Last week proved to be quite confusing for Yu-Gi-Oh! players, however, that time has now come to an end. After being announced and the bizarrely recounted, the Justice Hunters set has been on quite a journey. Now, this expansion is back again, hopefully for good this time.
Quick Story Recap
Justice Hunters was first officially announced last week (April 24th). The expansion was given an official launch date of August 1st, the same month as the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships.
Less than a day later, the Justice Hunters product page mysteriously vanished. There was no explanation given by Konami.
Outside sleuthing left more questions than answers. The European version of the Justice Hunters product page could still be viewed, albeit with some legwork needed, and online distributors we’re still taking pre-orders.
It was a real mystery for the sudden disappearance of Justice Hunters from the catalogue until now.
It’s Back With Some Changes
One weekend later and Konami has seen fit to bring back the Justice Hunters product page. Just like when it was taken down, there doesn’t seem to be any explanation for the sudden game of ‘hide the expansion’.
At first glance, it looks like nothing has changed. Justice Hunters is still set to hit the North American market on August 1st and July 31st for the European region. All three advertised archetypes are still a part of the set.
Combing through the returned product page, there do appear to be some modifications. It appears that the “Dragontail” archetype has been reworded into “Dracotales”.
We don’t know if this modification will be applied to the archetype-specific cards that shared the original wording.
Given Konami’s recent actions, we can hazard that there’s a pretty good chance for this modification to be applied to the actual cards.
The Mystery was Never Really Answered
Due to Konami’s lack of explanation, we can only speculate on the reason/s why Justice Hunters was pulled back and given this update.
There are some snippets of dialogue throughout the internet that theorize Konami’s rewording was to avoid any legal landmines. This, however, is unconfirmed, and Konami appears to be tight-lipped about the situation.
We can only hope that Konami will come forward with a statement to sate our curiosity in the future. Until then, we do now have the Justice Hunters expansion to properly look forward to, at least.