The thing about Dragoon is that it's perilously "balanced"(although I use that term loosly) by the restrictions of Red-Eyes Fusion, considering that's the way most people bring him out as an engine. If there was an easier way at all to bring him out without using resources in your hand, he would go from "staple" to "busted please ban" in no time at all. Putting all the parts to 1 doesn't help either because you usually only want to bring it out once anyone, so people would still run Red-Eyes Fusion, Red-eyes, and D Magician at 1, because Dragoon is that good of a card to bring out with RE Fusion. The downsides on RE Fusion keeps it from being busted.
It's not balanced in any way by it. They just set a crapload of negation backrow and still have a massive advantage. The only way it won't be busted is, as I noted below, they slap an activation clause that's actually worthwhile. Shaddoll Fusion, as strong as it is, has some kind of thing to make it second turn only for it to do anything busted, and part of that was related moreso to Construct at the time.
Keep in mind that the degeneracy comes from all 3 cards in tandem. REF is able to be dumped by Anaconda, so it takes up to 2 cards minimum to have a "negate almost anything with a discard" card, combined with a free attack boost as am option. People don't run Anaconda all the time either, and still make extremely difficult to break boards due to REF alone. This is why the OCG limiting all 3 was worthless. REF or Dragoon has to go to stop the 1-turn unbreakable boards. Neither card can exist with each other. Both are borked designs that do way too much. REF has zero activation clauses, which is what actually makes it busted. Dragoon only highlighted it. Dragoon's busted on its own, but it's actually very difficult/cost-heavy to get out without REF. Keep in mind the reason all 3 were hit in the OCG was cause decks ran 3 REF and 1-2 Dragoon, without Anaconda, constantly winning. All of them play an important role. Anaconda is literally the weakest link of the three, and anybody suggesting banning it doesn't realize it was never a core part of making a good board. Just a bonus.
It's debatable if it's REF or Dragoon that really sets Konami back from making proper DM/RE support, however, Dragoon is clearly way more powerful on its own, but in a vacuum, it hard depends on REF to matter. Hopefully that clears up the issue with the combos. REF, basically put, is a problem similar to Future Fusion. They both were able to very quickly give you advantages due to no activation clauses. REF honestly could easily become busted outside of Dragoon too, as long as they don't make any attempts to fix it. It's not like it's that hard to fix. Negate the monster summoned by it till your opponent's End Phase if they controlled no cards when you activated it, your opponent has to actually control cards to activate it, etc. Though I'm pretty sure neither makes it so Anaconda puts you at anything but a "ignore the activation clauses"...
ouch, poor Buster Blader
Smoke Grenade had it coming for long time.
Nobody used it for Buster Blader, actually. Sword was mainly there to equip onto tons of other stuff in general. Union Carrier ignores all that and lets you equip it to any monster with the same attribute or type. Carrier is definitely something that has potential for borked stuff in the future.
Lamperouge or
Dutch Raikuna and anyone else is also free to tag me.
