I got into advanced after getting into goat / edison as a returning player. I built a fairly budget deck (ninja) and kept playing it at locals for a bit. I thought I would probably hate it, but it's more enjoyable than I expected. But overall I feel that edison or even HAT are the most enjoyable. What I've noticed about modern yugioh is that your deck has to have many "one card combos" to really compete. You cram your deck full of hand traps and going second cards to make it so you don't auto lose going second, but in a weird way that effectively means you start with a 2-4 card hand, the rest of your hand being hand traps and going second cards. Those cards have to be capable of building a powerful board all on their own. My Ninja deck can do that, and I've actually done fairly well at locals after playing for a bit, but the main problem with my deck that I've noticed is that there are just too many cards that can't pop off on their own, so I often open hands with a bunch of hand traps and 2 "extenders" that can't create a powerful board on their own. My deck has plenty of powerful cards, even 1 card OTKs, but there's just too many "bad but you have to play it" cards in the deck. Even budget and rogue decks can do insane things, but the top meta decks are the ones that brick the least. I've noticed that that means that in some sense, all their cards have to be almost the same card to be reliable. Look at a deck like Kashtira. Fenrir and Unicorn both special summon themselves, search an extender, etc. They can search each other. Both can be searched by the field spell and Theosis. So you have a bunch of cards that are *almost* the same card + a bunch of hand traps and going second cards. I think this leads to boring designs for achetypes. What I love about my ninja deck is all the cards feel unique, but that's kind of what makes it bad, lol. It's more fun than I thought it would be, but just not quite as fun as those older formats. But there's a part of me that misses getting new archetypes and cards, and that's what ultimately drew me to it. Wish they could start over and be more strict about maintaining a certain power level. It feels like a shame, because there are so many cool decks that people could be having fun playing that get left by the wayside. I hope as time goes on that yugioh players begin to act more like Magic commander players and just have conversations about power level and casual play.
I agree with this so much, and it's the reason I prefer 2008 - 2015 Yu-Gi-Oh. I still enjoy the modern game, but it was better when the game didn't end on turn 1 effectively. This also makes your opening hand and who wins the die roll much more important, which just makes the game more RNG.
Agree. That time period was peak yu-gi-oh. Sure there were times during that period where some formats were not as good. But overall it was a golden age.
@@umitencho The very fast pace comes from combo decks with enough negates to ensure otk turn 3. Usually the negates are the same monsters (baronne, appolousa,...)
The problem with the game is Link and XYZs because they allow you to pull monsters virtually out of thin air. Another big problem with them game is that you have a lot more cards that allow you to add cards to your hand with no costs and drawbacks. For example, you have spell cards that let you add a Ritual Monster and the Ritual Spell to your hand, so it's basically drawing two cards. I understand the older game needed just a tad bit more speed, but the game is so broken now that it's no longer fun. You just better hope you don't get OTK'd on the first turn.
One thing I recently noticed is that more and more spell/trap searchers are printed with effects that set those cards from the deck (sometimes even face-up) instead of adding them to the hand to avoid Ash Blossom
@@Ragnarok540 and for that reason collosous was banned and will have to be errata to even remotely be considered coming off the ban list. So his effect would have to be changed to effect both sides or have a once per turn prevention of searching of one card to make him able to come back. Personally I think just having a once per turn search stopping card effect would be the best way to solve his text to not be so op. just like kirin should be errata to only be able to bounce on your turn and it be a hard once per turn.
They can get the game back to full circle in terms of power creep. The 1st stage of yugioh was about big beaters and economical cards that took away cards from your opp or gained card advantage. The 2nd stage of yugioh had more toolbox removal effects specifically destruction. So to equalize the amount of destruction cards we had back in 2008-2010s we had more cards that floated to offset that power creep. Then 3rd stage of the game's evolution was about making more interruptions/negates and the card design to offset that power creep was cards like dark ruler/droplets/ talents, board breakers, kaijus, Now I think Konami still hasn't matured their offsetting for this 3rd wave of power creep. They need to create more cards that float or have additional utility effects that allow someone to skillfully maneuver around negate/interrupt boards so that decks that can grind and rebuild their board are the decks that have the advantage. Tears are a great example of this. Tears are a heavily interactive deck, only problem is it outclasses every other deck, but if every deck rose up to the level of Tears, we would have interaction that can still play through many disruptions and it would give more opportunities for the better player to make better decisions to affect the longer the game continues. The game of yugioh is just like a quickdraw gun fight instead of a sword wielding duel. It's all about who draws 1st blood, and despite any player skill differences you can still lose more often than not than a meta where you have more turns and opportunities to outplay your opponent.
I agree for the most part, but the thing i dont like for tear (and spright to a lesser degree) is that they dont only play around negates and interact a lot--they do so while building (or reinforcing) their own unbreakable board *during your turn* while youre trying to START building your own I dont really enjoy the idea of every deck playing all cards, constantly, to the point that turns dont actually matter
Personally, I believe the biggest issue with modern yu gi oh is the artificial prices of cards. It would be so easy for Konami to just print multiple rarities of cards in the same set
I agree with the printing, it's hard to argue against it when you go to Japan and see access code talker for 50p and even maxx c is affordable for a few £. I think they should print every card as a common from the start and include other rarities and have a collector's pack too. Price shouldn't be a barrier to entry for players who want to play.
I think the problem with modern Yu-Gi-Oh is you get way too much value off of in archetype starter cards. If your hand is Aluber + 4 random cards you have full combo. If you have spright starter + 4 cards that's full combo. Every good deck nowadays has a 1 or 2 card combo that also has a searcher and a searcher for the searcher which means you need less in engine cards to make a powerful board which means you have more room for generic hand traps and board breakers making your deck even more powerful. "Back in the day" if you wanted to play an otk strategy you would have to play few to no trap cards because you needed almost your whole hand to break your opponents board and push through your otk. If you played a control strategy your offensive power was low because you were running so many traps and one for one removal. Modern decks don't have to choose if they want to be otk or control oriented they can be it all.
I recently got back into the game after a decade+ of being away. I embraced all the new cards and changes that I experienced. Pendulum, links, xyz, I've played with and tested all I could get my hands on. What I find throughout it all though is that there are just some types/setups that allow for so much recursion, you basically have to play them to have a chance at anything. Which if those are your favorite cards, is great, because you can play them often and win condition on top of it. But if that isn't the case for you, your favorite cards or type of cards just get chewed up on the field. And there is only so much deck-building one can do against an objectively more powercrept deck. The factor of fun and cool is taking more of a backseat to the stun/lock/negate meta styles of today. Even card destruction effects are starting to lose It's oomph because protections prevent it from happening or the card will just return to the field momentarily. The ability to even set up a board or be able to do much against an established one is getting harder and harder.
Both this and the side channel have been such critical aspects of my work day. I adore listening to your insight while I work on office stuff. Thank you so much!
Generic extra deck monsters and power creep are the two biggest problems in Yugioh. Decks have no only lost their identity due to generic ED monsters making a lot of end boards similar, but it's also had a big impact on power creep, since new cards have to compete with the busted generics in the ED. Power creep is definitely a huge issue. It's one thing for a 2001 deck to be unable to compete with a 2023 deck, but we've gotten to the point where meta relevant decks from 2020 can't compete with 2023 decks.
with POTE bringing more main deck combo starter monsters with 3 or more effects, the future of the game is bleak. next thing we know, we are looking at the possibility of a combo starter with lv 1, 3k attack and 5 effects or a link 1 that can search Triple tactic thrust
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 i mean if you reached the point where ur opponent is going for accesscode, they were in a better position than you and you were not winning it anyway. the problem wouldnt be accesscode there, it is the fact that you lost control of the game.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 THANK YOU! I hate that virtually every deck can shit out a 5300atk Dark Armed from the extra deck that cannot be responded to. So often I just didn't have enough oomph to kill an opponent after breaking their board. And then they kill me through a board full of monsters and full lifepoints because Accesscode exists.
