#gandora

As for the special ability itself, it's pretty drastic. In order to use it, the player will have to pay half of their Life Points, and it affects ALL on-field monsters, even the player's own. And this is AFTER they sacrifice 2 other monsters to bring this to the field in the first place!

There might be some who object to my rendition of how this ability works, in that it just removes monsters from the game (known in modern Yu-Gi-Oh parlance as "Banishing" monsters). Technically, Yugi says in the english translation's dialogue that "Gandora" only destroys monsters, and its name even includes the word "Destruction" in it. However, this doesn't match up with what it actually does in its first appearance.

In Chapter 327, "I Won't Give Up!!", thanks to the effect of Dark Bakura's Magic Card "Cursed Necro Twins", Dark Bakura has no Graveyard. This means that, when his cards are destroyed and would be sent to the Graveyard, they linger on the field instead, largely unable to affect the battle.

Yugi's counter for this is to summon this card while shielding his own monsters with the (unreleased in Konami's game) Magic Card "Magic Barrier".

But if "Gandora" just destroys monsters, that wouldn't help him at all. All destroyed monsters would simply stick around. Logically, being removed from the game is the only thing that could stop Dark Bakura's game plan.

Additionally, the card text on "Destruction Dragon Gandora" says that it first destroys monsters, then removes them from the game (which is why Konami's own card works in the bizarre way that it does). However, as far as I can tell, on-panel all of Dark Bakura's monsters are instead just removed instantly, even the ones that aren't displaced. Thus, on my card I've opted to skip the redundant "destroy" step and make it so this card simply removes all other monsters from the game outright.

There's one more aspect to this card I have to discuss. Dialogue and card text both mention that this ability counts as a "magical attack".

This part of the in-manga "Magic & Wizards" game is unfortunately, thanks to a messy translation, poorly understood by the English-speaking side of the fanbase. The gist of it is: certain broad types of monsters, as well as some specific monsters, have attacks- or in this case, special abilities- that have an additional special property. This property interacts with other cards in unique ways. For instance, "Marshmallon" is immune to normal attacks but vulnerable to "magical attacks", and Bandit Keith's Machine-type monsters all have a special ability called "Anti-Magic Armor", which makes them immune to all "magical attacks".

This is not an irrelevant property of "Gandora"'s special ability. It is explicitly stated in its text that this ability counts as a "magical attack"; Yugi plans around this aspect by activating the Magic Card "Magic Barrier" in response to his own activated special ability, a card that says it makes its controller's monsters "immune to (/deflect all) magical attacks". Additionally, in Chapter 341, "Vs. the Strongest Servant!!", it's shown that activating this combination special ability/magical attack still counts as declaring an attack, and so Dark Yugi is successfully able to activate "Holy Barrier: Mirror Force" in response to this ability!

Truly a unique monster card. In the past, I've speculated that in terms of function, this card almost acts more like a Magic Card. If it was, what would it look like? Perhaps something like this?

In some ways, this might make more sense. But the way Takahashi handled it in the story is definitely more impactful, if you ask me.

Whoops, this ended up being a long one today! Major thanks to you if you stuck around this long!