Editing Summoned Skull (section)

==Archetype (or lack thereof)==
Somewhat unintuitive Summoned Skull is part of the Archfiend due to the clusterfuck that was, you guessed it, the aftermath of the [[Satanic Panic]]. As was usual for companies at the time Upper Deck, Yugioh's worldwide distributor at the time decided to censor a lot of stuff they thought would anger parents at the time. In this particular case, the word they were covering up was the word Daemon, which was used generically in the name of a lot of cards like how Dragon and Magician was and still are used. Unfortunately for the translators eventually Archetypal Effects that based their effects on the names of monsters eventually came into existence and with that came a number of Archetypes that included a lot of older cards, most prominently and of note this article Daemon. Daemon was translated to Archfiend at that point to mimic how the Demon monster type was translated as Fiend previously, but there was still the problem of all the random cards that were now part of the Archetype but didn't have it in their translated name. They didn't want to go back and errata the names of the cards so instead they errata the text of the new cards to include or exclude certain cards from the effect. This lead to a lot of stupid situations and bloated text and eventually lead to the creation, many years later mind you, of Archetype Conditions that allowed a card to be specified as part of an Archetype without it being in the name.
TLDR: Summoned Skull's name is actually Summoned Daemon and Archfiend is actually Daemon. Translation can be very dumb across cultures.

Now that bloated history lesson is out of the way we can actually talk about Summoned Skull's Archetype, Archfiend. Archfiend, as you should know if you actually read the previous paragraph, didn't actually start out as an Archetype but a generic word used in card names. As such you'd rightly guess that the initial cards all had no real synergy except for the cards that actually made them an Archetype, a set of chess fiend demons that resembled Summoned Skull. So as that was the case you would expect the designers to either find a way to fold the old unrelated cards in to the new Archetype or just focus on the new set of cards when making new Archfiend cards, right? Right? Well no they made an entirely unrelated set of sport-themed Archfiend cards focused loosely around Red Dragon Archfiend, the ace monster of the rival of 5Ds. As these were the monsters of a major rival they would of course support this set of Archfiends right? Right...? Nope, they completely ignored them and went on to produce a lot of random retrains of Summoned Skull, most of which were useless. Not to mention this entire time, and to this very day, cards were still being produced with Archfiend in the name as if Archfiend was still a generic term adding even more unrelated cards to this mess. Finally, in 2010 Starstrike Blast a set of strong royalty-themed Archfiends was started who while more cohesive and powerful than any pervious Archfiends were still only decent.

So surely with all these various cards, along with a searcher or two in Archfiend Heiress, you've got to be able to make something approaching a good deck? Eh it's fine but barely stands up to other causal decks. Even with all the support it's received over the years the Archetype still isn't consistent and doesn't have a real game plan. Abuse the fact their Dark Fiends, a very well-supported and powerful group of monsters? Nope there are most other proper Fiend Archetypes that can do that significantly better than Archfiends and the ones that can't basically pack filler trash. Exploit the few actually good cards the Archfiends have in Archetype like Archfiend's Awakening or god forgive Mazera DeVille. Despite them being part of the Archetype the deck is terrible at using them and doesn't even have a way in Archetype to summon ritual monsters like Archfiend's Awakening!

The simple fact of the matter is that Archfiends are a mess that has been redone multiple times now and no one at Konami seems interested in trying to fix. Besides Summoned Skull no one really cares about Archfiends except those people who are interested in trying to find some way to sort this mess out. And we haven't even gone into specifics as to why they're really terrible as this article is specifically about Summoned Skull in particular! What we're trying to impress upon you is that despite being a very popular card Summoned Skull has no really supporting Archetype besides its strange retrains. These retrain are the only proper support the card gets and well... Just take a look in the next section to see.