So Older Tends to Be Better, I've Noticed

In the pre-GX anime, at any rate, it seems like the further back you go, the more powerful things tend to get. This is most prevalent in the Waking the Dragons arc, as the conversation after the Seal of Orichalcos is first played effectively goes something like...

Yami: The ancient power of my Millenium Puzzle will banish your dark magic!

Bad guy: The power of the Millenium Puzzle isn't strong enough! It is only three/five thousand (dubs or subs, man) years old, while the Seal of Orichalcos is over ten thousand years old, which makes it stronger!

Everyone: *le exaggerated gasp*

It seems a fairly consistent thing. The longer something has existed, the more terrifyingly powerful it seems to get, and if you don't currently have a spell that can do something in your ancient and musty tomes, you must find ancienter and mustier tomes. (Millenium World RPG)

I'm honestly kind of curious about why that is. I mean, I can't say anything for the Atlanteans, but the Egyptians in Yu-Gi-Oh seemed fairly progressive in terms of their magic, responding to the monster crisis by inventing magics to seal them in stone tablets and eventually even making those weird duel disk-looking things to help channel ka better. So there's clearly some research being done and magic being progressed to the metaphorical next level. Yet despite advances in skill and technique-related thing, it always seems to be going downhill, rather than growing more powerful as it's improved upon.

My first theory is that magic is a force that decreases with time, which is why it appears that nowadays, people without a connection to the Millenium Items can't use magic at all. But that doesn't really hold up under its own weight; if magic were, in fact, decreasing in power, then it only stands to reason that the Seal of Orichalcos would've lost just as much power. Of course, you could argue that the Seal had been powered by the souls it's stolen, but given that said power was going into freeing Leviathan, that doesn't make a lot of sense either.

My second idea is that it's the reverse; once a type of magic is invented, it gains power the longer it exists. That explains the strength of both the God Cards, the Millenium Items, and the Seal of Orichalcos, but of course then you come to the question of why modern ka seems to be nearly nonexistent and why the Millenium Items don't appear to be any stronger than when they were made.

The last idea to cross my mind was one of more advanced =/= more powerful. In this light, the more restraints one puts on magic, the safer and easier to control it is, but it also becomes less powerful. The Seal of Orichalcos is an unbridled power channeled directly from the stone it came from, with almost no restrictions placed on it. Conversely, the Millenium Items are far more restricted than the Seal of Orichalcos but still relatively free, and since they were also fed the unbridled ka of many sacrifices they managed to become much more powerful than they normally could with what restrictions they did have. This would explain the fall of the Egyptians despite their sorcery, as the magic would have eventually been controlled to the point of being too weak to wage war with, and why modern ka don't tend to express themselves due to the much more complex educated lifestyle we experience in the modern world.

What are you guys' opinions on this? I know I'm overanalyzing this, so don't bother telling me that.

> more advanced =/= more powerful
> easier to control it is, but it also becomes less powerful

That is probably the most correct. A better way to think about it is in better terms that you are more familiar with. Think fire.

When fire was first discovered, it was a powerful, wild, amazing thing that literally came from no where. They had no control over it at all. Then as time progressed, people started to understand it a little more, and gains some control over it. But it was still something they saw as powerful and wild.

Now, what is fire to us? A chemical reaction where a fuel source is being converted into different elements and as a result heat and light are created as a by product. We understand fire. Like, all of it. We can predict what fire will do based on external factors and the fuel source. We can control it. Heck, we have tiny instruments that summon fire at our fingertips.

The Seal is old. Even the people who used it didn't understand what it could do that much. So they just let it do what it did, and pulled the power straight from the stone.

But what if there was a dedicated team analyzing the power and seeing what else could be done with it? They probably could have imbued the power of the Seal straight into monsters. That reduces the risk it places on your followers, and opens up more people who could safety use it. But, as you noted, would weaken or restrict its powers (whole field vs one monster).

Good points all around. Of course, the fire example is more an issue of perspective, not actual power. I mean, fire isn't any less potent nowadays simply because we know how it happens and can generate it ourselves. In fact, we've both been able to utilize it in a variety of ways, and even make it more potent than natural fire is for our purposes.

But then again, magic is weird, and using magic is really a lot more like throwing an intellectual mental punch than the sciences people always compare it to; you can increase precision and tackle more situations with it by focusing it and holding back on the strength, but with a few exceptions you'll get the most raw power out of a full swing.

Codifying Yu-Gi-Oh! magic is a bit weird, though, because it's like Harry Potter. What you can do with it and how hard each thing is to do and how strong it is in a given capacity are all decided mostly arbitrarily as the plot demands it. Doesn't mean I'll stop trying to apply reason to chaos, though. Thanks for the feedback, you guys.

The Seal of Orichalcos was older and was also a secret from most of the world. Hence why the Egyptian Shadow Magics could do nothing against it. Even the EGC's fell to its might.