The hardest part as a new player is, that even if you read a card, you have no idea what this enables. Especially since you can't read cards in your opponent's deck.
Having played Pokémon, there have been some tricky interactions and non-linear playstyles historically, but even then you're only a step or two away from what you're actually trying to achieve after playing any given card. In YuGiOh, there is no possible way for a human being to divine what will happen if they allow Dark Infant to resolve, and that's step 2 of the @ignister combo
So the problem isn't necessarily that reading a card doesn't explain it. It's that unlike mtg the only format is effectively legacy and every card leads to a cavalcade of decision trees and interactions that unless you're enfranchised enough to know what every card in an archetype does or enfranchised enough to guess correctly you just get rolled. In Mtg the colors help fix this a lot because every color generally has specific things it does meaning witha bit of bedrock knowledge i can intuit my opponent's general gameplan without needing to know the exact list they're running. Add in the intro formats are less complex and well.
This is true for the first several hours of every card game. There are thousands of off the wall MTG cards you'd never intuit how they work until they stomp your face 9 times. At least after playing against "Rikka" you know if you ever see "Rikka" again what they are working toward
I was explaining to a coworker who's returning to Yugioh from early 5Ds that in modern Yugioh, that even the technically correct response can mean exactly dick if your opponent has the *other* card in their hand or whatever. I showed him my Marincess deck, told him it's a mid-tier strategy, and then showed him how if you hit the wrong card with the wrong piece of interaction (depending on what the other 4 cards in my hand are and what I rip off of Blue Tang Clan), I'm still ending my turn with a 4300 Towers with triple s/t negates that can summon equipped monsters that summon MORE monsters AND backed up by Toad and at least 2 more pieces of interaction in hand. And I reiterated that this is maybe the 8th best deck in the format.
Rarran's "mistake" was assuming(like a sane person) that reading a card would give you some expectation of the plays that are about to happen, but they really don't unless you're an enfranchised player. Searchers bring with them a whole other card to read and often they're trying to push for access to OTHER CARDS in the Extra Deck that they DONT KNOW ABOUT. You can see him frantically try to understand Rikka but nothing IN THE CARD makes it clear for a new player what is happening. I've yet to see a tutorial for YGO that properly adresses this and gives an actual feel for the modern game.
This is not only an issue for new players but also for returning players and even a big issue for not-longtime players at eg locals. If you kept playing over 25 years and kept up with the game throughout, this would obviously not be a big deal but the sheer variety of decks means you need to learn 30 different flavours of Yugioh. Ever heard the word "sacky" being used to describe decks in how it basically uses cheap strategies to win you games? That's what playing versus any new deck feels like in Yugioh. I started playing paper about a year ago. Okay, Floo kicked my ass. No big deal, people (by now) know how to counter Floo. Later? Naturia Runick. What do I negate? What do I blow up? Okay, lost to Naturia Runick. I now look up how to counter this deck and what the chokepoint is. Next week? Played versus Phantom Knights. No idea what the chokepoints were and I basically won by dumb luck (D-Barrier) Next week? Versus Gishki. I won, thankfully, but still went 2-1 with Branded because I didn't know what the deck does. In order to play Yugioh "well", you need to know what every single deck does. You might think any given deck that searches from the deck should be ashed but actually it's better to hold it for the GY setup. How would you know this? You can't. I would argue countering meta decks is "easier" because you know what the choke points are (Ash Branded Fusion, Imperm on Mo Ye and pray he didn't start with Longyuan) but there is absolutely no way you will ever know how to counter everything. That's not even going into proper deckbuilding or anything of the sort. This is basically your every game entry barrier. What do I get rid of to win? Trick question, it's really tough to know.
Thats exactly the point. I started yugioh a year ago and i only improved because i lost over and over and over. I knew some cards becaused i watched duellogs, mbt, doug but i had to learn how to counter Decks only by losing to them multiple times.
I returned from the game after a 12 year hiatus and rawdog reading literally every card played every game worked for me but I played for LITERALLY hundreds of hours including LITERAL 16+ hour sessions a DAY for LITERAL months during the first half of 2022. Literally all I did was grind MD ranked during my 8 hour remote work shift and an additional 8 to 10 hours a day after my shift ended just because I wanted to really understand the game. I don't think the experience I had between 2002 to 2011 really translated to any of this. I don't think a new player even someone with a competitive background like this guy had can reasonably learn yugioh without either a coach or doing what I did and literally study the game for unhealthy amounts of hours for what is now well over a thousand hours.
@samuelheddle I learned how link climbing works through trial and error on master duel. The tutorial didn't explain it but the mechanic is intuitive so trial and error with problem solving skills can get you there lol.
I've been playing Yugioh for 17 years now, and I completely agree with Rarran. It used to be the case that, as an outsider or newbie, you could pick up a structure deck or a fully playset of an archetype and understand what the deck wants to accomplish and how to facilitate that. Sure, building a deck like that isn't optimal, but it gets your foot in the door. In the year of our lord 2023, trying to pick up the game by cracking open 1x or 3x structure deck is an exercise in masochism, especially if you aren't particularly familiar with the game. If you handed a beginner a Traptrix or Albaz or Crystal Beast structure deck and asked them to figure it out, understanding the combos and ideal board states is a task beyond "just read the card, bro." And that's not even counting your opponent's deck! Ishizu Tear is probably the most complex Yugioh deck to be meta (after D/D/D), but even "simple" meta decks are extremely difficult to gauge if you aren't familiar with them. How is a new player supposed to know that a successfully resolving Ecclesia or Mo Ye is a +2? How is a new player supposed to know that Branded Fusion, a card that says on it, "Fusion Summon 1 Fusion Monster" will result in at least 2 or 3 fusion summons? The problem I ran into when I tried to introduce other players to the game is that: a.) Every card I played required a 20-30 seconds of my opponent reading what my card does, or explaining why my previous card lets me play my current one. b.) "Getting good" at Yugioh requires extreme deck knowledge for not just your deck, but your opponents deck. c.) The only ways to get knowledge of how a deck works is to a.) Watch a video (10+ minutes for a deck for a baseline understanding), play the deck yourself (by goldfishing over and over through trial and error, could easily be 20 minutes to an hour per deck), having a friend teach you the ins and outs of a deck (again, 20 minutes to an hour per deck), or losing against that deck... a lot. In Magic the Gathering's Commander format, it's often the case that you run into cards that you have literally never seen before in your life, but because of how streamlined individual mechanics are, even a new player can pilot a preconstructed deck relatively proficiently against a deck they've never played against before. Rarran's video casts Yugioh in a negative light, but I think he embodies the problems inherent with Yugioh's complexity. These are true, legitimate issues that make it hard for new players to learn how to play the game *with a teacher*, never mind learn how to play by themselves.
Someone in Farfa's chat once mentioned that structure decks should come with a pre-scripted duel, so, solo mode IRL, and I agree. The solo mode tutorials in MD aren't good enough at showing you your wincon, they usually just show you literally one or two combos and then throw you into a low-power mirror match to figure it out on your own, but, like, that's kind of good enough? It'll teach you the mechanics. You're not supposed to come out of that being a top class pilot of that deck. Expecting simulators or structure decks to spoon feed you how to be a pro is lazy and would lead to everyone playing the same. I get that for simpler games it's easier to do that, but even the simpler games have a sizable skill gap between "guy who finished the tutorials" and top players. I dread the day that Konami attempts to dumb YGO down to the level of new card games that were built to be played on mobile phones, it will absolutely kill the fun. It'd be nice to see them put more effort into tutorials at least, though.
Idk, I encountered problems you highlighted in numbers while trying mtg a long time ago, not to mention I had to remember too many keywords... Also ppl complain about negate spam in ygo while in mtg blue didn't let me play most of the time kekw. Although tbf I've quitted mtg before ixalan release
I agree with a lot of what you said but I wouldn't recommend a new player on Magic to play commnader. Sure is the most popular format but It also has some complexity on it that a new player shouldn't really have to worry, not to mention it can lead to some long games depending on the power level. Keep at it on 1v1 with like a standard pool, kitchen table or draft/sealed and later I think a precon should do fine for them to try out commander.
@@drewbabe I don't think dumb down is same as simplify, the main problem is the too complicated to learn as card way too painful too read and too many obscure ruling like SOTP and HOPT for example will make most ppl back out ofc One way to start is better card layout, make clear which one cost/condition and which one is effect like Rush Duel. Another thing is much shorter text like "when this card summoned...." could be just shorted to 'on summon :..."
I play yugioh with a friend who has played it for over 10 years. He still gets things wrong sometimes. I took him a Magic The Gathering "game night" box to test out one day, and after 2 hours of explaining the rules and playing, he wasn't making any mistakes, of course this was a more basic version of the game using basic decks. But it's insane how complicated yugioh is compared to other card games, like it's not even remotely a similar experience for new players.
@@shiftedrabbiteeqBeginner decks ARE real magic. If you play a beginner deck, you're getting an experience comparable to a real match, developing skills which help you in regular gameplay and even in formats like draft and sealed. You give a 'beginner deck' to someone? Then it's either too complicated and not good for a beginner or too weak and not representative of a real yugioh match
I genuinely cant imagen how frustrating this game must be if you've never played this game before. Ive been playing this game for about 15 years and even i will just sometimes go months without playing do to the game having a series of bad formats( i sat out the almost the entirely of MR4 until the revision). Can you imagen trying to get into this game during something like Kash format? That must leave a TERRIBLE impression on a new player. Fucking miserable and I dont blame anyone for bouncing off of this game.
I totally fell off at MR4. My friends and I were having a blast with playing pack releases until link came out and we tried one game with the cyberse starter set and all agreed to just play MR3.
As someone who never played yugioh until master duel came out, I'm glad that the community is starting to talk more about these issues with the game. It was a pain in the ass to learn this game, and even now sometimes I feel like I don't understand whats going on after playing this game for over a year.
Yeah, I've been playing about 6 months, and I was following YGO content online first, without the wider community and resources, I just don't know if the game is something you can realistically brute force your way through, even if you'd *love* the game at the end of that process...
Yh i never played irl. Got the game on my phone and though it might be fun, you know bring back the memories from watching the show. Turns out it’s not fun. I like playing random decks (got like 15 different ones) and playing against Kash now or Tear before for like 10 games straight its just boring. I play ranked for a bit, then just wait for the special events
Ygo prop needs a reboot in both text design and rulings (there are many “hidden" rulings such as token ruling, timing, you name it). I have hoped and still hope that Rush Duel is said reboot at least in some form but can’t say since Konami doesn’t really publish RD stuff in the west. I don’t think that the power level should be lowered since I like this high energy gameplay where people can actually do a lot and not just have to sit and basically just wait on one to three cards for five rounds. Although too long, for a lack of better term boring (à la „ns Aleister“ or „activate Branded Fusion“) combos where there’s not any interaction and variability (aka ability to adapt gameplay upon interruption) should at the very not be competitively viable. I can understand that Konami and players want deranged plays/decks to exist but they should in my opinion be for casual where if your opponent doesn’t like it, you have to change your deck or else you two just won’t play.
@@asmindeat least the challenges are fun, they give you loaner decks that are pretty good now. I don't think just playing those are a bad experience per se, everyone engages with their hobbies to the extent that they want to.
one year is definitely not enough for us to learn everything, every week I find out about a new floodgate that I dont know about and therefore cant play around.
Unlike most other evaluations where they say "Where's my old Yu-Gi-Oh!?!?!?". He's at least like "Really hard for me to get into, but if you like it, good on you cause it does look fun."
And yea didt say where's my old yugioh cause he plays hearthstone mainly Honestly didt care enough to look into what old yugioh was considering again rarran never played it
Even as a veteran player, learning new stuff can be a time sink. I play mostly Branded right now and want to try other decks, but learning more decks means probably another couple weeks of non-stop playing to learn how the deck even functions at an optimal level. And I just don't have the time for that right now. So I stick with the deck I already invested fully in playing, too afraid to move off it because I will probably play it so bad that I will lose.
Yeah, I've been back to YGO for over a year now and all caught up with the new stuff and I've been playing since early 2000s on and off. Whenever a new set comes out, it's pretty much impossible to comprehend what's going on unless you invest the time to read all the new cards. I mean, I'm not implying that you should be able to play without reading what cards do, but the cards nowadays read like a freaking book, back in the day you could get the gist of what they do as you play with a quick read.
What gets me is, this is suppose to be a hobby right? Why does every Yugioh veteran I see talk sound like this is a 60 hour a week job on top of their rl job. That does not sound like fun.
@@TheLastSane1 Imagine wanting to have Yugioh as your hobby, but you have to read and understand a college thesis worth of text to even learn how to play. Then you play with other people and get stomped turn one. Doesn't that sound fun?
@@TheLastSane1 That is how the game is now. Most of us are only still playing because we played it for so long. I don't know how new people can even attempt to play this game at this point. I feel like they just missed the boat. It is sad, too. The game has a lot going for it if Konami just learned how to properly deal with the game.
U dont need weeks for that, just play it few times against others to find out how it works lol..its ez that way..who has time for that bs "weeks" just to learn some eff 😂 and if u lose u lose why is that bad?
Honestly, Konami's biggest decision to keep new players from sticking around is to make the goat/edison formats official. Those two formats are perfect for the new/returning players who understood yugioh by its core mechanics or having a deeper gameplay experience if they are looking for something faster. Yugioh could work without a mana system, the problem is that Konami power crept the game without taking that aspect into consideration.
@@ducky36F Time Wizard is something Konami should really invest more into, imagine reprint packs designed for those preparing to play in the return of older formats, and other interactions that might make them more interesting (such as legalizing say certain legacy support so something like crystal beasts is more viable, though of course this would need to be done within reason, given how current Crystal Beast support is.)
or maybe just reboot this game completely imo as this point ygo already broken beyond repair that make it so hard to make newbie to try and stick to your game by various mean more streamlined card design, clearer text to explain what they want to do, maybe icon/keyword could work too, not too reliant on ED to just make combo etc
@@waskithonugroho3955 There already is; it's called Rush Duel. Problem is it's limited to Japan and Korea atm unless you play the Nintendo Switch game or the upcoming Duel Links update.
I've been watching Rarran for about a year, he's been experimenting with a lot of other card games lately so I knew that him trying YGO out would be an absolute disaster
He should have started with duel links really, or waited until rush duels dropped. Master duel just overwhelms people with how long its combo goes and how much they have to read. Duel links has its combos decks, but almost nothing worse than orcust comboing. Its not like he would randomly face the 1 person playing crystrons.
@@neonoah3353 Duel Links has no crafting system and is extremely P2W. Also the format is revolving around OP character's skill that have longer text then Pendulum cards
Tbh on casual mode the issue is really that the name is just wrong. The way it works is the way it works in every card game, but they usually call it what it is. Unranked. I.e. there is no rank. Which means inconssitent matchmaking and an environment people will use to test new decks without risking their rank. It should just really be renamed.
for me, my learning experience was: - playing bad 5ds era hero/good stuff level 4 decks with friends as a kid - reading the 5ds manga which showcases really cool like 3-5 card combos for different archetypes throughout, the progression of card interactions and stuff all made sense, and I fell in love with Infernity 0 Hand Control especially - I played a little bit of games on a simulator with a friend, trying to make my synchro infernity pile work, mostly trying different ways to summon out Beelzeus, against his Trains deck, mostly losing, but occasionally getting to do something cool, like stalling out with infernity guardian and avenger and getting my synchro board - watched 2014 worlds, *kind of* understood it, and loved watching people make these cool decks work - played a bit of Legacy of the Duelist, played all the 5ds decks in the campaign but didnt really build myself - got master duel at launch, committed to Synchron, I'd put all the synchron/junk/warrior cards that I liked in there, and then just keep testing, rebuilding, testing, rebuilding to optimize the consistency as much as possible, never really got to the point of being a *good* deck but I won in lower ranks sometimes - hit a point where I was happy with my synchron deck and I wanted to try other decks but id used up most of the free resources, so I went back to edopro along with my friend and would repeatedly build other archetypes I was interested and try them against my friend, again, mostly losing but occaisionally id get things to line up. Eventually I made what I consider to be my first *decent* deck, the 4th version of a 60 Card Grass RDA/Chaos pile I'd been tinkering with, and I started doing roughly 30-70 against my friend and casual players online, and I had a lot of fun. - since then, I've just kept building and tweaking decks for niche or new archetypes that interested me from throughout yugioh's history, and I've had a great time with it. I absolutely adore yugioh's vast and incredibly *flexible* card pool, all the math that goes into super big synchro routing, or optimizing deep draw ratios within banlist limits, it's the best. I really love yugioh now (although meta decks with uncontestable resource advantage, consistency, and game locking cards arent great), I love how I can play so many different decks and get a completely different experience, even within the same archetype. Watching LukeVonKarma/Duellogs' videos showcasing cool stuff you can do with hyperspecific older cards. But it really did take me about 6 years of on and off play to become the expert I am now, I didnt learn how pendulums worked until about 3-4 months into master duel hahaha (I love them now, Abyss Actor and Endymion are my favorites because they have cool effects as continuous spells outside of just scales). I think if I didnt have that 5DS Era framework for how yugioh combos *could* work, I probably wouldve had a really hard time in modern. I *love* yugioh's complexity and I wouldnt change it, it's part of what makes the game so fun for me. But the learning experience, and lack of legacy format support is really poor, and is definitely a huge barrier to entry.
This is not dissimilar to my own experience. About 5, 6 years ago I played duel links briefly which introduced me to the core mechanics of the game, but then I found out ab ygopro (or, its deranged brother TDoaNE,) & seeing all the cards I instantly fell in love and got cooking. Now *what* I was cooking... that I couldn't tell you but after about a year I had built an Endymion deck & I had some intuitive understanding of archetypal design and gameplan. Ever since then once in a while I'd hop on and read enough cards to build a deck, head to a casual room, get washed while once in a while washing my opponent, and that was really all the introduction I needed to get significantly better at intuiting my opponents decks, as well as building up a 1000+ catalog of cards in my head to varying levels of specificity. But once you take your lumps in that sense MD becomes a lot more understandable, and I often remind myself of the privilege of having done all that in a controlled, casual, and permanently unranked environment.
As a fellow yugiboomer who got back into the game a few years ago i have to say that i had an amazing time getting back into the game. I was very lucky to start off with duel links in its early 5Ds days. I got to learn synchro which i never understood as a kid. Then they introduced xyz and i had a few months to master it, then pendulum released and so on. I had sufficient time with each mechanic to fully understand it. After that ladder of learning i had an easy time getting into the real deal. Duel links was a great introduction, but i think that is something that can sadly not be replicated again.
As someone who played off and on I enjoyed reliving early Duel Link progression though at this point it feels too caught up and I prefer Master Duel. I think if MD had an official place for Goat and Edison the retro scene would be perfect for new and returning players but I don't know if Konami is in touch enough to ever recognise this as it doesn't directly help their bottom line.
Oh yeah duel links for sure helped the progression of learning, I played the game for well over 5 years and then master dual came out I would play rogue deck and randomness, love metaphys and exiling your things and buster blader lock which are toxic for sure
Rarran is a hearthstone dude Not any brand of yugioh fan Mgt and others just labeled yugi boomer cause they dislike his opinon Act man was a legit yugi boomer but rarran nah I think the term is just used to shame those who dislike yugioh's current direction It's not anything productive
I think a big part of this problem, as you identified, is how reading a card often doesn’t give you a lot of info about what it’s resolution is going to do because the format is so combo focused. In MTG, even cards that have a lot of text and keywords you might have to look up will usually boil down to some set of actions that you can evaluate. “Draw 3 cards, return 1 card from graveyard to hand, and make a 3/3 token” might be a lot of things, but you don’t need to be as worried that you’ll immediately get hit with a second stronger effect that you have to completely intuit in the way the “find a card in your deck” cards do - plus it helps that a lot of these cards in magic are either mana expensive or only in very high-power, high-enfranchisement formats. I think this is where the lack of a “resource system” really becomes clear. In MTG if you get the most powerful card in your deck off a draw or a search, you’ll usually have to wait another turn to deploy it. In modern yugioh archetypes, getting that best card in your deck immediately becomes the next thing you are doing. In MTG there are a ton of combo decks that kick your teeth in, especially if you don’t know what cards to watch out for. However, even in the strongest formats, a good handful of decks do win by hitting you for 10-30% of your life total at a time while trying to protect that threat. This actually makes the low power beginner formats that are dominated by nearly vanilla beaters actually reflective of what some of the game will be, with added complexity added on top. I think Konami could benefit a lot from making a beginner archetype(s) that does do a turn 1 combo that we so expect from this game while also being more simplified and lacking the surprise blowout cards so new players can learn. I think many new players, especially those enfranchised to other TCGs, don’t mind losing a bunch when they are just getting started. It just really shouldn’t feel like you are losing to things that are so out of your control that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen, especially when there are so many that you can’t just learn the 2/3 cards you need to play around.
Yes, when I lose to a better deck in Magic, it helps me understand the game better by evaluating my opponent's strategy. When I lose in Yugioh, I don't even know what my opponent did.
A robust and FUN solo mode is the perfect solution. Something that Konami stopped doing since games like Tag Force, World Championship, and Legacy of the Duelist while they had their own benefits also tended to not sell very well. But they provide you a basic yet easy to understand starter deck (in some games even multiple starter decks) that isn't competitive but it is full of simple cards and a coherent strategy (like a Scrap deck). They have the decks of the opponents you face scale up from weak but creative gimmick decks to actual full-blown competitive builds. In some games they even separate decks by era so if you don't understand the game in the Arc-V era you can go back a few anime series to get more used to it. And the games are fun, with legitimate story modes and exploration and stuff. A game like Tag Force 6 is just overall a much more enjoyable experience about the game all around, it's amazing how much fun you can have just going back to one of the pre-internet games even if you aren't really interested in retro formats. You can see some ridiculous but memorable combos like Phantom Hand + Soul Absorption.
@@GoogleyMoogley The same thing that happens in every competitive game, you have to know the game or get blown out. FPS, fighting game, other card games, online board games, rhythm games - literally EVERY online game is full of sweaty players many of whom will know the game inside and out right from the start.
I've played World Championship 2011 for years, replaying it with different decks and strategies, and I don't think I even had more fun playing on Master Duel, even against real players. The point about decks going from "Gimmick" to "competitive" is just very on point, and it made the best learning experience you could get. You also had several features added the more you progressed into the game, like Duel Puzzles, or Structure Decks matchs, which helped learn other strategies you weren't aware of. I even modded the game so I could remove the first deck you get in the game, and only have the "Random All-cards" pack to buy from, plus making money much more difficult to get, meaning I'd have to assemble something that works from a bunch of random junk. It's still my favorite experience with YGO nowadays, even if it involved me, and a bunch of slow-playing bots. Which is to say : Having players to play with is fine, but if the gameplay loop itself isn't fun in the first place, it would still be better to go back a few iterations back playing with bots if the game is more fun that way. I just wish Konami would start implementing actually supported alternative formats. They already made a good thing with Time Wizard format, but I'd like to see them go further and actually implement it on Master Duel. At least they're adding Rush to DL...
Honestly, I don't see a reason why the campaigns in Legacy Of The Duelist couldn't be imported into Master Duel (beyond balancing reasons, of course, since modern decks absolutely decimate even the challenge duels). I loved Legacy Of The Duelist. It felt like Master Duel but with more of a focus on solo play.
Master Duel gave you simple starter decks, the problem is you were playing them into fucking Drytron, Zoodiac Tri-Brigade, Virtual World with VFD, Adamancipator, Prank Kids, and floodgate Eldlich on launch day. There was no environment for them to be useful, you just threw them away immediately and built a real deck if you knew what you were doing.