I think ishizuTear is the indication of where the game is going which is worrying. A deck with endless resources, powerful starters, able to go first or second and with very few weaknesses or areas where it can be blown out. It obviously needed the Ishizu cards to reach that level but eventually it'll be an in-archtype version which is terrifying. It's interesting when talking about hand traps being the first attempt to combat power creep, maybe that is the reason why I enjoy Dino Rabbit format so much (once they dealt with the hunter hand loop). I feel like that was a format where you could go first or second and still be in the game. Everyone played MaxxC, Effect Veiler, Dark Hole, Heavy Storm and Monster Reborn. All cards that were realistically great going second but the turn 1 boards weren't unbeatable. You also had such an array of tier 1 and tier 2 decks that made the format diverse enough that deck building was interesting since you had Dino Rabbit, Inzektor, Wind Ups, Chaos Dragon, Hero Beat, Hieratics, etc. You almost had a perfect balance of going first powerful starters, resource management and going second tools.
I'm not sure when it started but once the game went from"big guys go boom" and have a lot of damage on the board where battle phase actually matters to this devolved "how do I make my opponent not be able to play the game" that's when this game became less interactive and less fun. There is a reason why a lot of people are clamoring for legacy formats because it's a time in which Yu-Gi-Oh was a five to six turn game, and not a one to three to turn game. if you ask me, that basically happened when dragon ruler format happened, if not when necroz format happened. Because it became less about I have big guys that you have to beat over or destroy and it turned into non-targeting, destruction immune, negates that are just obnoxious. 5 maybe 10 years ago, nobody would have ever guessed that solemn judgment, raigek,i or change of heart would ever get unbanned or unlimited. now they are known as bad cards, well two of them are bad cards, and that speaks a lot of volumes to what this game is turned into
Because modern Yugioh's turn 1 threats nearly always come from the easy access Extra and turn 2 answers mostly come more randomly from the Main; going 2nd is significantly harder. Carefully designed answers from the Extra could help, partly because they'd be easier to access, but also as their inclusion means less space for threats, and less necessity on hand traps and board-breakers in the main.
I like to joke that one day we'll get "Extra Spells" (i.e., some way to activate spell cards out of the extra deck). I've never taken the idea seriously enough to wonder if it could actually help the game, but anything is possible.
@@MetallicityMore like Extra Traps. Konami could test the water by making a bunch of those belonging to a same archetype and all sharing a once per turn (something like "You cannot activate the effects of [archetype name] monsters for the rest of the turn")
I still think it's kinda incredible that ishizu tear was THE perfect deck, where its only big weakness was shifter and bystials, but anything else it could manage to survive and workaround. Just the fact that it had so much access to its engine on the opponent's first turn, could probably be a sign of what's to come for future archetypes. Personally I'm glad ishizu tear doesn't exist anymore at full power, because I didn't like how it restricted deck building so much, but I hope konami takes notes from ishizu tear on how to implement ways for deck to grind, play through floodgates and have interesting ways to fight back going second, that don't rely just on drawing blowouts or multiple handtraps
for meta i play kash-scarclaw, and 2 other variants i try to make, and or traditional kash, my rouge deck is gravekeepers, its so funny when i just put the enitre combo, shaman, necro, hidden temple, supernaturalis and some links and xyz are just freaking crazy watch how aloot of deck just surrnder, no special summon, all the graveyard banish, effect of the GY negated with the shaman,
Konami has basically the player base in some sort of arms race that doesn't stop. They first print handtraps that let you interact when going second, then they release call by the grave, to nullify that interaction. When it was at three I'm sure everyone who played decks that were hurt by handtraps, and I think most are, had three call by the grave in their decks.
honestly, this is the best video I've ever seen that discuss this topic with such clarity and impartiality, you analyzed the history of the meta game and the problems that went with it with a very interesting way, I'm definitely want more of these videos
The mystical deck you are wondering about that beats all the handtraps and all the boardbreakers is called tearlaments. It puts up multiple bosses and multiple backrow interruptions. It answers everything. Thats what a deck that answers every going second card looks like. It has strength in 3 areas after setting up. Hand, monsters, set spells and traps.
+ a loaded graveyard with interuptions (if we include the Ishizu stuff. I mean, come on, those were clearly designed as Tearlament support from the beginning), on-the-fly extension and follow-up.
Yea konami clearly designed em too powerful, YGO not ready for em yet lol, maybe in few years after they being powercreeped. Thats why they being murdered in all formats, excpt master duel. But it will too soon enough.
@Dimitri Le Pain I think they were actually meant to work with Vernusylphs specifically. They printed a bunch of Earth support (such as Naturia, Morphtronic, Amazoness, etc) all around the same time, across many products, similar to how they are releasing a ton of fire stuff and unbanning Blaster all at the same time in the OCG now. Like, they were excellent in Tearlaments, but I think that was somewhat incidental.
Tbh my biggest issue is the way that cards nowadays don't just have good effects, they have 2-3 good effects. It makes it so that the effect of one-off negates don't cut it anymore. So then they just escalate the offense then escalate the defense to deal with that. There needs to be some way to push things back towards multiple turn games that doesn't involve floodgates. There needs to be some way to bounce back on turn 3 and continue playing when your resources are spent.
Except that won’t work because we’ve seen “comeback cards” before and they often don’t stay comeback cards, they’re extenders. Soul charge is a great example. You pay LP to reborn an entire GY, but you don’t get your battle phase. But thats not going to be used on turn 3 to bring your board back, it’s going to be used on turn 1 to remake your board after a nib or to extend your plays after playing through handtraps. Giving you more advantage doesn’t work. What about taking away your opponent’s advantage? That’s what the blowout cards do. Evenly matched is quite literal with its name and even then it’s incredibly powerful. There is no way to make a viable comeback card. If it’s not useful in early turns, nobody will play it because it’s literally a brick until those later turns. Cards like that in an archetype are played at 1 or not at all, let alone generic cards. If it’s not effective, but can be played earlier, nobody will use it because it’s not strong enough. Yugioh has a very strong snowball when it comes to winning; the greater your advantage over the opponent, the exponentially better your chances of winning are. And quite frankly, that’s okay. We don’t need individual cards to bounce back with. You need decks that work well with keeping up their steam throughout the game. That’s the main issue with slower control and stun decks compared to combo. Combo can scrape their way back into the game because they’re designed to generate as much gas as possible with as few cards as possible. They can get stuff from the Gy, the deck, the banished pile, even the extra deck. Let’s also not forget float effects or backrow that gives protection or effects that prock when your cards go bye bye. Control doesn’t have that. Some decks have very good float effects, like krawler. Some decks have incredible flexibility with lots of floodgates, like subterror. Some make their backrow into even more effective cards by adding additional effects and triggering archetypal cards, like labyrinth and traptrix. But none of these decks can play through or stop the common blowouts to their deck. Dlink and swordsoul can make savage and baronne, but we won’t see a traptrix player combo out of their mind to end on either of those cards to answer the blowouts. If there was a control archetype that was both good and could play through or around common board breakers, they’d be a great deck.
I've been playing this game for 8 years now, and since then every year when a broken archetype or card is released, in the first few years I thought it couldn't get any worse, they wouldn't release a stronger archetype or card, and they always do, they don't know how much is enough. In my personal opinion, if the power ceiling of yu gi oh cards stayed the same as the toss format with decks like orcust without mermaid, salamangreat and sky striker, where there is a grind game and resource management matters, that would be great.
Aside from everything you just said, which I mostly agree with, another big one would be that the game is not beginner friendly and the community has to be more welcoming and friendly to new players in order to keep the game alive.
