've had a noticeable impact on the meta than of Cyber Angel's power, though Cyber Angel's do have some decent power. They're game plan is basically revolves around summoning of their Ritual monsters, tributing those monsters to activate their effects, and recycling them to keep your resources in check. This is by no means a bad strategy as their Ritual monsters are excellent but their supporting engine, the ''Cyber Girl'' series, isn't up to snuff to actually facilitate their plays. As such they are often mixed in with better ritual decks that make use of them, such as Drytrons one of the aforementioned meta impacting decks. they were used by GX's Alexis, a fan favorite character. Unfortunately for her and her Cyber Angels this popularity hasn't translated to consistent support.

* '''Cyber Dragon''' - The original Cyber Dragon is Power Creep: The Card, to the point that there's still a popular fan format, GOAT Format, which is "everything that came before Cyber Dragon" (though other cards from the same booster are also serious power creep, Cyber Dragon is the one on the cover that ''Cybernetic Revolution'' is named for). Being used by the only competent rival in GX, Zane, they've gotten enough support through the years to play in any format since their release. Their first main strategy is quickly summoning the above Level 5 2100 ATK monster to the field (without Tributes) and then using the "Power Bond" card to create an 8000+ ATK Fusion Monster that runs over everything. In later formats, they might try to create a Rank-5 Xyz Monster or a number of other tactics.
**'''Cyberdark:''' when your rival falls to the dark side, and gets a new [[edge]]y upgrade, but actually a [[fail|downgrade]]. A spin of Cyber Dragons, a card ahead of its time, and then drag it down to down to pack filler while the anime insists it's an improvement. The deck involved equipping dragons in the grave to the machine dragons more ATK. as they were cards a popular GX rival had used, they had gotten support long after. its third wave came During a structure deck poll, with Cyberstyle getting second place (beaten by the meme that was Ice Barriers). aiming to merge Cyberdarks with Cyber Dragons, getting better at searching out cyber cards and dumbing monsters. Zane's signature "Power Bond" card is now searchable and easier to use, and fusing his two boss monsters together to create a '''Towers''' monster with the legendary 5000 ATK. Still, nothing to place it into meta at the time, but now Cyberdarks don't feel like a joke of an Archetype.

* '''Dark Magician''' - The signature monster of Yugi Muto from the original series. On its own, the Dark Magician is... not very good. 2500/2100 for a two-Tribute monster is middling, even back in the day. Summoned Skull provided the same ATK for only one Tribute, and for two Tributes you could instead get a Blue-Eyes White Dragon. To mitigate this the archetype includes a fair number of Monster/spell/trap cards to summon, support, and protect the Dark Magician. Once got a card called Dragun of Red-Eyes, shared with Red-Eyes with an effect so bonkers it was limited to one per deck before it was released in English.
** '''Magician Girl''' - A sub-archetype based around gaining power and summoning more Spellcaster-type monsters. The Dark Magician Girl is notable for being one of the most popular [[waifu]]s of the game.

* '''Dark World''' - 

* '''Earthbound''' - 

* '''Egyptian Gods''' - Giant God-Soldier of Obelisk, Sky Dragon of Osiris and Winged God-Dragon of Ra, aka Obelisk the Tormentor, Slifer the Sky Dragon and Winged Dragon of Ra. The only three monsters in the game with the Divine-Beast type, they are legendary monsters based around the Egyptian gods Ra, Osiris and... [[Wat|Obelisk]]. They all require THREE Tributes to summon normally but they are beefy: their summoning cannot be negated and no cards can be activated as a reaction to their summoning. Obelisk has a hefty 4000/4000, cannot be targeted by spells, traps or card effects (but can still be destroyed by non-targeted effects). By tributing 2 monsters Obelisk can destroy all monsters your opponent controls, but Obelisk cannot attack that turn. Slifer's has all monsters your opponent summons lose 2000 ATK (if they hit 0 they are destroyed), and Slifer's ATK and DEF are equal to the number of cards in your hand x1000. Ra starts out with 0 ATK/DEF, and by paying all but 100 of your LP Ra's ATK and DEF becomes equal to the paid. By paying 1000 LP you can destroy one monster on the field. It's obvious that these two abilities are difficult to use at the same time. While powerful they're difficult and risky to use. Suffers from how destruction effect heavy Yu-Gi-Oh is and how only one of them has any protection from it

* '''Elemental HERO''' - Used by Jaden Yuki from GX, the HERO monsters (based on superheroes) require extensive use of Fusion Summoning to get your good monsters on the field and attack with them. A serious source of [[skub]] because of the heavy reliance on summoning, the fact that they were used by the GX protagonist, that they were in every set of the GX era meaning that they clogged up booster space, and there were a LOT of them. Seriously: about two dozen in the main deck, over three dozen in the Extra Deck, and that's not even counting all their support cards and sub archetypes. On top of all that the HERO monsters are terrible, with only a few being worth running. Has some of the worst support cards in the game thanks to mediocre effects tied to overly obtuse activation requirements.
** '''Destiny HERO''' - Like the Elemental HERO monsters, except 50% more [[British Empire|British]], 50% more [[edgy]], and actually fucking good. Used by Aster Phoenix from GX.
** '''Neso''' - An archetype built around Elemental HERO Neos, Jaden Yuki's signature monster. The archetype revolves around using Contact Fusion involving Neos and a Neo-Spacian Monster to summon a better monster. These monsters are not spectacular on their own, and they're made even worse by the fact that they return to the Extra Deck at the end of the turn. This made an already iffy archetype drop even more in use. Its best monster, Neo-Spacian Grand Mole, has nothing to do with the archetype in the slightest but sees use because its ability to repeatedly bounce both itself and whatever it fights to the hand makes it really good at screwing over any deck that used anything more than their normal summon to bring a monster out (read: almost all of them).
** '''Evil HERO''' - As above, but less Britishness and with extra edge. Used by Jaden Yuki once he goes evil in the third season of GX.
** '''Masked HERO''' - Based on [[Mantis Warriors|Kamen Rider]], the Masked HERO cards use Transformation Fusion to turn Elemental HERO monsters into Masked HERO monsters, who have powerful effects. The three transformation cards are all Quick Play cards, allowing you to change your monsters mid-turn to attack over and over again. Have no main deck monsters unlike in the source material due them all being Normals, as such there only support card is Elemental HERO Shadow Mist. Used by Jaden in the GX manga, which weirdly is based on the anime and not the other way around.
** '''Vision HERO''' - [[Cyclops|Cyclopean]] robot men?, like the Evil HEROs they're more based on their user than actual references to media. Have the gimmick of coming back from the graveyard as Continuous Traps and then being able to be special summoned by tributing a monster. Are surprisingly competent and form the engine of the modern HERO deck. Used by Aster Phoenix in the GX manga.