I appreciate how active you are in addressing the issues with the game you love. Enjoying a game requires both being excited and critical at appropriate times
This is wild to me. Because I am one of those players who got in on the ground floor in 2002 and I stuck it out for years and years. I think the final straw, at least for me, was around the start of Pendulum Summoning. That on top of this recurring trend of exponential power scaling towards OTK solitaire combo fiestas to where, if I am not playing a deck on that level or throwing a metric ton of floodgates into my deck on the off chance I go first, can activate them all, and pray my opponent doesn't have any removal, I'm basically destined to lose. And it's not like I was coming back into Master Duel playing a bunch of random vanilla cards or a decklist that was meta in 2008. I was playing Monarchs with a lot of the modern Monarch support that I saw for the first time in Master Duel's single player mode because I absolutely adored it. I thought the floodgates they added were stupid and unfun for my opponent and it made me feel bad to even run them, but when you see what the most popular kind of deck style is (not archetype, deck style), and it's all "I have to go first, set up my board, stop my opponent from doing anything on Turn 2 through floodgates and negates on an indestructible stick, then OTK on my next turn", how is it that anyone who plays this game still have hair!? It's infuriating! I was listening to a game dev podcast that had Mark Rosewater on as a guest (Rosewater is one of the head designers for Magic) and he describes this thing about how he wants to design games for "Johnnys" and "Jennys", or game players who try to make really absurd, bonkers combos with pieces few people would ever expect, and he said something interesting and something that Yugioh has entirely ignored. I paraphrase, but he basically said something like "Johnnys/Jennys find it fun to see a new card and figure out how they can squeeze the potential out of it by themselves. If you just hand them all of the tools, they're just going to get bored." This is how I see archetypes in Yugioh. Rarely are there tools in Yugioh that aren't either "staples" and everyone knows about them and everyone can use them because they are universally useful, or they're explicitly locked into an archetype, be that monster type, monster card name, monster attribute, or some other arbitrary statistic on a card to ensure it is so hyper-controlled and contained that it can't get out of Konami's control. I want to enjoy Yuigoh. Some of my favorite moments playing Yugioh were in the 5Ds era. Like yeah, there were competitive decks back then that were particularly dumb, but there certainly felt, at least, way more freedom in what you could reasonably do. Like... I won a locals with a Fish Synchro deck. Built it entirely on my own without copying a list online, so it wasn't a well-oiled machine by any stretch of the imagination, and I got to live out a power fantasy at the time of, if it did work, getting out both Shooting Star Dragon and Red Nova Dragon on the same turn. Did my deck need to run Red Nova? Absolutely not. Was it in any way detrimental to the flow of my deck to accommodate Red Nova when I could have used better Synchros at the time? Absolutely. But was it fun? Undoubtedly. -- I know this is going on essay territory and I do not expect anyone to read it, so I'll tl;dr it as best I can: Rarran's experiences as a new player echo my experiences as a returning player. He is absolutely correct in all the ways you point out, and I really hope Konami can find a way to get this shit under control because, right now, a game that cannot attract new players is not only going to bleed players, but is also a really bad business model for a game. Konami needs to do better and players should be vocal about it.
Unfortunately rarran is the exception here, you see that mbt mentioned rastafarian, the man who quits elden rings In less than 5 hours because he can't beat that horseman boss, I won't expect him to survive duel strategy 2 link and battle replay in master duel. A new players gets introduced to yugioh through archetype system, I'm included, I played synchron and madolche in 2012 returns to yugioh in MD and I don't have any problem with it, I fact comboing now is easier.
Like when rosemi starts playing yugioh she looks at traptrix archetype and like their art design, giving you the motivation to learn the archetype inside out. Rarran unfortunately decided to just completely ignore solo mode to see if somehow if he like the archetype master duel offered to new players.
@@r3zaful Indeed it's not the average experience... the average is even worse. What if they think "I want to play a cool Dragon deck" and land on Dragon Link? That's one of the most convoluted decks in history, because it's 80% engine so you don't know what the deck is trying to do. I've watched it many times and I only know it likes to link climb, revive link monsters from the graveyard and get an ocassional syncro summon, and is not clear what should you prioritize. And that deck has been tier 2 for years at this point so is indeed something you have to know the matchup if you want to win.
I truly believe that Solo Mode just needs to be updated better with archetypes that are seeing actual play. I believe there should be a Duel Training EX or another SP Challenge that focuses around the harder things to get like hand advantage and learning about handtraps etc.
@@HazeEmry I think they should have a separate area for combo teaching. Just basic lines that insulate you from things like Rafflesia on SpSm4/5 for Nibiru
@@catalysts94 or just not have a competitive card game that instantly goes into a game of solitaire while the other player can do nothing but watch and wait 10 mins.
I saw quite a few people complain about Rarran not reading the cards on his own deck, but they need to understand that even when you read the cards, it's a completely separate problem from understanding how to pilot your deck. Newcomers won't immediately know the importance of "Add a Salamangreat card into your hand" or "You can link summon the same monster using a link monster on the field" let alone imagining the end board. Not to mention, things will only get more complicated when playing against opponents who have interruptions to your combo. I can only imagine what a newcomer would feel when they run into someone who plays Adamancipator and spends 20 minutes setting up a Dragite, Baronne, L3 Borreload Savage, I:P Masquerena, Block Dragon, and Apollousa pass.
Newcomers can understand the importance of drawing, tutoring, and searching. The tutorials explain the summoning mechanics, but he literally skipped half of the tutorials. I get that just reading your own deck won't tell you how to pilot it to an optimal endboard but you can definitely not go -3 on turn 1 because you did nothing but click buttons if you just read your damn cards. He was obviously just trying to get to the funny part of the stream where he gets to laugh at the bad card game he doesn't play, because he only plays the good card games, you see.
@@drewbabe Because surely a sane person would spend 5 hours straight just to laugh at a children card game. Rarran clicking yes on every prompt MD show you is a common new player mistake, you can see that all the time in low rank lobbies or when the game first came out. Him going -3 for no reason other than "shiny button must click" is not a valid reason to paint him as just another yugioh hater
@drewbabe The main issue isn't understanding the core summoning mechanics-that much is pretty simple. The struggle usually comes with the context behind the various rules and effects. MD Solo can teach you the mechanics as much as it wants to, but if it never gives you cards and solutions relevant to what's being actively played, the player will not understand how the archetype is usually piloted. Take the latest Tenyi gate as an example, where the tutorial only teaches you a link route and a synchro route in a deck jammed with Tenyi Spirits. All this tutorial does is "Hey, you can summon these monsters with spirits, and you can make this boss monster that banishes!" Not to mention, MD also doesn't teach them specific removal and order contexts. Think about "When" and "If" cards within chain links and missed timings, or how target and non-target cards behave visually similarly, yet follow different rules, or why "destroy" a card is different than "send card to GY" and doesn't lead to a trigger. Understanding what the player *cannot* do is equally as important as what they *can* do. MD focuses on only the *can*, and a very skewed way at that.
I can tell you what I felt when I first played against this adamancipator combo deck…. I sat through the combo, tried to play on my turn, found out that I can’t do anything, I got super angry, surrendered and then whenever I see adamancipator I just auto surrender on the first card they play. I don’t want to sit through 10+ minutes of my opponent comboing only to be locked out of any action afterwards. And yes, I don’t play “meta” decks, so this may be why I can’t do anything, but it is still super frustrating. Edit: context: I started playing a year ago.
I started playing with master duel launch and the first time I encountered adamancipator I was like "oh that's neat" and then by the time the combo was over I was like "damn block dragon is pretty fucked up". I don't remember if I had a way to break the board, I assume not so I probably just scooped. Might have had lava golem idk. The launch format was pretty fucked up in general I don't think I was particularly annoyed by adam. I would have been playing pend magicians so it's not like my endboard was much more fair
My experience with playing Yu-Gi-Oh is randomly picking up duel links way back when Floodgate Trap Hole was the best card in the game. I played the game with pure E-Hero and a weird Warrior pile made of mostly Joey's cards and ended up bottoming out around Silver for months. Took me so long to even watch youtube videos for it or even the anime. Ended up having to studying duellinksmeta to learn how to be pretty okay at the game. Ended as a Legend player who hit KoG once during Sylvans meta. Ended up trying out TCG because of my friends, and played Amazoness since it was the bane of my existence in Duel Links and ended up losing every game on Dueling Nexus, but it was fun, but I never really put time into it because it was so different. Then Master Duel came out, at this point I've played probably less than 10 hours of TCG, and I picked up the game, played Aroma and Amazoness because those were "my" decks and while Amazoness was still the bad jank battle phase pile I remembered, Aroma was this interesting and complex plant link deck now and I didn't even know, I basically just played the deck like I did in Duel Links but with Sweet Marj this time. Now I watch a bunch of Yugitubers and keep my finger on the pulse of card releases trying to see what I can fit in VW or Branded or Labrynth, but I don't think I ever appreciated how those years of Duel Links made me different from the actual beginners. Like the game is super different to what I knew, but its way more of a solid foundation than I would've ever given credit without that Rarran video I guess.
Master Duel NEEDS a tutorial that takes you through game play over the years, take people through the different complexities of the game. THEN they need to have matchmaking lobbies for each of them. this would 1) let people actually learn the game as it happened and 2) let people stick with complexity levels of what they are comfortable with. no more learning to normal summon Gemini Elf and then going into Casual Ladder just to play against full power Labrynth
Well I'd recommend Duellinks. The powerlevel is a million times lower , speedduell means no 10 minute combos , anime - skills and characters bring that nostalgic vibe along ... And duellinks doesn't have Bullshit like maxx c , Tear , Kash, Labyrinth , Ash , or floodgates like skilldrain , Tkabo, anti spell , IO ...
I agree, but also that lab player in the video was probably by far the worst lab pilot I've ever seen, so I can see where they were coming from playing in casual
As in other card games I can understand playing tier1/top meta decks in casual/unranked, it's a place to practice lines and to build up knowledge of the deck. Where it derails is when you're going for daylies or just easy wins to boost your ego. Recommending different game to get into YGO doesn't solve the issue with Master Duel's onboarding experience, just makes it less compelling for a new player even more.
One thing about hard resources, since it was the last note done. Yes, that kind of resourcing certainly drags the games, even adds inconsistency to it, but it is nonetheless an exhaust vent. You can modulate how good or bad a card is with it. You can print the same card, give it one more or less mana, and it is a completely different thing. If anything, the powercreep doesn't just come from adding more words to the card, but also sometimes lowering the cost. In YGO, both up and down powering of a card comes from adding words to a card. Also, the better cards are more efficient, and they do that... by having more words in the card. Something that a single symbol can do in other games. Also rotation... That's another exhaust vent for power creep. Doesn't mean it won't happen, but you get a serrated upwards curve instead of the linear power creep YGO has (and the wordiness with it). Are there arguments against those things? Yes, of course. But people who love YGO tend to forget that there was a price to pay for such bombastic play pattern, and only after many years it becomes an indisputable truth.
As someone who tried to get into Yugioh for a bit and get my friends in, this was my experience also. I think the thing besides the length of the cards the problem is that yugioh cards actually represent numerous cards. Take, say, Madolche Anjelly. That one card is relatively easy to parse once you understand what it's 3 or so effects are doing. It tributes itself for a search, it has a 1/turn restriction, and it has the standard madolche recycle effect. All good so far. Plenty of games have cards that can search another card. But Anjelly actually represents finding any Madolche, which means like Puddincesoeur, then Puddingcess, then one of the rank 4s, then Ala Mode, then Hootcake, then Messangelato, then Chateau, then second Messangelato, then Sistart, then Promeade. This is one card actually representing a chain of 11 cards, most of which were in an area the opponent cannot see at all. Other games with resource systems mostly prevent this kind of card cascade by having things cost resources and thus eventually run out of steam even in a deck full of searches. This is madness to first comprehend. Both for an opposing player to even guess how this combo is going to play out, and for the player to figure out how to use. It is basically impossible via option and information overload for a fresh player to understand what to do with this kind of deck when first given it or to understand what it even can do and how to interact with it when facing it. A new player given a functional Madolche deck will not pull of this wombo combo. They will start with like normal summoning Messangelato pass. Eventually if they familiarize themselves with the deck, they might figure out how to get to one Tiramisu regularly. But to by themselves figure out the long branching combo chains to end on a powerful board is basically impossible, requiring them to instead just be spoon fed a combo guide. On the opposite end, being faced with this will result in a new player just zoning out and giving up trying to understand or anticipate what is happening. This is why Yugioh is just nightmarishly complicated. I showed my friends a few decks, we all did our best to comprehend what the hell they were supposed to do, then they just gave up and really didn't want to try again. It's a bit of a shame because I did try to learn a few decks like DM and Evil Twin just because I thought they were fun. But, eventually I also gave up. I spent a ton of time understanding the ins and outs of DM, then Verte was banned and the deck sank like the titanic. And just the idea of trying to grasp all the other decks to understand how to interact with them seemed like such a herculean task that it was not worth it. I will say I did like the feel of like Evil Twin and the feel of churning through the engine and thinking of the possibilities and options. But, just couldn't do it in the end.
I think masterduel could benefit from a section for AI battles where your AI opponent plays meta decks from multiple time periods. This would help bridge the gap between casual online play and give new players a concrete goal to work towards and learn in a controlled environment. So many current meta decks use cards that previous meta decks from several years ago used and having an AI to learn from using these cards can help teach players about common utility cards and confusing mechanics like missed timings. The community is so huge and there’s so many passionate players who would be willing to help in the creation of these decks.
I’ve definitely thought about this in the past myself. Gives new players a chance to see what their deck should somewhat be doing to be viable and help experienced players test and practice there decks
To add to this, Master Duel should have a feature, where you can build a deck (or even take one from the public decks) to give to an AI opponent to play against, so people can learn to counter a specific deck, that way people could watch the AI play, read all the cards and get a feel for how to play against it. And on top of that Master Duel should have some kind of Testing feature where you can play a deck you haven’t crafted yet to learn the combo, see if your interest in building it and just generally be able to play test.
@@nathanburton5024 Small indie company too worried about making big $$ on people opening packs, they probably dont have enough devs or the smarts from management to give a shit until the shareholders walk into their office and hold a gun to their head.
I mean, a lot of these first few points were even raised during konami's recent investor meeting... the game struggles to attract new players because the game has grown too complicated...but to keep the game fresh for older players, konami introduced a new mechanic once every like 4 years. The game requires newness and novelty to remain satisfying
The problem isn't newness and Novelty. The problem is the designers being unable to do so without writing 900 words on a card. If each card was limited to 2 normal length sentences, the new player experience would infinitely improve.
@@XJ-0641 honestly i like that it doesnt, but there should be a format where they go insane on the banhammer. Like the common card tourney that was in MD was fucking awesome, something like that in the real card game they actually support would be sick
@@jasonjanisewski78 most cards are about 2 sentences, with only a 3rd to say "once per turn". Rikka Petal for example is 2 effects and then a 3rd sentence for once per turn.
This isn’t really true, Magic add a ton of new and stupid gimmicks but I have never seen people call it over complicated. To be honest I think people who try and play Yu gi oh are just kind of dumb and don’t want to accept that fact so I have very little sympathy
I played from 02-04 and left during Chaos Control format because I couldn't afford the Chaos duo and every deck that wasn't Chaos just lost, every time. I started playing Master Duel in Oct 2022 and instantly got roflstomped into the ground. I was interested in learning though, randomly built my first deck: Solfachords 😂. Went to town with Electrumite all the way to Platinum (it was a long grind). Decided I missed cardboard Yugioh and decided to go to locals Nov 2022 in the height of Tear 0. Bought a Crystal Beast structure deck and soundly took last place. But the guys at locals were super helpful and showed me the ins and outs of the actual TCG meta and I built Traptrix (pre-structure deck), an easy to learn control strategy to help me stall while I got used to seeing combos. Fast forward to now: I play Sunavalon Rikka, Labrynth, Weather Painters, and Nemleria. I still have a post structure Traptrix deck that I play occasionally, as well as Generaiders. I also built a CR'd out Solfachord deck that I play occasionally. I Electrumite to be free'd. I also just got into Edison with Twilight Chaos Plants! Honestly, Edison or Speed Duel would be a good way to easy new players in to Yugioh. At the end of the day, I'm just trying to say. Someone will learn Yugioh if they are actually interested.
The problem is getting them interested in the first place. If you gave me a game and told me "You have to invest 50 hours of learning rulings, cards and current strategies while losing constantly" to just start to enjoy the game, I'd just leave without looking back. And anyone but you probably would feel the same way. You're an exception among the crowd. There's probably one person out of a thousand dedicated enough to struggle and fight just to understand how the game works. Not everyone has the same dedication, and that in an of itself is an aberation. A game is meant to be fun, not a grindfest of frustrating gameplay.
You said something that hit the nail on the head and one that hit me over the head as I was laddering a couple of weeks ago: The best way to play this game is to make sure your opponent can't. That sucks. I was playing Dogmatika Shaddoll. I go second against Floodgate Lab, Anti-Spelled, and basically lost the game on the spot. Loaded up against Traptrix next game and got trap holed to death. Then played Tear...dude end of Rukalos, Keleidoheart, and Dweller with Cryme in the back. 😅😅😅 I got tired of losing and switched to my pure P.U.N.K deck and started handtrapping people to death. Even though I was winning, I wasn't having fun. I realized I was doing the same to my opponents. Watching them surrender after 2 turns of "gameplay" was just disheartening. I wasn't having fun. And when I thought about it, I had been struggling to have fun with the game for a while at that point. I've been playing this game since I was a kid. Many of my best friends came to me through this game. I felt in that moment that it was probably time for me to stop playing and that legitimately made me sad. I'm still playing but the fact I even thought about quitting is wild to me..
I considered getting back into the game a couple of years ago because all my friends did. After playing with a few of their decks I quickly realized there was no getting back into it. I’ve enjoyed Master Duel so far. I have just come to accept I probably won’t make it to the highest tier and that most meta decks can likely deal with my rogue deck. I don’t get mad when I lose to things like labyrinth because I’ve chosen to have a ceiling in my play experience. Not sure how many new players would feel that way though.
Man I wasn’t expecting MBT going through a character arc and admitting the problems that modern yugioh has towards grabbing new players. Edit: honestly they should introduce legacy formats for new players as a way to simplify the game.
Yeah, the problem is instead tournament support they just keep trying peddle dogshit reprint commons from a mc pack to new players unwilling to fully invest into these things. Duel links are their only successful venture in this regard and they have full power orcust now!. Oh yeah and ocg favoritism.
No, legacy formats are not a good way to teach new players, they are a trap. Why? because legacy formats DO NOT teach you how modern cards work, the knowledge that a new player is going to get from playing edison for a few months does NOT translate to playing against a modern deck like kashtira or labyrinth
This isn't a character arc. Every yugioh player knows the problems with the game and Konami's absolute terrible handling of it, and they say it daily. The Act Man's video was eviscerated because it was poorly researched and made in bad faith. Rarran's is not. MBT even reiterated that he agreed with some of the Act Man's points.
@@MrGshinobi While true, it does SIGNIFICANTLY help ease them into the game. The main problem right now is you download MD, do the tutorial, and then queue into casual/ranked just to play against Kash, Tear, etc. You have no idea what is happening, none of the cards tell you what the opponent is about to do, and you just get blown out with no way to easily understand what just happened to you. What happened to only summoning 1 monster? Why did they get to play half their deck? Keep in mind, I've played YGO off and on for most of life too, and even I see a new deck and go "I have no idea what I'm supposed to do about this." Something like goat format is significantly easier to start with, because it's exactly the game these people will remember from childhood. They can understand the core fundamentals of the game in a format where fundamentals are pretty much all there is. Then, if they want to try out newer stuff, they can move to edison or even modern YGO. Yes, they'll have to learn all the new stuff still, but now they know and have solidified the BARE MINIMUM of the game. They aren't trying to understand how spell and trap cards work, while also getting blown out by massive combo decks. They understand the very core of YGO, and can focus solely on the newer things. MtG has multiple formats, and to my knowledge, it works wonders for both new and veteran players. Sick of the current modern meta? Just go play legacy or commander until the cards you hate either rotate, or aren't meta anymore. New player? Here's a low power format that will help you understand the core of MtG, and we can talk about more complex stuff later. It gets people in the door, and then we can show them the cool stuff you can do in more recent iterations of the game later. Editing because I'd like to add the clarification: I love modern Yugioh. Came into Master Duel playing Elemental Heroes, The Egyptian Gods, and Dark Magician for the nostalgia, but have since also started playing Branded (love the archetype), and am excited to put together Dark Worlds (was waiting on the new support) and try out Kashtira when it arrives.
True, but they are fun, interesting, and much more accessible. A way to get into yugioh in general without having to learn kashtira as step 1. It would be a great supplemental resource in addition to a proper solution.
Farfa had a good idea in his video about Master Duel implementing a real "casual" mode for beginners. Perhaps a mode where only players under a certain level can access and forces them to use the pre-built starter decks. Sure the decks aren't great, and it still isn't a real reflection of what the actual game has to offer, but putting you and your opponent on essentially an even playing field no matter what could help a new player ease better into the game.
If I'm not mistaken, Hearthstone has implemented a pretty smart way of handling ladder. They try to pair you up with other players of a similar or slightly better skill level to you. If you start a fresh Hearthstone account, you will be paired up with people who also have fresh accounts.
Attitudes like this guy has are exactly why Speed Duel should be cherished and promoted by Konami. No one sitting down for Speed Duel will after the match be like "I couldn't do anything and didn't get what was going on."
the problem with things like speed duel is getting the active playerbase to also adopt it. It doesn't matter if a new player sees speed duel as a way to play a less complicated version of the main game, when they have nobody else to play with.
Yugioh is exactly like a fighting game the parallels are crazy. -huge execution barriers -huge cost barriers -a great amount of depth that you are forced to explore before you have even a cursory understanding of what is happening -a community of people whose favourite phrase is "skill issue" As much as I love this game, I absolutely take peoples point about it when they bring up these kind of issues. I cant, however, say that I think something should be done about it; what would one do to improve the new player experience besides detract from the games complexity, an aspect which is also the games entire appeal.
I feel like the only possible solution would be an alternative format in which new players could engage, as I cannot think of a possible equivalent to sf6s rather more elegant solution in modern controls.
There is a potential solution to this, master duel needs a story mode similar to the tag force/world championship series of games where instead of you using prebuilt decks, you use your own, and npcs gradually get stronger and stronger, forcing players to adapt and learn more and more complex systems. Have this story mode give out gems after every duel (including rematches, but make it maybe 50 gems per duel so players are forced to duel more to open packs, and as such, learn more) and by the end of this, maybe the npcs are using legitimate decks that you’d find in the lower ranks, think pure infernobles, dinosaur, trickstar, etc. By doing this, players learn these complex mechanics naturally and suddenly they’re much easier to grasp. Alternatively master duel could add duel puzzles, seriously these things are AMAZING at teaching how to break boards, combo, and show more obscure things like missing timing or how something like stardust dragon can bypass skill drain since it has to pay the cost and by doing so, dodges said skill drain. Also, they could allow players to make and upload their own duel puzzles to help teach newer players. Admittedly this wouldn’t be as good as a story mode, but it’s much more doable on Konami’s end.
Completely agreed. I'd love to see duel puzzles. The hand-holding "do exactly these steps to attack an opponent for game when they have 1 card on board, 0 in hand, and you have exactly lethal in hand" tutorials are NOT duel puzzles, they teach you about 1-2 combos at best and that's it. I'd love to see actual duel puzzles
A potential issue with this could he that MD’s meta shifts constantly. A decent deck from this time a year ago may be no longer competitive or riddled with bans. It’d have to be constantly updated to be useful as an intro to the current ladder.
With the current environment of the game, duel puzzles and a story mode that doesn't hold your hand through things like a forced prebuilt deck would definitely be a great way of helping building skills gradually rather than the all at once approach the game currently more or less relies on
Master duel should have multiple oldschool/simplified formats accessible at all times, not just as an event. And new players should be guided and even restricted to them in the first few hours on the app. And they should get fully functioning complete top-of-the-line decks for these formats for free, for example as mission rewards. And for the love of god, keep any and all FTK, floodgates and Solitare combos out of them. MD releasing with drytron, VFD and Rhongo was the worst idea in card game history.
Yes the Yu-Gi-Oh tradition of structure decks one copy of 40 individual cards which only a few of them actually work together Must end. They are Nicole and diming the player base but making the game impenetrable and an inconvenient slog which relies upon 3rd party information resources to function I should be able to purchase or better yet, unlock a fully functional Kashtira deck. Not spend 3000 gems gambling for essentially half a functional game experience.
restricting players to not playing the actual game sucks and it's not a good way to learn the game. yugioh players like you often misunderstand that some new players WANT to learn the modern game, they know that it's a crazy combo umvc3 fuck fest and they want to understand it, but they cannot at first glance, and forcing them to play goat for 5 hours is NOT gonna solve that.
incredibly interesting topic. I'm a very casual yugioh player (I often times understand like 3% of the concepts in these videos). But i love these discussion videos talking about the "meta" of card games. The casual newcomer experience, paper vs master-duel. It's all fascinating to me. I feel like the only true way a yugioh video game could teach people is to take the apporch of a fighting game. Provide complex tutorials from "how to jump" all the way to learning combos. The problem with that is losing the people who want to just jump in and play.
The problem with that is losing people who want to just jump in and play." I think yu-gi-oh does a good enough job of that with the massive combo lines that take 9 minutes, adding a tutorial that explains that part couldn't hurt
@@DeviousHands that's true. I'm just thinking from my experience with games that require long and dull tutorials. You can definitely do it right. I think the whole "puzzle' match thing some Yu-Gi-Oh games have done is an incredibly creative and fun way of teaching somebody how to play.
