He controls a puppet that resembles Kaiba and uses his stolen deck
Performapals are the perfect deck to get used to Pendulum summoning they can swarm the field with a bunch of cute monsters, then act as a classic beat down deck from the good old days of Yu-Gi-Oh
It's worth comparing the card to English-language Presentation Blastoise - another costly card lower down this list
And Standard is full of ways to make tokens, like job select in Final Fantasy, offspring in Bloomburrow, and mobilizing in Tarkir: Dragonstorm
There are two reasons
The second most popular archetype, mono-green devotion, now includes Polukranos Reborn from March of the Machine but, overall, with the card pool being so large, only a small fraction of the new cards make an impact, thus greatly diminishing the Too Many New Cards effect