Starting Deck

Kira logged onto both KaibaCorp's and Industrial Illusions' card search websites and looked up the cards currently available for direct purchase.

The first thing was undoubtedly that card—the card any card player reincarnated into this world with even a functioning brain would immediately look for.

—Pot of Greed.

Or rather, the uniquely overpowered Draw Engines of the Early Anime World represented by Pot of Greed.

Pot of Greed let you draw Two Cards from your deck with no conditions whatsoever. That simple, brutal effect had made it a permanently banned card in the Real Card Environment, the poster child for an indefinite sentence that would almost certainly never be lifted within anyone's foreseeable lifetime.

Its fellow sufferer was Graceful Charity. Not only did it let you draw three cards from your deck, but it also let you choose two cards from your hand and send them to the Graveyard. Once Yu-Gi-Oh! developed into an era where Graveyard and hand resources were practically interchangeable, the sheer terror of drawing three while also providing a Mill Strategy had surpassed even Pot of Greed.

However, duelists in the DM Anime had not paid much attention to these cards. By the GX Era, though, duelists in the Anime Environment seemed to have started recognizing just how powerful they were. After all, in the GX Anime, every protagonist seemed to carry at least one Pot of Greed and one Graceful Charity. In Asuka's duel, you could even see Pot of Greed draw into another Pot of Greed. The scene was utterly savage.

When it came to Monster Cards, Kira found himself suffering from choice paralysis.

After looking through the entire Card Pool, he simply could not find a single one he liked. As a card player who had transmigrated here, he really could not bring himself to use monsters that had to obediently gather Tributes for a Tribute Summon, only to come out as little more than 2,000-ATK vanilla beatsticks.

There were some relatively decent monsters, but many of them were priced without any actual supply. They simply could not be bought.

For example, Jinzo was one of the first cards that came to mind. It was one of Katsuya Jonouchi's signature monsters from the previous Protagonist Group. It was Level 6 and required only one Tribute, yet possessed a respectable 2400 ATK/DEF, along with a Trap Negation Ability that was rather overpowered in the early environment—as long as it was on the field, Trap Cards could not be used.

Kira remembered that in the Real Card Environment of this era, it was also an extremely high-quality individual card and a frequent fixture in Top-Tier Deck Building for tournaments.

But when he searched for it, it was out of stock.

Jinzo was an exceptionally rare Rare Card that had been out of stock for a long time. There was simply no way to buy it.

That left Kira somewhat frustrated. He quickly realized that another major difference between the Anime Environment and real cards was the difficulty of obtaining cards.

In reality, players could check every card in the current Card Pool at any time and use virtually any card to create whatever deck they wanted. But duelists in the Yu-Gi-Oh! world did not have that convenience.

There were also cards he wanted, but after taking one glance at their prices, he could not help but suck in a cold breath.

Never mind.

Kira knew perfectly well that cards in this world were practically equivalent to weapons and power, so he had long been prepared to bleed money for any necessary card, no matter the cost.

But saying that was one thing. Looking at the absurd price tags on certain Rare Cards, he figured that even selling himself would not be enough to afford them.

That was not an exaggeration. He meant it literally.

Sure enough, the price gap between ordinary cards and Rare Cards in this world was outrageous. Regular cards and normal booster packs cost about the same as they had in his previous life, affordable for anyone. But for certain Rare Cards, saying one card cost as much as a house was no exaggeration at all.

And those were merely the ordinary Rare Cards that could actually be bought. As for the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, of which there were famously only three cards in the entire world, all in Seto Kaiba's possession, that was not even worth discussing.

After digging further, Kira discovered that this world had not only car loans and mortgages, but even something called a card loan. As the name implied, you could take out a loan to buy cards.

"So this is what it feels like to have no cards. It sucks," Kira said with a curl of his lip.

Fortunately, even under such restrictions, he still managed to come up with a deck concept using cards he could obtain.

The prototype for this deck was the first World Championship Winning Deck in the Real Card Competitive History of Yu-Gi-Oh!, a deck with milestone significance.

Hand Destruction.