* '''Exodia''' / '''Forbidden One''' - The most famous alternate win condition, Exodia comes in five pieces. If you have all pieces in your hand you win the duel. While on their own it's very unlikely to obtain all parts, when combined with a wide variety of draw and search engines you become able to draw just about your entire deck in one turn and obtain all the parts. This means that playing an Exodia deck automatically makes you [[That Guy]], even in the eyes of other That Guys with their own That Guy decks. There are a number of monsters based on Exodia and are supported by him, but they're mostly even more difficult to use than regular Exodia. Its tendency to reduce matches to [[Patience|solitaire]], even if not consistent enough to be competitive viable without an otherwise broken draw engine, would have gotten it banned over a decade ago if it weren't so highly iconic. Still, Exodia rarely sees competitive play due to the simple fact that anytime there's enough draw/search to make it good, there's some more consistent FTK options that require fewer, non-limited, cards.

*'''Fallen of Albaz''' - Konami's next long-running storyline set in an inter-dimensional junkyard desert, about the forbidden love between a nun from the church that hates the extra deck and a dragon boy that fell from the sky who's a polymerization on legs. The archetypes are connected by the ''Branded'' support cards that also include Albaz. His Dragon fusion produces an advantage when sent to the GY, which is liked by...
**'''Dogmatika:''' Dogmatika is an interesting deck for its time as the pool of cards that what to be directly dumped from the extra deck to the GY so to activate their effects is ever increasing. Throwing way ''Elder Entity N'tss'', ''Fossil'' monsters, or one of Albaz's fusion forms grant greater card advantage than summoning them. 
**'''Tri-Brigade:''' a group of post-apocalyptic [[anime]] [[Furry]]s rebelling against the church. made up the 3 beast monster types (Beast, Beast-warrior, and Winged beast) with a gimmick of the main deck monsters banishing themselves and others of the bestial type as material for link summoning.
**'''Springans:''' the introduction of ''[[splash Damage]]'' to YuGiOh. They are a crew of robots made from ammunition. they XYZ summon the hover ship that sails across the desert, able to attach them sieve to it from the hand, field, and GY. They are also in truth a bunch of soot creatures that pilot the robots, except for Kit who is a Tri-Brigade member who decided to join the Springans. Unfortunately for them they're pretty terrible compared to the other Archetypes in this storyline but het they got their own spin-off!
**'''Despia:''' The true form of the Dogmatika nation, a bunch of cultists that worship The Hole and masqueraded as holy warriors. Have a theater theme and are centered around Fusion summoning, Dark Fairies and Light Fiends, and Branded support cards. Revealed their true nature in a dramatic display where they brought about an apocalypses upon their own people and turned their holy warriors into monsters through their Brands. Seems to be lead by a red haired counterpart to Fallen of Albaz.
**'''Swordsoul:''' A bunch of [[Dragonborn|humanoid Wyrm]] monsters that summon Tokens that they use to Synchro summon with a single monster. The saviors of the Dogmatika nation joined up with them.
**'''Icejade:''' An Archetype of female Water Aqua monsters composed of Jade. They start out their lives as white but turn black as they age. At the end of their lives they become black crystals used to forge the Swordsoul's glowing swords. 
**'''Therion:''' The first foes the Springans meet in their spin-off storyline. They are a bunch of Western Zoodiac themed robot Gladiators, and the captain of the , Sargas, appears to be the Scorpion member of the group. Like the Koa'ki Meiru they both support their Therions and the monster type of that particular Therion. They are attacking the Springans for some unknown reason, are powered by a glowing engine in a spaceship called Argyro that suspiciously resembles the Springans' true forms, and seem to be transformed into the Splights after Argyro goes crazy.
**'''Splight:''' A bunch of level 2 Thunder monsters that are humanoids composed of electricity. Each of them is branned with one of the Zoodaic signs not covered by the Therions and is named after a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper-atmospheric_lightning transient luminous event]]. There gimmick is that they can treat Link 2s as level 2s for Xyz summoning and they are ridiculously overpowered.

* '''Fortune Fairy''' - 
* '''Fortune Lady''' - 

* '''Frog/Toad''' - An deck full of, you guessed it, [[Frogemhoth|Frogs]] and Toads! While they have a couple of beatdown builds like Wetlands, or gimmicky strategies like Centerfrog, the main use of Frogs is to swarm the field with fodder for summoning better monsters like Monarchs. They have one good boss monster in Toadally Awesome, a omni-negate that sets the card it negates to your field and can recycle itself.

* '''Gadget''' - Like Frogs they're a bunch of fodder for better decks to use, but this time it's little gear robots. They have a few bosses of their own but all suck, and with the changing time all the Gadgets except for their new gold and silver versions suck. Even those newer versions are barely played in decks that can use them.

* '''Gem-Knights''' - A gemstone-themed archetype of warriors who can combine to create more powerful beings in order to face more powerful opponents. And before you ask: the Gem-Knights came around just over three years before Steven Universe became a thing. The Gem-Knights are [[Paladin|a bunch of honorable warriors who fight to protect the weak]]. They are very reliant on Fusion Monsters: of the 24 monsters in the archetype, there are 12 Normal, Effect, and Gemini monsters, 11 Fusion monsters and one Xyz monster. To aid in this they have access to six cards that allows Fusion for Gem-Knights in a variety of ways.

* '''Gishki''' - A revival of the long-neglected Ritual summoning method, they are built around finding both Ritual Monsters and the Gishki Aquamirror Ritual card, which allows them to summon all of their monsters. They are one of the archetypes featured in the Duel Terminal arcade machines, where they made their debut.

* '''Gladiator Beast''' - A deck full of Roman themed [[Furry]] [[Awesome| wrestlers]]. Their gimmick is that at the end of the battle phase after battling then can tag out for another Gladiator Beast in the deck. They also make use of Contact Fusion and do it better than Neos could ever hope to do.

