I always liked the idea of making a master rule of limiting either (and/or); monster effects per turn, special summons per turn maximum negations on field. That way game is more interactive for two players, no solitaire 15-mins turn with 10 omninegates/floodgates, and many forgotten archetypes could see see a light through the game. (This just an idea that can be developed much better)
@OlgaZuccati most of the most broken effects historically were always the ones with the simplest effects because it meant they had no restrictions. Pot of Greed is about as simple as an effect can get and would also be ran in every deck with no exceptions. There is not a single deck that would not want to run it, not even infernity, the deck that wants 0 cards in hand.
maxx c should be at 3 to keep solitaire decks under control its like how in vintage mtg, where every deck can potentially FTK, there are certain pieces of interaction (like force of will) that can, when used properly, completrly stop an enemy from winning on turn 1
i always had a love hate relationship with yugioh's powercreep. konami always manages to pump out the most elaborate decks/archetypes that break the game in interesting ways, but everyone including konami can see that this isn't sustainable. they always try to set back the clock with new formats or games like duel links, speed duels, or rush duel but they all inevitably run into the same issues. this makes me worried about the longevity of the game, especially considering how difficult it is to onboard new players onto the game.
Powercreep in yugioh has gone so bad that decks are experiencing convergent evolution. As a former yugioh player my problem with modern yugioh is honestly that every modern deck plays the exact same way, often times even culminating in the exact same boss monsters with the only difference between rogue and top tier decks being the number of disruptions they can play through and their consistency. Gone is the contrast between say a HAT player summoning myrmeleo, search for bottomless, set 3 or 4 pass, and then his opponent tries to go off with mythic rulers on the next turn. Or a bujin player trying to play the whole game with never summoning more than once or twice vs a sylvan deck that swarms the board and makes multiple high rank XYZ. These decks were so different but saw play at the same time. Decks actually had identity back in the day, now they are all the same. 2014-2015 was peak yugioh
The recurring problem with YGO is that it tries to diversify decks with archetypes and themes for years, yet those builds centers arround the same boss monsters and counters. Why you want to play Deck A to end with Baronne and/or Apollousa, when Deck B does the same more consistently? Why you want to play Gate Guardian with all its new support and unique boss monsters, when the rest of decks out there are summoning they same big monster leading the board anyways? Lately they're trying to avoid generic summoning conditions, as they banned those two examples in some formats. Some Decks like Memento, Labrynth or Vaalmonica are good examples of unique builds that tries to stay on their own playstyle, but they can still add just a few tech options without losing their whole identity.
@@YGOstratPlayerthis is simply not true. konami this year banned all generic endboard monsters. a runick white forest players endboard is a diabell and 3-4 runick spells. a yubel endboard is phantom, varudas, rage, desirae. a lab endboard (2 lab players got top 32 at a 1800 ycs this week) is 5 set cards pass. a ritual beast endboard is a collosus, ulti-galli, and protos. no endboard is the same every deck has dif lines and point of interaction
"Power creep is required for games to keep up" sounds like a self-fufilling prophecy. "Power creep is required for profit margins" though.. It sounds more.. hm.. descriptive.
In a grand sense, power creep is happening any time new cards are relevant to non-rotating formats, but it's not necessary for the average power level of new material to be higher than the average power level of old material. I do think this video misses that distinction.
Yeah, I just want the game to be interesting, I don't keep playing a game because I want it to get more ridiculous. I mean, look at Yu-Gi-Oh and how it's not even remotely the same game anymore.
it is amazing how game like FAB handles this thing. In their logic if a hero with that weapon is really successful that means it will win a lot of tournaments, collect a lot of points and will rotate to legends faster and will not be legal in tournaments :D
The first statement is more that if none of the new cards are power creeping, there's no reason to buy them. You can argue it's all about profits, which is a part of it, but if no one is buying new cards, the game is dead, regardless of the profits the company makes. In that situation with no power creep, new cards would just become collectible cardboard, while tournaments would become increasingly dominated by specific archetypes as the meta stops shifting and people get more and more of the best cards since they've been out the longest.
@derangedberger Right, but that can happen without intent, especially if things are already fairly balanced. It doesn't necessitate 'pushing' cards, let alone pushing the entire set. This is why themed content is so important: Yes, if every single set was not just average in power level, but also a complete mix of every theme, there would be little motion, but in a large design space, you can focus new products in different regions of that design space.
There is a distinction to be made between power creep and complexity creep. Both happen in all games but some learn more towards one than the other. In Magic and Yugioh, the average card has gotten more text on them over time but in Pokémon, by just upping the numbers a lot, cards haven't truly gotten that much more complicated.
That is boring though, pokemon has sadly often repeated, specific ability or attacks and makes it so kinda boring sometimes. Like if you go throught multiple generations you often see very often similarities between pokemon or what specific types can do.
In MTG case, there was old cards with complicated and long texts of rules, but in the end it was just one effect. Nowadays, cards with lot of texts do 2 ~ 3 different things rulewise. Sometimes they are value, engine, and finisher all in one card.
Pokemon is easily the most balanced/best game out of all the TCG's. Every deck gets to play, every deck has its own playstyle, every deck does what other card games consider absurd like drawing 9-14 cards per turn, every deck has tech cards to win and outplay opponents and on top of that it's the CHEAPEST TCG out there by miles.
@@Flatfootsy .... it's not even the cheapest of the 4 games in the video, let alone of all TCGs, though? Hearthstone has tens of thousands of players who have never spent a cent. That is fundamentally not possible for a paper card game, even if you are gifted a bunch of cards, somebody paid for them, wizards tpc and konami got their piece for it. MTGA and Duel Links/Master duel also host free players. Pokemon is the odd one out in this context, tbh. It's literally the only one that you MUST pay to play. How does that work out to be cheapest in your head?
One thing I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the Yugioh section is hard once per turns. They put a very clear limiter on what you can and cannot do by making sure copies of your card can't activate their effect
It would be especially interesting because Yu-Gi-Oh has the very rare trait of reverse powercreep, where the release of new cards can increase the viability of older cards (either by design as nostalgia bait or accidentally due to some niche interaction). This is especially the case with older cards that lack once per turn limits on their effects or have some powerful effect with a cost that is now no longer detrimental.
@qweqwe5609 that is what I like about yugioh. A card like Blue Eyes White Dragon can go from basically worthless to meta relevant with the release of new support cards
Complexity creep in YuGiOH has reached insane levels, making the onboard game really hostile to new players since it became like a MOBA (League or Dota) where the only way to improve is knowledge and the way to earn it (because of how many cards/characters exist) is to play A LOT of games to face a lot of the decks and cards that exist but also how the mechanics of the game works in general and for those specific archetypes, and in the process you are going to get demolished over and over again, that makes the game overwhelming to learn and most people won't be able to take that many loses to just grasp the general idea of how YuGiOh plays.
Not to mention the 'rulings' and card text in Yugioh are absolutely dogshit awful. For example: If/When timing and missing activations. The difference between "select" "target" and how cards effectively target "at resolution" but because it doesn't say target it doesn't actually "target". The lack of PSCT and the need for writing entire sentences like "Cannot be targeted or destroyed by card effect, battle, traps, spells, whatever" instead of just saying "indestructible." Yugioh is a fucking mess and a pile of dogshit of a card game- and that's from someone who joined during the then "end times" of Spellbook vs Druler and played up until now. That's not even touching on powercreep and monetization I only talked about PSCT and Yugioh's lack of. Nevermind the lack of supported formats outside of advanced (standard) and Edison alone.
I’m fine with having random words mean different things as it’s an expression of skill, though I can see how that’d be an issue for someone getting into the game. There are other formats, like duel links and rush. I have no defense for the cost asides from its way better in the ocg, and to play master duel. Also power creep is fun, and I’d say that Konami has helt it pretty well.
And once you do reach the point where you understand enough to feel competitive you also realize it's simply not worth the effort since the game is anti-fun. The only people who actively enjoy the gameplay are sadists.
Yugioh actually has official, 1st party articles explaining the comprehensive psct they have and if you understand it, like 99% of "rulings" questions immediately evaporate. Keywords are fun, and good design, but if you read the psct article, you will almost never have a ruling question for the rest of your time playing the game @Flatfootsy
@@Flatfootsy Well the confusing wording were always a problem especially in the old days some cards were not even clear they target or not. Really good example is Sakuretsu Armor which come up a lot back in the days cuz it says nothing about targeting however IT DOES and you just had to know... Well there is some support for old formats they have official Time Wizard format buuuut yeah these events are rare and supported that much. GOAT is supported mostly by community (that's what i play btw) and not really by Konami.
It is true that Powercreep is unavoidable but it can be properly managed and somewhat mitigated. The problem with Magic recently is that there is so much product and that just makes us feel the effects of powercreep more often.
I agree. Powercreep should be something that happens slowly. If i look at some new cards i buy and they are better in every way than the cards i used to play 4 years ago than so be it. But sometimes in MTG you buy a new Commander Deck or make a Standard Deck and 2 Sets Later half of it is outdated and considered "not that good" anymore. Horrible feel.
The problem is that manabased cardgames just dont have a lot of design space as the gameplay is so linear. Only so many ways to print a 2drop, a removal spell or a draw spell yeah it can be really unique but it will still be what it is fundamentally. So you just keep playing the same formats in different coats of paint. MtG will never evolve thanks to set rotation, it will always be more of the same but slightly different.
not just the amount of product, but also the fire design philosophy. powercreep used to be slow and gradual. a year and a half ago we were arguing about monastery switftspear being too strong for standard, now its barely even making the cut for a playable red onedrop
@@Abdojtj THIS is so real 💀 the fall off of supposedly ban worthy cards like swiftspear, liliana, sheoldred and haughty djinn needs to be studied. The Powercreep in Standard is stronger than it ever has been before.
I stopped playing hearthstone when they started to constantly print cards that are "strictly better" than others, I just hate that I understand that powercreep is inevitable, but at least in digital you could update older cards to make them on the same power level as new releases instead of just forgetting about them, that is something marvel snap is doing so far and I quite like it
I would argue power creep isnt required after a game has become notably complex. Once you have enough interesting mechanics and unique cards, just printing new ones that change interactions and the meta, is enough to attract and keep players.
Powercreep in Pokemon has really not been bad at all the past 2 generations. It’s just the Tag Team fuckup that really created a huge problem, and the designers have slowly been deescalating since
I feel like I missed the memo then. The power creep has come from the energy acceleration. Welder used to be considered overpowered and only somewhat "acceptable" because fire was in a weaker place. Now, attaching an extra energy would borderline be considered a bad card when you have cards digging for/attaching 3 energies at a time.
@@P4brotagonistGood point! Again, I haven't played for a while but I remember ADP decks being able to consistently get an Altered Creation tag team attack off on turn one going second mainly due to energy acceleration and moving a steel energy from Zacian V to ADP. Also I might be wrong but weren't you able to play Welder on turn one until they changed the rules regarding supporter cards?
@DarkMarkGaming94 Oh god instant PTSD from just reading "ADP." Yeah you could use them first turn but that got changed. After ADP/Zacian they really reigned in the energy acceleration. Heck it was considered insane when they printed a psychic pokemon that let you dig and attach psychic energy, but you had to go second to even use it. Now, you have like 3-4 energy a turn with damn near infinite discard recursion.
He talked about 4 different TCGs, which is more than what the average player knows about. He doesn't need to be 100% accurate to illustrate a general point. Don't miss the forests from the trees!