Perhaps every novice duelist who entered the game through the anime harbored unrealistic fantasies about dueling—clashes between high-ATK big brothers like in the anime, fierce exchanges of offense and defense, direct confrontations, and a satisfying battle that ended with a GG.

But that was fake Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Real Yu-Gi-Oh! meant that only one of the two people sitting at the table got to play Yu-Gi-Oh!.

The safest path to victory had always been to erase every possibility of the opponent's strategy, leaving them unable to play any cards at all. That principle remained true to this day, and it had been just as true in the early dueling environment.

Hand Destruction was a deck built around precisely that idea. As its name suggested, its strategy was to destroy the opponent's hand, leaving them with no cards to play. From the moment they sat down, they could only stare blankly and idle there. It could be considered the ancestor of Dark Side of Dueling decks.

Anyone facing this deck would have their understanding of dueling completely overturned. Within just a few minutes, the poor victim would experience the laborer's triple combo of "my blood pressure is skyrocketing," "are you fucking kidding me," and "I summon my fist in Attack Position."

So if one had to name this type of deck's greatest weakness, it was probably that its user's personal safety was difficult to guarantee.

Of course, Kira could not possibly remember the entire construction of such an ancient Champion Deck, and some Rare Cards were beyond his reach anyway. So he merely borrowed its underlying idea and built a new deck of his own.

As for some of the empty slots in the deck, he would stuff in more Trap Cards with passable individual quality for now.

In truth, from Kira's perspective as a card player, some of those Traps were not even particularly profitable or necessarily that useful. The main point was that the more traps there were, the easier it was to break the opponent's mentality.

He was not some devil, and he was not trying to mess with people's heads out of sadistic amusement. Psychological warfare was part of dueling too. Sometimes, breaking the opponent's mentality before reducing their LP to zero was an effective tactic.

Yes, that was all.

As he continued browsing the website absentmindedly, his gaze swept across a page, and his eyes suddenly lit up.

Jinzo, stock quantity: 1.

Kira immediately scrolled back and clicked to search. But the website rejected him right afterward.

"No access permission."

"Academy Division exclusive card."

Kira froze.

Academy Division? What was that?

After another round of online searching, he finally understood.

The so-called Academy Division referred to Duel Academy. It was the world's largest dueling academy, personally established and managed by Seto Kaiba. He had bought an entire island as the Academy Headquarters and poured resources into it.

Students on the island had the chance to access newly released booster packs first, and they had channels to buy Rare Cards that were completely unavailable outside. They could even enjoy outrageously steep discounts when making purchases.

Even setting aside the academy's facilities, faculty, and instruction, the Rare Cards and discounts alone were enough to make anyone jealous.

For students with sufficiently outstanding grades, even their grades and credits could be exchanged for cards. In a world where a single card could sell for an astronomical sum, this could save students an enormous amount of deck-building budget.

Not to mention that graduates of Duel Academy possessed the most prestigious diplomas in the Dueling World. Whether they wanted to pursue professional dueling or work for KaibaCorp or Industrial Illusions, they would receive priority referral opportunities.

As he casually scrolled further down, Kira even spotted Chaos Sorcerer!

Chaos Sorcerer was Level 6 with 2300 ATK. By banishing LIGHT/DARK Attribute monsters from the Graveyard, it could be Special Summoned directly onto the field, and it had the powerful effect of banishing one monster on the opponent's field from play Once Per Turn.

Because it had summoning conditions and effects similar to the even more famous Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning, it became a lower-tier substitute after Black Luster Soldier was placed on the ban list. Card players jokingly called it Little Envoy, and it was a first-rate force in the current environment.

In this world, Black Luster Soldier was an Ultra Rare Card. In the anime, only Duel King Yugi Mutou was known to possess one, while the GX Anime featured another exhibition card in a replica deck of Yugi Mutou's. Other than those, it had never been seen again.

So obtaining Big Envoy was nearly impossible. But if he could buy a Chaos Sorcerer, that would already be excellent.

There were also several other fairly good Rare Cards, likewise difficult to encounter on the outside market, and their prices really were discounted to a fraction of their market value.

Seeing this, Kira took a deep breath.

He had decided.

He would take the Duel Academy entrance exam first.

If he failed, he would try again next year.