Well, it's balanced around that, after all. If you don't stop your opponent from playing, your opponent stops you from playing. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a very, very different game from how it was 20 years ago - and understandably so, everything changes - but I think, if a game is optimized around not letting your opponent play the game, something has gone incredibly wrong along the way.
Oftentimes, people will literally hit the point with their face as if they ran into a wall and they still won't get it. They can't zoom out or really try to see it from someone else's perspective because of their own bias, or in his case Stockholm syndrome.
@@Geo-ok1nw that's what happens when you shill for a corporation. He should have just left the issue alone if he "doesn't care about it". "That's just the way it is" is not a defense and it does nothing to solve the issue. He just likes to hear himself talk. Meanwhile, his braindead fans slurp it up like the beaten dogs they are. We can still call him out for it, which everyone should, so not sure what you were hoping to accomplish here.
Josh talking about legacy support being too hard to make was contradicted earlier last year. Melodious went from being a total non-entity to being a reasonably strong Tier 2 deck. Ritual Beast was a Tier 2 deck. It's possible to make good legacy support that makes the archetype competent but not so overly powerful that people hate them. And neither deck had their playstyle dramatically changed as a result of it, as Glad Beast has been guilty of
Legacy support being too hard to make isn't even related to the original argument. It's impossible to make a perfectly balanced game, so there will always be better cards and worse cards, and players trying to be the best will choose the better cards, that's how metagames work. Paul's issue that Josh missed is that there's always going to be people who want to play those worse cards, and there's no real place in Yugioh to do that without a significant number of your losses being due to power scaling and not your skill as a player.
Hell, we don't need to look between tiers 2, YUBEL of all things won worlds last year thanks to legacy support. Do you know for how long Yubel was a non-deck? And Kanami fixed that with only two waves of support! It something was proven in 2024, was that Konami can make anything they want playable.
The problem is not "who is this for?" The problem is "where do I play this?" Because if you have no friends to play with OR your friends are busy, who do you play with? Where you do you go to do so?
Heart of the under dog exists to fix this problem but locals never run them. I think communities needs to actually push their locals to run them and then actually show up.
@@aka_Ingmar konami created a service that the community doesnt use why do you think they would create a completely new format if locals dont even run underdog tournaments. Its not about what should happen its about what can be done. Be solution oriented.
@@aka_Ingmar 100% getting the yugioh community to actually involve themselves in fanmade formats is actually so hard. I don’t know why the culture of yugioh is so different than MtG and Pokémon in that respect (which both have insanely popular fanmade formats in Commander and Smogon)
@ducky36F is almost like those companies like to work with it's players and have communication and like doing that they do. Konami is in it for the money.
Joshua is a content creator I greatly respect, but he missed the mark with his arguments. Such as: It's a lot of work. Players pay Konami to manage the game; it's their responsibility. It's always been that way. This reasoning highlights why players are leaving and not solving the issue. Alternative format? Name every card legal in that format right now. A strawman argument that avoids engaging with the suggestion. All cards can't be playable. Another strawman-no one expects perfect balance across all cards. You don't want to play well to win. This misrepresents concerns by dismissing them as a lack of effort. Who is this for? It's for players who don't feel represented by the current format. Other card games are the same. Dismissing comparisons without understanding how other games handle similar challenges. Additionally, the idea that players want every card to be sound oversimplifies the issue. The focus is on making more cards have meaningful utility.
I think one thing that is kinda overlooked is that it’s not just legacy support, it’s new archetypes as well, I don’t remember who mentioned it on twitter but Nouvelle is a really cool deck, but it never stood a chance, why print a whole archetype as essentially pack filler, what’s the purpose of printing them if there is no way to have enjoyment with that archetype
Mbt put it well, and yeah you are 100% correct, konami keeps printing all this support for archetype that are basically impossible to play and that is all exacerbated by the fact that its yugioh, its not that you dont win, you literally dont play the game Edit: thinking about it, i think it makes the problem even worse than if they ignored these aechetypes, its just a reminder to them how theyll never be able to play them.
It's a difficult balance trying to speed up Farfa who speeds up Josh who speeds up Paul whose now talking at 500 mph. Also, on Josh's point about "The community should make the alternate low power format". The community can't add that into Master Duel. I know MD isn't exactly hurting for new players but more and more would play with an actual low power format. You'd still be crafting cards and getting new product but you wouldn't have to deal with Tenpai if you don't want to. That is something only Konami can do.
Master duel would have held onto a lot more players if it had “old school only” and a N/R or even just N/R/SR modes and I’ll die on that hill. Just me I had 5 non-yugioh friends all try master duel and all stopped just because as soon as they got to high on ladder they would just get frog stomped and stopped having fun.
@@ducky36F crazy thing is you don't even have to climb that high to start facing the best decks in the game every other duel 🤣 you start seeing them around like silver 5
I love this reaction inception. I need team APS to react to farfas breakdown of Josh’s video with Cimoo guest appearance to jumpscare MBT when he watches that one
I want to add my experience to that of "playing out of your mind with a rogue deck and still losing". Recently I had a match vs fiendsmith Ryzeal Bystial, I was using the RDA/Centurion deck inspired by Revz. It was a proper 0-2 to me. In one game, not only did I play many of my lines as cleanly as possible, but, my opponent who was proficient with his deck missplay several times since he didn't know my deck and effects. He was reacting as the game was being played. It was a 30-minute back and forth but, in no single moment he was in danger, at every turn I gave, every step that I took, even taking everything that I could in my favor, he always was in a better position than me. Yeah, it was a fun game, but, not being able to take even a single game playing almost perfectly and with the opponent making several non-forced mistakes can be disheartening. Of course, this was a friendly game, but it puts into consideration the bigger gap that is happening not only between good and average players (me being the latter) but, also between the best decks and just "good" decks
@@Mesa7Yugioh yeah and thats the nature of Yugioh, josh tried really to point out other games that don't have formats, but what he fails to realize is that the best deck in Yugioh literally doesn't let you play, but in other card games, a bad deck is bad because it has like 40% win rate, that is just impossible in ygo, a pet deck will lose 10 out 10 games to a meta one
Josh not being able to comprehend midcore players is wild. Doesn't he play on MD? The game that launched with a bunch of players frothing at the mouth with excitement at the prospect of having somewhere to play lower powered decks? The game with a bunch of festivals/events that have made attempts at getting people to play different things? Even in ranked, it used to be possible to climb with almost anything... There's a difference between uphill battle and facing a literal wall.
The gap in decks definitely widened massively. When Hardleg did his second Ghoti ladder climb he kinda got his spirit broken hitting against a wall and now changed the rules for how new the decks need to be for people to vote for him to play. (Ghoti isn't the point of this example, it is that he experienced playing a deck immediately before and a while after snake eyes and it forever changed how he does his ladder climb show)
@@negate-07Dawg Ghoti aint 2020. Its from Pote. It started in 2023 and got genuinly great Support as late as mid 2024. Thats How you know yugioh powercreep has gotten insane, the gap between meta and rogue is so large people think decks are 3 times older than they actually are
Easiest way to show this is retro formats. Yeah goat is dominated by Chaos and Edison is Blackwing/Vayu/Frogs/Heros. But in both formats you can pick up a rogue or jank deck and expect to win more than your fair share of games. Not really the case with 2024/2025 yugioh.
Exactly. I'm a customer and it's not my job to fix the problems of the business. The people working at the business are being paid to keep the customers happy. It's always the community this, the community that. Where's Konami? It's not my job to figure out what I'm supposed to do with these cards that just don't fit anywhere
I’m really digging Farfa’s current arc where he’s being critical of the game and Konami. It’s nice to see yugitubers be real instead of constantly gassing up a broken game. I love this game, but there is so much room for improvement.
Idk why you or others think this, I have NEVER stopped talking about Yu-Gi-Oh!'s problems. None of these opinions or talking points brought up in this video are new from me. I never allowed my Konami sponsorship to prevent me speaking up.
@@FarfaHighlights People repeat memes until it becomes their actual view. At first it was "Haha funny konami employee", then people started believing you were an actual bootlicker I guess
Living in Los Angeles, there’s literally no such thing as a casual locals here. Although I love the ‘iron sharpens iron’ vibe they create, I acknowledge that it’s not for everyone! Sometimes I see topping lists from the Midwest and think how tf?
Josh keeps saying he doesnt think those reasons are right and then saying thats just his perspective, while Paul is speaking from a point of having asked a bunch of ex players exactly why they left. At that point it doesnt matter what your perspective is right? You have the perspective of the players who quit, and if a lot of them are saying they dont frel theres a place for them in the game then you have to accept that
@@SeveNStarSeveN I totally believe a random responding to me in a UA-cam comment section over a well known member of the community with picture evidence of the event he went to
@@absolutionveil8632 Over? Why can't both be correct? The point is that different people have different answers, and it's quite clear that the perspective of someone who goes to another card game convention is more likely to dislike Yu-Gi-Oh! than an active player. Anyways, the way I see it, people aren't necessarily aware of why they dislike the game. I know it's arrogant to say, but it's something I've observed elsewhere, just shifting the blame on the direct cause of the situation, and not the indirect reason as to why the direct cause can occur.
@@bidoof6458 Yes over, both can't be correct because ones being facetious to avoid the actual point of any argument being stated on the ground that an imaginary 200 people unanimously agree that this is the best YuGiOh has ever been without a doubt. No cost issues, no prizing issues, no problem with Konami printing policy, nothing. Everything is the peak the game has ever experienced. Also, implying that people that don't like the game do not know why they dislike It is arrogant. You can dislike the effect without knowing the cause. Just because someone doesn't know the cost is grossly increased due to Konami TCGs printing policy doesn't mean they can't dislike how expensive it is.
Farfa got so many things right that Josh got wrong. Proof that being good at the game doesn't actually give you perspective into what makes the game healthy and fun.
Yeah they are all blind to how much better the meta became after the mulcharmies, if maxx c was legal and ash and droll and every card that negates it was banned the format would be even better
@@NeostormXLMAX Pretty sure Josh did believe Mulcharmies were healthy. Maxx 'C" is a very diffenrent beast though. Will defintely not make the game more healthy.
@@qaz6400 I don’t think that’s why Josh is like this though I think he is genuinely to “in” the game to see how it drives people away regardless of whether he gets paid by Konami or not.
I genuinely believe the only real problem with yugioh is the price and all these other problems would be small enough to ignore if the game was affordable
Are you talking about from your prospective or the game's? If you mean overall, that's a really ignorant take. There is a reason Konami is freaking out about not being able to get and retain new players. If you mean from someone that's already a fan of the disaster that is current YGO, then fair enough.
@@TheMattTrakkerI mean this from the point of view of somebody who is a fan of modern Yu-Gi-Oh in theory. People who quit Yu-Gi-Oh because of hand traps or link/pendulum summoning are never coming back because they hate what modern Yu-Gi-Oh is at its core so even if Yu-Gi-Oh becomes cheaper, they won't come back. However, fo wer the rest of the player base, I do genuinely think that most of the issues Paul discussed in his video are HEAVILY exacerbated by the cost of the game and if it were affordable, these issues wouldn't cause nearly anyone to quit. For example, I play madolche and am part of the "midcore" that Paul talks about. While it is true that madolche stands no real chance against ryzeal or maliss in any real competitive setting, I would personally enjoy attending my locals and playing the game regardless because I love Yu-Gi-Oh and I love trying to make my decks as competitive as I can even if they're not as good as the meta. And yes, the gap between madolche and the meta decks is really big and it would be nice if it were smaller, but at the end of the day I still love playing madolche and playing Yu-Gi-Oh so I would deal with it. At least I would...if my madolche deck didn't cost 500$ (which is what it would cost last time I check on tcg player). As a result I don't play the tcg and am stuck to master duel instead
@@TheMattTrakker Okay, to add more detail. What I am saying is there is a subset of players of yugioh who are never going to return. For example, players who quit because of hand traps, pendulum/link summoning etc. These players simply reject what modern yugioh is at its core and that is okay. Modern yugioh isn't for everyone and if they don't like it, they dont have to play it. With that said, if you take the rest of the playerbase (those who enjoy modern yugioh at its core), even if they have complaints about the game (many of which are valid), if the game was affordable, very few would quit. For example, I am a "midcore" player. My main deck on master duel is madolche which I climb to master rank every season with. I agree that the gap between madolche and yubel is very large and even the madolche support which came out in master duel a few months ago didn't fix the issue. With that said, I still have a lot of fun playing with madolche in master duel. Even though the constant stream of tenpai, yubel, snake eyes (not to mention maxx C and now the mulcharmies) makes it really hard to win many games because of the huge power difference between our decks, I love trying to optimize my deck for the meta and use my superior matchup knowledge (since I'm more familiar with how to play against yubel than they are against madolche) to eek out as many wins as I can. I would love to take this approach to my locals and play against ryzeal or maliss. The primary reason why I won't ever do it though is because my madolche deck (according to tcg player), comes out to $500 and there is no way I am spending that much on a rogue deck that I am almost certainly going to lose 80% of my games with, no matter how much I love playing it. Now if that same deck was $100, it'd be a different story
@@Moman1898 So you mean it from the perspective of someone that likes the current game. That's fine, but to say that's the ONLY real problem still seems pretty ignorant. It's not just about getting back old players, but being able to bring in new ones. This game is really off putting to many new players and that's not just a $ thing. A game needs to be consistently bringing in new players to replace those that leave and from the looks of it(Konami board meetings + pushes to get new players by them)...that's not happening.
@@TheMattTrakker that's a different point and I somewhat agree with it but yes I am primarily talking about the playerbase that does enjoy what modern yugioh is in general
Bro i brought my shitbox CyDra Deck to locals and i had 2 other ppl (out of ca. 15) that didnt play fiendsmith whatever its called. and one of those 2 was my friend who i brought along. So Josh saying "oH jUsT plAy It At LoCAls" is making me actually mald.
