In this special edition of my Card Tales and Mysteries series, I’m going to cover a pair of cards that have a strong connection to the original Yu-Gi-Oh! manga. And I feel like it’s a story that in this day and age of the franchise has sadly been forgotten. So since I’ve been reading the original Yu-Gi-Oh! manga again, something that’s become an annual yearly tradition of mine, I’ve decided to tell a little bit of the story behind these cards and the reasons why they’ve probably been forgotten.
If those of you reading have clicked on the links above, you’ve seen that the cards I’m going to cover are a Ritual Monster and its corresponding Ritual Spell. Both cards were first released many years ago in the Dark Crisis booster set, with Zorc being released as a Super Rare. In the most recent rerelease of the cards, which was in the Legendary Collection 3: Yugi’s World set; both cards were included as commons. But I’m sure to at least a few of you reading the name Zorc is very familiar. That’s because Zorc is the name of the final and ultimate villain in the original Yu-Gi-Oh! Saga, and Dark Master – Zorc is in fact one of his incarnations. So if this Ritual Monster is in fact an incarnation of the infamous Zorc, why did he never show up in the anime? And why is his card now a mere common card that collectors would probably toss to the bottom of the shoebox?
Dark Master Zorc may not have appeared in the anime series that many of us know quite well, but he was in the original Yu-Gi-Oh! manga. And in his appearance in the manga, Zorc was not a Duel Monsters card, but something else relating to a very different type of game. At this point, I should probably explain some things about the original Yu-Gi-Oh! manga that some of you reading may not know. The first and biggest of those things is that the franchise’s iconic card game was not always at the center of the series. The game of Duel Monsters did play a significant role in parts of the second, fourth and fifth volumes of the manga, but it wasn’t until the eighth volume, known by many here in the U.S. as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist Volume 1, that the card game took over much of the plot.
In those first seven volumes, many of the battles in the story were waged using different kinds of games, such as board games, digital keychain games (remember those?), killer theme park attractions, one kind of regular playing card solitaire, and games that Yugi would quickly put together using items that he’d “just happen” to find lying around. With the notable exceptions of that iconic first duel between Yugi and Kaiba (which is actually their second duel) and the important details of how Yugi and Joey became friends, many of the events from those first seven volumes of the manga were either completely left out of the anime we all know, or heavily altered and shown as flashbacks. The reason for this is because much of the content from those first seven volumes was what many of us here in the U.S. would consider unsuitable for the younger target audience that Yu-Gi-Oh! is primarily aimed at. The events of those first seven volumes of the manga were made into a different anime series that many fans know as Yu-Gi-Oh! Season 0, but the level of “questionable content” in that series was so high that not even the butchers at 4kids could alter it into a state where it would’ve been suitable to run as part of a Saturday morning cartoon show lineup.
The part of the first seven manga volumes that Dark Master Zorc appeared in was a story arc known as the Monster World arc (aka the Millennium Enemy arc), which was the final big arc before the start of Duelist. It’s in this story arc where Yugi and his friends first meet Bakura and encounter the spirit of the Millennium Ring. One afternoon, Yugi and his friends go over to Bakura’s apartment to play a tabletop RPG called Monster World, but things go horribly wrong when Yami Bakura traps Yugi and the others inside the game world by sealing their souls inside the lead figures that represent their characters. And of course the only way out for them is to defeat the “final boss” or Dark Master. If you think about it, the Monster World arc is kind of an early tabletop version of Sword Art Online. The concept for both stories is more or less the same. Some people get trapped inside a fantasy game, and the only way out for them is to beat the final boss and clear the game. In fact at the start of the arc, Bakura’s other victims are in comas at the hospital and don’t come out of them until Yugi and the gang beat the game, so there’s another similarity.
Anyway, Yami Bakura’s boss monster avatar in Monster World was Dark Master Zorc, the very same monster that would later become the Ritual Monster that is the subject of this post. The illustration of Contract with the Dark Master is actually the scene in the manga where the human form of Yami Bakura’s avatar morphs into Zorc. Also, the dice roll effect of Zorc’s card is a reference to how a pair of ten-sided dice was used to decide the outcome of battles in the Monster World game. The negative effect of rolling a six with Zorc’s effect in Duel Monsters is equivalent to rolling a 99 or “fumble” in Monster World, while rolling a one or two is equivalent to rolling a 00 or “critical”. There was also a final form that Zorc took in the Monster World arc called Last Zorc, but at this point I doubt that form will ever be made into a real card.