@@psynque His Yugioh examples are not exactly great either, and somehow managed to miss out on the biggest elephant in the room being Tearlaments, then again, he clearly didn't plan on going very indepth into each game. He mentions boss monsters but failed to actually put up any picture of semi-modern boss monsters, just grabbing the iconic anime ace cards from each summoning type. It's like instead of Nadu and Sheoldred it's Chandra and Gideon instead, very famous in the story, but not actually very relevant in terms of the topic. (Except for Firewall, but he is talking about Boss Monsters, Firewall is not an endboard boss monster, you'd grab say Borreload for that. Also, his conclusion is technically wrong as well as Firewall in particular received an Errata, this is the other way out for Yugioh cards, however it's indeed less common, but it is another way.)
2:28 Another side effect of powercreep, especially in eternal formats, is having duplicates in your deck. If you can only put 4 copies of a card in your deck, but they print a stronger version, put all 8 in the deck and now you've doubled your chance of drawing the card, although copies 5-8 are slightly weaker, sometimes that's worth it. Similar to that is a concept called critical mass, which is something devs want to avoid or someone might just make a deck with 24 lands and 36 copies of effectively the same card. (Magic in this scenario)
So I cast Orim’s Chant. On your next turn, Revel in Silence. Next turn, gonna cast the OG silence. You tried to mess with my silence? Lemme counter whatever you did with Render Silent. Now lemme snapcaster mage, so I can silence you AGAIN.
The powercreep in Yugioh is immense, but the way Yugioh works allows them to go and apply that power creep to old decks, even decks that were bad on release 12 years ago and make them suddenly an amazing deck. The current top deck in the TCG uses Yubel cards, that were previously a deck of 3 hard to summon 0/0 monsters with battle related effects (battle is typically seen as irrelevant to many players in Yugioh). Now the deck is an absolute menace, so they might have taken it a bit too far in this case, but they support old decks relatively often.
The beauty of Yugioh is extremely bad old cards from 20 yrs ago that never saw play suddenly becomes spicy meta threat and catches people off guard winning tournaments. Mushroom man 2 in kashtira meta, "Numen erat testudo" in spright meta etc... yugioh has printed too many cards and pack fillers for every situation imaginable eventually some of them see play without the help of powercreep
I always liked the idea of making a master rule of limiting either (and/or); monster effects per turn, special summons per turn maximum negations on field. That way game is more interactive for two players, no solitaire 15-mins turn with 10 omninegates/floodgates, and many forgotten archetypes could see see a light through the game. (This just an idea that can be developed much better)
@@casoch3279if you allow your opponent to set up anywhere above 2 omni negates on their first turn, you're either just bad, or drew no hand traps (which also might be your fault, depending what your deck looks like)
It's interesting how all of the big 3, mtg, ygo, and pokemon, started with powerful spell cards (trainers) and simple, stat blocky monsters... then flipped it to have powerful monsters with powerful effects
I recently booted up mtgarena after not having played for a few years. It was almost impossible to jump back in as every single card now has a wall of text that needs to be read, understood, and memorised. I was exhausted after the first few turns.
Clicks on video titled "How Bad is Powercreep in Every Card Game?" Opening line: "This is my video about how bad powercreep is in every card game." Me: "Excellent, this is my kind of video"
Yugioh back in the day graveyard actually meant graveyard and banished zone meant it’s out for good. Now even banished zone is like our back pocket just ready to activate effects to counter opponent and graveyard is second hand but easier to access than our actual hand
This one will be a little long so i can explain some things. The biggest power creep i have been a part of (besides yugioh) was when Kaijudo introduced the set Dragonstrike Infernus. The release of that set alone made all previous sets worthless aside from staples. The set introduced 5 dragon boss monsters, 1 for each color in the game. Light gave you more life and control, Fire did huge damage, blew up stuff and locked your opponent out of a good chunk of cards, Nature gave the opportunity for a free body any time you gained mana, Dark did big damage and revived creatures that had died and Water left your opponent's board frozen so they couldn't attack. In addition to these dragons, they all had a corresponding bird that all had the ability to make all dragons cost 1 less mana to play and the ability stacked, but all provided an additional effect like draw a card everytime a dragon is played, if I dragon would die, send this bird instead as blanket protection for all of them or give all of you dragons Slayer (death touch). In addition to that, they introduced a card called Herald of Infernus. The creature cost 5 mana to play but if you had the Water and Light bird out, it would only cost 3 because of their effect, you would draw when you played it and it had protection from destruction once. If Herald were to win a battle against another creature, you get to play any dragon in your hand for free, no matter the cost. To get around the ability, games turned into a stand still where the opponent wouldn't attack because then they would be giving the player free giant dragons. So dragons would play cards that forced their opponent to be open to attacking to get the effect of Herald. There was another dragon in the set called Lyra, The Blazing Sun. It only cost 1 more than Herald to play and when you did, you got to tap an opposing creature down and it didn't untap at the start of their next turn. Since the summoning sickness of Herald had worn off, if could swing in and start dropping big dragons. Finally, the set introduced the only card to ever be banned in the game. Bottle of Wishes was a water spell card the cost 5 mana to play from hand, however, it had Shield Blast, meaning if it was in your shields (your life) and attacked, you go the effect for free. This card let you suffle your deck and reveal the top card. If it was a non-evolution creature or a spell that cost 7 or less, you got to play it for free. If not, the card is added to your hand. If broken on turn 2, there is a good chance you could get a card out essentially 7-8 turns sooner than you should and the game was basically over. The game would eventually introduce Rotation and everything from Dragonstrike and before we're removed from the game. During the final tournament of the games life, Wizards had a side tournament with Open Format allowed. Only rule was you can only play 1 Bottle of Wishes in your deck. Despite having at least 12 sets of cards to chose from, Dragons made up 3 of the top 8. Not only that, they won the entire event. Game will be dead for 10 years this year. Not many people remember because it was an attempt to reboot Duel Master but handled wrong. We still have a small community out there and frequently have tournaments in our server. They had at least 3 more years if the game planned out. Shame we will never get to see what that future would be like.
Flesh and Blood recently went through a power de-creep. The heroes from older sets like Monarch and Tales of Aria were busted to hell and back, but the way that rotation works in that game, those heroes got themselves banned eventually. Now all the more modern, less overtuned heroes are in the spotlight and the game doesn't feel quite so crazy anymore
Fab card design philosophy are on a different level but no one wants a lick of that when they're already entrenched in their own tcg. As a 70/30 player collector Ive sold all my Pokemon, vanguard, yugioh and most of my MTG collections to pivot into fab. How vanguard powercrept out their older generation cards was criminal and I can't touch another Japanese TCG because of that
I love the way these feel like short presentations, almost like a class project but with the highest quality. Fascinating to learn about the other TCGs than just the one I play and used to play; keep at it, and I will keep watching.
What about horizontal scaling instead? Create new mechanics and ways to win, that are not better or worst than existing one, just different? Might not be feasable, but imo it should be the goal
@12Tsurugi Horizontal scaling is probably the ideal situation, at least from a player perspective, it just is going to take a lot of very good playtesting to get that the way it should be. It's a challenge to keep a new mechanic from being so strong it ends up being vertical anyway, or not strong enough that people don't even bother with it.
@@12Tsurugi in an idealistic world it is the goal, but honestly how much you can make it absolutely horizontal all the way while keeping it fun? it is just a fact that some mechanics in all card game or even any game are far easier to break and abuse, which is what competitive players are looking and strive to achieve. even if you can maybe maintain it for a while, oversight will happen, and the spike will arrive. the slope of power going up, while noticable and maybe can be the starting point of "game gone bad", can also bring in a lot of fun as well. being with many mechanic of similar power might be fun for a while, but at the end, meta will form, and some might fall off entirely without being able to be saved, and those that enjoys mechanics that dies the easiest wont have fun anymore
Yugioh is a fascinating game when it comes to power creep. Semi casual - rogue tier decks are fascinating decks that use a massive variety of mechanics in different ways that are on a similar level and lead to varied, in depth, back and forth games The problem is the consistent release of one or two decks that warp the entire game to be just about them. Tearlaments and Fire Format are key examples, but even things like Kashtira which never became the sole dominant deck, are so far and above even things that are printed later and have locks/restrictions which they just simply don’t that it makes the vast majority of decks in Yugioh never see play
I was fine with the fire format, as there was a lot of decks that you could play asides from snake eyes, also I liked snake eyes. Just, they’ve been around for wayy too long.
Just because nobody bothers to power rank all the rogue decks doesnt make them equal. There will always be a best deck and a lot of rogue decks are really oppressive if they ever were the best deck. Remember a key design philosophy of konami is to just give older decks some floodgate boss to make them good again.
I always liked the idea of making a master rule of limiting either (and/or); monster effects per turn, special summons per turn maximum negations on field. That way game is more interactive for two players, no solitaire 15-mins turn with 10 omninegates/floodgates, and many forgotten archetypes could see see a light through the game. (This just an idea that can be developed much better)
TRUEEE i feel like yugioh Is sooo close to getting It right yet every other month you have 3-4 decks that are just objectively better then everything else and just compete with each other.
in marvel snap we are seeing power creep when you compare some cards to the vanilla stat line, before a 4 cost 6 power card was vanilla stats, so a card with a benefit at that cost, needed to have less stats, like enchantress and specially shan chi (a 4 cost 3 power destroy your opponents 10 power or more cards here) while huge payups like crossbones (a 4 cost 10 power) had a downside, now we are at the point where a 4 cost can have 7 power and no theoretical downside and be fine. what i find interesting is "retroactive" powercreep, where a group of cards had very little effect in the meta but a single new card can push them over the edge to the point those old cards start to look overpowered for what they do, just because they gained consistency in modern times
the 4-costs in snap appear to be the most volatile cards in the game right now. first symbiote spiderman and now misery, the stat lines are nuts. I know they buffed misery because she removes damage from the board but even just playing her in an empty lane feels like a strong move. Regardless of triggering on reveals again
My biggest thing is how in a ton of the ads they bragged about the game not being pay to win, but the recent cards in their battle pass have been meta defining. Agent Venom (pre the recent nerf) was insanely broken. I feel like the power creep has gotten even worse over the past few months.
People like to focus on tag teams discussing Pokémon, but I feel people forget those early black and white years… the $30 Pokémon catcher without a coin flip, computer search as the only useable card of its kind, $80 XBall mewtwo that completely dominated nearly all formats it was part of. As bad as ADPZ may have been, those team up to cosmic eclipse days were still dynamic and affordable, and it has only gotten better since then.
I love your videos, they are do informative and educational. I only know/played Yu-gi-oh, so its great to learn how certain topics translates across TCGs. However, I'd like to give you some feedback to try work on your cadence when narrating and explaining. You sometimes speed up to finish a sentence. Try to keep your cadence more consistent all across, but feel free to keep shifting in tone. Anyways, love your content 🙌🏻 you earned my sub :))
Great video! A little tip for future videos, try relax the pace of your narration. You sound very rushed sometimes with lots of sharp inhales. Great content and delivery though, look forward to future videos :)
@@PhotriusPyrelus You can still play the PvE content you bought and iirc you can still buy it nowadays but they stopped introducing more of that kind of content
Ey I want to say I really like your videos and how you talk about the context of every card game and how it's different, have you considered to expand the games that you include? I would really love to see you include Flesh and blood in all this analysis that you do Keep the good work!❤
Subscribed to make the number go up! Also, I'd love to see some comparisons to Flesh and Blood with this too -- it's a very new TCG (only released in 2020 I believe?) but it's already had a few cards banned because they made certain decks just way too oppressive in the meta
Power creep in Magic was kept in check due to its rotating formats. But it has been getting worse since they started designing primarily for Commander which is a non-rotating format.