Was watching RogueHero channel, saying the same. Just go to locals. And get stomped? People are looking to play meta they are looking for a casual experience. Konami has several formats for this but it's up to the locals to implement them. Common Charity, Heart of the Underdog, Generation Duel. Of course, Konami sucks at promoting their game.
I know Josh doesn’t want to talk about price but right now it’s really really bad. Especially outside the US and EU. Fiendsmith, Raizeal and Maliss are all prohibitively expensive, fuwalos and the dominus cards are over priced and even when Blue-Eyes comes out the Primite cards are already overpriced. Tenpai was the only almost budget competitive deck and it’s both toxic and now requires Fiendsmith to be competitive! Master duel is playable price wise but is ruled by Tenpai and now has Maxx C plus the Multcharmys making it incredibly unappealing to play. Even snake eye format had better competitive options than this if you didn’t want to play snake eye.
100% agree. I bought 3x Lordly Lode for £90 because I wanna be able to play BEWD next month, and i'm lowkey praying they reprint primite before the tins come out because I have good friends who would also love to play it for nostalgia reasons, but can't justify that price.
Even tier 2 deck like Azamina and WF are priced out of the wazoo. Can you image 50USD for a single card? I am so glad that my local allow me to play with deck mixed with TCG, AE, OCG and hosting tournament with both OCG and TCG banlist but even then one single copy of Elzette is 10 usd, my whole Azamina WF deck at cheapest would be around 1k. That shit is wild. And Josh never try to adress the issue that legacy support was printed in the same booster pack as the new archtype, yet with lower power scale, lower popularity but has the same rarity slot.
The issue Josh should let Paul disscussion finish compeltely. Half the video was him pausing and guess what he was gonna say, or guessing his reason. There was no need to guess 😂😂 Just hear them out. Discussions should have responses not reactions
Yugioh decided to make the game about archetypes with unique identities and playstyles, but only 5% of the archetypes are playable and sometimes none of the newly released archetypes are even minimally viable. It honestly feels like an unkept game that is fighting against it's own identity.
Literally. That's all the argument is. I see so many comments of elitism about make the deck rouge or git gud. YCS has Edison and Goat format. So CLEARLY Konami knows there's an audience that wants to play a slower pace. Do the same thing but for TODAY'S CARDS. The ones you want me to buy now. Crazy because there are alternate formats like Common Charity, Heart of the Underdog, and Generation Duel (basically goat, Edison, etc by the eras of the game) but Konami just doesn't endorse it or remind tournaments. I've got locals around me that don't even do the structure deck tourney. I mean KONAMI needs to step it up and promote these things. Give extra ots packs. Something!
THIS.Even those broken card they print will just become an engine once they got massive hit by banlist ( Tear , Kash , Snake Eye , SHS ... ) Konami should try to listen from the casuals cuz they are the future of the game. They are the one who play the game with passion .
I understand the feeling. But I have a hard time squaring this against the fact so much of the legacy support for last year was cracked af. I honestly felt the Six Sam support was pretty powerful as well. It just doesn't hold up well against the current meta. That being said, I would love it if we just didn't get as many new cards so quick. By the time I feel I have a solid grasp on a format, the new set already arrived that spends the format once again. Nobody is asking for cards to get printed so much so quickly
@ It's not about support being necessaryly good or bad, it's about being well designed and balanced. If Konami wanted they could make all decks viable, with a few strategies being a more viable than others. But what we get instead is either useless garbage or pushed crack. We have 15000 cards in the game, I don't even know how many archtypes, and yet they keep releasing more and more unplayable shit while more than half of the strategies are already completely forgotten. All useless garbage -- literally some times. The game feels like an abandoned museum being used as a fashion store.
It's funny seeing Six Sams used as the example of Legacy support needing to be stronger when the possibly best example of terrible Legacy support is Fire Fists. The deck went from Tier 1 meta to unplayable garbage without even getting demolished by a banlist. 5/6 years later they get 11 or 12 new cards and every version of the deck is still completely unplayable, even at a locals level.
I usually never share my opinion online but i just wanna say something, full power tear format was sooo bad for me, the deck is so demanding i feel exhausted after 1 game, chain link 7-8 every turn, so many decisions in one turn, i see why competitive players find that enjoyable, but for me it was too much for one turn to the point were i don't wanna play another match, i feel like a modern deck like this is so bad for someone who play the game just to pass time
okay so because you usually don't share your opinion online I give you some praise that you did this time and some positive reinforcement, because once I needed it too. (so to have a good experience with commenting)
The thing is, six samurai is not just random pack filler, is a beloved archetype that a lot of people feel attachment to from their mechanics/lore/gameplay. It’s not like dragoon lamp is a secret rare, it’s a boss monster of a very real archetype with intended synergies that boost its gameplay. Asking your average six samurai player to play the equivalent of “hardcore” just because they like the deck but you need to play out of your mind to beat things like ryzeal or maliss is ridiculous and a disingenuous argument to believe that that should be the future for every single beloved archetype as the correct course of action.
The other thing Josh doesn't understand but unironically keeps bringing up is he's speaking from a stance of privilege. He keeps saying "not everyone has the money to spend $1000 on a deck" like that's not a big deal... . Yes Yu-Gi-Oh is a hobby, yes it's a luxury to play ... But bro like farfa said most people can't justify spending that on cards when that is their car note for a couple months or they have a girlfriend who's just as bad as Yu-Gi-Oh. Or even kids and teens who don't have money and have to ask their parents for cards and you have to explain "yeah Mom i need 3 copies of bonfire at 180 a pop". The reason we were able to play as kids is because we took a structure deck, or just bought packs and played with the pile. But here the meta is so expensive AND oppressive to where you can't even get the chance to play against the top deck as a rogue deck. To where you just want to scoop just because you know what your opponent is playing. My deck loses to 1or2 interruption just to only get up like 2 interruptions, but my opponent can play through 5 interruptions and still set up a board with 8. You're not going to want to sit through that 5 times a week at locals bro. And that's on top of me having to pay 400 to play a rogue deck.
Josh’s argument about making n legacy good but not to good is so asinine. Thank farfa for understanding that people get paid to do this. It’s not that fkng hard. They have done it before. Konami just spend more time on making support that doesn’t solve issues and newer broken one card combo decks. It’s a matter of priorities.
The issue is there are way too many cards. The amount of work required to properly place each individual Yu-Gi-Oh card in existence in a tier is enormous.
That's a solution that should be considered for sure. It would create various tiers where decks are more or less at the same power level, the only problem is the actual realization. Smogon's system is based on the usage of specific pokemon, how would you transfer that idea into yugioh? Do we take into consideration single cards or entire archtypes and engines? I honestly think a tier system is our best bet, but it's implementation will determine wether people play it or not, not the system itslef.
The idea has already been put in practice, Kuchen Format, but it never took off. Maybe because of the people behind it, maybe because of the tiering decisions, maybe because of the lack of data for the tiering, but it has been tried. I agree the idea is very good if well executed.
@@ulisesmunguia8715 there's def some smogen context I'm missing cause i don't know much about it. But generally speaking alot of people say yugioh has too many cards whenever building a new format is mentioned, but the amount of powerful cards in this game is way smaller than the bad cards so I think focusing those would be natural and realistic.
Nah he should join Pokemon. Not really but I think he’d get an interesting from the community :p. I can see him playing Lorcana. Or maybe even than new Gundum TCG.
@@Eru_3ru I don’t think it’s that he’s getting paid they really wouldn’t make up the bulk of his income. It’s just that he conflates Konami the company with the game of yugioh that he loves too much.
I don't even think it's that, I think he just has difficulty looking through other people's perspectives. It just comes across as dickriding because he's a perfect Konami customer (plays the main formats to be the best, buys sealed, creates content on MD aka buys a lot of gems, can afford the super expensive secret rares, and competes for competing's sake alone so he doesn't care about prizing).
When Josh was saying 'so you want to win locals with a weaker deck and less skill', I felt that he was not understanding the difference between wanting to feel that they played a game of yugioh vs having a high win rate, this seems like a vibes based problem, not a winrate problem that Josh sees it as. A 'midcore' yugioh player sounds to me like a player who wants to play the game with decks they like (good, mid or bad), but winning isn't their only motivation. These problems with wanting a casual feeling alternative format, high cost and product feeling lacking seem like 3 or 4 different problems instead of the one problem or arguement. I cannot really know how true these problems are, since I don't play in paper (don't have an english locals available).
This game is at the point of taking as much as they can from the whales and disregarding the rest. That speaks to the health of the game than the rest. You lost faith in your ability to capture new players and talking a lower per capita. YGO is filled with elitists saying "let them eat cake" (draw the out or just play more staples).
Legit that I see every single UA-camr and competitive player happily drop 1000s on these new decks and not even just that but MAX OUT the rarities without second thought saddens and frustrates me. It’s an attitude I’ve seen people who I know are on normal wages emulate at locals and it makes me wonder how in the heck they are affording it. We’re never going to get reasonable card prices if the player base is happy to cough up whatever the cost.
@@ducky36FHard agree. Blaming Konami alone is incorrect. They are bad but it is taking responsibility off of the playerbase. I know other bases do this but calling this "an investment" is madness. It is a hobby you dunk resources into. People spend on it like a broke man buying lotto tickets.
Josh is being completely obtuse and unreasonable. There's a fundamental difference between playing a bad deck and playing unplayable deck. The power gap in this game is massive. Like in a goat tournament you can scum a win or two with a stupid skull servant zombie deck. Right now you simply cannot play most decks at all even at locals. There are decks that lose to one handtrap. And the meta deck can play through three handtraps and not care.
Exactly, you can play complete jank in goat and Edison and expect to win games. You ain’t doing that without playing out of your mind and winning the die roll at a regular locals the power gap between meta and the rest is to much.
@ducky36F Exactly, Josh just assumes the bad faith version of "I want my deck to win locals" when really most people just want to be able to win a couple games at locals. Like, I'm not sweaty. I don't want to have to grind and train the entire week to be able to win games. I just want to sling cardboard on my day off of being a wageslave. I can live with only winning two games out of all my matches or so. But if I'm not winning anything at all, I'm going to stop going.
Joshua straight up lies about saying Digimon doesn't have alternative formats where you can use lower tier decks. Digimon has multiple Ultimate Cups a year that have "mono-color" rules. Where all your cards need to share a color. So when decks like black wargreymon or beelzemon were dominating the meta they basically were unplayable and it allowed lower tier decks like Ulforce Veedramon and Gallantmon to shine through.
Man that was frustrating. Josh dug into that guys hexagon for rating things black and white while spending most of the video doing the same about card design.
22:04 It is not just the gap between T1 and T3 that has dramatically increased. The gap between T1 and T1.5/T2 has also dramatically shifted. T2 right now is as powerful as T1 was during TOSS (8 years ago). Current T1 decks are like showing up with full power Dragon Rulers in 2010. Everything below T1 is shockingly close together. When I play Centurion against Lab, Floo, Swordsoul, and Ritual Beast I still stand a chance of winning. If going against Ryzeal or Maliss I better have drawn Kaijus, Book of Eclipse, or some other equalizer because the alternative is to scoop. 1:12:20 If making legacy support is so hard maybe there should be a format that enables legacy decks or maybe YGO shouldn't be an eternal format. Let's provide solutions to the problem instead of ignoring the problem completely. To speak on Gateway. You can ban Gateway and retrain it to not be so powerful. 1:18:43 And here's his diconnect. Its a hobby for me and for the commenters. Its not a hobby for him; it's his job. He doesnt care about rogue and legacy decks bring unplayable because he already isnt playing them. His only reason to play rogue and legacy decks is the exact moment they becime meta viable because his job is to be a world champion competitor. 1:48:00 In the USA for most states you just have to pass the test which is like $50-80. After that you just have to pay the license fee to keep the vehicle registered and property taxes. RIP Euros.
I'm pausing at 48:43 to leave this comment, so idk if this gets addressed at a later point. But as someone who plays both YGO and MTG, the pack filler in YGO is an absurd problem. MTG booster packs have *15 cards* in most cases, there were some older sets that did 9-card packs and those threw off the math for limited formats like drafting. But even putting aside the obvious solution of "Officially support limited formats" like Wizards of the Coast does for MTG, the main competitive format that is pushed by the game is so varied right now that the otherwise-useless pack filler can find a place. We just recently had a new set release that is going to be legal for 5 years when the majority of our current sets stay for... I think it's 3 years now? I'm not too certain on the rotation schedule, I mostly play limited and Commander. But having this set - which is massive with something like 500 cards compared to the most recent set before it having around 250 - gives players a foundation to start from to develop and evolve decks and strategies. In our current Standard format (the main rotating competitive format), we have over 3,000 cards that are currently legal. And while that number pales in comparison to YGO's eternal Advanced format, we still manage to see a huge variety of decks being represented. When I play Master Duel, I can count on one hand the number of truly unique decks I play against. But if I spend the same amount of time playing Ranked Standard in Arena? I'd put it at somewhere between 10 and 25 different kinds of decks. And these are both at the same level of play in their respective ranked ladders. In Master Duel, I can take my pet decks into Ranked and *maybe* break even on my win-loss if I play absolutely out of my mind and draw straight gas constantly. In Arena, I have a rotation of five or six pet decks I bring into Ranked and work on upgrading and experimenting with and I'm able to consistently hit the 15 daily wins in a single play session. Are all of these decks going to be topping the Spotlight Series (Magic's current YCS equivalent)? Almost certainly not. It has its own metagame and dominant decks. But there's still a place to play these filer archetypes and play them against other filler archetypes. If I brought my Zombie World deck to Locals, I'd be a punching bag for people testing their latest Ryzeal brews. But if I bring my White/Blue Enchantment deck to a Friday Night Magic Standard event, I probably wouldn't even face the same deck twice.