Agreeing with both of you, I'm trying to get into fighting games and decided to start with Marvel vs Capcom 2 and it's pretty much exactly how Yugioh must feel for a new player. It's a ton of fun when I'm winning, but it is a NIGHTMARE in terms of game complexity. It is very easy to feel helpless even against the AI (I don't want to imagine what it'd feel like fighting against even a low-level Sentinel/Storm/Magneto player), there is an insane amount of mechanics and character combinations to learn, and it's not easy finding good tutorials, despite this being one of the most celebrated games ever made. I've actually resorted to just playing Super Turbo, which isn't nearly as fun, but at least I have a better sense of what I'm doing and feel like it'll be easier to get good
However most of combo from a lot of deck in yugioh case was created by playerbase Not from konami themself Unless they want to assosiacte themself with certain pro player about creation of combo line guide, there no chance they'll make any combo guide in the game I mean,did you really think they intentionally create halqifibrax just to make 20min worth of wait combo line with so many branches line and deck variation that also make board full of negaters?
@@abdurachmanromzy4778 halq pull a crystron tuner is fine firedog search a flamvell magician is fine adamancipator researcher search green gem make the adamancipator 6 is fine these at least teach you that you can use these tools to make basic boards, and smarter players will notice that they can make better use of these tools than the tutorial shows. it at least gets them to start considering how a deck might play, even if not at the highest level, something the game does not really teach at all rn
I think another problem is that the thing that makes yugioh so fun (at least to me) is also the reason new players have such a hard time: the unique nature of each deck/ archetype. Every deck has a unique game plan, which means that 1) some decks are just inherently better then others so if the thing pulling you in isn't good enough then too bad (i speak as a subterror behemoth fan so i feel like i have some experience on this front) and 2) learning a deck, either to play it yourself or to counter it, does not help you in the long term because there is not guarantee you are putting in this effort to learn something that is broadly applicable for a lot of other decks. Worst of all, as far as i can see there is no easy way to deal with this without having the game lose his identity, aside from going all in on simplified alt formats which still risk having many decks feel very similar if not identical.
I disagree with that every deck and archetype is unique in fact I'd argue far too many of them are the same they boil down to some form of projectile hand vomit and special summon spam ending on a huge board of stuff
Learning the way the different decks play is the funnest part of Yugioh. Some decks like Floowander, are designed in a way that is really intuitive and easy to understand. While some decks like D/D/D, synchrons, and Vaylantz are virtually impenetrable without prolonged hands on study.
honestly i think the best decks for new players are the ones with extremely clear win conditions, and the least friendly are the ones which rely excessively on extra-deck staples. far easier to explain to someone that their deck's plan is "make rank 10 monsters, special summon gustav max, special summon liebe"
one reason ygo is hard to learn because the archetype system makes it difficult to do so. ygo archetypes are essentially sets of smaller games you play almost by yourself using a generalized basic ruleset, therefore they dont really offer much from one to another. dude went from dragonmaid to salamangreat and probably felt bewildered at the difference
As someone who gave Master Duel a try, trying to build a deck as a beginner is almost impossible. With MtG, you can stick together 30 something cards chosen completely at random and 20 something lands of the right color and while you're not going to have a deck that's any good, you still have a technically functioning deck. With Yugioh, it felt like every card I picked required another card I didn't have to even be able to hit the field.
You can do so, but you are stuck to structure decks and close to no tech/handtraps. Basically, imagine playing mono black, w/o tenacious underdog and gy trespasser and long night instead of liliana. The idea is there, but you don't have enough tools to deal with some issues.
You Google a deck list. I figured that most people found that answer a pretty obvious and natural one. And you figure out why they told you to put in what they did as you go
@@RNGHater YEP. When your game revolves around needing these "handtraps or board breakers" and you somehow dont draw any an the opponent goes first your either conceding on the spot or wasting 5-6 minutes hoping they screw up. "Interactive gameplay" nah bro that shits watching a 5 minute unskippable ad.
@@RandomGuyCDN I mean, some decks are all gas and no breaks and are able to open a board anyways or deal with it one way or another (Mikanko). Others can just survive long enough to be able to win from grinding you of all resources (Paleo). You are showcasing ONE scenario. Yes, it sucks when it happens multiple times. Yes it would be better if we had a best of 3 that can actually help you deal with the issues that a BO1 format has. But is not a Yugioh problem in itself. Otherwise, we would be complaining about not opening Raigeki in LOB format and crying about the Golem in defense mode because it's too big.
I think changing how cardtext is shown in the tcg would be a great thing, like how they do it in the ocg. Not a big block of text where you have to figure out what of the multiple effects are hard, soft or non-once per turns. That would make things simpler
A lot of complaints I hear center around "I can't do anything." Konami could very easily make tutorials for beating established boards, and understanding good points to negate things mid action, like an advanced tutorial where the opponent has a full monster board and your hand has dark ruler. New people. Do not know. What staples specifically are in this game. Some people may just stick around if you show them a card or three and say "if you do this you don't have to really worry about about anything. And this looks more intimidating than it is". It's one thing to hold someone's hand into a burning building and let go, and another to tell them where the fire extinguisher is and how to use it.
the problem is deeper tbh. at its core, with how link summoning, gravesearching, negating etc work, the point of the game is to stop the other player from playing. it's anti interactive and often makes one player feel cheated. Not knowing WHEN to negate or die is a SYMPTOM of this.
@@ianslee4765 And then when you take away the tools to stop the player from stopping the other player from playing, people will say that the game has no "interaction". Lmao One of the most stupid arguments i ever saw was the reason as to why duel links players wanted "hey trunade" banned, because it would allow the opponent to essentialy remove their "interaction" (backrow) to stopping the opponent from playing, and lead into otk. Completelly ignoring that, if they changed their deck to deal with that, they would not lose like that, but they were annoyed they could not use their staples for just that, so konami went and banned hey trunade. Now we are in a meta where end boards are literally "you dont play the game" backrow cards and everyone wants storm to be unlimited and twin twisters to be added to the game.
@@neonoah3353 the problem is negates on opponents turns with little cost to advantageous cost(milling a card chains its effect). Each player being limited in negates per turn unless a card specifies is really not a hard concept either.
Hard to "do anything" even with the knowledge when the game doesnt provide you the tools to do it. Komoney wants new MD players to swipe their credit cards just to get access to the required playsets of hand traps and board breakers, thats the kind of horse shit new plays dont tolerate. When you game is balancing around needing interupts and the only way to do it is to pepegacredit then your game is flawed.
Your point about Tears, Lab and Fenrir are genuinely spot on. It’s too late to fully reverse the “Combo for 8 minutes into unbreakable board” decks. But they can introduce more valuable cards that work first and second. Havnis and Bystials may be broken but it’s very much the correct way to lead the game
I’d rather get Havnissed then fenrired. It sucks not being able to even do an inherent summon from the hand without triggering him and getting banished immediately.
Ah yes because newbies must really be drawn to playing and playing against the tear mirror. That’s definitely the ideal way of gettting people into Yugioh :^))))
I'm someone who started playing yu-gi-oh in 2019 with duel links and was put off from playing the full game because I thought the main game was too complicated. The main reason I actually started playing TCG style yu-gi-oh was Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution which I bought on a whim during the beginning of covid. It has both a better tutorial than master duel and a fully fleshed out story mode with all the major duels from the anime. Not only were the anime duels nostalgic for someone who grew up watching the show but at the start of each series their was a tutorial based on the shows introductory duel that taught you how to use the mechanics that show introduced (Vrains had a Link tutorial, Arc-V had a pendulum, etc.). From a new player perspective this really helped introduce me to new mechanics through having a tutorial at the start then playing with and against them for the entire series to the point where I like all of the new summoning mechanics (yes even pendulums). once make a deck you can try out ranked and unranked multiplayer with global leaderboard. It also has both sealed and draft modes which have been big suggestions to add to master duel. Decks were somewhat easy to build as one story mode duel got you enough points for 30 packs and specific archetypes were in different packs based around characters from the anime. The super and ultra rare luck could be kind of bad sometimes but it is nowhere near as bad as master duel where you can spend 11,000 gems you saved up and pull no Spright blue, Elf, or starter from the selection pack (this happened to me and I'm still mad). The price is also much better as the base game is only 40 dollars for the full game whereas less than 50 packs in master duel is 64.99. The biggest problem for Legacy of the Duelist was that it was never updated with new cards so it is completely stagnant. I think Master Duel could be vastly improved by incorporating some of these features into its system. They could add anime/ manga arcs to solo mode and work tutorials on summoning mechanics into that experience. adding sealed and draft play would allow for more variation in the game besides just ranked as well as offer a slower format. Finally, adding a one time payment to permanently increase gem rewards from dueling would make bad pull luck much less infuriating as you are able to earn those gems back quicker. PS: also they should add a rush duel mode that sounds really fun.
This is why they should have more of the Dual Trial events and have them last longer than just a couple days. I also think they should give a notification for mobile whenever it opens.
The difference between yugioh and mtg's complexity is pretty easy. MTG can be complex, Yugioh is inherently convoluted. I've taught nearly a dozen people MTG by teaching them how casting cards works, and then playing a single game of it with both of our hands revealed so they can ask me any and all questions they have about what they are capable of doing. Simple, effective, and gives a fantastic general idea of how to play. It's even led to people reading what's in their hand and asking me how certain combos and cards work and they get so excited they are figuring it out. Yugioh's word soup doesn't allow that, and I think part of the issue is that while you can teach people easily enough the basic summoning methods and the basic game that doesn't tell you ANYTHING about how decks play and so many of them work off of their own rules.
You can *probably* figure out how to do basic shit in a normal MTG deck without knowing every card in the deck front and back beforehand. Compare that to like, playing a salamgreat deck as a new player without a guide to basic combo lines
Exactly, after spend hours trying to understand summoning mechanics, the next BIG gap is deck building. You can copy anyone's deck on internet then realized you have no idea why there're cards that's not the same archetype, why this card is in this deck, how does this card work in this deck, etc. And after you managed to understand your deck, the final HUGE gap is to understand opponent's deck which is.........as someone said, it's like fighting game but you need to learn over 200 characters moves and every possibility for each move opponent could've done.
But you’re talking about having to teach people while MBT and Rarran are talking like it’s unforgivable for a card game to have to do that to onboard people.
the big benefit of MD, i think, is that you can kiiiinda learn by doing by just assing around for a few hours in ranked with your deck until you have it down - that's something you can't really do at locals. that being said, especially for new players, yeah, i think guides are important. someone mentioned him not knowing to create Accesscode and like - what the hell in the Salamangreat deck suggests that a wincon is creating Accesscode Talker and attacking for game? it's not even in the same archetype!
@@vinnythewebsurfer not exactly relevant. I'm just talking about the ease with which you can slide someone into the game. It's an anecdote about how easy the game is to teach and learn.
As someone who collected cards as a kid then jumped back into the game through Duel Links zero actual knowledge I'm glad I got to get in when I did because getting to experience an accelerated version of the evolution of the game so when Master Duel launched I could transfer over with little effort. Still I don't expect new players to have to spend 5+ years in different format to understand the main one and also they can't even do that anymore given the massive power creep in Duel Links.
I got into duel links right when synchros came out and I 100% agree Duel link just perfectly encapsulated the feeling of playing TCG Yugioh for decades in like 4 years which is why it was seemless transfer to clients like Project ignis I just looked up the best decks currently in the tcg and learnt upsides downsides and countrers much like when a new meta drops in DL If Master Duel could have a "YGO over the years" Solo/casual mode where you play the most prominent decks of each year since YGO dropped with cards legal of that time then player experience could be 1000x better
This, also shoutout to rank10ygo’s analyses for trash archetypes, re-reviewing them + their general gameplan after they are surprisingly given new support, and what that might mean for its original idea and moving forward, what you might see it in. The battle of the trash, where archetypes he’s reviewed compete for the crown of least trash trash deck, where usually most of the archetype engine is present, and you can see what someone would do if they were trying to deckbuild using as much of that trash archetype as possible to make it competitive. Those were good too, it teaches you what cards to look for in an archetype that stand out and provide the most amount of game wins. Those are purely battling trash with trash, so you will see the furthest of meta has to offer, and what each deck needs to build on to become better. Most cards are mid, less are good and an even smaller portion are broken.
ideally they should just integrate past formats into master duel like GOAT and Edison, and then have additional formats after that, so that people can progressively step up once they feel they have a grasp on the game from these simpler formats. GOAT and Edison can be complex, but with stuff like GOAT you're more likely to encounter an opponent where all they do on their first turn is set and pass, as opposed to playing for 20 minutes and then you just have to surrender because they set up an unbeatable board. Some sort of progression tiered formats are by far the best way to let someone get into the game at their own pace before they decide they're ready for regular advanced format that follows the current banlist.
It's so weird that I see so many people suggesting past formats as a solution. Where are new players going to find all of these 20-year old cards? When they go to the game store it'll just be the new releases, so now that can't actually play the game they learned on Master Duel irl without having to go deep into the secondary market. I also just don't think there is much appeal to new players in playing a format that is entirely old cards (other than maybe some returning Yugi-boomers, they might dig it). When new sets come out all of the enfranchised players are going to be talking about how excited they are for the new stuff, and they will be like, 10 years behind trying to catch up. Except the aforementioned Yugi-boomers, most new players aren't going to have any nostalgic connection to these legacy formats, so it's going to basically be like telling them to take a five semester history course before they can play the game. Just do what basically every other card game does and have a rotating entry-level format or actual support for a limited environment that lets you play after opening/drafting a few of the most recent packs. It won't teach how to play Yu-Gi-Oh as it is played now, but it will get people on their way and will probably slow down the power and complexity creep the game is infamous for. It's much easier to start with the new stuff and work your way back than it is to start with the old stuff and work your way forward.
@@adamgalloy9371 that would be the point of putting legacy formats on master duel, then you can play online so you don't need [physical cards and officially supporting them would mean products directly specifically at those formats like MtG does. Yugioh also does have a "beginner" format. Speed Duels. Just way less people play speed duels than play Goat and Edison so it is harder to recommend them than the legacy formats.
@@ducky36FThey don't need products specifically for the new formats. Think of how many cards in each new set are completely unplayable filler. Now, imagine there is a lower-power level rotating format and/or a limited environment where people can actually use those cards instead of them being literal trash. Enfranchised players are going to incidentally get these cards since they come in the new packs, so they might as well play the new formats to help on-ramp the new players (as opposed to Speed Duel which they'll just ignore). It requires a bit of a change in design philosophy of course to make these plans work, but it's much overdue at this point and basically every other card game makes it work. For the longest portion of its history MtG didn't even have different types of products for its formats, everything (more or less) just came in through the same Standard-legal sets and it actually worked pretty well. In fact, many players consider it a bad thing that they are starting to make sets specifically aimed at other formats like Modern and Commander because it is arguably leading to the power and complexity creep issues that have plagued Yu-Gi-Oh.
@@adamgalloy9371 Or Konami can lean into its aggressive reprint policy - one of its strongest assets as a game - and aggressively reprint Goat and Edison cards with their correct wording for the time. We already see a little of this, just ramp it up a lot more.
@@shuttlecrossing7084 I get that people like playing these formats and I think it'd be great for the game if they did reprint these cards so that legacy format events can be held. I just don't think these formats would be compelling to new players who have no appreciation or context for the history of the game even if their gameplay is easier to get into. Like I said above, it comes off like telling someone they need to take a history class before they can play the "actual" game. New players will also want to play with the new sets that everyone else is getting hyped about (and that Konami is marketing most heavily). Everyone (beginner or pro) experiencing a new set together for the first time is a pretty powerful community experience and is why release or pre-release events tend to be so popular for card games. These legacy formats cut out this experience for a format that literally hasn't changed in 10+ years. I guess I'm somewhat projecting an opinion to new players here, so it's possible I am wrong, but... I just don't see this being appealing to most new players. IDK what else to say. Basically every other card game has solved the problem of having an entry-level format and many card games have demonstrated they can support multiple formats. It baffles me that Yu-Gi-Oh players refuse to learn anything from that and insist on reinventing the wheel with these kinda half-baked ideas.
As someone who played on and off for a while, the increasing complexity eventually pushed me away. I ended up printing out a quick summary of what cards did so i didn't have to read tiny text and had it summarized in a neat way that was way more comprehensible. Meanwhile something like the Pokemon TCG, even with increasing power levels, was so, so easy to hop into. Not cost-wise, but from an understanding point. Even the most complex abilities and attacks only take a little bit of figuring to understand, if any at all.
heck i'd argue that even cost wise pokemon is also easier to get into on that front as well. a pokemon deck would cost you about 60+ dollars. or you coulod just buy 2 league battle decks and you would be set competitively until rotation or until you want to invest again. but yugioh decks usually cost around 100-200 dollars for the average deck. half of those cards are probably staples.
Playing and understanding the entirety of LostBox, the most "technical" deck in the meta in recent memory was easier for me than having to understand how 1 branded despia combo work.
As a yugi boomer who’s teaching multiple people how to play at the moment. This video is 100% spot on! Only thing missing is how toxic some players can be. My friend doesn’t ask for advice online anymore because a bunch of commenters gave him hate because he was playing Suships and told him he was a “bad player”. I told him “you’re learning and having fun, that’s all that matters man”
Your Fiend? No matter people online were toxic, that is a classic example of xenophobia! (Yes, I know you meant "My friend" but I really wanted to comment this unfunny joke)
One of the easier ways for new players to get into the game if they don't like memorizing combo lines is playing control, and your reward is everyone calling you a toxic player who's representative of everything wrong with the game
The player base is so incredibly toxic. The amount of “your deck sucks if you can’t play through a single ash” condescension I see on Reddit when new players ask for help is unbelievable. When the fact is ash is an oppressive card and there are opening hands in full power Ishizu Tearlament that lose to a single ash Blossom. That’s just the way the game goes.
i think its fine to an extent to tell people their decks arent competitive. some of the most toxic comments from people come from people who a) want to play the decks they like, and b) want to consistently win in ranked, and sometimes you can't do both at the same time. some people unnecessarily shit on non-meta decks but there's also the types who refuse to accept that- if they play harpie lady swarm in 2023, they're probably going to lose a lot. that doesn't mean you can't play it but you do have to accept that you're going to lose a lot @@isidoreaerys8745
Yeah, ppl like to blame meta players for this or yugiboomers but it's just toxic players and recently ygo was opened to a whole swath of toxic ppl with no life at all So yeah fully With you there, and the toxicity simply breeds more toxicity since we don't do anything as a community to stop it
I really liked that Rarran highlighted how simple the first turn is in pretty much every other card game compared to Yugioh. In most tcgs, the game starts slow and simple, and then it ramps up as the game goes on and you can start doing more things. This allows new players to jump into a game and start learning by doing. Also, almost every duel in the YGO anime is written like this, because this type of game is very engaging both to play and to watch. In modern YGO you are just overwhelmed from the start with a million different actions, which makes it so difficult to for a new player to learn as they go, as there’s no way a newbie can process everything going on. And he’s totally right that it’s crazy how many games are just over without you even having a chance to participate at all.
I've been saying forever that either number of summons or card activations should be limited on a curve. Tutor a card? That's one less card you can play on your turn. Even Deck building games like Dominion operate on this concept. Speed World in 5D's also did this. Wild how it hasn't been implemented yet
@@KevinTangYT I’ve often wondered what it would look if there was a format where you can only special summon as many times as the number of turns you’ve taken (ie turn 1 you get 1 special summon, turn 2 you get 2, etc). You’d obviously have to adjust the banlist and probably add some kind of limitation to spell cards as well, but I think that would be a cool format to explore.
I'm glad that I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh right when MD came out, I was able to learn using invoked shaddoll and tri brigade which were extremely linear and had easy to understand effects. I couldn't imagine trying the game for the first time and running into tear lab or kashtira without having someone to explain to me wtf they're doing.
This is without a doubt my experience playing the game with friends. Story time: Ive been playing yugioh for almost a decade now and I still had to have my more experienced friend coach me and re-teach me almost every aspect after my break in 5Ds. I am now a decently competent player and my previous yugioh friend group is nonexistent now after 5 years. Fast forward to Master Duel and trying to get my friends into the game so i have some people to play with who arent playing MvC at a competitve level (this was my favorite comparison in the video, its perfectly accurate). Friend A is a yugiboomer, like myself, who loved the original show and battle city growing up and like the rest of us was eager to play yugioh again. He refuses to touch it now, even to play against me or our other friend, because he cannot find a foothold to play against anyone even with some help from myself and other decklists or guides. Friend B had never played yugioh before but it was something to play with friends so he was willing to learn. He will only play now if i mention it until he found witchcrafters to try and give the game another chance with friends only, I.E me. 3 people in this story of 3 different yugioh backgrounds and each one us is an example of every single point here. I am currently betting on which game/company will crash first: Konami and yugioh or Blizzard and Diablo
11:20 okay, so maybe they aren't the most complicated decks in the game, but they are certainly not new-player friendly. Decks that require you to set up negates and pops and interruption are inherently difficult for new players, because they require you to learn what your opponent is playing to interact with them. Decks that set up a Towers and pass, or a deck like numeron going second OTK are much more new player friendly, as they tend to do 1 thing, do it very efficiently, and dont require you to knoe too much about what your opponent is up too, which lets you learn the game at a reasonable pace while having above a 10% win rate
If someone asks me a good deck to try out to play the game for the first time, im linking them Hardleg's video on Crusadia. Easy to understand, easy to play, Equimax is a cool motherfucker, you get to play Kaijus which are objectively cool as hell
@anonymous71207 going second otk decks in general are super nice. You don't have to learn what to and what not to handtrap, or anything like that. Click duster, click lightning storm, click kaiju, do your combo line for big guy, attack. Gotta love big bonk beatdown
Branded pre bystial support is IMO one of the best beginner decks, that you can still win with. The game plan is simple activate branded fusion, summon lubellion then use lubellion to get mirrorjade. When you get used to that combo you add ad libitum to summon back mirrorjade, and all the bystial support to step by step get a understanding on the game’s speed while being able to sometimes win games.
Honestly (as someone who's been playing for 7 years) I think the main issue now is how old cards that were unsearchable or just not an issue before get so much value out of the sideboard. After a break from the game a mate threw photon/galaxy at me and I played it in paper and it was fun since my plunder runic opponent didn't board since it was just casual games. Played on DB and just got summon limited game 2 and droll into summon limit skill drain game 3. This was against VS and as since I'd never seen the deck I went from interested in what it does into losing to solely non-engine blowouts. You could argue I just didn't board into every bit of back row hate but since they were mostly in the side (besides skill drain) I had no idea why on earth I would've needed to after how g1 went
I think Rarran's comment about resource systems is half right. Yeah Yu-Gi-Oh does have resources, but the difference is in how they're used. Mana, energy, land etc... the main benefit is that they provide a slow ramp up of power. You start out with less resources, but as the game goes on you acrew more and can spend more on more powerful effects. Yu-Gi-Oh is almost exactly the opposite. You start the game with basically everything already within your grasp, the only resource you have to build up is your graveyard. But everything else is basically at the palm of your hand sicne everycard searches for another card which searches for another card which searches for another card which you can tren tribute to create an uninteractible behemoth that if your opponent even looks at they loose the game. Instead of starting off small and working your way up, Yu-Gi-Oh starts you at your strongest from the getgo.
the idea that someone claims dragon maids to be "too complicated for new players" is INSANE to me, my buddy (who has never touched yugioh before in his life) choose that as his very first deck when he started master duel and gushed about how understandable and easy it was, dragon maids being "too complicated" has aboslutly nothing to do with why a new player might not enjoy this game
I agree with point 1 a lot. I don't shy away from mentioning to friends that I play Yugioh, but I usually follow it up with a recommendation to not get into it. I've been playing since I was three, and I only took a short break in my early teen years. I know what to expect through years of playing. I can't imagine someone having to learn that (which is why Pak is so damn impressive).
It is clear that something needs to change, the problem is how can Konami, the people who have led YuGiOh to this position in the first place, possibly be trusted to lead it out. I have little faith in Konami to fix the game.
Well no one else can fix the game. But it is in in their interrest to fix this issues sinse they really want new players. So maybebig creators could like make an open latter to Konami with some ideas on how to fix this issues. Because I think everyone can think of some ways to this issues that are quite easy to implement.
Konami already failed to leave a good first impression on the casual audience with Master Duel, all they're doing now is trying to keep the people still hanging on from leaving.
Let's just say those shareholders meetings will force them to chance. They hold more power than anyone in konami's offices. If they're concerned that getting no new players is going to hinder the growth and profit they can force konami to shut the game down competely if it's not making them $$
I got back into the game in 2019 and I'm still not confident enough to take my decks to an LGS. I don't want to be that guy sitting there reading my own cards and the opponents, and making game 1 take 45 minutes.
The duality of man; I can back to the game in 2019 with my last game being HAT format. Picked up Sky Striker in 2019 because it's not a complicated deck mechanically and went to a YCS one month later lol
Kinda similar. I was so bored during the pandemic that I started watching YGO videos, specifically Rata's Archetype videos. After that I downloaded Duel Links and gave it a go. Hell, I didn't even bother to go to the subreddit or DL Meta or any external help because I hate doing that with video games. I guess I was super lucky that I managed to win several of my first duels on the ladder that I got invested again after not playing for literally decades. After that it was just about learning a few mechanics one at a time and being extremely patient. I really, REALLY wanted to learn YGO.