* '''Golden Castle of Stromburg''' - An unusual archetype with no shared names between the cards. Instead all of them reference Golden Castle of Stromburg in their text or target cards that reference it in their text. This field spell card requires you banish 10 cards each turn or destroy it, but protects you from battle damage while its up and lets you special summon monsters of its archetype from the deck.

* '''Gouki''' - 

* '''Gravekeeper''' - One of the oldest archetypes and one of the few that play up the Egyptian aspect of the game, Gravekeeper Monsters resemble Egyptians protecting tombs and those who rest in them. Some of the artwork resembles characters from ancient Egypt as depicted in the anime/manga. They heavily depend on the Necrovalley Field Spell, which shuts down just about anything having to do with the graveyard. Despite being able to mess over many other archetypes this way a well-placed negation or card destruction will leave them quite vulnerable.

* '''Harpie''' - The signature archetype of Mai Valentine from the original show, the Harpie monsters resemble, well, [[Harpy|harpies]]. Attractive winged women who don't wear a lot of clothing, their archetype is built on swarming the field with monsters and beat the opponent down that way. Awkwardly predates modern archetype standards so cards have to change their name to "Harpie Lady" to benefit from older stuff and the archetype has been kinda sucky. Still, as the signature monsters of one of the major anime characters, it will keep getting support for forever and can be a decent deck. Not great, just decent.

* '''Herald''' - 

* '''Ice Barrier''' - A shit archetype which spawned two broken cards that aren't even used in it. They have no well-defined strategy at all (the nearest they get is some passable walls) but they have Synchro Monsters (Brionac and Trishula) that can be used in other decks and have superb effects: Brionac allowed the player to repeatedly bounce their own cards back to the hand and reuse on-activation effects, which was so broken they had to issue an erratum, and Trishula removes 1 card each from the hand, field, and Graveyard when summoned. Memed by "Forcing Konami explains what Ice Barrier do", They had surprisingly won a Structure deck poll, even beating out the more popular Cyber Dragons. Second wave Ice Barrier, while not Spetecluarly powerful does elevate the archetype from a grab bag of cards to a proper deck with combos. Most Still have situation Stun effects but you can now make boards of them to hinder your opponent and then summon your strong synchros to attack for game. 

* '''Infernity''' - HAAAANNNDLESS COMBO!!! Wild West (with a few medieval-themed monsters for some reason) fiends that are based around having no cards in your hand for relatively powerful effects.

* '''Infinitrack''' - ''Mightly machines, big and mighty machines, working for you, doing mighty things!~'' Giant fucking construction machines, apart of the Earth Machine family, based around XYZ summoning.

* '''Invoked''' - A very small Archetype with a single main deck monster, Aleister the Invoker, that on normal summon searched it's archetypal fusion spell. All of the deck's Fusion monsters just need Aleister and a single monster of a certain attribute to summon. This combined with it's potent field spell made the Archetype a widely played package in many decks and spawned the [[Meme|"Normal summon Aleister' meme]].

* '''Inzektor''' - 

* '''Jar''' - Just about the biggest middle finger you can play to your opponent, Jar monsters are weak (except for Pot of The Forbidden) monsters resembling jars with a grinning creature inside. They all have very powerful but annoying flip effects, from discarding your hand and drawing a new card to wiping the board followed by forced revealing of cards, playing some of them and putting the rest in the graveyard. These are all supremely annoying effects, and the most annoying ones are outright forbidden. Playing them automatically makes you [[That Guy]] on the same level of an Exodia player, except even Exodia players think you're being That Guy because Jars get rid of Exodia pieces so easily.

* '''Jinzo''' - A small archetype dating back to the early days, Jinzo (short for the [[Japan]]ese ''jinzoningen'', which means cyborg) itself is a Lvl 6 2400/1500 Monster that stops the activation of and negates all Trap cards on the field. Given that Trap cards were a notable part of the game, Jinzo was quite feared back in the day for outright shutting down an entire type of card on top of being almost as strong as Summoned Skull's 2500 attack (the then gold standard for a one tribute monster). At one point it even was Limited to stave off its reign of terror, but in the modern day it is Unlimited because it is easier to get rid of, and traps are relatively rare. Jinzo spawned a few spinoffs that either shut down Trap cards as well or aid in summoning other Jinzo monsters. Jinzo was only a archetype in that their were anime people that played some Jinzo support cards for a long time until Konami gave a proper deck. A Situational play style of now Jinzo making card advantage if the enemy happened to play traps against a Jinzo deck, but still works better a side option that's rarely used. Jinzo became one of Joey Wheeler's signature monsters halfway into the Battle City arc of the original show.

* '''Junk''' - 

* '''Kaiju''' - GOJIRA! Yes, of course Godzilla and Friends were adapted into the game. Their gimmick is twofold: you can summon one to your opponent's side of the field to make it easier to summon one of your own (because Kaiju do love to battle one another, and because this is done by tributing one of their pre-existing monsters), and their non-Monster cards generate Kaiju Counters which can be spent for a variety of potent effects. Their roster includes expies of Godizlla, Mothra, Gamera, Gigan, Kumonga, Ghidorah and Mecha Godzilla, and strangely enough Dark Lugiel from Ultraman as well. Of course none of this matters since people only play Gamera, the weakest in terms of attack, to get rid of the opponent's monsters easily. Opinions are sharply divided on if such a card is healthy for the game or not, debating on if it's a good way to avoid "unbreakable boards" of monsters immune to all other removal that plagued some prior formats. 

* '''Koa'ki Meiru''' - A bunch of monsters of varying types and appearances that have a shared dependence on ''The Iron Core of Koa'ki Meiru'' or on a monster of the same type. They have a variety of useful effects but their dependence on using certain cards as fuel for their effects makes them unsustainable in most decks with certain exceptions like Adamancipator.

* '''Karakuri''' - Named for, and designed after the mechanical Japanese puppets of the same name, Karakuri is another member of the three archetypes-wide Earth Machine (Including Infinitrack, MOTHERFUCKING TRAINS, and some monsters of the Machina archetype) family, focused on Synchro summoning. The major hitch with Karakuri is that when they are selected for an attack by the opponent, they change from ATK position to DEF position. However, they possess a variety of effects that make this not as bad as it seems and in some situations highly desirable since it can activate the effects of some of your other Karakuri monsters and spells.

