Updating the Power of Marik Ishtar for the 25th Anniversary

While Yugi had many enemies and antagonists in the series, Marik was the epitome of evil and dark power. The chant to summon the Winged Dragon of Ra still remains stuck in many of our heads. With the game celebrating its 25th anniversary, we wanted to look back at one of the anime's most beloved arcs: Battle City.

The last few duels of this arc were epic, but deck building in the show was based on sacky one-offs drawn at the right moment. While trying to keep the spirit of the anime alive, we wanted to see how these decks could look with modern design ideas, like realistic odds of drawing your key cards.

Marik's Deck

The identity of Marik's deck back in the day was very simple: Summon as quickly and efficiently as possible while controlling the duel. To achieve this goal Marik often used his , , , and , keeping a multitude of sacrifices for Ra on his side of the field. Meanwhile he would continuously draw cards with {c=Cards of Safe Return} whenever came back from the graveyard.

Nowadays there are countless support cards for all of the gods. So we felt it was rather easy to keep the slime and god essence of Marik's deck alive while adding modern powerhouses. Increasing the consistency of the bricky mess that god decks used to be was the first thing we needed to tackle. and cover exactly that, while and helped us with the summoning of Ra.

Even the Jam portion of the deck got many new cards in , and . They nicely cover the tribute material issue.

decklist
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Marik Ishtar Deck
Main DeckExtra Deck
  • 3
  • 2
  • 2
  • 3
  • 3
  • 2
  • 2
  • 1
  • 3
  •  
  • 3
  • 3
  • 2
  • 2
  • 2
  • 2
  • 2
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  •  
  • 3
  • 1
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 2
  • 3
  • 3
  • 3
  • 1

Time to Duel!

Now the only thing left to do was battle it out in a series of videos and see who would win this modern version of Battle City. For this particular job we had to find someone who was both evil enough to represent Marik as well as smart enough to remember the entire chant to summon a Ra. The choice was easy. Leoni would step in and become the ultimate Yu-Gi-Oh! villain.