It therefore makes complete sense that there’s a Hamburger card! This game has its fair share of weird, funny, and just plain stupid cards. And I think they deserve some recognition too. This list will break down some of the funniest (and strangest) cards in Yu-Gi-Oh, covering weird looking card arts, ridiculous effects, and everything in between!
20. Weather Report
This guy gets points for a weird art and a stupid effect. When it’s flipped up, you can destroy your opponent’s Sword of Revealing Light. If you do manage to destroy one, then you get two battle phases when you next get to attack. This is one of the most niche cards I’ve ever seen in Yu-Gi-Oh: What are the odds that not only does your opponent have Swords of Revealing Light actually out on the board, but you also have this guy set face down? His art is also just bizarre. It’s like someone in the Konami art department was rushed for time, drew a face on a rubber ball, and decided that was good enough. 10/10, never change Weather Report.
19. Master of Oz
Master of Oz is Yu-Gi-Oh’s attempt at conveying Australia in one single card, and I absolutely love it. You summon it by fusing a Koala with a Kangaroo, the two most Australian animals you can think of. What do you get when you do that? A colossal Koala with a creepy moustache, a worrying amount of armpit hair, and boxing gloves. Makes perfect sense! You may also recognize that familiar rock plateau in the background. That’s a reference to one of Australia’s most popular natural landmarks, Uluru! A neat reference to the country, and way more flattering to Australians that the koala standing in front of it.
18. Interplanetarypurplythorny Dragon
I’m 90% sure the people naming this card couldn’t decide on just one name, and had to go for a mashup of every possible suggestion. This card’s name is ridiculous – and it makes for some hilarious interactions. There are a lot of interactions in Yu-Gi-Oh where you’ll have to specifically say a card’s name to target it, and this guy just makes that so much more funny. Trying to imagine your opponent saying “Interplanetarypurplythorny Dragon” without messing up is hilarious, and I highly recommend it. What’s even better is that the OCG version of this card has a normal name! This guy was originally called Thorny, Purple Dragon from Another World. That actually sounds kinda cool, and a lot less wordy that Interplanetarypurplythorny Dragon.
17. Pot of Generosity
Pot of Generosity is a mick-take of all the other pot cards in Yu-Gi-Oh, like Pot of Greed and Pot of Duality. All of these Pot cards revolve around drawing more cards, with exception to this one. With Pot of Generosity, you put cards back into your deck from your hand. I cannot think of a single use for this card. At a push, maybe you could flex on your opponent a little? If you can pull this off in a duel and still manage to win, then you truly deserve the title king of games.
16. Slushy
This card sits on the border between weird and kind of adorable. It looks exactly how you’d expect it to look: like one of those Slushy drinks you’d get at an arcade as a kid, only it’s now come to life and has spilled itself everywhere. It’s got an okay-ish effect for Water decks, but I just love the idea that there’s a card in Yu-Gi-Oh that’s literally just a drink. What’s even better is that clearly Konami hasn’t forgotten about this card either. It actually got a reprint in one of the recent Speed Duel sets! Forget the Mega Tin reprints, this is the kind of reprint I want to be seeing more of in Yu-Gi-Oh!
15. Parasite Paracide
Parasite Paracide is one of the worst cards ever to be banned from tournament play. And during the lockdowns, all Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments were carried out as Remote Duels through Video Call software – making Parasite Paracide physically impossible to play! This is because to activate its effect, you need to put it in your opponent’s deck face up. The only way I can think of this working is you mailing this card to your opponent, putting the duel on pause until they receive the card, and then start again once they have it. Now for tournament play, I can imagine this would slow down the games just a little… In face-to-face play, this card is equally weird. I mean, you put a card in your opponents’ deck, face up. I don’t think there’s anything quite like this in Yu-Gi-Oh. You can definitely tell this card was made during Konami’s more experimental period early in Yu-Gi-Oh’s history.
14. Humpty Grumpty
Okay, I’ve heard about “devilled” eggs before, but this is just ridiculous. This card is pretty mediocre in terms of its effect, but it definitely gets points for looking bizarre. It’s a parody of the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpy – and in this case it shows an Egg with little devil horns and a tail running away from something, screaming. There’s so many disturbing things about this card’s art. Those little baby legs, the weirdly detailed face, the cheek bones that’d make Eddie Redmayne jealous, they all come together to make one of the weirdest looking Yu-Gi-Oh cards I’ve ever seen.
13. Inmato
Riddle me this: What on Earth could a tomato possibly do to warrant it being thrown in jail? Weirdly enough, this isn’t the only card in the “Inmato” series – there’s been other bad veggies too. That’s right, there’s a whole mini archetype based off of tomatoes in jail. It only has 2 members, but maybe that’ll change in future. It’s a wonder this archetype hasn’t seen more support in recent years, and I can only pray that one day we’ll be blessed with other vegetable felons in Yu-Gi-Oh. But for now, this card is absolutely hilarious, and actually not a bad card for most plant decks.
12. Hungry Burger
A hungry… burger? A thing that you eat… is hungry? Hungry Burger was made at a time when Ritual monsters were a bit of an oddity in Yu-Gi-Oh. Since then, we’ve had a few good ritual decks like Nekroz, and players generally recognize Rituals as a solid deck – with exception, of course, to Hungry Burger. With the new generic ritual support released, quite a few players have taken it upon themselves to turn this card into the key player in an OTK deck. You can now officially get killed in a single turn by a literal burger. And if that doesn’t make you proud of Yu-Gi-Oh, I don’t know what will!
