Newly Spoiled Yu-Gi-Oh Hand Trap has Absurd Limitation

If you haven’t been keeping up with the new Infinite Forbidden Yugioh set coming to the Japanese OCG, it's all anyone in the space can talk about. The amount of absolutely ridiculous cards that have been spoiled from this set is startling. From a new Maxx ‘C’ variant to an expansion to the Exodia archetype, this set seemingly has everything that Yu-Gi-Oh! fans could ever want.

If you’re like me and played Yu-Gi-Oh! during its early stages, you’ll know that the game has changed to the point of being almost unrecognizable. The days of Normal Summoning a 1900 attack beater and setting a few defensive spells are gone outside of alternate formats. Players are now trying to end games in the opening turns, so utilizing cards that can interact with an opponent on their first turn, before you’ve even had the chance to take a game action, has become crucial.

Hand traps, as a result, have become a necessary evil in the Yu-Gi-Oh! metagame. Unless you want to let your opponent create an incredibly sticky board or, worse, kill you before you can take a game action, you need to be able to interact with them as quickly as possible. Hand traps allow you to do this by activating from your hand instead of in play. The Maxx ‘C’ remake that everyone is going nuts over also happens to be a hand trap.

This new hand trap, while very powerful, has quite a bizarre limitation, which, again, could signal a worry for future card design in the format.

Dominus Purge

Similar to Infinite Impermanence, Dominus Purge is a trap card that can be activated from your hand. This particular card shuts down card effects that want to search an opponent’s library. If you have a trap in your grave when you use Dominus Purge, you also get to destroy the card providing the effect in question.

This offers yet another option similar to the popular hand trap Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring, but considering this card’s downside, it's unlikely you’ll be playing these over Ash Blossom in a variety of different decks. That’s because, if you want to use this, you will be unable to Special Summon Dark, Water, and Fire monsters for the rest of the game, essentially killing this card’s viability in any decks that include those elements.

This signals yet another worrying direction for card design in Yu-Gi-Oh! The downside given to Dominus Purge is a rather ugly one. Instead of creating a more nuanced downside that could interact with deck designers’ gameplans more elegantly, many players feel like Konami just decided to make the card unusable in certain archetypes. This means that future cards could be printed with similar downsides, seemingly making it randomly unavailable to half of the card pool.

Is it Any Good?

Ultimately, Dominus Purge, to our understanding, is just a worse version of Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring. Not only does Ash Blossom hit multiple things with different types of abilities, but there is no severe downside to using it.

Many players think that Dominus Purge won’t be very playable, but there could be niche areas where you may want to use it. Admittedly, since Dominus Purge offers anti-synergy with Ash Blossom, you would need to find a scenario where you would specifically want Dominus Purge over the traditionally popular hand trap. While that scenario certainly exists somewhere, it's going to be an incredibly unlikely one.