The thing is, drafting is never present in Yugioh's core design. Take a look at OCG set structures, you'll notice how their packs are smaller in size (4-5 cards per pack) but has more packs per box, with a rarity distribution set up so that opening a box gives you roughly 65-75% of the cards in the set, including the chase cards. It's only when Yugioh got imported to the TCG when Upper Deck decided to mimic MTG's set structure and rarity distribution that you get the mess that Yugioh sets have today.
@@ryuuohdeltaplus7936 This accidentally turned into an essay, so I'll give you a TL;DR up front. I agree, but limited play wasn't my point. Magic is naturally more diverse in competitive and casual constructed play than Yu-Gi-Oh and Konami needs to expand on their support for and promotion of gameplay diversity. ------------------------------------------------------- This is all true, but I'm talking about even beyond limited play like draft. Magic's Standard environment - the comparable format to Yu-Gi-Oh's Advanced format - is currently so diverse that nearly all pack filler and draft chaff can find some kind of play at different levels. Locals are home to infinite jank possibilities, MTG: Arena promotes experimentation with rotating daily missions requiring certain deck constraints like focusing on creatures or using specific colors, and the tournament scene recently had 7 different decks with significant presence and 15 total different decks seeing enough play to be categorized outside of "Others" The most prevalent decks were both tied with 14% of the decks used. Meanwhile, Yu-Gi-Oh's locals are typically training grounds for decks copied from top tournament lists where a single deck makes up nearly half of all decks used. Looking at YCS Anaheim, Ryzeal made up 44% of the top cut. And since price is an issue for a lot of people - myself included - let's take a look at the costs of the top decks from each game's most recent tournaments. In Magic's Spotlight Series: Atlanta, just over a week ago, the winning deck would run you $270. The decks that were able to stand in the ring with it and give it good competition? Anywhere from $150 to $450 with a single one almost reaching $600. Hopping on over to YCS Anaheim back in December, we see the *floor* of the top decks nearly hitting $700. The winning deck? Nearly *$1,500*. Now I know none of this was even mentioned in your comment, so please do not take this as an attack on your reply. I'm mostly using it as a jumping-off point to expand on my original point. The diversity in useable cards in Yu-Gi-Oh is the real problem. Pack filler wouldn't be as bad if there was *somewhere* to use it outside of finding friends to play with in a time where so many people only have the time and money to invest in a single hobby if they're lucky. Would limited formats help? Sure, but the game really is not structured to be played like that. Back before, say, 2008? Sure, you could make piles of loosely related cards and generic good stuff work wonders. But today, the *vast* majority of cards are made with a single archetype in mind and will be functionally dead cards in anything but what they were designed to work with. I think something like Heart of the Underdog is a fantastic solution and it needs to be supported by Konami. While yes, it *technically* is recognized as an official way to play, it's not pushed by Konami at all. It's left in the shadows of Advanced and Time Wizard with the responsibility of even making people aware of the format thrust on the players.
57:00 This is an incredible point. If you go watch any Magic video during spoiler season, you'll find that most cards get a "This is pretty cool" reaction. And it's not because there are a hundred cards that are obviously going to be Standard relevant. It's because one of those is good in Standard, another is good for this really old deck in Modern, another one is simply very interesting for draft, and whatever is left is at least a contender in casual Commander. Yu-Gi-Oh! is not lacking uniqueness in its "bad" cards. It's not like the pack filler are all Normal Monsters. Most of those cards could be very fun if there was a format for them.
When will these idiots realize that the YCS numbers and regional attendance are NOT indicative of MIDCORE PLAYERS. If players aren't attending locals, the game is actively dying.
My friends and I did a "non rogue" series of house tournaments where you were allowed to play decks that top 8ed the most recent big tournament. The first one was a shit show where everyone wasn't "playing Kash" or "playing Tear" "I'm playing a small engine of X meta deck, it's not the deck". After, and combined with the person running them having to approve deck lists, it was pretty cool.
From what I’ve seen here in the US is a lot of card shops stopped selling yugioh products because the prices fluctuate so quickly it’s an “unsafe market” for a lot of these places. And a lot of people I know that at least know of yugioh’s tcg stopped playing because it’s so expensive and the amount of money they spend on a deck can’t be justified since within the next few months the deck can get hit to unplayable or rogue and they wasted $200+ or the game has gotten too complicated to keep up with unless it’s your only/main hobby. Those people still like older formats because they know how everything works they get to play with cards they own and the game doesn’t end after the first turn in most cases. Those same people have all picked up a different tcg like magic the gathering since formats like commander makes it so they only need to buy a card once and it’s usable forever, there’s multiple ways to play and different levels of competitive through these different formats, and it’s not as hard to keep up with
Not only do the newer/newest decks have a much higher power floor & ceiling than the "rouge" decks (Madolche, for ex. used in the video) regardless of legacy support given to aforementioned rouge decks, there are constantly new and more powerful staples in the form of handtraps, board breakers, and semi-floodgates that are intended to tone down or keep the top decks in check- and what ends up happening is these staples compound the issue and make trying to perform with those rogue decks even more difficult to an exacerbating degree in some cases making the "cliff they need to climb" in order to win *even higher*. tl;dr - Staples releasing to combat/counter meta decks are also beating down midrange rouge decks, pushing them even further down than by merit of engine cores alone.
Everyone celebrating Mulcharmies but they kill older decks that don't achieve much in minimal steps. Meta players just celebrating they only have to learn a few matchups
I don't feel that rogue decks are considerably worse than they were, but it feels as if modern deckbuilding principles has changed from as recently as agov format - due to how hyper consistent and small engines are now, they can fit a ton of non engine, so you have to mash these small engines together to play through the non engine everyone else has. If you're willing to take a lower winrate, you can stuff some of these newer engines into anything and end up with a better and more resilient deck (kash, fiendsmith and bystial can all be splashed in pretty much anything), but pet deckers often don't want the dynamics of their deck to change as much as this changes the principles of the deck. The only major way I think this can genuinely change is if the number of handtraps decreases significantly, but there's no way this doesn't make going second significantly worse - which is, to me at least, the bigger problem with yugioh from a gameplay perspective.
I just want a MD game mode that features deck progression as a core part of the mode, whether that be official Masochist, an Arena/Adventure style game mode, official Dungeon Duel Monsters, a way to play to offset frustrating loss streaks in ranked.
I'd like to weigh in as a person who used to go to locals and now only consume yugioh through yt and occasion Master Duel stint. There are so many cards being printed in YuGiOh, that I would love to play, try out and lab, but I felt bad playing Chimera when I bought the deck and tried it out in my locals, so in the current locals environment I would not dare bringing something fun just to get dumpstered and not even have a chance to play with my cards and enjoy their effects and abilities. Alternate format with a slightly custom ruleset maybe would create a space for people to value non-meta cards more.
25:50 The issue is that the past couple years amped up the powercreep to an extent that makes duelist alliance blush. You can keep banning the top decks of this meta, but the top decks of yesteryear suddenly turn into unbeatable titans again. You would have to erase years of nonsense to get to a level where the casual decks are playable. Then you have the issue of casual "rogue" decks being actually just as much if not more toxic, because their new support made them into generic negate board wombo-combo decks or something similar. Where do you draw the line? I feel like 5 years from now we will have the same discussions without solutions, because there is just none. You could go back before duelist alliance and continue from there maybe. EDIT: Just before the "boomer hates pendulums", no... Shaddolls and BAs are the reason the game is in it's current state.
Zoodiac was the camelbreaker that broke the game (no duh, what if the "two of a kind" summoning mechanic was one of a kind) and we're still suffering the shockwaves of trying to correct it
The issue isn't just power creep, the yugioh community has over the past decade has shifted further and further toward a competitive first mindset a la smash bros melee. There are a number of reason for this shift. Some those reasons are Konami's fault, some are the communities fault, and at least one was happen stance. First up is Konami, the release of master rule 4 and links caused irreparable damage to the casual player base. Anyone who was playing a non-meta synchro, fusion, or xyz was out of luck as those strategies were completely neutered and required immediate link support to make playable. link support that would take years to release and by the time it did release the rules changed to make so you didn't actually need it anymore. Lots of casual players quit during this time and the few that remained had to adapt and find another deck to play. Next is the communities changing attitude toward regionals. This is largely an online issue but it still is relevant. Regionals are meant to be the midcore tournament. thirteen or fourteen years ago a rogue deck winning a regional would generate talk in the community. was this rogue deck competitive? probably not but it helped shine a light on regionals and indicated a level of importance. that has largely evaporated, and in the words of MBT "any deck can win a regional." and if any deck can win a regional then they are no better then large locals, and that's shown by the community lack of interest. It's all about the YCS's or the ARG's back when they existed now and with the focus on big tournaments comes a bigger focus on "THE META". Next is covid. Covid is probably the biggest factor as to why low and midcore yugioh is so bad right now. The inability to go to locals led numerous players to join online communities to scratch that yugioh itch and this along with having a lot of free time due to not being able to go outside meant that they had a lot of time to play yugioh. this period caused a significant increase in the communities understanding of the game, and those developments always find their way to the rest of the player base. even if you don't participate in an online community you only need one or two players (who are not unlikable jerks) at your locals who did participate to spread the ideas around (a rising tide lifts all boat). Next is the community again. sorry to say but the development of alt formats be they Edison/goat, progression, and now draft has dethroned locals as the place where you play for fun. If you spend a lot of time playing yugioh online messing around with other players, then when you do eventually go to locals you are going to take it much more serious after all that's where you improve your in person skills and there a prizes on the line. again it only takes 4 or 5 players taking locals seriously for it to cause problems for the rest of the player, and after a certain threshold of players begin taking it seriously say good bye to casual play. Finally power creep. yeah it's a problem, not just in what decks are playable but also in how decks have to be built. yeah some decks are absurdly powerful but another major issue is the massive increase in staples required to deal with those decks. good luck building a for fun deck when 9-21 deck slots are going to be dedicated to hand traps. wants that you want to play a deck with a number of engines that have really cool synergies welp too bad you need to run at least 9 hand traps. this of course led to smaller and smaller main deck engines which has finally resulted in decks being able to run 21 hand traps. you know what we called decks that had 20+ trap cards....stun we called them stun and guess what every deck is stun now. doesn't matter if it is a combo deck or a mid-range deck every deck has to dedicate a significant number of deck space too hand traps and that kills all the stupid but fun casual decks from ever seeing an iota of play. after all who wants to bring a fun casual deck to locals if it will lose to a single ash or imperm. Yugioh is in a bad spot and everyone but the poor guy playing mechanical chaser beat down is to blame. but it can be fixed. but it will require time. first issue is local prizing, Konami needs to work with stores to make special prizing for lower powered formats. Create a separate list to curb the number of hand traps and powerful decks present and provide an incentive for player who are competitive to come and play in that lower powered format. Stores will have to require players register their deck before hand and they will have to monitor what decks are too strong and address them. but this should help the midcore player base recover.
That's one of the things no one ever touches on, my utopia deck can set up 2 monster negates, 1 omni negate and a spell negate if they allow me to go full combo, it's a very hard board to break and it sets up more than 8k damage for the next battle phase. It still loses to 1 ash though. The only difference between rogue and meta is how easy it is for you deck to do something unfair that won't allow your opponent to play. There's no way of making a format that allows all these legacy archetypes to be viable without severely crippling them by taking away some of their new win conditions.
About the whole point around 1:08:00. The way yugioh works as a game and how it's designed completely shuts down rogue decks to a degree that is just simply not the case in any other card game. A rogue, bad deck in hearthstone is bad because it has around 40% winrate, but a rogue deck in yugioh literally does not play the game, they will lose every single duel against a meta deck and that is just not the case in games like HS because of the resource system as well as the fact that card design isn't as volatile. So yeah HS doesn't need another format because you can actually play a dogshit deck for the format (not even getting into rotation here) and you can win 40% of your games, good luck winning any game in yugioh with a pet deck. I'm using HS as an example but this is true for most card games
The biggest tragedy is that Master Duel is the easiest way to implement a middle ground, and they only provide that as a 2 week format twice a year. There should be a queue in Master Duel for people that want to slap Dark Magician onto the table without having to deal with Tenpai. There should be a queue for people that just learned to tribute summon. MTG Arena has options for most players, with many live formats, so why doesn't Master Duel? I know people that loved the YGO anime, but want nothing to do with the card game, and this should be an easy onboarding process. The most popular format in MTG is a fan-made format, and that's kinda insane. In YGO, people are so entrenched in specific decks, that fan-made formats don't have the same chance to compete (MTG players generally associate more generally to colors, if anything).
Would be cool if MD supported TW formats as well. Dueling book is basically the only place to do that but atleast for me I'd play on MD if they did that.( not sure why they haven't. adding a goat,edison,tengu,hat format as alternative options on MD wouldn't be hard 🤷)
Master duel has been the solution to this for me, each ranked season I just play a bad deck and get as high as I can then swap to something actually meta viable. I think the lower ranks in master duel are exactly the kind of environment where you can have fun with "bad decks"
The events are also interesting with their unique banlists, I think the main problem is that there's no market for it. I'll not say Konami doesn't blunder because they do a lot, but I've also noticed that any good idea Konami has had to somewhat fix this problem ends up being unviable because at the end of the day, most players do want to win but in the advanced format tournaments, and even if Konami catered to them with events tailored for their tastes they would still not adhere with enough numbers to turn it into a real thing.
