In Yu-Gi-Oh, what do levels, attack and defense represent lore-wise?

In Yu-Gi-Oh, what do levels, attack and defense represent lore-wise?
Would a monster with 0/0 be unable to deal or receive any kind of damage?

Mechanics and lore don't really relate in YuGiOh most of the time.

Watch the anime, it explains very clearly the corrolation between lore and mechanics in the game.

Most monsters don't even have an elaborate lore, which is unfortunate. I'd like to know the origin or purpose of some of them.
>Watch the anime
I'm planning on doing so eventually, but in short, what is the correlation?

>but in short, what is the correlation?
Ancient Egyptians, except when they're even older Atlanteans or Nazca lines or space aliens or extradimensional monsters or something else entirely, I don't fucking know anymore.

Yeah, I know they're supposed to be spirits of monsters called Ka or whatever. But as far as I know, no offensive or defensive values are assigned to the egyptian stone tablets of monsters, in the manga at least. Yet they don't seem to be completely arbitrary in the card game

It doesn't explain the mechanics, but the gist is ancient egyptian wizards summoned monsters, sealed with in giant stone tablets to fight other wizards. Yugi's spirit boyfriend was the pharaoh and was really good at it. Past kaiba had sex with the blue eyes white dragon. Past Bakura used a big demon boy to fight past yugi. And mechanics have no relevance to lore.

Yeah I recall those things from the manga.
>mechanics have no relevance to lore
Well that's kind of disappointing.

In duel world your levels correspond to your heirarchy in their society.

>your levels correspond to your heirarchy in their society.
Where was that stated?

The printed card stuff is all way more game-ey than, say MtG, and for every inference you can make about them there are exceptions. Generally, other than "this monster is quite powerful" from ATK and "holy shit that is a lot of stars" for God Cards, there really isn't any direct relevance to lore.

That being said, there are a lot of archetypes that play with levels for flavor. The Infernoids are all different levels (except for Dekatron who can be any level I guess) and the levels correspond to the demon that they represent. Or something like that.

If you want an archetype that has the strangest but very cool flavor and mechanic interweave, look up the Flower Cardians. They play just like Hanafuda cards, complete with the cards making combinations into Synchro monsters. It's fucking amazing, they're criminally underrated.

Thanks. I haven't played competitive for a while but I'll check it out.

Isn't it supposed to be that monsters with a higher level are more difficult to control

IIRC, and most of this is probably headcanon,
Yugioh is based on a spiritual/psychic battle system
the Stars represent the amount of spiritual energy the high priests had to expend to summon them (in the old bandai version of the game points were awarded based on how many stars a defeated monster had)
Attack/Def is just that, how much attack strength and defense strength a card spirit has once summoned. If you can overpower an opponents monster spirit you defeat it and destroy it, thus weakening the summoners spirit energy. I assume the fact that they aren't physical beings is why you can off them with one strong blow.

maybe Pegasus is just bad at game design

That would make sense if there weren't some obviously very powerful monsters (the Meklord archetype, the Relinquished/Restrict archetype, Venominaga, Yubel, and a bunch of others) that have null offense and defense values. It seems counterintuitive that card effects notwithstanding, Kuriboh could defeat all of those because of a higher ATK value
Your headcanon makes sense otherwise, that's what I figured as well.

Pegasus made a pretty balanced game overall actually.

nearly all the lore can only be inferred, there's actually quite a bit of lore but nearly all of it is hidden in the card art
the literal lore is that it's just a card game and lore doesn't really matter for almost every card, since it's still a recreational card game in-universe

...

It was kinda balanced at the time. Monsters where just beat-sticks and spells did all the really cool stuff, or you had monsters like armed ninja and man-eating bug who had very low stats but a very good effect to compensate for their low stats.

Was tribute summoning in the game from the beginning or was it added later?

It was added in Battle City, I think. The game prior to Battle City is a bit of a clusterfuck.

>Was tribute summoning in the game from the beginning or was it added later?
in the real Konami game: yes
anime/manga:

>tfw we'll never get a detailed handbook or extra about yugioh monsters lore
>the only things we're ever going to get are flavor texts on normal monsters and visual references in the illustrations
kind of a waste, really

but the only good lore were:
-six mofos samuraïs, or how some guy manages to become a shogun, unite earth, and becomes a tyran that even his kagemusha decides to fight, also this was technically the first ever lore, archetype and cards in yu-gi-oh ever.
-giga, the elemental witches and the army guy, because holy fuck that ending.
-buster blader, because a literal edgy dragonslayer got feels too.
everything else on in-cards lore isn't that good.

I think the stars represent how much mass/energy a monster requires to be summoned.

