The World’s First V18 Just Went Down. Its Backstory is Even Cooler.

Four years ago, Elias Iagnemma went looking for a boulder in Piemonte, northern Italy. When he found it, he saw the face of a monster—and couldn’t look away.

Now, that boulder, named after the monster it bears, may have catapulted the climbing world into a new era. On November 11, after putting in a steely 211 sessions over four years, the 29-year-old Italian climber made the first ascent of Exodia, a 25-move boulder in Refugio di Barbara near the French-Italian border. Then, he sent shock waves through the climbing world by announcing that he thinks Exodia is a V18, the hardest boulder in history.

Achieving the world’s first V18, Iagnemma tells Climbing, was never the goal. “I did Exodia just for me,” he says. “For my mind, my body, my heart, and as a part of my life. I’m not the strongest climber in the world. But my best quality is my perseverance. I would have climbed it until I couldn’t climb anymore. Until my body gave out.”

Iagnemma is one of the few boulderers accomplished enough to suggest a V18 and be taken seriously. Nine years ago, Nalle Hukkataival established the first V17, a five-move sequence called Burden of Dreams in Lappnor, Finland. Since then, 12 more V17s have either survived downgrades or not yet experienced a repeat. Last year, Iagnemma became the fourth ascensionist of Burden; this January, he proposed his own V17, The Big Slamm, as the hardest boulder in Italy. He’s also sent three V16s: Ephyra, Gioia, and Ganesh, the former in Switzerland and the latter two in northern Italy.

But Exodia, to Iagnemma, eclipsed all prior challenges. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he says. To put that in context, he solved Burden in 25 sessions and The Big Slamm in 35; his proposed V18 took him more than six times as long. He describes it as a power endurance boulder in two parts: a V14 part one requiring sustained body tension and a V16 part two with dynamic jumps. In between, he rests his arms on a strenuous and slippery kneebar. The crux, he says, is a jump to pinches at the start of the V16.

Iagnemma’s obsession with the route began in June 2021, when his wife, Stephania Colomba, told him to check out an unfinished Christian Core project in Piemonte. What he found was an overhanging roof of chunky, slippery blocks that looked, frankly, impossible.

Still, he examined the rock for clues to a possible line from the ground. Sheets of black rock intermixed with yellow to form a dynamic, memorable topography, with veins of white chalk threading between the bones of the roof.

Then he saw it.

“The face of Exodia is carved into the boulder,” he explains, four years later. “Right at the crux.”

Exodia: The Forbidden One

To see the world’s first proposed V18 through Iagnemma’s eyes, you need to understand a bit about Yu-Gi-Oh.

For those who aren’t familiar, Yu-Gi-Oh was originally a Japanese manga launched in 1996 by Tokyo artist Kazuki Takahashi. The series followed a boy named Yugi as he challenged his peers to a series of magical contests, including dueling monsters. The manga became an anime in 1998. The next year, a company called Konami launched a spin-off trading card game based on the dueling monsters.

By 2009, when Iagnemma was 13 years old, it had become the most popular trading card game in the world, with 22 billion cards, two films, a tournament circuit, and a whopping 39 video games. At the time, he had just started climbing, and he played Yu-Gi-Oh constantly with his friends at school.

The premise of the game is simple. Each player starts with 8,000 life points and a personal deck of 40 cards. By drawing cards and then playing the cards in your hand, you can attack your opponent and reduce their life points. If your life points hit zero, you lose. The complexity of Yu-Gi-Oh comes from its more than 12,000 different cards in existence, with a dizzying number of special abilities and rule-altering conditions.

Exodia is an iconic card that functionally breaks the rules of the game. “It’s the best card,” says Iagnemma. Nicknamed the Forbidden One, Exodia is a monster so fearsome that his mere existence is enough to instantly win any duel. He appeared in episode one of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime as a skyscraper-sized titan with bulging shoulders, no neck, and a psychotic, Pennywise-esque grin.

In the game, Exodia is split across five cards: the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg, and the head. Like the Egyptian god Osiris, each body part was separated and magically sealed to prevent him from resurrecting. The five cards are extremely weak on their own. But if a player collects all five pieces, the duel ends immediately. It doesn’t matter whose turn it is. Time stops; the player with Exodia in their hand has won.

