In one of the best competitive gaming highlights of the year, one Yu-Gi-Oh player has used the iconic Exodia cards to win a modern tournament match that got everyone in the crowd roaring.
Yu-Gi-Oh legend Jeffrey Leonard, widely known for using off-meta decks like the now-banned Mystic Mine burn strat, piloted an Exodia one-turn-kill (OTK) deck at the recent Yu-Gi-Oh Championship Series (YCS) Indianapolis tournament.
The deck's entire strategy revolves around searching out and drawing into the five pieces of Exodia, the Forbidden One, a monster with an alternative and instantaneous win condition so deeply embedded in card game canon that countless OTK strategies across innumerable games are often called Exodia strategies. If you get all five pieces in hand, you win, no questions asked.
Leonard managed just that through a mix of loopable monster summons and search effects, repeatedly digging for dark spellcaster-type monsters to add Exodia's components to his hand. You've got to love the way he fans them out on the table after game one, physically constructing the silhouette of the monster that the Yu-Gi-Oh anime alone has seared into the minds of millions.
Match three, a tie-breaker, is even better. Leonard, his opponent, the crowd, and the casters all see the writing on the wall as the tried-and-true combo continues uninterrupted on the very first turn. "One more piece, one more piece," the audience chants, almost with the energy of Daigo Parry witnesses. Even Leonard's opponent, knowing full well he's about to lose, gets caught up in it, laughing and clapping as Exodia comes together.
"It has been an honor to sit in the booth and watch Jeffrey," one caster says. Channeling the first episode of the classic anime, both casters conclude: "Exodia, obliterate!"
JEFF USED EXODIA TWICE!!!THIS IS THE BEST YUGIOH FEATURE MATCH!!!! https://t.co/gnyRJHkrbz pic.twitter.com/XAWnlCASk1October 21, 2023
The sheer showmanship of the match aside, Leonard's 2-1 win was special for a few reasons. First of all, while Exodia can still win you a game on the spot, almost nobody plays it in modern tournaments. That's mainly because, like many combo decks, it's extremely vulnerable to disruption like discard and search-blocking effects. As one caster said during Leonard's first game: "In the over 20 years that I have played this game, the amount of times that I've actually seen Exodia assembled is few and far between, and I certainly don't remember the last time I've seen it."
Exodia is part of the original Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon card set, and modern Yu-Gi-Oh is downright unrecognizable compared to the way it was played in 2002. The modern format generally revolves around a wealth of extra deck summons that set up ways to counter your opponent's moves using powerful boss monsters. This creates especially unfavorable matchups for a precise strategy like Exodia, which has to get five specific cards – all limited to one copy apiece by the TCG's ban list – in hand at once. On top of that, the deck that Leonard beat, a nerfed but still powerful version of Tearlaments, was once regarded as one of the most overpowered decks of all time.
The fact that Exodia's alternative win condition was resolved in a modern tournament at all is close to a miracle. For Leonard to do it twice, after his Tearlament opponent had a chance to side in cards to counter him, and with the final match ending with a true first-turn kill, is astonishing. Exodia is now old enough to drink in the US, which is a lifetime in any TGC and 10 lifetimes in a game as fast as Yu-Gi-Oh, yet it's still out here obliterating all those other, pathetic cards.
Yu-Gi-Oh recently introduced its first new monster type in some time, and it literally can't be defeated.