* '''Kozmo''' - You know what's neat? The Wizard of Oz. You know what's also neat? [[Star Wars]]. So what happens when you slap those two together? You get the Kozmo archetype. Oh yes. Luke Skywalker is now [[promotions|a smokin' hot redhead]], R2-D2, C-3PO and Chewbacca are the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion, Ben Kenobi has been replaced by a rather attractive Good Witch of the North and even the Darth Vader and Darth Maul of the set (The Wicked Witches of the West and East respectively) are pretty. You'd think "Oh [[Japan]]" at this, but the archetype was actually created on the TCG side. The archetype consists of two kinds of cards: the "pilots" are used to summon the second type, the spaceships. Summoning the spaceships is as easy as banishing the pilot in order to get a spaceship on the field. In turn, a spaceship that's in the graveyard can be banished to summon a pilot from the deck. This means that it's ridiculously easy to get extremely powerful cards on the field, and aimed destruction is easily avoided. There was even a very easy one-turn kill available that lead to several Kozmo cards being Limited.

* '''Kuriboh''' - One of the contenders for the title of series mascot, Kuriboh are a series of Lvl 1 300/200 or lower monsters with a series of effects that involve negating your opponent's attacks. Yugi, Jaden and Yuma from the first, second and fourth series  all have their own Kuribohs which saw frequent use. Because of their low stats Kurioh have great difficulty standing on their own, and require support from powerful monsters in order to win a duel instead of avoiding losing it. Despite the support, only one Kuriboh was ever used seriously and that was purely as an effect.

* '''Lightsworn''' - A bunch of light monsters that focus on sending their deck to the graveyard as a cost. With the number of cards that work in the graveyard nowadays and their already good effects, they're heavily splashable. Despite seeing solid play and support, they somehow wound up in a poll on what archetype should gain more support in 2020. The backlash was enough that they lost to an obscure archetype focused on the unpopular pendulum summoning mechanic in their first round.

* '''Lunalight''' - A bunch of [[Furry|Beast-Warrior girls that have a moon theme with their Extra Deck monsters being dancers]], they focus on Fusion summoning and simple OTKs.

* '''Lyrilusc''' - A bunch of level one Winged Beasts, even though they are in fact [[Furry|women in bird costumes]]. Are an Xyz focused deck that focus on attacking directly for quick OTKs and have a ton of protection.

* '''Machina''' - 

* '''Madolche''' - A bunch of cute dessert themed monsters of varying types. They focus on summoning their Fairy Xyz monsters as well as recycling their monsters back into the deck.

* '''Magician''' - While there are a lot of Magician cards, such as Dark Magician or Gagaga Magician, the Magician Archetype is specifically composed of Pendulum Spellcasters used Yuya in ARC-V.

* '''Majespecter''' - 

* '''Malefic''' - A bunch of famous Dragon monsters with strange monochromatic cybernetics. They can only be summoned by banishing one of the monster they were based on and have the Earthbound restriction of needing a field spell and only having one on field. What sets them apart from Earthbounds are they have actual Extra Deck monsters and decent support, they still suck though.

* '''Meklord''' - An anti-Synchro deck that is pretty terrible. Their gimmick is that they blow themselves up if there boss monsters The Emperor aren't on field. Doing so triggers their boss monster's effect to special summon themselves to the field. Like Nordics they eventually got support that solved the Archetype's issues by ignoring them and giving them a sort of easy to summon boss monster. Is among that strangest deck adapted from the show as the deck functioned in a completely different way there. Basically the Emperors are really supposed to be a bunch of tiny useless monsters that "combine" together with a core to form the actual boss. It was a neat gimmick and it's strange that Konami didn't adapt it properly.

* '''Melodious''' - A deck of Light Fairy monsters with a music theme used by Zuzu Boyle the secondary protagnist of ARC-V, and some of them have a flower/butterfly theme because of a plot stuff [[DERP|but barely any of the monsters have it making it seem like they shoved it in last minute]]. It's a stun focused deck that goes on the offense using it's Fusion monsters which are the core of the Melodious's gameplan, [[DERP|even though it's implied in the show that Zuzu shouldn't be using Fusions because "They don't suit her", ARC-V had bunch of dumb plot]].

* '''Metalfoes''' - A bizarre Archetype of Fire Psychic Normal Pendulums that are themed of of anime like Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, which was adapted into [[Robotech]], and alloying metals. Their Normals are people riding vehicles and their Extra Deck monsters are those people wearing the vehicles as armor. They are surprisingly powerful thanks to their excellent support cards and their ease of finding them thanks to their Pendulum effect of blowing up their own cards to set their spells from deck. One of their cards, Electrumite, has been on the ban list for a long time since it's a generic Pendulum searcher and fixes a lot of the problems Pendulums have that prevents them from being meta relvent.

* '''Monarch''' - A series of tall humanoids dressed in armor, the Monarch archetype consists of a series of <s>six</s> <s>eight</s> nine 2400/1000 Monsters supported by two 2800/1000 Monsters and upgraded versions of the original six, a series of Spell/Trap cards, weaker 800/1000 Monsters, six Vassals for the core six and two Squires for the two 2800s, and a few other cards built around Tribute Summoning. When you successfully do so the Monarchs destroy or otherwise remove cards from your opponent's field, giving you the advantage. They can Tribute Summon at a relatively high speed and can even shut down your opponent's Extra Deck, but this is at the cost of many Monarch cards revolve about you either not using or having an empty Extra Deck on your own. They can be frighteningly effective and fast, filling their field while emptying their opponent's, and were a top deck in the final years before synchro (though that may have been largely due to heavy restrictions on other forms of removal during this era). Monarchs are a rather large archetype, with around 40 cards (but don't build a deck of 1 of each of these cards: it won't work very well). Exactly what they are monarchs of is unknown. Their ability to remove stuff from the field while generating a beatstick that only requires a monster tribute to fuel them makes the cards in the archetype without extra deck restrictions extremely splashable, especially in decks focused on special summoning. They're a prolific deck, especially within the early days of the game, and while their prominence has decreased as Tribute summoning got less and less viable they still pop in the meta from time to time.