11. Toadally Awesome
Sometimes the translation team at Koami really messes up (see “Mekk Knight Avram” for a perfect example of this). Other times they really nail it. Depending on who you ask, Toadally Awesome is one or the other. The original name for this guy was Treatoad, due to the orange he has resting on his head. I have no idea how they went from that to Toadally Awesome, but it’s one of my favorite cards in the entire game, so no complaints here! The weirdest thing is that as goofy as this card looks, it’s actually a competitive beast. It pretty much revived Frog decks as a whole, and Toadally Awesome seems widespread play to this day.
10. The Humble Sentry
Like Pot of Generosity, this card is a parody of an overpowered card in Yu-Gi-Oh. This card makes fun of The Forceful Sentry, a spell card that lets you look at your opponent’s hand and shuffle one card back. Humble Sentry is the exact opposite of this effect. You show your hand to your opponent and they shuffle one of your cards back into the deck. It’s literally giving your opponent a free “Forceful Sentry” (which is a spell card that’s so good it’s been banned for years). I love that Konami printed some parody cards like this. It’s obvious no-one’s ever going to make use of this card, but it’s hilarious to see.
9. Ojama Yellow
I picked Ojama Yellow as it is, in my opinion, the ugliest of the bunch. However, you really could’ve picked any of the Ojama cards – none of them are a sight for sore eyes! Everything about this card artwork is horrifyingly funny. The little spandex pants he’s wearing, the pose that makes him look like a bag of knees held together by willpower, the gigantic red lips dripping in saliva, all of these features combine to form one of the ugliest looking Yu-Gi-Oh cards I’ve ever seen. As an actual deck, Ojamas have some amazingly hilarious strategies. It’s really a go hard or go home strategy – if you can get all 3 Ojamas out at once, you have access to some seriously broken effects. Otherwise, you just have a field with a couple of Ojamas – and that won’t get you anywhere.
8. Transmission Gear
What I love in Yu-Gi-Oh is cards like this, which change up how the game works with some bizarre mechanic. Transmission Gear changes how battle works entirely: If your monster battles an opponent’s monster, you and your opponent are forced to play Rock-paper-scissors. If you lose, your monster gets banished face down. If your opponent loses, their monster gets banished face down. With this trap card, it really doesn’t matter how strong monsters are anymore. And it just makes the battle phase so much more fun. You don’t need a strong attack to beat someone in Rock-paper-scissors. So it really does become a free for all.
7. D-Boyz
Ah, clearly a card that was designed at around about the same time that the Backstreet Boys were at their peak, and when insanely baggy jeans were all the rage. Oh wait, it was actually 2011! The effect of D-Boyz is pretty awful, too: When it’s flipped up you can special summon copies of this guy from your deck, taking 1000 damage for each. That’s 2000 damage for 100 attack monsters! The hilarious thing about this card is that it was a secret rare in its original set Photon Shockwave. Imagine getting the luck to actually pull a secret rare from a booster pack, only for it to be D-Boyz. Not only is this hands-down the worst secret rare in the set, but if you wanted to even play it, you’d have to pull 2 more secret rares and hope for D-Boyz!
6. Doom Donuts
If I had a nickel for every piece of food on this list that looked like it could kill me, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice. Those razor-sharp teeth, the determined little eyes… I just can’t get over how scary this guy is while also being kind of adorable? I just want to know the thought process that led to Konami deciding the next scary monster of the set would be a donut.
5. Ghost Beef
You know how sometimes less is more? The flavor text of this card cracks me up every time I read it. “The Ghost of Christmas Dinner.” It says everything it needs to in one quick sentence, and it’s just so blasé it’s hilarious! This card is actually part of a two card set, with the other half being a cooked turkey. These cards were released when Pendulum monsters were still pretty new, and Konami wasn’t quite sure what direction to take the mechanic. I have to say I’m gutted that we haven’t got a full deck consisting of various pendulum monsters made out of meat – but I can dream!
4. Yu-Jo Friendship
It’s not often you’ll see characters from the Yu-Gi-Oh Anime on actual cards: In fact, there are only really 3 of them, all of which were Shonen Jump Promo cards. This one was the first ever card in Yu-Gi-Oh to actually require a physical interaction between players, too. With Yu-Jo Friendship, you ask your opponent for a handshake. It they accept, both players have their life point totals equaled out. It’s such a bizarre card, since if your opponent has more life points than you, all they need to do is refuse that handshake! But that’s not in the spirit of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime – and could you really say no to the Pharaoh like that?
3. Overworked
I can imagine what one particular Konami employee was feeling like when they made this. Although this card is actually pretty decent at stopping decks that constantly give attack buffs. But more importantly, you can just feel the passive aggressive energy flowing out of this card. I just hope that employee got some well-deserved holiday time after this set – they deserve it for making such a funny card.
2. Cold Feet
This is my favorite of all the parody cards. Cold Feet is a parody of Cold Wave, which is an incredibly powerful spell card that prevents both players using spells or traps for a turn. Like the other parody cards in our list, this one is just like that, but way worse. Cold Feet makes sure that only you can’t use spells and traps for a turn, while your opponent can do whatever they like. If you can think of a competitive use for this card let me know immediately, because I’m stumped! It also shows the same dinosaur from Cold Wave getting frozen in the snow, giving a nice little nod to the original card.
1. Tardy Orc
Tardy Orc is the most 4th-wall-breaking card in all of Yu-Gi-Oh. The set that released before this card was called Order of Chaos – and on actual cards, this was abbreviated to ORCS. Fans noticed that in a set called ORCS, there were literally no ORCS! Konami took notice of this outrage, and in the next set they released Tardy Orc, with his artwork showing him running late for the bus. In an official blog post, they stated that Tardy Orc wasn’t in Order of Chaos for this very reason! This breaks the 4th wall about Yu-Gi-Oh being a card game more than any other card or product – and that’s why I think this is the funniest card in the entire game.