@@RairikyHow I have played both Dragon maids and D link and no version outside of dragon maid d link is hard to combo. Dragon link is way harder to combo with it.
@@RairikyYou must be high on copium. Dragonmaid is my petdeck and even Dragonmaid Tears is not even that hard to pilot. DLink Dragonmaid might be convoluted but that is the hardest shit you can get with Dragonmaids.
As someone who stopped playing until the synchro era of Yugioh, when I first played master duel, I was stumped at how one can combo for ad infinitum for the summoning of herald of ultimateness. It took me quite some time to not only learn my deck but also learning some mechanics of the game and I am still learning how pendulum cards work. The amount of work you have to put through learning the game is quite immersive that it reminds me of school at some degree... but at least in yu-gi-oh, you dont fail the subject. There is nothing wrong in learning the game on your own, but it will take time... like months, not 10 hours...
I stopped playing roughly around the time that pendulum summoning was announced or something, there was just too much to keep track of anymore, I was already bad at building decks and remembering what my cards did, so something clicked and I had a moment of clarity that went like this: Am I having fun? no Am I winning games? no Am I making money off of this? no Then why am I even playing this anymore when none of the above applies, it's costing me hundreds of dollars to even try and compete, and my skill hasn't gotten any better? I'm out. Still have my cards from years back but i'm more interested in selling them off and seeing if I can make any money off them.
8:25 "people started saying stuff like 'maybe you're not the right kind of person for YGO'." Ah, yes, the children's card game made for children so even a child should be able to understand it but now you need an entire rulebook next to you and don't you dare get when and if confused.
If Konami won't do it, it really comes down to the community to change the way *we talk about the game.* You capture it really well; the game is complex, and it is hard to learn, but it also *can* be learned if we are honest with new players and hype up that complexity as the *goal.* It is fun to play 20 cards over the course of your first turn, but if you're told that you don't need to do that to have fun, and then discover that was a lie, that sucks.
I think the biggest issue with getting new players in the door is multifaceted. 1. "I can't do anything." If you don't know about the standard going second staples for the modern game, and when to use them, you may as well throw in the towel if you lose the die roll. The tutorials don't really show off stuff like how do i break a board/interrupt a combo. Or how to formulate your own combo lines and set up an endboard 2. Even if you do know this there's still a good chance you'll get to do nothing because the only format this game lets you play is mtg vintage where every deck has like 12 copies of Force of Will. If you don't like the format, you can't go play something like Goat Edison Hat or something like the Domain Monarch days. Not without a buddy or 3 where it's slower or you don't have to worry about your search being ruined by a Forehead from the hand you don't have the ability to interact with. 3 Hand Traps. So integral to the game being playable but incredibly indicative of its problems in the modern era considering everything. If you're going first with one of the many decks that die to Ash because maybe someone gave you a bunch of old cards or you're a returning player with an old deck and someone ash's your normal or imperms it you can't really do anything about it because in the modern age decks are so hyper consistent and powerful that hand traps need to be relevant and any consistently good answers to them are either banned or limited.
Also, don't lie to ourselves, YGO is CONVOLUTED, not complex. It has only one gameplan in combo, either slow or fast, and once you know the plan there's not much else you can do because there's not a lot of meaningful decision making.
I first started playing Yugioh when the craze happened back in the 2000s. Then after about a year I stopped. It never went beyond playground yugioh. Fast forward to the middle of Baby Ruler format and I decide to pick up the game again. I remember my first Dueling Network match with my blue-eyes dragon deck. I just summoned Blue-Eyes, Kaiba did it, the game let me do it, why would it be wrong? It took a few months for me to get good at the game. Doesn't help that I didn't have any help. But then 2014 and HAT came around and something just clicked for me. I was no longer trying to make anime decks with cards that weren't even real, here was a format that I really enjoyed, with decks that were only moderatly difficult. Hell, at a certain level, everything back then was at least usable. But learning the game like I did? It took months of dedication and a format that clicked with me. I can't imagine getting back into the game now. It's not the speed that's the issue, it's the length of turns and the sheer amount of text on each card. It's exhausting. I just got into magic, why can't we have keywords? Or simpler worded effects? I know we can do better.
The way I learned how to play was by watching through DM on Netflix back in the day, then basically picking out Arc-V out of a hat to watch because it looked cool. Luckily that was the season that explained every summoning type except links, so I could just wing it on MD from there. My point being, the anime doesn’t exist as a starting point anymore. The new show is based on a secondary game not available to the US, so there’s no resource like that to rely on that anymore unfortunately.
Also it was my understanding that rather than one of the most popular, standard is one of the least popular ways to play the game, with having 4 or 5 lgs around your area not a single one of which does standard locals being completely normal. Its pretty much only the most popular on Arena, and on a downward trend there too, no?
Standard tends to have down turns with changes like the recent change 2 to 3 year rotation. People wore getting sick of standard before that change was made and it turned a lot of players away for a year just to get away from Black/Red or Blue/Black/Red piles. Give it a few months to a year and Standard will come back with new card pools pushing out the older meta standouts before they rotate out.
Really amazing video. I especially feel the point of "You play so your opponent cant" Thats the part where I've always thought about quitting the game completely, cause I think: Yugioh, especially in paper should NEVER be a single player experience, and for lots of decks, thats exatly the case. And these are duels I just walk away from, or Alt F4 in Master Duel. Cause obviously you dont want me to play, so why not play test hands in the first place? Like it has the same effect if Im not gonna be able to do a single play. Biggest issue in my opinion and of course one that really doesnt get new players into the game if we are honest. Like Noone wants to play a game that your cant play, right?
I last played in 2005. Been curious about the current meta but quickly realized it’s not a game for me. I never understood the “I play so my opponent can’t” mentality. In that case, why are you even playing “a game” against someone? I feel like if I played against someone like that and they went first, I’d say “I’m gonna go make a sandwich while you do all your combos and we’ll say you won, okay?” Seems like they could shuffle their deck at home and see if they can manage their combos without needing to “play” against someone.
The funny thing is, YGO had a resource system that I would argue kept it balanced for a long time: the Normal Summon. I feel like the game's current state was almost an inevitability after it was no longer so 'special' to special summon.
There's no reason why alternative format/rules can't also limit Special or at least Extra Deck summons. Can't retroactively change card text, but having a summon limit that scales like mana I think is the most elegant solution
its so accurate, I spent around a full year on EDO/Dueling Nexus during Covid just brute forcing my learning of the game, and nearly another year before I was finally comfortable playing in paper which was still another big learning curve that my locals were thankfully very patient with.
Link evolution has a great new player experience. It goes through every new mechanic one by one then mixes them up so you can see all the interactions.
I watch dzeef, farfa and MBTs content a lot and I don't even play the game. I tried Master Duel but got bounced off how hard it was to learn so I figured I'd watch some UA-cam content to figure it out and found these guys and even though I've now learned a lot about the game (like what MaxxC does lol) I stuck around because you guys are just really funny youtubers and your content is very easy to follow.
@Mrinternasional: even though they are too many negated, this is why yugioh have called by the grave to mainly negated hand trap, but they can counter something else. I know you are not guarantee to start of with call by the grave, the majority of the time if your opponent only have hand trap, then they used all they hand trap against you, but because they never used one of their hand trap as a monster card, they lose the duel, because after they used all hand trap, they have nothing to protect the life point, and they only draw one card, so they would be out of resource.
Its not even that negate everything are so common, but that a lot of decks create similar endboard of boss monsters like Apollusa and Barrone. Its just what route you wanna take.
I got into the game in 2010, fell off for a few years, then got back in in 2016 when someone brought a Pendulum Monster to school and I had to know what that was. Honestly, the fact that I've stuck with the game for this long is miraculous
Honestly "the way to play yugioh is to ensure someone at the table isn't having fun" is just 100% facts Me and my friend play and honestly I lose 99% of the time and just suck it up recently I got into a archetype and won 3 duels before he pivoted into one of the most annoying control stun decks out there so I was just prevented FULLY from playing
It's a shame. Back in early to mid xyz era I actually did think YGO was the best card game ever made. The extra deck functioned like a toolbox of MtG commanders and helped speed the game up while promoting individuality even when 2 players were playing the same archetype, and there was a lot of back and forth. Sure, there were crazy combos that could happen, but they were still outable without relying on cards designed to completely obliterate an existing field, AND when one of those crazy combos actually went off it was exhilarating for the player making the play and the opposing player felt like they were suddenly thrust into a raid boss fight because it was more of a novel thing. The crazy combos existed, but they weren't consistent; they required either a godly hand or multiple turns of stalling to draw into the pieces. Now, YGO is a game I play because I still have a lot of friends who play it, I like crafting crazy combos, and there is a deep nostalgia in my heart for it, but I rarely actually enjoy playing against other players. That's a problem, and the only possible solutions are so radical that there is no way people will ever agree on what to do. While, MtG's land system is fundamentally flawed, and even at its best, MtG never gets close to the heights YGO used to have on a regular basis, I would be playing MtG if my friends weren't so entrenched in YGO's clutches.
@@yuwu585 Don't take tiers 0 as the generality rather than the exception. To a degree, even in the middle of the pendulum era, the game was still balanced enough to allow both players to play the game most of the time. And even in Dragon Ruler format, the best you could do turn 1 was summoning some really big/solid monsters like Dracossack. Negation wasn't yet a big thing, interruption was still mostly on unsearchable trap cards. Or if you could put out negates it wasn't more than 1. These decks were powerful, but going second wasn't yet the death sentence it is today...
Yall are stupid. Dragon Ruler was definitely not early xyz era and Bujins came after that. Xyz era started in TCG in 2011, Pendulum era started in 2014, and Dragon Rulers came out in 2013. Not what I'd call "early to mid," but I guess you could call it mid if you ignore that "early to mid" would likely not include the later half of mid. Even so, I'd 1 million percent take Dragon Ruler format or anything else in xyz era (except maybe Wind-Up format) over modern YGO. At least you got to play the game, even if playing a different deck meant you were going to be out-valued over the course of a few turns if you weren't also playing a top tier deck. Even Wind-Ups were only comparably fun to play against to current meta. Oh, and anyone who has looked at the time Bujins were around as a legacy format can tell you sitting on Yamato all game wasn't even the better way to play the deck.
i feel like this would all be solved by an official draft mode in master duel, like hearthstones arena. forcibly limiting the card pool so that experienced players cannot feasibly construct enormous combo decks and are forced to play with lower power cards while also introducing new players to all types of cards, giving them a much more controlled stream of knowledge in a much more contained space. you could even have a seperate draft pool limited playground era dm cards so boomers could get their kicks.
Yes; that will put everyone on fairly even footing.. and then, expansive combos wouldn't be possible... it'd be a game of skill to manage your resources.
Yugioh always boils down to same thing sadly:"Ash Blossom? No/wrong card? Lost." (Which forces you to have game knowlage) Apart from that every deck just tryes to coom first and who ever cooms faster just wins guaranteed. So the game is 2 ppl masturbating like it's a solo adventure, occasionaly throwing rocks at eachother while trying to comprehend the 7 page document that is their deck. And the best thing is most cards could be summerised by "wipe your ass". Konami always asked themselfes if they could, but never if they should, so the power just kept creeping and creeping. The game being that fast now is just boring, imagine coming home from work and you finally understand how to play that deck just for your games to be over in seconds and you can't do anything about it. Besides this game takes work to play and all this work isn't worth the shallow game expiriance. If I play a game against another player, I want skill to matter, not just game knowlage. Yugioh is incredably stiff, in comparison to other card games, there's no RNG what so ever besides your starting hand, making every game feel like the same.
My gf recently got into yugioh and she's gotten very competative with it. We started her off with 3 albaz structure decks and spent almost 2 weeks playing speed duels to get her used to the basics. Moved her onto her structure decks. Than after a week of that we started walking her thru deck building. 6 months later she has beaten 2 of the best deck pilots I know and has a 50% win rate again myself aswell. It's a game that requires a community and good group that can help you learn and improve
How to explain Yu-Gi-Oh in Magic terms: everyone is playing UW control (you have to know every card in your opponent's deck to make sure you negate the right ones) and manaless dredge at the same time
Imo the real answer is starting to support alternative formats significantly more heavily. We already have Edison in time wizard. i think it's important to push incredibly hard in to retro formats (ESPECIALLY ON MASTER DUEL) to give these kinds of new/returning players *something* to grasp at. Can you imagine if we had an edison format ladder in master duel? There are a lot of angles they could go about solving this problem but it's so simple to take something thats clearly proven to work.
In MTG: Arena, I constructed a casual, standard legal, “pauper”, Mono Black Zombie Deck that I constructed IRL for around $40. I have prior knowledge and experience of the game, but I actually feel like anybody could pick up an archetype without spending any money through MTG: Arena and gradually make at least a half-decent and fun deck. I never felt that way about Yu-Gi-Oh, but I do appreciate observing the meta and rogue decks be played and explained. I do appreciate that Yu-Gi-Oh! can be a fun game, but other than the Paleozoic Frog or F.R.O.G. rogue decks, I don’t think I would have fun with it.
My Pioneer deck is a Rakdos (Black and Red) Knight deck from the original Eldraine set, with added flavor from other sets. It’s mostly also for play with my friends. Affording legitimately broken decks is where Magic gets a little bit more difficult to access.
I think a tag team duel concept might be fun to try, as long as people can connect and say what deck they want to play, that would help with supporting new players and showing them what their deck strategy could go for. More experienced players usually have the cards those new players should see to help them understand the important parts of current format, like hand advantage and floodgate bosses. It could either go really bad or really good, but I’m willing to see what people could cook up if it had the same rank system as ladder.
I've started playing duel links around 2019. I had fun with the game and wanted to try the online aspect, I had no idea what to or what the meta was like and started watching guides on thunder dragon and dark magican, td was even too complicated for me to understand basic interactions. This made me just stay on duel links and learn the game from there and the slow implementations of cards made it easy to understand throughout the months. I'm just playing master duel and having fun with a lot of things. I like playing the game but when it takes months/years to be confident in your understanding of cards, something seems wrong.
I don't think we can, in my opinion. But not because there's nothing that can be done. Yugioh is way too old to change without a huge backlash from old players (maybe more than Pendulums) and, even if Konami says "screw that, we are going to change regardless", that is not a garantee way to bring new players (like Pendulums... yeah, that was a dark era for the game) Edit: well... maybe there is a way. If Konami supported different formats. But they will never do that. Look at TimeWizard format and that one with deck master. They talked about it ONCE and did NOTHING to support those.
We ditch the game and we all play Rush Duel whenever Konami decides we've waited enough for the worldwide release. But I guess many of us aren't ready to take the jump yet anyway. All of that to say : I seriously don't think TCG can be fixed anymore. The game has been going in the wrong direction for the past 10 years.
It's entirely possible to fix this, and i think konami has already started to do so, how? two ways: 1. By designing cards that force interaction and allow both players to play the game (talents, kashtira fenrir, kurikara, recent decks like tear, runick, spright, rescue ace, purrely, vanquish soul, etc) 2. by creating better products for new players that introduce you to the ACTUAL MODERN game with easy access to essential staples and by making better structure decks that you can actually pick up and build up (the dino structure, salad structure, shaddoll structure, machina structure, etc)
@@MrGshinobi And that also means anyone playing any other deck but the ones you mentionned just can't play anymore, cause they're just 20 negates in a trenchcoat of "interaction", but sure...
I don't think you should coach him. I think you should set up a highly simplified tournament precisely for new players and invite other known card game YTubers. Design the card pool so it specifically helps players grasp with the mechanics of the game. Maybe even limit the extra deck to fusions and xyz to keep the combos shorter 🤔 I think a organised yugiboomer tournament would be a good way to go about this.
@@LucasDaffern no, not set rotation. That's still too much, I'm talking mega simplified. His tournament has salads... that's too much. I'm more thinking weather painters without the links. Not to mention, that the target should be people who play these other cardgames or liked old school yugioh. Community events like this could get people interested enough to go further into the deep dark hole of yuigoh.
The core issue of searching cards and chaining together combos isn't fixable without ruining the game. So at least that will probably remain a big pain point that people will just have to get over. Tutorials and Starter Products are on Konami to improve. MD Structure decks should just cost 1500 and come with 3x of all the good cards and assembled in a semi reasonable decklist. We should have a format that is new player friendly like Speed Duel on MD. N/R format might be a decent alternative for something that does already exist. Aside from that there should be more community action focused on giving new players good resources. A lot of the guides are either outdated or unsuitable to new players by being directed at enfranchised players and thus in a language that new players dont speak yet. Reformat the Card text to the OCG style with the numbered effects. Its for the good of everyone. We will just have to concede the point that you won't be able to learn the game from ingame tutorials in a reasonable time as you could MTG, HS or LoR. Reshaping the entire game to attract new players is not a good Idea. Changes if any should be small and precise like the above mentioned ones. Sweeping changes like Rotation will drastically affect everyone's enjoyment of the game and we have 0 clue if it would actually bring new players in and retain them. If MD had released with Rotation it might have been different but we can't exactly release MD again and hope everyone comes back after they got burned by Drytron, VFD, Eldlich format. Even then the new decks are still just as complex if not more so and rely on "search into search into combo" gameplay which relies on game knowledge just as much as all the older stuff. The game is hard and complex and thats kinda why people love it. I wouldn't want Yugioh to become HS or MtG because those games already exist for people to play right now. Its better to have different things and especially in the online sphere its mostly manabased cardgames.
As a newbie I'm playing Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution's campaign. Did the first 3 anime stories and was having fun, ended up making a Red-Eyes deck which I'd barely use since it was so overpowered relative to NPCs - then I decided to jump to the last anime campaign because I wanted to see what I could create out of Link cards.... Holy moly, the difficulty and complexity jump was unbelievable, with relatively early NPCs chain summoning by the 2nd turn (and with this game's animations, as a player you're doing nothing but watching the computer play for 4+ mins) every NPC's play pattern "theme" seemed to homogenize too, everyone had massive GY recursion or Deck searches on nearly every card, summoned links upon links, and had a slightly different flavor of hard-shutting down your strategy. Even my previously OP Red-Eyes deck became too fair at this point and would lose just as easily as it would win (it manages to get the opponent to 3100 LP by turn 1, or outright kill him if I'm lucky, for reference)
The exact reason why Yu-Gi-Oh failed at maintaining the Power Creeps is because of effect monsters. There are three different card type in Yugioh, monster, spell, and trap cards. But now the spell and trap cards doesnt matter anymore. The monsters now are everything.
Monster gets trap that can be used immediately, oh its my turn, no wait opponent has 30 different actions on my draw phase that lets them set up 80 negates, a full board and basically refill their hand. Then to top it all off they shotgun maxx c. YGO is a zero sum fun game until the shareholders kick konami in the ass to actually fix their game.
Crusadia is the most linear, unga-bunga deck that new players should start with. Teaches you how to link summon. Has the ability to put up a few interruptions going first. Combos are super easy to understand. It really helped me adjust when I was getting back into the game a few years ago.
Was my first thought too,decks like that or floo are perfect for beginners because while linear they are flexible and all the cards mostly say the same so you can gloss over the text
Controversial opinion, but, I think going back to Master Rule 4 might make the game more fun just because it offers a pretty strict limitation with the Link mechanic that, at the time, hurt a lot of decks but now that pretty much every archetype that needs a Link monster has one, is probably a good format to play in now if given a chance. Like, imagine if instead of just going into a bunch of fusion monsters immediately with Tearlament or Branded, or a bunch of synchros with Swordsoul, you needed to set up a Link monster, or just sit on the one extra deck monster you summoned. Suddenly, a lot of popular decks become clunkier to use, and slower decks like Plunder or Salamangreat become much more threatening.
@@ashblossomandjoyoussprung.9917 hard disagree,master rule 4 didn't simplify the game one bit while completely killing half the decks to even play for fun,if say i wanna fusion i don't wanna pray there is a link that actually let me do it i just want,decks should be capable of doing what they are meant to do just limited by the deck itself and the player,not by rules
I started playing in 2020 with a few friends, we used to just play against each other with structure decks and random pack filler until one day we decided to go to our first tournament. This was during full power Drytron format, where the end board was Herald of Ultimateness with 4+ fairies in hand and Dragoon so we spent the whole day having every single card we played negated and a Towers we had no outs too, pretty much after that experience my friends lost interest, while I spent a lot of time and effort learning this game and none of them are interested in trying to play again which really sucks. I enjoy this game and the complexity, the fact that there is basically endless things you can do is so cool to me, but that’s also the thing that makes it so hard for people to get into, there’s too much you need to learn that it takes you weeks of practice to really feel confident enough to play.
the best way to learn to play yu gi oh is through the community of players, in the physical format with decks assembled by a colleague who knows how it works. In this way they come together to play and learn. Learning only in master dueling or buying cards without knowing will only lead to frustration and boredom.
Can someone give me a list of the names I was called in this video
1. Rarran
interview with mbt or farfa please it would be so funny
Nice try Rastafarian
RA-RAN
no ratrace
The hardest part as a new player is, that even if you read a card, you have no idea what this enables. Especially since you can't read cards in your opponent's deck.
Having played Pokémon, there have been some tricky interactions and non-linear playstyles historically, but even then you're only a step or two away from what you're actually trying to achieve after playing any given card.
In YuGiOh, there is no possible way for a human being to divine what will happen if they allow Dark Infant to resolve, and that's step 2 of the @ignister combo
So the problem isn't necessarily that reading a card doesn't explain it. It's that unlike mtg the only format is effectively legacy and every card leads to a cavalcade of decision trees and interactions that unless you're enfranchised enough to know what every card in an archetype does or enfranchised enough to guess correctly you just get rolled. In Mtg the colors help fix this a lot because every color generally has specific things it does meaning witha bit of bedrock knowledge i can intuit my opponent's general gameplan without needing to know the exact list they're running. Add in the intro formats are less complex and well.
The amount of times winning comes down to Ash Blossoming the correct searcher is insane
This is true for the first several hours of every card game. There are thousands of off the wall MTG cards you'd never intuit how they work until they stomp your face 9 times. At least after playing against "Rikka" you know if you ever see "Rikka" again what they are working toward
I was explaining to a coworker who's returning to Yugioh from early 5Ds that in modern Yugioh, that even the technically correct response can mean exactly dick if your opponent has the *other* card in their hand or whatever. I showed him my Marincess deck, told him it's a mid-tier strategy, and then showed him how if you hit the wrong card with the wrong piece of interaction (depending on what the other 4 cards in my hand are and what I rip off of Blue Tang Clan), I'm still ending my turn with a 4300 Towers with triple s/t negates that can summon equipped monsters that summon MORE monsters AND backed up by Toad and at least 2 more pieces of interaction in hand. And I reiterated that this is maybe the 8th best deck in the format.
Rarran's "mistake" was assuming(like a sane person) that reading a card would give you some expectation of the plays that are about to happen, but they really don't unless you're an enfranchised player. Searchers bring with them a whole other card to read and often they're trying to push for access to OTHER CARDS in the Extra Deck that they DONT KNOW ABOUT.
You can see him frantically try to understand Rikka but nothing IN THE CARD makes it clear for a new player what is happening.
I've yet to see a tutorial for YGO that properly adresses this and gives an actual feel for the modern game.
This is not only an issue for new players but also for returning players and even a big issue for not-longtime players at eg locals. If you kept playing over 25 years and kept up with the game throughout, this would obviously not be a big deal but the sheer variety of decks means you need to learn 30 different flavours of Yugioh.
Ever heard the word "sacky" being used to describe decks in how it basically uses cheap strategies to win you games?
That's what playing versus any new deck feels like in Yugioh. I started playing paper about a year ago. Okay, Floo kicked my ass. No big deal, people (by now) know how to counter Floo.
Later? Naturia Runick. What do I negate? What do I blow up? Okay, lost to Naturia Runick. I now look up how to counter this deck and what the chokepoint is.
Next week? Played versus Phantom Knights. No idea what the chokepoints were and I basically won by dumb luck (D-Barrier)
Next week? Versus Gishki. I won, thankfully, but still went 2-1 with Branded because I didn't know what the deck does.
In order to play Yugioh "well", you need to know what every single deck does. You might think any given deck that searches from the deck should be ashed but actually it's better to hold it for the GY setup. How would you know this? You can't.
I would argue countering meta decks is "easier" because you know what the choke points are (Ash Branded Fusion, Imperm on Mo Ye and pray he didn't start with Longyuan) but there is absolutely no way you will ever know how to counter everything.
That's not even going into proper deckbuilding or anything of the sort. This is basically your every game entry barrier. What do I get rid of to win? Trick question, it's really tough to know.
People are like "just read the cards" and yeah. im sure the salamangreat cards explain "link climb into talker, attack for game"
Thats exactly the point. I started yugioh a year ago and i only improved because i lost over and over and over. I knew some cards becaused i watched duellogs, mbt, doug but i had to learn how to counter Decks only by losing to them multiple times.
