Editing Yu-Gi-Oh (section)

===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.