Just Desserts vs No Monsters on Field / Activating for No Effect [GFFAR#2]

[@NecromancyForKids]

Full Transcript for Easy Understanding: Hello, everyone, necromancy4kids here once again. This time finally bringing you the second part to my video series “Goat Format Frequently Asked Rulings”, or GFFAR for short! I’ve noticed that within the Goat community, some specific ruling questions come up quite often, and I thought it might be helpful to make a series answering these questions that people keep pondering. This time around, I've decided to answer a rather simple yet very common and long-reaching ruling regarding the card “Just Desserts”. There will be timestamps for this video in the description, so feel free to skip to the part most relevant to you, even the concluding statement! The ruling question for today's episode is: Can you activate “Just Desserts” while there are currently no monsters on the opponent's side or the field? A lot of players get hung up on this question because they can't find any rulings for it, either in goat format or other formats in general. The reason for this is quite simple: It is a basic rule of Yu-Gi-Oh! that you cannot activate a card or card effect that would fail to do anything in the current state of the game if not negated. This is true for both Goat Format and the current game as of writing this script. [yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Activate ] You can't activate “Lightning Vortex” while there are no face-monsters on the opponent's side of the field, nor activate “Heavy Storm” while there are no other Spell or Trap Cards on the field, nor declare a Type with the effect of “Tribe Infecting Virus” which isn’t currently face-up on the field. As you can guess, this of course extends to effects which would deal 0 damage, because 0 damage is considered “no damage” and thus has “no effect”. [www.goatformat.com/rulings7.html "Tribe-Infecting Virus"] You can, however, use a card like “Ring of Destruction” even on a 0 ATK monster because even if it ends up dealing 0 damage, it’s doing something with the effect itself, which is destroying a monster. The damage is just gravy on top of those fluffy mashed potatoes. [www.goatformat.com/rulings7.html "Thousand-Eyes Restrict"] One common scenario which people try to use to counter this rule when using “Just Desserts” is to chain “Ojama Trio” to its activation so that the opponent would presumably have 3 monsters during resolution. However, the rule does not make exceptions for “the possibility it could have an effect”. It only cares about what the game is like in its current state. No “what ifs”. In other words, this would be an illegal activation of “Just Desserts”. I figure I should also mention that an effect being negated is not considered the same as “failing to do anything” for the purposes of this rule. In the same way that the game does not care about “the possibility it could have an effect” as previously mentioned, the game also doesn’t care about “the possibility it will be negated or reduced”. So yes, you can activate “Just Desserts” even if a card like “Royal Decree” or “Des Wombat” is face-up on the field. Finally, as you may already know, in Goat Format, we DO have one major exception to this rule which doesn’t apply to newer formats: “fail to find”. Players in Goat Format CAN activate effects which search their decks even if they do no have any legal targets. I’ve heard people say this is because players aren't expected to know the contents of their deck at this point in the game, but I won't speculate further. Just know that it is an exception to the existing rule. [www.goatformat.com/basics.html "Failure to Find"] So, in conclusion: Can you activate “Just Desserts” while there are currently no monsters on the opponent's side or the field? No, you cannot. Even if you wish to activate “Ojama Trio” or a similar card effect in response to its activation which would give the opponent monsters on their field. Hopefully this video has helped you understand a bit more about the game, and might possibly help resolve some ruling issues you have in the future while playing Goat Format! I think for the future, to make these videos easier to find and parse through for their rulings, I'll only be doing rulings for a single card each time. Let me know in the comments if you are okay with that, or if you would prefer for there to be multiple card rulings per video! With all that said, thank you very much for watching, and have a wonderful day!

[@RockoMyler]

Good video.

[@MasterCowClips]

Had good fun working on this. Thank you for the opportunity.

[@Luubuu-125]

I really liked the yeah at 2:05 hahahaha

[@NecromancyForKids]

@@Luubuu-125 My editor did a really good job adding in some nice sounds like that lol