With the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG in bad shape in the mainstay advanced format, operator Konami has put together an emergency ban list that’s expected to be nuclear.

“Forbidden & Limited list updates are coming, to prep for Magnificent Maestros!” reads a post from the official Yu-Gi-Oh Konami Europe Twitter account. “With 34 newly Forbidden cards and 8 Limited cards, we’re revealing the list in 5 parts at YCS Houston – 1 on Friday, 2 each on Saturday and Sunday!”

Magnificent Maestros is a new Yu-Gi-Oh holiday set scheduled to launch on November 13, featuring “re-imagined cards based on characters from the TV series: Seto Kaiba, Zane Truesdale, Jack Atlas, Kite Tenjo, Yuto/Yugo/Yuri, and Varis.”

With everything from Blue-Eyes fan service to full-art collector pieces, this is the type of product that would normally excite a range of Yu-Gi-Oh players, but many people currently find the game so tiresome that the response has been blunted. Magnificent Maestros also contains plenty of powerful cards relevant to top decks, and the latest ban list did very little to adjust the long-troubled meta, so players worried it would just make the game worse.

It’s no coincidence that alternate Yu-Gi-Oh formats like Genesys, which restricts the card types and high-power cards that players can put in their deck, have recently grown in popularity. Sure, they can be fun in their own right, but people are also actively fleeing from advanced format, the normal way to play, due to a homogenous wave of decks so powerful that games are routinely decided on turn zero with the coin flip to see who goes first.

A useful explanation is provided by Yu-Gi-Oh expert Joseph “MBT” Rothschild. In short, the game has essentially hit a singularity. Yu-Gi-Oh decks and the archetype engines that power them have become so fast, consistent, and flexible that stuffing your deck with a few of the best engines – creating so-called “Pile” decks – is an incredibly effective strategy with access to end boards and routes that have no meaningful counterplay. Resolving one card can launch a game-ending combo, and these decks are full of cards like that.

Yu-Gi-Oh has struggled to balance first-turn advantage, archetype power creep, and one-turn games for a while. It’s boiling over today because some of the new archetypes that emerged in this problematic era are working together to feed the singularity, and the from-hand traps meant to rein them in are either powerless to stop today’s combos or instantly ending games in different but equally boring ways. When the best players in the world are telling you that their experience matters far less than a coin flip, you have a real problem.

“As a result, gameplay started to resemble Go Fish,” says Rothschild, except that game of Go Fish now requires 15+ minutes of comboing off before someone concedes. And “if you’ve been following [regional tournaments] for the past couple of weeks, you know that attendance is plummeting,” he adds, because “people didn’t want to play this weird non-format prior to the ban list, and post-ban list they felt no reason to update their decks.”

That’s where Konami’s surprise ban list comes in. In previous slumps, Konami has rushed out silver bullet ban lists to brute force a meta shift. The tenure and dominance of multiple Yu-Gi-Oh archetypes, and the fact that a whopping 34 cards are getting the ban hammer this time, suggests the game is once again taking a sledgehammer to advanced. We’ll have to wait to find out which cards are being hit, but Yu-Gi-Oh players already have a lot riding on this list.

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