I returned from the game after a 12 year hiatus and rawdog reading literally every card played every game worked for me but I played for LITERALLY hundreds of hours including LITERAL 16+ hour sessions a DAY for LITERAL months during the first half of 2022. Literally all I did was grind MD ranked during my 8 hour remote work shift and an additional 8 to 10 hours a day after my shift ended just because I wanted to really understand the game. I don't think the experience I had between 2002 to 2011 really translated to any of this.
I don't think a new player even someone with a competitive background like this guy had can reasonably learn yugioh without either a coach or doing what I did and literally study the game for unhealthy amounts of hours for what is now well over a thousand hours.
@samuelheddle I learned how link climbing works through trial and error on master duel. The tutorial didn't explain it but the mechanic is intuitive so trial and error with problem solving skills can get you there lol.
I've been playing Yugioh for 17 years now, and I completely agree with Rarran.
It used to be the case that, as an outsider or newbie, you could pick up a structure deck or a fully playset of an archetype and understand what the deck wants to accomplish and how to facilitate that. Sure, building a deck like that isn't optimal, but it gets your foot in the door.
In the year of our lord 2023, trying to pick up the game by cracking open 1x or 3x structure deck is an exercise in masochism, especially if you aren't particularly familiar with the game. If you handed a beginner a Traptrix or Albaz or Crystal Beast structure deck and asked them to figure it out, understanding the combos and ideal board states is a task beyond "just read the card, bro."
And that's not even counting your opponent's deck! Ishizu Tear is probably the most complex Yugioh deck to be meta (after D/D/D), but even "simple" meta decks are extremely difficult to gauge if you aren't familiar with them.
How is a new player supposed to know that a successfully resolving Ecclesia or Mo Ye is a +2? How is a new player supposed to know that Branded Fusion, a card that says on it, "Fusion Summon 1 Fusion Monster" will result in at least 2 or 3 fusion summons?
The problem I ran into when I tried to introduce other players to the game is that:
a.) Every card I played required a 20-30 seconds of my opponent reading what my card does, or explaining why my previous card lets me play my current one.
b.) "Getting good" at Yugioh requires extreme deck knowledge for not just your deck, but your opponents deck.
c.) The only ways to get knowledge of how a deck works is to a.) Watch a video (10+ minutes for a deck for a baseline understanding), play the deck yourself (by goldfishing over and over through trial and error, could easily be 20 minutes to an hour per deck), having a friend teach you the ins and outs of a deck (again, 20 minutes to an hour per deck), or losing against that deck... a lot.
In Magic the Gathering's Commander format, it's often the case that you run into cards that you have literally never seen before in your life, but because of how streamlined individual mechanics are, even a new player can pilot a preconstructed deck relatively proficiently against a deck they've never played against before.
Rarran's video casts Yugioh in a negative light, but I think he embodies the problems inherent with Yugioh's complexity. These are true, legitimate issues that make it hard for new players to learn how to play the game *with a teacher*, never mind learn how to play by themselves.
Someone in Farfa's chat once mentioned that structure decks should come with a pre-scripted duel, so, solo mode IRL, and I agree. The solo mode tutorials in MD aren't good enough at showing you your wincon, they usually just show you literally one or two combos and then throw you into a low-power mirror match to figure it out on your own, but, like, that's kind of good enough? It'll teach you the mechanics. You're not supposed to come out of that being a top class pilot of that deck. Expecting simulators or structure decks to spoon feed you how to be a pro is lazy and would lead to everyone playing the same. I get that for simpler games it's easier to do that, but even the simpler games have a sizable skill gap between "guy who finished the tutorials" and top players. I dread the day that Konami attempts to dumb YGO down to the level of new card games that were built to be played on mobile phones, it will absolutely kill the fun. It'd be nice to see them put more effort into tutorials at least, though.
Idk, I encountered problems you highlighted in numbers while trying mtg a long time ago, not to mention I had to remember too many keywords...
Also ppl complain about negate spam in ygo while in mtg blue didn't let me play most of the time kekw. Although tbf I've quitted mtg before ixalan release
I agree with a lot of what you said but I wouldn't recommend a new player on Magic to play commnader. Sure is the most popular format but It also has some complexity on it that a new player shouldn't really have to worry, not to mention it can lead to some long games depending on the power level. Keep at it on 1v1 with like a standard pool, kitchen table or draft/sealed and later I think a precon should do fine for them to try out commander.
@@drewbabe I don't think dumb down is same as simplify, the main problem is the too complicated to learn as card way too painful too read and too many obscure ruling like SOTP and HOPT for example will make most ppl back out ofc
One way to start is better card layout, make clear which one cost/condition and which one is effect like Rush Duel. Another thing is much shorter text like "when this card summoned...." could be just shorted to 'on summon :..."
@@dhanyl2725 I'd MUCH rather keywords than the novels that are in yu-gi-oh cards.
I play yugioh with a friend who has played it for over 10 years. He still gets things wrong sometimes. I took him a Magic The Gathering "game night" box to test out one day, and after 2 hours of explaining the rules and playing, he wasn't making any mistakes, of course this was a more basic version of the game using basic decks. But it's insane how complicated yugioh is compared to other card games, like it's not even remotely a similar experience for new players.
As a Magic and yugioh player i can confirm: magic is easier to learn
@@simplyyunak3189And btw, Magic has MORE MECHANICS. YGO has the problem of being ONLY fast combo and control.
So he played beginner decks and not real magic?
Just try explaining "missing the timing" to a MtG player.
@@shiftedrabbiteeqBeginner decks ARE real magic. If you play a beginner deck, you're getting an experience comparable to a real match, developing skills which help you in regular gameplay and even in formats like draft and sealed.
You give a 'beginner deck' to someone? Then it's either too complicated and not good for a beginner or too weak and not representative of a real yugioh match
I genuinely cant imagen how frustrating this game must be if you've never played this game before. Ive been playing this game for about 15 years and even i will just sometimes go months without playing do to the game having a series of bad formats( i sat out the almost the entirely of MR4 until the revision). Can you imagen trying to get into this game during something like Kash format? That must leave a TERRIBLE impression on a new player. Fucking miserable and I dont blame anyone for bouncing off of this game.
I came back just as Tear=Shizu was being released. I almost quit again after a month.
I totally fell off at MR4. My friends and I were having a blast with playing pack releases until link came out and we tried one game with the cyberse starter set and all agreed to just play MR3.
Yeah I’ve played off and on since 2004 and MR4 was the only period of time where I didn’t even bother trying to play or learn the new cards.
It's only frustrating if you try to learn everything at the same time, and you don't play an opponent of equivalent competency.
@@LChaos2 Thats another problem though. The game doesnt not give you a slow paced environment that you can ACTUALLY learn in.
As someone who never played yugioh until master duel came out, I'm glad that the community is starting to talk more about these issues with the game. It was a pain in the ass to learn this game, and even now sometimes I feel like I don't understand whats going on after playing this game for over a year.
Yeah, I've been playing about 6 months, and I was following YGO content online first, without the wider community and resources, I just don't know if the game is something you can realistically brute force your way through, even if you'd *love* the game at the end of that process...
Yh i never played irl. Got the game on my phone and though it might be fun, you know bring back the memories from watching the show. Turns out it’s not fun. I like playing random decks (got like 15 different ones) and playing against Kash now or Tear before for like 10 games straight its just boring. I play ranked for a bit, then just wait for the special events
Ygo prop needs a reboot in both text design and rulings (there are many “hidden" rulings such as token ruling, timing, you name it). I have hoped and still hope that Rush Duel is said reboot at least in some form but can’t say since Konami doesn’t really publish RD stuff in the west.
I don’t think that the power level should be lowered since I like this high energy gameplay where people can actually do a lot and not just have to sit and basically just wait on one to three cards for five rounds.
Although too long, for a lack of better term boring (à la „ns Aleister“ or „activate Branded Fusion“) combos where there’s not any interaction and variability (aka ability to adapt gameplay upon interruption) should at the very not be competitively viable. I can understand that Konami and players want deranged plays/decks to exist but they should in my opinion be for casual where if your opponent doesn’t like it, you have to change your deck or else you two just won’t play.
@@asmindeat least the challenges are fun, they give you loaner decks that are pretty good now. I don't think just playing those are a bad experience per se, everyone engages with their hobbies to the extent that they want to.
one year is definitely not enough for us to learn everything, every week I find out about a new floodgate that I dont know about and therefore cant play around.
Unlike most other evaluations where they say "Where's my old Yu-Gi-Oh!?!?!?". He's at least like "Really hard for me to get into, but if you like it, good on you cause it does look fun."
And yet he still didt like it
And yea didt say where's my old yugioh cause he plays hearthstone mainly
Honestly didt care enough to look into what old yugioh was considering again rarran never played it
Even as a veteran player, learning new stuff can be a time sink. I play mostly Branded right now and want to try other decks, but learning more decks means probably another couple weeks of non-stop playing to learn how the deck even functions at an optimal level. And I just don't have the time for that right now. So I stick with the deck I already invested fully in playing, too afraid to move off it because I will probably play it so bad that I will lose.
Yeah, I've been back to YGO for over a year now and all caught up with the new stuff and I've been playing since early 2000s on and off. Whenever a new set comes out, it's pretty much impossible to comprehend what's going on unless you invest the time to read all the new cards. I mean, I'm not implying that you should be able to play without reading what cards do, but the cards nowadays read like a freaking book, back in the day you could get the gist of what they do as you play with a quick read.
What gets me is, this is suppose to be a hobby right? Why does every Yugioh veteran I see talk sound like this is a 60 hour a week job on top of their rl job. That does not sound like fun.
@@TheLastSane1 Imagine wanting to have Yugioh as your hobby, but you have to read and understand a college thesis worth of text to even learn how to play. Then you play with other people and get stomped turn one. Doesn't that sound fun?
@@TheLastSane1 That is how the game is now. Most of us are only still playing because we played it for so long. I don't know how new people can even attempt to play this game at this point. I feel like they just missed the boat. It is sad, too. The game has a lot going for it if Konami just learned how to properly deal with the game.
U dont need weeks for that, just play it few times against others to find out how it works lol..its ez that way..who has time for that bs "weeks" just to learn some eff 😂 and if u lose u lose why is that bad?
Honestly, Konami's biggest decision to keep new players from sticking around is to make the goat/edison formats official. Those two formats are perfect for the new/returning players who understood yugioh by its core mechanics or having a deeper gameplay experience if they are looking for something faster. Yugioh could work without a mana system, the problem is that Konami power crept the game without taking that aspect into consideration.
Time wizard formats and Speed Duerls should 100% be Master Duel.
@@ducky36F Time Wizard is something Konami should really invest more into, imagine reprint packs designed for those preparing to play in the return of older formats, and other interactions that might make them more interesting (such as legalizing say certain legacy support so something like crystal beasts is more viable, though of course this would need to be done within reason, given how current Crystal Beast support is.)
for speed duel we got duel link for that and the game still become broken when new deck is released way before their time like sylvan or fur hire lol
or maybe just reboot this game completely imo
as this point ygo already broken beyond repair that make it so hard to make newbie to try and stick to your game by various mean
more streamlined card design, clearer text to explain what they want to do, maybe icon/keyword could work too, not too reliant on ED to just make combo etc
@@waskithonugroho3955 There already is; it's called Rush Duel. Problem is it's limited to Japan and Korea atm unless you play the Nintendo Switch game or the upcoming Duel Links update.
I've been watching Rarran for about a year, he's been experimenting with a lot of other card games lately so I knew that him trying YGO out would be an absolute disaster
Oh...
Kim is k poop p
kkmvvbbfjn hookup
He should have started with duel links really, or waited until rush duels dropped.
Master duel just overwhelms people with how long its combo goes and how much they have to read.
Duel links has its combos decks, but almost nothing worse than orcust comboing.
Its not like he would randomly face the 1 person playing crystrons.
@@neonoah3353 Duel Links has no crafting system and is extremely P2W. Also the format is revolving around OP character's skill that have longer text then Pendulum cards
@@neonoah3353Ah yes to get into a card game he should’ve… not played the card game itself?
Tbh on casual mode the issue is really that the name is just wrong. The way it works is the way it works in every card game, but they usually call it what it is. Unranked. I.e. there is no rank. Which means inconssitent matchmaking and an environment people will use to test new decks without risking their rank. It should just really be renamed.
Couldn't agree more, for a casual experience just play low ranked
Couldn't agree more
To get a good casual experience you should play low ranked duels
@@RubenLeyva-uw4lf😊
Would be great if u could set parameters in casual mode so you get queued up with other players who want to play decks with similar parameters.
@@RubenLeyva-uw4lf That's actually crazy right if you want a true casual experience play low ranked and its sad how true this is.
I can’t believe he put the y slur in the title
Problematic af
He said the y-word??? Cancel him! /j
Smiger incident 2
With a hard r too, smh my head
Yugioh
for me, my learning experience was:
- playing bad 5ds era hero/good stuff level 4 decks with friends as a kid
- reading the 5ds manga which showcases really cool like 3-5 card combos for different archetypes throughout, the progression of card interactions and stuff all made sense, and I fell in love with Infernity 0 Hand Control especially
- I played a little bit of games on a simulator with a friend, trying to make my synchro infernity pile work, mostly trying different ways to summon out Beelzeus, against his Trains deck, mostly losing, but occasionally getting to do something cool, like stalling out with infernity guardian and avenger and getting my synchro board
- watched 2014 worlds, *kind of* understood it, and loved watching people make these cool decks work
- played a bit of Legacy of the Duelist, played all the 5ds decks in the campaign but didnt really build myself
- got master duel at launch, committed to Synchron, I'd put all the synchron/junk/warrior cards that I liked in there, and then just keep testing, rebuilding, testing, rebuilding to optimize the consistency as much as possible, never really got to the point of being a *good* deck but I won in lower ranks sometimes
- hit a point where I was happy with my synchron deck and I wanted to try other decks but id used up most of the free resources, so I went back to edopro along with my friend and would repeatedly build other archetypes I was interested and try them against my friend, again, mostly losing but occaisionally id get things to line up. Eventually I made what I consider to be my first *decent* deck, the 4th version of a 60 Card Grass RDA/Chaos pile I'd been tinkering with, and I started doing roughly 30-70 against my friend and casual players online, and I had a lot of fun.
- since then, I've just kept building and tweaking decks for niche or new archetypes that interested me from throughout yugioh's history, and I've had a great time with it. I absolutely adore yugioh's vast and incredibly *flexible* card pool, all the math that goes into super big synchro routing, or optimizing deep draw ratios within banlist limits, it's the best.
I really love yugioh now (although meta decks with uncontestable resource advantage, consistency, and game locking cards arent great), I love how I can play so many different decks and get a completely different experience, even within the same archetype. Watching LukeVonKarma/Duellogs' videos showcasing cool stuff you can do with hyperspecific older cards. But it really did take me about 6 years of on and off play to become the expert I am now, I didnt learn how pendulums worked until about 3-4 months into master duel hahaha (I love them now, Abyss Actor and Endymion are my favorites because they have cool effects as continuous spells outside of just scales). I think if I didnt have that 5DS Era framework for how yugioh combos *could* work, I probably wouldve had a really hard time in modern.
I *love* yugioh's complexity and I wouldnt change it, it's part of what makes the game so fun for me. But the learning experience, and lack of legacy format support is really poor, and is definitely a huge barrier to entry.
This is not dissimilar to my own experience. About 5, 6 years ago I played duel links briefly which introduced me to the core mechanics of the game, but then I found out ab ygopro (or, its deranged brother TDoaNE,) & seeing all the cards I instantly fell in love and got cooking. Now *what* I was cooking... that I couldn't tell you but after about a year I had built an Endymion deck & I had some intuitive understanding of archetypal design and gameplan. Ever since then once in a while I'd hop on and read enough cards to build a deck, head to a casual room, get washed while once in a while washing my opponent, and that was really all the introduction I needed to get significantly better at intuiting my opponents decks, as well as building up a 1000+ catalog of cards in my head to varying levels of specificity. But once you take your lumps in that sense MD becomes a lot more understandable, and I often remind myself of the privilege of having done all that in a controlled, casual, and permanently unranked environment.
Tl;dr
As a fellow yugiboomer who got back into the game a few years ago i have to say that i had an amazing time getting back into the game. I was very lucky to start off with duel links in its early 5Ds days. I got to learn synchro which i never understood as a kid. Then they introduced xyz and i had a few months to master it, then pendulum released and so on. I had sufficient time with each mechanic to fully understand it. After that ladder of learning i had an easy time getting into the real deal. Duel links was a great introduction, but i think that is something that can sadly not be replicated again.
As someone who played off and on I enjoyed reliving early Duel Link progression though at this point it feels too caught up and I prefer Master Duel. I think if MD had an official place for Goat and Edison the retro scene would be perfect for new and returning players but I don't know if Konami is in touch enough to ever recognise this as it doesn't directly help their bottom line.
Oh yeah duel links for sure helped the progression of learning, I played the game for well over 5 years and then master dual came out I would play rogue deck and randomness, love metaphys and exiling your things and buster blader lock which are toxic for sure
But helped against all this bs you see in the meta
Rarran is a hearthstone dude
Not any brand of yugioh fan
Mgt and others just labeled yugi boomer cause they dislike his opinon
Act man was a legit yugi boomer but rarran nah
I think the term is just used to shame those who dislike yugioh's current direction
It's not anything productive
I think a big part of this problem, as you identified, is how reading a card often doesn’t give you a lot of info about what it’s resolution is going to do because the format is so combo focused.
In MTG, even cards that have a lot of text and keywords you might have to look up will usually boil down to some set of actions that you can evaluate. “Draw 3 cards, return 1 card from graveyard to hand, and make a 3/3 token” might be a lot of things, but you don’t need to be as worried that you’ll immediately get hit with a second stronger effect that you have to completely intuit in the way the “find a card in your deck” cards do - plus it helps that a lot of these cards in magic are either mana expensive or only in very high-power, high-enfranchisement formats. I think this is where the lack of a “resource system” really becomes clear. In MTG if you get the most powerful card in your deck off a draw or a search, you’ll usually have to wait another turn to deploy it. In modern yugioh archetypes, getting that best card in your deck immediately becomes the next thing you are doing.
In MTG there are a ton of combo decks that kick your teeth in, especially if you don’t know what cards to watch out for. However, even in the strongest formats, a good handful of decks do win by hitting you for 10-30% of your life total at a time while trying to protect that threat. This actually makes the low power beginner formats that are dominated by nearly vanilla beaters actually reflective of what some of the game will be, with added complexity added on top. I think Konami could benefit a lot from making a beginner archetype(s) that does do a turn 1 combo that we so expect from this game while also being more simplified and lacking the surprise blowout cards so new players can learn.
I think many new players, especially those enfranchised to other TCGs, don’t mind losing a bunch when they are just getting started. It just really shouldn’t feel like you are losing to things that are so out of your control that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen, especially when there are so many that you can’t just learn the 2/3 cards you need to play around.
Yes, when I lose to a better deck in Magic, it helps me understand the game better by evaluating my opponent's strategy. When I lose in Yugioh, I don't even know what my opponent did.
A robust and FUN solo mode is the perfect solution. Something that Konami stopped doing since games like Tag Force, World Championship, and Legacy of the Duelist while they had their own benefits also tended to not sell very well. But they provide you a basic yet easy to understand starter deck (in some games even multiple starter decks) that isn't competitive but it is full of simple cards and a coherent strategy (like a Scrap deck). They have the decks of the opponents you face scale up from weak but creative gimmick decks to actual full-blown competitive builds. In some games they even separate decks by era so if you don't understand the game in the Arc-V era you can go back a few anime series to get more used to it. And the games are fun, with legitimate story modes and exploration and stuff.
A game like Tag Force 6 is just overall a much more enjoyable experience about the game all around, it's amazing how much fun you can have just going back to one of the pre-internet games even if you aren't really interested in retro formats. You can see some ridiculous but memorable combos like Phantom Hand + Soul Absorption.
Okay but now what if, and get this, you want to play against people and not bots?
@@GoogleyMoogley The same thing that happens in every competitive game, you have to know the game or get blown out. FPS, fighting game, other card games, online board games, rhythm games - literally EVERY online game is full of sweaty players many of whom will know the game inside and out right from the start.
I've played World Championship 2011 for years, replaying it with different decks and strategies, and I don't think I even had more fun playing on Master Duel, even against real players.
The point about decks going from "Gimmick" to "competitive" is just very on point, and it made the best learning experience you could get.
You also had several features added the more you progressed into the game, like Duel Puzzles, or Structure Decks matchs, which helped learn other strategies you weren't aware of.
I even modded the game so I could remove the first deck you get in the game, and only have the "Random All-cards" pack to buy from, plus making money much more difficult to get, meaning I'd have to assemble something that works from a bunch of random junk. It's still my favorite experience with YGO nowadays, even if it involved me, and a bunch of slow-playing bots.
Which is to say : Having players to play with is fine, but if the gameplay loop itself isn't fun in the first place, it would still be better to go back a few iterations back playing with bots if the game is more fun that way.
I just wish Konami would start implementing actually supported alternative formats. They already made a good thing with Time Wizard format, but I'd like to see them go further and actually implement it on Master Duel.
At least they're adding Rush to DL...
Honestly, I don't see a reason why the campaigns in Legacy Of The Duelist couldn't be imported into Master Duel (beyond balancing reasons, of course, since modern decks absolutely decimate even the challenge duels).
I loved Legacy Of The Duelist. It felt like Master Duel but with more of a focus on solo play.
Master Duel gave you simple starter decks, the problem is you were playing them into fucking Drytron, Zoodiac Tri-Brigade, Virtual World with VFD, Adamancipator, Prank Kids, and floodgate Eldlich on launch day. There was no environment for them to be useful, you just threw them away immediately and built a real deck if you knew what you were doing.
I appreciate how active you are in addressing the issues with the game you love. Enjoying a game requires both being excited and critical at appropriate times
This is wild to me. Because I am one of those players who got in on the ground floor in 2002 and I stuck it out for years and years. I think the final straw, at least for me, was around the start of Pendulum Summoning. That on top of this recurring trend of exponential power scaling towards OTK solitaire combo fiestas to where, if I am not playing a deck on that level or throwing a metric ton of floodgates into my deck on the off chance I go first, can activate them all, and pray my opponent doesn't have any removal, I'm basically destined to lose.
And it's not like I was coming back into Master Duel playing a bunch of random vanilla cards or a decklist that was meta in 2008. I was playing Monarchs with a lot of the modern Monarch support that I saw for the first time in Master Duel's single player mode because I absolutely adored it. I thought the floodgates they added were stupid and unfun for my opponent and it made me feel bad to even run them, but when you see what the most popular kind of deck style is (not archetype, deck style), and it's all "I have to go first, set up my board, stop my opponent from doing anything on Turn 2 through floodgates and negates on an indestructible stick, then OTK on my next turn", how is it that anyone who plays this game still have hair!? It's infuriating!
I was listening to a game dev podcast that had Mark Rosewater on as a guest (Rosewater is one of the head designers for Magic) and he describes this thing about how he wants to design games for "Johnnys" and "Jennys", or game players who try to make really absurd, bonkers combos with pieces few people would ever expect, and he said something interesting and something that Yugioh has entirely ignored. I paraphrase, but he basically said something like "Johnnys/Jennys find it fun to see a new card and figure out how they can squeeze the potential out of it by themselves. If you just hand them all of the tools, they're just going to get bored." This is how I see archetypes in Yugioh. Rarely are there tools in Yugioh that aren't either "staples" and everyone knows about them and everyone can use them because they are universally useful, or they're explicitly locked into an archetype, be that monster type, monster card name, monster attribute, or some other arbitrary statistic on a card to ensure it is so hyper-controlled and contained that it can't get out of Konami's control.
I want to enjoy Yuigoh. Some of my favorite moments playing Yugioh were in the 5Ds era. Like yeah, there were competitive decks back then that were particularly dumb, but there certainly felt, at least, way more freedom in what you could reasonably do. Like... I won a locals with a Fish Synchro deck. Built it entirely on my own without copying a list online, so it wasn't a well-oiled machine by any stretch of the imagination, and I got to live out a power fantasy at the time of, if it did work, getting out both Shooting Star Dragon and Red Nova Dragon on the same turn. Did my deck need to run Red Nova? Absolutely not. Was it in any way detrimental to the flow of my deck to accommodate Red Nova when I could have used better Synchros at the time? Absolutely. But was it fun? Undoubtedly.
--
I know this is going on essay territory and I do not expect anyone to read it, so I'll tl;dr it as best I can: Rarran's experiences as a new player echo my experiences as a returning player. He is absolutely correct in all the ways you point out, and I really hope Konami can find a way to get this shit under control because, right now, a game that cannot attract new players is not only going to bleed players, but is also a really bad business model for a game. Konami needs to do better and players should be vocal about it.
Unfortunately rarran is the exception here, you see that mbt mentioned rastafarian, the man who quits elden rings In less than 5 hours because he can't beat that horseman boss, I won't expect him to survive duel strategy 2 link and battle replay in master duel.
