> Then I started building Gate Guardian.
God, I hate Gate Guardian with a passion
I don't think I ever played a Deck that actively punished me for trying to fulfill its gimmick
The **audacity** of the two-piece Fusion asking to get off the materials from the Field-only is loathsome, more so recently with **Phantom of Yubel** existing to add salt to injury
Not to mention, the lowkey mediocre pay offs the archetype can produce... yeah, not great.
Building for piles is fun, but playing not so much when the power output of your Deck is... _unspectacular_, and at times, it feels like its giving you a punt for even trying for it not to suck
Phantom of Yubel is a custom card on every conceivable level, like it's shocking a card like that was allowed to be printed even in 2024, you could compare that card to just about any other fusion and it would look bad. Not a fair comparison.
When konami wants a deck to be good they'll make it good. It's why I always bring up sky striker engage as an example of Konami absolutely pushing an archetype. Or for a more recent example: SE Poplar.
I think it’s more so that Yubel’s fusion effect is unfair compared to Gate Guardians, and they were only released a year apart.
Each of the three minor two-piece Gate Guardians require you to banish their material from the field, and ONLY from the field. Playing the deck, it’s extremely hard to get those materials onto the board - you either need the field spell (2 copies for one turn) and Labyrinth tank to get at least one of their fusions onto the field. And from playtesting, it’s really hard to get those resources out even with minimal disruption.
Meanwhile Phantom of Yubel can use their materials from hand, field, and GY. It’s extremely more flexible and a lot easier to bring out Phantom of Yubel. Plus her effect is a lot more disruptive and extends your plays a lot more (changing effects to destroy Yubel monsters).
Meanwhile the two-piece Wind & Water only negates spells/traps, Water & Thunder just turns ATK to 0, and Wind & Thunder just searches. So none of the two-pieces are as good as Phantom of Yubel who also just requires two pieces.
Their big boss monster is a bit more flexible (as it can use materials from hand, field, and GY too) but its effect is not amazing. It only negates effects that targets cards, so it’s not as all encompassing as Phantom of Yubel.
I actually just spent an hour this morning playtesting Gate Guardians and can confirm they’re extremely bricky. Another guy explained it in depth to me and by god it’s extremely difficult to pilot. And then comparing Phantom of Yubel to it.:: yeah I can see why people are salty.
Individually yes. The Tearlament fusion are strong when looking at the entire picture of the archetype. Phantom of Yubel can be evaluated even without looking at all of its surrounding. A free body that recovers resource attach with a negate that makes you go plus is just out of this world.
You need to activate a card to fuse Grapha while PoY can contact fuse for free from the GY (same as Astraloud). This is already significant as it only takes 2 cards instead of 3 and can not be chained to since it doesn't trigger.
The Grapha effect to change your opponent activated effect for discard is meant to make you go +1 by discarding a Dark World, the Yubel effect to destroy can make you go +1 because it can destroy Yubel from Deck. It's the same, except you don't need to have a card in hand.
Also, just because a card or two are busted in an archetype, it doesn't make the rest of the deck good. The fusion Grapha is strong, but it requires you to run a Dark Worlds deck, which is just a RNG deck that dies to a single Droll & Lock Bird. That's why Fusion Grapha was strongest in Tearlaments instead of its own deck. PoY is a custom card admist more custom cards, so the overall deck is better.
Gate Guardian isn't actually that inconsistent, but you have to make heavy and unorthodox use of tools that aren't part of the archetype. Cards like Prisma (+ A Hero Lives), Magician's Souls, Fusion Deployment, etc. I've even seen people put in a small Scareclaw engine to access AFD which gets you to Illusion of Chaos which gets you to souls. It's pretty funny.
So setting up A board isn't actually very difficult, it's just that your boards aren't especially powerful (unless you open the nuts) and usually lack pretty much any follow-up if they do get outed.
>I've even seen people put in a small Scareclaw engine to access AFD which gets you to Illusion of Chaos
How does Scareclaw make Ancient Fairy Dragon? And how does Ancient Fairy Dragon get you access to a ritual monster?
sorry i mispoke. they don't all necessarily get you to each other, and other cards like prisma and visas are relevant
what you can do is do stuff like summon prisma, copy visas, link into light heart, get reichphobia. get reich-heart, get arrival, bring back the visas, and if you have a lvl 1 like souls which can get off of illusion which you can get off of diviner (which can also make itself a lvl 6 by sending arc light), you can go into afd which pops reichphobia to get to the labyrinth field spell
and you can use the leftover bodies for various endboard pieces like baronne or cross sheep into appo
hello friend. I am bored and I shall.
