I think it's a little past time I did a post about a discovery I made about a couple of weeks ago. I've reported before that the upcoming Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS anime is going to introduce a new summoning method known as Link Summoning. What I've failed to report was that with this new summoning mechanic also comes to dramatic new rule changes to the game. Below is a picture I just found on Zerochan that sort of shows what these changes are going to be and perfectly illustrates how I feel about them.

The changes I'm speaking of have to do with the duel mat on Reji's desk in the above image. One thing that's immediately noticeable is that the Pendulum Zones have been moved to the ends of the back row. These new Pendulum Zones can also be used for playing regular Spell and Trap cards, but this change basically forces decks that rely on Pendulum Summoning to play with only three regular Spell and Trap cards at a time. The really big change though is those two blue spaces in the middle of the board known as the Extra Monster Zones. According to the new rules, monsters in the Extra Deck can only be summoned to those two zones. They can't be summoned to any of the five original Monster Card Zones - now called the Main Monster Zones - unless they're summoned from the Graveyard. The other thing about these new Extra Monster Zones is that once a player takes one for their monster, the remaining unoccupied zone goes to the other player.

Now there is another way to summon an Extra Deck Monster to the Main Monster Zones besides summoning it from the Graveyard, and it lies with the new Link Monsters. If you'll refer to the above picture again, you can see a diagram of a Link Monster card on the board behind Reiji. Notice those triangular markers around the frame for the monster illustration? Those markers are known as Link Markers, and a number of them are colored orange depending on the Link Monster in question. Whatever Monster Zones that the orange markers point to become Linked Zones that are connected to the zone the Link Monster is in, and these Linked Zones can be used to summon other Extra Deck monsters. Plus the more Link Monsters that you summon, the more Main Monster Zones you can use for your Extra Deck monsters.

So while these new rules add a whole new level of strategy to the game, they also kind of nuke every existing archetype that relies heavily on Extra Deck monsters, like Reiji's D/D/D monsters. Even classic archetypes like Jaden Yuki's Elemental Heroes will likely be very affected by this. I know that the Speedroid deck that I built will certainly become useless in these new rules. So the only things to do now really are simply get out of the game, try and modify your existing deck to be compatible with the new rules, or just build a new deck from scratch. I for one am going to try and build a brand new deck using the cards of new anime's central protagonist. We'll just wait and see how that works out.

In the meantime, I am totally feeling Reiji's pain with these new rules.