So anything 4 star or less can be summoned by just the casters own power/will but a 5-6 star monster requires a tribute along with the casters power/will in order to meet the requirement of the summon. And a 7-8 star monster requires two.

Ritual monsters play to this idea as well because they require the sacrificed monsters' stars to either equal or exceed the monster you're trying to summon.

>there are other breathing beings itt right now
we have to change that

I can honestly counter this entire archetype multiple times in a row, antimeta ftw.

The new monster designs + the power creep make the game so tasteless.
Shit like "Neo Galaxy Eyes Photon Dragon" or whatever seem really unnecessary and over the top.

This, they all look like flamboyant metrosexual dishwasher mascots.

>let's paint the dragon white and stick a bunch of blue, green, yellow orbs on it and have red, blue, green and yellow lines run all along it as well. Who needs subtlety when you can have a the most cramped design ever made (until next week once the new "dragon" is released).

I mean, there is the Duel Terminal lore.

Yeah you're right. It's better than nothing.

>we'll just keep coming up with new and thus increasingly convoluted and heavy designs instead of just elaborating on existing archetypes
I know they do the latter as well, but fuck, do they need to introduce ten new ones + a new type + a new game mechanic every two years? Why not keep things simple, and focus more on making existing archetypes not only better but actually playable in the meta?

>that effect
What the fuck? Egyptian Gods look like a joke compared to that.

>do they need to introduce ten new ones + a new type + a new game mechanic every two years?

Honestly, it seems like they're trying to use every existing word as an archtype. Here's one "guardian" which they thought would be a good idea to add even tho they had made several cards with the word "guardian" in it's name already which the guardian support cards have to explicitly state to not support.

Sometimes I wonder if archtypes are even needed, instead of crystalbeasts we could have just had beasts. Instead of gladiatorbeasts we could have had beast-warriors etc.

It seems most type of monsters either have 1 or maybe 2 archtypes and due to powercreep most of the vanilla monsters aren't used anyway so nobody would run a "frog the jam" in a from archtype deck anyway.

actually, they got released again in a playable form with a fuckton of buffs to match their mango appearance.

I think that's also about translation; kanji and all that, so they have to specify differences even if it sounds the same in English. I might be wrong, though. But you have a point anyway, most archetypes are unnecessarily restricting, and things could be done better simply with type support and by providing synergy to cards that are thematically related to each other without necessarily sharing an archetype.
That would also limit the powercreep. It's been at least seven or eight years since you could make compromises with your deck and run stuff that might've been less efficient but that you liked more. Now FTK/OTK isn't even uncommon.
I know, but they're still not half as good as the abomination the other user posted.

lore wise the cards represent ancient tablets in which the form of ones soul is trapped, relinquished probably being a manifestation of Pegasus soul or whatever they called it in anime. ka? relinquished stole monsters away much how he stole souls to use against others.

Pegasus' Ka probably wasn't Relinquished.

She brings a sword to battle, attacks twice with her 3500 ATK legs.

fuck off soundwave

how do you know its soundwave? it could be getter

Go figure. The Egyptian God cards were already pretty shit at the time Battle City was airing.

no

They would have been playable if they had Towers-like immunity, instead of only Obelisk having any actual self-protection.

Is this the most broken playable card in the game right now?

Being proud about beating Cubics is really sad, it's like being proud about beating up a armless and legless cripple.

Not even close.

What are the contenders, then?

It's garbage, absolute fucking garbage, a single one of the things you need to fuse it can win the game on its own, there' s no point to this besides hilarious overkill.

This guy

>It's garbage, absolute fucking garbage
How are you even supposed to counter a monster like that, though?

If the guy actually manages to summon it and you let him summon it he deserves to win.

...

Bruv, you're not getting the time to beat Nova Trinity with the Lightning because you're dying horribly the turn it's summoned, like, the thing is far from good or strong but Lightning isn't the thing that beats it.

Fine, Crystal Wing, Storming Mirror Force, Quaking Mirror Force, Millennium-Eyes Restrict chaining to Nova Trinity's effect to halve LP targeting a Crimson Nova in Grave while chaining Millennium-Eyes Illusionist to equip your opponent's Duza, putting Millennium Eyes Restrict at 4600 ATK, 100 more than Crimson Nova Trinity.

Or you know, just negate its summon like a normal person.

But you can't negate it's summon

God I love Cubics. The embodiment of glass cannon.

Nothing like Crimson Nova with 12000ATK swinging for broke.

You can, nothing on the fusion trap or Trinity itself says you can't neg it.

>Why not keep things simple, and focus more on making existing archetypes not only better but actually playable in the meta?
Because you get HEROs and Performapals if you put too many cards in an archetype.

Do you want more HEROs/Perfomapals? I don't.

They've got some really busted cards, shame they ain't nearly consistent enough for competitive play.

