Was Kaiba About To Defeat Yugi? [Clash in the Coliseum]

Misplay for me. Towards the end I mention Kaiba could have fused and made Ultimate Dragon to attack over Dark Magician, but fusion monsters can’t attack the turn they are summoned. Sorry about that.

I'm glad he made a note of how Yugi waited for Kaiba to walk back to his spot before activating exchange. The level of pettiness in that moment is hilarious

Gotta admit it. Kaiba walking all the way up to Yugi, talking smack, then walking all the way back to his side of the field just for Yugi to make him walk all the way back to him again as a kind of payback was gold. My only regret is we don't get to see Joey laughing his butt off about it.

I love how, after the Gods clash and destroy each other, both Yugi and Kaiba begin using some of their original cards. Yugi goes straight into Dark Magician and Kaiba goes straight into Blue Eyes.

"Lightforce Sword had a 25% chance of getting Obelisk and it paid off." Gonna be honest, I feel like Kaiba's grandstanding drastically increased those odds.

No matter how many misplays there are in the duel, it'll always be my personal all time favourite duel. Six episodes of then just slugging with each back and fourth.

This series has quickly become favorite series you produce. And you produce a lot of banger content.

At the end, Kaiba considered Obelisk as having served its purpose, thus his going back to his true fallback of the Blue Eyes.

My only argument for Kaiba doing what he did was to win with his Blue Eyes to prove that "his fate was NOT destined" as he did with ishizu. I know he wanted to beat Atem with his Obelisk versus Atem"s Slifer, I think the moment Obelisk got destroyed his first thought was, "Blue Eyes has my back."

Part of why I love this duel so much is that it’s very character driven. Both Kaiba and Yami Yugi make bad oversights through the duel that they don’t tend to make with other opponents - there’s a lot riding on this duel for both of them, Kaiba had his mind and his pride utterly wiped by Yami Yugi and this entire tournament is about taking that back, Yami Yugi’s just seen his friends get utterly shafted by an evil magical egomaniac and he just wants to get past Kaiba so he can defeat Marik. There’s so much grand-standing ego bought out in this duel that they miss a lot of opportunities to win, and I actually like that 😂 goes to show you can be considered an amazing duellist but you’re just human in the end. Anyway, great analysis, I love these kinds of videos from this channel!

I think Kaiba, being Kaiba, wanted Yugi to summon Slifer as destroying it would feel like a more complete victory, and he was so confident in his strategy that he allowed Yugi to make certain plays to allow this to happen.

Honestly, you mentioned Yugi having tunnel vision, but they really both do- it's why Kaiba didn't attack earlier- he was so incredibly focused on bringing out Tormentor. Most characters seem to have tunnel vision wrt their aces, but these two get it Really Badly the whole series.

The Mystery cards: For Yugi, it was Beaver Warrior. noble and Reliable. For Kaiba, it was Hitosume Giant. Never build a deck without it

It feels appropriate that they'd both have tunnel vision during this duel. They both have a significant amount of history with each other at this stage and the duel is high stakes for both of them, even if they consider different stakes to be the important ones. It makes a lot of sense they'd both get wrapped up in outthinking the other, overthinking their way past the available winning moves to find a strategy that wins in 3 turns or something, or otherwise generally overlooking ways to win now in favour of sticking to the way they'd planned to win going in to the duel. Being cautious and avoiding overextending only to underextend and misplay, missing the forest for the trees and all that. I was thinking about these breakdowns just yesterday rewatching V-Rains; It might not be an end-game/ super plot significant duel like most of the ones you've covered, but I'm curious how a breakdown of the Playmaker VS Ghost Girl duel in episodes 14-15 would go. Altergeists are a known rogue deck that's been relevant enough for long enough to achieve the highest praise any control strategy can get of making people groan when they realise they're matched up against it, and this was their anime debut. There's also a fair amount of talk from the duel's onlookers about how it's such a "high level duel" and "so complicated [they] can barely keep up", so while it's not the most important duel it seems like it might be an interesting one to examine like this.

All the misplays Kaiba made make sense. I knew plot dictated Yugi had to win, but all the missed opportunities really made sense in context: It wasn’t enough for Kaiba to win. He had to claim the perfect victory. An absolute domination. He was tunnel-visioned not on just beating Yugi, but proving his unquestioned superiority. He needed to win with Obelisk or his Blue-Eyes. And as we saw, he made a play for Slifer too. He wanted, no NEEDED, to make Yugi look as small as possible. If this were a mook or Marik? Basically anyone else other than Joey or Yugi? Kaiba would have just wanted to end the duel quickly. He has nothing to prove against anyone else. NOTE: I included Joey here because I feel he would take a similar win over Joey as Yugi, but for different reasons. Kaiba is personally insulted by Joey’s participation in HIS tournament. So yeah, he’d want to go for a similar sense of domination. But for Yugi? This is personal. And this tunnel-vision clouds his judgement. And it’s why Kaiba will never ever eke out a true win against Yugi. Yugi brings out the worst characteristics in Kaiba. Against Yugi? Kaiba is not logical, he’s temperamental. He’d totally forgo a sure thing in favor of the bigger win. Just look at Pyramid of Light. Had he just taken Blue Eyes Shining Dragon? He might have actually won! Kaiba had Yugi dead to rights. But he went the extra mile to take an additional card he didn’t NEED but would make the victory even more decisive: and this cost him. Kaiba will never play at his full potential against Yugi. He’ll misplay, he won’t take game if it’s not a devastating win. Against Yugi? Kaiba is inherently compromised.

This tells me that the writers REALLY wanted to drag this duel long enough.

Regarding Magic Formula play at the end, what I am assuming the writers are thinking, is that Absorb Spell could have absorbed the effect of De-Fusion, so by Kaiba wasting it here, by just being power greedy, he missed the chance to steal DeFusion and split up Dark Paladin. Yugi played Magic Formula first to try to lure Kaiba spell card, and it worked

On April fool's day you should do: "Was Sylvio about to defeat Zarc?"

I feel like a lot of the problems with this duel could have been fixed by simply changing the order each player drew their cards in. The way it’s written both Yugi and Kaiba hold onto perfectly good cards for turns on end when they should be going all in for game.

I feel the point with Kaiba in particular always was that he doesn't just want to win. He wants to win in a way that lets no one ever think he maybe just won by luck. So it has to be a spectacle, which is why he made the whole Colosseum to begin with (don't forget that the duel was broadcasted). A one turn kill would be one of these ways. Or beating the Dark Magician (the monster people know Yugi for) with his Blue Eyes (the monster people know Kaiba for) showing that his Ace monster (aside from the god cards) is the stronger one where the battle of the gods concluded in a draw. The only problem I have with it that this is never actually really discussed in the content of the show aside from that one moment where Yugi talks about Kaiba's hate and I guess you can make a connection there. The only things that are a bit weird (like with most duels) is that they seem to not just set cards when they easily could. But I feel this is also done to make sure that the viewer/reader doesn't need to keep track of too many cards at the same time since we usually don't get an overview of the whole field and you could easily lose track of all the cards (as someone not super familiar with the game) during all the dialogue that happens in between. Might even be more of a problem that comes from the manga, considering that the anime typically adds longer and more shots which help in that regard. Though to be fair, this is usually balanced out by just giving the characters extremely powerful cards like "Power Balance", so I gues it's fine.