Most of the topics you touch on certainly hit home. Dang near spot on with some of my views. Some of it does rely on the players too though. The whole meta vs unmeta. I feel like meta players in general do have the options to break boards, have outs and in return also have those same unfun and un-interactive gameplay mechanics. And then you have me, who plays Ojamas, Crystal Beasts and Giant Ballpark on Master Duel. And somehow I consistently rank in Diamond, but I think that's because I'm forced to run Maxx C and Ash Blossom. To me, the fun in Yu-Gi-Oh is to find all of these weird and amazing strategies and make them work, but when you actually play the game, you only see maybe 150 cards? Like, my matches in Master Duel is really only 3 decks and with Tear, it's only 2 decks now. I can play a game with over 10,000 cards and only see 1 deck for 5 hours. The entire meta game is completely stale and the only time you see someone not running meta, it's because they're trying to counter the meta with other unfun cards. That's not to say I don't like modern Yu-Gi-Oh, far from it. I like Sky Strikers, I love Sprights, I don't even mind playing against Branded, but these top tier decks don't actually feel that dominant. My Ojama-ABC deck can consistently take wins against these guys. And that's fun. When the top tier meta isn't built around negate boards and are instead all about value generation, it becomes incredibly fun to play and play against. These are the meta decks that allow me to get addicted to this game for 12-14 hours on my day offs.
I'm someone who came back into the game at late 2015, after a 10 year hiatus, and observing deck building mentality and card design from that time until today, I noticed that a lot of powerful cards no longer have an adequate cost of drawback in comparison to the power they have. The first negation on an extra deck boss monster, Quazar, required a synchro tuner and 2 non-tuner synchro monsters, now you have a synchros like Borreload Savage Dragon or Baronne that simply require a generic tuner and a generic non-tuner to make, and they are omni negates to boot where a card like Crystal Wing was monster negate only. Mechaba is a boss monster I see as good card design as it is 1 normal summon = 1 negate and it is a negate that requires a specific discard, which makes it break even and not generate advantage to the boss monsters that negate and destroy. That is another design choice I have my gripe with, monster summoned from the extra deck that negates should not remove the monsters they negate. Then you have cards like Apollousa that needlessly increase the ceiling of decks or insulate decks against interaction. Another problem is the critical mass of generic powerful turn 1 monsters in the extra deck. The first time this actually became a problem was with PePe, a deck that was able to summon those monsters from the extra deck during the first turn and make an unbreakable board. Unfortunately the problem was laid primarily at the feet of PePe's main deck and not the monsters in the extra deck it summoned and Konami continued printing powerful turn 1 boss monsters, and making them generic. If these monsters were not generic, but locked within their archetype then this would not have been a problem. The monsters that you want to have as generic are the toolbox monsters, not the boss monsters. When it comes to the extra deck, Konami needs to be much more pro-active with the banlist and ban cards like Apollousa, Baronne, Borreload Savage Dragon, Accesscode Talker and Zeus to lower the ceiling of this game, instead of having them linger around, and stop making more cards like them. It doesn't matter if your deck can go +10 on turn 1 and play through 4 hand traps, if what your deck can end on is limited by what you can make from the extra deck. The less generic boss monsters in the extra deck, the lower the ceiling of that deck will become. If Konami wants to continue selling generic turn 1 boss monsters, then they should not have proactive quick effects effects like Baronne but reactive effects like Stardust Dragon or the new Gate Guardian boss monster, effects that respond to your opponent interacting with your board.
The Problem I see specificly is , to make a very old school example: If I run into a mirror force or man eater bug : That was my choice. I saw a set card, I took that risk during my turn to potentialy trigger it but until I actualy chose to interact with those cards, I could still actualy play the game. There was a interaction there. But with modern ED cards and hand traps? For Hand traps, you had no real way of seeing that coming ( Besides well just assuming everyone plays handtraps of course) or with generic negating ED card boards where theres n nothing realy I do during my turn that I could point to and say: "Jup I allowed my opponent to trigger that effect by doing X or Y" because they basicly just fry whatever you throw out. The only out Iyou had was using your own negates in the form of hand traps during their turn before that board ever came up or having the hand traps to counter their negates. Wich then is a gamble regarding if you draw any as even if they were easily searchable... again theres a bunch of negates for everything likely already on the board so whatever you could use to search for a hand trap... wont go through.
@@Eagle93Writer That's true, to keep the speed of the current game we'd need to be able to combo/setup with handtraps (basically give some semi-generic (to avoid printing 1000 new cards) Havnis to everyone).
Really good video. I think the hardest problem YGO has to deal with right now is that its speed and power creep choices are almost unanswerable without making a huge and massive change - no matter what you do, things will make someone mad. I come from other games where I feel like the only thing that can really allow for a massive power level decrease is something like a major rules change or a rotation, but even then I have to admit that when games rotate their power levels to be way lower a lot of people get frustrated even if there remains an "eternal" format where people can still play all their old cards. Konami seems more interested in constantly inventing new alternate formats that start from 0 like Duel Links, Speed Duels, and even Rush Duels, and I think so long as they do that they're probably gonna run on the idea of just power creeping "real yugioh" until it stops working finally, without much of a plan for what they're gonna do when that happens. I think that Tear Ishizu was a sign that we're gonna hit a new era where every deck is like that and the entire game becomes the first turn with both players able to play, and then after that, who knows what's going to happen. Very curious to see what happens next.
Back in the days when Pot of P was over 100 buckets, lol, since that i always build only rogue decks, cheap and fun sometimes. Fun fact: TCG Accesscode is minimum 40 buckets when in ocg u can buy it for 4 buckets or low sometimes
My biggest hope for yugioh is that someday Konami starts to print every card as a common in the set and then we would have rarities and alt arts in the same set of some of those cards instead of how we currently have to hunt for the high rarity cards to even play the new archtypes. it would be amazing to be able to own 3,4,5 or even 6 decks and switch up every week at locals if you feel like it.
I mean, OCG Yugioh is almost this way, but decks like kashtira are the best example that they bump up the rarities in the TCG on purpose. It's sad, but Konami is a well known money hungry pachinko/gambling overlord in the east for a reason...
@@soaprobot3609 Is not on purpose. Blame the correct people: TCG players. At some point we had the same exact set as OCG. Game was dying in TCG, casually after introducing chase cards like Heraklinos, dark armed dragon, eradicator virus, etc. Sales started ramping up. OCG players buy a bunch of packs no matter how bad the set is, TCG players only buy packs when you are guaranteed decent pulls like gold series. This changes the way they have to print the game in TCG. Do you want cheaper cards? Buy more packs at retailers. Change the behaviour where vendors are the ones opening packs
For me the biggest issues are just the way cards are designed leading to going first becoming OVERWHELMINGLY strong. This has trickled down to a million "necessary evils" that act like poor band-aid fixes for deeply systemic issues with the way Konami makes cards. Handtrap, floodgates, unresponsive board breakers, and etc have to exist because of the massive advantage turn 1 player has, but since there's nothing stopping the turn 1 player from using these things to their full potential as well, it just makes the problem worse. Another problem that's separate from balancing issue (but still goes back to poor card design), is that no one at Konami cares about how it actually FEELS to have to play against certain strategies and they are way more concerned about whether the cards will sell packs or not. A modern example is of Course Kash. That deck is not enjoyable to have to play against whatsoever. Its designed in a way that leads to most games being decided by a coinflip and whether or not the opponent had something like sphere mode in thier hand. Its a deck that guarantees (lose or win) that you WILL NOT have an interesting game of Yugioh and decks like it are becoming more and more common(scythe, floo, runick) . Both of these problems lead right into something else. IT FEELS BAD TO LOSE IN THIS GAME. Nearly every time you lose its because your opponent either set up so much interaction that you cant feasibly play through it or they flip a funny purple card that just locks you out of playing that game. this entire game feels like its designed around the idea that "only the person winning should be allowed to interact with or enjoy that game" and more often than not its whoever is allowed to go first.
Prob only new master rule can fix this game. The ones that actually trying to slow the game down. Limiting what ppl can do in 1 turn, activating effects limit or special summon limit etc, at least for few first turns, then u can be free vomiting all ur stuffs on turn 4-5 or something. Something for konami to think carefully about i guess. Or....they will just keep doing what they do atm. Releasing powerfuk turn 1 decks, then ban em, then release board breaker, handtrap and floodgates in between as bandaids.
That's what I miss. I'm not saying yugioh was perfect and the fundamental design kinda just came back to haunt the game. I just wish the game encouraged actually feeling like a battle with strategy focus. I liked the anticipation that yugioh builds with its face down card mechanics. It's very unique game that I hope doesn't die out.
