Another Edition of "Terribly Designed Yugioh Cards" · 7:11pm Nov 23rd, 2019
The face-up monster(s) with the highest ATK on the field is unaffected by the effects of Spell Cards. When "Pole Position" is removed from the field, destroy the face-up monster(s) with the highest ATK on the field.
Do you see the obvious hiccup there? If you do, congratulations, you're a better card designer than Konami.
https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Card_Rulings:Pole_Position
tl;dr - this card is capable of accidentally creating infinite effect loops in countless ways, forcing you to rewind the duel to undo such moves if you accidentally do it, preventing you from making such moves in the first placr (which can include preventing you from using monster destruction effects or just setting cards, if the right circumstances are present where those things would trigger an effect loop), and in circumstances where an effect loop is unavoidable due to state of play, you have to just destroy it.
Huh. In Magic, an infinite loop that doesn't kill someone just makes the game end in a draw. Time-reversing logical paradoxes and unspoken gameplay restrictions seem like a much less elegant way of resolving matters.
Could be worse. It could be an entire tier 1 archetype based off of one card no one asked for or cared about
Sometimes I really wonder what Konami’s approval process is. This screams anime card, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most commons are completely brushed over, but then we get some blatantly stupid situations, like Firewall Dragon (did no one see the FTK potential of one of pack cover and protagonist ace monsters?) and Independent Nightingale and Starving Venom (the archetypes are from the same series and released close to each other), among countless other situations. The first few sets are excusable to some extent as they were still trying to figure out the game, so things like pre-errata Approaching Darkness and lack of future proofing were more excusable, but by anything after the start of the XYZ era (at least XYZ were weird to balance due to the whole material thing), they should have some kind of reasonable play testing going on. But no, we get stuff like Dragon Rulers and PePe (decks so obscene they still can’t come back) on one end, and crap like Firewall and Starving Venom on the other end. Barring the obscenely long FTK and pseudo FTK era, it hasn’t gotten worse than it was before, just a lot less excusable considering how big the game got.
5159580
Konami seems to be completely against draws, with most cards that can cause a draw being banned or errata’d. General rule of thumb for infinite loops in YuGiOh is that if they don’t cause any change in the game state, they’re just illegal to activate. Pole Position is just such a mess that it needed a ton of special rulings and for some reason wasn’t just banned or errata’d.
5159594
You mean like these?
5159597
Let us not forget the original bullshit card, Chaos Emperor Dragon. 1000 Life Points to nuke the field AND hand and deal a huge amount of burn damage on top of it, can end games in the second or third turn.
When I played on Dueling Network, I gave up on keeping up with the metagame in the Xyz era, when pre-Limited Wind-Ups and Inzectors could church out powerful monsters while casually demolishing your hand and field, and cards like Cyber Dragon Infinity and Silent Honor Ark will bypass any protection effects to steal your monsters and use them to protect themselves.
5159619
Now it's things like Dark Magician Dragon/Eternal Soul. I went to AWA with a 60-card Lightsworn Deck—gimmicky as all hell, but still kinda sentimental to me and my girlfriend—and went up against someone who used that combo against me.
That duo of cards is nutzo good.
(Sidebar: I wish they did some legacy support for CED that gave it a parallel to BLS.)
5159626
Clearly Konami is being run by Syndrome. "When every deck is overpowered, none of them will be"
5159635
That was why I liked the Duelist Alliance era so much. There were a lot of competitive Decks that made it big in those days. Yang Zing, Shaddolls (my fave, and which I'm hoping to build with the Structure Deck in a few months), and then Ritual Beasts and Nekroz a little later.
And then Qliphorts and Infernoids came into the picture, and that was where things went a little samey.
5159619
Wind-Ups is more or less where I draw the line of where Konami should’ve learned their lesson. Chaos was a disaster, but the game was still super young, Dark Armed Dragon was a mess, and Cyber Dragon was just plain silly, but the XYZ era was a shift in design. That’s when extra deck space started mattering, that’s when they were trying new ways of balancing monsters (XYZ materials), that’s when the tool box Extra Deck really started taking off. Since then, the only really crazy shift has been Links, but Konami immediately undid the limiting factor by just giving Links super powerful effects. Shock Master was the breaking point for generic ultra powerful cards and Wind-Ups were the breaking point for blatant loops. After that, Konami has no excuse for letting so much slip through, especially the whole Firewall, FTK, hand loop, Rhongomyniad/Utopic Zexal era.
I will say though, I think they’ve finally found their footing and current Yu-Gi-Oh! seems to be heading in the right direction. There’s a ton of viable decks, including four tier 1 decks and tons of tier 2 and rouge decks. Ban lists now target problems without just killing off decks all together and old cards that don’t need to be banned anymore are coming back. Now there are so many powerful generics that they’re all competing for space (whether it be main deck, extra deck, or side deck), plus competing with engines, and there’s an out to everything. And since the different meta decks all play differently enough, they all need different counters, which you just plain can’t include all of them and still have space. Heck, since Salamangreats, there’s been only a handful of events that had a single deck/archetype take up half or more of tournament tops and there’s always 4+ decks, with 8+ not being rare. Funnily enough, it seems like the make everything OP (as long as it’s not degenerate like FTKs and hand loops) kind of worked out as everything is OP in a different way and deck space/general deck building becomes much more complex.
5159619
I was actually referring to the garbage fire that is Thunder Dragons
Oh this card... so troublesome Konami doesn't even put it in the video games after the first time
I'm so out of touch with Yughioh that I don't get how this triggers infinite loops.
5160560
it's an old card and I linked the page that explains how?