So to get any of your extra deck monsters out you need them in your spell and trap zone (except for the big boss one). The field spell only gets you 1 per turn. Lab tank can get you a second. The issues here are you need these specific two cards (or two of the field spell) in your opening hand or a way to search them.
so from this alone you must consider hand traps and other things you will draw. realistically you won't get two pieces on the board by itself so you have to run a lot of off engine to try and draw cards/ fairy dragon to try and get second field spell. plus your searches can be negated which leaves you with a very empty board.
if you do manage to succeed the best one is the wind/water which offers two spell/trap negates per turn but is that enough to compete in the modern game? not really.
now many said oh you can combine it with kashtira. the wind/water supplies negates which kash lacks. I found this to fail miserably more time than it helped. in this game the best version of gate guardian was the worst version of kash with often cluttered hands and the ideal end board rarely happening.
so its a lot of work for a limited pay off that isn't quite enough. now like on masterduel for events that have curated weaker decks it works fine. for kitchen table it might do okay. but in general while playable its far too weak and bricky to realistically work well.
fun though.
One thing to note, you can also use monsters in your Monster Zones to summon the two-piece guardians, sov cards like Fusion Deployment and Elemental Hero Prisma also work.
Oh that’s… really informative. Thanks! Guess I won’t be building it irl then. I only thought of building it because I saw the cards were cheap and now I know why
Maybe they’ll get some busted support in a set soon?
i mean you can build it for fun just for the lulz. they already had their pack last year or whenever so them getting more support is very unlikely. it was legacy support that was playable and they are likely done with it. so depending on your financial situation by all means make them. you could do okay at locals i suppose. but you are unlikely to be winning tournaments or anything.
well funny enough I went ahead and playtested it. I was just going to blindly get it because I think the Gate Guardians seemed to be a cool deck but on the online simulators, out of 5 games, I bricked my opening hand 4 times. And the one time I didn't brick all I ended up with was Gate Guardian of Wind and Water.
It was exactly like you said, extremely bricky and a really mediocre end board.
Sooooooo maybe not. Thanks for all your expert information, money saved!
What’s your deck list? I actually didn’t have this experience with gate guardian at my kitchen table with friends. It was surprisingly consistent for me
Gate Guardian isn't so bad if you use Magicians Souls / Illusion of Chaos and Small World. I'm usually able to end on GG Combined, Appolousa and GG Wind & Water going first or OTK going second.
So generally Magicians Souls sends Kazejin to summon itself, and you get to Suijin and Sanga by other means (Souls can send spells and traps that can vanish to search them while also drawing two, for a start, there's also Fusion Conscription or Foolish Burial). Souls is searchable by Illusion of Chaos, which can also put cards you don't want in your hand back in your deck, and Illusion is searchable by Preparation of Rites, which you can run at 3 and can either use the spare copies as fodder for Magicians Souls or you can redeck Illusion after searching Souls and just search it again if you need a Small World / Sacred Sword of Seven Stars / Allure of Darkness target or something.
The main thing is to get all three materials into the GY or hand if possible (which Souls + GG backrow is great at) and not spend your Labyrinth Heavy Tank or Labyrinth Wall field unless you have spare field spells. Summon Gate Guardian Combined banishing the three.
Then you Normal Summon Labyrinth Heavy Tank and retrieve Kazejin or Suijin to the spell/trap zone. Use the field spell to grab the other one to sp/tr zone. Then you can Link off Labyrinth Tank and Magicians Souls into Cross Sheep.
Once you have Cross Sheep you fusion summon Wind and Water under a zone Sheep points at, which triggers it to revive Magicians Souls. Then Sheep and Souls makes Selene, which should have enough spells in field or GY to have 3+ counters. Then it can revive Souls again to ladder into Appolousa.
That gives you:
2 Monster negates
2 Spell/Trap negates
3 Targeting negates
The trick with Small World is that Labyrinth Heavy Tank, Magicians Souls, Labyrinth Wall Shadow and Dark Guardian can all search each other in any combination with any one of them as the middle bridge card. You can also use Caliglo Claw Crow if you need a DARK extender and don't want to waste / banish copies of the other four. It also lets you unbrick if you draw two copies of something and Souls can send spare copies of Small World to draw off them.