I think at this point, it's very hard to go back in design philosophy. We are at a point where every single engine card in your hand will do a lot for you, and it's very hard to formulate rules that would restrict your access to the cards in your hands. And the core problem is, in the end, simply that too much revolves around turn 1. This is definitely a big issue that's very hard to tackle, but I have a few hot takes that I would at least consider. Least hot take: Going second player starts with 6 cards in hand and also doesn't draw for turn. That way, you will more consistently see handtraps that stop your opponent; you are more likely to see e.g. Nib + Imperm, you also don't draw Nib for turn anymore. Mid hot take: The above, but combine with Mulligan only for the second player. However, I can totally see that what would happen here is that we simply move the power of the first turn from the going first player to the going second player, i.e. games are still decided on turn 1/2, we just move the weight more towards going second instead of going first. Therefore: Hot take: Reduce starting hand sizes to 3 or 4 (potentially combined with my least hot take, i.e. going second player gets the extra card). This would hugely offset the balance of the game, as you are less likely to see e.g. certain starter cards, but it also means that hands are more likely to run out of gas against fewer interactions since you draw fewer extenders, and this goes for both sides (i.e. the going second player will also lose steam more quickly against fewer interactions). This would (probably) force the game to be far slower. Other side effects: decks with 1 card combos would be better, especially in a top decking situation. I think this might actually be worth a shot. Take I personally don't really like: Make every new deck like Tear. The result is that turn 1 and 2 are super interactive, however, I really think this would overload the interactions in this game. Going to chain link 5 or higher on a regular basis is, to me, not fun to play or watch and makes the game even more inaccessible to new players.
I think using "fair" and "unfair" is also something that constantly changes for each card because it depends on the format. Like if my opponent is playing a goat deck then tenki-bear-pop would be extremely unfair, but then from 2015 that just didn't do anything.
I think what YGO really need is different formats just like MTG. You could have something like: Standard: The most popular format where only cards printed/reprinted in the last 4 box releases are permitted. Modern: The current YGO format. Legacy: YGO with no ban list. All formats would also have their own ban lists (except legacy in my example). That way, you could pick your favorite format, a faster or a slower one. Also, that solves the power creep problem, since the standard would only be the last 4 releases, Konami wouldn't have to power creep all collections before to make players buy the new set. That also solves players' burnout: when you get tired of seeing Kash every single match, you just hop into a different format. Anyways, those formats I've listed are just an example, I'm sure people in chat can come up with smarter ideas, but I do believe this would make yugioh a better game.
i think tier-based formats would be better (like OU, RU formats in Pokemon Showdown, without considering the year in which the card was printed, but only considering how it would affect the game), but it's probably hard to analyze all cards of evey archetype and non
I completely agree that there being so much emphasis on the first turn is a core issue with the game. I myself have wondered if a lot of that could be rectified by increasing the total life points to say 10,000, maybe even 12,000. If you can survive being attacked by 3x 3000 attack monsters (which I'd say feels like an average amount of damage a good deck can put out) then you will need to consider your follow up plays more. Of course we'd need to ban cards like Ancient Leaf, but that's quite easy. Bumping up the starting life points just seems like a nice straight forward fix that wouldn't require a huge, sudden shift in game design or an acpocalypic ban list. I'd say a good example of this would be the gimmick puppet lock in Branded. That play would be far less devastating when it succeeds if Branded didn't immedaitely OTK you on the next turn.
Slight LP increase wont change game at all tbh, they wont really change how u play the game. Unless u make pretty big jump of LP. Like 20k++ then there might be some difference even then i still doubt.
doesn't do anything. even if the number is let's say 50k lp, it means nothing, because card advantage and boardstate means everything. if i have 3 negations up that can negate each turn, and you have no cards on hand or field and no ignitions in gy, it doesn't matter how many turns pass, i will win the game
I had a match with a friend a few days ago he was on Dinos and I was using Dark World…after 3 games I felt sick at how disgusting dark worlds are also my friend wasn’t having fun (I also did the hand loop) so I went to Labyrinth x Dinomorphia…after putting up skill drain(the card and the boss monster) 3 games in a row I swapped to Exosisters…he actually had a good time which I was glad
Ok I'm gonna spit out my thoughts before listening to your takes so I can compare and maybe hear something I didn't think about. -Going 1st is generally too powerful, being able to set up something your opponent needs a specific out in order to play makes little sense and makes the game "not fair" -In order to fix the first issue you have to go even worse with the "unfair" state of the game printing cards that are able to address the board your opponent can set up, so the gamestate becomes "Ok I draw my out I win because if I Evenly/Duster/Dark Ruler my opponent he is gonna have a really hard time to come back into the game or I just instascoop" -Broken cards for going 1st are even a bigger problem because once I know my matchup after siding I can just instawin with stuff like Anti-Spell or Skill Drain -Enablers are fuckin crazy, every time a card like Isolde, Fiber, Chaos Ruler, Kitkallos, Auroradon, Linkross, Mermaid or Elpy is prevalent in the meta you know that some crazy bullshit is right around the corner -Tools are just too generic and flexible, look at how many decks could fit the Brave engine or Runick, or how control decks can just play almost every Floodgate because the strategy usually revolves around turboing out a boss Monster that does 90% of the work for the Archetype, or even Extra Deck stuff, like why Accescode Talker or Borrelsword can give a guaranteed win con to every deck? -Card design is very lazy in general. Every deck, even the ones with cool gimmick in paper like Floo (the migration of birds that return to your hand) or Dinomorphia are kinda flat because they just put a giant Skill Drain boss monster on field that like 95% of archetypes got as lecacy support or payoff for their combo -We have too many counter to the counter kind of effects. Really why stuff like Called By The Grave or Crossout is even allowed to exist in the first place? -The game is hard. For a returning/new player learn the rules, the interactions, the combos, the activation conditions of some cards and all the other shananigans is just very difficult and you kinda need some preparation to get into the game, I don't think it's possible to just go to a local and straight up play the game for the first time and not get a million warnings or look at your opponent and going like "what the hell is happening here?"
Amazing video, i see a lot of people being angry at combo decks and board it makes. However, every time i play sky strikers, deck without floodgates and plan to outresource opponent; they still complain about how it is worst deck ever to play against. People will complain whatever the current state of Yu-Gi-Oh is.
I've been saying since 2020 that powercreep in yugioh has accelerated to a point where new archetypes are so fast and so resourceful that they're close to the breaking point. There's virtually no cost anymore and every deck can do everything. If Konami (or the community) doesn't rein the game in a little bit, soon everyone will be making combos without even using the field or GY or banished zone. And then what?
Let's start prefacing with the statement that game design and game balance are not easy things to get right, so anyone that thinks there's a easy fix to those problems, think harder. With that said, I see 2 main problems with Yugioh: 1. Yugioh is too reliant on specific outs. That's a problem that is not exclusive to Yugioh, if I'm playing Hearthstone I may make a board where my opponent has to draw a specific removal spell to survive, but since most minions don't have a lot of protection and are reliant on their health, you can counter boards in a variety of ways, you can make a board of your own to contest the opponent's board, you can use single-target removal, AoE spells or more expensive mass removal, you can use minions with efficient Battlecries or with Rush, etc. With the exception of combo decks, usually there's a pletora of ways to deal with what your opponent throws at you, and the best players know how to get creative and best use their resources. The luck of the draw still plays a role in the game, but you're usually not reliant on drawing a single out. Yugioh on the other hand, is somewhat problematic, in that you're reliant on drawing specific outs. Cards like Lava Golem exist because you usually cannot out a board with engine alone, and because you have so few of those cards in your deck they have to be so powerful to be worth it, but having your chances of playing rely solely on if you draw the out or not is not fun or skillful gameplay. If you could contest whatever your opponent is doing with your own engine, then handtraps and going second cards becomes way less of a necessity, which is why Runick decks can get away with very few non-engine, as a lot of their engine can be used as removal. Having the extra deck as a toolbox is a potential way to minimize that problem, but when you're opponent is able to set up properly, chance are that they're going to interrupt you before you can get to your ED. 2. Decks are unidimensional. Now, this doesn't apply to all decks, but most archetypes have a set combo they go for that you always do. In other card games, is usual that you adapt your play and strategy to best counter whatever the opponent is playing, whatever cards you drew and maybe play around some outs, but in a lot of Yugioh decks that's not possible, you either play the standard combo or you make a objective weaker board, so most decks don't have a option to adapt, they either work or they don't, you either brick or you don't, your opponent either has the out or he doesn't, there's no in-between. Even Kashtira, that currently has the whole dilemma of playing around Nibiru or not, usually feels like is just sheer luck what the best way to play is, as you can't really know what outs your opponent has, but a lot of decks can't even do that much.