Two aspects about powercreep that weren’t mentioned: niche filling and conditional effects. They can overlap but are different. Niche filling is just the result of having more options, which means as new cards get made it’s more likely a specific hole in a strategy will be filled. Now, this isn’t guaranteed to happen, but it’s likely to happen as more and more options are made. As powercreep, the result is often that the power floor of the game is raised, rather than the ceiling. Although, naturally, sometimes a specific niche might push a strategy over its ceiling by covering a weakness. Now onto the next topic. “Restriction breeds creativity,” as Mark Rosewater often says. I think conditional effects are inherently more interesting than otherwise, and I think most players and designers agree-even if unconditional cards are stronger. This makes most card games lean into specific archetypes or subsets of cards that need to be played together for them to work well. Note that this includes otherwise drawbacks and downsides on cards. One of the consequences is that conditional cards will provide a stronger effect for the same rate, or the same effect for a cheaper rate. After all, you’re paying an extra deckbuilding, gameplay, or resource cost. Note that this isn’t powercreep-as I said, it does incur an additional cost. But as satisfying that cost becomes less of a burden, the end result is that you gain access to a better effect for free just by adhering to a specific strategy. This can be related to niche filling in that for everything you want the deck to do, there’s a card tailor-made for the specific strategy. The end result is that satisfying the extra condition is so trivial as to be free, and in the specific deck every conditional card works as a better version of the unconditional card. It’s powercreep not through individual cards, but by different options coming together to enable a stronger deck. I want to leave another comment, and I might follow up this train of thought there if I do make that one.
I think the most important thing that you missed in the Pokémon section is how Sableye and Crobat G were good cards, but didn't become broken until they made the poor choice of reverting all of the turn 1 restrictions in 2011. All of the cards in the previous 3-4 years of sets were designed around those limitations (No Trainer, Supporter, Stadium cards on the first turn) and balanced by them. In 2014, they realized how silly it was to have no downsides to going first and began to add them back with limitations on attacking and eventually Supporters in 2020.
I would have mentioned regarding Yugioh the concept of turn 0. When you go 2nd as (full powered) Tearlaments, you can functionally win the game after the first action that your opponent does on their turn when they go first, by chaining Tearlaments and millers to distrupt and floodgate your opponent before they can play the game. Other decks like Labrynth and Rescue Ace can do this too. But Tearlaments does it the best.
Ooooh my gosh Y'all yugioh players will do anything but discuss the topic of the video if it means you can't *whine* This is not "in depth (yet also exaggerated and partially just wrong) examples of power creep in particular as they relate to turn theory in card games"... it's "power creep in card games" What you described a. Only discusses Winda if we say floodgates, which is outed by imperm, gamma, called by, *Smashing Ground* and more, aside from necessitating you start with a monster effect and they have Havnis (I assume you're a MD player here bc you're still upset about tearlaments) who's at 1? Who mills 3 and hits both a shadoll *and* a fusing name/Reino (3+2 Scheiren + 0 Merrli = 5) b. Misrepresents Labrynth's superior ability to do the same thing (Arias is at 3 who sets big welcome or welcome from hand and makes them activatable, cooclock + Changdra/Stovie does the same thing, and if what's-her-face hits the field while you have no chainables they quite literally epidemic or dbarrier you, let alone any shifter deck in the format, and C. Was already covered in the video conceptually, under the point that powerful effects are archetype locked and relatively unique. Sheesh.
IshizuLament player 1: "So, you playing same type of deck as me." IshizuLament player 2: "Tsk!" IshizuLament player 1: "MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! ..." IshizuLament player 2: "ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ..."
0:30 A new card pushing out an older card isn't automatically power creep. If the old card is so far below the power curve that nobody plays it and the new card isn't ABOVE the power curve, that's not power creep.
They have to be as good or better otherwise they wont be used competitively and getting exactly as good is Very hard. Also even if in a vacuum card power level remained the same versatility and synergy would increase creating power creep that way
That's what Shadowverse Evolve is mostly doing. The power scale crept up very slowly and when it seems like something is one or two cards away from being way too good they'll shift to something new until other classes catch up. People generally enjoy swapping over to new archetypes since they do different things instead of being the same thing but more powerful every set. Shifting over to the novelty rail has been a great strategy.
I play MTG standard and the way Sheoldred and invoke despair warped a meta was insane. Any deck even if it was a 3 color would run those 2 cards and it was brutal. Invoke despair was eventually banned but Sheoldred was still a card you always have to need an out to or your opponents just wins by default.
Good video! Very evenhanded, and I think you're right that card games will need exciting and powerful new cards printed every set to survive. Pokemon's rules overhaul sounds very interesting--my main game is Magic and the play/draw disparity has definitely been discussed a lot. Some kind of rules change to slow down the player on the play would be nice.
I find it really fun how playing different formats really informs the power of a card. For example I play commander in mtg so solitude is pretty bad as it’s mana and evoke cost are extremely high compared to STP or PTE but in standard I can see how the evoke cost is much less expensive on the deck
For me, the worst aspect of power creep in hearthstone is that as cards got stronger, the game became less fun. It's like it lost any sense of identity and enjoyment in exchange for ever more ridiculous uninspired cards
Going from Magic to One Piece was like a breath of fresh air. The amount of space for art on each card felt like unfocusing my eyes after a year of strain. The game will definitely face its own problems with power and complexity creep so I'm going to enjoy this while I can.
One piece is SO good. Best designed game I think. They took the best parts of every card game and made them better. No doubt it will be the biggest tcg worldwide eventually. I especially love the life system. So, so brilliantly designed!
I really miss old Hearthstone with its minion focus. I found building a board and trading minions with the opponent to over multiple turns to be very satisfying. It wasn't absurd for a minion to stick on the board for 3 turns, and that didn't even automatically win you the game. It's what made Hearthstone unique compared to other card games and I'm sad that they went into a different direction.
i dont really understand this sentiment maybe because im a newer player? every single paladin midrange tempo deck has been about board control till you get enough mana to buff your board to start going face, elemental mage is about board, evolve shaman cares about minions, pirate demon hunter cares about minions aswell and board based combat, all of these decks that are viable routinely go against each other and going 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 is the way you win each of these matchups, is that not what you talk about?
@@muditjain4024 Its simply nostalgia. Players say this all the time, but when blizz launched a "classic" hearthstone, it bombed so hard that it was pretty much only bots on ladder. It is a finished format too, everyone already knows what is the best, and as said in the video, it had very little variation besides your draws. Matchups are won or lost if you draw flame imp on turn one or wild growth on curve. Most of meta decks of classic hs weren't minion focused too, freezing mage, ramp druid, miracle rogue, to name a few, weren't minion focused at all.
@CassianoAlanCanossa because classic was the absolute base version of the game and got boring quick as there was only like 3 or 4 decks viable, the game was best between naxxramas and then peaked with Whispers of the old Gods, it's gone slowly downhill after that
Hey man, is everything alright? You sometimes breath in a very quick succession, like you breath in after part of a sentence, say 2 - 3 words and then breath in again. This happens super often. E.g. 2:15 "This way, powercreep can feel kind of draining on players, *breath* either feeling like *breath* all of their old cards basically *breath* serve no purpose after new cards come out to replace them *breath* [...]" This is just one example, it happens a lot. If this is not a condition (and I apologize in advance if it is, I don't want this to be critique of an health issue or something), try to listen to some professional speakers and see where they make their breathing pauses. Also try to take longer breaths and not these quick ones, so you can say a lot more on a breath, because you are able to do that. This makes the (in music this is called:) phrasing a little more coherent and better to listen to, instead of having these short pauses, that are often times (not always) awkward, because of the short breaths. Again, if this is an actual condition that you're struggling with, I'm sorry. This isn't supposed to be a thing of "Skill issue, now get healthy or you can't do UA-cam anymore" or something like that. I was just geniunely curious and trying to give some advice.
Rotation is a powerful tool to mitigate the rate of powercreep. If there is a rotating format then you can powercreep certain aspects of the game at a time and then when you cycle back around to that again the older strong cards of that kind will have rotated out. Over time with magic for example we can see that with Llanowar Elves "power-creeping" (in the context of Standard) other mana ramp multiple different times over the years. It also in general gives an additional motivation to keep up with new cards aside from just power. Draft and sealed environments are the same way. You can design large numbers of cards that are all weak in constructed formats if they make for a fun limited environment.
One important thing in Pokemon was the power of Dark Energy that gave you +10 damage to attacks. When your pokemon had 60HP a +10 was massive. The game progressively move to higher HP pokemons to reduce the impact of cards like Dark Energy and Plus Power.
Hi SodaTCG, I am getting more and more interested into the game theory (not the Nash etc one, the theory behind games themselves) and its relation to economical health. Can you suggest any textbook or other kind of sources to learn about this topic? Thank you very much for your content!
14:45 i used to play pokemon tcg back when all the rule changes to the first turn happened. first i cant use supporters, then suddenly they remove any turn 1 restriction at all and give the player going 1st a major advantage, then a few years later they add an attack restriction going 1st and add a coinflip to a powerful trainer card that was a major centerpiece of the format for 3 years. the amount of change with every new generation was too much as a kid to keep up with so i ended up quitting when that happened around XY release (also because the deck i just invested the little money i had as a kid in was a pretty fast and agressive deck that relied on attacking turn 1 and abusing that trainer card to easily knock out weak benched basic pokemon and grab extra prize cards thanks to an ability LOL). apparently they re-added the supporter rule another few years later on too lmao. i went to a prerelease once many years later to support our new local game store at the time (it still died a year later due to covid restrictions :skull:) and i was struggling the whole time trying to remember what the current rules of going 1st even were, because i had seen so many different iterations in the past when i still played.
It’s been no supporter no attacking turn one for a little while now, I don’t see them changing it any time soon. The restrictions encourage different decks to actively wanting second or first into specific matchups, rather than everyone wanting first. Sometimes the meta swings one way or the other depending on what’s good, but right now your choice, and ability to deal with it when you don’t have a choice, have a lot of skill and nuance built into it.
It would have been really interesting to see your take on Cardfight Vanguard. The powercreep has become so bad not just once, but twice to the point where the company had to soft-reboot the game on both occasions, resulting in different format splits and the game constantly becoming feature creeped each and every instance.
Vanguard powercreep is a bit out of hand - every time a new product in D format releases, the entire metagame shifts. And they release new sets so fast. At the moment, it seems to be in a good place but for a year there the competitive format was just a rotating door of “Top 3” decks. Because of the way Guard Values and Attack Points scale, they could just simply inflate the numbers to keep complexitycreep in check but for some reason they have elected not to do it.
When i was 17, i decided to join a local yugioh tournament that was free entry. I hadnt played in about 5 years. I lost on turn 2 because my opponent was able to instant counter the spells i tried to play, search their deck twice for specific cards, summon 4 monsters, destroy my monster with an effect, and then attack my lifepoints directly for 12,000 points.