“Exodia! It-It’s not possible,” stammers Seto Kaiba, Yugi’s arch-rival. “No one’s ever been able to call him!”

“Exodia, obliterate!” Yugi orders.

The monster roars. In its hands is a sphere of whirling light, which it loosens into a nuclear explosion. Kaiba’s three dragons disintegrate. First their skin falls away, then their bones.

(From Yu-Gi-Oh, season 1, episode 1)

The ultimate puzzle

For four years, Iagnemma brought the five Exodia cards from his Yu-Gi-Oh deck to every session on the boulder. He started to notice his own five elements that had to line up for a send: good conditions, physical readiness, mental readiness, the starting V14 sequence, and the final V16 sequence.

Though he climbed other boulders, Exodia remained Iagnemma’s top priority, even as he began projecting Burden of Dreams in 2022. “With Burden, and with all the other hard problems I’ve climbed, I knew that one day, I would probably do it,” he says. “It was only a matter of a few days because I was very close. But unfortunately, with Exodia, the problem is that I have great sessions and fall on the last move, and then there were sections on subsequent sessions where I couldn’t repeat single moves or sections. It was really difficult to understand.”

On Yu-Gi-Oh forums, experts regularly warn newcomers that Exodia is not a winning strategy. They point out the math: In a standard, 40-card game, the chance of drawing all five Exodia cards in the opening hand is 0.0000015%, or one in 658,008 games. If you played one game every 30 minutes, it would take you more than 37 years to do that.

But it does happen. And even if you don’t draw all five Exodia body parts right away, you can still commit to stalling your opponent and playing abilities that let you keep drawing cards until your destiny aligns.

Like Iagnemma’s mega-project, summoning Exodia requires patience, luck, and an overwhelming faith in your deck; there’s no back-up strategy. You sacrifice everything to keep taking chances. At a certain point, you only need one more.

Session 211

In early May, after 160 sessions, Iagnemma posted on Instagram that his “Exodia Project” season for 2025 had begun. “I’ve never felt closer,” he wrote. “The fire is burning, the shape is there—now it’s just a matter of conditions.”

At this point, working Exodia had become an infinite ritual. Unlike Burden, which shredded Iagnemma’s fingers and required multiple rest days between sessions, Exodia was amenable to brute force and over-obsession. The 29-year-old found himself heading out to the project roughly every other day.

He mused over the fact that out of all five cards, only the head of Exodia—the face that appeared carved into the rock at the crux—was technically “The Forbidden One” in Yu-Gi-Oh. “Exodia watches me when I climb,” he says plainly. “This part is the hardest. Maybe that is the forbidden part.”

A sudden breakthrough didn’t happen until November 11, one week before his 30th birthday. On that day, nearing the end of the fall season, Iagnemma finally felt himself give up on the idea of sending. It was session 211.

Then the miracle happened.

“The day I stopped thinking that I would be able to climb it,” he says, “it went.”

For two minutes that stretched across four years, Iagnemma climbed the hardest sequence of his life. Incessant body tension through the first part. Forty-three seconds at the kneebar rest, just as he’d practiced. A powerful jump to the pinches.

He knew he could fall at the final move. At no point was it over.

Then, as suddenly as flipping a card, it was.

There’s a quiet in the aftermath of such an all-consuming battle. While extremely happy to have climbed Exodia, Iagnemma admits that he now feels a little empty. “It became my daily routine, so now I feel like a bit of my life is gone,” he says.

His V18 suggestion comes primarily from a comparison to Burden. “The first section of Exodia is 8B+ [V14], and the second part is 8C+ [V16],” he says. “If Burden is 8B [V13] at the first move and the second part is 8C [V15], then I think it makes sense.”

Going forward, Iagnemma plans to head back to the gym for training and maybe drive to Fontainebleau in his van for the winter. There won’t be a project, he insists, because it takes time to mentally recover from the epic that was Exodia.

He adds, “But for sure I’ve got to try Soudain Seul.”

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