A new players gets introduced to yugioh through archetype system, I'm included, I played synchron and madolche in 2012 returns to yugioh in MD and I don't have any problem with it, I fact comboing now is easier.
Like when rosemi starts playing yugioh she looks at traptrix archetype and like their art design, giving you the motivation to learn the archetype inside out. Rarran unfortunately decided to just completely ignore solo mode to see if somehow if he like the archetype master duel offered to new players.
@@r3zaful Indeed it's not the average experience... the average is even worse.
What if they think "I want to play a cool Dragon deck" and land on Dragon Link? That's one of the most convoluted decks in history, because it's 80% engine so you don't know what the deck is trying to do. I've watched it many times and I only know it likes to link climb, revive link monsters from the graveyard and get an ocassional syncro summon, and is not clear what should you prioritize. And that deck has been tier 2 for years at this point so is indeed something you have to know the matchup if you want to win.
I truly believe that Solo Mode just needs to be updated better with archetypes that are seeing actual play. I believe there should be a Duel Training EX or another SP Challenge that focuses around the harder things to get like hand advantage and learning about handtraps etc.
solo mode should teach the new decks every time a new set releases
@@catalysts94omg yesss. Or at least when a starter deck releases
@@HazeEmry I think they should have a separate area for combo teaching. Just basic lines that insulate you from things like Rafflesia on SpSm4/5 for Nibiru
@@catalysts94 or just not have a competitive card game that instantly goes into a game of solitaire while the other player can do nothing but watch and wait 10 mins.
@@TheLastSane1 It's too late to fix that. All you can do is work around it. 😊
I saw quite a few people complain about Rarran not reading the cards on his own deck, but they need to understand that even when you read the cards, it's a completely separate problem from understanding how to pilot your deck. Newcomers won't immediately know the importance of "Add a Salamangreat card into your hand" or "You can link summon the same monster using a link monster on the field" let alone imagining the end board. Not to mention, things will only get more complicated when playing against opponents who have interruptions to your combo.
I can only imagine what a newcomer would feel when they run into someone who plays Adamancipator and spends 20 minutes setting up a Dragite, Baronne, L3 Borreload Savage, I:P Masquerena, Block Dragon, and Apollousa pass.
Newcomers can understand the importance of drawing, tutoring, and searching. The tutorials explain the summoning mechanics, but he literally skipped half of the tutorials. I get that just reading your own deck won't tell you how to pilot it to an optimal endboard but you can definitely not go -3 on turn 1 because you did nothing but click buttons if you just read your damn cards. He was obviously just trying to get to the funny part of the stream where he gets to laugh at the bad card game he doesn't play, because he only plays the good card games, you see.
@@drewbabe Because surely a sane person would spend 5 hours straight just to laugh at a children card game. Rarran clicking yes on every prompt MD show you is a common new player mistake, you can see that all the time in low rank lobbies or when the game first came out. Him going -3 for no reason other than "shiny button must click" is not a valid reason to paint him as just another yugioh hater
@drewbabe The main issue isn't understanding the core summoning mechanics-that much is pretty simple. The struggle usually comes with the context behind the various rules and effects. MD Solo can teach you the mechanics as much as it wants to, but if it never gives you cards and solutions relevant to what's being actively played, the player will not understand how the archetype is usually piloted. Take the latest Tenyi gate as an example, where the tutorial only teaches you a link route and a synchro route in a deck jammed with Tenyi Spirits. All this tutorial does is "Hey, you can summon these monsters with spirits, and you can make this boss monster that banishes!"
Not to mention, MD also doesn't teach them specific removal and order contexts. Think about "When" and "If" cards within chain links and missed timings, or how target and non-target cards behave visually similarly, yet follow different rules, or why "destroy" a card is different than "send card to GY" and doesn't lead to a trigger.
Understanding what the player *cannot* do is equally as important as what they *can* do. MD focuses on only the *can*, and a very skewed way at that.
I can tell you what I felt when I first played against this adamancipator combo deck…. I sat through the combo, tried to play on my turn, found out that I can’t do anything, I got super angry, surrendered and then whenever I see adamancipator I just auto surrender on the first card they play. I don’t want to sit through 10+ minutes of my opponent comboing only to be locked out of any action afterwards. And yes, I don’t play “meta” decks, so this may be why I can’t do anything, but it is still super frustrating.
Edit: context: I started playing a year ago.
I started playing with master duel launch and the first time I encountered adamancipator I was like "oh that's neat" and then by the time the combo was over I was like "damn block dragon is pretty fucked up". I don't remember if I had a way to break the board, I assume not so I probably just scooped. Might have had lava golem idk. The launch format was pretty fucked up in general I don't think I was particularly annoyed by adam. I would have been playing pend magicians so it's not like my endboard was much more fair
My experience with playing Yu-Gi-Oh is randomly picking up duel links way back when Floodgate Trap Hole was the best card in the game. I played the game with pure E-Hero and a weird Warrior pile made of mostly Joey's cards and ended up bottoming out around Silver for months. Took me so long to even watch youtube videos for it or even the anime. Ended up having to studying duellinksmeta to learn how to be pretty okay at the game. Ended as a Legend player who hit KoG once during Sylvans meta.
Ended up trying out TCG because of my friends, and played Amazoness since it was the bane of my existence in Duel Links and ended up losing every game on Dueling Nexus, but it was fun, but I never really put time into it because it was so different.
Then Master Duel came out, at this point I've played probably less than 10 hours of TCG, and I picked up the game, played Aroma and Amazoness because those were "my" decks and while Amazoness was still the bad jank battle phase pile I remembered, Aroma was this interesting and complex plant link deck now and I didn't even know, I basically just played the deck like I did in Duel Links but with Sweet Marj this time.
Now I watch a bunch of Yugitubers and keep my finger on the pulse of card releases trying to see what I can fit in VW or Branded or Labrynth, but I don't think I ever appreciated how those years of Duel Links made me different from the actual beginners. Like the game is super different to what I knew, but its way more of a solid foundation than I would've ever given credit without that Rarran video I guess.
Master Duel NEEDS a tutorial that takes you through game play over the years, take people through the different complexities of the game. THEN they need to have matchmaking lobbies for each of them. this would 1) let people actually learn the game as it happened and 2) let people stick with complexity levels of what they are comfortable with. no more learning to normal summon Gemini Elf and then going into Casual Ladder just to play against full power Labrynth
😂😂😂😂 The last sentence killed me.
Literally legacy of the duelist but we gotta keep it outdated to push new product. That game does exactly this and is how i got back into ygo
Well I'd recommend Duellinks.
The powerlevel is a million times lower , speedduell means no 10 minute combos , anime - skills and characters bring that nostalgic vibe along ... And duellinks doesn't have
Bullshit like maxx c , Tear , Kash, Labyrinth , Ash , or floodgates like skilldrain , Tkabo, anti spell , IO ...
I agree, but also that lab player in the video was probably by far the worst lab pilot I've ever seen, so I can see where they were coming from playing in casual
As in other card games I can understand playing tier1/top meta decks in casual/unranked, it's a place to practice lines and to build up knowledge of the deck. Where it derails is when you're going for daylies or just easy wins to boost your ego. Recommending different game to get into YGO doesn't solve the issue with Master Duel's onboarding experience, just makes it less compelling for a new player even more.
One thing about hard resources, since it was the last note done. Yes, that kind of resourcing certainly drags the games, even adds inconsistency to it, but it is nonetheless an exhaust vent. You can modulate how good or bad a card is with it. You can print the same card, give it one more or less mana, and it is a completely different thing. If anything, the powercreep doesn't just come from adding more words to the card, but also sometimes lowering the cost. In YGO, both up and down powering of a card comes from adding words to a card. Also, the better cards are more efficient, and they do that... by having more words in the card. Something that a single symbol can do in other games.
Also rotation... That's another exhaust vent for power creep. Doesn't mean it won't happen, but you get a serrated upwards curve instead of the linear power creep YGO has (and the wordiness with it). Are there arguments against those things? Yes, of course. But people who love YGO tend to forget that there was a price to pay for such bombastic play pattern, and only after many years it becomes an indisputable truth.
As someone who tried to get into Yugioh for a bit and get my friends in, this was my experience also. I think the thing besides the length of the cards the problem is that yugioh cards actually represent numerous cards. Take, say, Madolche Anjelly. That one card is relatively easy to parse once you understand what it's 3 or so effects are doing. It tributes itself for a search, it has a 1/turn restriction, and it has the standard madolche recycle effect. All good so far. Plenty of games have cards that can search another card.
But Anjelly actually represents finding any Madolche, which means like Puddincesoeur, then Puddingcess, then one of the rank 4s, then Ala Mode, then Hootcake, then Messangelato, then Chateau, then second Messangelato, then Sistart, then Promeade. This is one card actually representing a chain of 11 cards, most of which were in an area the opponent cannot see at all. Other games with resource systems mostly prevent this kind of card cascade by having things cost resources and thus eventually run out of steam even in a deck full of searches.
This is madness to first comprehend. Both for an opposing player to even guess how this combo is going to play out, and for the player to figure out how to use. It is basically impossible via option and information overload for a fresh player to understand what to do with this kind of deck when first given it or to understand what it even can do and how to interact with it when facing it. A new player given a functional Madolche deck will not pull of this wombo combo. They will start with like normal summoning Messangelato pass. Eventually if they familiarize themselves with the deck, they might figure out how to get to one Tiramisu regularly. But to by themselves figure out the long branching combo chains to end on a powerful board is basically impossible, requiring them to instead just be spoon fed a combo guide. On the opposite end, being faced with this will result in a new player just zoning out and giving up trying to understand or anticipate what is happening. This is why Yugioh is just nightmarishly complicated.
I showed my friends a few decks, we all did our best to comprehend what the hell they were supposed to do, then they just gave up and really didn't want to try again. It's a bit of a shame because I did try to learn a few decks like DM and Evil Twin just because I thought they were fun. But, eventually I also gave up. I spent a ton of time understanding the ins and outs of DM, then Verte was banned and the deck sank like the titanic. And just the idea of trying to grasp all the other decks to understand how to interact with them seemed like such a herculean task that it was not worth it. I will say I did like the feel of like Evil Twin and the feel of churning through the engine and thinking of the possibilities and options. But, just couldn't do it in the end.
I think masterduel could benefit from a section for AI battles where your AI opponent plays meta decks from multiple time periods. This would help bridge the gap between casual online play and give new players a concrete goal to work towards and learn in a controlled environment. So many current meta decks use cards that previous meta decks from several years ago used and having an AI to learn from using these cards can help teach players about common utility cards and confusing mechanics like missed timings. The community is so huge and there’s so many passionate players who would be willing to help in the creation of these decks.
That is a lovely idea. I can contribute my Zombie decks.
I’ve definitely thought about this in the past myself. Gives new players a chance to see what their deck should somewhat be doing to be viable and help experienced players test and practice there decks
To add to this, Master Duel should have a feature, where you can build a deck (or even take one from the public decks) to give to an AI opponent to play against, so people can learn to counter a specific deck, that way people could watch the AI play, read all the cards and get a feel for how to play against it. And on top of that Master Duel should have some kind of Testing feature where you can play a deck you haven’t crafted yet to learn the combo, see if your interest in building it and just generally be able to play test.
@@nathanburton5024 Small indie company too worried about making big $$ on people opening packs, they probably dont have enough devs or the smarts from management to give a shit until the shareholders walk into their office and hold a gun to their head.
I mean, a lot of these first few points were even raised during konami's recent investor meeting... the game struggles to attract new players because the game has grown too complicated...but to keep the game fresh for older players, konami introduced a new mechanic once every like 4 years. The game requires newness and novelty to remain satisfying
The problem isn't newness and Novelty. The problem is the designers being unable to do so without writing 900 words on a card. If each card was limited to 2 normal length sentences, the new player experience would infinitely improve.
Its almost like card pool rotation is a mechanic that combats this exact problem or something. Crazy. And Yugioh doesnt have it. Wild.
@@XJ-0641 honestly i like that it doesnt, but there should be a format where they go insane on the banhammer. Like the common card tourney that was in MD was fucking awesome, something like that in the real card game they actually support would be sick
@@jasonjanisewski78 most cards are about 2 sentences, with only a 3rd to say "once per turn". Rikka Petal for example is 2 effects and then a 3rd sentence for once per turn.
This isn’t really true, Magic add a ton of new and stupid gimmicks but I have never seen people call it over complicated.
To be honest I think people who try and play Yu gi oh are just kind of dumb and don’t want to accept that fact so I have very little sympathy
I played from 02-04 and left during Chaos Control format because I couldn't afford the Chaos duo and every deck that wasn't Chaos just lost, every time.
I started playing Master Duel in Oct 2022 and instantly got roflstomped into the ground. I was interested in learning though, randomly built my first deck: Solfachords 😂. Went to town with Electrumite all the way to Platinum (it was a long grind). Decided I missed cardboard Yugioh and decided to go to locals Nov 2022 in the height of Tear 0. Bought a Crystal Beast structure deck and soundly took last place.
But the guys at locals were super helpful and showed me the ins and outs of the actual TCG meta and I built Traptrix (pre-structure deck), an easy to learn control strategy to help me stall while I got used to seeing combos.
Fast forward to now: I play Sunavalon Rikka, Labrynth, Weather Painters, and Nemleria. I still have a post structure Traptrix deck that I play occasionally, as well as Generaiders. I also built a CR'd out Solfachord deck that I play occasionally. I Electrumite to be free'd.
I also just got into Edison with Twilight Chaos Plants! Honestly, Edison or Speed Duel would be a good way to easy new players in to Yugioh.
At the end of the day, I'm just trying to say. Someone will learn Yugioh if they are actually interested.
The problem is getting them interested in the first place. If you gave me a game and told me "You have to invest 50 hours of learning rulings, cards and current strategies while losing constantly" to just start to enjoy the game, I'd just leave without looking back. And anyone but you probably would feel the same way. You're an exception among the crowd. There's probably one person out of a thousand dedicated enough to struggle and fight just to understand how the game works. Not everyone has the same dedication, and that in an of itself is an aberation. A game is meant to be fun, not a grindfest of frustrating gameplay.
You said something that hit the nail on the head and one that hit me over the head as I was laddering a couple of weeks ago: The best way to play this game is to make sure your opponent can't. That sucks.
I was playing Dogmatika Shaddoll. I go second against Floodgate Lab, Anti-Spelled, and basically lost the game on the spot. Loaded up against Traptrix next game and got trap holed to death. Then played Tear...dude end of Rukalos, Keleidoheart, and Dweller with Cryme in the back. 😅😅😅 I got tired of losing and switched to my pure P.U.N.K deck and started handtrapping people to death. Even though I was winning, I wasn't having fun. I realized I was doing the same to my opponents. Watching them surrender after 2 turns of "gameplay" was just disheartening. I wasn't having fun. And when I thought about it, I had been struggling to have fun with the game for a while at that point.
I've been playing this game since I was a kid. Many of my best friends came to me through this game. I felt in that moment that it was probably time for me to stop playing and that legitimately made me sad. I'm still playing but the fact I even thought about quitting is wild to me..
ZERO SUM FUN TRADING CARD GAME.
I considered getting back into the game a couple of years ago because all my friends did. After playing with a few of their decks I quickly realized there was no getting back into it.
I’ve enjoyed Master Duel so far. I have just come to accept I probably won’t make it to the highest tier and that most meta decks can likely deal with my rogue deck.
I don’t get mad when I lose to things like labyrinth because I’ve chosen to have a ceiling in my play experience. Not sure how many new players would feel that way though.
I learned the list of like top 5 "Meta" decks and if they go first and drop a starter i just nope out.
Man I wasn’t expecting MBT going through a character arc and admitting the problems that modern yugioh has towards grabbing new players.
Edit: honestly they should introduce legacy formats for new players as a way to simplify the game.
Yeah, the problem is instead tournament support they just keep trying peddle dogshit reprint commons from a mc pack to new players unwilling to fully invest into these things. Duel links are their only successful venture in this regard and they have full power orcust now!. Oh yeah and ocg favoritism.
No, legacy formats are not a good way to teach new players, they are a trap.
Why? because legacy formats DO NOT teach you how modern cards work, the knowledge that a new player is going to get from playing edison for a few months does NOT translate to playing against a modern deck like kashtira or labyrinth
This isn't a character arc. Every yugioh player knows the problems with the game and Konami's absolute terrible handling of it, and they say it daily. The Act Man's video was eviscerated because it was poorly researched and made in bad faith. Rarran's is not. MBT even reiterated that he agreed with some of the Act Man's points.
@@MrGshinobi While true, it does SIGNIFICANTLY help ease them into the game. The main problem right now is you download MD, do the tutorial, and then queue into casual/ranked just to play against Kash, Tear, etc. You have no idea what is happening, none of the cards tell you what the opponent is about to do, and you just get blown out with no way to easily understand what just happened to you. What happened to only summoning 1 monster? Why did they get to play half their deck? Keep in mind, I've played YGO off and on for most of life too, and even I see a new deck and go "I have no idea what I'm supposed to do about this." Something like goat format is significantly easier to start with, because it's exactly the game these people will remember from childhood. They can understand the core fundamentals of the game in a format where fundamentals are pretty much all there is. Then, if they want to try out newer stuff, they can move to edison or even modern YGO. Yes, they'll have to learn all the new stuff still, but now they know and have solidified the BARE MINIMUM of the game. They aren't trying to understand how spell and trap cards work, while also getting blown out by massive combo decks. They understand the very core of YGO, and can focus solely on the newer things. MtG has multiple formats, and to my knowledge, it works wonders for both new and veteran players. Sick of the current modern meta? Just go play legacy or commander until the cards you hate either rotate, or aren't meta anymore. New player? Here's a low power format that will help you understand the core of MtG, and we can talk about more complex stuff later. It gets people in the door, and then we can show them the cool stuff you can do in more recent iterations of the game later.
Editing because I'd like to add the clarification: I love modern Yugioh. Came into Master Duel playing Elemental Heroes, The Egyptian Gods, and Dark Magician for the nostalgia, but have since also started playing Branded (love the archetype), and am excited to put together Dark Worlds (was waiting on the new support) and try out Kashtira when it arrives.
True, but they are fun, interesting, and much more accessible. A way to get into yugioh in general without having to learn kashtira as step 1. It would be a great supplemental resource in addition to a proper solution.
Farfa had a good idea in his video about Master Duel implementing a real "casual" mode for beginners. Perhaps a mode where only players under a certain level can access and forces them to use the pre-built starter decks. Sure the decks aren't great, and it still isn't a real reflection of what the actual game has to offer, but putting you and your opponent on essentially an even playing field no matter what could help a new player ease better into the game.
I think a better iteration of this is just an official sealed format
If I'm not mistaken, Hearthstone has implemented a pretty smart way of handling ladder. They try to pair you up with other players of a similar or slightly better skill level to you. If you start a fresh Hearthstone account, you will be paired up with people who also have fresh accounts.
Duel links has this every once in a while called Legacy Duels. Problem is they don't keep it around permanently.
if they do that i might terrorize this mode by making new accounts and playing full tearlament to scare new players
@@MrGshinobi They could make it a low powered format on purpose. Like, not like a tier 3 format, but take the storymode stuff and make it that format.
Attitudes like this guy has are exactly why Speed Duel should be cherished and promoted by Konami. No one sitting down for Speed Duel will after the match be like "I couldn't do anything and didn't get what was going on."
the problem with things like speed duel is getting the active playerbase to also adopt it. It doesn't matter if a new player sees speed duel as a way to play a less complicated version of the main game, when they have nobody else to play with.
Nah, rush duels
Speed duel? What's that? In this household we only play Edison!
for God's sake please localize rush duels and release it in the client
@@samuelheddle I mean they are... and putting it as a mode in Duel Links.
Yugioh is exactly like a fighting game the parallels are crazy.
-huge execution barriers
-huge cost barriers
-a great amount of depth that you are forced to explore before you have even a cursory understanding of what is happening
-a community of people whose favourite phrase is "skill issue"
As much as I love this game, I absolutely take peoples point about it when they bring up these kind of issues. I cant, however, say that I think something should be done about it; what would one do to improve the new player experience besides detract from the games complexity, an aspect which is also the games entire appeal.
I feel like the only possible solution would be an alternative format in which new players could engage, as I cannot think of a possible equivalent to sf6s rather more elegant solution in modern controls.
That is not at all the appeal to me.
To me the appeal is "Yugioh got to me before Magic or Pokemon and I already know what Normal Summon means."
There is a potential solution to this, master duel needs a story mode similar to the tag force/world championship series of games where instead of you using prebuilt decks, you use your own, and npcs gradually get stronger and stronger, forcing players to adapt and learn more and more complex systems. Have this story mode give out gems after every duel (including rematches, but make it maybe 50 gems per duel so players are forced to duel more to open packs, and as such, learn more) and by the end of this, maybe the npcs are using legitimate decks that you’d find in the lower ranks, think pure infernobles, dinosaur, trickstar, etc. By doing this, players learn these complex mechanics naturally and suddenly they’re much easier to grasp.
Alternatively master duel could add duel puzzles, seriously these things are AMAZING at teaching how to break boards, combo, and show more obscure things like missing timing or how something like stardust dragon can bypass skill drain since it has to pay the cost and by doing so, dodges said skill drain. Also, they could allow players to make and upload their own duel puzzles to help teach newer players. Admittedly this wouldn’t be as good as a story mode, but it’s much more doable on Konami’s end.
Completely agreed. I'd love to see duel puzzles. The hand-holding "do exactly these steps to attack an opponent for game when they have 1 card on board, 0 in hand, and you have exactly lethal in hand" tutorials are NOT duel puzzles, they teach you about 1-2 combos at best and that's it. I'd love to see actual duel puzzles
Gotta admit, I do ADORE duel puzzles. They perfectly distill the feeling of "smash your head into it until you understand it" /srs
Solo Kinda does this.
A potential issue with this could he that MD’s meta shifts constantly. A decent deck from this time a year ago may be no longer competitive or riddled with bans. It’d have to be constantly updated to be useful as an intro to the current ladder.
With the current environment of the game, duel puzzles and a story mode that doesn't hold your hand through things like a forced prebuilt deck would definitely be a great way of helping building skills gradually rather than the all at once approach the game currently more or less relies on
Master duel should have multiple oldschool/simplified formats accessible at all times, not just as an event. And new players should be guided and even restricted to them in the first few hours on the app. And they should get fully functioning complete top-of-the-line decks for these formats for free, for example as mission rewards. And for the love of god, keep any and all FTK, floodgates and Solitare combos out of them. MD releasing with drytron, VFD and Rhongo was the worst idea in card game history.
Yes the Yu-Gi-Oh tradition of structure decks one copy of 40 individual cards which only a few of them actually work together
Must end.
They are Nicole and diming the player base but making the game impenetrable and an inconvenient slog which relies upon 3rd party information resources to function
I should be able to purchase or better yet, unlock a fully functional Kashtira deck.
Not spend 3000 gems gambling for essentially half a functional game experience.
@@isidoreaerys8745 Based take
Dude I agree 1000%
"Nicole and diming" lol
you mean Nickel and diming?@@isidoreaerys8745
restricting players to not playing the actual game sucks and it's not a good way to learn the game.
yugioh players like you often misunderstand that some new players WANT to learn the modern game, they know that it's a crazy combo umvc3 fuck fest and they want to understand it, but they cannot at first glance, and forcing them to play goat for 5 hours is NOT gonna solve that.
incredibly interesting topic. I'm a very casual yugioh player (I often times understand like 3% of the concepts in these videos). But i love these discussion videos talking about the "meta" of card games. The casual newcomer experience, paper vs master-duel. It's all fascinating to me. I feel like the only true way a yugioh video game could teach people is to take the apporch of a fighting game. Provide complex tutorials from "how to jump" all the way to learning combos. The problem with that is losing the people who want to just jump in and play.
The problem with that is losing people who want to just jump in and play."
I think yu-gi-oh does a good enough job of that with the massive combo lines that take 9 minutes, adding a tutorial that explains that part couldn't hurt
@@DeviousHands that's true. I'm just thinking from my experience with games that require long and dull tutorials. You can definitely do it right. I think the whole "puzzle' match thing some Yu-Gi-Oh games have done is an incredibly creative and fun way of teaching somebody how to play.
Agreeing with both of you, I'm trying to get into fighting games and decided to start with Marvel vs Capcom 2 and it's pretty much exactly how Yugioh must feel for a new player. It's a ton of fun when I'm winning, but it is a NIGHTMARE in terms of game complexity. It is very easy to feel helpless even against the AI (I don't want to imagine what it'd feel like fighting against even a low-level Sentinel/Storm/Magneto player), there is an insane amount of mechanics and character combinations to learn, and it's not easy finding good tutorials, despite this being one of the most celebrated games ever made.