* '''Nekroz''' - see "Gishki", but insert the words "broken" and "busted" as necessary between all the words. Technically not in Duel Terminal, though, but they were part of the follow-up to the Duel Terminal story that was being rolled out between 2014-17, to the point that their Ritual Monsters were corrupted versions of Duel Terminal story favorites.
* '''Ninja''' - A relatively large wind/dark warrior archetype themed around the eponymous shinobi, focusing on using Ninjitsu art cards to defend and counter against your opponent's actions. The Ninjitsu art cards of transformation, combined with the special summonable Ninja themed monsters results in a deck that can surprise your opponent with sudden heavy hitters from Divine Beast Smigorgh to [[Awesome|Blue-Eyes Ultimate fucking Dragon]]
* '''Nordic''' - 

* '''Number''' - Central to the plot of ZEXAL, the Numbers are Monsters whose names start with a number. While they are all Xyz monsters this is the only thing they have in common: their archetypes, attributes, types and effects are all widely different. Some of them are generic, while others work exclusively in certain archetypes. In the anima only they did also had a ''Number claws'' which they can only be destroyed in battle by another number. 

* '''Odd-Eyes''' - The archetype used by Yuya Sakaki, the protagonist of ARC-V. The Odd-Eyes monsters are a group of dragons with heterochromia, giving them mismatched eye colors. The archetypes consists of a large number of high level, high power (7+, 2500+ ATK) dragons and their support cards, which includes the Magician archetype. A large number of them are Pendulum cards designed to summon a large number of them onto the field quickly. There are also several cards that are both Pendulum and another type: Fusion Pendulum, Synchro Pendulum and Xyz Pendulum.

* '''Ojama''' - Named after the Japanese phrase Ojamashimasu ("pardon me for interrupting"), the Ojamas resemble small ugly imps in tiny speedos. ''Oh you, Japan.'' They are the main archetype used by Chazz Princeton, one of the main characters of GX, and the spirit of Ojama Yellow acts as Chazz' sidekick in the show. Standing at a weak 0/1000 each, the core Ojama monsters are not very tough. Instead, they rely on a mix of spell and trap cards to clog up the opponent's side of the board with tokens that they cannot tribute and stall the battle, allowing for the summoning of the Ojama King and using their field spell to switch around the ATK and DEF of all Ojama monsters, followed by either a wipe of the opponent's side of the board or destroying all other Ojamas on the field to make the Ojama King unreasonably buff. A gimmicky and not very powerful archetype by it self that's fun to play but annoying to play against. Later on to synergies with Chazz's other cards, Ojama also becomes an engine to spit out ABCXYZ and Armed Dragon monsters.

*'''Paleozoic''' - an archetype with all its main Deck monsters are normal Traps based on sea creatures from that era. Many cards have good effects to help deal with an opponent any turn or give you more card advantage. The defining Gimmick of the archetype is that they summon themselves as Level 2 Aqua Normal Monster that are unaffected by monster effects when another trap card is activated. Cards like "Canadia" are often slotted into decks that used traps as they provide removeal while giving a extra body.

* '''Performapal/Performage''' - One of the most broken archetypes of its time and a contender for the most powerful deck of the game pre-nerf, Performapal and Performage are based on circus animals and circus performers respectively. The former is the other archetype of ARC-V's Yuya Sakaki, who uses the circus animals for his signature Entertainment Dueling style. Both archetypes are based on Pendulum Summoning and shenanigans in the battle phase that break the game so utterly, Konami was forced to employ the second emergency ban list in the game's history. ''Even then'' it remained powerful enough to remain a meta staple until the [[power creep]] set in. It's safe to say that a lot of people did not like them a lot, with the cartoony art being the least of their complaints.

* '''Phantom Knights:''' - often abbreviated to PK, Used by Yuto, the XYZ dimension's version of Yuya Sakaki from Arc-V and as such are associated with the Xyz Dragon Archetype. They Are made of level 3-4 Dark Warriors but have a weird tensing were the monster is called "The Phantom Knights". Their effects often revolve around banishing themselves from the GY to summon themselves or other Knights with many of the Spell & Trap cards also having GY effects to summon them themselves as monsters. Newer support has tried to link them with Raid Raptors, to great success.

* '''Photon/Galaxy/Galaxy-Eyes Photon Dragon'''  -  Used by Kite, one of the main Rivals in ZEXEL. The deck consists of Light monsters with specifically 2000 ATK so you can tribute them to summon his ace dragon. Outside some anime Number monster gimmicks, his deck is based around XYZ summoning Rank 4 and 8 monsters, which is a ready strong pool of Toolbox monsters. In his Arc-V version, he also added Galaxy-Eyes Cipher Dragon with a gimmick of stealing monsters to make a copy of itself. Add in that some XYZ Galaxy-Eyes monsters can rank up on top of other Galaxy-Eyes, now you have Rank climbing shenanigans.

* '''Predaplant''' - 

* '''Prophecy'''  -  An Archetype of Spellcasters that support the ''Spellbook'' Archetype. Besides some connections to ''Endymion'' and ''Invoked'' there really isn't much notable about them as they're game plan is a pretty simplistic "Gain advantage" sort of deal.

* '''Raidraptors:''' Used by Shun from Ark-V. Was clearly made to be the XYZ version of Blackwings. Mostly spamming level 4 Dark Winged beasts and ranking up their XYZ monsters with searchable Quick-play Rank-up Magic cards. Since the release of Waking the Dragon in 2018 their boss monster Raidraptor - Ultimate Falcon sees use in loads of random decks as an easy to bring out hard to remove beatstick.

* '''Red-Eyes''' - The Red-Eyes Black Dragon (Red-Eyes B. Dragon because they wanted to avoid the association with black magic) is one of the game's most famous cards and the signature card of Duelist Kingdom's Joey Wheeler. On its own the Red-Eyes is not very impressive: 2400/2000 at level 7 is just not worth it, even with its good attribute and type: outclassed by the Dark Magician and the Summoned Skull alike it's just not up to par. What it makes up with however is its support and mind-boggling versatility: Gemini, Burn, Pendulum, Toolbox and more are all options for the archetype. This means that the archetype is capable of a great many things, but herein lies the trap: an improperly built deck will only get in its own way. A good Red-Eyes deck is the result of a great degree of finetuning to make a specialized deck. The archetype is also lacking in defensive measures and doesn't have a large number of good trap cards to support it, so a powerful opponent will simply steamroll a Red-Eyes deck. Shares broken Dragoon of Red-Eyes with Dark Magician, and Red-Eyes Fusion as support made it even crazier.