I think there heading in a really good direction with the structure decks, the recent ones have been really good. I do think they need to support older formats though, some people don’t want to deal with the complexity of the modern game and they never will it’s that simple.
6:36 I agree 100%. With such a weak format as we are in right now, for the middle pack decks to be able to keep up, they have to rely on lots of handtraps and floods. Good examples of decks like that are the one card cyberse decks(Mathmech and Marincess). If Mathmech didn't have the ability to play 15 handtraps and rivalry, the deck would be utterly unplayable. If Marincess wasn't able to play 15 handtraps and gozen match, it would be garbage tier unplayable.
4 am will watch fully in morning, just some off the top of my head. Banlists often times miss key elements, banlists often times have cards that, 1 or 3 (beatrice, infernity archfiend, miragestallio etc *yes stallio is free now*) change nothing, or cards that are still locked up in the tcg, despite having a decade of freedom in the other region (Zenmaity is banned in a world Gigantic Spright exists) the "whenever we want" is also insane that they can get away with that. Product availability in certain regions, Australia still doesn't have the most recent ots, which is nearing 2 months of age. Card availability, cards are all rarity bumped to hell and back for the consuuumers instead of for the players, perhaps while we have the 25th secrets, they may actually be *somewhat* alleviating compared to the ocg, who frankly speaking have higher end cards than we do, but then also have 5 aud baronnes.
it used to be difficult to bring out boss monsters pre 5ds era but now you get multiple turn 1, the problem with yu-gi-oh is way to many things going on and not enough counters to go around making the game horribly unstable
My current issue with modern Yugioh is having to sit down and just watch somebody play by themselves for 5 minutes on turn one and then flood the board. I’m sure I sound like a boomer but this new style of yugioh just isn’t fun to me. I don’t mind losing but I gotta be able to participate in the actual duel.
Biggest problems are omninegate bossmonsters that every deck can summon, preventing your enemy from using their field zones and that there’s no real back and forth anymore. You either win on your first turn or you scoop
i think seeing more in-archetype handtraps that play on your opponent's first turn could REALLY help with this, like rescue-ace impulse or tearlaments havnis. this way, decks could inherently be designed to go second a little easier, i think? it's one of the things people liked most about tear format, that really the only deciding factor between going first or second was who made abyss dweller
Those decks did too much in a single turn though, so they don't really fit the criteria of allowing say, slower decks where you set normal traps, etc etc, to play without floodgates. They are more of a bandaid idea than anything.
Havnis is one of the things people hated about tear format. In archetype handtraps are fine, like kelbek is a fine in archetype handtrap. But the shear inconsistency about havnis is what made it awful. Your opponent could mill no names, or your opponent could mill 2+ names and you just lose because of that.
My biggest problem with modern yugioh is the Auto-win cards. Over the past recent years konami has both unlimited/printed a lot of ridiculously powerful board breakers, and also unlimited some of the older floodgates like dimensional fissure, macro, skill drain, etc. All of these can create non-games and remove the healthy back and forth. I honestly think that if they banned lightning storm, evenly, duster, and even raigeki (and probably a couple others im not remembering), the game would be much better. Same goes for either banning or re-limiting the floodgates that they unlimited for no good reason. None of these cards are particularly meta defining, aside from maybe evenly matched and duster, but none of them create healthy gamestates when they resolve. I also really despise the design of the positive feedback loop cards. Mo Ye is always my go to since that card is a plus 3 when not interacted with, but is just as easy to stop as any other generic normal summon. Card design like that forces you to play cards that "negate" on your turn 0, where your opponent can generate a second full hand of cards just because you didn't draw a hand trap. And if you did, they get none/less of those resources.
Finally a good comment on this section. I would just add that along with banning these auto-win cards, they need to make archetypes with a much lower ceiling, either in power (interruptions, negates and card advantage), or in resilience, so it is not necessary to have at least 2 cards of non-engine to be able to play, as Josh himself said, current decks are made to play for multiple interruptions turn 1. Both reducing auto-win cards and lowering the cap need to be implemented together.
Both floodgates and board breakers need to be as powerful as they are (or maybe even more for board breakers) to combat nowdays power lvl and speed of the decks. So they all needed for modern YGO. If u want ban em all, u need to really create new master rule that limiting ehat ppl can do, especially first few turns and really slow the game down.
I love your second channel. I never have time to watch your streams, because of university, but im very interested in competetive yugioh. Your content gives me so much knowledge about the game thanks for that. In German: Bildungsauftrag Erfüllt
Haven't watched the video yet. But the new/returning player experience is so hard. I topped regional and a ycs back in the day and I have been working to come back for 6 months. It's still impossible to understand all the interactions. The game has so many game actions and little interactions. The game isn't that much different then summon laggia set 4 pass and you just lose... but it takes 10 minutes of tiny interactions to get to a comparable board.
I feel like Yugioh's card pool has reached a critical mass which means if they made newer, slower archetypes the game would probably find an older strategy that was just better. It's also a reason I think most archetypes are too reliant on archetype specific cards or are now centered around smaller card pools, like spright being level 2, Kashtira being psychic, or swordsoul being wyrms
Personally, for me, a big problem with modern YGO is the amount of luck needed to play a game is too high sometimes. Regardless of whether you and your opponent is playing combo or floodgate, You always need to open both engine and interation, or lack of better term "the nuts" in the first 2 turns in order to have good interactive games. Otherwise you could end up having a one-sided game, and the same is applied to your opponent. I've always enjoyed games where me and my opponent were going off in my locals, but never enjoyed either opening no handtraps or opening no engine.
I think this partially comes back to the 2-3 turn game to some degree. Hand luck is so crazy in yugioh because you just don't get turns to draw card. Cards also need to make an immediate impact on the game it's so easy to brick on even relatively solid cards because they need to make an immediate impact you can't save that card until the time is right, it's do or die from turn 1.
To be fair there was a huge amount of luck involved in old Yu-Gi-Oh with praying you draw the pot of greed/graceful charity/BLS/the summoning materials for it.
A year on and the problem is worse the condensation of all decks into a mono turn 1 spam style is pretty much complete and rogue or casual players are tired and leaving for less oppressive games. Out of the 5 card shops in my city 4 are gone no one plays anything but casual friend vs friends or something like that no one is interested as far as I can see in my local scene which is concerning to see.
Only halfway of video and this is very good take from u as usual. Those blowout cards and oppresive floodgates are necessary to the game now more than ever before coz game speed is being too fast right now, adn those card helps slow down a game a bit to some extent, and punish turn 1 players. At this point too late to slow game down, maybe need new master rule that limits what players can do on few first turns. Limit special summons / effect activated, that maybe a start. If not, well just keep making bandaids like floodgates and blowout cards also can i guess, like they have done for years now
Limiting extra deck summons make more sense since these (outside of fusion which requires a spell) are free ways to turn multiple monsters into 1 like a tribute summon.
Returning player here (after 18 years). The issues for me personally are that 1 turn can be 15 min +, unbreakable board, and literally one type of deck regardless of the archetype (combo). There are no aggro and mid-range styles of play and it's literally all combo control style that tries to set up the same type of board with omni-negates. Also, on the company side of things are blatant greed by crazy power creeping to sell sets (literally banned Tearlament because it was destroying the upcoming Kash supports in OCG). The community is saying that set rotations are dumb, but fail to see that we are pretty much in a set rotation because in order to play "competitively" you need to use the newer archetype. It just creates an illusion of choice but in order to be competitive you have to get the newer set. (Tears, Kash, Spright, and Branded) Not to mention the rarity bumps from OCG to TCG to boost sales. At this point, I think the only thing that will make the game more fun will be Master Duel because it will allow Konami to pool all the communities together so it will be big enough to host legacy formats for a variety of play styles. Also, not to mention this will also generate way more money for Konami.
