The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is an absolute treasure for more reasons than one. While it’s, in all honesty, a fantastic anime that ran for hundreds of e🃏pisodes, it has also produced a lot of hilarious moments, for better or worse. The logic used in battle in the anime is sometimes completely devoid of any reasoning whatsoever and often differs from how the actual card game works in real life. Many times, cards gain new effects based on what the story requires, or completely new cards are just made up, which leads to some pretty ridiculous moments that have no business ever happening.

From cards that literally steal souls (and that actually isn’t the craziest effect), to the literal destruction of the moon, all the way to an entire season of this 🌄entire series that was completely inaccurate, we have 20 ridiculous times that Yu-Gi-Oh! broke its own rules. Before we get into it, I’m just gonna throw it out there. Mai Valen꧒tine deserved so much more. Anyway, enjoyꦓ!

20 First Season Summoning

The first season of Yu-Gi-Oh! was just completely ridiculous (a LOT more on that latꦐerꦰ).

Literally, no rules apply to any battles ever, everyo💎ne just kind of does whatever they want.

But one aspect that was really messed up was summoning. Ritual monsters just sometimes didn’t need to be ritual summoned, tributes truly j🌠ust didn’t exist, and also sometimes Time Wizard would just, like, transform monsters into different monsters? I’m surprised anyone ever lost in the Duelist Kingdom because essentially anyone could make ꦛup any rule about any card and it just became a rule. Is this lazy writing or great writing? It's hard to tell.

19 The Entire Labyrinth Arc

Does anyone want to tell me what exactly was going on here♓? The Paradox Brothers played a card that turned the entire Duel Monsters game into a completely different game with an entirely new set of rules and mechanics. Do you know what card it was that did this?

A non-effect card with 0 attack and 3,0💯00 defense.

What? How even? Tell me this isn’t like that one time Zigfried hacked the system to add 400 abilities to the Gold🅠en Castle of Stromberg. Imagine playing your favorite video gam🐽e and mastering all the mechanics and then suddenly a boss decides to just "change the game to something entirely different." Doesn't seem fair, does it?

18 Multiply Every Time It Was Used

The card Multiply, in real life, summons some tokens. In the anime, it summons several thousand Kuribohs that stop literally anything from touching you ever and you win the game automatically. Seriously though, anytime Yugi used this card, it seemed like he was deciding🎀 then and there what the card did in this specific instance that would save him from destruction. Oh, you summoned each Egyptian god card and I have no monsters on my side of the field? Let me play multiply, now I have 6,000! Yay! This was a sಌeriously silly skill on the show but imagine how game-breaking it would be if the actual card behaved that way.

17 Mystical Elf's Song

Did you know Mystical Elf has an ab💖ility that allows her to transfer h𒅌er attack points to any monster her duelist chooses?

Well,🎶 forget the faꦿct that she doesn't have that ability at all, because she does!

Why? Because Yugi decided ꧙that she does in one random duel. Why did he decide that she has that power? Because it was convenient for the plot, duh. Why Yugi couldn't have just drawn a card to give his mon♌ster 800 attack points rather than creating a new ability for Mystical Elf is truly beyond me. Then again, Yugi is always "creating" random new effects for all his cards.

16 Literally Every Harpie Mechanic

The Harpie Lady archetype in the anime is a bit different from its real-life equivalent. In the anime, the card used to summon the more powerful variant of the Harpie, Harpie Lady Sisters, actually triples the single Harpie Lady, along with any p💜ower-ups she currently has. Since this archetype is built around swarming the field, this essentially breaks the archetype and makes it super powerful. Yet, somehow Mai still loses 100% of her duels. Honestly, it's pretty insane how Mai doesn't 🥀manage to completely sweep the floor with these cards. What did she do to upset the writers this much?

15 Time Wizard's Dark Sage

Okay, Joey is the King of Games an𒉰d that's that. You know why?

Because he beat Yugi in Duelist Kingdom.

Oh wait, he didn't! Because Yugi pulled out his classic “little did you know I added an effect to my non-effect monster when it was convenient for me” move. What a guy. If the writers really wanted Yugi to beat Joey, they could have easily just, you know, have made Yugi win legitimately. Ya know, because 𝐆they're the writers. We know the show is supposed to be dramatic and the hero is supposed to prevail but Yugi has some of the thickest plot armor we have ever seen.

14 The PaniK Duel

Ah, this is peak “literally what” moments of the anime. In his duel with eliminator PaniK, Yugi targets his Castle of Dark Illusion with Catapult Turtle to win the duel. While Catapult Turtle can't usually target monsters, it's not that big of a deal in terms of rule breaking. That is, until we learn that Yugi actually used the effect to hit the cas🎶tle's floatation device (???), which causes the castle to fall and crush all of PaniK's other monsters.

I truly, truly cannot deal with the entire first season because of t♚his mꦯoment alone.

This is convoluted to the point of actual insanity, and I'm mainly confused about who went through the effort to make such a ridiculous plot point. Who needs rules w♔hen you can🌟… not have rules?

13 Trap Card Activation

One little rule bend that continued to be used through the anime's entirety is trap cards just kind of… being quick play spell cards. In the anime, you could just kind of activate traps whenever you wanted to, unlike the trap cards in the actual card game, that have certain times they're allowed to be played. I mean, considering that season 4 of this show was an actual thing that happened, this is truly the least of our concerns though. In the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, trap cards and spell cards are apparently the same thing. Is it reall♐y that hard🌳 to not break the rules for one episode?

12 Dark Magician Girl’s Arrival

The entire crux of Yugi winning his duel with Arkana was the Dark Magician Master’s use of Dark Magic Curtain. What Arkana didn’t know 🌺was that Dark Magic Curtain has another effect (wrong). The card allows both players to use its summoning abilities (nope) in order to summon any Dark Magician monste💧r in their deck (still no). If this duel had been played in real life, Arkana would have destroyed Yugi in that turn, but plot armor would never allow for something as plausible as that. The card game would be a lot easier to conquer if you could simply pull a powerful monster card from thin air.

11 Attack The Moon

Rememﷺber that one time that Yugi used his Giant Soldier of Stone to literally attack the moon so the tide would dry up and allow him to go aftꦿer Mako’s water monsters?

Because I do. I will never forget that memory.

This move was so baffling that it actually caused a card called "Attack the Moon!" to be made for the TCG, because literally who thought that any of that was a good idea and why? Honestl,y this is one of the weirdest moves in the entire anime. Thank goodness the cards in the ♏real world don't have the same effects. We love our Moon.