Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Dark Magician. Even Flame Swordsman or Stardust Dragon. When people think of Yu-Gi-Oh, they tend to think of the lead character’s ace monsters. Those monsters tend to lean on the side of “cool,” being impressive-looking magicians or dragons that can appeal to kids and adults alike.
We never really think of cute, but Yu-Gi-Oh’s got a history of cute monsters dating back to the days of Kuriboh and Dark Magician Girl. As the fanbase came to be more and more hardcore anime fans, it’s no surprise Konami decided to lean into making entire decks for people who liked cute stuff. This list consists of decks that are not only cute but powerful decks, so a player isn’t losing just because they got an adorable deck.
10 MAGICIAN GIRLS
Yu-Gi-Oh fans are used to seeing Dark Magician alongside his protege, Dark Magician Girl. But a few years back, Konami decided to create a different archetype based around Dark Magician Girl herself. A collection of spellcaster monsters, there are six different Magician Girls, each one a different level from one to six, and all of them with different attributes. Their naming type is all over the place as well—most of the others are named after fruit, but one of them is actually named “Chocolate Magician Girl.” Mostly their powers center around special summoning one another or raising the attack of what’s already on the field. Unfortunately, the majority of their spell and trap support is basically Dark Magician stuff—hopefully they can get their own in the future.
9 TOONS
Pretty much everyone who’s ever watched Yu-Gi-Oh remembers the Toon deck. When Kaiba made his way into the Duelist Kingdom tournament and challenged Pegasus, the Toons were the deck he used to counter the teenaged genius. Made up of some of the most popular monsters from both Yugi and Kaiba’s deck, only tiny and cute, the Toons were a pretty fearsome deck. Though they have a glaring weakness in that destroying their field spell Toon World destroys them as well, they’re all capable of attacking directly unless the opponent controls a Toon Monster.
8 NATURIA
This deck isn’t good by any means. It takes forever to set up any kind of combo, and while it can eventually lock your opponent out of playing the game, by the time that happens they should’ve won already anyway. Having said that: who cares? Look at these little guys!
As one might expect from the name, it’s made up of plants and insects that are anthropomorphic in nature. It’s like walking through a Disney forest. It’s synchro and fusion monsters aren’t quite as cute (though Naturia Beast is the cutest half plant/half-tiger anyone’s ever seen), but the deck still makes one want to protecc...the environment.
7 FLUFFAL
This deck arguably shouldn’t be on this list. It’s not that they aren’t cute—Fluffals are essentially a deck made up of Fairy monsters which are actually stuffed animals. Their entire strategy centers around searching and card drawing to create an incredibly consistent deck that’s still one of the best in the game, even six years after their initial release. However, the Fluffals aren’t much without their boss monsters—the Frightfur, which takes the deck from adorable stuffed animals to Five Nights At Freddy’s. Still, the main deck monsters are the best, aren’t they?
6 MAJESPECTER
The Majespecters were a unique group of Pendulum monsters, in that they were all based off different mythological Japanese creatures, and all had the same effect: they could not be targeted or destroyed by an opponent’s card effects. This lined up with their naming, as they were basically specters, and destroying a specter would probably be pretty hard. What made them especially good at the time was their status as Pendulum monsters, allowing them to take advantage of traps to negate or banish the opponent’s monsters, only to come back through Pendulum summoning the following turn. An infuriating deck, but they were at least all cute to make up for it.
5 DESKBOTS
The world of Yu-Gi-Oh is filled with some incredible machine archetypes. More often than not, they’re based around being imposing or cool. But in the case of the Deskbots, that’s not quite the case. They’re a group of tiny monsters that are all based around school supplies. It’s like a group of kid robots that only have access to what’s at school, so their armor and weapons are things like rulers and glue and watercolor paint. Of course, while they’re cute, their abilities aren’t cute at all to their opponents: their job is to swarm the field and boost one another’s ATK until they can take out the enemy in one or two attacks.
4 SYLVAN
If you thought the cute plant cards stopped with Naturia, that was a mistake. Though they’re not nearly as cute as Naturia, they’re infinitely more playable. Focused solely on Plant-type monsters, the inspiration for the deck comes from fusing different types of plants and trees with different elements of the Japanese Shinto religion. The deck works off a unique mechanic known as excavate, which lets players look through the first 1 to 5 cards of their deck to activate monster effects.
3 WINDWITCH
Spellcasters often wind up having some of the cutest monsters. The Windwitch deck comes from Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V, and all happen to follow a similar design of having a bell somewhere on their bodies. They’re a synchro deck that centers around swarming the field with a number of monsters and burning the opponent for damage, one of the few types of damage that most opponents aren’t equipped to deal with.
2 GHOSTRICK
Ghostricks are the definition of spoopy. They’re an archetype of monsters that are based off actual scary monsters, but it’s more like they’re monsters in training than anything. Even their key boss monsters aren’t particularly scary, which isn’t true for most of the monsters on this list.
The entire strategy of the deck is based around stalling the opponent while building up resources to make a board that’s near impossible to break. They have a ton of monsters which can negate attacks, a monster that flips everything face down, and field spells that allow direct attacks when everything on either side is face down.
1 MADOLCHE
The cutest deck in all of Yu-Gi-Oh, Madolche are a deck made up of dolls and plush people and animals, and all of them have names which are based on sweets, making them one of the most pun-filled decks as well. On top of being adorable though, they’re also one of the strongest decks—for years they’ve not only been a consistent but a powerful deck. They’re centered around going back to the deck rather than the graveyard when being destroyed, but what really makes them powerful is how easily they can swarm the field with big bosses and easily take out their opponent if they aren’t careful. That’ll teach them not to be moderate with their sweets.