Would…would you rather they have not banned Tear? Banning a Tier 0 deck inherently boosts sales, because it makes the game more fun to play. If you want to say it’s bad on that basis, then you’ve exited the realm of ideas that purport to describe reality.
Honestly, some of my most enjoyable games have been when I’ve gotten evenly matched after creating an unbreakable board pretty much. I don’t have any more resources and he can’t do a whole lot and this kind of brinks brings it back to old-school Yugi.
11:19 THIS. Combo going first be like this. You never know what opponent has on their hands so you have to summon negates as much as you can COPE that some will survive from Kaiju, LarvaG, or Ra ball.
I think the ideal game would be something like 6-7 turns, each player has about 3-4 turns to play. Also, on game design, Eldlich and Branded triggering most of their resource management effects during the End Phase are IMO a clear design attempt to slow the game down artificially (imagine all branded extra-deck monsters triggering immediatly). Since those two decks were highly succesful, I would not find it strange if Konami kept playing with decks that while really strong, have slower trigger effetcts (next standby, ep, opponents x phase, etc)... This would maybe help extend the average game from turns 2-3 to 4-5, which would be a win already I guess. EDIT: I think make decks resource intensive (like Eldlich), but not so powerful (like Branded, Tear, etc), and then both players will play a longer game.
To be honest, I think Mathmech post Cyberstorm Acess has really high potential to play around almost everything. Just like tear back in the day, putting up layered interruptions is so strong and Mathmech (thanks to the new cyberse support) can now use every recourse available in the game. Interruptions in hand/field/gy and backrow. :D
@@6210classick the new "firewall defenser" is a great one card starter for the deck + "cyberse sage" and "cyberse disabwurm" not only give you access to a 4 Negate "Dark fluid dragon", the fusion "cyberse disabwurm" also provides a spell trap negate that can be used from the graveyard. + not having to play I:P to end on a decent endboard makes you play around Talents (Talents cooks mathmech so hard if you play anything thats not heatsoul pass)
@@alexanderpech7302 the new "firewall defenser" is a great one card starter for the deck + "cyberse sage" and "cyberse disabwurm" not only give you access to a 4 Negate "Dark fluid dragon", the fusion "cyberse disabwurm" also provides a spell trap negate that can be used from the graveyard. + not having to play I:P to end on a decent endboard makes you play around Talents (Talents cooks mathmech so hard if you play anything thats not heatsoul pass)
I agree with your points. They definitely need to slow the game down a bit and add a way to sandbag players from comboing all the way similar to how other cards games have resources such as mana to do so. The change in card design with a lot of cards being able to be used only once per turn was a step in the right direction imo. Sometimes I wonder if the speed counters in the anime duels could be the solution as that could be a form of resource that limit too much cards being played and if they design it right, there should be a balance of counter generation and cards that use said counters so that they can be played...
As a “Yugi boomer”, my biggest problem is how “slowly speedy” the current game is. I want a genuinely slower game but not in the way the current game is played where we sit around and wait for our opponent to take 5 minutes comboing out a full board and it’s still only their first turn. I want that 5 minutes to consist of a lot more back and forth. Maybe it’s my ignorance to how the current game is played and I’m sure my skill level plays a part but it’s just nowhere near as fun as it used to be because of this shift.
There are 2 solutions to this problem : - nerfing decks that take shit ton of time - giving most decks the ability to play turn 0 I prefer the 2nd option
This is why I always go to bat for stun or control decks. Combo decks have far and away taken off as the most popular ones, and I wouldn’t mind it so much if players of those decks didn’t turn around and vilify decks that don’t match up well with theirs. I play Snake Eyes too, but I also love to play Runick because I don’t always want to set up a big stupid board of beatsticks.
In modern YGO every single "problem" card of today is just a solution to a problem card of yesteraday and sometimes I dread of what tomorrow will bring.
Thank for this discussion Josh! What I find interesting is that there are a lot of videos and articles popping up about issues of modern yugioh. Moist Critical had an interesting reaction video up a few days ago. I think that whatever opinion you have, it’s quite objectively true that the state of yugioh and possible problems of the tcg is a topic that is gaining attention as more people talk about that topic.
Yeah, even up to today, the devs of YGO have been entirely reactionary to their own missteps. The almost lack of rules and complete open-endedness of the game just gravitates towards explosive turn 1. The game is mostly built on the exceptions in the rules text of various monsters/spells/traps and not from any inherently interesting rules interactions. Devs have no other knobs to tweak than to just release better card that beats last year's card, which just exacerbates power creep, complexity creep, and 'speed' creep. I personally don't see a permanent solution that isn't just 'make a new game' when there's no inherent penalty to overusing resources. This is why I think Konami JPN have Rush Duel now.
New master rule maybe? Severely limiting what ppl can do in few first turns. That could slow down the game, tho im not sure whats the best way of doing it.
Most games don’t have “inherently interesting rules interactions”. You generally don’t want those in card games. You want interesting card interactions and strategy interactions, and Yugioh has generally delivered on that very well. It’s also worth noting that the people designing most cards are at Konami of Japan. TCG exclusives generally show much better design than OCG cards, and TCG banlists are generally much better at dealing with problems than OCG banlists (which have left broken and unfun cards like Gumblar legal far after they should’ve been banned). EDIT: “TCG exclusives generally shown” -> “TCG exclusives generally show”
@@cephalosjr.1835 Let me clarify what I mean by 'rules interactions' (I probably should have said something like 'Rules based Interactions'). If you were to strip a game down to it's barebones (ex: french vanilla creatures, basic lands, & simplest instant/sorceries for MtG) it's still interesting to play because the rules of the game motivate dynamic strategies. That's what I mean. I find YGO is the opposite, where the strategy of the game comes almost exclusively from the exceptions produced by card effects. The interesting parts of the game are X hand trap exists, I must play around it, or Z boss monster invalidates some part of my strat. I will concede the extra deck has been an inherent dynamic mechanic (I love the level management Synchros/XYZ introduced to the game). This all to say that designing this game is weirdly tough because. . . I feel like the devs have no choice but to pile on these powerful warping cards to make the game interesting, there is nothing to downscale to. The game would be less cool if these busted cards didn't exist and warp things around them. Konami understood that and has made it the central appeal of the game for almost a decade now.
@@TheNotableNobody This is a feat of insight, and I thank you for sharing it with me. What I was mostly disagreeing with were the ideas that the game devs don’t have design levers and knobs that don’t induce powercreep and that there’s no inherent penalty to overusing resources. For the second one, there actually is an inherent penalty: If you use a resource, you lose it and so can’t use it again. The game does have attrition, it just takes place over the course of a few turns rather than, like, 10. For the first, game developers in general can’t avoid powercreep: If you print cards that aren’t entirely competitively unplayable, they will fit into some deck, increasing its power, and powercreep will have occurred. Yugioh devs also don’t just release cards that are better than last year’s; OCG releases a lot of archetypes that aren’t clearly better than last year’s meta and also aren’t terrible, and TCG exclusives almost never cause power sprint. EDIT: That said, I do think OCG devs have problems with going over the power level they’re targeting. That along with letting their mistakes stay for too long shows a worrying lack of skill at balancing.
