In Yu-Gi-Oh!, you are only allowed to have 60 cards in your deck because a German player went overboard

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Since 2008, the card game of the anime Yu-Gi-Oh! has had a rule that a maximum of 60 cards may be included in one’s own deck. A German player had gone completely overboard in 2007, prompting Konami to adjust the rules.

What happened? At the official national Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament held in Hannover in 2007, Maik S. participated with his deck. However, it was not the usual deck size used at such a tournament: Maik came with a total of 2,222 cards in his deck.

A photo shows him and his buddy, Tobias H., carrying the cards in a gigantic acrylic box to the tournament:

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Was that allowed? In 2007, there was only the rule that at least 40 cards must be shuffled into the deck. There was no maximum limit at that time. Therefore, Maik was allowed to participate with his deck of 2,222 cards.

Maik ruthlessly exploited a gap in the rules. And Konami learned from this: Since 2008, there has been a rule that a maximum of 60 cards may be included in the deck. 

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Maik reveals the reason why he participated with a gigantic deck at the Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament

Why did he do that? On YouTube, Maik explains that he found the idea funny. With the gigantic card set, he wanted to make others laugh.

To perfect the joke, Maik included numerous cards in his deck that required him to search for additional cards from his deck. You can imagine that it takes a perceived eternity to find a specific card in this gigantic deck.

However, cards in Yu-Gi-Oh! that allow other cards to be searched from the deck require the deck to be reshuffled afterward. So Maik invested even more time in reshuffling his deck.

Did he win the tournament? Maik played a card that required him to reshuffle the deck. The shuffling took too much time, causing him to lose the match. After the second game, he was disqualified.

This proved that the real rules are different from those in the anime. There, a deck of 2,222 cards would have been unthinkable. By the way, there was another change in the German version of the anime that differs from the original: Yu-Gi-Oh! is actually much more brutal than you saw in the German TV version

This is an AI-powered translation. Some inaccuracies might exist.
Source(s):
  1. Comic Book