I've actually resorted to just playing Super Turbo, which isn't nearly as fun, but at least I have a better sense of what I'm doing and feel like it'll be easier to get good
However most of combo from a lot of deck in yugioh case was created by playerbase
Not from konami themself
Unless they want to assosiacte themself with certain pro player about creation of combo line guide, there no chance they'll make any combo guide in the game
I mean,did you really think they intentionally create halqifibrax just to make 20min worth of wait combo line with so many branches line and deck variation that also make board full of negaters?
@@abdurachmanromzy4778 halq pull a crystron tuner is fine
firedog search a flamvell magician is fine
adamancipator researcher search green gem make the adamancipator 6 is fine
these at least teach you that you can use these tools to make basic boards, and smarter players will notice that they can make better use of these tools than the tutorial shows. it at least gets them to start considering how a deck might play, even if not at the highest level, something the game does not really teach at all rn
I think another problem is that the thing that makes yugioh so fun (at least to me) is also the reason new players have such a hard time: the unique nature of each deck/ archetype.
Every deck has a unique game plan, which means that 1) some decks are just inherently better then others so if the thing pulling you in isn't good enough then too bad (i speak as a subterror behemoth fan so i feel like i have some experience on this front) and 2) learning a deck, either to play it yourself or to counter it, does not help you in the long term because there is not guarantee you are putting in this effort to learn something that is broadly applicable for a lot of other decks.
Worst of all, as far as i can see there is no easy way to deal with this without having the game lose his identity, aside from going all in on simplified alt formats which still risk having many decks feel very similar if not identical.
I disagree with that every deck and archetype is unique in fact I'd argue far too many of them are the same they boil down to some form of projectile hand vomit and special summon spam ending on a huge board of stuff
Learning the way the different decks play is the funnest part of Yugioh.
Some decks like Floowander, are designed in a way that is really intuitive and easy to understand.
While some decks like D/D/D, synchrons, and Vaylantz are virtually impenetrable without prolonged hands on study.
honestly i think the best decks for new players are the ones with extremely clear win conditions, and the least friendly are the ones which rely excessively on extra-deck staples. far easier to explain to someone that their deck's plan is "make rank 10 monsters, special summon gustav max, special summon liebe"
one reason ygo is hard to learn because the archetype system makes it difficult to do so. ygo archetypes are essentially sets of smaller games you play almost by yourself using a generalized basic ruleset, therefore they dont really offer much from one to another. dude went from dragonmaid to salamangreat and probably felt bewildered at the difference
As someone who gave Master Duel a try, trying to build a deck as a beginner is almost impossible. With MtG, you can stick together 30 something cards chosen completely at random and 20 something lands of the right color and while you're not going to have a deck that's any good, you still have a technically functioning deck. With Yugioh, it felt like every card I picked required another card I didn't have to even be able to hit the field.
You can do so, but you are stuck to structure decks and close to no tech/handtraps.
Basically, imagine playing mono black, w/o tenacious underdog and gy trespasser and long night instead of liliana. The idea is there, but you don't have enough tools to deal with some issues.
@@RNGHaterfor a beginner that's completely fair though
You Google a deck list.
I figured that most people found that answer a pretty obvious and natural one. And you figure out why they told you to put in what they did as you go
@@RNGHater YEP. When your game revolves around needing these "handtraps or board breakers" and you somehow dont draw any an the opponent goes first your either conceding on the spot or wasting 5-6 minutes hoping they screw up. "Interactive gameplay" nah bro that shits watching a 5 minute unskippable ad.
@@RandomGuyCDN I mean, some decks are all gas and no breaks and are able to open a board anyways or deal with it one way or another (Mikanko). Others can just survive long enough to be able to win from grinding you of all resources (Paleo).
You are showcasing ONE scenario. Yes, it sucks when it happens multiple times. Yes it would be better if we had a best of 3 that can actually help you deal with the issues that a BO1 format has. But is not a Yugioh problem in itself.
Otherwise, we would be complaining about not opening Raigeki in LOB format and crying about the Golem in defense mode because it's too big.
I think changing how cardtext is shown in the tcg would be a great thing, like how they do it in the ocg. Not a big block of text where you have to figure out what of the multiple effects are hard, soft or non-once per turns. That would make things simpler
A lot of complaints I hear center around "I can't do anything." Konami could very easily make tutorials for beating established boards, and understanding good points to negate things mid action, like an advanced tutorial where the opponent has a full monster board and your hand has dark ruler. New people. Do not know. What staples specifically are in this game. Some people may just stick around if you show them a card or three and say "if you do this you don't have to really worry about about anything. And this looks more intimidating than it is".
It's one thing to hold someone's hand into a burning building and let go, and another to tell them where the fire extinguisher is and how to use it.
the problem is deeper tbh. at its core, with how link summoning, gravesearching, negating etc work, the point of the game is to stop the other player from playing. it's anti interactive and often makes one player feel cheated. Not knowing WHEN to negate or die is a SYMPTOM of this.
@@ianslee4765
And then when you take away the tools to stop the player from stopping the other player from playing, people will say that the game has no "interaction". Lmao
One of the most stupid arguments i ever saw was the reason as to why duel links players wanted "hey trunade" banned, because it would allow the opponent to essentialy remove their "interaction" (backrow) to stopping the opponent from playing, and lead into otk.
Completelly ignoring that, if they changed their deck to deal with that, they would not lose like that, but they were annoyed they could not use their staples for just that, so konami went and banned hey trunade.
Now we are in a meta where end boards are literally "you dont play the game" backrow cards and everyone wants storm to be unlimited and twin twisters to be added to the game.
@@neonoah3353 the problem is negates on opponents turns with little cost to advantageous cost(milling a card chains its effect). Each player being limited in negates per turn unless a card specifies is really not a hard concept either.
@@ianslee4765 imo, limiting the amount of times that cards can be activated by the opponent during our turn would already be really great.
Hard to "do anything" even with the knowledge when the game doesnt provide you the tools to do it. Komoney wants new MD players to swipe their credit cards just to get access to the required playsets of hand traps and board breakers, thats the kind of horse shit new plays dont tolerate. When you game is balancing around needing interupts and the only way to do it is to pepegacredit then your game is flawed.
Your point about Tears, Lab and Fenrir are genuinely spot on. It’s too late to fully reverse the “Combo for 8 minutes into unbreakable board” decks. But they can introduce more valuable cards that work first and second.
Havnis and Bystials may be broken but it’s very much the correct way to lead the game
Bystials yes, havnis was functionally impossible to play around and created some absolutely misserable sacky moments lol
I’d rather get Havnissed then fenrired.
It sucks not being able to even do an inherent summon from the hand without triggering him and getting banished immediately.
That only makes new players even more overwhelmed. Cards like Molecricket or Incredible Ecclesia are better.
@@isidoreaerys8745 Fenrir only triggers if you activate an effect if you inherant summon he doesn't
Ah yes because newbies must really be drawn to playing and playing against the tear mirror. That’s definitely the ideal way of gettting people into Yugioh :^))))
I'm someone who started playing yu-gi-oh in 2019 with duel links and was put off from playing the full game because I thought the main game was too complicated. The main reason I actually started playing TCG style yu-gi-oh was Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution which I bought on a whim during the beginning of covid. It has both a better tutorial than master duel and a fully fleshed out story mode with all the major duels from the anime. Not only were the anime duels nostalgic for someone who grew up watching the show but at the start of each series their was a tutorial based on the shows introductory duel that taught you how to use the mechanics that show introduced (Vrains had a Link tutorial, Arc-V had a pendulum, etc.). From a new player perspective this really helped introduce me to new mechanics through having a tutorial at the start then playing with and against them for the entire series to the point where I like all of the new summoning mechanics (yes even pendulums). once make a deck you can try out ranked and unranked multiplayer with global leaderboard. It also has both sealed and draft modes which have been big suggestions to add to master duel. Decks were somewhat easy to build as one story mode duel got you enough points for 30 packs and specific archetypes were in different packs based around characters from the anime. The super and ultra rare luck could be kind of bad sometimes but it is nowhere near as bad as master duel where you can spend 11,000 gems you saved up and pull no Spright blue, Elf, or starter from the selection pack (this happened to me and I'm still mad). The price is also much better as the base game is only 40 dollars for the full game whereas less than 50 packs in master duel is 64.99. The biggest problem for Legacy of the Duelist was that it was never updated with new cards so it is completely stagnant. I think Master Duel could be vastly improved by incorporating some of these features into its system. They could add anime/ manga arcs to solo mode and work tutorials on summoning mechanics into that experience. adding sealed and draft play would allow for more variation in the game besides just ranked as well as offer a slower format. Finally, adding a one time payment to permanently increase gem rewards from dueling would make bad pull luck much less infuriating as you are able to earn those gems back quicker.
PS: also they should add a rush duel mode that sounds really fun.
This is why they should have more of the Dual Trial events and have them last longer than just a couple days. I also think they should give a notification for mobile whenever it opens.
The difference between yugioh and mtg's complexity is pretty easy. MTG can be complex, Yugioh is inherently convoluted. I've taught nearly a dozen people MTG by teaching them how casting cards works, and then playing a single game of it with both of our hands revealed so they can ask me any and all questions they have about what they are capable of doing. Simple, effective, and gives a fantastic general idea of how to play. It's even led to people reading what's in their hand and asking me how certain combos and cards work and they get so excited they are figuring it out. Yugioh's word soup doesn't allow that, and I think part of the issue is that while you can teach people easily enough the basic summoning methods and the basic game that doesn't tell you ANYTHING about how decks play and so many of them work off of their own rules.
You can *probably* figure out how to do basic shit in a normal MTG deck without knowing every card in the deck front and back beforehand. Compare that to like, playing a salamgreat deck as a new player without a guide to basic combo lines
Exactly, after spend hours trying to understand summoning mechanics, the next BIG gap is deck building. You can copy anyone's deck on internet then realized you have no idea why there're cards that's not the same archetype, why this card is in this deck, how does this card work in this deck, etc. And after you managed to understand your deck, the final HUGE gap is to understand opponent's deck which is.........as someone said, it's like fighting game but you need to learn over 200 characters moves and every possibility for each move opponent could've done.
But you’re talking about having to teach people while MBT and Rarran are talking like it’s unforgivable for a card game to have to do that to onboard people.
the big benefit of MD, i think, is that you can kiiiinda learn by doing by just assing around for a few hours in ranked with your deck until you have it down - that's something you can't really do at locals.
that being said, especially for new players, yeah, i think guides are important. someone mentioned him not knowing to create Accesscode and like - what the hell in the Salamangreat deck suggests that a wincon is creating Accesscode Talker and attacking for game? it's not even in the same archetype!
@@vinnythewebsurfer not exactly relevant. I'm just talking about the ease with which you can slide someone into the game. It's an anecdote about how easy the game is to teach and learn.
As someone who collected cards as a kid then jumped back into the game through Duel Links zero actual knowledge I'm glad I got to get in when I did because getting to experience an accelerated version of the evolution of the game so when Master Duel launched I could transfer over with little effort. Still I don't expect new players to have to spend 5+ years in different format to understand the main one and also they can't even do that anymore given the massive power creep in Duel Links.
I got into duel links right when synchros came out and I 100% agree
Duel link just perfectly encapsulated the feeling of playing TCG Yugioh for decades in like 4 years which is why it was seemless transfer to clients like Project ignis I just looked up the best decks currently in the tcg and learnt upsides downsides and countrers much like when a new meta drops in DL
If Master Duel could have a "YGO over the years" Solo/casual mode where you play the most prominent decks of each year since YGO dropped with cards legal of that time then player experience could be 1000x better
Resources! There's, cards in hands, Once per turns, ZONES (suddenly remembers a certain deck) sometimes.... LOL
I learned modern yu gi oh by watching Cimo's progression series.
At first modern yu gi oh is kinda daunting but now I've come to enjoy it.
This, also shoutout to rank10ygo’s analyses for trash archetypes, re-reviewing them + their general gameplan after they are surprisingly given new support, and what that might mean for its original idea and moving forward, what you might see it in.
The battle of the trash, where archetypes he’s reviewed compete for the crown of least trash trash deck, where usually most of the archetype engine is present, and you can see what someone would do if they were trying to deckbuild using as much of that trash archetype as possible to make it competitive. Those were good too, it teaches you what cards to look for in an archetype that stand out and provide the most amount of game wins. Those are purely battling trash with trash, so you will see the furthest of meta has to offer, and what each deck needs to build on to become better.
Most cards are mid, less are good and an even smaller portion are broken.
ideally they should just integrate past formats into master duel like GOAT and Edison, and then have additional formats after that, so that people can progressively step up once they feel they have a grasp on the game from these simpler formats. GOAT and Edison can be complex, but with stuff like GOAT you're more likely to encounter an opponent where all they do on their first turn is set and pass, as opposed to playing for 20 minutes and then you just have to surrender because they set up an unbeatable board. Some sort of progression tiered formats are by far the best way to let someone get into the game at their own pace before they decide they're ready for regular advanced format that follows the current banlist.
It's so weird that I see so many people suggesting past formats as a solution. Where are new players going to find all of these 20-year old cards? When they go to the game store it'll just be the new releases, so now that can't actually play the game they learned on Master Duel irl without having to go deep into the secondary market.
I also just don't think there is much appeal to new players in playing a format that is entirely old cards (other than maybe some returning Yugi-boomers, they might dig it). When new sets come out all of the enfranchised players are going to be talking about how excited they are for the new stuff, and they will be like, 10 years behind trying to catch up. Except the aforementioned Yugi-boomers, most new players aren't going to have any nostalgic connection to these legacy formats, so it's going to basically be like telling them to take a five semester history course before they can play the game.
Just do what basically every other card game does and have a rotating entry-level format or actual support for a limited environment that lets you play after opening/drafting a few of the most recent packs. It won't teach how to play Yu-Gi-Oh as it is played now, but it will get people on their way and will probably slow down the power and complexity creep the game is infamous for. It's much easier to start with the new stuff and work your way back than it is to start with the old stuff and work your way forward.
@@adamgalloy9371 that would be the point of putting legacy formats on master duel, then you can play online so you don't need [physical cards and officially supporting them would mean products directly specifically at those formats like MtG does. Yugioh also does have a "beginner" format. Speed Duels. Just way less people play speed duels than play Goat and Edison so it is harder to recommend them than the legacy formats.
@@ducky36FThey don't need products specifically for the new formats. Think of how many cards in each new set are completely unplayable filler. Now, imagine there is a lower-power level rotating format and/or a limited environment where people can actually use those cards instead of them being literal trash. Enfranchised players are going to incidentally get these cards since they come in the new packs, so they might as well play the new formats to help on-ramp the new players (as opposed to Speed Duel which they'll just ignore). It requires a bit of a change in design philosophy of course to make these plans work, but it's much overdue at this point and basically every other card game makes it work.
For the longest portion of its history MtG didn't even have different types of products for its formats, everything (more or less) just came in through the same Standard-legal sets and it actually worked pretty well. In fact, many players consider it a bad thing that they are starting to make sets specifically aimed at other formats like Modern and Commander because it is arguably leading to the power and complexity creep issues that have plagued Yu-Gi-Oh.
@@adamgalloy9371 Or Konami can lean into its aggressive reprint policy - one of its strongest assets as a game - and aggressively reprint Goat and Edison cards with their correct wording for the time. We already see a little of this, just ramp it up a lot more.
@@shuttlecrossing7084 I get that people like playing these formats and I think it'd be great for the game if they did reprint these cards so that legacy format events can be held.
I just don't think these formats would be compelling to new players who have no appreciation or context for the history of the game even if their gameplay is easier to get into. Like I said above, it comes off like telling someone they need to take a history class before they can play the "actual" game. New players will also want to play with the new sets that everyone else is getting hyped about (and that Konami is marketing most heavily). Everyone (beginner or pro) experiencing a new set together for the first time is a pretty powerful community experience and is why release or pre-release events tend to be so popular for card games. These legacy formats cut out this experience for a format that literally hasn't changed in 10+ years. I guess I'm somewhat projecting an opinion to new players here, so it's possible I am wrong, but... I just don't see this being appealing to most new players. IDK what else to say.
Basically every other card game has solved the problem of having an entry-level format and many card games have demonstrated they can support multiple formats. It baffles me that Yu-Gi-Oh players refuse to learn anything from that and insist on reinventing the wheel with these kinda half-baked ideas.
As someone who played on and off for a while, the increasing complexity eventually pushed me away. I ended up printing out a quick summary of what cards did so i didn't have to read tiny text and had it summarized in a neat way that was way more comprehensible.
Meanwhile something like the Pokemon TCG, even with increasing power levels, was so, so easy to hop into. Not cost-wise, but from an understanding point. Even the most complex abilities and attacks only take a little bit of figuring to understand, if any at all.
heck i'd argue that even cost wise pokemon is also easier to get into on that front as well. a pokemon deck would cost you about 60+ dollars. or you coulod just buy 2 league battle decks and you would be set competitively until rotation or until you want to invest again. but yugioh decks usually cost around 100-200 dollars for the average deck. half of those cards are probably staples.
Playing and understanding the entirety of LostBox, the most "technical" deck in the meta in recent memory was easier for me than having to understand how 1 branded despia combo work.
@@misteralien8313 lostbox step 1 know decklist. Step 2 dont screw yourself. step 3 ?? step 4 profit.
As a yugi boomer who’s teaching multiple people how to play at the moment. This video is 100% spot on! Only thing missing is how toxic some players can be. My friend doesn’t ask for advice online anymore because a bunch of commenters gave him hate because he was playing Suships and told him he was a “bad player”. I told him “you’re learning and having fun, that’s all that matters man”
Your Fiend? No matter people online were toxic, that is a classic example of xenophobia!
(Yes, I know you meant "My friend" but I really wanted to comment this unfunny joke)
One of the easier ways for new players to get into the game if they don't like memorizing combo lines is playing control, and your reward is everyone calling you a toxic player who's representative of everything wrong with the game
The player base is so incredibly toxic.
The amount of “your deck sucks if you can’t play through a single ash” condescension I see on Reddit when new players ask for help is unbelievable.
When the fact is ash is an oppressive card and there are opening hands in full power Ishizu Tearlament that lose to a single ash Blossom. That’s just the way the game goes.
i think its fine to an extent to tell people their decks arent competitive. some of the most toxic comments from people come from people who a) want to play the decks they like, and b) want to consistently win in ranked, and sometimes you can't do both at the same time. some people unnecessarily shit on non-meta decks but there's also the types who refuse to accept that- if they play harpie lady swarm in 2023, they're probably going to lose a lot. that doesn't mean you can't play it but you do have to accept that you're going to lose a lot @@isidoreaerys8745
Yeah, ppl like to blame meta players for this or yugiboomers but it's just toxic players and recently ygo was opened to a whole swath of toxic ppl with no life at all
So yeah fully With you there, and the toxicity simply breeds more toxicity since we don't do anything as a community to stop it
I really liked that Rarran highlighted how simple the first turn is in pretty much every other card game compared to Yugioh. In most tcgs, the game starts slow and simple, and then it ramps up as the game goes on and you can start doing more things. This allows new players to jump into a game and start learning by doing. Also, almost every duel in the YGO anime is written like this, because this type of game is very engaging both to play and to watch.
In modern YGO you are just overwhelmed from the start with a million different actions, which makes it so difficult to for a new player to learn as they go, as there’s no way a newbie can process everything going on.
And he’s totally right that it’s crazy how many games are just over without you even having a chance to participate at all.
I've been saying forever that either number of summons or card activations should be limited on a curve. Tutor a card? That's one less card you can play on your turn. Even Deck building games like Dominion operate on this concept. Speed World in 5D's also did this. Wild how it hasn't been implemented yet
@@KevinTangYT I’ve often wondered what it would look if there was a format where you can only special summon as many times as the number of turns you’ve taken (ie turn 1 you get 1 special summon, turn 2 you get 2, etc).
You’d obviously have to adjust the banlist and probably add some kind of limitation to spell cards as well, but I think that would be a cool format to explore.
I'm glad that I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh right when MD came out, I was able to learn using invoked shaddoll and tri brigade which were extremely linear and had easy to understand effects. I couldn't imagine trying the game for the first time and running into tear lab or kashtira without having someone to explain to me wtf they're doing.
I STILL don't know what they're doing and I've played on and off since launch.
I just kinda hope I pick the right times to mess with them
This is without a doubt my experience playing the game with friends. Story time: Ive been playing yugioh for almost a decade now and I still had to have my more experienced friend coach me and re-teach me almost every aspect after my break in 5Ds. I am now a decently competent player and my previous yugioh friend group is nonexistent now after 5 years. Fast forward to Master Duel and trying to get my friends into the game so i have some people to play with who arent playing MvC at a competitve level (this was my favorite comparison in the video, its perfectly accurate). Friend A is a yugiboomer, like myself, who loved the original show and battle city growing up and like the rest of us was eager to play yugioh again. He refuses to touch it now, even to play against me or our other friend, because he cannot find a foothold to play against anyone even with some help from myself and other decklists or guides. Friend B had never played yugioh before but it was something to play with friends so he was willing to learn. He will only play now if i mention it until he found witchcrafters to try and give the game another chance with friends only, I.E me. 3 people in this story of 3 different yugioh backgrounds and each one us is an example of every single point here. I am currently betting on which game/company will crash first: Konami and yugioh or Blizzard and Diablo
Yeaaaah I think Blizzard took the last thing you said as a race rather than a warning
11:20 okay, so maybe they aren't the most complicated decks in the game, but they are certainly not new-player friendly. Decks that require you to set up negates and pops and interruption are inherently difficult for new players, because they require you to learn what your opponent is playing to interact with them.
Decks that set up a Towers and pass, or a deck like numeron going second OTK are much more new player friendly, as they tend to do 1 thing, do it very efficiently, and dont require you to knoe too much about what your opponent is up too, which lets you learn the game at a reasonable pace while having above a 10% win rate
If someone asks me a good deck to try out to play the game for the first time, im linking them Hardleg's video on Crusadia. Easy to understand, easy to play, Equimax is a cool motherfucker, you get to play Kaijus which are objectively cool as hell
@anonymous71207 going second otk decks in general are super nice. You don't have to learn what to and what not to handtrap, or anything like that. Click duster, click lightning storm, click kaiju, do your combo line for big guy, attack. Gotta love big bonk beatdown
@@classymofo1059 true. I transitioned into earth machine which is just a fancier version of big bonk beatdown
earth machine/rank 10 trains is a really good beginner deck with an obvious win condition, imo. and it's decently rogue-levels of competitive as well
Branded pre bystial support is IMO one of the best beginner decks, that you can still win with. The game plan is simple activate branded fusion, summon lubellion then use lubellion to get mirrorjade. When you get used to that combo you add ad libitum to summon back mirrorjade, and all the bystial support to step by step get a understanding on the game’s speed while being able to sometimes win games.
Honestly (as someone who's been playing for 7 years) I think the main issue now is how old cards that were unsearchable or just not an issue before get so much value out of the sideboard. After a break from the game a mate threw photon/galaxy at me and I played it in paper and it was fun since my plunder runic opponent didn't board since it was just casual games. Played on DB and just got summon limited game 2 and droll into summon limit skill drain game 3. This was against VS and as since I'd never seen the deck I went from interested in what it does into losing to solely non-engine blowouts. You could argue I just didn't board into every bit of back row hate but since they were mostly in the side (besides skill drain) I had no idea why on earth I would've needed to after how g1 went
Evenly matched needs to be banned.
@@isidoreaerys8745no
I think Rarran's comment about resource systems is half right.
Yeah Yu-Gi-Oh does have resources, but the difference is in how they're used.
Mana, energy, land etc... the main benefit is that they provide a slow ramp up of power. You start out with less resources, but as the game goes on you acrew more and can spend more on more powerful effects.
Yu-Gi-Oh is almost exactly the opposite. You start the game with basically everything already within your grasp, the only resource you have to build up is your graveyard. But everything else is basically at the palm of your hand sicne everycard searches for another card which searches for another card which searches for another card which you can tren tribute to create an uninteractible behemoth that if your opponent even looks at they loose the game.
Instead of starting off small and working your way up, Yu-Gi-Oh starts you at your strongest from the getgo.
And gets worse overtime, getting to a point were topdeck matters... if no one found the kill, which almost never happens due to cards being so OP.
the idea that someone claims dragon maids to be "too complicated for new players" is INSANE to me, my buddy (who has never touched yugioh before in his life) choose that as his very first deck when he started master duel and gushed about how understandable and easy it was, dragon maids being "too complicated" has aboslutly nothing to do with why a new player might not enjoy this game
I agree with point 1 a lot. I don't shy away from mentioning to friends that I play Yugioh, but I usually follow it up with a recommendation to not get into it. I've been playing since I was three, and I only took a short break in my early teen years. I know what to expect through years of playing. I can't imagine someone having to learn that (which is why Pak is so damn impressive).
It is clear that something needs to change, the problem is how can Konami, the people who have led YuGiOh to this position in the first place, possibly be trusted to lead it out.
I have little faith in Konami to fix the game.