(Please forgive me, the spacing of this post is a little wonky and I'm working on editing it.) This turned way longer than I intended, but I just wanted to say, I love the fact you are bringing this topic to light in a constructed and educated way. You give fair points to both sides and are not biased in your constructed criticism. I am personally of the opinion that I find the game not to be fun anymore, given the importance of the first turn, and that's okay, we can disagree on certain aspects of the game but so long as we can understand one another that is what truly matters. My hopes for the game personally are (and yes this might be a hot take) to really dial back what decks are able to do on their first turn, targeting the end result of what you go up against. And exactly like you said when you deal with the main issues the side issues or band-aids that were created to deal with that main issue can be addressed as well. Without writing a full essay I think what is most difficult for players is identifying what the real problem is. And that in order to really fix these issues you cannot take just one single action but multiple things have to be changed to get the result you wish for. (I will touch on this at the end) My personal wish for the game is that we could return to a speed and level of interaction during the first half of the Arc V Era, the area of time from Duelist Alliance to till the end of the Nekroz format. This was a point and time when decks were fast, but not too fast, they were able to float into other cards or gain back resources rather well or even have effects that activated in the grave to give you more options to a card after it was destroyed, but all of this did not happen in the first turn of the game but over the course of several turns going back and forth with the opponent. But hand traps were powerful but they could not truly shut off a deck's ability to play, it might have been greatly hindered, but you were most likely not going to lose if you got Vielered, or dare we say it (Maxx C ed). (Personal take here) This was a time before kaijus, Ash and Imperm, Dark Ruler and Nibiru, or omni negating extra deck monsters such as Borreload Savage or Apoulsa and personally, I find the exclusion of such cards to be much more enjoyable.(and Yes I understand that there were still extra deck negating monsters and I'm not saying those were fine back then, they were not, but they were much less prevalent in that era of the game, not every deck made a Herald or a Hope Harbinger, this could happen but it was not the gameplan of every deck to outright negate the opponent's board and kill them next turn) But I will not lie, compared to what decks do nowadays, this is child's play, the idea of playing Dante and setting some cards is unthinkable when you can just play your entire hand on your first turn. Players have gotten used to doing more and more with their decks and simply because their cards do more because they HAVE to do more because the game realistically will not last as long as it once did. To be frank, if the options are there the players will use them. I'm not saying it's useless to talk about these issues, far from it, but Konami and their design team really are in charge of this issue. And to be fair their band aid fixes only go so far. The introduction of hand traps and board breakers are these band aids in order to handle the unchanged might that is made from decks establishing multiple negates on their first turn or flipping floodgates to gain an advantage in their favor. But in order for this discussion to happen fans need to listen to one another and not dismiss another's opinion on the matter. There is a big divide between the casual and competitive players in this game and it's pretty sad. Players will just jump to conclusions about the opponent's viewpoints and joke about it and that gets us nowhere. Causal players want to interact in the game they enjoy, if they are left sitting there for 5 minutes, either facing down a board of negates, getting their zones locked, having an opponent play on their turn and chain locking them out of their own card's effects, can you blame them for not "enjoying" this? I don't think so. Their only option is to change their deck into something that is better equipped to handle these decks and have to auto-include 9+ hand traps or multiple going second cards just to have a chance on their first turn. This cuts them out of playing their favorite decks and strategies because they simply are not good enough. And there is no place for these lower-powered decks, there is no real format where you can play decks that are not the top ends of the meta and not get stomped. I personally love coming up with fan-made formats to help fill a need I see in the game. But if we as players cannot come together and listen to each other constructively and give honest critiques of the problems the game faces at hand, then the game may just continue down the same road its been going down and the gap between the two fan bases will grow wider and wider. Simply put, I'm a casual fan that just wants to have a few back-and-forth turns with the opponent, (actually having the game go beyond the third turn, or the game not decided by sometimes the first turn). To have each deck have its own identity and have our boss monsters be the focal point of our deck's strategy. Not to have every single card we play negated and have different and interesting game states and a multitude of possible answers at our disposal TLDR: Loved your video! While I may have some disagreements I agree with you 95%! We need to get yugioh fans talking about this and actually have constructive conversations! Not just slinging insults at one another or not being open to the other's viewpoints! Have a great day everyone and go enjoy yugioh, in your own way!
Thank you Josh for every content that you creat! And especially thanks for those kinda videos because ist is always a pleasure to hear your thoughts about yugioh in general!
i think that a way to fix the power of a single turn is just to substantially raise the life point counter. if people could not OTK then holding cards for followup turns/plays would be more valuable
How much more tho? Even 20k LP not mean much nowdays if u cant play through opp combo board / floodgated and no outs. Nowdays vomitting 8k on board not that hard, 20k prob just make u live for another 1 turn. If u mean like 50k LP maybe i agree lol. Edit: 50k is absurd now i think about it lmao. But yea at least 20k+ maybe good idea if u want to really slow down the game.
This actually drastically changes whats viable since OTKing suddenly becomes impossible. Consider that there are numerous decks with alt wincons rn, eg. kashtira and runick.
Ayo, Josh, can we maybe get a Tear equivalent of that Spright video you made for MD? I really enjoyed seeing you think about the bo1 format and the different banlist, and also loved seeing you notice the Maxx C bounce with frog. Enjoy your vacation, king
I know you are talking about Yu-Gi-Oh in a whole with all the cards released but right now the feeling of tear coming out in master duel has shifted so much. I feel like you either have to play it or play a complete counter to it. Maybe bc I'm not as good as the game but it just feels oppressive
RE; Decks becoming faster and faster - I will say that I think they had a good idea for a "bandaid fix" with the more recent design philosophy of hard once per turn effects on basically everything. Decks like branded have a built in limit to how much shit they can do a turn and a lot of the interactions they set up aren't hugely oppressive effects like omni-negates or floodgates. I think in an ideal yugioh, basically ever deck would function this way while huge blowout cards and board breakers aren't as needed or (I can hope) absent altogether. A limited engine to sort of get itself started and build a board on turn 1, and a decent amount of archetype specific interactions they can set up that aren't oppressive in gameplay sounds a lot more enjoyable imo. Of course, it would be tricky to find a good base for what effects aren't oppressive in a game like this, but I think that would be a way more enjoyable form of the game - one that is decided purely by interactions instead of shit like dark ruler, super poly, evenly, nibiru, kurikara, etc.
I agree a lot with that! And I do think the good design of decks like Branded is not just coincidental but that they know about the fundamental game design problems the game has and this is a new game design philosophy we are seeing. At least I hope that it is that. But I feel like we see this trend more and more with modern decks.
Thats mostly older YGO where u can still play back and forth and longer than 5 turns. But its too late to comeback to that aside just play other formats ofc. The best they can do is to limit what players can do in few first turns, by master rule change. Either limiting special summons, or even effects activation limit.
the worst is a lot of boards are actually breakable, even without the blow-out going 2nd cards. the problem is when with a full board, you also have to face 2-3 hand traps; see superheavy samurai: it makes a huge board off 1 card, and other than that, you also have to play through a lot of HTs, making it impossible to beat, going 2nd. and shs is even unaffected by your own HTs, since it can make a Baronne de Fleur, unaffected by your cards, even before starting its real combo.
i usually watch your vods since i'm out of your streaming time zone. Pretty entertaining. I remember you explained this in MBT's video on floodgate and going second card
Hi Josh, long time no see! I think the problem is that there is such a big focus on negates, be it in the form lf boss monsters or floodgates. Compare that to back and forth formats that people love to this day like goats, tele dad or dragon rulers, where you had a war of attrition because it was more about generating advantage. In rulers you made a strong board with maybe 2 dracossacks, but the second players could break it because he also had access to his resources. It would be nice if more boss monsters would focus on generating advantages, especially setting up following turns (search in end phase for example) and not locking opponents out. Not sure how to get there from this point though 😅
Having interruptions on boss monsters isn't problematic in itself though. I think it's healthy to have some boss monsters that generate advantage, some that interrupt the opponent (not free negates tho) and some that are just big and hard to get out of the field (what you'd want in a more defensive deck).
Another thing that feels like a problem to me that comes from this is that... Often there's no real *reward* for drawing a hand of 4 engine + 1 non-engine? A lot of the time modern decks are designed such that you only need one, two, three at most to make the best endboard that your deck can produce, and at best the extra engine cards are follow up and insulation against handtraps to give you the same board as always. The distinction between starters and extenders and everything makes that worse.
YGO needs a new Master Rule that introduces limits on special summoning. My initial thought is that you have a mana counter system where you accrue 1 counter each turn. Your number of special summons per turn is limited to the number of counters you have during that turn. That way players can't build massive boards on the first or second turns. There would be a ramp up. Of course, Konami could ruin the idea by making effects that allow you to violate the counter limit.
