Joey Wheeler is one of the most beloved side characters in anime, and definitely in Yu-Gi-Oh. He starts out without having much skill in the game, and the viewers get to watch him grow into a confident player, one who consistently places high in the tournaments and has even come close to beating some of the arc villains.

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This list is devoted to looking at some of the best cards Joey had in his deck. It pulls from multiple seasons of the show, where he changed his deck multiple times and acquired the ace cards of several players thanks to Battle City, making him into a consummate duelist that even the elites became wary of.

10 TRAP HOLE

Trap Hole was a pretty awesome trap when it first came out. It activates when an opponent normal or flip summons a monster with 1000 or more ATK, instantly destroying it.

Joey used this card in the virtual world, making him the very first person to activate a Trap Hole card in the anime and also the only person to do so in the anime, which is a shame because this would’ve been the most useful in this series.

9 MAGICAL ARM SHIELD

The sheer disrespect of this trap card. When the opponent declares an attack, the player can grab one of the opponent’s other monsters and take control of it. The new monster is attacked instead before the card is given back during the end of the Battle Phase.

Well, it’s supposed to be given back, but it’s usually destroyed. This kept Joey from taking damage and instead resulted in his opponent taking the damage he was meant to take.

8 TIME WIZARD

Time Wizard

Time Wizard is one of the strangest cards introduced into the Yu-Gi-Oh series. Originally, it was just a spell card, and only later was it considered a monster. When it’s used, the player can spin a roulette wheel with a 1-in-2 chance of getting it right.

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If they get it right, every monster on the field is aged, but if not the player loses all their monsters and takes damage equal to half their attack. This was a very all or nothing card, but it created Dark Sage and Thousand Dragon, two of the best moments of Duelist Kingdom.

7 MARAUDING CAPTAIN

A fairly simple card that reflected how straightforward Joey’s playstyle tended to be. When Marauding Captain was summoned, it could stop the opponent from attacking any other Warrior-Type monsters besides itself.

Then, it could also special summon a monster from the hand once it was summoned. This was a great way to set up for following turns, and it’s a shame Joey only began using this card halfway into the show.

6 GEARFRIED THE IRON KNIGHT

Gearfried was almost overpowered early on in the game. It was a level 4 with 1800 ATK at a time when it wasn’t uncommon to see level 5s with 1900 or 2000.

1800 was definitely one of the strongest normal summon monsters in the game. It also was set up so that any equip spell placed on it would be destroyed, which worked in Joey’s favor, but also kept Gearfried from getting too powerful.

5 SCAPEGOAT

Scapegoat is so good of a card it’s still played to this very day. It summoned four Sheep Tokens with zero ATK and DEF, and they couldn’t be used for a tribute summon, and it stops the player from summoning monsters the turn it’s activated.

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Joey typically used this card on his opponent’s turn, stopping them from getting an attack off. The following turn, it allowed him to use cards like Panther Warrior, which required the tribute of a monster to attack.

4 GRACEFUL DICE

This card was one of the weirder cards for Joey to play, as it counted on him having a weak enough monster and rolling a high enough number. The player gets to roll a six-sided die and pick a monster with 500 or less ATK, then multiply that monster’s attack by whatever the die roll is.

This could result in a monster gaining up to 3000 ATK but sometimes result in him getting nothing at all. It was even a quick-play spell, which means he could “surprise” his opponent with the card during their turn.

3 GIANT TRUNADE

Surprisingly, Giant Trunade was one of Joey’s cards. It’s got a simple enough effect—both players return all their spell and trap cards to their hands.

But the fact that it doesn’t have any special activation requirement and it doesn’t destroy means the opponent likely can’t activate most of those cards. This was great for turning the tide on the opponent once he’d gained the right cards to get over their monsters.

2 RED-EYES BLACK DRAGON

Red-Eyes Black Dragon

What makes this card good isn’t the card itself. It’s a vanilla card with 2400 ATK. At level 7, that makes it too weak for how much work it takes to summon it.

Joey won this card off Rex Raptor after defeating him during Duelist Kingdom, and even before the arc ended he found multiple different versions of it that could fuse with other cards to create more powerful, more dangerous cards.

1 JINZO

Jinzo in real life hasn’t been good in ages, because it takes too much work to summon and traps aren’t so important that people would run a one-tribute normal monster just to knock out traps for both players.

But when Joey took down Espa Roba and gained this card, he gained the confidence of his opponent’s traps being completely meaningless. This was a time when they had cards like Mirror Force and Magical Cylinder coming out of nowhere, but Jinzo didn’t care about that at all.

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