Originally, I didn’t watch all the way to the end of Josh’s react because *for me*, he lost lots of credibility after about the first hour. But after hearing what he said around 1:46:50, I’m gonna unsubscribe to him.
i feel im the person being discussed here. i went to locals last week for the first time in maybe 2 months. at least since ryzeal and maliss came out. i played against 2 maliss, 1 ryzeal, a melodious, and our local eyptian god player. im playing bystial control, waiting for blue eyes to come out so i can play; 1. a deck that i like the play of 2. a good meta deck (since tearlament, i was able to play that) 3. A DECK I CAN MAYBE AFFORD! i have bills and a car that doesn't like to work. i have other responsibilities. im not in high school anymore. luckily, i got lordly lodes at 5 bucks a piece, or else blue eyes wouldn't even be on the table for me. i refuse to pay more than 30 dollars for a piece of cardboard, and im only going to make an exception for beryl because I've been setting aside extra money for it. i can't afford to travel to tournaments. I've gone to 2 regionals in my entire life. I'd love to play more competetively, but i just dont have the extra money to do so. fuwa is 150 dollars canadian. engraver is 120. I'd love to use these cards. i can't. it was the same before the rarity collections, too, baronne, accesscode, prosperity, triple tac, i only have thrust cause i pulled 2 from ots packs. the reprint sets came out, and now i still can't afford the new staples. the only reason i haven't jumped ship is because no other card games interest me that I see play in my area. I would play elestrals, but nobody hosts tournaments in my city. i love this game, and I'd love to play it. i just feel excluded from the conversation because i haven't made the game my job, or im not rich enough to not care. essaying over. sorry for all the text.
Just watched a video about Domain where Josh was playing with the people from Card Market. It was a great video with fun gameplay, and I could see it doing well with mid core players except for one thing: getting the cards would be a logistical nightmare. Graceful Charity at its cheapest is $2.50 because of its ban. If Domain were to take off, those prices would sky rocket because either players would buy the limited supply of cards, or someone would buy the whole stock and sell them at a premium. This circles back to the main issue Farfa highlights (buh dum tsh) in the video: no alt formats are really going to take off without support from Konami, in this case by both sanctioning it and also printing a card base that is available to players that won’t price gate the format JUST LIKE advanced already does.
Before Prosperity's reprints, I've recommended it to several people to improve consistency but was shut down soon as I mentioned the price tag (just the one copy btw and consistency matters a lot to older/casual decks). For many people, they can use that money being competitive in another game, i.e. Meta OP deck, high power MTG or cEDH w/ proxies (ftk/infinite loops). The banning/limiting of floodgates makes it difficult for some older yugioh decks/archtypes to compete as well (i.e. Zombie World+Rivalry). Cost would not be as much of an issue if our set had alternative set rarities like the OCG or other card games like One Piece. Even after meta cards are reprinted, it may be too late because of powercreep or loss of interest.
The big draw of Commander / Domain format for me is when someone pulls up with a "meta" strong deck you can balance the format within a single game by just teaming up to break their board.
Personally I believe competitive people in yugioh don’t want an alternative format. It’s nice to have 1 format you can measure your skills in. To me everyone seems to be missing the point to legacy support. I personally, and I don’t think everyone agrees with me and that’s ok, just want Konami to spend as much time on creating competitively viable support for my pet deck as they do on new archetypes. If you slow down the release schedule and narrow the focus to 2-3 new decks a year with 2-3 actually good legacy support I think that possible. People keep saying you can’t have every deck on the same level. I understand that but if you’re going to spend time making cards for a legacy deck, why would you not make them competitive. Stop releasing cards that don’t solve the problem of the legacy decks and release more cards that actually solve their issues. I just don’t understand why this keeps being overlooked.
People do want alternative formats. That's why Edison, GOAT, HAT, Master Saga, Masochist Ban List, Last Card Standing, Progression, and Highlander exist. The problem with the game is that Konami doesn't support these alternative formats enough or at all, the product that Konami sells does not support these formats, and the card pool doesn't support these formats.
Joshua is an AI that just feeds into whatever Konami is giving him, not being able to think and reason like a average person. Meanwhile teamAPS has always looked even to other card games for ways to improve yugioh and make it more fun. Tunnel visioned person in a bubble VS someone who can look int all directions and judge every aspect of something
Josh has a very privileged take saying he wished people didn’t only look at Yugioh through a money lens. Unfortunately for him , that’s not realistic. The majority of players ARE casual , and if you lose a casual player base your game will start to decline heavily. And I may be a bit tilted , but if you have easy access to buy whatever you want then why not buy decks for your community. Because saying the money isn’t the only lens is really narrow minded and shows (to me) he actually doesn’t know or engage with people who’d like to play TCG but can’t overcome that financial barrier.
they need to just make yugioh 2 where they restart card design to wherever they want and we can play in this lower power format, whilst also still keeping yugioh 1 alive, eventually maybe the game takes a better turn as the experience from previous design comes in handy
A yugituber format where y’all agree on a ban list and everyone’s fans promote it at their locals until the silent majority pushes out the meta players in numbers
34:39 i disagree with this. DEPENDING on the resource, that knowledge is still good knowledge, as someone whos very good and competitive in my own sport i still hit up the basics or listen to folks who are better then me, your never too good to learn or hear about foundational skills. Saying that your so advanced that your sticking to your local circle just puts you in a box/ echo chamber.
The numbers are down enough that stores just don't carry YGO (some of that probably has to do with Konami's shitty printing practices). In order to SELL MORE PRODUCT konami has created such a dramatic difference between OU and UU that they can't really hope to compete. The solution for this would be for Konami to make it so that most archetypes are similar in power, but it doesn't seem like they have any idea how to balance anything. Is this dude ignorant or is it just cope when he talks about how their product is doing fine? They've literally said otherwise at board meetings and with their actions.
It's honestly just cost at the end of the day, people would put up with any format or busted card much more easily if the game didn't require a lifetime commitment, and I'm not even making a hyperbole, if you want to do good in yugioh you will simply have to say goodbye to other hobbies that require money, sorry bro I can't go hiking this weekend because I need to save on gas since I just spent 200€ for THREE cards (again).
That’s so true sadly, lmao.. Im saving money and getting staples I miss for the new white forest support since I been playing the deck on release and..ugh . I had to cut things out my life I enjoy bc of this but it’s whatever lmao. Im to invested in the game anyways
I think we as a community to easily default to the price issue (which is valid) but I think the point here was; Where/how do I play my mid tier decks and the discussion was added to with the mention of legacy support; Why bother making legacy support which STILL means my mid tier deck cant compete. These are far more interesting questions which got lost in the wake of pricing. . . again
We are at a point where the power level is either broken or ryzeal. So what happens now is they keep printing cards that get banned and people are wasting there money or we get decks of the same power. So eventually there will be a meta with dozens of decks. So why not go back and power up these older archetypes? The alternative is they keep printing more and more powercreep similar to Tear and everyone is miserable. Companies do not need to powercreep to sell product. It is just the lazy way out.
I love Josh, but focusing on details and debunking instead of offering solutions is why no one plays German TCGs. Shoutout to Germany, you're great! Also, Speed Duels and Duel Links are basically a lower powered YGO formats, that use the same cards. Rush is an entirely different format that invokes the spirit of the old 2000's gameplay, but with bigger, faster gameplay. I want something that's similar to Trinity Format in what cards they ban, without the incredibly harsh deck building restrictions.
I think people really underestimate heart of the underdog. Every locals near me has it, and it works great for allowing a vast variety of decks to compete. If you're locals doesn't have it the solution isn't to just cry about it online, TALK TO THE PEOPLE RUNNING YOUR LOCALS, work with them to set it up. They might not have considered it, and there is probably interest in it in your community.
1:21:23 it's frustrating, and it costed you well over 100 bucks or whatever, when the same experiment of "this deck was fun but it isn't tier 1" costs 20 bucks in any other card game. thats why people are leaving the game. yugioh has competition now, and if konami doesnt address the game's faults, they will continue to lose its players
25:26 we do have ygoprodeck for stats now. We could just blanket ban every deck over a certain percentage of representation for Heart of the Underdog. It’s getting the community to actually get involved that is hard.
13:41 This is the perfect description I think, and it greatly resembles my own experience. Coming back into YGO after 15 years, I jumped on a DM anime deck, no hand traps, no disruption, no consistency, etc. It wasnt until I learned about the competitve space that I realized YGO is very different now. So, I made a new deck, incorporating new staples, disruptions, engines, all while preserving the idea of DM. That landed me on a fun Branded DM combo that I really enjoy and find decent success with climbing ladder on MD.
Card design is a problem(making more and more broken and super resiliant to anything that came before it decks). Price is a problem and the second hand market propping up "konami bad" messaging to justify making cards cost RIDICULOUS amounts of money(also helped by the ultra competitive players being so entrenched they'll spend whatever it takes to compete in a game they gain nothing but personal satisfaction from). And its sad that Josh cant recognize while he's got nothing but pure intentions as a person who loves YGO he and everyone in a position similar to him(ultra competitive) make this game worse and will only make it more worse for everyone who isnt ultra competitive. Until they stop letting this game abuse them it will continue to become more and more abusive to those of us who are just here to have a little fun with our bad decks.
I would love to play the best decks if they were actually interesting. I bought snake-guy and hated it for being the most mind numbing deck I have ever played. I bought Ryzeal and hated it for being, again, the most mind numbing deck I have ever played. Not interested in playing Cyberse slop either. The only downside of playing rogue for me now is that I just get blown out of the water completely whereas in the past I was able to at least do well maybe not the best but did okay with decks. It's infuriating
People who play casual decks don't want to only win - their definition of fun YGO is the same definition as ANY other player. It's good back and forth where both sides are reaching that breaking point where any top deck can change the game. Even Yugiboomers and their common complaint of how new YGO has a lack of turns loosely ties into this idea that a fun game of YGO is one with interactions spread across the entire game. They might not be able to wrap their head around that new YGO just crams all these interactions over the span of 2 turns, but even their understanding of "fun" is the same.
I think its funny that people think this is a competitive game with high skill when most esports pros could become a 'pro' yugioh player within a year with a good teacher but not the other way around :)) Also the competitive scene has 0 financial incentive to win making the competitive depth shallow compared to basically any other tcg or esport.
The gap between the meta and lower ranked decks in YuGiOh can not be understated when compared to other games. A competently built and piloted rogue deck in Magic actually has a chance against even the best decks of whatever format is being played. YuGiOh's history has been riddled with tier zero, or near tier zero formats. Magic, despite being around for longer, has only ever had a handful of tier zero decks throughout a fewer number of formats. Caw Blade, Affinity, and Eldrazi to name probably the majority of such decks. Pet decks actually have a place when you support multiple formats. Some decks are even represented in more than one format. Burn is a lower level deck that has versions in Legacy, Modern, and Pauper, and stands a chance in each. I'm glad Farfa repeatedly touched on this point because I feel like it's the core issue that needs to be addressed to keep the midcore players happy. When I play my pet deck, I want to feel like a game against the top deck is an uphill battle to overcome rather than an impossible force to suffer through.
Just bring Paul to the podcast at this point
amen
Paul is based and GOATed, he would be a great guest
And make a reaction video to what he says on the podcast? Brilliant
100% agree brother
There is also the problem with ygo that it's not just that "I can't win with my deck", in a lot of instances you won't even be able to PLAY
No no no you see people get to play because hand traps.....then you lose to the 5 different 1 card combos the meta guy is playing
@@Leamas_Nave only for them to have a 9 negate board and you can't break it because you drew into 4 hand traps trying to stop their combo😢
@@Picmanreborn If they landed on a 9 negates board after you opened 4 handtraps then I hate to say it but that's kind of a skill issue...
@@kasumi2173they’re exaggerating for the sake of the point.
Well, it's balanced around that, after all. If you don't stop your opponent from playing, your opponent stops you from playing. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a very, very different game from how it was 20 years ago - and understandably so, everything changes - but I think, if a game is optimized around not letting your opponent play the game, something has gone incredibly wrong along the way.
Josh, who’s life revolves around Yugioh, doesn’t understand what’s its like for casual and budget players, more news at 11
I can’t wait for MBT to react to gage reacting to this (its master saga season 69)
nice
Josh really did try his hardest to not get the point.
It’s even funnier because he did get it multiple times and kept talking himself back out of getting it again 😂
his entire premise boils down to "casual = enjoys playing garbage" which is just a facepalm
Oftentimes, people will literally hit the point with their face as if they ran into a wall and they still won't get it. They can't zoom out or really try to see it from someone else's perspective because of their own bias, or in his case Stockholm syndrome.
It’s by design guys. Hes not gonna talk too negatively about the game. Yall know this
@@Geo-ok1nw that's what happens when you shill for a corporation. He should have just left the issue alone if he "doesn't care about it". "That's just the way it is" is not a defense and it does nothing to solve the issue. He just likes to hear himself talk. Meanwhile, his braindead fans slurp it up like the beaten dogs they are. We can still call him out for it, which everyone should, so not sure what you were hoping to accomplish here.
Josh talking about legacy support being too hard to make was contradicted earlier last year. Melodious went from being a total non-entity to being a reasonably strong Tier 2 deck. Ritual Beast was a Tier 2 deck. It's possible to make good legacy support that makes the archetype competent but not so overly powerful that people hate them. And neither deck had their playstyle dramatically changed as a result of it, as Glad Beast has been guilty of
Legacy support being too hard to make isn't even related to the original argument. It's impossible to make a perfectly balanced game, so there will always be better cards and worse cards, and players trying to be the best will choose the better cards, that's how metagames work. Paul's issue that Josh missed is that there's always going to be people who want to play those worse cards, and there's no real place in Yugioh to do that without a significant number of your losses being due to power scaling and not your skill as a player.
I just wish we'd get Holo melodious prints instead of commons 😭
Hell, we don't need to look between tiers 2, YUBEL of all things won worlds last year thanks to legacy support. Do you know for how long Yubel was a non-deck? And Kanami fixed that with only two waves of support!
It something was proven in 2024, was that Konami can make anything they want playable.
The problem is not "who is this for?" The problem is "where do I play this?" Because if you have no friends to play with OR your friends are busy, who do you play with? Where you do you go to do so?
Heart of the under dog exists to fix this problem but locals never run them. I think communities needs to actually push their locals to run them and then actually show up.
@ora5799 things should not be run by a community only. People need to pay for their stores to do it and actually show up
@@aka_Ingmar konami created a service that the community doesnt use why do you think they would create a completely new format if locals dont even run underdog tournaments.
Its not about what should happen its about what can be done. Be solution oriented.
