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There are tons ofYu-Gi-Oh!cards released every year, giving you more and more cards to collect and play with. Sometimes though, there are a few updates that have to happen to the cards to ensure they’re competitive and make sense in the scope of the game.
One of these cards is almost infamous at this point for a very confusing change that long-time fans still find confusing to this day. This is the curious story of Harpie’s Brother, why the card suffers from a bit of an identity crisis, and everything you need to know to understand the decision.
What Is The Harpie Archetype?
Before we can dive into the Harpie’s Brother, we need totake a look at the Harpies archetype. For classic Yu-Gi-Oh fans, this archetype can trace its roots back to the very first anime and the card game’s earliest sets.
The Harpies are the signature cards of the sometimes enemy, sometimes ally Mai Valentine. Her strategy almost always involved getting one of the three Harpy Lady cards out in play and then giving it bonuses from other cards.
As a fun bit of trivia, the GameCube game Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom gave all the Harpy Ladies a name. Harpy Lady 1’s name is Airo’, Harpy Lady 2’s name is Ocupete, and Harpy Lady 3’s name is Keraino.
All these names are based on the ancient Greek myth of the Harpies, and are inspired by their classical names of Aello, meaning ‘storm swift’, Ocypete, for ‘the swift wing’, and Celaeno, meaning ‘the dark’.
Being an archetype, there is a ton of support for the Harpy Lady cards released over a variety of sets over the years, giving the archetype the power to compete, or at least be fun to play, alongside more modern cards.
What Is Playing The Harpy Deck Like?
As a bit of a curious limitation on the deck, all three Harpy Lady, and the Cyber Harpie Lady cards share a special rule thatlimits the number of cards you can play in a deck. Since they have the name condition “This card’s name is always treated as Harpie Lady,” you can only have amaximum of three of any number of these cardsin your deck.
For example, you can include one Cyber Harpie Lady, one Harpie Lady 2, and one Harpie Lady 3 in a deck, but no more.
A few other Harpie Lady cards are treated as a Harpie Lady when they’re in play butdon’t have the same deck-building limitations. With all these cards, you’re able to quickly fill the field with plenty of synergistic Harpies, turning the match in your favor after only a turn or two.
So What’s The Deal With Harpie’s Brother?
As it turns out, the Harpie’s Brother wasn’t a brother at all and was a case of design changes that occurred over time. When the localization team in charge of translating card text from Japanese to English saw that card, they had no idea that archetypes and synergistic cards would be coming to the game. They saw a man with bird-like traits and large red wings that looked awfully close to the Harpy Ladies.
Harpie’s Brother was first released in 2004’s Pharaoh’s Servant set as a common Normal Monster card. As more and more sets were released, players started to slowly notice thatnot a single support card for the Harpie Ladies would include anything about the Harpie’s Brother.
While not a problem for the most part, the name change from the Yu-Gi-Oh Offcial Card Game to the wider Yu-Gi-Oh Trading Card Game did cause some confusion for players. TheYu-Gi-Oh’s OCG card name is “Birdman”and bearsno relation to the Harpie Ladies.
This change would be updated with the release of Astral Pack Two in 2013. The Harpie Brother would no longer be known as a member of the Harpie family and, instead, would forever be known as Sky Scout.
The English printing of the card isn’t the only one that has this change. The French, German, Italian, and Spanish versions of the card were also all referred to as Harpie’s Brother and would have to face the same inevitable change.
Has This Happened To Other Yu-Gi-Oh Cards?
Of course it has, especially in a card game with thousands of cards. Sometimes, these changes have been rather benign, like removing an accidental extra space or a missed capitalization on a letter. Other times, like the Harpie’s Brother, it required a full name change to ensure everything lined up appropriately. Other cards had to have major changes to ensure there was no confusion as to where the card belongs or where it doesn’t.
While errata like this has slowed down in recent years as design teams get more in line with global releases, there’s always a chance that something will slip through the checks that Konami puts into place, possibly leading to more changes like Harpie’s Brother to Sky Scout happening in the future.
