Dark Area

The Dark Area is a new Zone of the Field which is placed in front of the Graveyard. As time passed, more and more cards and entire archetypes were created that could easily recover banished cards and even benefit from cards being banished, so this mechanic literally stopped representing what was called like when it was created: remove from play (or "exclude from the game" in early Japanese texts). Even cards that are banished face-down can be easily recovered by some cards. So this somewhat created the need of a new mechanic that allows to exclude cards from the game permanently in most situations. Very few cards can recover or move cards from the Dark Area, and those that do cannot be used in every Deck, and no Deck can be dedicated to massively send cards to the Dark Area like it can be done with banishment (through cards like "" and ""). Cards that are sent to the Dark Area are sent face-down by default, and cannot be targeted by any card effect, nor be checked by your opponent. No card sent there has any effect triggered. Some monsters start the Duel in the Dark Area (face-down) and must be Summoned from there.