I wish Buddyfight was included in this video. By it’s end basically every monster and item had “cannot be destroyed by effects, you cannot take damage from effect”
Dragon Ball Super Card Game is one of the best examples of how power creep affected that game with the early sets being slow and costing a lot of energy to play things to later sets basically having every card be free or 1-2 energy to get some insane effects
I actually like where Magic's power/complexity creep is right now. There are a handful of problem cards here and there, but most formats have a wider field of viable decks than a decade ago when I started and there's a higher power floor on cards which has made budget building more viable. I think MH3 was a good sign for power creep in the game, since excluding Nadu the power level was pretty manageable despite the Modern Horizons sets being the 'lets put all the busted cards here' sets. My favorite card that shows off what I like about Magic's current power and complexity creep is The Modern Age from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. It's a 2/3 enchantment creature with flying for 2 in blue that also double loots at common. It's not breaking tournaments or anything, but I've loved the card in Standard as a role player in graveyard-focused decks.
As a Pokémon player, I don't think power creep is much of a problem in the game. Numbers have inflated since the old days, but in recent years the power levels stay pretty steady.
The pokemon damage output is also scaled well with the hp values now so it really doesn't feel very crept. Also literally everything is playable to some degree even cradily go silly turbo
High numbers, but everything scales accordingly. Means the prize card system is actually good, since it has aged well. Looking at YGO's life point system on the other hand...
@@AoyagiMeiYugioh is more about how many negates and hand traps you can assemble rather than life points lol. Which isnt terrible. The resources keeping you alive are variable and have a lot of weird interactions. You do have to make choices on which tools in your toolkit to utilize
@@danielhicks1824 The LP acts as a timer on how many turns you get to draw outs or pieces to make a comeback play. Big boards are too easy to assemble these days.
Every time I see a picture of Sheoldred it makes me glad I stopped playing Magic nearly 20 years ago. Feels like the creativity of combining cards to win is gone and you just need 1-2 powerhouse cards now to likely win.
Never played Pokemon but it sounds like a fascinating TCG; I'm starting to understand why it's so popular in JP. MTG & Yugioh both have inherent basic Power Creep, some newer TCGs I've played lean heavily towards Complexity Creep which I think is a more interesting way to go about it: in essence it's just fancier Power Creep imo as various cards get pushed out of the meta for more efficient options.
"Power creep is required to keep people playing your game." Yeah, that must be why no one ever plays Monopoly or chess or uno or phase 10 any more. They didn't power creep enough. Power Creep doesn't serve to "keep people *playing*" the game, it serves to keep people /buying/ the card board equivalent of a live service game. ...or in Hearthstone's case, just a live service game.
Dude, uno, chess, and monopoly have been power crept lmao. Chess less so than the others, but you have how many different versions/gimiks of uno and monopoly? Electronic monopoly with fake credit cards? Uno with "new" cards or the one that will spit the deck at you for some reason. As for chess, the "powercreep" usually is in wacky and zanny online games.
@@TheClone37 Gimmicks like automatic banking and different names for the properties and art for the board are not "power creep". That's like saying the basic lands in MtG are power crept because they have different art. Absurd. Chess variants aren't power creep. The world chess organization (whatever its name is) doesn't play them. It play chess. No single variant (or heck, all of them combined) of chess even comes within a galaxy of the popularity of stock-standard chess that's been played for thousands of years.
The bigger problem I have with yugioh and why I stopped playing was the tendency to ban older cards/decks that were being played and seeing some decent results only to print smth much more obnoxious and op.. then they just do that over and over so if you want to stay competitive you have to dump hundreds/thousands into the game every banlist unless your deck got lucky.
I want to get back into a CCG, but I’m not really sure which one to put my time into these days. I originally got WAY into The Elder Scrolls Legends back in the day, and absolutely loved everything about it. Then it went into maintenance mode, around the thine LOR was about to come out. I tried Hearthstone for a short while, but absolutely hated how hard it was to build a usable deck without dropping a ton of money. Then I tried GWENT and enjoyed it for a time, but it didn’t keep me coming back. Then LOR came out and I was hooked on it for several months and then dropped off a few years ago. Now, I’m just trying to decide whether or not to jump back into LOR or try something else.
12:16 you forgot to mention, that part of the trainers become supporters (and you can play only 1 supporter per turn), and part of them became items, which can be used multiple times.
In the case of Naud in Magic, commander playtesters hated the "old" Nadu, which gave everything flash (spell speed 2 in Yugioh terms I believe). So they've put that effect and didn't bother to test, likely for time crunch reasons
I like Magic's powercreep. By making new mechanics instead of just bigger numbers, suddenly cards from 20-25 years ago have relevant use cases, like how Delirium added a huge buff to gimmicky Mill decks by buffing the cards on the field instead of using Mill to tutor your most powerful cards with Graveyard removal.
I know you kinda gloss over it at the end (to save time presumably), but the Sableye meta in Pokemon was absolutely nuts. Between the BW rules going into effect and then subsequently getting changed to fix it, there were competitive tournaments played at the local level (City Champs, don't know if they are still called that now) and there were three types of decks you saw people play: Sableye decks, decks built specifically to counter Sableye (e.g. Machamp), and "normal" decks played by less competitive players who got run over by Sableye most of the time. There's a great video from that 2011 here on UA-cam by Jwittz (ua-cam.com/video/7JHOqFi9Yf0/v-deo.html) who walks through a typical opening turn for the deck and it's still insane to me that it was ever possible to play the Pokemon TCG like that.
Yugioh right now is based on engines, little archetype packages that can mash within each other and create a deck. The issue is that in reality, there are only 3 engines and a bunch of bad decks that can't win against them. Fiendsmith, Snake-eyes and the new Yubel package.
Hey man, really like your videos, they are fun and really interesting. May I give you a small pint of constructive critizism tho? I think you need to slow down with your speed at which you speak at. It feels like its a rush for you and one can bearly keep up sometimes and one can hear you breathing in really heavy sometimes. I feel like your video ideas are great and you explain everything nicely but personally i think if you improve your speaking skill in your videos a little bit it can push these videos to the next level. I hope this finds you well. Thx for the great videos.
Digimon feels like it's had so much bad power creep, it's kinda crazy. Especially with blast digivolution coming out, the game changed a lot in only a few years of being out.
Shadowfist is interesting because even though it's a paper game, they aren't afraid to issue errata and reprint cards with different text. So a lot of the broken "alpha" cards have been reworked with higher cost or additional restrictions to be more fair. For example, the "political favors" faction has a lot of ways to gain mana that don't involve lands. One card lets you steal an unspent mana from target player. Has decent counterplay if your opponent is playing Ascended you should try not to have unspent mana floating around. Except on the first turn of the game. It was such a feelbad moment when the ascended player stole your only mana on turn 1 before you could play anything that the card now reads "target an opponent who has completed at least one turn."
@SodaTCG Great video! Just some constructive criticism on your audio. Try reading from a script a little more often when doing these long form videos where you are talking a lot. It helps with your pacing of breath if you know how many words your going to say instead of breathing in after a long sentence. And it will help your videos sound more professional in my opinion. Otherwise great content so far.
You should have titled this Part 1 of Powercreep because you only covered four games instead of "every" card game. At least you confirmed my wonder if power creep came in how decks are built as well as individual cards. I've got a feeling power creep is getting into Elestrals in the form of the starter decks instead of individual cards. As with any card game, certain cards are staples while others are less significant unless the deck is designed for them.
I think that power creep inevitable as much as it is the easiest way to give players more things to do and the top most reason I believe is profits. Players may not buy new cards if they’re not stronger, but players do buy new cards if they do new things. The best example (for now while the pvp mode still exists) is Legends of Runeterra. The power climbs very slowly only so it can give specific strategies new tools to play better or decks that are doing fine more and new effects to play with. Legends of Runeterra is also not afraid to release new, different mechanics in every set, ie key words. LoR only had a year’s worth of pvp content planned because the roguelite mode that was added later in development makes more money so enjoy a game with simple cards and lots of ways to play while you can.
Yugioh doesn't have power creep, it has power sprint
You could say it’s… “Rushing Recklessly”
@@RJV-s3lNot bad, but i think it is in a "space" of "chaos"
Well at least the power creep has slowed down. Hard to power creep a consistent turn one win
@@antarath517until tearlament dropped and full comboed you on your turn when you go first
@@jamismiscreant7514and thank god it did the first fun format and only one since 2020
"Speed and power must be kept in check" meanwhile Yu-Gi-Oh cranking it up laughing maniacally
I always liked the idea of making a master rule of limiting either (and/or); monster effects per turn, special summons per turn maximum negations on field.
That way game is more interactive for two players, no solitaire 15-mins turn with 10 omninegates/floodgates, and many forgotten archetypes could see see a light through the game.
(This just an idea that can be developed much better)
@@casoch3279 I think we need something like a format of only cards with 15 words or less
@@OlgaZuccati lol, that could work, except it would be hard to know which are those, Edison format works too but that prevents modern cards
@OlgaZuccati most of the most broken effects historically were always the ones with the simplest effects because it meant they had no restrictions. Pot of Greed is about as simple as an effect can get and would also be ran in every deck with no exceptions. There is not a single deck that would not want to run it, not even infernity, the deck that wants 0 cards in hand.
Yu-Gi-Oh *Reprints Max C twice*
Yugioh old school: set 1 monster and 1 face down card
New Yugioh: with this 1 card i can literally play solitaire
Future Yugioh: with this 1 card I can wreck entire families
Future YGO will involve winning games before you play that
...for 20 mins, and you will enjoy it 🤣
I remember back in some 2005, we had thought that Cydra was broken... Then saw saw DAD and the synchros. Then i saw the F link and i decided to quit 😂
maxx c should be at 3 to keep solitaire decks under control
its like how in vintage mtg, where every deck can potentially FTK, there are certain pieces of interaction (like force of will) that can, when used properly, completrly stop an enemy from winning on turn 1
i always had a love hate relationship with yugioh's powercreep. konami always manages to pump out the most elaborate
decks/archetypes that break the game in interesting ways, but everyone including konami can see that this isn't sustainable. they always try to set back the clock with new formats or games like duel links, speed duels, or rush duel but they all inevitably run into the same issues. this makes me worried about the longevity of the game, especially considering how difficult it is to onboard new players onto the game.
Powercreep in yugioh has gone so bad that decks are experiencing convergent evolution.
As a former yugioh player my problem with modern yugioh is honestly that every modern deck plays the exact same way, often times even culminating in the exact same boss monsters with the only difference between rogue and top tier decks being the number of disruptions they can play through and their consistency. Gone is the contrast between say a HAT player summoning myrmeleo, search for bottomless, set 3 or 4 pass, and then his opponent tries to go off with mythic rulers on the next turn. Or a bujin player trying to play the whole game with never summoning more than once or twice vs a sylvan deck that swarms the board and makes multiple high rank XYZ. These decks were so different but saw play at the same time. Decks actually had identity back in the day, now they are all the same. 2014-2015 was peak yugioh
The recurring problem with YGO is that it tries to diversify decks with archetypes and themes for years, yet those builds centers arround the same boss monsters and counters. Why you want to play Deck A to end with Baronne and/or Apollousa, when Deck B does the same more consistently? Why you want to play Gate Guardian with all its new support and unique boss monsters, when the rest of decks out there are summoning they same big monster leading the board anyways?
Lately they're trying to avoid generic summoning conditions, as they banned those two examples in some formats. Some Decks like Memento, Labrynth or Vaalmonica are good examples of unique builds that tries to stay on their own playstyle, but they can still add just a few tech options without losing their whole identity.