* '''Red Dragon Archfiend/Resonator'''  - The deck of the Main Rival and teammate Jack Atlas. Is an inverse to Yusa's Defensive Stardust Dragon, with a focus on offensive and pressuring the opponent. Keeping up the reflection of Stardust, Red Dragon Archfiend has several evolutions, with the higher level taking the approach of using multiple tuner monsters instead of a Synchro Tuner monster. The Resonator Tuners facilitates that Red Dragon Archfiend gets out first turn.

* '''Reptilianne''' - 

* '''Rokket''' - An Archetype of bullet themed robot Dragons. Are meant to facilitate the summoning of...
** '''Borrel''' - An Archetype of [[Awesome|gun themed robot Dragons]]. Are mainly composed of Link monsters and act as excellent generic boss monsters.

* '''roid''' - Cars with faces. A deck that sucks, played in GX by a character who sucks. Make a typical anima fusion Archetype were the game plan was to make random weak pack filler that only wins because of plot. Sometimes called "Vehicroids" so as not to be confused with...
** '''Speedroid''' - These are technically roids, but they look completely different and have a completely different strategy. This gave them a headache when it came to attempting to making Vehicroids not garbage, as they had to support them in a way that didn't help Speedroids. As a result of trying to work around this they decided that the solution was to cripple Vehicroids by no longer letting them use Wind monsters. [[Fail|Despite the fact that all the good Vehicroids are Wind, including the ones they haven't printed yet]], but hey, it's Konami. Speedroids are Wind monsters based on toys that want to synchro-spam. Used by Yugo, the Synchro dimension's version of Yuya Sakaki from Arc-V and as such are associated with the Synchro Dragon Archetype.

* '''Sacred Beast''' - A weird Series of monsters that straddle the line between Series and Archetype hard. Are bunch of GX knock offs of The Egyptian God cards but [[Irony|are in fact more playable then them due to their superior support]]. Their main gimmick besides having twisted versions of The Egyptian Gods' effects is that they each need to be summoned by sending three of a certain card from the field to the graveyard to summon. Specifically Monsters, Spells, and Traps respectively... at least that's how they were supposed to be. Like many cards that were designed for the anime when it came time to print them in the card game they felt that they were too powerful and needed to be nerfed, even though The Egyptian God cards didn't receive any nerfs. Now they specifically need Fiend, Continuous Spells, and Continuous Traps to be summoned. This regulated them to niche use until the release of their Structure Deck where new support in the form of Fiends based off the old ones design, Continuous Spells and Continuous Traps actually designed for Sacred Beasts, and a retrained boss monsters propelled Sacred Beast into a strong Rouge Status.

* '''Salamangreat''' - 

* '''Shaddol'''  - A menace of its time being a fusion archetype basted around of all things, strong flip monsters that were zombie puppets of Dual Terminal monsters. The Flip effects were just icing during a time when set a monster and pass was still a viable move. The real threat was how much card advantage they generated by the absurdly broad stipulation that they had to be '''sent to the GY by card effect'''. Not just by fusion summing, not just by your opponent, not just by Destruction, not just sent from the hand. If you had a card that discarded, dump, or milled, you got card advantage. Being such splashable and powerful made it tier-zero for a time until the banhammer came. By a fan pull, Shaddols did make a return years later with a structure deck, new card, and with all the old ones unbanned, but the meta had evolved past Shaddol's shenanigans.

* '''Six Samurai''' - An unimpressive archetype that focused on shifting what monster was destroyed by battle with a bit of swarming.
** '''Legendary Six Samurai''' - A much better archetype that focuses primarily on swarming and deck searching to fuel that summon. This surplus of monsters on the field is then used to summon their quite good boss monster, and supporting it with tribute monsters (they're also good at summoning utility synchro monsters from outside the tribe). Since it so heavily focuses on a single card it's very vulnerable to limited list changes and Master Rules 4. 
** '''Secret Six Samurai''' - 

* '''Sky Striker''' - 

* '''SPYRAL''' - A TCG-only set that's two parts [[James Bond]], one part [[Metal Gear]] and a nod at the Spyral agency from DC Comics. The archetype revolves around getting its core monster, SPYRAL Super Agent (or one of the many, many, cards counted as it on the field), onto the table followed by using a set of support cards to keep it on the field. It also involves looking frequently at your opponent's hand (which fits with the spy theme) to trigger effects. This means that the SPYRAL archetype suffers from a few weaknesses that, if exploited, can utterly shut it down. While it saw play with relative frequency, it was never ''that'' popular till years of support eventually built up and it suddenly became a tier 0 (65%+ of tournament placements used it) strategy in 2017.

* '''Spellbook''' - An odd archetype that has a ''single'' monster card (not that central ''and'' also a member of an otherwise unrelated archetype as well), and is entirely (bar one trap) spell card-based. This is mostly because they were a companion Archetype to ''Prophecy'', and as such were meant to be played together. They focus on tutoring other cards of the archetype out and supporting Spellcaster monsters but are prevented from spamming them by only allowing one of each card name to be activated per turn. Due to their ability to thin the deck and support monsters they don't have, they are typically combined with other archetypes. Had Spellbook of Judgement, which led to one of the most broken decks of all time that only avoided dominating the game because the equally broken Dragon Rulers were around at the same time.

* '''Starry Night'''  - an example of Konami executives finding an old OG Vanilla monster and deciding to make a new entire archetype around it. Most of the monsters are Level 4 Light Fairies, with the purpose of Special summoning or bouncing back to the hand a Level 7 Light Dragon, specifically, the retrain of Seiyaryu, Starry Night, Starry Dragon. Its main ability being popping a card each time it's summoned from the hand. 

* '''Superheavy Samurai''' - An Archetype of Synchro focused Earth Machines with a Samurai aesthic, focused on the defense position. They're gimmick is twofold, firstly they can attack while in the defense position and can use their DEF value instead of their ATK value, second they forgo Spells and Traps and many of there effects don't work if they're in the Graveyard. To make up for this weakness they have a unusual number of in Archetype handtraps as well as monsters that can act as equip spells.

