Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG Genesys allows Official Tournament Stores and other Tournament Organizers to set their own point caps on their Genesys events. Default is 100 points, but stores can set their cap at 200, 50, or zero points, or any other number they choose.

Let’s talk a bit about what each of these caps mean.

50-point Cap

This one’s simple enough. Link & Pendulum Monsters are already never allowed in Genesys. A 50-point cap, right away, means that any card with a point cost of 51 or higher is also not allowed.

In addition to that, the overall power cap on everyone’s Decks goes down. Your first thought might be “everyone’s Deck is half as powerful” but it can be more complicated than that.

Let’s use Pot of Greed as an example, again. (This card allows you to draw 2 cards from your Deck.) At 30 points (for now!), you can normally have 3 copies in your Genesys Deck (if you want) with 10 spare points left over to grab other cards. With a 50 point cap, you’re down to 1 Pot of Greed, tops. You do have 20 spare points now (instead of 10), but it’s an example of how, if you’re relying on triples of a card with a cost in the 30-point range, going from 100-cap to 50-cap does a lot more than cut your strategy in half.

If a 50-point cap sounds scary, always remember, it’s not just you who is affected. Your opponents also have fewer points to work with!

That’s one of the main things about Genesys: With EVERYBODY de-powered some, games can involve more turns, and you can see your Deck’s strategy in action more.

0-point Cap

A 0-cap event really puts your brain to work. You’ll need to go back to the drawing board to work on your Deck, and you’ll be looking at a lot of cards you never thought you’d be playing with!

Over 500 cards (currently) have a point cost, all of which are unusable in 0-cap (as well as Pendulums and Links, of course). So, if you’re playing in a 0-cap event, if you’re having trouble re-tooling your regular Genesys Deck, it might be better to just make a brand-new Deck. A lot of themes from over the years have effects that duplicate the abilities of powerful cards that have point costs. You just have to play the theme to access them. (For example, Supercharge is a card used with Machine “roid” monsters that lets you draw 2 cards! It was originally designed for “Vehicroids” but it works just as well with “Speedroids,” which adds even more potential cards to your Deck.)

Look around, dig out your old binders and shoeboxes full of cards, and who knows where your creativity will lead you!

And once you build a 0-point Deck you like, you’re in good shape! You can use it in 0-cap events, or retool it for 100-cap events by just adding the power cards of your choice from the points list.

200-point Cap

As you probably know, a lot of First Turn Kill (FTK) combos are priced out of the default 100-cap Genesys format. We identify FTK combos and price the parts of the combo so that the total cost for both parts is above the 100-point cap (for example, 1 card is 100 points, and the other is 1 point). If you want to use either card for any other reason besides that FTK combo, you can! But you can’t use them together for the combo, because you won’t have enough points.

You might also see the same idea, just with different numbers, like a 71-point card and a 30-point card. We do that when the 30-point card is stronger than the 1-pointer in the other example, and deserves a higher point cost just on its own. No need to put the other half at 100 points, in that case.

If you play in a 200-cap event, then that genie (not La Jinn!) is out of the bottle because the 100-point barrier isn’t blocking those FTK combos from being used. However, Duelists still won’t have enough points to play with multiple sets of both cards in the combo. So FTK’s are there, but they’re still powered down.

If you are NOT using FTK’s in a 200-cap Duel, you’ve got way more tools to fight them! With twice as many points to put power cards in your Deck, you can load up with all sorts of goodies that you could never squeeze into a 100-cap Deck.

So, a 200-cap event can have a lot more variety. It could have some (depowered) FTK Decks running around, battling it out with Decks that are a lot more heavily armed to fight against them (and each other!), so check it out if you have the chance!

Custom

Official Tournament Stores can also set a custom point cap for their events. Anything they want.

P.S. There’s a lot more we could say about 200-cap. If you work with it, you end up in some very interesting places, which might merit an additional adjustment. But more about that later.