Hell the people at Konami don't even play the game, so of course they can't be trusted to fix it.
Well no one else can fix the game. But it is in in their interrest to fix this issues sinse they really want new players. So maybebig creators could like make an open latter to Konami with some ideas on how to fix this issues. Because I think everyone can think of some ways to this issues that are quite easy to implement.
Konami already failed to leave a good first impression on the casual audience with Master Duel, all they're doing now is trying to keep the people still hanging on from leaving.
Let's just say those shareholders meetings will force them to chance. They hold more power than anyone in konami's offices. If they're concerned that getting no new players is going to hinder the growth and profit they can force konami to shut the game down competely if it's not making them $$
I basically taught myself yugioh starting around summer of 2020 and I didn’t feel comfortable really playing it until master duel released
I got back into the game in 2019 and I'm still not confident enough to take my decks to an LGS. I don't want to be that guy sitting there reading my own cards and the opponents, and making game 1 take 45 minutes.
@@DarkAuraLordhonestly, as a guy that got into competitive yugioh around the same time, i agree
The duality of man; I can back to the game in 2019 with my last game being HAT format. Picked up Sky Striker in 2019 because it's not a complicated deck mechanically and went to a YCS one month later lol
Kinda similar. I was so bored during the pandemic that I started watching YGO videos, specifically Rata's Archetype videos. After that I downloaded Duel Links and gave it a go. Hell, I didn't even bother to go to the subreddit or DL Meta or any external help because I hate doing that with video games.
I guess I was super lucky that I managed to win several of my first duels on the ladder that I got invested again after not playing for literally decades.
After that it was just about learning a few mechanics one at a time and being extremely patient.
I really, REALLY wanted to learn YGO.
We've all got Stockholm Syndrome. I can't imagine what would convince anyone to call Dragonmaid one of the most complex decks.
As a maid player i can attest the combo versions are among the hardest decks to pilot I've tried,arguably harder than dragon link
@@RairikyHow I have played both Dragon maids and D link and no version outside of dragon maid d link is hard to combo. Dragon link is way harder to combo with it.
@@RairikyYou must be high on copium. Dragonmaid is my petdeck and even Dragonmaid Tears is not even that hard to pilot. DLink Dragonmaid might be convoluted but that is the hardest shit you can get with Dragonmaids.
As someone who stopped playing until the synchro era of Yugioh, when I first played master duel, I was stumped at how one can combo for ad infinitum for the summoning of herald of ultimateness.
It took me quite some time to not only learn my deck but also learning some mechanics of the game and I am still learning how pendulum cards work. The amount of work you have to put through learning the game is quite immersive that it reminds me of school at some degree... but at least in yu-gi-oh, you dont fail the subject.
There is nothing wrong in learning the game on your own, but it will take time... like months, not 10 hours...
I stopped playing roughly around the time that pendulum summoning was announced or something, there was just too much to keep track of anymore, I was already bad at building decks and remembering what my cards did, so something clicked and I had a moment of clarity that went like this:
Am I having fun? no
Am I winning games? no
Am I making money off of this? no
Then why am I even playing this anymore when none of the above applies, it's costing me hundreds of dollars to even try and compete, and my skill hasn't gotten any better? I'm out.
Still have my cards from years back but i'm more interested in selling them off and seeing if I can make any money off them.
"It is no more difficult to learn Yugioh than it is to learn Magic"
God I wish.
Maybe the quote is referring to actual real life magic, being a Wizard.
8:25 "people started saying stuff like 'maybe you're not the right kind of person for YGO'."
Ah, yes, the children's card game made for children so even a child should be able to understand it but now you need an entire rulebook next to you and don't you dare get when and if confused.
I have not seen a child play ygo in over a decade, ygo's playerbase is exclusively 20~30 somethings.
If Konami won't do it, it really comes down to the community to change the way *we talk about the game.* You capture it really well; the game is complex, and it is hard to learn, but it also *can* be learned if we are honest with new players and hype up that complexity as the *goal.* It is fun to play 20 cards over the course of your first turn, but if you're told that you don't need to do that to have fun, and then discover that was a lie, that sucks.
I think the biggest issue with getting new players in the door is multifaceted. 1. "I can't do anything." If you don't know about the standard going second staples for the modern game, and when to use them, you may as well throw in the towel if you lose the die roll. The tutorials don't really show off stuff like how do i break a board/interrupt a combo. Or how to formulate your own combo lines and set up an endboard
2. Even if you do know this there's still a good chance you'll get to do nothing because the only format this game lets you play is mtg vintage where every deck has like 12 copies of Force of Will. If you don't like the format, you can't go play something like Goat Edison Hat or something like the Domain Monarch days. Not without a buddy or 3 where it's slower or you don't have to worry about your search being ruined by a Forehead from the hand you don't have the ability to interact with.
3 Hand Traps. So integral to the game being playable but incredibly indicative of its problems in the modern era considering everything. If you're going first with one of the many decks that die to Ash because maybe someone gave you a bunch of old cards or you're a returning player with an old deck and someone ash's your normal or imperms it you can't really do anything about it because in the modern age decks are so hyper consistent and powerful that hand traps need to be relevant and any consistently good answers to them are either banned or limited.
Also, don't lie to ourselves, YGO is CONVOLUTED, not complex. It has only one gameplan in combo, either slow or fast, and once you know the plan there's not much else you can do because there's not a lot of meaningful decision making.
I first started playing Yugioh when the craze happened back in the 2000s. Then after about a year I stopped. It never went beyond playground yugioh.
Fast forward to the middle of Baby Ruler format and I decide to pick up the game again. I remember my first Dueling Network match with my blue-eyes dragon deck.
I just summoned Blue-Eyes, Kaiba did it, the game let me do it, why would it be wrong?
It took a few months for me to get good at the game. Doesn't help that I didn't have any help.
But then 2014 and HAT came around and something just clicked for me. I was no longer trying to make anime decks with cards that weren't even real, here was a format that I really enjoyed, with decks that were only moderatly difficult.
Hell, at a certain level, everything back then was at least usable.
But learning the game like I did? It took months of dedication and a format that clicked with me.
I can't imagine getting back into the game now. It's not the speed that's the issue, it's the length of turns and the sheer amount of text on each card. It's exhausting.
I just got into magic, why can't we have keywords? Or simpler worded effects? I know we can do better.
The way I learned how to play was by watching through DM on Netflix back in the day, then basically picking out Arc-V out of a hat to watch because it looked cool. Luckily that was the season that explained every summoning type except links, so I could just wing it on MD from there.
My point being, the anime doesn’t exist as a starting point anymore. The new show is based on a secondary game not available to the US, so there’s no resource like that to rely on that anymore unfortunately.
Also it was my understanding that rather than one of the most popular, standard is one of the least popular ways to play the game, with having 4 or 5 lgs around your area not a single one of which does standard locals being completely normal. Its pretty much only the most popular on Arena, and on a downward trend there too, no?
Standard tends to have down turns with changes like the recent change 2 to 3 year rotation. People wore getting sick of standard before that change was made and it turned a lot of players away for a year just to get away from Black/Red or Blue/Black/Red piles. Give it a few months to a year and Standard will come back with new card pools pushing out the older meta standouts before they rotate out.
@@Asmodean1111 that change was made because standard was really unpopular though. Itd been unpopular for a while.
Really amazing video.
I especially feel the point of "You play so your opponent cant"
Thats the part where I've always thought about quitting the game completely, cause I think: Yugioh, especially in paper should NEVER be a single player experience, and for lots of decks, thats exatly the case. And these are duels I just walk away from, or Alt F4 in Master Duel. Cause obviously you dont want me to play, so why not play test hands in the first place? Like it has the same effect if Im not gonna be able to do a single play.
Biggest issue in my opinion and of course one that really doesnt get new players into the game if we are honest. Like Noone wants to play a game that your cant play, right?
I last played in 2005. Been curious about the current meta but quickly realized it’s not a game for me. I never understood the “I play so my opponent can’t” mentality. In that case, why are you even playing “a game” against someone? I feel like if I played against someone like that and they went first, I’d say “I’m gonna go make a sandwich while you do all your combos and we’ll say you won, okay?” Seems like they could shuffle their deck at home and see if they can manage their combos without needing to “play” against someone.
The funny thing is, YGO had a resource system that I would argue kept it balanced for a long time: the Normal Summon.
I feel like the game's current state was almost an inevitability after it was no longer so 'special' to special summon.
There's no reason why alternative format/rules can't also limit Special or at least Extra Deck summons. Can't retroactively change card text, but having a summon limit that scales like mana I think is the most elegant solution
@@KevinTangYT"Can only Special as many times as the turn number" maybe?
its so accurate, I spent around a full year on EDO/Dueling Nexus during Covid just brute forcing my learning of the game, and nearly another year before I was finally comfortable playing in paper which was still another big learning curve that my locals were thankfully very patient with.
“There are zones” *Kashtira has entered the chat* “…sometimes”
Link evolution has a great new player experience. It goes through every new mechanic one by one then mixes them up so you can see all the interactions.
I watch dzeef, farfa and MBTs content a lot and I don't even play the game. I tried Master Duel but got bounced off how hard it was to learn so I figured I'd watch some UA-cam content to figure it out and found these guys and even though I've now learned a lot about the game (like what MaxxC does lol) I stuck around because you guys are just really funny youtubers and your content is very easy to follow.
Honestly its people like you who could help us the most, just enough of a clue but not quite all of it
Literally the best way to learn the game, just watch A LOT
The real Problem with Yu-Gi-Oh is that negate everything cards are so common now. It makes going second make you want to quit
@Mrinternasional: even though they are too many negated, this is why yugioh have called by the grave to mainly negated hand trap, but they can counter something else. I know you are not guarantee to start of with call by the grave, the majority of the time if your opponent only have hand trap, then they used all they hand trap against you, but because they never used one of their hand trap as a monster card, they lose the duel, because after they used all hand trap, they have nothing to protect the life point, and they only draw one card, so they would be out of resource.
Well... you can always play dark ruler no more😊
Its not even that negate everything are so common, but that a lot of decks create similar endboard of boss monsters like Apollusa and Barrone. Its just what route you wanna take.
80 negates on board, only used 1 card to make board, hand full of hand traps and probably maxx c mini game. Oh my turn? OP: Here's maxx c HF gamer!
I got into the game in 2010, fell off for a few years, then got back in in 2016 when someone brought a Pendulum Monster to school and I had to know what that was. Honestly, the fact that I've stuck with the game for this long is miraculous
Honestly "the way to play yugioh is to ensure someone at the table isn't having fun" is just 100% facts
Me and my friend play and honestly I lose 99% of the time and just suck it up recently I got into a archetype and won 3 duels before he pivoted into one of the most annoying control stun decks out there so I was just prevented FULLY from playing
It's a shame. Back in early to mid xyz era I actually did think YGO was the best card game ever made. The extra deck functioned like a toolbox of MtG commanders and helped speed the game up while promoting individuality even when 2 players were playing the same archetype, and there was a lot of back and forth. Sure, there were crazy combos that could happen, but they were still outable without relying on cards designed to completely obliterate an existing field, AND when one of those crazy combos actually went off it was exhilarating for the player making the play and the opposing player felt like they were suddenly thrust into a raid boss fight because it was more of a novel thing. The crazy combos existed, but they weren't consistent; they required either a godly hand or multiple turns of stalling to draw into the pieces.
Now, YGO is a game I play because I still have a lot of friends who play it, I like crafting crazy combos, and there is a deep nostalgia in my heart for it, but I rarely actually enjoy playing against other players. That's a problem, and the only possible solutions are so radical that there is no way people will ever agree on what to do. While, MtG's land system is fundamentally flawed, and even at its best, MtG never gets close to the heights YGO used to have on a regular basis, I would be playing MtG if my friends weren't so entrenched in YGO's clutches.
Xyz era you mean when Dragon Ruler was a thing?
Bujin sit on kaiser is fun if I remember and yeah we don't have spell and trap removal except catastrophe and mst.
Be careful of what you wish for
@@yuwu585 Don't take tiers 0 as the generality rather than the exception. To a degree, even in the middle of the pendulum era, the game was still balanced enough to allow both players to play the game most of the time. And even in Dragon Ruler format, the best you could do turn 1 was summoning some really big/solid monsters like Dracossack. Negation wasn't yet a big thing, interruption was still mostly on unsearchable trap cards. Or if you could put out negates it wasn't more than 1. These decks were powerful, but going second wasn't yet the death sentence it is today...
Yall are stupid. Dragon Ruler was definitely not early xyz era and Bujins came after that. Xyz era started in TCG in 2011, Pendulum era started in 2014, and Dragon Rulers came out in 2013. Not what I'd call "early to mid," but I guess you could call it mid if you ignore that "early to mid" would likely not include the later half of mid. Even so, I'd 1 million percent take Dragon Ruler format or anything else in xyz era (except maybe Wind-Up format) over modern YGO. At least you got to play the game, even if playing a different deck meant you were going to be out-valued over the course of a few turns if you weren't also playing a top tier deck. Even Wind-Ups were only comparably fun to play against to current meta. Oh, and anyone who has looked at the time Bujins were around as a legacy format can tell you sitting on Yamato all game wasn't even the better way to play the deck.
i feel like this would all be solved by an official draft mode in master duel, like hearthstones arena. forcibly limiting the card pool so that experienced players cannot feasibly construct enormous combo decks and are forced to play with lower power cards while also introducing new players to all types of cards, giving them a much more controlled stream of knowledge in a much more contained space. you could even have a seperate draft pool limited playground era dm cards so boomers could get their kicks.
Yes; that will put everyone on fairly even footing.. and then, expansive combos wouldn't be possible... it'd be a game of skill to manage your resources.
Yugioh always boils down to same thing sadly:"Ash Blossom? No/wrong card? Lost." (Which forces you to have game knowlage)
Apart from that every deck just tryes to coom first and who ever cooms faster just wins guaranteed.
So the game is 2 ppl masturbating like it's a solo adventure, occasionaly throwing rocks at eachother while trying to comprehend the 7 page document that is their deck. And the best thing is most cards could be summerised by "wipe your ass".
Konami always asked themselfes if they could, but never if they should, so the power just kept creeping and creeping.
The game being that fast now is just boring, imagine coming home from work and you finally understand how to play that deck just for your games to be over in seconds and you can't do anything about it.
Besides this game takes work to play and all this work isn't worth the shallow game expiriance.
If I play a game against another player, I want skill to matter, not just game knowlage. Yugioh is incredably stiff, in comparison to other card games, there's no RNG what so ever besides your starting hand, making every game feel like the same.
My gf recently got into yugioh and she's gotten very competative with it. We started her off with 3 albaz structure decks and spent almost 2 weeks playing speed duels to get her used to the basics.
Moved her onto her structure decks. Than after a week of that we started walking her thru deck building.
6 months later she has beaten 2 of the best deck pilots I know and has a 50% win rate again myself aswell.
It's a game that requires a community and good group that can help you learn and improve
How to explain Yu-Gi-Oh in Magic terms: everyone is playing UW control (you have to know every card in your opponent's deck to make sure you negate the right ones) and manaless dredge at the same time
Pretty much. Ironically in Japan is more control focused because Maxx C is unbanned, so the game got slower there.
@@vDeadbolt that is literally not true. The TCG and OCG in 99% of all times share the exact same META
@@vDeadbolt In the video they are talking about Masterduel. That has a more OCG-style banlist with Maxx C at 3 and a bunch of combo tools open.
Yugioh players be like "Just read the cards" then you read the card and it makes it worse.
Both this topic and the currently debated "our turn" decks like Tear, R-ACE and Labrynth would make killer Magical Hats episodes.
Imo the real answer is starting to support alternative formats significantly more heavily. We already have Edison in time wizard. i think it's important to push incredibly hard in to retro formats (ESPECIALLY ON MASTER DUEL) to give these kinds of new/returning players *something* to grasp at. Can you imagine if we had an edison format ladder in master duel? There are a lot of angles they could go about solving this problem but it's so simple to take something thats clearly proven to work.
In MTG: Arena, I constructed a casual, standard legal, “pauper”, Mono Black Zombie Deck that I constructed IRL for around $40. I have prior knowledge and experience of the game, but I actually feel like anybody could pick up an archetype without spending any money through MTG: Arena and gradually make at least a half-decent and fun deck. I never felt that way about Yu-Gi-Oh, but I do appreciate observing the meta and rogue decks be played and explained. I do appreciate that Yu-Gi-Oh! can be a fun game, but other than the Paleozoic Frog or F.R.O.G. rogue decks, I don’t think I would have fun with it.
My Pioneer deck is a Rakdos (Black and Red) Knight deck from the original Eldraine set, with added flavor from other sets. It’s mostly also for play with my friends. Affording legitimately broken decks is where Magic gets a little bit more difficult to access.
I think a tag team duel concept might be fun to try, as long as people can connect and say what deck they want to play, that would help with supporting new players and showing them what their deck strategy could go for. More experienced players usually have the cards those new players should see to help them understand the important parts of current format, like hand advantage and floodgate bosses.
It could either go really bad or really good, but I’m willing to see what people could cook up if it had the same rank system as ladder.
The problem is that no other card game needs any real outside help to understand how to play the game and have a chance.
I've started playing duel links around 2019. I had fun with the game and wanted to try the online aspect, I had no idea what to or what the meta was like and started watching guides on thunder dragon and dark magican, td was even too complicated for me to understand basic interactions. This made me just stay on duel links and learn the game from there and the slow implementations of cards made it easy to understand throughout the months. I'm just playing master duel and having fun with a lot of things. I like playing the game but when it takes months/years to be confident in your understanding of cards, something seems wrong.
I’m glad that people are really starting to point this problem, but the question is, how do we fix it?
I don't think we can, in my opinion. But not because there's nothing that can be done.
Yugioh is way too old to change without a huge backlash from old players (maybe more than Pendulums) and, even if Konami says "screw that, we are going to change regardless", that is not a garantee way to bring new players (like Pendulums... yeah, that was a dark era for the game)
Edit: well... maybe there is a way. If Konami supported different formats. But they will never do that. Look at TimeWizard format and that one with deck master. They talked about it ONCE and did NOTHING to support those.
We ditch the game and we all play Rush Duel whenever Konami decides we've waited enough for the worldwide release.
But I guess many of us aren't ready to take the jump yet anyway.
All of that to say : I seriously don't think TCG can be fixed anymore. The game has been going in the wrong direction for the past 10 years.
the same way you fix any game. you move on and play a better game
It's entirely possible to fix this, and i think konami has already started to do so, how? two ways:
1. By designing cards that force interaction and allow both players to play the game (talents, kashtira fenrir, kurikara, recent decks like tear, runick, spright, rescue ace, purrely, vanquish soul, etc)
2. by creating better products for new players that introduce you to the ACTUAL MODERN game with easy access to essential staples and by making better structure decks that you can actually pick up and build up (the dino structure, salad structure, shaddoll structure, machina structure, etc)
@@MrGshinobi And that also means anyone playing any other deck but the ones you mentionned just can't play anymore, cause they're just 20 negates in a trenchcoat of "interaction", but sure...
I don't think you should coach him. I think you should set up a highly simplified tournament precisely for new players and invite other known card game YTubers.
Design the card pool so it specifically helps players grasp with the mechanics of the game. Maybe even limit the extra deck to fusions and xyz to keep the combos shorter 🤔
I think a organised yugiboomer tournament would be a good way to go about this.
You mean his set rotation series that does exactly that?
@@LucasDaffernKonami x Nijisanji Master Duel Festival did that
You know what happens?
Those youtuber still play pure meta deck.
@@LucasDaffern no, not set rotation. That's still too much, I'm talking mega simplified.
His tournament has salads... that's too much. I'm more thinking weather painters without the links.
Not to mention, that the target should be people who play these other cardgames or liked old school yugioh. Community events like this could get people interested enough to go further into the deep dark hole of yuigoh.
The core issue of searching cards and chaining together combos isn't fixable without ruining the game.
So at least that will probably remain a big pain point that people will just have to get over.
Tutorials and Starter Products are on Konami to improve. MD Structure decks should just cost 1500 and come with 3x of all the good cards and assembled in a semi reasonable decklist.
We should have a format that is new player friendly like Speed Duel on MD. N/R format might be a decent alternative for something that does already exist.
Aside from that there should be more community action focused on giving new players good resources.
A lot of the guides are either outdated or unsuitable to new players by being directed at enfranchised players and thus in a language that new players dont speak yet.
Reformat the Card text to the OCG style with the numbered effects. Its for the good of everyone.
We will just have to concede the point that you won't be able to learn the game from ingame tutorials in a reasonable time as you could MTG, HS or LoR.
Reshaping the entire game to attract new players is not a good Idea. Changes if any should be small and precise like the above mentioned ones.
Sweeping changes like Rotation will drastically affect everyone's enjoyment of the game and we have 0 clue if it would actually bring new players in and retain them.
If MD had released with Rotation it might have been different but we can't exactly release MD again and hope everyone comes back after they got burned by Drytron, VFD, Eldlich format.
Even then the new decks are still just as complex if not more so and rely on "search into search into combo" gameplay which relies on game knowledge just as much as all the older stuff.
The game is hard and complex and thats kinda why people love it. I wouldn't want Yugioh to become HS or MtG because those games already exist for people to play right now.
Its better to have different things and especially in the online sphere its mostly manabased cardgames.
As a newbie I'm playing Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution's campaign. Did the first 3 anime stories and was having fun, ended up making a Red-Eyes deck which I'd barely use since it was so overpowered relative to NPCs - then I decided to jump to the last anime campaign because I wanted to see what I could create out of Link cards....
Holy moly, the difficulty and complexity jump was unbelievable, with relatively early NPCs chain summoning by the 2nd turn (and with this game's animations, as a player you're doing nothing but watching the computer play for 4+ mins) every NPC's play pattern "theme" seemed to homogenize too, everyone had massive GY recursion or Deck searches on nearly every card, summoned links upon links, and had a slightly different flavor of hard-shutting down your strategy. Even my previously OP Red-Eyes deck became too fair at this point and would lose just as easily as it would win (it manages to get the opponent to 3100 LP by turn 1, or outright kill him if I'm lucky, for reference)
The exact reason why Yu-Gi-Oh failed at maintaining the Power Creeps is because of effect monsters. There are three different card type in Yugioh, monster, spell, and trap cards. But now the spell and trap cards doesnt matter anymore. The monsters now are everything.
Yeah I was wondering why Spells and Traps are barely talked about in modern YGO circles
Monster gets trap that can be used immediately, oh its my turn, no wait opponent has 30 different actions on my draw phase that lets them set up 80 negates, a full board and basically refill their hand. Then to top it all off they shotgun maxx c. YGO is a zero sum fun game until the shareholders kick konami in the ass to actually fix their game.
I think DragonMaid is perhaps "The" best new player friendly deck, and Salad is top 5 at least.
Crusadia is the most linear, unga-bunga deck that new players should start with. Teaches you how to link summon. Has the ability to put up a few interruptions going first. Combos are super easy to understand. It really helped me adjust when I was getting back into the game a few years ago.
Was my first thought too,decks like that or floo are perfect for beginners because while linear they are flexible and all the cards mostly say the same so you can gloss over the text
Controversial opinion, but, I think going back to Master Rule 4 might make the game more fun just because it offers a pretty strict limitation with the Link mechanic that, at the time, hurt a lot of decks but now that pretty much every archetype that needs a Link monster has one, is probably a good format to play in now if given a chance.
Like, imagine if instead of just going into a bunch of fusion monsters immediately with Tearlament or Branded, or a bunch of synchros with Swordsoul, you needed to set up a Link monster, or just sit on the one extra deck monster you summoned. Suddenly, a lot of popular decks become clunkier to use, and slower decks like Plunder or Salamangreat become much more threatening.
@@ashblossomandjoyoussprung.9917 bro forgot u-linking exists
@@ashblossomandjoyoussprung.9917 hard disagree,master rule 4 didn't simplify the game one bit while completely killing half the decks to even play for fun,if say i wanna fusion i don't wanna pray there is a link that actually let me do it i just want,decks should be capable of doing what they are meant to do just limited by the deck itself and the player,not by rules
I started playing in 2020 with a few friends, we used to just play against each other with structure decks and random pack filler until one day we decided to go to our first tournament. This was during full power Drytron format, where the end board was Herald of Ultimateness with 4+ fairies in hand and Dragoon so we spent the whole day having every single card we played negated and a Towers we had no outs too, pretty much after that experience my friends lost interest, while I spent a lot of time and effort learning this game and none of them are interested in trying to play again which really sucks. I enjoy this game and the complexity, the fact that there is basically endless things you can do is so cool to me, but that’s also the thing that makes it so hard for people to get into, there’s too much you need to learn that it takes you weeks of practice to really feel confident enough to play.
the best way to learn to play yu gi oh is through the community of players, in the physical format with decks assembled by a colleague who knows how it works. In this way they come together to play and learn. Learning only in master dueling or buying cards without knowing will only lead to frustration and boredom.