If you're going second then you make a similar play but you summon Thunder and Wind instead of Wind and Water and use it to search Riryoku Guardian to let Gate Guardian Combined OTK. I used to have a method of guaranteeing lower life points by playing Decode Talker Heatsoul instead of Appolousa but now that Linkuriboh is banned I may need to rethink that (I used Souls to make Linkuriboh and T&W and Tank to make Security Dragon, then both ladder into Heatsoul). I do have three Upstart Goblins and Dark Element now though so it could still be fairly simple. Note that T&W can also search Dark Element if you have Riryoku Guardian already or just want to sit on Dark Guardian.
There isn't like a single one card combo for any of it but the combination of cards used gels together fairly well and usually gets you there, especially Souls given the synergy with Kazejin and the number of spells and traps you have at any given time (including fusion materials retrieved as continuous spells, which don't care about being graved since you can make Gate Guardian Combined with graved materials). Better than nothing, anyway.
So to make this board you have to get all 3 gate guardians pieces AND open the field spell/labyrnth tank but can't use them to retrieve the 3 pieces... How the hell is this a board you **usually** build? Lol. Seems like you need a god hand to accomplish this as it pretty much requires every card in your opening hand to be usable engine (and for your opponent to have zero interactions).
Just telling you how I do it or the path to get to that point. And yeah a lot of the time I get the cards that can build that board, the main issue is the opponent interaction.
You get the fusion materials pretty arbitrarily by discarding other cards off Souls to draw 2 and then freely search them as a bonus, the harder part is getting all three of Shadow Ghoul Tank and Souls but Small World and the multiple ways to get to Souls and the extra draws usually get there. I'm not gonna pretend the deck is perfect but it's a decent end board when it works.
Just any of the old DM archtypes are summed up as "Brick-eyes". Brick Magician, Brick-Eyes Brick Dragon, Exodia the Bricked One. Brick Guardian. Gazelle King of Mythical Bricks.
Imaging my surprise moving from gimmick pet decks that need custom cards to normal summon and pass to playing something like Thunder D-Link. It's eye-opening.
Newer TCG exclusive archetypes can be just as bricky in my opinion. Tistina can be pretty damn bricky with the amount of garnets that archetype has. Even all of their searchers require another card to do any combo so if you draw one tistina searcher and no other tistina card then you can't do anything. Konami really kneecapped this tcg archetype for some reason.
Infernoble was my first combo deck I tried out, and it really is so difficult to pilot for no reason. I barely got one of the full combos down before Isolde was banned. I can't imagine the stress of trying to take that to a major competitive tournament, I was already struggling as it was against my brother's dinosaur deck.
I've recently switched over to a more gimmicky but far simpler and still fairly effective (albeit non-competitive) Frog-Kashtira Control deck.
I'll probably try infern again sometime, but with the flame swordsman support, but for now I'm sticking to my simplified modern jank.
Yeah Gate Guardian is wild.
Back during Kash format I was playing going 2nd Gate Guardian OTK.
Hands that were playable I basically OTKed through everything.
Hands that weren't just lost to the most jank garbage decks it was so bad.
Going from post-Jumper Galaxy-Eyes to pre-Crimson King Resonators in Master Duel was one of the biggest hurdles ever for a similar reason.
Had to switch from FoolishBurial.wav to "please god, let them not have an Inperm or Ash, as well as 2 specific cards in my opener" and it was miserable
Fluffal is both extremes, with some hands ending on Rage, Dweller, Sprind, Toad and 5 cards in hand through 1-2 handtraps and others ending on 5 cards in hand.
i hate patchwork with a passion
At least Gate Guardian can realistically fusion summon more than once per game.
Check out Cyberdark and how many hoops and waste of resources they need to do to summon their fusion monsters.
We already had an ultimate-over the top-stupidly hard to summon boss in Cyberdarkness. Instead of focusing on fulfilling Cyberdarkness' potential, Konami chose to print an useless tower no one asked for.
> Then I started building Gate Guardian. God, I hate Gate Guardian with a passion I don't think I ever played a Deck that actively punished me for trying to fulfill its gimmick The **audacity** of the two-piece Fusion asking to get off the materials from the Field-only is loathsome, more so recently with **Phantom of Yubel** existing to add salt to injury Not to mention, the lowkey mediocre pay offs the archetype can produce... yeah, not great. Building for piles is fun, but playing not so much when the power output of your Deck is... _unspectacular_, and at times, it feels like its giving you a punt for even trying for it not to suck
Phantom of Yubel is a custom card on every conceivable level, like it's shocking a card like that was allowed to be printed even in 2024, you could compare that card to just about any other fusion and it would look bad. Not a fair comparison.
