Yeah, they did, but they still added more cards, and also added the turbo dueling with 2 partners, which will compensate the loss of space from those sprites.
Cards take up a lot less file space than you think. It's a low-quality jpg, a bit of text, and a few lines of code to specify it's stats & effect. Card effects are probably function-based, so all the cards, for example, that when attacking a def position monster do the leftover atk to life points all have a small flag that turns on the effect. (I've thought a lot about how the games work because I kinda want to make a Python Yu-Gi-Oh! Game that actually knows the rules unlike all the other homebrew ones)
QUOTE(FlashX007 @ Feb 23 2011, 07:43 PM) Sprites were never needed anyway. I don't know why they ever thought that made the game good. I'm gonna wait till tomorrow for a better results. Whatever gets released tonight might not be the whole thing or dumped wrong.