* '''Supreme King''' - Near the end of ARC-V a new sub-archetype was introduced to reflect the series' villain: the Supreme King archetype. The main card of this archetype is Supreme King Z-ARC, a Fusion Pendulum monster that requires you to tribute 1 Fusion, 1 Synchro, 1 Xyz and 1 Pendulum dragon-typed monster. In return, you get a 4000/4000 beast that cannot be destroyed or targeted by your opponent and can Special Summon a Supreme King Dragon card from your (extra) deck if it destroys a monster. With the changes made to the game regarding Link Summoning, this archetype has become next to unusable. Still some of there cards are used in most Pendulum decks due to being excellent for the summoning type as well as having the only 0 scale in the game.

* '''Tellarknight''' - 

* '''T.G.''' - 

* '''The Agent''' - 

* '''Thunder Dragon''' - An Archetype created around the unique OG monster Thunder Dragon, a Thunder monster than can discard itself to add up to two copies of itself to the hand. This combined with it's Fusion monster made it one of the few viable Fusion strategies in the early days of the game, still it was only a niche option. As the Konami designers sometimes do they made an Archetype that emulates this unique style of play of discarding one's cards for value while adding in a banish focused play style to make use of all those cards you were discarding. The end result was a terrifyingly powerful deck that has some of the most broken boss monsters to be released to this day.

* '''Timelord''' - 

* '''Traptrix''' - 

* '''Trickstar''' - 

* '''True Draco/True King''' - 

* '''Twins''' - Kisikil and Lilla are the V-Tuber duo known as Live☆Twin by day, and the jewel thieves Evil★Twins by night. They swarm with Live☆Twins to use them as tribute/link material to bring out the Evil★Twins series, which destroy the opponent's field on summon.

* '''Watt''' -  A seemingly random (their Japanese names all start with キ/ki, but this is impossible to convey in English) series of animals with electrical parts on them. They focus on attacking directly and inflicting additional pain on the opponent for doing so successfully. Unfortunately, the most relevance they ever got was one of the video games had them used by the default partner, a game only character that’s prime waifu fodder.

* '''Windwitch''' - 

* '''World Legacy''' - An archetype notable not for its game effects, but because of how (alongside World Chalice, Krawler, Mekk-Knight, Knightmare, Crusadia, and Orcust which it supported), it's art and names tell a surprisingly complex story that could have been its own vidya. How complex? The official Master-Guide series takes multiple pages across tens of pages each in multiple installments to cover it (and the latest additions post-date the newest so it doesn't fully cover it). There are multiple videos (even in Japanese) that need an ''hour'' to tell the whole thing, and even the ultra condensed version takes several minutes. World Legacy was the overall archetype that supported a bunch of other archetypes related to the story, with even monster names being a part of a bunch of them. It also included eponymous World Legacies, a set of monsters with interesting but meh effects with one exception.
** '''World Chalice:''' - 
** '''Krawler:''' - 
** '''Mekk-Knight:''' - 
** '''Knightmare:''' - Reveled that the Fairy was evil all-along, and corrupted all the Mekk-Knights. Many are Currently a stable in every deck given how generic they are, with the always available ability to pop a problem card as long you have bodies on the field and one card in hand being that good.  You get other effects if they are co-linked with another monster but more often people just link them away after doing their job for stronger links.
** '''Crusadia''' - After the whole Nightmare fiasco, the Chosen underwent a time skip and made new friends. Crusade is about link summoning, swarming from the hand to fill unoccupied link arrows so the link monster gains massive attack points to bulldoze anything in their way.
** '''Orcust'''  - Konami is also compiled to create at least one tier zero archetype whenever they do their long-running stories. A Link Deck of dark machines monster made of orchestra instruments. The deck locks you into Dark monster for the rest of the turn but gives you card advantage by banishing them from GY, then have your link monsters Recycle them to get you your powerful counter-trap, then use that link monster to immediately go into '''Dingirsu''' to pop and protect your field. Given Splashablity with the already well-supported Machine and Dark cards, easy to dump for effects, and easy to loop for card advantage, you have a tier zero deck until power creep raised the totem pole.
** '''Guardragon'''  - A Series of generic dragon and normal monsters being composed of the [[Wat|World Legacies after they were transformed into Dragons]]. Yeah Yugioh lore gets weird in some places. Anyway the Guardragons themselves are pretty terrible with the exception of the Dark Link monsters, they formed the cornerstone of ''Dragon Link'' 

* '''Yang Zing''' - 

* '''Zoodiac''' - 
</div></div>

===Non-Archetype Deck Themes===
Notable deck themes that ''aren't'' based on card archetypes. Most of these are either based on the effects of a particular card (which can quickly be killed by banlist changes), interactions between two specific cards, or Type-based tribal (which has been supported since before there was a real card game in the original manga).
* '''Burn''': Do direct damage to the opponent's life points and stall till they die instead of trying to smash them with monsters. Some archetypes support this (Konami threw minor burn effects in entirely random archetypes a lot during the GX era) but burn decks without an archetype are common.
** '''Nurse Burn''': Both Darklord Nurse Reficule and Bad Reaction to Simochi have an effect where anytime the opponent would gain life, they lose it instead. Nurse Burn decks combine this with effects that give your opponents life points, something that is pretty easy since it's often included on otherwise good cards as a drawback, or on apparent joke cards that do nothing ''but'' give your opponent a bunch of life points.

* '''Cyber-Stein''': Cyber-Stein was an earlyish card that allowed special summoning nearly any fusion monster without polymerization or the materials at the low cost of 5000 life points. This was really good, since a good fusion monster on its own could deal almost that much damage in one turn while Megamorph would boost that attack enough for a OTK (and later it had a lot of toolbox options it could choose on demand). While a common card in Japan and a guaranteed inclusion in the Kaiba starter deck (alongside the best abuser, Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon), for some bizarre reason it wasn't released in the west for years till it was given out as a tournament prize card. It was later released as a rare card, just in time to cause the tournament finale to end in three turns and promptly get it on the next ban list. It's merely limited today, but power creep, only working on fusion monsters, and more counters has rendered it less useful.