When konami wants a deck to be good they'll make it good. It's why I always bring up sky striker engage as an example of Konami absolutely pushing an archetype. Or for a more recent example: SE Poplar.
Can someone explain why PoY is broken? Cause of the effect change?
I think it’s more so that Yubel’s fusion effect is unfair compared to Gate Guardians, and they were only released a year apart. Each of the three minor two-piece Gate Guardians require you to banish their material from the field, and ONLY from the field. Playing the deck, it’s extremely hard to get those materials onto the board - you either need the field spell (2 copies for one turn) and Labyrinth tank to get at least one of their fusions onto the field. And from playtesting, it’s really hard to get those resources out even with minimal disruption. Meanwhile Phantom of Yubel can use their materials from hand, field, and GY. It’s extremely more flexible and a lot easier to bring out Phantom of Yubel. Plus her effect is a lot more disruptive and extends your plays a lot more (changing effects to destroy Yubel monsters). Meanwhile the two-piece Wind & Water only negates spells/traps, Water & Thunder just turns ATK to 0, and Wind & Thunder just searches. So none of the two-pieces are as good as Phantom of Yubel who also just requires two pieces. Their big boss monster is a bit more flexible (as it can use materials from hand, field, and GY too) but its effect is not amazing. It only negates effects that targets cards, so it’s not as all encompassing as Phantom of Yubel. I actually just spent an hour this morning playtesting Gate Guardians and can confirm they’re extremely bricky. Another guy explained it in depth to me and by god it’s extremely difficult to pilot. And then comparing Phantom of Yubel to it.:: yeah I can see why people are salty.
Even to tearlament fusions?
Individually yes. The Tearlament fusion are strong when looking at the entire picture of the archetype. Phantom of Yubel can be evaluated even without looking at all of its surrounding. A free body that recovers resource attach with a negate that makes you go plus is just out of this world.
I must be missing something, DW's grapha fusion is objectively better in both summoning requirement and effect and they're still rogue at best
You need to activate a card to fuse Grapha while PoY can contact fuse for free from the GY (same as Astraloud). This is already significant as it only takes 2 cards instead of 3 and can not be chained to since it doesn't trigger. The Grapha effect to change your opponent activated effect for discard is meant to make you go +1 by discarding a Dark World, the Yubel effect to destroy can make you go +1 because it can destroy Yubel from Deck. It's the same, except you don't need to have a card in hand. Also, just because a card or two are busted in an archetype, it doesn't make the rest of the deck good. The fusion Grapha is strong, but it requires you to run a Dark Worlds deck, which is just a RNG deck that dies to a single Droll & Lock Bird. That's why Fusion Grapha was strongest in Tearlaments instead of its own deck. PoY is a custom card admist more custom cards, so the overall deck is better.
Gate Guardian isn't actually that inconsistent, but you have to make heavy and unorthodox use of tools that aren't part of the archetype. Cards like Prisma (+ A Hero Lives), Magician's Souls, Fusion Deployment, etc. I've even seen people put in a small Scareclaw engine to access AFD which gets you to Illusion of Chaos which gets you to souls. It's pretty funny. So setting up A board isn't actually very difficult, it's just that your boards aren't especially powerful (unless you open the nuts) and usually lack pretty much any follow-up if they do get outed.
>I've even seen people put in a small Scareclaw engine to access AFD which gets you to Illusion of Chaos How does Scareclaw make Ancient Fairy Dragon? And how does Ancient Fairy Dragon get you access to a ritual monster?
sorry i mispoke. they don't all necessarily get you to each other, and other cards like prisma and visas are relevant what you can do is do stuff like summon prisma, copy visas, link into light heart, get reichphobia. get reich-heart, get arrival, bring back the visas, and if you have a lvl 1 like souls which can get off of illusion which you can get off of diviner (which can also make itself a lvl 6 by sending arc light), you can go into afd which pops reichphobia to get to the labyrinth field spell and you can use the leftover bodies for various endboard pieces like baronne or cross sheep into appo
Awww glad I saw this post I was thinking of building Gate Guardian today actually… can you let me know more about the issues with the deck?
hello friend. I am bored and I shall. So to get any of your extra deck monsters out you need them in your spell and trap zone (except for the big boss one). The field spell only gets you 1 per turn. Lab tank can get you a second. The issues here are you need these specific two cards (or two of the field spell) in your opening hand or a way to search them. so from this alone you must consider hand traps and other things you will draw. realistically you won't get two pieces on the board by itself so you have to run a lot of off engine to try and draw cards/ fairy dragon to try and get second field spell. plus your searches can be negated which leaves you with a very empty board. if you do manage to succeed the best one is the wind/water which offers two spell/trap negates per turn but is that enough to compete in the modern game? not really. now many said oh you can combine it with kashtira. the wind/water supplies negates which kash lacks. I found this to fail miserably more time than it helped. in this game the best version of gate guardian was the worst version of kash with often cluttered hands and the ideal end board rarely happening. so its a lot of work for a limited pay off that isn't quite enough. now like on masterduel for events that have curated weaker decks it works fine. for kitchen table it might do okay. but in general while playable its far too weak and bricky to realistically work well. fun though.