Yes, because fuck archetype bloat, not everything needs to be fucking HEROs or PPals.

if two monsters with 0 atk points attack each other neither is destroyed since they didn't deal any damage. The levels represent a power level of combined attack and defense originally. This power level has been pushed since the creation of mechanical chaser. That was the beginning of the power creep that this game is famous for.

But negating the trap or whatever fusion Spell isn't the same as negating the summon. And you can't use stuff like Solemn Strike on it because it's being summoned by another card.

Mate, you can neg it, get your head out of your ass, you neg the trap you neg the summon and nothing on the trap or Trinity says you can't do it.

>neither is destroyed since they didn't deal any damage
That's a bit of a strange mechanism.
If you want to depict a weak monster, why not just give it 100 ATK? 0 implies it's literally incapable of doing anything, not taking its effect into account

0 atk is for strange things most of the time, having three digit attack is for weaklings.

You can't negate the summon of a monster if that monster is being summoned by a card effect.

To be fair there's not a lot of creatures with 0 attack and most of them have some way to control battle such as relinquished or yubel but you are correct that is the idea; a creature with 0 atk cannot fight.

>strange things
Then why not just give them ? ATK, in that case? It's functionally the same thing if the value's going to change via its effect anyway.

That's where you're wrong kiddo.

Because ? atk makes them unsearchable by things that look for attack despite it being functionally the same once they're on the board.

Fair enough.

You can Warning the effect that summons the monster, but you can't negate the summon. You can negate the Special Summon of a Special Summon only monster, like Cyber Dragon. If you don't negate the effect that is summoning Crimson Nova Trinity, you lose your chance to activate Warning.

You must be fun at parties.

Most of those effects require something else to make them powerful so they can have a unique mechanic or to make up for a powerful effect. Relinquished has no attack because it steals another monster to get it's states. Yubel doesn't take battle damage but reflects it. King of the Skull Servants needs his subjects to gain in strength.
There is one creature in the game without an effect with 0/0 [thousand eye idol] but it's intentionally weak to make up for the fact that it's fusion material for a really powerful card.

Soitsu is a normal monster with 0/0 as well.

No warning can negate things that have the effect to summon others. You could negate call of the haunted with it.
If you read the card, it says OR when a Spell/Trap Card, or monster effect, is activated that includes an effect that Special Summons a monster(s)

>You can Warning the effect that summons the monster

Oh yeah I forgot about those guys, they needed other cards to get attack similar to the other ones.

>100 is just weak but 0 means a monster that doesn't have any capability for attack or defense whatsoever
That's a good explanation.

0 is symbolizes that weird shit is going on with this thing, having a actual attack score marks you as a weakling that can be punched to death.

>he thinks that's a good boss monster
you are like a little baby
Watch this.

It's not as good, though.
The best "boss monster" should be something completely un-targetable on top of hitting hard, like Geh or whatever

Chaos Giant shits on Geh

If you want the actual best boss monster currently, this is it. Everything else is either restricted to high hell and/or tied to a horrible archtype.

>restricted
Summoning conditions and support don't matter if we're just talking about raw power.

Theres a lot of boss monsters with similar power and protection, so the most important thing about boss monsters is their ease to get out.

Geh got a card and it's shit, Doom Giant is a billion times better at actually being threatening because the archetype it's tied to is at least half-functional.

there's a bunch of monsters with 0 in one or both of their stats that don't have a special effect that changes their atk/def or anything.

Yeah, but raw power doesn't mean much outside of goldfishing and conjecturing.

Now what if I told you this card could easily become one of the strongest monsters in the game

>I know, but they're still not half as good as the abomination the other user posted.
in a vacuum yes, but in reality the god cards are much, much easier to summon
bringing out Cubic Trinity is about as hard as winning with exodia, before exodia got more support and alternate win conditions, and you still have to rely on it actually being able to kill your opponent, it's a flashy ridiculous card that was made to be the boss monster for the villain of a theatrical movie iirc

Deskbots are my fucking jam

I've never played them, what's their game plan?

flood the board with deskbots

even this bitch can tell him to fuck off, and about the lore, there are 2 kinds, anime cards like the Earthbound Inmortals, Numbers, Zarc dragons and other stuff are important to the plot of the shows, and then there is the Duel Terminal, which is a collection of stories in which the monster cards are characters, and some magic and trap cards show events that happenned in there, archetypes like Shaddoll, Qliphorts, Nekroz, Gem Knights, Tellar Knights, Gusto, Ritual Beast, Yang Zing, Naturia and some others are from there, El Shaddoll Construct is basically the big bad for a long part of it

Have the new support cards made the restrict archetype sort of playable now?

my man

Somewhat. It's tier 2