@@aka_Ingmar 100% getting the yugioh community to actually involve themselves in fanmade formats is actually so hard. I don’t know why the culture of yugioh is so different than MtG and Pokémon in that respect (which both have insanely popular fanmade formats in Commander and Smogon)
@ducky36F is almost like those companies like to work with it's players and have communication and like doing that they do. Konami is in it for the money.
Paul, drops a small video
Josh, drops the paleo version
Yap man himself, “hold my beer, I’m going in”
and we love him for that! 😂
Joshua is a content creator I greatly respect, but he missed the mark with his arguments. Such as:
It's a lot of work.
Players pay Konami to manage the game; it's their responsibility.
It's always been that way.
This reasoning highlights why players are leaving and not solving the issue.
Alternative format? Name every card legal in that format right now.
A strawman argument that avoids engaging with the suggestion.
All cards can't be playable.
Another strawman-no one expects perfect balance across all cards.
You don't want to play well to win.
This misrepresents concerns by dismissing them as a lack of effort.
Who is this for?
It's for players who don't feel represented by the current format.
Other card games are the same.
Dismissing comparisons without understanding how other games handle similar challenges.
Additionally, the idea that players want every card to be sound oversimplifies the issue. The focus is on making more cards have meaningful utility.
💯💯💯👏👏👏
Best comment.
I think one thing that is kinda overlooked is that it’s not just legacy support, it’s new archetypes as well, I don’t remember who mentioned it on twitter but Nouvelle is a really cool deck, but it never stood a chance, why print a whole archetype as essentially pack filler, what’s the purpose of printing them if there is no way to have enjoyment with that archetype
Agreed. The only reason I know about Nouvelles is because Hardleg played the deck on his ladder climb series.
Josh literally playing Ashened and get frustrated at the same stream but somehow not connecting the two problems 😂
Mbt put it well, and yeah you are 100% correct, konami keeps printing all this support for archetype that are basically impossible to play and that is all exacerbated by the fact that its yugioh, its not that you dont win, you literally dont play the game
Edit: thinking about it, i think it makes the problem even worse than if they ignored these aechetypes, its just a reminder to them how theyll never be able to play them.
Remember that ritual event in md? Nouvelle loaner mirror was funny and enjoyable
Magikey exists but could never compete with anything meta
It's a difficult balance trying to speed up Farfa who speeds up Josh who speeds up Paul whose now talking at 500 mph.
Also, on Josh's point about "The community should make the alternate low power format". The community can't add that into Master Duel. I know MD isn't exactly hurting for new players but more and more would play with an actual low power format. You'd still be crafting cards and getting new product but you wouldn't have to deal with Tenpai if you don't want to. That is something only Konami can do.
GOTTA GO FAST
ToP in real time shenanigans going on😂
I just don’t think they will do it. They do the monthly event and that’s their alternate format support. It sucks
Master duel would have held onto a lot more players if it had “old school only” and a N/R or even just N/R/SR modes and I’ll die on that hill.
Just me I had 5 non-yugioh friends all try master duel and all stopped just because as soon as they got to high on ladder they would just get frog stomped and stopped having fun.
@@ducky36F crazy thing is you don't even have to climb that high to start facing the best decks in the game every other duel 🤣 you start seeing them around like silver 5
I love this reaction inception. I need team APS to react to farfas breakdown of Josh’s video with Cimoo guest appearance to jumpscare MBT when he watches that one
Screw mbt
I want to add my experience to that of "playing out of your mind with a rogue deck and still losing". Recently I had a match vs fiendsmith Ryzeal Bystial, I was using the RDA/Centurion deck inspired by Revz. It was a proper 0-2 to me. In one game, not only did I play many of my lines as cleanly as possible, but, my opponent who was proficient with his deck missplay several times since he didn't know my deck and effects. He was reacting as the game was being played. It was a 30-minute back and forth but, in no single moment he was in danger, at every turn I gave, every step that I took, even taking everything that I could in my favor, he always was in a better position than me. Yeah, it was a fun game, but, not being able to take even a single game playing almost perfectly and with the opponent making several non-forced mistakes can be disheartening. Of course, this was a friendly game, but it puts into consideration the bigger gap that is happening not only between good and average players (me being the latter) but, also between the best decks and just "good" decks
@@Mesa7Yugioh yeah and thats the nature of Yugioh, josh tried really to point out other games that don't have formats, but what he fails to realize is that the best deck in Yugioh literally doesn't let you play, but in other card games, a bad deck is bad because it has like 40% win rate, that is just impossible in ygo, a pet deck will lose 10 out 10 games to a meta one
Josh not being able to comprehend midcore players is wild. Doesn't he play on MD? The game that launched with a bunch of players frothing at the mouth with excitement at the prospect of having somewhere to play lower powered decks? The game with a bunch of festivals/events that have made attempts at getting people to play different things? Even in ranked, it used to be possible to climb with almost anything...
There's a difference between uphill battle and facing a literal wall.
The gap in decks definitely widened massively. When Hardleg did his second Ghoti ladder climb he kinda got his spirit broken hitting against a wall and now changed the rules for how new the decks need to be for people to vote for him to play.
(Ghoti isn't the point of this example, it is that he experienced playing a deck immediately before and a while after snake eyes and it forever changed how he does his ladder climb show)
cheater, of couse a "rogue" deck of 2020 cant stand up against 2025
@@negate-07 nah, ghoti isnt even from 2020. its in the same pack as tear. like we are talking 2023 deck
@@negate-07Dawg Ghoti aint 2020. Its from Pote. It started in 2023 and got genuinly great Support as late as mid 2024. Thats How you know yugioh powercreep has gotten insane, the gap between meta and rogue is so large people think decks are 3 times older than they actually are
Easiest way to show this is retro formats. Yeah goat is dominated by Chaos and Edison is Blackwing/Vayu/Frogs/Heros. But in both formats you can pick up a rogue or jank deck and expect to win more than your fair share of games.
Not really the case with 2024/2025 yugioh.
@@negate-07 ghoti is POTE, the latest support is newer than that.
Exactly. I'm a customer and it's not my job to fix the problems of the business. The people working at the business are being paid to keep the customers happy. It's always the community this, the community that. Where's Konami? It's not my job to figure out what I'm supposed to do with these cards that just don't fit anywhere
Only two more recation-reactions on this and Paul speaks with the Speed of light …
I’m really digging Farfa’s current arc where he’s being critical of the game and Konami. It’s nice to see yugitubers be real instead of constantly gassing up a broken game. I love this game, but there is so much room for improvement.
The game is fine, if you dont like it get the fuck out
@@Demonhead223 problem #1
@junshiroi1952 ok weeb, why don't you go jerk off to children's cartoon?
Idk why you or others think this, I have NEVER stopped talking about Yu-Gi-Oh!'s problems. None of these opinions or talking points brought up in this video are new from me. I never allowed my Konami sponsorship to prevent me speaking up.
@@FarfaHighlights People repeat memes until it becomes their actual view. At first it was "Haha funny konami employee", then people started believing you were an actual bootlicker I guess
Living in Los Angeles, there’s literally no such thing as a casual locals here. Although I love the ‘iron sharpens iron’ vibe they create, I acknowledge that it’s not for everyone!
Sometimes I see topping lists from the Midwest and think how tf?
Josh keeps saying he doesnt think those reasons are right and then saying thats just his perspective, while Paul is speaking from a point of having asked a bunch of ex players exactly why they left. At that point it doesnt matter what your perspective is right? You have the perspective of the players who quit, and if a lot of them are saying they dont frel theres a place for them in the game then you have to accept that
Yeah Josh seems to have missed the fact that Paul went out and asked people
I asked over 200 people and they all said that the game was better than it has ever been before. Now you have to contend with those people right?
@@SeveNStarSeveN I totally believe a random responding to me in a UA-cam comment section over a well known member of the community with picture evidence of the event he went to
@@absolutionveil8632 Over? Why can't both be correct? The point is that different people have different answers, and it's quite clear that the perspective of someone who goes to another card game convention is more likely to dislike Yu-Gi-Oh! than an active player.
Anyways, the way I see it, people aren't necessarily aware of why they dislike the game. I know it's arrogant to say, but it's something I've observed elsewhere, just shifting the blame on the direct cause of the situation, and not the indirect reason as to why the direct cause can occur.
@@bidoof6458 Yes over, both can't be correct because ones being facetious to avoid the actual point of any argument being stated on the ground that an imaginary 200 people unanimously agree that this is the best YuGiOh has ever been without a doubt. No cost issues, no prizing issues, no problem with Konami printing policy, nothing. Everything is the peak the game has ever experienced. Also, implying that people that don't like the game do not know why they dislike It is arrogant. You can dislike the effect without knowing the cause. Just because someone doesn't know the cost is grossly increased due to Konami TCGs printing policy doesn't mean they can't dislike how expensive it is.
Farfa got so many things right that Josh got wrong. Proof that being good at the game doesn't actually give you perspective into what makes the game healthy and fun.
and farfa isn't a konami employee
Yeah they are all blind to how much better the meta became after the mulcharmies, if maxx c was legal and ash and droll and every card that negates it was banned the format would be even better
Not surprising since Josh is a Konami bootlicker that was fine with every card being expensive because "it's just a hobby"
@@NeostormXLMAX Pretty sure Josh did believe Mulcharmies were healthy. Maxx 'C" is a very diffenrent beast though. Will defintely not make the game more healthy.
@@qaz6400 I don’t think that’s why Josh is like this though I think he is genuinely to “in” the game to see how it drives people away regardless of whether he gets paid by Konami or not.
I genuinely believe the only real problem with yugioh is the price and all these other problems would be small enough to ignore if the game was affordable
Are you talking about from your prospective or the game's? If you mean overall, that's a really ignorant take. There is a reason Konami is freaking out about not being able to get and retain new players. If you mean from someone that's already a fan of the disaster that is current YGO, then fair enough.
@@TheMattTrakkerI mean this from the point of view of somebody who is a fan of modern Yu-Gi-Oh in theory. People who quit Yu-Gi-Oh because of hand traps or link/pendulum summoning are never coming back because they hate what modern Yu-Gi-Oh is at its core so even if Yu-Gi-Oh becomes cheaper, they won't come back.
However, fo wer the rest of the player base, I do genuinely think that most of the issues Paul discussed in his video are HEAVILY exacerbated by the cost of the game and if it were affordable, these issues wouldn't cause nearly anyone to quit.
For example, I play madolche and am part of the "midcore" that Paul talks about. While it is true that madolche stands no real chance against ryzeal or maliss in any real competitive setting, I would personally enjoy attending my locals and playing the game regardless because I love Yu-Gi-Oh and I love trying to make my decks as competitive as I can even if they're not as good as the meta. And yes, the gap between madolche and the meta decks is really big and it would be nice if it were smaller, but at the end of the day I still love playing madolche and playing Yu-Gi-Oh so I would deal with it. At least I would...if my madolche deck didn't cost 500$ (which is what it would cost last time I check on tcg player). As a result I don't play the tcg and am stuck to master duel instead
@@TheMattTrakker Okay, to add more detail. What I am saying is there is a subset of players of yugioh who are never going to return. For example, players who quit because of hand traps, pendulum/link summoning etc. These players simply reject what modern yugioh is at its core and that is okay. Modern yugioh isn't for everyone and if they don't like it, they dont have to play it.
With that said, if you take the rest of the playerbase (those who enjoy modern yugioh at its core), even if they have complaints about the game (many of which are valid), if the game was affordable, very few would quit. For example, I am a "midcore" player. My main deck on master duel is madolche which I climb to master rank every season with. I agree that the gap between madolche and yubel is very large and even the madolche support which came out in master duel a few months ago didn't fix the issue. With that said, I still have a lot of fun playing with madolche in master duel. Even though the constant stream of tenpai, yubel, snake eyes (not to mention maxx C and now the mulcharmies) makes it really hard to win many games because of the huge power difference between our decks, I love trying to optimize my deck for the meta and use my superior matchup knowledge (since I'm more familiar with how to play against yubel than they are against madolche) to eek out as many wins as I can.
I would love to take this approach to my locals and play against ryzeal or maliss. The primary reason why I won't ever do it though is because my madolche deck (according to tcg player), comes out to $500 and there is no way I am spending that much on a rogue deck that I am almost certainly going to lose 80% of my games with, no matter how much I love playing it. Now if that same deck was $100, it'd be a different story
@@Moman1898 So you mean it from the perspective of someone that likes the current game. That's fine, but to say that's the ONLY real problem still seems pretty ignorant. It's not just about getting back old players, but being able to bring in new ones. This game is really off putting to many new players and that's not just a $ thing. A game needs to be consistently bringing in new players to replace those that leave and from the looks of it(Konami board meetings + pushes to get new players by them)...that's not happening.
@@TheMattTrakker that's a different point and I somewhat agree with it but yes I am primarily talking about the playerbase that does enjoy what modern yugioh is in general
Bro i brought my shitbox CyDra Deck to locals and i had 2 other ppl (out of ca. 15) that didnt play fiendsmith whatever its called. and one of those 2 was my friend who i brought along. So Josh saying "oH jUsT plAy It At LoCAls" is making me actually mald.
Was watching RogueHero channel, saying the same. Just go to locals. And get stomped? People are looking to play meta they are looking for a casual experience.
Konami has several formats for this but it's up to the locals to implement them. Common Charity, Heart of the Underdog, Generation Duel.
Of course, Konami sucks at promoting their game.
It could even worse, you could be one of those guys who cant play at locals because they dont have local yugioh play at their area
In my experience the locals in my area is just as competitive as our regionals or even our one YCS a year.
Its very easy for a locals to basically be a mini regionals and see the same decks show up. The idea of locals not playing the best decks is a myth.
I know Josh doesn’t want to talk about price but right now it’s really really bad. Especially outside the US and EU. Fiendsmith, Raizeal and Maliss are all prohibitively expensive, fuwalos and the dominus cards are over priced and even when Blue-Eyes comes out the Primite cards are already overpriced.
