Term · Yu-Gi-Oh!
Exodia the Forbidden One
Five cards, sealed apart for a reason, and holding all of them at once ends the duel before your opponent takes a turn.
In Otakana the clue reads: Sealed card that wins the duel instantly
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Yu-Gi-Oh!
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Exodia is split into a head, two arms and two legs, and none of the pieces do anything alone. Gather all five in your hand and you win immediately, no attack, no calculation, no chance to respond. It is the only win condition in the game that ignores life points entirely, which is why the card text reads like a legal clause and why players treat drawing it as a kind of miracle.
The anime spent that miracle in its first episode. Yugi, losing badly to Kaiba, draws the last piece and the room goes gold, and Kaiba's response to being beaten that way sets up his obsession for the next several hundred episodes. It is an enormous swing to fire in an opening, and it defined what the show was willing to do.
In the real card game, Exodia decks are a recognised and genuinely infuriating archetype, built entirely from cards that draw more cards. Konami has repeatedly limited the pieces to keep them from making duels a coin flip, and players still build the deck, because winning without ever attacking is funnier.
Spelling EXODIA
EXODIA opens on an E and puts an X in second place, which is the rarest letter in this answer set and effectively ends the row once it lands. Six letters, four of them vowels, in the pattern vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, vowel. Otakana wants the short name, not the full card title with the Forbidden One attached.