* '''DAD''': An infamous deck that centered around ''Dark Armed Dragon'', a powerful monster that could be easily summoned in the right deck and could [[Rape|destroy an entire board piece by piece]]. Most variants of the deck utilized Destiney HEROs as the means of getting the needed Dark monsters in the graveyard, helped along by Reinforcement of the Army and Elemental HERO Stratos. There were a lot of variants of this deck such as DADReturn, TeleDAD, and Zombie DAD.
** '''TeleDAD''': The most infamous version of the DAD deck, combining the basic DAD strategy with a explosive Psychic Synchro Spam strategy creating a deck that could so easily keep Dark Armed Dragon supplied with Darks that it rose to Tier Zero status.

* '''Dinosaur''': [[Meme|Holy fucking shit, it's a dinosaur, Jesus Christ, what the fuuuuck.]] A whole lot of Dinosaur monsters slapped together to form a deck, supported by spells/traps. These are dinosaurs that do not fit into any of the existing archetypes, so they band together to form a large toolbox with many different ways to essentially do the same thing: rush and beat down your opponent.

* '''Dragon''': With age and popularity, Dragon has a lot of strong cards that spam these beat sticks. Although many were intended to support a particular archetype, they are usually generic enough to be used with any dragon card. After Releasing the Guard Dragon link monster which allowed you to summon from the Grave, Main, and extra deck, it became a perfect storm that made Dragon-link decks cancer it is today even after banning the offending Guard Dragon cards.

* '''Demise & Ruin''': A Series of ritual cards focused on Demise the King of Armageddon, Ruin the Queen of Oblivion, and their various alternate versions. Demise's cards focus on paying life points to destroy things and Ruin's focuses on attacking twice and destroying monsters in battle. Demise, King of Armageddon specifically saw a little bit of meta play do to being a board wipe like the original Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End, but his Archetype has mostly been relegated to irrelevancy due to their minor support.

* '''Empty Jar''': Morphing Jar is a card that forces both players to discard their entire hand and draw 5 cards when it's flipped. Since you were constantly getting new cards it was quite easy to repeatedly flip and unflip Morphing Jar with these cards to rapidly to deck out your opponent just by having slightly more cards in your deck and some ways to return cards from the graveyard to the deck. Since this could win the game on the first turn, the combo components have repeatedly been subjected to the banlist. Still possible today with Morphing Jar (currently limited to one per deck) being easily searched, but hand traps can easily disrupt it and it's non-trivial to recover if disrupted.

* '''(IT'S THE) Final Countdown''': The card Final Countdown gives its user a win 20 turns (opponent's turns included) after its activation. Final Countdown decks focus on getting that spell out and stalling till they win.

* '''Goat Control''': The card Scapegoat loads your field with level 1 token with zero attack and defense that can block attack. The card Metamorphosis lets you turn a monster on your field into a Fusion Monster of the same level. Thousand-Eyes Restrict is a level 1 Fusion monster that's really hard to bring out normally (requiring a useless monster, a hard to bring out ritual monster, ''and'' Polymerization) with a powerful effect of absorbing one of your opponent's monsters and gaining their attack and defense. After combining those three elements, the deck focuses on flipping TER upside-down then up again to destroy the stolen monster and let it absorb another before crushing the enemy. The signature and namesake deck of the "GOAT Format", a format consisting of everything in the TCG prior to Cybernetic Revolution's release on August 17, 2005 that is still played regularly today. Nowadays while Metamorphosis has been banned for over a decade, TER is unlimited (after spending forever banned) and a valid target for Instant Fusion, though changes to the game since its been gone mean its merely an option instead of a central focus.

* '''Gren Maju''': Gren Maju Da Eiza is a card with a really simple, and really good, effect that grants it a bunch of attack for every banished card. At first it was just an unofficial member of the Golden Castle of Stromberg cards, but when Konami decided to print a bunch of cards that banished cards from your deck as a cost people started making entire decks around it (though it still overlaps with Golden Castle decks).

* '''Normal Monster''': Once Konami realized Normal Monsters no longer really had a point, they started releasing a bunch of for support them. This is a deck type that focuses on the support that would be powerful if it wasn't designed for such bad monsters. Support was never enough to make it that great a deck type, but it has its fans. The support for swarming normal monsters saw use once link monsters were a thing, but that was always just an engine to special summon effect monsters.

* '''Plant''': Similar to Dragon there is a lot of generic Plant support, unlike Dragons until the introduction of Rokkets Plants are a solid stragey that can be played without leaning on an Archetype. Unlike Dragon however there are no powerful Plant Archetypes that can make good use of all the support relegating Plant decks to rouge status at best. During the advent of Synchros generic Plant decks were the best Synchro Spammers due to Akiza Izinski using a powerful generic plant deck in 5Ds.

* '''Synchro Spam, XYZ Spam, and Link Spam''': Decks focused around summoning a bunch of monsters in one turn into order to use them to bring out powerful extra deck monsters. Typically paired with more swarm-friendly archetypes, but can be run on its own (in fact, such an archetypeless swarm deck is the starter deck for ''Tag Force Special'', which is by far the best starting deck in any video game in the series).
** '''R4NK''': A deck focused on level 4 monsters that quickly bring out Rank 4 XYZ monsters quickly. Since almost all level 4 monsters can be normal summoned, they've traditionally been easy to special summon compared to higher levels. 
** '''Rank 10''': In contrast to Rank 4, Rank 10 monsters are supposed to be harder to bring out and are accordingly more powerful than their rank 4 counterparts. In practice, level 10 [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Heavy_Freight_Train_Derricrane has] [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Night_Express_Knight enough] [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Exodius_the_Ultimate_Forbidden_Lord easy to] [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Metal_Reflect_Slime special] [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Tragoedia summon] [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Rocket_Arrow_Express monsters] (and the [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Revolving_Switchyard aid of] [https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Mirror_Ladybug level changers]) it's not all ''that'' hard to use a Rank 10 engine.  A subtype, "trains" is in the weird position of having a series of thematically and mechanically related cards with a relatively prominent user in the anime but not having any common name and not being a ''true'' archetype as a result. 

* '''Zombie''': Focuses on the excellent support the Zombie type has received. One of their big things is graveyard revival, often letting you pull out monsters who are normally hard to summon properly.