Tenpai was the only almost budget competitive deck and it’s both toxic and now requires Fiendsmith to be competitive!
Master duel is playable price wise but is ruled by Tenpai and now has Maxx C plus the Multcharmys making it incredibly unappealing to play.
Even snake eye format had better competitive options than this if you didn’t want to play snake eye.
the worst part is the mulcharmys, which slow down the game so older decks can keep up are going for 50$ a piece on release minimum
Tenpai toxic😂 lemme guess go first combo deck😂?
100% agree. I bought 3x Lordly Lode for £90 because I wanna be able to play BEWD next month, and i'm lowkey praying they reprint primite before the tins come out because I have good friends who would also love to play it for nostalgia reasons, but can't justify that price.
Even tier 2 deck like Azamina and WF are priced out of the wazoo.
Can you image 50USD for a single card? I am so glad that my local allow me to play with deck mixed with TCG, AE, OCG and hosting tournament with both OCG and TCG banlist but even then one single copy of Elzette is 10 usd, my whole Azamina WF deck at cheapest would be around 1k. That shit is wild.
And Josh never try to adress the issue that legacy support was printed in the same booster pack as the new archtype, yet with lower power scale, lower popularity but has the same rarity slot.
the thumbnail gave me "i am out of touch? no, it is the midcore player who is wrong" vibes
The issue Josh should let Paul disscussion finish compeltely.
Half the video was him pausing and guess what he was gonna say, or guessing his reason.
There was no need to guess 😂😂
Just hear them out. Discussions should have responses not reactions
But then you would need to actually watch the video first before live reacting and write points down, which is too much effort :(
The boy just loves yapping 🤷♂
@@halqthedarktemplar He plays yugioh he should be use to sitting and waiting his turn
@@CyrusIsnt You mean he used to "having interaction" with his opponent?
@@halqthedarktemplar then people would complain it was “prewatched” tbf
Yugioh decided to make the game about archetypes with unique identities and playstyles, but only 5% of the archetypes are playable and sometimes none of the newly released archetypes are even minimally viable. It honestly feels like an unkept game that is fighting against it's own identity.
Literally. That's all the argument is. I see so many comments of elitism about make the deck rouge or git gud.
YCS has Edison and Goat format. So CLEARLY Konami knows there's an audience that wants to play a slower pace. Do the same thing but for TODAY'S CARDS. The ones you want me to buy now.
Crazy because there are alternate formats like Common Charity, Heart of the Underdog, and Generation Duel (basically goat, Edison, etc by the eras of the game) but Konami just doesn't endorse it or remind tournaments. I've got locals around me that don't even do the structure deck tourney.
I mean KONAMI needs to step it up and promote these things. Give extra ots packs. Something!
THIS.Even those broken card they print will just become an engine once they got massive hit by banlist ( Tear , Kash , Snake Eye , SHS ... )
Konami should try to listen from the casuals cuz they are the future of the game. They are the one who play the game with passion .
I dont think it's about pace, but about budget rather
I understand the feeling. But I have a hard time squaring this against the fact so much of the legacy support for last year was cracked af. I honestly felt the Six Sam support was pretty powerful as well. It just doesn't hold up well against the current meta.
That being said, I would love it if we just didn't get as many new cards so quick. By the time I feel I have a solid grasp on a format, the new set already arrived that spends the format once again. Nobody is asking for cards to get printed so much so quickly
@ It's not about support being necessaryly good or bad, it's about being well designed and balanced. If Konami wanted they could make all decks viable, with a few strategies being a more viable than others. But what we get instead is either useless garbage or pushed crack.
We have 15000 cards in the game, I don't even know how many archtypes, and yet they keep releasing more and more unplayable shit while more than half of the strategies are already completely forgotten. All useless garbage -- literally some times. The game feels like an abandoned museum being used as a fashion store.
It's funny seeing Six Sams used as the example of Legacy support needing to be stronger when the possibly best example of terrible Legacy support is Fire Fists.
The deck went from Tier 1 meta to unplayable garbage without even getting demolished by a banlist.
5/6 years later they get 11 or 12 new cards and every version of the deck is still completely unplayable, even at a locals level.
I usually never share my opinion online but i just wanna say something, full power tear format was sooo bad for me, the deck is so demanding i feel exhausted after 1 game, chain link 7-8 every turn, so many decisions in one turn, i see why competitive players find that enjoyable, but for me it was too much for one turn to the point were i don't wanna play another match, i feel like a modern deck like this is so bad for someone who play the game just to pass time
okay so because you usually don't share your opinion online I give you some praise that you did this time and some positive reinforcement, because once I needed it too. (so to have a good experience with commenting)
@FlareBlossom thank you very much, i appreciate your gesture, very wholesome of you
Proffessional Yugioh Streamer with no other interests wonders how anybody could think Yugioh is too expensive
The funny thing is that whenever Ruxin react to someone concerning this chain of videos, the number of reacts will double
The thing is, six samurai is not just random pack filler, is a beloved archetype that a lot of people feel attachment to from their mechanics/lore/gameplay. It’s not like dragoon lamp is a secret rare, it’s a boss monster of a very real archetype with intended synergies that boost its gameplay. Asking your average six samurai player to play the equivalent of “hardcore” just because they like the deck but you need to play out of your mind to beat things like ryzeal or maliss is ridiculous and a disingenuous argument to believe that that should be the future for every single beloved archetype as the correct course of action.
I feel you I want every deck to get more support
The other thing Josh doesn't understand but unironically keeps bringing up is he's speaking from a stance of privilege. He keeps saying "not everyone has the money to spend $1000 on a deck" like that's not a big deal... . Yes Yu-Gi-Oh is a hobby, yes it's a luxury to play ... But bro like farfa said most people can't justify spending that on cards when that is their car note for a couple months or they have a girlfriend who's just as bad as Yu-Gi-Oh. Or even kids and teens who don't have money and have to ask their parents for cards and you have to explain "yeah Mom i need 3 copies of bonfire at 180 a pop".
The reason we were able to play as kids is because we took a structure deck, or just bought packs and played with the pile. But here the meta is so expensive AND oppressive to where you can't even get the chance to play against the top deck as a rogue deck. To where you just want to scoop just because you know what your opponent is playing.
My deck loses to 1or2 interruption just to only get up like 2 interruptions, but my opponent can play through 5 interruptions and still set up a board with 8. You're not going to want to sit through that 5 times a week at locals bro.
And that's on top of me having to pay 400 to play a rogue deck.
Josh’s argument about making n legacy good but not to good is so asinine. Thank farfa for understanding that people get paid to do this. It’s not that fkng hard. They have done it before.
Konami just spend more time on making support that doesn’t solve issues and newer broken one card combo decks. It’s a matter of priorities.
Vanquish souls was fkng meta !
Yugioh just needs a Smogon like format where specific cards are placed under Ubers, OU, UU, etc.
The issue is there are way too many cards. The amount of work required to properly place each individual Yu-Gi-Oh card in existence in a tier is enormous.
That's a solution that should be considered for sure. It would create various tiers where decks are more or less at the same power level, the only problem is the actual realization. Smogon's system is based on the usage of specific pokemon, how would you transfer that idea into yugioh? Do we take into consideration single cards or entire archtypes and engines?
I honestly think a tier system is our best bet, but it's implementation will determine wether people play it or not, not the system itslef.
The idea has already been put in practice, Kuchen Format, but it never took off. Maybe because of the people behind it, maybe because of the tiering decisions, maybe because of the lack of data for the tiering, but it has been tried. I agree the idea is very good if well executed.
@@ulisesmunguia8715 there's def some smogen context I'm missing cause i don't know much about it. But generally speaking alot of people say yugioh has too many cards whenever building a new format is mentioned, but the amount of powerful cards in this game is way smaller than the bad cards so I think focusing those would be natural and realistic.
Lol, no.
Josh is always konamis biggest soldier
John Konami more like Josh Konami am I right
I mean he did get circular banned lol
If we get runic support in the near future, we all know why …
@@nouvelle147 you are right
I swear we are like 3 months from Farfa finally picking up the One Piece TCG and finally joining us in greener pastures.
that would be amazing. every player I know that quit YGO to play OP or Lorcana are genuinely so much happier and thriving at the game
Nah he should join Pokemon.
Not really but I think he’d get an interesting from the community :p. I can see him playing Lorcana.
Or maybe even than new Gundum TCG.
Been saying this. Josh is very smart but he 1000% dick rides Konami to the death
you gotta ride the (barfing) horse that carries your money
@@Eru_3ru I don’t think it’s that he’s getting paid they really wouldn’t make up the bulk of his income. It’s just that he conflates Konami the company with the game of yugioh that he loves too much.
@@ducky36F he gets paid for ygo content especially meta related, it is in his interest that ygo isnt bad looked upon
I don't even think it's that, I think he just has difficulty looking through other people's perspectives. It just comes across as dickriding because he's a perfect Konami customer (plays the main formats to be the best, buys sealed, creates content on MD aka buys a lot of gems, can afford the super expensive secret rares, and competes for competing's sake alone so he doesn't care about prizing).
When Josh was saying 'so you want to win locals with a weaker deck and less skill', I felt that he was not understanding the difference between wanting to feel that they played a game of yugioh vs having a high win rate, this seems like a vibes based problem, not a winrate problem that Josh sees it as. A 'midcore' yugioh player sounds to me like a player who wants to play the game with decks they like (good, mid or bad), but winning isn't their only motivation.
These problems with wanting a casual feeling alternative format, high cost and product feeling lacking seem like 3 or 4 different problems instead of the one problem or arguement. I cannot really know how true these problems are, since I don't play in paper (don't have an english locals available).
This game is at the point of taking as much as they can from the whales and disregarding the rest. That speaks to the health of the game than the rest. You lost faith in your ability to capture new players and talking a lower per capita.
YGO is filled with elitists saying "let them eat cake" (draw the out or just play more staples).
Legit that I see every single UA-camr and competitive player happily drop 1000s on these new decks and not even just that but MAX OUT the rarities without second thought saddens and frustrates me.
It’s an attitude I’ve seen people who I know are on normal wages emulate at locals and it makes me wonder how in the heck they are affording it. We’re never going to get reasonable card prices if the player base is happy to cough up whatever the cost.
@@ducky36FHard agree. Blaming Konami alone is incorrect. They are bad but it is taking responsibility off of the playerbase. I know other bases do this but calling this "an investment" is madness. It is a hobby you dunk resources into. People spend on it like a broke man buying lotto tickets.
Josh is being completely obtuse and unreasonable.
There's a fundamental difference between playing a bad deck and playing unplayable deck. The power gap in this game is massive.
Like in a goat tournament you can scum a win or two with a stupid skull servant zombie deck.
Right now you simply cannot play most decks at all even at locals.
There are decks that lose to one handtrap. And the meta deck can play through three handtraps and not care.
no shit sherlock. the game is 25 years old.
@domimomi3954 That's not a counterpoint at all, retard.
When was Josh not completely obtuse and unreasonable? Dude is will lick Konami's boots even if they kicked him in the face.
Exactly, you can play complete jank in goat and Edison and expect to win games.
You ain’t doing that without playing out of your mind and winning the die roll at a regular locals the power gap between meta and the rest is to much.
@ducky36F Exactly, Josh just assumes the bad faith version of "I want my deck to win locals" when really most people just want to be able to win a couple games at locals.
Like, I'm not sweaty. I don't want to have to grind and train the entire week to be able to win games. I just want to sling cardboard on my day off of being a wageslave.
I can live with only winning two games out of all my matches or so. But if I'm not winning anything at all, I'm going to stop going.
Joshua straight up lies about saying Digimon doesn't have alternative formats where you can use lower tier decks. Digimon has multiple Ultimate Cups a year that have "mono-color" rules. Where all your cards need to share a color. So when decks like black wargreymon or beelzemon were dominating the meta they basically were unplayable and it allowed lower tier decks like Ulforce Veedramon and Gallantmon to shine through.
Man that was frustrating. Josh dug into that guys hexagon for rating things black and white while spending most of the video doing the same about card design.
Josh has fallen off ever since he lost to speedroid
If only there was some kind of way for Farfa and Josh to discuss directly 😔
Pet decker sounds like a slur lmao.🤣
22:04 It is not just the gap between T1 and T3 that has dramatically increased. The gap between T1 and T1.5/T2 has also dramatically shifted.
T2 right now is as powerful as T1 was during TOSS (8 years ago).
Current T1 decks are like showing up with full power Dragon Rulers in 2010. Everything below T1 is shockingly close together. When I play Centurion against Lab, Floo, Swordsoul, and Ritual Beast I still stand a chance of winning. If going against Ryzeal or Maliss I better have drawn Kaijus, Book of Eclipse, or some other equalizer because the alternative is to scoop.
1:12:20 If making legacy support is so hard maybe there should be a format that enables legacy decks or maybe YGO shouldn't be an eternal format.
Let's provide solutions to the problem instead of ignoring the problem completely.
To speak on Gateway. You can ban Gateway and retrain it to not be so powerful.
1:18:43 And here's his diconnect. Its a hobby for me and for the commenters. Its not a hobby for him; it's his job. He doesnt care about rogue and legacy decks bring unplayable because he already isnt playing them.
His only reason to play rogue and legacy decks is the exact moment they becime meta viable because his job is to be a world champion competitor.
1:48:00 In the USA for most states you just have to pass the test which is like $50-80. After that you just have to pay the license fee to keep the vehicle registered and property taxes. RIP Euros.
