It would take an anime villain to kidnap the main character's closest family member and then invite them to a tournament where they'd have to win to have any shot at getting them back. Pegasus' ridiculous plan made him one of the most memorable villains in all of Yu-Gi-Oh history.
He was also a blatant cheater, what with being able to see his opponent's cards and read their mind. But even without that, Pegasus had something pretty impressive going for him with the cards he played. His deck was full of Toon monsters and creepy monsters that could steal his opponent's cards, making it impossible to win the battle. Unless the player were the King of Games.
10 TOON MASK
This could only work in the anime. The card allows the player to tribute a Toon monster after the opponent special summons a monster. The trap then special summons a Toon Monster from the hand or deck with the same name as the summoned monster. How else could this really work other than having knowledge of the opponent’s deck? The “actual” card special summons a monster with a level less than or equal to the level or rank of the opponent’s monster.
9 TOON WORLD
This card had the weirdest abilities when it was introduced. It’s supposed to just be a field spell that players have to use to have Toon Monsters on the field. But it also allowed any monsters Pegasus had to transform into Toon Monsters, and any Toon Monsters would be unable to be attacked with normal monsters. This made it into one of the most powerful cards in the game, and easily the best field spell of that era.
8 TRAP DISPLACEMENT
This seems like a trap that’s too powerful to exist. Trap Displacement decides that whatever trap is activated, the opponent receives whatever the effect of the trap is.
Pegasus got over on Yugi when he played Spellbinding Circle to weaken Kaiba’s monster, only for Kaiba to use this card to weaken Yugi’s Summoned Skull and allow Pegasus to destroy it easily with one of his own monsters.
7 TOON ROLLBACK
This card is positively absurd. Introduced in the filler duel Kaiba had with Alister who was pretending to be Pegasus, Toon Rollback is a spell that activates when the opponent negates the attack of any Toon monster. Rather than negating the negate attack, it gives them an entirely new battle phase for the turn. This is the pettiest card ever, as it involves basically refusing to take the L after losing a monster’s attack, and simply finding a way to go through with whatever the player wanted to do to begin with.
6 TOON TABLE OF CONTENTS
Toon Table of Contents introduced the game of Yu-Gi-Oh! to something that would become quite common later on. It can add any Toon card from the deck to the hand. This means it can also search itself, which is useful for deck thinning, but in the anime Pegasus of course used it to grab any toon monster he was looking for.
5 BLUE-EYES TOON DRAGON
The original Blue-Eyes Toon Dragon was pretty insane. If anyone tried to attack it, Blue-Eyes Toon Dragon can instead “dodge” the attack. And at the end of the turn, it can hide inside of “Toon World” to avoid being destroyed. Later it was given the ability to attack directly so long as the opponent didn’t control a Toon monster, which makes sense because why would anyone actually have a Toon monster?
4 DRAGON CAPTURE JAR
This is another card that only makes sense from an anime perspective. Pegasus used it against Kaiba—activating it as a trap to special summon it as an effect monster.
It took Kaiba’s Blue-Eyes White Dragon and absorbed it, leaving Kaiba with no monsters. It also somehow gained all of Blue-Eyes White Dragon’s DEF, making it into a 2700 DEF monster that Kaiba was unable to actually get over.
3 RELINQUISHED
Relinquished was our introduction to how powerful and dangerous ritual cards could really be. Once a turn, it was able to absorb a monster the opponent had. It gains ATK and DEF equal to whatever the monsters it’s absorbed combined have, which means it continuously grows in strength every turn. Each time the opponent destroys one of it’s controlled monsters, the opponent takes the battle damage , and Relinquished can’t be destroyed until it has no monsters in it’s control.
2 THOUSAND-EYES RESTRICT
Fuse Relinquished with Thousand-Eyes Idol and they give us Thousand-Eyes Restrict. This card can absorb monsters once per turn, gaining ATK and DEF equal to the combined ATK and DEF of the monsters that it’s absorbed. It also can’t be destroyed as long as it has absorbed monsters, and whenever an absorbed monster is destroyed by battle the owner takes the damage. But it also has one other ability that’s unfair: other monsters can’t actually declare an attack.
1 PROPHECY
A ridiculous trap card that most players wouldn’t be able to play in real life. The player picks a card from the opponent’s hand at random and guesses whether it has less or more than 2000 ATK. When they get it right, they get to take that card for themselves. We never learn what happens if the player guesses wrong, because Pegasus’ Millenium Item makes that something that can’t actually happen. So he just got to steal cards for free.