Most of the Duelist Alliance archetypes are capable of summoning their boss monster without sacrifice their card advantage because every materials can replace themselves, and often thinning their deck at the same time. I am a long time Shaddoll player, so in this article I'll mostly use Shaddoll as an example. In a traditional fusion summon, you will need at least 2 monsters and a fusion spell. In terms of card advantage, you give up 3 cards to perform fusion summon of a fusion monster, that is technically a minus 2. That is why fusions are so bad during their initial release. However, if you resolve Shaddoll Fusion, even without using the "fuse from deck" part, the play is technically a minus 0 if you fusion summon El Shaddoll Winda and El Shaddoll Construct, and minus 1 for every fusion monsters of other attributes. And considering that almost all of the main deck Shaddoll monsters except dragon, have the effect that give you more cards when being sent to the graveyard, you can summon your fusion monsters first turn, the sit on the back of their oppressive effect. The effect that gives you more cards to work with is always more reliable than the effect that take away cards from your opponent because it will always do the same thing going first or second. Duelist Alliance not only introduces several archetypes that promote the use of floating boss monster, but also promote the use of boss monster usable on either first or second turn.
if you pay attention to the card text, you will see the design trend that attached to it. Most of the monsters of that era normally have 2 or 3 effects, but you can only activates one of the effect, and you can only activate that effect once per turn. I call this type of restriction "hard once per turn pick one effect".A Single monster can be given multiple effects that can be used in multiple situations, expanding the number of options. This type of design trend can be traced back to the era of Dragon Rulers, which also have this kind of "hard once per turn pick one effect" type of effects. Other duelist Alliance archetype such as Burning Abyss and Satellarknight also have this type of restriction.
Let me ask you a question, what is the best Shaddoll main deck monster? You will probably have an answer right now. Then the next question is, how much better is the best Shaddoll main deck monster compared to the second best Shaddoll main deck monster? Probably not that much. This is because all of them are created at nearly equal quality, and running all of them seems to be the most logical choice (except Shaddoll Hound). Because if you run all of 5 of them ( again except Hound ), and each of them has 2 effects which gives you 10 options to choose from. Even the worst card going first, Shaddoll Dragon is still being used at 1 copy due to it can provide additional options for player to work with. This is an important characteristic which will be compared to more recent deck later.
I am going to hold pendulum design for later discussion, we will just be focusing on non-pendulum cards. After the long review about the previous trend or pattern in card design, what is the point of this article? Sorry if I sound too boring and repetitive, if you feel boring that is probably because I am talking about things that you already know. This paragraph will be focusing on the changes as we move along from set to set, this type of restriction called "hard once per turn pick one effect" is being removed from design and change to "hard once per turn for every effect" when Nekroz became the most dominant archetype. Every Nekroz monster has 2 effects, one effect that activates in hand and another effect that activates on field, and you can activate both effects in a single turn. This is a very slight powercreep, but it is not a big deal as at one point, both Shaddoll and Nekroz has a very close amount of tops, suggesting that they can still beat each other even though Nekroz is a stronger deck.
Honestly speaking, I love those time not only because decks are fun to play, it is also because power creep can be easily prevented just by releasing new archetype that has similar power level, but do things a little differently than the previous top deck. For example, when Shaddoll was the best deck, other extra deck strategies were absolute because Shaddoll Fusion punishes those who rely entirely on their extra deck boss, and El Shaddoll Winda can basically prevent the opponent from ever summoning a Xyz or a Synchro monster again. Then Konami decided to release Nekroz, a deck that punishes the use of extra deck but do not use extra deck itself. Nekroz is a hard counter to Shaddoll, so Shaddoll switched from OTK play style to playing control build with hand trap such as Effect Veiler in order to compete. Is Nekroz as a deck more powerful than Shaddoll? Definitely yes, but not by that much. If we were still in that era, and we assume that we were in an alternate time line that Konami never release EMEM ( or PEPE in TCG ) , but they release another archetype that counters the play style of Nekroz and Shaddoll but has a relatively similar power level to them, then hit them slightly if necessary ( but still playable at competitive level ), the meta would be evolving smoothly where the old deck would change their build to fight the new deck. But we know this will never happen because Konami is a business and they need to rotate out old product.
I would also like to talk a little bit about pendulum card design. Pendulum card are actually easier to balanced than non-pendulum card. Why I say so? It is because we have more things to work with. The first one being their level. We can give them certain level which makes them not pendulum summonable or to remove certain synergy in their respective deck/archetype. For example, can you imagine how broken it is if Performapal Monkeyboard is Level 4? Other things we can use for balance are pendulum effect, pendulum scale and monster effect. I have not seen any pendulum monster with both its pendulum effect and monster effect to be amazingly great. The only few cards close to that is actually Performage Plushfire and Eccentric Archfiend. Performapal Monkeyboard actually has terrible monster effect, terrible level, meaningless type and attribute, and significant restriction when you look at it. The real restriction to the pendulum cards is space on the card board. There is only so many words you can print if you want all of them to be readable. There is almost no way to include those 'hard once per turn pick one effect" type of effects for pendulum monster. Combining with the fact that Konami decided to hit all the generic good pendulum support after the EMEM era, I believe that pendulum will be fine and balance in the near future.
Recently, more and more archetype with only a few insanely good card, but with all the other support being unusable are becoming more and more common. For example, the Zoodiac Beast gave us the Zoodiac Beast Molmorat, Zoodiac Beast Viper being insanely good, but all other main deck Zoodiac Beast being subpar.Some other archetype like Phantom Knight, Speedroid, and Predplant also having the same story. This type of card design allow player to build a deck consist of the best card from different archetypes since all of them can "ignite" the whole engine just from one key card, allowing player to basically "compress" the whole engine into minimal size, the fill the deck size with other engine and generic good card. For example the famous SR PK Fire deck that top multiple YCS are created with this type of mindset. Even in OCG, decks like Eidolon Windwitch Artifact, Eidolon Zoodiac, Zoodiac True King start to take over the competition. Is this power creep in action? In my opinion, yes it is. And if you notice the card text, they no longer keep the "hard once per turn" card text on most of the card. Zoodiac Beast Molmorat would be pretty balanced if it has that restriction.
One card should never do that much for you. When a single Zoodiac Molmorat and result in 2 Rank 4 and one search, that is something wrong with the card design no matter how you look at it. The same goes for one card undestroyable Crystal Wing Synchro Dragon without using normal summon. I have given enough example, now let's go back to the root. How to prevent power creep and still sell cards? Maybe the history has shown us the answer. Just release a new deck, that do things differently than the previous top deck, but with similar power level. Then the old deck will adapt and maybe a diverse meta will form again, creating a format with multiple tier 1 decks. Banlist should still be use to balance the game but not only just to forcefully rotate out old decks.
