Hey everyone,

With the nationals season concluded, we just got the final Banned & Restricted List before the World Championships in a few weeks, and I want to take a few minutes to talk through my thoughts on it.

My Thoughts Before the B&R

Let’s be honest, the deck is a problem. There was genuinely no reason to play any deck besides Fractals, and I am pretty confident in saying that the deck was borderline Tier 0. Your worst matchups were, at worst, 45/55s. While it would certainly be possible to construct a deck that is better than a 55% into fractals, I don’t believe that it was possible without being really bad into the rest of the field; and because the field is so open (even though it shouldn’t be), a deck like that is actually unplayable in a tournament (it would probably be something like Wind Seiryuu w/ mainboard 8 phantasia hate, innervates, and blanches. Maybe Wind Luxem w/ mainboard 8 hate. The problem is it takes so much space to fit those that you make a lot of your other matchups significantly worse). The only thing holding it back from being actually Tier 0 is that there are only about 15 people in the world that I believe are piloting the deck to the degree required to make it Tier 0, but it’s at that skill level that I am making the above statistics. I won’t list who the 15 people are, but if they’ve top 8’d a major with the deck, there’s a pretty good shot they’re on the list. And Caban. We can acknowledge he’s the Fractal GOAT. 

However, I don’t think that there are only 15 people who can do so, just that there are only 15 people currently. I think any good, technical player that spends 50+ hours grinding fractals can pilot the deck at a sufficient skill level, but a lot of those players simply aren’t choosing to do so. I wasn't even playing the deck until after OCE nationals, because I genuinely didn’t believe the deck was that broken. While I talk about this more in my NA Nationals Tournament Report (coming soon, it’s a long one), suffice to say, Caban and Terry talked a lot of sense into me in Auckland.

So, what to do about the deck? At NA Nats, I was pretty vocal that there were 2 options: Ban Burst Asunder or Ban Glimmering Refusal. A lot of people said “What about banning Dissonant Fractal,” and I disagreed pretty strongly (more on that below, since that’s what ended up happening). Personally, I was advocating for Glimmering, because Fractals is one of the strongest combo decks in the game that also has the best counterspell in the game. Take away the counterspell, and now you just have a combo deck that is weak to interaction, and that seemed pretty good to me. My teammate Rex argued that they should ban Burst Asunder, because taking away the degenerate combo finisher card makes the deck fundamentally more fair, and without such a powerful finisher, the deck just becomes a control deck (that might even go up to Diao Chan lvl 3) and can still utilize the powerful counterspell. 

So, If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the banned List: https://www.gatcg.com/article/ban-and-restricted-june-2nd-2025 

The Changes

Dissonant Fractal - Banned

Lost in Thought - Category 2

Crystalline Mirror - Category 2

Mercenary’s Blade - Category 1

Scepter of Lumina - Off the List

Dissonant Fractal

Oh boy Weebs, you’ve fallen for the classic blunder. I’ve played A LOT of competitive Yugioh, from 2015 to 2019, and if there’s one thing I learned in that time, it’s that Konami LOVES to hit consistency cards, and it rarely works out well. Konami’s banlist functions not really for the health of the game so much as promoting the newest and latest cards, so their model is always “print a broken deck, hit the consistency cards a little bit after people have bought a lot of product so that its still playable, then print something new and broken later.” However, they rarely ban the actual problem cards. 

See, the issue with hurting consistency is it just increases the RNG. Over the course of a tournament, this means that the number of copies of that deck that perform well round over round will decrease, but some will still have a good RNG run and keep chugging on through the event, because their deck is still fundamentally broken. While some competitive players will opt for a more consistent deck, it already takes a good amount of luck to win events; so there will still be good, professional players who take the gamble on the deck and will get rewarded for it. All this does is reduce the density of the deck in the day 2 field, but the odds of it winning the event are still fairly high. In essence, it makes it appear as if the problem is solved, even though it isn’t. 