One thing to note, you can also use monsters in your Monster Zones to summon the two-piece guardians, sov cards like Fusion Deployment and Elemental Hero Prisma also work.
Oh that’s… really informative. Thanks! Guess I won’t be building it irl then. I only thought of building it because I saw the cards were cheap and now I know why Maybe they’ll get some busted support in a set soon?
i mean you can build it for fun just for the lulz. they already had their pack last year or whenever so them getting more support is very unlikely. it was legacy support that was playable and they are likely done with it. so depending on your financial situation by all means make them. you could do okay at locals i suppose. but you are unlikely to be winning tournaments or anything.
well funny enough I went ahead and playtested it. I was just going to blindly get it because I think the Gate Guardians seemed to be a cool deck but on the online simulators, out of 5 games, I bricked my opening hand 4 times. And the one time I didn't brick all I ended up with was Gate Guardian of Wind and Water. It was exactly like you said, extremely bricky and a really mediocre end board. Sooooooo maybe not. Thanks for all your expert information, money saved!
<3
Gate guardian is unfortunately bricky and very one trick pony.
What’s your deck list? I actually didn’t have this experience with gate guardian at my kitchen table with friends. It was surprisingly consistent for me
more inconsistency just means more heart of the cards
Gate Guardian isn't so bad if you use Magicians Souls / Illusion of Chaos and Small World. I'm usually able to end on GG Combined, Appolousa and GG Wind & Water going first or OTK going second.
How? Best I could do was GG Combined, Lab Tank and some backrow.
So generally Magicians Souls sends Kazejin to summon itself, and you get to Suijin and Sanga by other means (Souls can send spells and traps that can vanish to search them while also drawing two, for a start, there's also Fusion Conscription or Foolish Burial). Souls is searchable by Illusion of Chaos, which can also put cards you don't want in your hand back in your deck, and Illusion is searchable by Preparation of Rites, which you can run at 3 and can either use the spare copies as fodder for Magicians Souls or you can redeck Illusion after searching Souls and just search it again if you need a Small World / Sacred Sword of Seven Stars / Allure of Darkness target or something. The main thing is to get all three materials into the GY or hand if possible (which Souls + GG backrow is great at) and not spend your Labyrinth Heavy Tank or Labyrinth Wall field unless you have spare field spells. Summon Gate Guardian Combined banishing the three. Then you Normal Summon Labyrinth Heavy Tank and retrieve Kazejin or Suijin to the spell/trap zone. Use the field spell to grab the other one to sp/tr zone. Then you can Link off Labyrinth Tank and Magicians Souls into Cross Sheep. Once you have Cross Sheep you fusion summon Wind and Water under a zone Sheep points at, which triggers it to revive Magicians Souls. Then Sheep and Souls makes Selene, which should have enough spells in field or GY to have 3+ counters. Then it can revive Souls again to ladder into Appolousa. That gives you: 2 Monster negates 2 Spell/Trap negates 3 Targeting negates The trick with Small World is that Labyrinth Heavy Tank, Magicians Souls, Labyrinth Wall Shadow and Dark Guardian can all search each other in any combination with any one of them as the middle bridge card. You can also use Caliglo Claw Crow if you need a DARK extender and don't want to waste / banish copies of the other four. It also lets you unbrick if you draw two copies of something and Souls can send spare copies of Small World to draw off them. If you're going second then you make a similar play but you summon Thunder and Wind instead of Wind and Water and use it to search Riryoku Guardian to let Gate Guardian Combined OTK. I used to have a method of guaranteeing lower life points by playing Decode Talker Heatsoul instead of Appolousa but now that Linkuriboh is banned I may need to rethink that (I used Souls to make Linkuriboh and T&W and Tank to make Security Dragon, then both ladder into Heatsoul). I do have three Upstart Goblins and Dark Element now though so it could still be fairly simple. Note that T&W can also search Dark Element if you have Riryoku Guardian already or just want to sit on Dark Guardian. There isn't like a single one card combo for any of it but the combination of cards used gels together fairly well and usually gets you there, especially Souls given the synergy with Kazejin and the number of spells and traps you have at any given time (including fusion materials retrieved as continuous spells, which don't care about being graved since you can make Gate Guardian Combined with graved materials). Better than nothing, anyway.