Now its been dificult to keep the old ones
@@YGOstratPlayerthis is simply not true. konami this year banned all generic endboard monsters. a runick white forest players endboard is a diabell and 3-4 runick spells. a yubel endboard is phantom, varudas, rage, desirae. a lab endboard (2 lab players got top 32 at a 1800 ycs this week) is 5 set cards pass. a ritual beast endboard is a collosus, ulti-galli, and protos. no endboard is the same every deck has dif lines and point of interaction
@@neroneroren6788baronne and appo are banned for a reason in the tcg to avoid generic endboards
"Power creep is required for games to keep up" sounds like a self-fufilling prophecy.
"Power creep is required for profit margins" though.. It sounds more.. hm.. descriptive.
In a grand sense, power creep is happening any time new cards are relevant to non-rotating formats, but it's not necessary for the average power level of new material to be higher than the average power level of old material. I do think this video misses that distinction.
Yeah, I just want the game to be interesting, I don't keep playing a game because I want it to get more ridiculous. I mean, look at Yu-Gi-Oh and how it's not even remotely the same game anymore.
it is amazing how game like FAB handles this thing. In their logic if a hero with that weapon is really successful that means it will win a lot of tournaments, collect a lot of points and will rotate to legends faster and will not be legal in tournaments :D
The first statement is more that if none of the new cards are power creeping, there's no reason to buy them. You can argue it's all about profits, which is a part of it, but if no one is buying new cards, the game is dead, regardless of the profits the company makes. In that situation with no power creep, new cards would just become collectible cardboard, while tournaments would become increasingly dominated by specific archetypes as the meta stops shifting and people get more and more of the best cards since they've been out the longest.
@derangedberger Right, but that can happen without intent, especially if things are already fairly balanced. It doesn't necessitate 'pushing' cards, let alone pushing the entire set. This is why themed content is so important: Yes, if every single set was not just average in power level, but also a complete mix of every theme, there would be little motion, but in a large design space, you can focus new products in different regions of that design space.
There is a distinction to be made between power creep and complexity creep. Both happen in all games but some learn more towards one than the other.
In Magic and Yugioh, the average card has gotten more text on them over time but in Pokémon, by just upping the numbers a lot, cards haven't truly gotten that much more complicated.
That is boring though, pokemon has sadly often repeated, specific ability or attacks and makes it so kinda boring sometimes.
Like if you go throught multiple generations you often see very often similarities between pokemon or what specific types can do.
In MTG case, there was old cards with complicated and long texts of rules, but in the end it was just one effect. Nowadays, cards with lot of texts do 2 ~ 3 different things rulewise. Sometimes they are value, engine, and finisher all in one card.
Pokemon is easily the most balanced/best game out of all the TCG's. Every deck gets to play, every deck has its own playstyle, every deck does what other card games consider absurd like drawing 9-14 cards per turn, every deck has tech cards to win and outplay opponents and on top of that it's the CHEAPEST TCG out there by miles.
Pokemon should introduce hand traps. Imagine how much that could open up the game.
@@Flatfootsy .... it's not even the cheapest of the 4 games in the video, let alone of all TCGs, though? Hearthstone has tens of thousands of players who have never spent a cent. That is fundamentally not possible for a paper card game, even if you are gifted a bunch of cards, somebody paid for them, wizards tpc and konami got their piece for it. MTGA and Duel Links/Master duel also host free players. Pokemon is the odd one out in this context, tbh. It's literally the only one that you MUST pay to play. How does that work out to be cheapest in your head?
One thing I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the Yugioh section is hard once per turns. They put a very clear limiter on what you can and cannot do by making sure copies of your card can't activate their effect
It would be especially interesting because Yu-Gi-Oh has the very rare trait of reverse powercreep, where the release of new cards can increase the viability of older cards (either by design as nostalgia bait or accidentally due to some niche interaction). This is especially the case with older cards that lack once per turn limits on their effects or have some powerful effect with a cost that is now no longer detrimental.
@qweqwe5609 that is what I like about yugioh. A card like Blue Eyes White Dragon can go from basically worthless to meta relevant with the release of new support cards
@@qweqwe5609it's why set rotation is dumb.
They dont make a difference, the result is the same, combo of on your first turn and negate all the opponent’s turn
HOPT is yugioh's "mana system"
Complexity creep in YuGiOH has reached insane levels, making the onboard game really hostile to new players since it became like a MOBA (League or Dota) where the only way to improve is knowledge and the way to earn it (because of how many cards/characters exist) is to play A LOT of games to face a lot of the decks and cards that exist but also how the mechanics of the game works in general and for those specific archetypes, and in the process you are going to get demolished over and over again, that makes the game overwhelming to learn and most people won't be able to take that many loses to just grasp the general idea of how YuGiOh plays.
Not to mention the 'rulings' and card text in Yugioh are absolutely dogshit awful. For example: If/When timing and missing activations. The difference between "select" "target" and how cards effectively target "at resolution" but because it doesn't say target it doesn't actually "target". The lack of PSCT and the need for writing entire sentences like "Cannot be targeted or destroyed by card effect, battle, traps, spells, whatever" instead of just saying "indestructible."
Yugioh is a fucking mess and a pile of dogshit of a card game- and that's from someone who joined during the then "end times" of Spellbook vs Druler and played up until now. That's not even touching on powercreep and monetization I only talked about PSCT and Yugioh's lack of. Nevermind the lack of supported formats outside of advanced (standard) and Edison alone.
I’m fine with having random words mean different things as it’s an expression of skill, though I can see how that’d be an issue for someone getting into the game. There are other formats, like duel links and rush. I have no defense for the cost asides from its way better in the ocg, and to play master duel. Also power creep is fun, and I’d say that Konami has helt it pretty well.
And once you do reach the point where you understand enough to feel competitive you also realize it's simply not worth the effort since the game is anti-fun. The only people who actively enjoy the gameplay are sadists.
Yugioh actually has official, 1st party articles explaining the comprehensive psct they have and if you understand it, like 99% of "rulings" questions immediately evaporate. Keywords are fun, and good design, but if you read the psct article, you will almost never have a ruling question for the rest of your time playing the game @Flatfootsy
@@Flatfootsy Well the confusing wording were always a problem especially in the old days some cards were not even clear they target or not. Really good example is Sakuretsu Armor which come up a lot back in the days cuz it says nothing about targeting however IT DOES and you just had to know...
Well there is some support for old formats they have official Time Wizard format buuuut yeah these events are rare and supported that much. GOAT is supported mostly by community (that's what i play btw) and not really by Konami.
It is true that Powercreep is unavoidable but it can be properly managed and somewhat mitigated. The problem with Magic recently is that there is so much product and that just makes us feel the effects of powercreep more often.
I agree. Powercreep should be something that happens slowly. If i look at some new cards i buy and they are better in every way than the cards i used to play 4 years ago than so be it. But sometimes in MTG you buy a new Commander Deck or make a Standard Deck and 2 Sets Later half of it is outdated and considered "not that good" anymore. Horrible feel.
But also very clearly the specific cards that are power creept are very obviously designed to be broken and force you to buy them
The problem is that manabased cardgames just dont have a lot of design space as the gameplay is so linear. Only so many ways to print a 2drop, a removal spell or a draw spell yeah it can be really unique but it will still be what it is fundamentally.
So you just keep playing the same formats in different coats of paint.
MtG will never evolve thanks to set rotation, it will always be more of the same but slightly different.
not just the amount of product, but also the fire design philosophy. powercreep used to be slow and gradual.
a year and a half ago we were arguing about monastery switftspear being too strong for standard, now its barely even making the cut for a playable red onedrop
@@Abdojtj THIS is so real 💀 the fall off of supposedly ban worthy cards like swiftspear, liliana, sheoldred and haughty djinn needs to be studied. The Powercreep in Standard is stronger than it ever has been before.
I stopped playing hearthstone when they started to constantly print cards that are "strictly better" than others, I just hate that
I understand that powercreep is inevitable, but at least in digital you could update older cards to make them on the same power level as new releases instead of just forgetting about them, that is something marvel snap is doing so far and I quite like it
I would argue power creep isnt required after a game has become notably complex. Once you have enough interesting mechanics and unique cards, just printing new ones that change interactions and the meta, is enough to attract and keep players.
Powercreep in Pokemon has really not been bad at all the past 2 generations. It’s just the Tag Team fuckup that really created a huge problem, and the designers have slowly been deescalating since
3 prize Pokemon were a big mistake imo. Late sun/moon into swsh format is where my interest slowly started to fade.
@@DarkMarkGaming94 Agreed. I stopped playing for a good 4-5 years and only came back last year. The meta is really good right now
I feel like I missed the memo then. The power creep has come from the energy acceleration. Welder used to be considered overpowered and only somewhat "acceptable" because fire was in a weaker place. Now, attaching an extra energy would borderline be considered a bad card when you have cards digging for/attaching 3 energies at a time.
@@P4brotagonistGood point! Again, I haven't played for a while but I remember ADP decks being able to consistently get an Altered Creation tag team attack off on turn one going second mainly due to energy acceleration and moving a steel energy from Zacian V to ADP.
Also I might be wrong but weren't you able to play Welder on turn one until they changed the rules regarding supporter cards?
@DarkMarkGaming94 Oh god instant PTSD from just reading "ADP." Yeah you could use them first turn but that got changed. After ADP/Zacian they really reigned in the energy acceleration. Heck it was considered insane when they printed a psychic pokemon that let you dig and attach psychic energy, but you had to go second to even use it. Now, you have like 3-4 energy a turn with damn near infinite discard recursion.
The examples he gives for powercreep are pretty wild. I don't think that many people would think of Solutide as a powercrept version of Path to Exile.
Especially considering swords to ploweshers exists
He talked about 4 different TCGs, which is more than what the average player knows about. He doesn't need to be 100% accurate to illustrate a general point. Don't miss the forests from the trees!
@@drago939393I guess he was accurate about the other two since with Magic and Hearthstone the examples didn't make much sense at all.
@@psynque His Yugioh examples are not exactly great either, and somehow managed to miss out on the biggest elephant in the room being Tearlaments, then again, he clearly didn't plan on going very indepth into each game. He mentions boss monsters but failed to actually put up any picture of semi-modern boss monsters, just grabbing the iconic anime ace cards from each summoning type. It's like instead of Nadu and Sheoldred it's Chandra and Gideon instead, very famous in the story, but not actually very relevant in terms of the topic.
(Except for Firewall, but he is talking about Boss Monsters, Firewall is not an endboard boss monster, you'd grab say Borreload for that. Also, his conclusion is technically wrong as well as Firewall in particular received an Errata, this is the other way out for Yugioh cards, however it's indeed less common, but it is another way.)
its not quite literally strictly better but it can be played for no mana
2:28 Another side effect of powercreep, especially in eternal formats, is having duplicates in your deck. If you can only put 4 copies of a card in your deck, but they print a stronger version, put all 8 in the deck and now you've doubled your chance of drawing the card, although copies 5-8 are slightly weaker, sometimes that's worth it. Similar to that is a concept called critical mass, which is something devs want to avoid or someone might just make a deck with 24 lands and 36 copies of effectively the same card. (Magic in this scenario)
Which is also the most likely way for the power of a card to be underestimated by their makers
This happens CONSTANTLY in Commander. It's kinda one of the reasons the "one of every card" thing doesn't have the same impact that it used to
@@nooneknows3520 you mean I can have 13 jeweled lotus in my deck? Lol
So I cast Orim’s Chant. On your next turn, Revel in Silence. Next turn, gonna cast the OG silence. You tried to mess with my silence? Lemme counter whatever you did with Render Silent. Now lemme snapcaster mage, so I can silence you AGAIN.