Practically speaking, how does banning Dissonant Fractal impact Fractals? Well, the main good thing is that the deck can no longer kill on T2. These lines require a 1 cost fractal, which no longer exists. Gone are the 4x fractals into Refracting + Burst Asunder before your opponent can materialize their Safeguard Amulet. This is good, lowering the ability to scam wins is great. But, the scam happens very rarely anyways, a fractal player will likely only hit it once in an event, so practically this doesn’t actually change much, just lowering the occasional feels bad. 

What it impacts the most often is your Fractal of Rain mills. Being able to stack your draws + mills is undeniably very strong, and without Dissonant, you’ll have to be random milling most of the time (Fractal of Insight still lets you stack a bit). But again, practically, this realistically only converts to 1, maybe 2 less float mills per game. 

Lastly, there’s the actual consistency piece of Dissonant Fractal, but this doesn’t come up as often as you might expect. A lot of the time, you play Dissonant and keep 3-4 cards on top. Yes, picking the order is good, especially with Rain as mentioned above, but it isn’t really essential. The glimpse matters most in bricked hands where you see only 1 fractal or many fractals, and evening those out is definitely quite valuable, I’m not denying that. But again, this is just affecting the consistency of the deck, and not actually its power in any way.

Even without Dissonant, the deck is still quite consistent. You have a lot of glimpse still through Fractal of Insight and Crystalline Mirror, and a lot of draw power through your regalia and float converters. You might see lists shift to a 23rd fractal just to help lower the odds of the 1 fractal starts now that Dissonant can’t help you dig out of them, but that’s really the only ratio that I see changing. Otherwise, it’s just taking out the 4x Dissonant Fractal and putting in 4x of a 2 cost fractal (cause you can still T1 triple fractal if you have 3x 2 costs and only 1 of them is hindered). Even without a triple fractal start, double fractal into pre rec Backup Charger is an incredibly powerful line.

Lost In Thought

Oh boy, I’m very glad that this card went to Cat 2, but I wish it went a bit further. Lost in Thought is an absolutely busted card that truthfully should’ve never been printed, and I genuinely believe should be banned. It allows water mill decks to realize so much of their card advantage gained from float without having to play a ton of float converting regalia, which fuels a lot of lvl 0-1 strategies in a way that I think isn’t healthy. Look at Silvie/Nico lists from the last format, where a primary problem was that a basic element midrange deck was able to generate and maintain so much influence. Lost in Thought was a key component of that strategy, and it’s still seen today in decks like Fractals and Genbu. Banning LiT will severely limit the power of lvl 0-1 Water strategies in a way that I think is healthy for the longevity of the game, because these decks shouldn’t be able to maintain such high influence.

Crystalline Mirror

This change is good, I agree with the developer's reasoning that Crystalline Mirror was designed in an era where the condition was harder to achieve, and also breaks the identity of Water. This card should be banned, and to be honest I’m surprised that it wasn’t since they’re already going after the consistency by banning Dissonant Fractal.

Mercenary’s Blade

I don’t really agree with this change. Yes it’s a free regalia activation, it’s pretty strong, but it’s in no way pushing anything over the top. I’m a big fan of the theme that it and Varuckan Soulknife have given Assassin decks in being able to get these weapons on demand. It’s good flavor for the Assassin decks, demonstrating how they’re always prepared and have a weapon ready, and it doesn’t break or overtune anything since they’re both very fair cards (because they’re only 1/1 weapons). This is only to category 1, which means they’re monitoring it for future design space, and don’t think it’s currently a problem, so it’s not like they’re looking to ban this anytime soon (thankfully).

Scepter of Lumina

Totally fine to move it off the list. The errata did a great job at changing the role Scepter plays in water decks, and the card is in no way problematic for the meta or health of the game. Water Tempo decks still get to leverage it as a powerful burst option, effectively enabling the Tempo archetype to exist in the first place, which helps create a healthy variety in aggro strategies available to players. 

Closing Thoughts

While most of the list was a hit, I really, strongly, fundamentally disagree with the choice to ban Dissonant Fractal. I think that Glimmering Refusal would have solved the problem of Fractals, but Rex has convinced me in our discussions post banned list that banning Burst Asunder would be an even better fix by directly solving the problem without affecting other potential strategies.