I'm pausing at 48:43 to leave this comment, so idk if this gets addressed at a later point. But as someone who plays both YGO and MTG, the pack filler in YGO is an absurd problem. MTG booster packs have *15 cards* in most cases, there were some older sets that did 9-card packs and those threw off the math for limited formats like drafting. But even putting aside the obvious solution of "Officially support limited formats" like Wizards of the Coast does for MTG, the main competitive format that is pushed by the game is so varied right now that the otherwise-useless pack filler can find a place. We just recently had a new set release that is going to be legal for 5 years when the majority of our current sets stay for... I think it's 3 years now? I'm not too certain on the rotation schedule, I mostly play limited and Commander. But having this set - which is massive with something like 500 cards compared to the most recent set before it having around 250 - gives players a foundation to start from to develop and evolve decks and strategies. In our current Standard format (the main rotating competitive format), we have over 3,000 cards that are currently legal. And while that number pales in comparison to YGO's eternal Advanced format, we still manage to see a huge variety of decks being represented. When I play Master Duel, I can count on one hand the number of truly unique decks I play against. But if I spend the same amount of time playing Ranked Standard in Arena? I'd put it at somewhere between 10 and 25 different kinds of decks. And these are both at the same level of play in their respective ranked ladders. In Master Duel, I can take my pet decks into Ranked and *maybe* break even on my win-loss if I play absolutely out of my mind and draw straight gas constantly. In Arena, I have a rotation of five or six pet decks I bring into Ranked and work on upgrading and experimenting with and I'm able to consistently hit the 15 daily wins in a single play session. Are all of these decks going to be topping the Spotlight Series (Magic's current YCS equivalent)? Almost certainly not. It has its own metagame and dominant decks. But there's still a place to play these filer archetypes and play them against other filler archetypes. If I brought my Zombie World deck to Locals, I'd be a punching bag for people testing their latest Ryzeal brews. But if I bring my White/Blue Enchantment deck to a Friday Night Magic Standard event, I probably wouldn't even face the same deck twice.
The thing is, drafting is never present in Yugioh's core design. Take a look at OCG set structures, you'll notice how their packs are smaller in size (4-5 cards per pack) but has more packs per box, with a rarity distribution set up so that opening a box gives you roughly 65-75% of the cards in the set, including the chase cards.
It's only when Yugioh got imported to the TCG when Upper Deck decided to mimic MTG's set structure and rarity distribution that you get the mess that Yugioh sets have today.
@@ryuuohdeltaplus7936 This accidentally turned into an essay, so I'll give you a TL;DR up front.
I agree, but limited play wasn't my point. Magic is naturally more diverse in competitive and casual constructed play than Yu-Gi-Oh and Konami needs to expand on their support for and promotion of gameplay diversity.
-------------------------------------------------------
This is all true, but I'm talking about even beyond limited play like draft. Magic's Standard environment - the comparable format to Yu-Gi-Oh's Advanced format - is currently so diverse that nearly all pack filler and draft chaff can find some kind of play at different levels. Locals are home to infinite jank possibilities, MTG: Arena promotes experimentation with rotating daily missions requiring certain deck constraints like focusing on creatures or using specific colors, and the tournament scene recently had 7 different decks with significant presence and 15 total different decks seeing enough play to be categorized outside of "Others" The most prevalent decks were both tied with 14% of the decks used.
Meanwhile, Yu-Gi-Oh's locals are typically training grounds for decks copied from top tournament lists where a single deck makes up nearly half of all decks used. Looking at YCS Anaheim, Ryzeal made up 44% of the top cut.
And since price is an issue for a lot of people - myself included - let's take a look at the costs of the top decks from each game's most recent tournaments. In Magic's Spotlight Series: Atlanta, just over a week ago, the winning deck would run you $270. The decks that were able to stand in the ring with it and give it good competition? Anywhere from $150 to $450 with a single one almost reaching $600. Hopping on over to YCS Anaheim back in December, we see the *floor* of the top decks nearly hitting $700. The winning deck? Nearly *$1,500*.
Now I know none of this was even mentioned in your comment, so please do not take this as an attack on your reply. I'm mostly using it as a jumping-off point to expand on my original point. The diversity in useable cards in Yu-Gi-Oh is the real problem. Pack filler wouldn't be as bad if there was *somewhere* to use it outside of finding friends to play with in a time where so many people only have the time and money to invest in a single hobby if they're lucky. Would limited formats help? Sure, but the game really is not structured to be played like that. Back before, say, 2008? Sure, you could make piles of loosely related cards and generic good stuff work wonders. But today, the *vast* majority of cards are made with a single archetype in mind and will be functionally dead cards in anything but what they were designed to work with. I think something like Heart of the Underdog is a fantastic solution and it needs to be supported by Konami. While yes, it *technically* is recognized as an official way to play, it's not pushed by Konami at all. It's left in the shadows of Advanced and Time Wizard with the responsibility of even making people aware of the format thrust on the players.
They dont ban enough shit lol
And they don't unban obsolete cards like Electrumite soon enough (stop clogging my scales Packbit and Flamberge)
57:00 This is an incredible point. If you go watch any Magic video during spoiler season, you'll find that most cards get a "This is pretty cool" reaction. And it's not because there are a hundred cards that are obviously going to be Standard relevant. It's because one of those is good in Standard, another is good for this really old deck in Modern, another one is simply very interesting for draft, and whatever is left is at least a contender in casual Commander. Yu-Gi-Oh! is not lacking uniqueness in its "bad" cards. It's not like the pack filler are all Normal Monsters. Most of those cards could be very fun if there was a format for them.
When will these idiots realize that the YCS numbers and regional attendance are NOT indicative of MIDCORE PLAYERS. If players aren't attending locals, the game is actively dying.
Yugioh is not dying, look up the ycs numbers
@@Demonhead223 If you're being serious, please don't delete your comment. It's funnier this way.
@@Demonhead223 funniest comment ive seen this year, really caught me off guard
It's crazy how many likes this dumb comment has. This person doesn't seem to understand that 2 things can be true simultaneously.
@@FarfaHighlights hey hello Farfa
My friends and I did a "non rogue" series of house tournaments where you were allowed to play decks that top 8ed the most recent big tournament.
The first one was a shit show where everyone wasn't "playing Kash" or "playing Tear" "I'm playing a small engine of X meta deck, it's not the deck".
After, and combined with the person running them having to approve deck lists, it was pretty cool.
From what I’ve seen here in the US is a lot of card shops stopped selling yugioh products because the prices fluctuate so quickly it’s an “unsafe market” for a lot of these places. And a lot of people I know that at least know of yugioh’s tcg stopped playing because it’s so expensive and the amount of money they spend on a deck can’t be justified since within the next few months the deck can get hit to unplayable or rogue and they wasted $200+ or the game has gotten too complicated to keep up with unless it’s your only/main hobby. Those people still like older formats because they know how everything works they get to play with cards they own and the game doesn’t end after the first turn in most cases. Those same people have all picked up a different tcg like magic the gathering since formats like commander makes it so they only need to buy a card once and it’s usable forever, there’s multiple ways to play and different levels of competitive through these different formats, and it’s not as hard to keep up with
Not only do the newer/newest decks have a much higher power floor & ceiling than the "rouge" decks (Madolche, for ex. used in the video) regardless of legacy support given to aforementioned rouge decks, there are constantly new and more powerful staples in the form of handtraps, board breakers, and semi-floodgates that are intended to tone down or keep the top decks in check- and what ends up happening is these staples compound the issue and make trying to perform with those rogue decks even more difficult to an exacerbating degree in some cases making the "cliff they need to climb" in order to win *even higher*.
tl;dr - Staples releasing to combat/counter meta decks are also beating down midrange rouge decks, pushing them even further down than by merit of engine cores alone.
Everyone celebrating Mulcharmies but they kill older decks that don't achieve much in minimal steps. Meta players just celebrating they only have to learn a few matchups
I don't feel that rogue decks are considerably worse than they were, but it feels as if modern deckbuilding principles has changed from as recently as agov format - due to how hyper consistent and small engines are now, they can fit a ton of non engine, so you have to mash these small engines together to play through the non engine everyone else has. If you're willing to take a lower winrate, you can stuff some of these newer engines into anything and end up with a better and more resilient deck (kash, fiendsmith and bystial can all be splashed in pretty much anything), but pet deckers often don't want the dynamics of their deck to change as much as this changes the principles of the deck. The only major way I think this can genuinely change is if the number of handtraps decreases significantly, but there's no way this doesn't make going second significantly worse - which is, to me at least, the bigger problem with yugioh from a gameplay perspective.
I just want a MD game mode that features deck progression as a core part of the mode, whether that be official Masochist, an Arena/Adventure style game mode, official Dungeon Duel Monsters, a way to play to offset frustrating loss streaks in ranked.
I'd like to weigh in as a person who used to go to locals and now only consume yugioh through yt and occasion Master Duel stint.
There are so many cards being printed in YuGiOh, that I would love to play, try out and lab, but I felt bad playing Chimera when I bought the deck and tried it out in my locals, so in the current locals environment I would not dare bringing something fun just to get dumpstered and not even have a chance to play with my cards and enjoy their effects and abilities.
Alternate format with a slightly custom ruleset maybe would create a space for people to value non-meta cards more.
need me the mbt progrussys channel reacting to farfa reacting to josh reacting to paul that's now 3 hours long
25:50 The issue is that the past couple years amped up the powercreep to an extent that makes duelist alliance blush.
You can keep banning the top decks of this meta, but the top decks of yesteryear suddenly turn into unbeatable titans again. You would have to erase years of nonsense to get to a level where the casual decks are playable.
Then you have the issue of casual "rogue" decks being actually just as much if not more toxic, because their new support made them into generic negate board wombo-combo decks or something similar.
Where do you draw the line? I feel like 5 years from now we will have the same discussions without solutions, because there is just none.
You could go back before duelist alliance and continue from there maybe.
EDIT: Just before the "boomer hates pendulums", no... Shaddolls and BAs are the reason the game is in it's current state.
Zoodiac was the camelbreaker that broke the game (no duh, what if the "two of a kind" summoning mechanic was one of a kind) and we're still suffering the shockwaves of trying to correct it
The issue isn't just power creep, the yugioh community has over the past decade has shifted further and further toward a competitive first mindset a la smash bros melee. There are a number of reason for this shift. Some those reasons are Konami's fault, some are the communities fault, and at least one was happen stance.
First up is Konami, the release of master rule 4 and links caused irreparable damage to the casual player base. Anyone who was playing a non-meta synchro, fusion, or xyz was out of luck as those strategies were completely neutered and required immediate link support to make playable. link support that would take years to release and by the time it did release the rules changed to make so you didn't actually need it anymore. Lots of casual players quit during this time and the few that remained had to adapt and find another deck to play.
Next is the communities changing attitude toward regionals. This is largely an online issue but it still is relevant. Regionals are meant to be the midcore tournament. thirteen or fourteen years ago a rogue deck winning a regional would generate talk in the community. was this rogue deck competitive? probably not but it helped shine a light on regionals and indicated a level of importance. that has largely evaporated, and in the words of MBT "any deck can win a regional." and if any deck can win a regional then they are no better then large locals, and that's shown by the community lack of interest. It's all about the YCS's or the ARG's back when they existed now and with the focus on big tournaments comes a bigger focus on "THE META".
Next is covid. Covid is probably the biggest factor as to why low and midcore yugioh is so bad right now. The inability to go to locals led numerous players to join online communities to scratch that yugioh itch and this along with having a lot of free time due to not being able to go outside meant that they had a lot of time to play yugioh. this period caused a significant increase in the communities understanding of the game, and those developments always find their way to the rest of the player base. even if you don't participate in an online community you only need one or two players (who are not unlikable jerks) at your locals who did participate to spread the ideas around (a rising tide lifts all boat).
Next is the community again. sorry to say but the development of alt formats be they Edison/goat, progression, and now draft has dethroned locals as the place where you play for fun. If you spend a lot of time playing yugioh online messing around with other players, then when you do eventually go to locals you are going to take it much more serious after all that's where you improve your in person skills and there a prizes on the line. again it only takes 4 or 5 players taking locals seriously for it to cause problems for the rest of the player, and after a certain threshold of players begin taking it seriously say good bye to casual play.
Finally power creep. yeah it's a problem, not just in what decks are playable but also in how decks have to be built. yeah some decks are absurdly powerful but another major issue is the massive increase in staples required to deal with those decks. good luck building a for fun deck when 9-21 deck slots are going to be dedicated to hand traps. wants that you want to play a deck with a number of engines that have really cool synergies welp too bad you need to run at least 9 hand traps. this of course led to smaller and smaller main deck engines which has finally resulted in decks being able to run 21 hand traps. you know what we called decks that had 20+ trap cards....stun we called them stun and guess what every deck is stun now. doesn't matter if it is a combo deck or a mid-range deck every deck has to dedicate a significant number of deck space too hand traps and that kills all the stupid but fun casual decks from ever seeing an iota of play. after all who wants to bring a fun casual deck to locals if it will lose to a single ash or imperm.
Yugioh is in a bad spot and everyone but the poor guy playing mechanical chaser beat down is to blame.
but it can be fixed. but it will require time. first issue is local prizing, Konami needs to work with stores to make special prizing for lower powered formats. Create a separate list to curb the number of hand traps and powerful decks present and provide an incentive for player who are competitive to come and play in that lower powered format. Stores will have to require players register their deck before hand and they will have to monitor what decks are too strong and address them. but this should help the midcore player base recover.
That's one of the things no one ever touches on, my utopia deck can set up 2 monster negates, 1 omni negate and a spell negate if they allow me to go full combo, it's a very hard board to break and it sets up more than 8k damage for the next battle phase. It still loses to 1 ash though.
The only difference between rogue and meta is how easy it is for you deck to do something unfair that won't allow your opponent to play. There's no way of making a format that allows all these legacy archetypes to be viable without severely crippling them by taking away some of their new win conditions.
had to lower the speed of this lmao
About the whole point around 1:08:00. The way yugioh works as a game and how it's designed completely shuts down rogue decks to a degree that is just simply not the case in any other card game. A rogue, bad deck in hearthstone is bad because it has around 40% winrate, but a rogue deck in yugioh literally does not play the game, they will lose every single duel against a meta deck and that is just not the case in games like HS because of the resource system as well as the fact that card design isn't as volatile. So yeah HS doesn't need another format because you can actually play a dogshit deck for the format (not even getting into rotation here) and you can win 40% of your games, good luck winning any game in yugioh with a pet deck. I'm using HS as an example but this is true for most card games
The biggest tragedy is that Master Duel is the easiest way to implement a middle ground, and they only provide that as a 2 week format twice a year.
