Edison is a preserved competitive era of the trading card game: the card pool as it stood on 28 April 2010, played under the Forbidden & Limited List of 1 March 2010. It is named after the Edison, New Jersey tournament of that spring.
Nothing released afterwards exists in it. There are no Xyz, Pendulum or Link monsters, no Extra Monster Zone and no Pendulum Zones. Games are slower and resource attrition matters: decks such as Gladiator Beasts, Blackwings, Quickdraw Dandywarrior, Lightsworn, Frog Monarchs and Infernity define the field.
| Start | 8000 life points and five opening cards. The player going first draws a sixth card in their Draw Phase and has no Battle Phase on the first turn. |
|---|---|
| Field | Five monster zones, five spell and trap zones, and a separate field spell slot for each player. One face-up field spell exists in total. |
| Summoning | One regular normal summon or set per turn. Tributes follow level; further normal summons only through actual card effects. Flip, special, contact fusion and Synchro summons follow their own conditions. |
| Priority | Ignition priority after a summon that starts no chain, including effects in the hand or graveyard — the pre-2011 behaviour that later rulings removed. |
| Damage step | The historical damage step windows with limited manual chains per sub-window. Two face-up attacking monsters with 0 ATK destroy each other, as the pre-2011 rule required. |
| Chains | Spell speed, activation conditions, simultaneous triggers and backward resolution. Mystical Space Typhoon destroys an already activated trap but does not negate it. |
The rules core runs in Master Rule 1 with the separate TCG priority, TCG SEGOC, damage sub-step and 0 ATK flags. Xyz, Pendulum and Link cards are rejected when a deck is checked. There is no house banlist, no altered card values, no invented summon limits and no extra balance rules: what is restricted is restricted by the March 2010 list alone.
The frozen pool contains 3,738 entries. Its 66 token entries are not offered as deck cards, so the workshop shows 3,672 cards, forbidden ones included and marked. After the March 2010 list, 3,628 cards are available for decks. Cards that share a rules name — Harpie Lady and its variants, or Umi and A Legendary Ocean — share their copy limit across main deck, extra deck and side deck.