@@wonkybiscuit2760lol
The powercreep in Yugioh is immense, but the way Yugioh works allows them to go and apply that power creep to old decks, even decks that were bad on release 12 years ago and make them suddenly an amazing deck. The current top deck in the TCG uses Yubel cards, that were previously a deck of 3 hard to summon 0/0 monsters with battle related effects (battle is typically seen as irrelevant to many players in Yugioh). Now the deck is an absolute menace, so they might have taken it a bit too far in this case, but they support old decks relatively often.
The beauty of Yugioh is extremely bad old cards from 20 yrs ago that never saw play suddenly becomes spicy meta threat and catches people off guard winning tournaments. Mushroom man 2 in kashtira meta, "Numen erat testudo" in spright meta etc... yugioh has printed too many cards and pack fillers for every situation imaginable eventually some of them see play without the help of powercreep
I always liked the idea of making a master rule of limiting either (and/or); monster effects per turn, special summons per turn maximum negations on field.
That way game is more interactive for two players, no solitaire 15-mins turn with 10 omninegates/floodgates, and many forgotten archetypes could see see a light through the game.
(This just an idea that can be developed much better)
yubel genuinely gives me some hope. but then again dark magician and blue eyes
@@samw6414 blue eyes is meta now with the newest support
@@casoch3279if you allow your opponent to set up anywhere above 2 omni negates on their first turn, you're either just bad, or drew no hand traps (which also might be your fault, depending what your deck looks like)
It's interesting how all of the big 3, mtg, ygo, and pokemon, started with powerful spell cards (trainers) and simple, stat blocky monsters... then flipped it to have powerful monsters with powerful effects
I recently booted up mtgarena after not having played for a few years. It was almost impossible to jump back in as every single card now has a wall of text that needs to be read, understood, and memorised. I was exhausted after the first few turns.
@@KenseiRaptor Some sets are better. Like this new foundations set or old core sets. But yea, every set needs to have new mechanics.
Clicks on video titled "How Bad is Powercreep in Every Card Game?"
Opening line: "This is my video about how bad powercreep is in every card game."
Me: "Excellent, this is my kind of video"
Yugioh back in the day graveyard actually meant graveyard and banished zone meant it’s out for good. Now even banished zone is like our back pocket just ready to activate effects to counter opponent and graveyard is second hand but easier to access than our actual hand
I love it 😍
This one will be a little long so i can explain some things. The biggest power creep i have been a part of (besides yugioh) was when Kaijudo introduced the set Dragonstrike Infernus. The release of that set alone made all previous sets worthless aside from staples. The set introduced 5 dragon boss monsters, 1 for each color in the game.
Light gave you more life and control, Fire did huge damage, blew up stuff and locked your opponent out of a good chunk of cards, Nature gave the opportunity for a free body any time you gained mana, Dark did big damage and revived creatures that had died and Water left your opponent's board frozen so they couldn't attack.
In addition to these dragons, they all had a corresponding bird that all had the ability to make all dragons cost 1 less mana to play and the ability stacked, but all provided an additional effect like draw a card everytime a dragon is played, if I dragon would die, send this bird instead as blanket protection for all of them or give all of you dragons Slayer (death touch).
In addition to that, they introduced a card called Herald of Infernus. The creature cost 5 mana to play but if you had the Water and Light bird out, it would only cost 3 because of their effect, you would draw when you played it and it had protection from destruction once. If Herald were to win a battle against another creature, you get to play any dragon in your hand for free, no matter the cost. To get around the ability, games turned into a stand still where the opponent wouldn't attack because then they would be giving the player free giant dragons. So dragons would play cards that forced their opponent to be open to attacking to get the effect of Herald.
There was another dragon in the set called Lyra, The Blazing Sun. It only cost 1 more than Herald to play and when you did, you got to tap an opposing creature down and it didn't untap at the start of their next turn. Since the summoning sickness of Herald had worn off, if could swing in and start dropping big dragons.
Finally, the set introduced the only card to ever be banned in the game. Bottle of Wishes was a water spell card the cost 5 mana to play from hand, however, it had Shield Blast, meaning if it was in your shields (your life) and attacked, you go the effect for free. This card let you suffle your deck and reveal the top card. If it was a non-evolution creature or a spell that cost 7 or less, you got to play it for free. If not, the card is added to your hand. If broken on turn 2, there is a good chance you could get a card out essentially 7-8 turns sooner than you should and the game was basically over.
The game would eventually introduce Rotation and everything from Dragonstrike and before we're removed from the game.
During the final tournament of the games life, Wizards had a side tournament with Open Format allowed. Only rule was you can only play 1 Bottle of Wishes in your deck. Despite having at least 12 sets of cards to chose from, Dragons made up 3 of the top 8. Not only that, they won the entire event.
Game will be dead for 10 years this year. Not many people remember because it was an attempt to reboot Duel Master but handled wrong. We still have a small community out there and frequently have tournaments in our server. They had at least 3 more years if the game planned out. Shame we will never get to see what that future would be like.
Flesh and Blood recently went through a power de-creep. The heroes from older sets like Monarch and Tales of Aria were busted to hell and back, but the way that rotation works in that game, those heroes got themselves banned eventually. Now all the more modern, less overtuned heroes are in the spotlight and the game doesn't feel quite so crazy anymore
Fab card design philosophy are on a different level but no one wants a lick of that when they're already entrenched in their own tcg. As a 70/30 player collector Ive sold all my Pokemon, vanguard, yugioh and most of my MTG collections to pivot into fab.
How vanguard powercrept out their older generation cards was criminal and I can't touch another Japanese TCG because of that
Why is your voice so calming and smooth. Like bruh, lowkey addictive.
Drinking game idea: whenever “random” is mentioned when talking about hearthstone.
The idea sounds fun but i rather stay alive :D
Praise Yogg 🙏
I love the way these feel like short presentations, almost like a class project but with the highest quality. Fascinating to learn about the other TCGs than just the one I play and used to play; keep at it, and I will keep watching.
Powercreep is an unavoidable reality of any game that has regular updates, especially if they're collectable in some fashion.
Dominion would like to have a word. Jokes aside, it is not collectable and I see that as the bigger factor
What about horizontal scaling instead? Create new mechanics and ways to win, that are not better or worst than existing one, just different?
Might not be feasable, but imo it should be the goal
@12Tsurugi Horizontal scaling is probably the ideal situation, at least from a player perspective, it just is going to take a lot of very good playtesting to get that the way it should be. It's a challenge to keep a new mechanic from being so strong it ends up being vertical anyway, or not strong enough that people don't even bother with it.
@@12Tsurugi in an idealistic world it is the goal, but honestly how much you can make it absolutely horizontal all the way while keeping it fun? it is just a fact that some mechanics in all card game or even any game are far easier to break and abuse, which is what competitive players are looking and strive to achieve. even if you can maybe maintain it for a while, oversight will happen, and the spike will arrive. the slope of power going up, while noticable and maybe can be the starting point of "game gone bad", can also bring in a lot of fun as well. being with many mechanic of similar power might be fun for a while, but at the end, meta will form, and some might fall off entirely without being able to be saved, and those that enjoys mechanics that dies the easiest wont have fun anymore
Didn't he say that neat verbatim on the video
Yugioh, being an eternal wild format, has the unique advantage of "If everything is broken, then nothing is."
Yeah, ygo and it's not even close
Yugioh is a fascinating game when it comes to power creep.
Semi casual - rogue tier decks are fascinating decks that use a massive variety of mechanics in different ways that are on a similar level and lead to varied, in depth, back and forth games
The problem is the consistent release of one or two decks that warp the entire game to be just about them.
Tearlaments and Fire Format are key examples, but even things like Kashtira which never became the sole dominant deck, are so far and above even things that are printed later and have locks/restrictions which they just simply don’t that it makes the vast majority of decks in Yugioh never see play
I was fine with the fire format, as there was a lot of decks that you could play asides from snake eyes, also I liked snake eyes. Just, they’ve been around for wayy too long.
Just because nobody bothers to power rank all the rogue decks doesnt make them equal. There will always be a best deck and a lot of rogue decks are really oppressive if they ever were the best deck. Remember a key design philosophy of konami is to just give older decks some floodgate boss to make them good again.
I always liked the idea of making a master rule of limiting either (and/or); monster effects per turn, special summons per turn maximum negations on field.
That way game is more interactive for two players, no solitaire 15-mins turn with 10 omninegates/floodgates, and many forgotten archetypes could see see a light through the game.
(This just an idea that can be developed much better)
TRUEEE i feel like yugioh Is sooo close to getting It right yet every other month you have 3-4 decks that are just objectively better then everything else and just compete with each other.
in marvel snap we are seeing power creep when you compare some cards to the vanilla stat line, before a 4 cost 6 power card was vanilla stats, so a card with a benefit at that cost, needed to have less stats, like enchantress and specially shan chi (a 4 cost 3 power destroy your opponents 10 power or more cards here) while huge payups like crossbones (a 4 cost 10 power) had a downside, now we are at the point where a 4 cost can have 7 power and no theoretical downside and be fine.
what i find interesting is "retroactive" powercreep, where a group of cards had very little effect in the meta but a single new card can push them over the edge to the point those old cards start to look overpowered for what they do, just because they gained consistency in modern times
Yeah, sounds like Ben brode
the 4-costs in snap appear to be the most volatile cards in the game right now. first symbiote spiderman and now misery, the stat lines are nuts. I know they buffed misery because she removes damage from the board but even just playing her in an empty lane feels like a strong move. Regardless of triggering on reveals again
My biggest thing is how in a ton of the ads they bragged about the game not being pay to win, but the recent cards in their battle pass have been meta defining. Agent Venom (pre the recent nerf) was insanely broken. I feel like the power creep has gotten even worse over the past few months.
Engrossing thank you for the information! Been a while since ive played any of these and its interesting to see how they're changing.
People like to focus on tag teams discussing Pokémon, but I feel people forget those early black and white years… the $30 Pokémon catcher without a coin flip, computer search as the only useable card of its kind, $80 XBall mewtwo that completely dominated nearly all formats it was part of. As bad as ADPZ may have been, those team up to cosmic eclipse days were still dynamic and affordable, and it has only gotten better since then.
Really digging your channel, keep up the good work!
I love your videos, they are do informative and educational. I only know/played Yu-gi-oh, so its great to learn how certain topics translates across TCGs.
However, I'd like to give you some feedback to try work on your cadence when narrating and explaining. You sometimes speed up to finish a sentence. Try to keep your cadence more consistent all across, but feel free to keep shifting in tone. Anyways, love your content 🙌🏻 you earned my sub :))
Great video! A little tip for future videos, try relax the pace of your narration. You sound very rushed sometimes with lots of sharp inhales. Great content and delivery though, look forward to future videos :)
Hearthstone power creep makes me the most depressed. Compared to what it used to be 6 years ago, it's so alienating to play the game.
I quit some time after they introduced rotation, and removed the pve story mode content that I paid for. They mismanaged the heck out of that game
@@-8h- Wait, they deleted PvE content you paid for?! Good grief that's so scummy... I thought Bungie were the only bungle-heads who did that.