There should be a queue in Master Duel for people that want to slap Dark Magician onto the table without having to deal with Tenpai.
There should be a queue for people that just learned to tribute summon. MTG Arena has options for most players, with many live formats, so why doesn't Master Duel?
I know people that loved the YGO anime, but want nothing to do with the card game, and this should be an easy onboarding process.
The most popular format in MTG is a fan-made format, and that's kinda insane. In YGO, people are so entrenched in specific decks, that fan-made formats don't have the same chance to compete (MTG players generally associate more generally to colors, if anything).
Would be cool if MD supported TW formats as well. Dueling book is basically the only place to do that but atleast for me I'd play on MD if they did that.( not sure why they haven't. adding a goat,edison,tengu,hat format as alternative options on MD wouldn't be hard 🤷)
Never thought i would be saying farfa had great takes but here we are
Master duel has been the solution to this for me, each ranked season I just play a bad deck and get as high as I can then swap to something actually meta viable. I think the lower ranks in master duel are exactly the kind of environment where you can have fun with "bad decks"
The events are also interesting with their unique banlists, I think the main problem is that there's no market for it. I'll not say Konami doesn't blunder because they do a lot, but I've also noticed that any good idea Konami has had to somewhat fix this problem ends up being unviable because at the end of the day, most players do want to win but in the advanced format tournaments, and even if Konami catered to them with events tailored for their tastes they would still not adhere with enough numbers to turn it into a real thing.
Originally, I didn’t watch all the way to the end of Josh’s react because *for me*, he lost lots of credibility after about the first hour. But after hearing what he said around 1:46:50, I’m gonna unsubscribe to him.
i feel im the person being discussed here.
i went to locals last week for the first time in maybe 2 months. at least since ryzeal and maliss came out. i played against 2 maliss, 1 ryzeal, a melodious, and our local eyptian god player. im playing bystial control, waiting for blue eyes to come out so i can play;
1. a deck that i like the play of
2. a good meta deck (since tearlament, i was able to play that)
3. A DECK I CAN MAYBE AFFORD!
i have bills and a car that doesn't like to work. i have other responsibilities. im not in high school anymore. luckily, i got lordly lodes at 5 bucks a piece, or else blue eyes wouldn't even be on the table for me. i refuse to pay more than 30 dollars for a piece of cardboard, and im only going to make an exception for beryl because I've been setting aside extra money for it.
i can't afford to travel to tournaments. I've gone to 2 regionals in my entire life. I'd love to play more competetively, but i just dont have the extra money to do so. fuwa is 150 dollars canadian. engraver is 120. I'd love to use these cards. i can't.
it was the same before the rarity collections, too, baronne, accesscode, prosperity, triple tac, i only have thrust cause i pulled 2 from ots packs. the reprint sets came out, and now i still can't afford the new staples.
the only reason i haven't jumped ship is because no other card games interest me that I see play in my area. I would play elestrals, but nobody hosts tournaments in my city.
i love this game, and I'd love to play it. i just feel excluded from the conversation because i haven't made the game my job, or im not rich enough to not care.
essaying over. sorry for all the text.
Just watched a video about Domain where Josh was playing with the people from Card Market. It was a great video with fun gameplay, and I could see it doing well with mid core players except for one thing: getting the cards would be a logistical nightmare. Graceful Charity at its cheapest is $2.50 because of its ban. If Domain were to take off, those prices would sky rocket because either players would buy the limited supply of cards, or someone would buy the whole stock and sell them at a premium. This circles back to the main issue Farfa highlights (buh dum tsh) in the video: no alt formats are really going to take off without support from Konami, in this case by both sanctioning it and also printing a card base that is available to players that won’t price gate the format JUST LIKE advanced already does.
Before Prosperity's reprints, I've recommended it to several people to improve consistency but was shut down soon as I mentioned the price tag (just the one copy btw and consistency matters a lot to older/casual decks). For many people, they can use that money being competitive in another game, i.e. Meta OP deck, high power MTG or cEDH w/ proxies (ftk/infinite loops). The banning/limiting of floodgates makes it difficult for some older yugioh decks/archtypes to compete as well (i.e. Zombie World+Rivalry). Cost would not be as much of an issue if our set had alternative set rarities like the OCG or other card games like One Piece. Even after meta cards are reprinted, it may be too late because of powercreep or loss of interest.
The big draw of Commander / Domain format for me is when someone pulls up with a "meta" strong deck you can balance the format within a single game by just teaming up to break their board.
Personally I believe competitive people in yugioh don’t want an alternative format. It’s nice to have 1 format you can measure your skills in. To me everyone seems to be missing the point to legacy support. I personally, and I don’t think everyone agrees with me and that’s ok, just want Konami to spend as much time on creating competitively viable support for my pet deck as they do on new archetypes. If you slow down the release schedule and narrow the focus to 2-3 new decks a year with 2-3 actually good legacy support I think that possible. People keep saying you can’t have every deck on the same level. I understand that but if you’re going to spend time making cards for a legacy deck, why would you not make them competitive. Stop releasing cards that don’t solve the problem of the legacy decks and release more cards that actually solve their issues. I just don’t understand why this keeps being overlooked.
People do want alternative formats. That's why Edison, GOAT, HAT, Master Saga, Masochist Ban List, Last Card Standing, Progression, and Highlander exist.
The problem with the game is that Konami doesn't support these alternative formats enough or at all, the product that Konami sells does not support these formats, and the card pool doesn't support these formats.
INFINITE CONTENT LOOP!!!!
farfa target cir
cir target dante
Chain silent graveyard
@@CyrusIsntChain Baronne de Fleur
@TheEternalJourney-u9n ? Baronne is banned in the tcg.
JUDGE JUDGE
@ how are you summoning baronne in ba?
Joshua is an AI that just feeds into whatever Konami is giving him, not being able to think and reason like a average person.
Meanwhile teamAPS has always looked even to other card games for ways to improve yugioh and make it more fun.
Tunnel visioned person in a bubble VS someone who can look int all directions and judge every aspect of something
Josh has a very privileged take saying he wished people didn’t only look at Yugioh through a money lens.
Unfortunately for him , that’s not realistic. The majority of players ARE casual , and if you lose a casual player base your game will start to decline heavily.
And I may be a bit tilted , but if you have easy access to buy whatever you want then why not buy decks for your community. Because saying the money isn’t the only lens is really narrow minded and shows (to me) he actually doesn’t know or engage with people who’d like to play TCG but can’t overcome that financial barrier.
The way Konami can fix product is to adopt the rarity collection idea but with new cards in core sets.
they need to just make yugioh 2 where they restart card design to wherever they want and we can play in this lower power format, whilst also still keeping yugioh 1 alive, eventually maybe the game takes a better turn as the experience from previous design comes in handy
They did. It's called Rush Duels and it's not available in TCG regions.
There was also Speed Duel but that's dead now.
A yugituber format where y’all agree on a ban list and everyone’s fans promote it at their locals until the silent majority pushes out the meta players in numbers
I mean price is definitely a big issue even for Master Duel. Just look at Ashened.
34:39 i disagree with this. DEPENDING on the resource, that knowledge is still good knowledge, as someone whos very good and competitive in my own sport i still hit up the basics or listen to folks who are better then me, your never too good to learn or hear about foundational skills. Saying that your so advanced that your sticking to your local circle just puts you in a box/ echo chamber.
The numbers are down enough that stores just don't carry YGO (some of that probably has to do with Konami's shitty printing practices).
In order to SELL MORE PRODUCT konami has created such a dramatic difference between OU and UU that they can't really hope to compete. The solution for this would be for Konami to make it so that most archetypes are similar in power, but it doesn't seem like they have any idea how to balance anything.
Is this dude ignorant or is it just cope when he talks about how their product is doing fine? They've literally said otherwise at board meetings and with their actions.
Podcast topic?
Yes please
It's honestly just cost at the end of the day, people would put up with any format or busted card much more easily if the game didn't require a lifetime commitment, and I'm not even making a hyperbole, if you want to do good in yugioh you will simply have to say goodbye to other hobbies that require money, sorry bro I can't go hiking this weekend because I need to save on gas since I just spent 200€ for THREE cards (again).
That’s so true sadly, lmao.. Im saving money and getting staples I miss for the new white forest support since I been playing the deck on release and..ugh . I had to cut things out my life I enjoy bc of this but it’s whatever lmao. Im to invested in the game anyways
I can't wait for Stevie Blunder to react to Farfa reacting to Josh reacting to Team APS, the content pipeline is gonma go crazyyyy
I think we as a community to easily default to the price issue (which is valid) but I think the point here was; Where/how do I play my mid tier decks and the discussion was added to with the mention of legacy support; Why bother making legacy support which STILL means my mid tier deck cant compete. These are far more interesting questions which got lost in the wake of pricing. . . again
Also near the end of the stream there was one guy trolling him
We are at a point where the power level is either broken or ryzeal. So what happens now is they keep printing cards that get banned and people are wasting there money or we get decks of the same power. So eventually there will be a meta with dozens of decks. So why not go back and power up these older archetypes?
The alternative is they keep printing more and more powercreep similar to Tear and everyone is miserable.
Companies do not need to powercreep to sell product. It is just the lazy way out.
Can't wait for MBT reacting to this on stream.
I love Josh, but focusing on details and debunking instead of offering solutions is why no one plays German TCGs.
Shoutout to Germany, you're great!
Also, Speed Duels and Duel Links are basically a lower powered YGO formats, that use the same cards. Rush is an entirely different format that invokes the spirit of the old 2000's gameplay, but with bigger, faster gameplay.
I want something that's similar to Trinity Format in what cards they ban, without the incredibly harsh deck building restrictions.
I think people really underestimate heart of the underdog. Every locals near me has it, and it works great for allowing a vast variety of decks to compete.
If you're locals doesn't have it the solution isn't to just cry about it online, TALK TO THE PEOPLE RUNNING YOUR LOCALS, work with them to set it up. They might not have considered it, and there is probably interest in it in your community.
2 hour "brief discussion" on a 1:21 video. This gonna be good
1:21:23 it's frustrating, and it costed you well over 100 bucks or whatever, when the same experiment of "this deck was fun but it isn't tier 1" costs 20 bucks in any other card game.
thats why people are leaving the game. yugioh has competition now, and if konami doesnt address the game's faults, they will continue to lose its players
Pokemon has different battles you can do based off a pokemon's rating like UU, OU, LC, or Uber
Ah yes, a "Brief" Discussion
25:26 we do have ygoprodeck for stats now. We could just blanket ban every deck over a certain percentage of representation for Heart of the Underdog. It’s getting the community to actually get involved that is hard.
13:41 This is the perfect description I think, and it greatly resembles my own experience. Coming back into YGO after 15 years, I jumped on a DM anime deck, no hand traps, no disruption, no consistency, etc. It wasnt until I learned about the competitve space that I realized YGO is very different now. So, I made a new deck, incorporating new staples, disruptions, engines, all while preserving the idea of DM. That landed me on a fun Branded DM combo that I really enjoy and find decent success with climbing ladder on MD.
Card design is a problem(making more and more broken and super resiliant to anything that came before it decks). Price is a problem and the second hand market propping up "konami bad" messaging to justify making cards cost RIDICULOUS amounts of money(also helped by the ultra competitive players being so entrenched they'll spend whatever it takes to compete in a game they gain nothing but personal satisfaction from).
And its sad that Josh cant recognize while he's got nothing but pure intentions as a person who loves YGO he and everyone in a position similar to him(ultra competitive) make this game worse and will only make it more worse for everyone who isnt ultra competitive. Until they stop letting this game abuse them it will continue to become more and more abusive to those of us who are just here to have a little fun with our bad decks.
I didn't exactly have a lot of respect for Josh before this but I've pretty much lost all of it after watching this
I would love to play the best decks if they were actually interesting. I bought snake-guy and hated it for being the most mind numbing deck I have ever played. I bought Ryzeal and hated it for being, again, the most mind numbing deck I have ever played. Not interested in playing Cyberse slop either. The only downside of playing rogue for me now is that I just get blown out of the water completely whereas in the past I was able to at least do well maybe not the best but did okay with decks. It's infuriating
People who play casual decks don't want to only win - their definition of fun YGO is the same definition as ANY other player. It's good back and forth where both sides are reaching that breaking point where any top deck can change the game. Even Yugiboomers and their common complaint of how new YGO has a lack of turns loosely ties into this idea that a fun game of YGO is one with interactions spread across the entire game. They might not be able to wrap their head around that new YGO just crams all these interactions over the span of 2 turns, but even their understanding of "fun" is the same.
I think its funny that people think this is a competitive game with high skill when most esports pros could become a 'pro' yugioh player within a year with a good teacher but not the other way around :)) Also the competitive scene has 0 financial incentive to win making the competitive depth shallow compared to basically any other tcg or esport.
The gap between the meta and lower ranked decks in YuGiOh can not be understated when compared to other games. A competently built and piloted rogue deck in Magic actually has a chance against even the best decks of whatever format is being played. YuGiOh's history has been riddled with tier zero, or near tier zero formats. Magic, despite being around for longer, has only ever had a handful of tier zero decks throughout a fewer number of formats. Caw Blade, Affinity, and Eldrazi to name probably the majority of such decks. Pet decks actually have a place when you support multiple formats. Some decks are even represented in more than one format. Burn is a lower level deck that has versions in Legacy, Modern, and Pauper, and stands a chance in each.
I'm glad Farfa repeatedly touched on this point because I feel like it's the core issue that needs to be addressed to keep the midcore players happy. When I play my pet deck, I want to feel like a game against the top deck is an uphill battle to overcome rather than an impossible force to suffer through.