Exodia Obliterates Yu-Gi-Oh! Tournament Feature Match With Unexpected Win
Exodia The Forbidden One is one of the most powerful card combinations in all of Yu-Gi-Oh! because assembling all five pieces in your hand automatically wins you the game, but pulling off such a feat isn’t so easy at a competitive tournament. That’s why the crowd went wild last weekend at the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series (YCS) Indianapolis 2023 when player Jeffrey Leonard pulled it off not once but twice on a streamed feature match.
Leonard started the tournament with an impressive 3-0 record piloting his Exodia Dracoslayer FTK (First Turn Kill) deck. Exodia is, of course, beloved by Yu-Gi-Oh! fans because it’s how Yugi Moto won his first duel against Seto Kaiba in the first episode of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Anime (“Exodia, OBLITERATE!”), but it’s considered one of the worst FTK decks in the competitive scene. Essentially, you either win the coin flip to go first and pop off with an extended combo that lets you summon Exodia in one turn, hoping and praying that your opponent doesn’t have a way to counter it, or you lose. This YCS was a major tournament with almost 2000 duelists competing, so Leonard winning three matches in a row with Exodia got him noticed and put on camera for the fourth round of the tournament.
The match was a best of three contest, so Leonard would have to pull off his Exodia combo twice to take the win. He was paired against veteran player and former Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG champion Justin Singh, who was piloting the Tier-1 Tearlament deck, so he had his work cut out for him. The first game saw Leonard get off to a rocky start, with Singh attempting to interrupt his combo early on, but Leonard was still able to string together the necessary pieces to summon Exodia, causing the crowd to erupt with applause and cheers.
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