@@PhotriusPyrelus You can still play the PvE content you bought and iirc you can still buy it nowadays but they stopped introducing more of that kind of content
Ey I want to say I really like your videos and how you talk about the context of every card game and how it's different, have you considered to expand the games that you include? I would really love to see you include Flesh and blood in all this analysis that you do
Keep the good work!❤
What a great video, have played pokemon, yugioh, mtg and hearthstone all in the past so this kind of video is perfect for me
You are steadily becoming my favorite TCG-tuber. Keep up the good work and informative videos.
Subscribed to make the number go up! Also, I'd love to see some comparisons to Flesh and Blood with this too -- it's a very new TCG (only released in 2020 I believe?) but it's already had a few cards banned because they made certain decks just way too oppressive in the meta
Power creep in Magic was kept in check due to its rotating formats. But it has been getting worse since they started designing primarily for Commander which is a non-rotating format.
Two aspects about powercreep that weren’t mentioned: niche filling and conditional effects. They can overlap but are different.
Niche filling is just the result of having more options, which means as new cards get made it’s more likely a specific hole in a strategy will be filled. Now, this isn’t guaranteed to happen, but it’s likely to happen as more and more options are made. As powercreep, the result is often that the power floor of the game is raised, rather than the ceiling. Although, naturally, sometimes a specific niche might push a strategy over its ceiling by covering a weakness. Now onto the next topic.
“Restriction breeds creativity,” as Mark Rosewater often says. I think conditional effects are inherently more interesting than otherwise, and I think most players and designers agree-even if unconditional cards are stronger. This makes most card games lean into specific archetypes or subsets of cards that need to be played together for them to work well. Note that this includes otherwise drawbacks and downsides on cards.
One of the consequences is that conditional cards will provide a stronger effect for the same rate, or the same effect for a cheaper rate. After all, you’re paying an extra deckbuilding, gameplay, or resource cost. Note that this isn’t powercreep-as I said, it does incur an additional cost.
But as satisfying that cost becomes less of a burden, the end result is that you gain access to a better effect for free just by adhering to a specific strategy. This can be related to niche filling in that for everything you want the deck to do, there’s a card tailor-made for the specific strategy. The end result is that satisfying the extra condition is so trivial as to be free, and in the specific deck every conditional card works as a better version of the unconditional card. It’s powercreep not through individual cards, but by different options coming together to enable a stronger deck.
I want to leave another comment, and I might follow up this train of thought there if I do make that one.
I think the most important thing that you missed in the Pokémon section is how Sableye and Crobat G were good cards, but didn't become broken until they made the poor choice of reverting all of the turn 1 restrictions in 2011. All of the cards in the previous 3-4 years of sets were designed around those limitations (No Trainer, Supporter, Stadium cards on the first turn) and balanced by them. In 2014, they realized how silly it was to have no downsides to going first and began to add them back with limitations on attacking and eventually Supporters in 2020.
cool to see you here I'm a big fan of your videos!
I would have mentioned regarding Yugioh the concept of turn 0. When you go 2nd as (full powered) Tearlaments, you can functionally win the game after the first action that your opponent does on their turn when they go first, by chaining Tearlaments and millers to distrupt and floodgate your opponent before they can play the game. Other decks like Labrynth and Rescue Ace can do this too. But Tearlaments does it the best.
Ooooh my gosh
Y'all yugioh players will do anything but discuss the topic of the video if it means you can't *whine*
This is not "in depth (yet also exaggerated and partially just wrong) examples of power creep in particular as they relate to turn theory in card games"... it's "power creep in card games"
What you described a. Only discusses Winda if we say floodgates, which is outed by imperm, gamma, called by, *Smashing Ground* and more, aside from necessitating you start with a monster effect and they have Havnis (I assume you're a MD player here bc you're still upset about tearlaments) who's at 1? Who mills 3 and hits both a shadoll *and* a fusing name/Reino (3+2 Scheiren + 0 Merrli = 5)
b. Misrepresents Labrynth's superior ability to do the same thing (Arias is at 3 who sets big welcome or welcome from hand and makes them activatable, cooclock + Changdra/Stovie does the same thing, and if what's-her-face hits the field while you have no chainables they quite literally epidemic or dbarrier you, let alone any shifter deck in the format, and
C. Was already covered in the video conceptually, under the point that powerful effects are archetype locked and relatively unique. Sheesh.
@@Caleb-zl4wk All his examples are many years out of date. It was and still is a fair point
Tear milling is so toxic i hate it to hell and back
Can't wait to see Yugioh lmao
It's all out anime brawl, ora ora vs muda Muda style
IshizuLament player 1: "So, you playing same type of deck as me."
IshizuLament player 2: "Tsk!"
IshizuLament player 1: "MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! MUDA! ..."
IshizuLament player 2: "ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ORA! ..."
I absolutely love your stuff :)) have you considered making any content with Flesh and Blood at all?
0:30 A new card pushing out an older card isn't automatically power creep. If the old card is so far below the power curve that nobody plays it and the new card isn't ABOVE the power curve, that's not power creep.
I appreciate you making these videos. I really enjoy them! Thank you 🥰
You don't need to make new cards more powerful than older cards to keep players interested. You just need to make them different.
They have to be as good or better otherwise they wont be used competitively and getting exactly as good is Very hard. Also even if in a vacuum card power level remained the same versatility and synergy would increase creating power creep that way
That's what Shadowverse Evolve is mostly doing. The power scale crept up very slowly and when it seems like something is one or two cards away from being way too good they'll shift to something new until other classes catch up. People generally enjoy swapping over to new archetypes since they do different things instead of being the same thing but more powerful every set. Shifting over to the novelty rail has been a great strategy.
@@jamismiscreant7514 they will be used competitively if the older cards get rotated out.
@@missingdays1 but the companies want cards to be playable on release they do t want to wait for rotation to happen
Alright, wise guy, you make a card game. All these million dollar companies haven't figured it out yet, so we could really use you.
I play MTG standard and the way Sheoldred and invoke despair warped a meta was insane. Any deck even if it was a 3 color would run those 2 cards and it was brutal. Invoke despair was eventually banned but Sheoldred was still a card you always have to need an out to or your opponents just wins by default.
Good video! Very evenhanded, and I think you're right that card games will need exciting and powerful new cards printed every set to survive. Pokemon's rules overhaul sounds very interesting--my main game is Magic and the play/draw disparity has definitely been discussed a lot. Some kind of rules change to slow down the player on the play would be nice.
I find it really fun how playing different formats really informs the power of a card. For example I play commander in mtg so solitude is pretty bad as it’s mana and evoke cost are extremely high compared to STP or PTE but in standard I can see how the evoke cost is much less expensive on the deck
For me, the worst aspect of power creep in hearthstone is that as cards got stronger, the game became less fun. It's like it lost any sense of identity and enjoyment in exchange for ever more ridiculous uninspired cards
Going from Magic to One Piece was like a breath of fresh air. The amount of space for art on each card felt like unfocusing my eyes after a year of strain. The game will definitely face its own problems with power and complexity creep so I'm going to enjoy this while I can.
One piece is SO good. Best designed game I think. They took the best parts of every card game and made them better. No doubt it will be the biggest tcg worldwide eventually. I especially love the life system. So, so brilliantly designed!
@@magicspoon2571 AND you don't need a life calculator to play! Just the cards on the table.
Can you make a video on what newer games (such as one piece, Dragonball, loricana, etc) are doing different to differentiate themselves
I think you missed out on mentioning the introduction of the Supporter sub-type in the Pokémon section. That also nerfed a lot of strong effects.
Lmao "over hall"
It's overhaul 😂
So what did I learned from this video? Asbolutly nothing, it's just a summary.
I really miss old Hearthstone with its minion focus. I found building a board and trading minions with the opponent to over multiple turns to be very satisfying. It wasn't absurd for a minion to stick on the board for 3 turns, and that didn't even automatically win you the game. It's what made Hearthstone unique compared to other card games and I'm sad that they went into a different direction.
Meanwhile Yugioh's goat format be like
i dont really understand this sentiment maybe because im a newer player?
every single paladin midrange tempo deck has been about board control till you get enough mana to buff your board to start going face, elemental mage is about board, evolve shaman cares about minions, pirate demon hunter cares about minions aswell and board based combat, all of these decks that are viable routinely go against each other and going 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 is the way you win each of these matchups, is that not what you talk about?
@@muditjain4024 Its simply nostalgia. Players say this all the time, but when blizz launched a "classic" hearthstone, it bombed so hard that it was pretty much only bots on ladder. It is a finished format too, everyone already knows what is the best, and as said in the video, it had very little variation besides your draws. Matchups are won or lost if you draw flame imp on turn one or wild growth on curve.
Most of meta decks of classic hs weren't minion focused too, freezing mage, ramp druid, miracle rogue, to name a few, weren't minion focused at all.
@CassianoAlanCanossa because classic was the absolute base version of the game and got boring quick as there was only like 3 or 4 decks viable, the game was best between naxxramas and then peaked with Whispers of the old Gods, it's gone slowly downhill after that
@@Lewis1995
Ungoro was the best tho
Hey man, is everything alright? You sometimes breath in a very quick succession, like you breath in after part of a sentence, say 2 - 3 words and then breath in again. This happens super often. E.g. 2:15 "This way, powercreep can feel kind of draining on players, *breath* either feeling like *breath* all of their old cards basically *breath* serve no purpose after new cards come out to replace them *breath* [...]" This is just one example, it happens a lot.
If this is not a condition (and I apologize in advance if it is, I don't want this to be critique of an health issue or something), try to listen to some professional speakers and see where they make their breathing pauses. Also try to take longer breaths and not these quick ones, so you can say a lot more on a breath, because you are able to do that. This makes the (in music this is called:) phrasing a little more coherent and better to listen to, instead of having these short pauses, that are often times (not always) awkward, because of the short breaths. Again, if this is an actual condition that you're struggling with, I'm sorry. This isn't supposed to be a thing of "Skill issue, now get healthy or you can't do UA-cam anymore" or something like that. I was just geniunely curious and trying to give some advice.
Yugioh also does Pokemon's powercreep, by limiting the olden generic broken cards to 1-2 copies
Rotation is a powerful tool to mitigate the rate of powercreep. If there is a rotating format then you can powercreep certain aspects of the game at a time and then when you cycle back around to that again the older strong cards of that kind will have rotated out. Over time with magic for example we can see that with Llanowar Elves "power-creeping" (in the context of Standard) other mana ramp multiple different times over the years. It also in general gives an additional motivation to keep up with new cards aside from just power.
Draft and sealed environments are the same way. You can design large numbers of cards that are all weak in constructed formats if they make for a fun limited environment.
One important thing in Pokemon was the power of Dark Energy that gave you +10 damage to attacks. When your pokemon had 60HP a +10 was massive. The game progressively move to higher HP pokemons to reduce the impact of cards like Dark Energy and Plus Power.
"over hall"😂😂😂 Stay in school kids.
Hi SodaTCG, I am getting more and more interested into the game theory (not the Nash etc one, the theory behind games themselves) and its relation to economical health. Can you suggest any textbook or other kind of sources to learn about this topic? Thank you very much for your content!
