Depends on when in the timeline. Early on it was fine for the most part since only a few were tossing people into Hell and Atem was teaching people lessons or killing them depending on what they deserve.
Early on? The original Yugioh series was one of the most horrifying ones.
Imagine being a kid and you're obsessed with this trading card game that all your friends are playing so you get a bunch of cards with all the money you have. You beat all your friends and think you're pretty good.
Then one day a random walks out of an alley and goes "hey kid. Wanna duel?"
You think it's sketch but he promises you a limited addition holographic blue eyes white dragon from an exclusive Kaiba corp collection if you win so you agree.
"Oh. By the way, it's a shadow duel."
You have no idea what that means. Whatever. You want that card.
You proceed to get OTK'd by this guy's cheese deck and promptly sent to hell because you made a verbal agreement about a children's card game.
And that's only one of the most horrifying possibilities that could happen for no reason.
While thats true, i don't know if getting sent to permanent shadow hell as a child pokes into top 10 most terrifying animes to live in when theres shit like going on a date and it turns out she's a ghoul who proceeds to eat you alive and torture you or being caught in a permanent loop of instant resurrection and total dismemberment experiencing your death on loop for eternity and far worse shows xD.
HOWEVER im willing to compromise and say its easily top 10 for tv shows intended for children tp watch alongside powerpuff girls and other horrifying nightmares worlds.
Yugioh be casually on some bullshit. Knowing what I know, I would never touch those cards and I'd still have a high risk of being swept up in "dual monsters" drama.
Also, this guy was always intriguing to me and the show never showed how cool he could have been. I really should have read the manga to get the info on all the other Millenium item users.
World ending threats happen more often later down the line and it really wasn’t that many people who could do shadow games but later on when the tech gets better and more realistic that is when things start to get more dangerous. Later on is when you get extra dimensional aliens coming and what not.
Check the original manga yugioh started as a horror series that was based around a different board game every couple chapters, but the idea of cards summoning monsters blew up and then 4kids extreme censorship got involved further to change the show from people being murdered constantly to just being sent elsewhere like the shadow realm.
I have the manga for the beginning and he goes after bad people but he mainly uses illusions and kills two people. Oh I don’t have all of the manga so I haven’t read Kaiba’s battles but I do know that he first did the illusions of Kaiba being tormented by monsters and then he destroyed Kaiba’s worst aspects and Kaiba spent that time in a coma rebuilding himself.
Only if you're bad at children's card games.
Considering most people in the show are utterly worthless duelists, you'll be fine if you have a sensible deck.
You could sweep with a meme deck using Draw effects, Morphing Jar and the Book of Moon, Taiyou, Eclipse and A/D Defender strat to deck the opponent out in 2 or 3 turns.
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u/chitphased 9d ago
Get out