Yugi's Pre-Battle City Monsters
We're going to do something a little different today!
My project involved recreating every Magic & Wizards card Yugi was shown to have in the manga, limited only to the monsters that I could, in fact, recreate.
The two monsters that are the subject of this post are an interesting edge case to that mission statement, due to how they showed up on-panel. See for yourself below:
In chapter 146, "The Ancient Lithograph", Yugi is shown recovering after the fire that occurred at the end of the D.D.D. (short for Dragons, Dice, & Dungeons) arc. (This is known as the Dungeon Dice Monsters arc outside of Japan.)
While he's in the hospital, Jonouchi cheers him up by playing a few games of Magic & Wizards (which goes about as well for him as you'd expect!).
In this chapter, Yugi says that he's rebuilt his deck with Dark Yugi during his stay in the hospital. And we see proof of that with the two Monster Cards in the right panel, which are entirely new.
So what are these new cards, anyway? In-universe, they're pretty immaterial; just new monster cards that never appear again. Out-of-universe is a different story, though.
The cards are clearly meant to be two monsters original to Konami's game: Tyhone and Terra the Djinn (called "Terra the Terrible" here). It's the first time Konami cards appeared in the manga. And they would be followed by a scant few more Konami-original cards over the course of the Battle City arc (as I mentioned in my post on "Pot of Greed").
Since they were Yugi's cards, used by him on-panel, they fell under the parameters of my project. But the size of the art for these two was so small that no amount of reworking would make them look good.
For a while, I was stumped. I feared they would fall in the category of cards that I simply couldn't recreate. Then I realized: these cards were based on Konami's art to begin with. What if I changed Konami's art to look like Takahashi's renditions? Would that work?
This is how they turned out!
