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Yugi's Duelist Kingdom Monsters: The 'Small Fry' Gang, Part 1

Duelist Kingdom will also be getting some 2-card posts! Yugi has a lot of what Takahashi calls 'small fry' in this arc. In my posts, I define 'small fry' as Yugi's Duelist Kingdom Monster Cards that have less ATK than "Curse of Dragon".

(I've excluded 2 monsters with similar stats from this subset of Monster Cards and put them in their own post. Those two have a different commonality worth noting; they'll get their own post later in the week.)

This time we'll start off with the "Giant Stone Soldier"! This monster is a personal favorite of mine.

There's something funny about this card's art in the manga. All of its appearances, bar one, have this strange anomaly in the top-left corner of the art:

During the manga's original run, Kazuki Takahashi only seems to have picked up on this for this monster's appearance in the final Pegasus duel, and so that's the only version of the card art that's fixed up.

Personally I'm amazed that he didn't go back and alter the flawed art in the older chapters for any future editions of the manga.

In fact, the only thing that Takahashi did to the affected chapter art in the 2016 color editions was try to color the anomaly in as if it was part of "Giant Stone Soldier" all along! Very strange.

This monster is famous for the moment in chapter 72 where Dark Yugi instructs it to...well, see for yourself:

I wish I could say this is due to some special ability of "Giant Stone Soldier"'s, but...nope.

I've studied the manga's rules extensively, trying to figure out what the deal is here (and other moments like it). But as far as I can tell, declaring an attack on your own Magic (also possibly Trap) Cards is just something that's part of the Duelist Kingdom tournament's own weird and undefined ruleset- from a Doylist perspective, just a way for the author to make this moment exciting for his readers.

(Now, attacking your opponent's Magic and Trap Cards is a different matter entirely! Only "Card-Hunting Grim Reaper" can do that, apparently. But that's neither here nor there.)

Towards the end of the Duelist Kingdom arc, we actually get to see this monster's original colorscheme!

Excerpt from the color title page for chapter 104, "True Crisis!!", released on 2 November 1998.

Here you can see it's a very rock brown sort of color. Much to my dismay, we only see the hologram form of this monster. We don't get a view of what these colors would have looked like on the in-manga card illustration itself!

Interestingly enough, Bandai's version of "Giant Stone Soldier" actually uses this colorscheme. In fact, their version of this card was released in November 1998 too, so it's hard to tell which of these two came out first. Personally, I suspect that Takahashi may have given Bandai's card team some input on what he wanted this specific card to look like. At the very least, this page and that card may have been worked on/developed at roughly the same time.

Like a few other cards I've talked about before, I'm not sure this has a Magic: the Gathering inspiration. There are no shortage of golems or other rock creatures it could be based on, but none of them seem to be a good match for this card in any way.

Next up: a sneaky little fella's headed this way. Hide your vintage aircraft!