Great video ! Also super obscure reference but you sound like the dude with braces in the UA-cam series Bridge Kids 😅😂
14:45 i used to play pokemon tcg back when all the rule changes to the first turn happened. first i cant use supporters, then suddenly they remove any turn 1 restriction at all and give the player going 1st a major advantage, then a few years later they add an attack restriction going 1st and add a coinflip to a powerful trainer card that was a major centerpiece of the format for 3 years. the amount of change with every new generation was too much as a kid to keep up with so i ended up quitting when that happened around XY release (also because the deck i just invested the little money i had as a kid in was a pretty fast and agressive deck that relied on attacking turn 1 and abusing that trainer card to easily knock out weak benched basic pokemon and grab extra prize cards thanks to an ability LOL). apparently they re-added the supporter rule another few years later on too lmao.
i went to a prerelease once many years later to support our new local game store at the time (it still died a year later due to covid restrictions :skull:) and i was struggling the whole time trying to remember what the current rules of going 1st even were, because i had seen so many different iterations in the past when i still played.
It’s been no supporter no attacking turn one for a little while now, I don’t see them changing it any time soon. The restrictions encourage different decks to actively wanting second or first into specific matchups, rather than everyone wanting first. Sometimes the meta swings one way or the other depending on what’s good, but right now your choice, and ability to deal with it when you don’t have a choice, have a lot of skill and nuance built into it.
here's a video idea:
card games that have cards with effects that people don't use but use the card in a different way.
It would have been really interesting to see your take on Cardfight Vanguard. The powercreep has become so bad not just once, but twice to the point where the company had to soft-reboot the game on both occasions, resulting in different format splits and the game constantly becoming feature creeped each and every instance.
Vanguard powercreep is a bit out of hand - every time a new product in D format releases, the entire metagame shifts. And they release new sets so fast.
At the moment, it seems to be in a good place but for a year there the competitive format was just a rotating door of “Top 3” decks.
Because of the way Guard Values and Attack Points scale, they could just simply inflate the numbers to keep complexitycreep in check but for some reason they have elected not to do it.
When i was 17, i decided to join a local yugioh tournament that was free entry. I hadnt played in about 5 years.
I lost on turn 2 because my opponent was able to instant counter the spells i tried to play, search their deck twice for specific cards, summon 4 monsters, destroy my monster with an effect, and then attack my lifepoints directly for 12,000 points.
Pls do a video on how easy it is to spot a fake card in every card game
Vanguard Overtrigger: "Allow me to introduce myself"
When magic focused on commander and lesss in standard we saw more and more powercreep.
The word you’re looking for is overhaul, dude 👍🏻
I wish Buddyfight was included in this video.
By it’s end basically every monster and item had “cannot be destroyed by effects, you cannot take damage from effect”
Here's a video idea: Alternate win conditions in each card game!
Dragon Ball Super Card Game is one of the best examples of how power creep affected that game with the early sets being slow and costing a lot of energy to play things to later sets basically having every card be free or 1-2 energy to get some insane effects
I actually like where Magic's power/complexity creep is right now. There are a handful of problem cards here and there, but most formats have a wider field of viable decks than a decade ago when I started and there's a higher power floor on cards which has made budget building more viable. I think MH3 was a good sign for power creep in the game, since excluding Nadu the power level was pretty manageable despite the Modern Horizons sets being the 'lets put all the busted cards here' sets.
My favorite card that shows off what I like about Magic's current power and complexity creep is The Modern Age from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. It's a 2/3 enchantment creature with flying for 2 in blue that also double loots at common. It's not breaking tournaments or anything, but I've loved the card in Standard as a role player in graveyard-focused decks.
I like the video but cut the bloopers where you fumble a word and maybe slow down a tad. Otherwise, keep up the good work
I know it's not as old, but I'd love to see Legends of Runeterra analyzed alongside Hearthstone, too!
As a Pokémon player, I don't think power creep is much of a problem in the game. Numbers have inflated since the old days, but in recent years the power levels stay pretty steady.
Yeah tag teams were really just the main mistake that led numbers to be as high as they are now but they are relatively steady now
The pokemon damage output is also scaled well with the hp values now so it really doesn't feel very crept. Also literally everything is playable to some degree even cradily go silly turbo
High numbers, but everything scales accordingly. Means the prize card system is actually good, since it has aged well. Looking at YGO's life point system on the other hand...
@@AoyagiMeiYugioh is more about how many negates and hand traps you can assemble rather than life points lol. Which isnt terrible. The resources keeping you alive are variable and have a lot of weird interactions. You do have to make choices on which tools in your toolkit to utilize
@@danielhicks1824 The LP acts as a timer on how many turns you get to draw outs or pieces to make a comeback play. Big boards are too easy to assemble these days.
Every time I see a picture of Sheoldred it makes me glad I stopped playing Magic nearly 20 years ago. Feels like the creativity of combining cards to win is gone and you just need 1-2 powerhouse cards now to likely win.
Funnily enough standard is so fast that I rarely see sheoldred in MTGA Mythic rank these days, bad against aggro bad against control
Never played Pokemon but it sounds like a fascinating TCG; I'm starting to understand why it's so popular in JP. MTG & Yugioh both have inherent basic Power Creep, some newer TCGs I've played lean heavily towards Complexity Creep which I think is a more interesting way to go about it: in essence it's just fancier Power Creep imo as various cards get pushed out of the meta for more efficient options.
"Power creep is required to keep people playing your game." Yeah, that must be why no one ever plays Monopoly or chess or uno or phase 10 any more. They didn't power creep enough.
Power Creep doesn't serve to "keep people *playing*" the game, it serves to keep people /buying/ the card board equivalent of a live service game. ...or in Hearthstone's case, just a live service game.
Exactly. If chess were owned by one company I'm sure they'd be releasing new pieces all the time.
Those are apples and oranges my guy.
Dude, uno, chess, and monopoly have been power crept lmao. Chess less so than the others, but you have how many different versions/gimiks of uno and monopoly?
Electronic monopoly with fake credit cards?
Uno with "new" cards or the one that will spit the deck at you for some reason.
As for chess, the "powercreep" usually is in wacky and zanny online games.
@@TheClone37 Gimmicks like automatic banking and different names for the properties and art for the board are not "power creep". That's like saying the basic lands in MtG are power crept because they have different art. Absurd.
Chess variants aren't power creep. The world chess organization (whatever its name is) doesn't play them. It play chess. No single variant (or heck, all of them combined) of chess even comes within a galaxy of the popularity of stock-standard chess that's been played for thousands of years.
The bigger problem I have with yugioh and why I stopped playing was the tendency to ban older cards/decks that were being played and seeing some decent results only to print smth much more obnoxious and op.. then they just do that over and over so if you want to stay competitive you have to dump hundreds/thousands into the game every banlist unless your deck got lucky.
I want to get back into a CCG, but I’m not really sure which one to put my time into these days.
I originally got WAY into The Elder Scrolls Legends back in the day, and absolutely loved everything about it. Then it went into maintenance mode, around the thine LOR was about to come out. I tried Hearthstone for a short while, but absolutely hated how hard it was to build a usable deck without dropping a ton of money. Then I tried GWENT and enjoyed it for a time, but it didn’t keep me coming back. Then LOR came out and I was hooked on it for several months and then dropped off a few years ago.
Now, I’m just trying to decide whether or not to jump back into LOR or try something else.
12:16 you forgot to mention, that part of the trainers become supporters (and you can play only 1 supporter per turn), and part of them became items, which can be used multiple times.
In the case of Naud in Magic, commander playtesters hated the "old" Nadu, which gave everything flash (spell speed 2 in Yugioh terms I believe). So they've put that effect and didn't bother to test, likely for time crunch reasons
I like Magic's powercreep. By making new mechanics instead of just bigger numbers, suddenly cards from 20-25 years ago have relevant use cases, like how Delirium added a huge buff to gimmicky Mill decks by buffing the cards on the field instead of using Mill to tutor your most powerful cards with Graveyard removal.
I know you kinda gloss over it at the end (to save time presumably), but the Sableye meta in Pokemon was absolutely nuts. Between the BW rules going into effect and then subsequently getting changed to fix it, there were competitive tournaments played at the local level (City Champs, don't know if they are still called that now) and there were three types of decks you saw people play: Sableye decks, decks built specifically to counter Sableye (e.g. Machamp), and "normal" decks played by less competitive players who got run over by Sableye most of the time. There's a great video from that 2011 here on UA-cam by Jwittz (ua-cam.com/video/7JHOqFi9Yf0/v-deo.html) who walks through a typical opening turn for the deck and it's still insane to me that it was ever possible to play the Pokemon TCG like that.
Yugioh right now is based on engines, little archetype packages that can mash within each other and create a deck.
The issue is that in reality, there are only 3 engines and a bunch of bad decks that can't win against them. Fiendsmith, Snake-eyes and the new Yubel package.
I randomly skip the video and heard summoning monster like dark arm turn one and I’m like why would anyone do that 😂
Will listen again later
Hey man, really like your videos, they are fun and really interesting.
May I give you a small pint of constructive critizism tho?
I think you need to slow down with your speed at which you speak at.
It feels like its a rush for you and one can bearly keep up sometimes and one can hear you breathing in really heavy sometimes.
I feel like your video ideas are great and you explain everything nicely but personally i think if you improve your speaking skill in your videos a little bit it can push these videos to the next level.
I hope this finds you well. Thx for the great videos.
Digimon feels like it's had so much bad power creep, it's kinda crazy. Especially with blast digivolution coming out, the game changed a lot in only a few years of being out.
Wish teppen could be discussed in these, most interesting card game imo
Should have mentioned Pokémon catcher going from an item to a supporter with Lysander
Shadowfist is interesting because even though it's a paper game, they aren't afraid to issue errata and reprint cards with different text. So a lot of the broken "alpha" cards have been reworked with higher cost or additional restrictions to be more fair. For example, the "political favors" faction has a lot of ways to gain mana that don't involve lands. One card lets you steal an unspent mana from target player. Has decent counterplay if your opponent is playing Ascended you should try not to have unspent mana floating around. Except on the first turn of the game. It was such a feelbad moment when the ascended player stole your only mana on turn 1 before you could play anything that the card now reads "target an opponent who has completed at least one turn."
@SodaTCG Great video! Just some constructive criticism on your audio. Try reading from a script a little more often when doing these long form videos where you are talking a lot. It helps with your pacing of breath if you know how many words your going to say instead of breathing in after a long sentence. And it will help your videos sound more professional in my opinion. Otherwise great content so far.
The thing is with yugioh, decks that were good months ago can be considered trash due to the required printing of better and bigger archetypes
You should have titled this Part 1 of Powercreep because you only covered four games instead of "every" card game. At least you confirmed my wonder if power creep came in how decks are built as well as individual cards. I've got a feeling power creep is getting into Elestrals in the form of the starter decks instead of individual cards. As with any card game, certain cards are staples while others are less significant unless the deck is designed for them.
I think that power creep inevitable as much as it is the easiest way to give players more things to do and the top most reason I believe is profits. Players may not buy new cards if they’re not stronger, but players do buy new cards if they do new things. The best example (for now while the pvp mode still exists) is Legends of Runeterra. The power climbs very slowly only so it can give specific strategies new tools to play better or decks that are doing fine more and new effects to play with. Legends of Runeterra is also not afraid to release new, different mechanics in every set, ie key words. LoR only had a year’s worth of pvp content planned because the roguelite mode that was added later in development makes more money so enjoy a game with simple cards and lots of ways to play while you can.
mtg powercreep started when hasbro woke up and started screaming "more secret layers! start collabs! stats must be higher than cost!" etc.