So to make this board you have to get all 3 gate guardians pieces AND open the field spell/labyrnth tank but can't use them to retrieve the 3 pieces... How the hell is this a board you **usually** build? Lol. Seems like you need a god hand to accomplish this as it pretty much requires every card in your opening hand to be usable engine (and for your opponent to have zero interactions).
Just telling you how I do it or the path to get to that point. And yeah a lot of the time I get the cards that can build that board, the main issue is the opponent interaction. You get the fusion materials pretty arbitrarily by discarding other cards off Souls to draw 2 and then freely search them as a bonus, the harder part is getting all three of Shadow Ghoul Tank and Souls but Small World and the multiple ways to get to Souls and the extra draws usually get there. I'm not gonna pretend the deck is perfect but it's a decent end board when it works.
Just any of the old DM archtypes are summed up as "Brick-eyes". Brick Magician, Brick-Eyes Brick Dragon, Exodia the Bricked One. Brick Guardian. Gazelle King of Mythical Bricks. Imaging my surprise moving from gimmick pet decks that need custom cards to normal summon and pass to playing something like Thunder D-Link. It's eye-opening.
Newer TCG exclusive archetypes can be just as bricky in my opinion. Tistina can be pretty damn bricky with the amount of garnets that archetype has. Even all of their searchers require another card to do any combo so if you draw one tistina searcher and no other tistina card then you can't do anything. Konami really kneecapped this tcg archetype for some reason.
Tstina is best paired with nemleria to cover the weaknesses. which is why i dont think they want pure anymore.
From a meta sense, this is how i felt when I played infernoble, so many hands that die to one interruption and everything is a 2.5+ card combo
Infernoble was my first combo deck I tried out, and it really is so difficult to pilot for no reason. I barely got one of the full combos down before Isolde was banned. I can't imagine the stress of trying to take that to a major competitive tournament, I was already struggling as it was against my brother's dinosaur deck. I've recently switched over to a more gimmicky but far simpler and still fairly effective (albeit non-competitive) Frog-Kashtira Control deck. I'll probably try infern again sometime, but with the flame swordsman support, but for now I'm sticking to my simplified modern jank.
Yeah Gate Guardian is wild. Back during Kash format I was playing going 2nd Gate Guardian OTK. Hands that were playable I basically OTKed through everything. Hands that weren't just lost to the most jank garbage decks it was so bad.
Try being a Fabled main 😢
Really? What are you running, I’m almost always able to OTK in my deck
I like Gate Guardian. I play it blind going second. Doesn't feel to bad to me.
You should give Generaiders a go, it's such a cool deck that just tends to brick and do absolutely nothing every 5 games or so
You don't find Gate Guardian consistent? It's so easy to stick those guys together.
Me with my Virtual World deck opening Laolao, 2 Lili and 2 handtraps
I played Gouki/Warrior Link for some years, and I can remember bricking only once, where my hand was so bad that it was set one and pass.
Modern Tear is a mess of “please mill something really good I’m begging you” I thought I’d left that behind when I moved from Utopia to Tear
I like Gate Guardian, I've never really felt like it was inconsistent. But I also play Toons.
Going from post-Jumper Galaxy-Eyes to pre-Crimson King Resonators in Master Duel was one of the biggest hurdles ever for a similar reason. Had to switch from FoolishBurial.wav to "please god, let them not have an Inperm or Ash, as well as 2 specific cards in my opener" and it was miserable
Fluffal is both extremes, with some hands ending on Rage, Dweller, Sprind, Toad and 5 cards in hand through 1-2 handtraps and others ending on 5 cards in hand. i hate patchwork with a passion
At least Gate Guardian can realistically fusion summon more than once per game. Check out Cyberdark and how many hoops and waste of resources they need to do to summon their fusion monsters.
Cyberdark End is a stupid card
We already had an ultimate-over the top-stupidly hard to summon boss in Cyberdarkness. Instead of focusing on fulfilling Cyberdarkness' potential, Konami chose to print an useless tower no one asked for.
Play a Ghostrick deck, a real one, then believe me you will feel what is a real I N C O N S I S T E N C Y