for anyone wondering what the yugioh meta is like rn with no irl tourneys, one of the most popular decks rn is a meme deck that does a super long, janky combo that, if successful, forces the opponent to a state where any move will cause an illegal infinite loop, so they cant play

the deck is centered around Pole Position, a card which grants the monster on the field with the highest attack an immunity to spell card effects. This seems simple enough, but this effect is so easy to cause an infinite loop with that it's ridiculous.

I wont explain the whole combo but basically it ends on a curious the lightsworn dominion equipped with divine sword phoenix blade and invoked purgatrio. Purgatrio gains 200atk for every opponents card and, crucially, has 100 less attack than curious.

curious has the highest attack on the field, so pole position means its unaffected by spells and doesn't get the 300 boost from phoenix blade. But if the opponent plays a single card, then purgatrio goes up to 2500 attack, 100 more than curious, and then it becomes immune instead

this causes curious to lose spell immunity, meaning it gets affected by phoenix blade and gets a 300 attack boost, up to 2700, which means it goes above purgatrio, so it becomes immune and loses the boost, which means it loses immunity and gains the boost, and this loops forever

rather than having rulings for what happens when an infinite loop occurs, rulings in yugioh mean that, if an action would cause an illegal game state such as an infinite loop, then you simply aren't allowed to do it. So in this situation, the opponent can't play any cards at all.

I feel I should stress that this deck isn't really "good." It requires a 60 card deck, 8 cards of which are dead if they're in your hand rather than the deck, and the combo dies to pretty much any disruption from your opponent

but it can pull the combo off pretty consistently if uninterrupted, it can go into link spam with cards like borrelsword it the pole position strat gets interrupted, and it's got more novelty factor than pretty much any popular deck has had in years