*As much as I love this game there are some things Id like to see get fixed. One issue I have is when konami creates cards like D barrier or combos like Gimmick Puppet lock that don't even allow you to interact with your opponent unless you draw specifics outs if they have any. *Hand loops and consistent FTK are another big issue with the game. It just feels so shitty when you feel like you loose because you didnt open the Hand trap and my opponent went first. *I hate floodgates too but I understand why we have them. The thing I hate about floodgates is when the floodgate only hinders me and not my opponent it seems. A good example of this is skill drain in eldich. I feel like floodgates were fine in older formats because the game was slower and we were main decking staples such as MST and heavy storm but with the game being so much faster now a days you cant afford maining those outs. *Some potential rule changes and alternatives I thought that could fix the game would be allowing you to open your 6th card if you are the player going 2nd and you just wouldn't draw for your first turn ether. At least it would give you a better chance to draw a handtrap to interrupt your opponent if they are comboing and if you are the going first player it would allow for something like tactics to be a little stronger because now youd get to see the 6th card if you look at there hand. *As far as power creeps go it would be nice to see the game slow back down like it was in edison format but if they were to do that I feel Konami would have to hard nerf decks on the banlist and just not power creep the next sets. Thats just my thoughts. Love the channel and thanks for the content.
Going second isn't that bad in the current format, I went 6-2 with a blind second deck in the last regional and if I was more informed in my deckbuilding, I could have won even more matches. The biggest issue imo are the pseudo ftk locks like puppet, iblee, dark angel, Naturia Beast, ... and also powerful floodgates post side like antispell.
@@DonMarzzoni if you build your deck as a going first deck with little going second cards, yes. But my point was if you have enough strong going second cards, you are not in a disadvantage if you go second. duster, storm, dark ruler, evenly, thrust, talents are strong. Prosperity helps as well. Also, Gamma and Shifter are strong handtraps as well. The more annoying part is the locks or pseudo ftks.
12:50 they already do that in the OCG. Many top tier decks simply just vomit 6-8 interruptions. The "best" 2 decks are Purely (which if you Kaiju the towers monster they recover 3 and SS 1. That guy also draws them 3 on your stand by) and Super Heavy FTK (Lock with Artifact Deathscythe and the actual 8000 dmg true ftk) that often vomits Baronne and other 3 more negators. Your realistic only outs to those boards is to either draw Dark Ruler or a Lava Golem and somehow OTK through a deadscythe.... or use Forbidden Dropplet and play the game with 1 card in hand.
I feel one MAJOR PROBLEM is the crazy power gap between decks, the thing I liked about the anime was how everyone played different decks that were equal in terms of power. Konami needs to either create new cards for archetypes that make them meta or make different formats that let older decks become powerful
@@TheHengKong the problem already existed. Older formata are basically the same as new ones but with different meta decks. Yu-Gi-Oh has never really been like the anime. Might be a shame but anime Yugi and the TCG are almost different games.
@@unaffectedbycardeffects9152 at least older formats u can actually play interactive back and forth, which can last more thzn 5 turns, unlike YGO nowdays.
@@invertbrid not always true, but I see where you are coming from. The older the format, the slower the game. Except for some specific formats that aren't the ones you mentioned, so they don't count.
Lets also talk about cards that provides like a plus five if they resolve and basically u autolose if u didnt have a response (branded fusion just as an example)
I think the problems with yugioh started when the graveyard was seen as a resource. Then to up that the deck is seen as your 2nd hand. So many cards search now. Take Kashtira. 4 of the cards just add another Kashtira card to your hand. 1 of them just summons one from the deck. I play Branded Blue-Eyes. I have 12 cards in my deck that give me access to my combo. All 12 use the deck as a resource. With 1 of my 12 starter cards I can build a board that has Mirrorjade, Dragostepelia, A Blue-Eyes Jet Dragon and a Blue-Eyes White Dragon on board. With a branded fusion in hand for next turn. All because that first card and every card after uses the deck instead of my hand for resources.
Right now it seems (at least to me) that Konami is trying a lot to make going second a much more viable option. - Flunder can play going second and people like KeasbeyTCG are trying their hardest to prove that. - Tearlament (through Havnis, Tearlament Kashtira) and the upcoming dino support are able to play "turn 0" to circumvent actually going second and having to rely on handtraps/ boardbreakers - Kashtira has built-in going second options in for example Fenrir, who isn't often referred to as "Pankratops at home" for nothing. - Dinos are slowly but surely making a resurgence with Lithosagym off the list and new support on the horizon and those bad boys are known as a capable going second strategy for a reason. - Sky Striker keeps rearing it's head with Engage back at 1 and new support coming soon as well, those can go second too (at least in the past, i don't know how feasable that is nowadays but i don't think it's THAT much worse) - Bystials are handtraps, boardbreakers and playstarters all-in-1 (think for example Magnamhut searching any dragon, like Luster Pendulum, Rokket Tracer, Dragunity Remus, or overlaying 2 into Beatrice sending for example Orcusts or zombies to the grave. Honestly, i think this is a great development (at least for now) as i often find myself interested in strategies, but then feel bad actually playing them, because all i can do is "draw Dark Ruler or forfeit immediately". To me, a complete strategy has a plan for going second as well and muuuuuch much much more strategies are getting one nowadays. Of course, i know, many people will probably disagree with this sentiment, which is fine. I still like this approach to powercreep, compared to "we'll just make going first EVEN BETTER".
Giga cope post. Floo can't go second, they can sack the opponent with dark ruler evenly but so can any other deck. Tear is dead lol, let it rest. Dinos are capable of going second because of Misc turning the game into single player mode, which is literally everything wrong with yugioh right now. Striker has been long powercrept and the post linkage support is dogsh. .
@@gatocochino5594 In all these cases i'm talking full power variants, because talking about a strategies capabilities in the context of overall game design directions after getting neutered is BS. Of course Floo can go second. Staples like Evenly, Dark Ruler and Lightning Storm are certainly very helpful and appreciated, but through chainblocking your birds and Unexplored Winds you can definitely pick apart some boards. Dinos have been more than "Misc for game" even with that boy at 3. Eating your opponents interruptions and then summoning UCT directly from hand has beaten many opponents that thought stopping Misc is all that's necessary + the upcoming Xeno (?) support let's you play turn 0, to make going second actually viable again. Yes, Tear is dead as of feb13. Tearlament as a strategy does have a plan to play going second nonetheless. Again, we really shouldn't lean on the banlist too much, when trying to assess the situation of Konami's general design trajectory. Nobody would have ever thought, Monkeyboard, Double Iris and Skullcrobat could ever leave the banlist, before Master Rule 5 happened. Didn't even take a year after that went into effect and both Double Iris and Skullcrobat were back to 3, Monkeyboard is now at 1 too. Sky Striker is able to use and abuse any and every spell card in the game to greater effect than any other strategy virtue of needing spells in grave to activate their in-archetype spells. Triple Tactics Thrust has been a godsent for the strategy, since it let's you pseudo-search Terraforming, Reinforcement Of The Army and even some archetypal cards. Additionally, Raye and her machinery has (some) cross-synergy with Runiks. Are you really trying to tell me, that new Link2 is dogsh. .? Are any of these strategies in their current situation going to win a YCS? Probably not, tho Tearlament and Floo still topped a couple times after feb13 and the upcoming Dino support is looking pretty good too. But all if this is not what i'm talking about. What i wanted to point out was the general direction the Konami seems to be taking the game: Making going second a little more viable through SOME in-archetype tools (like Unexplored Winds, Misc, Havnis, Fenrir, etc.). Those were never meant to be role models in the current game environment, but mere examples of the past, present and future to showcase a trajectory. But obviously i'm the one on copium.
@@dimitrilepain3821 Damn you are smoking some good copium. Any deck can go second if they draw non-engine, the last YCS london was decided by double kurikara and talents going second. Ish Tear has been the only deck that can win going second with only engine cards in years. And yes the new striker card sucks BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CONSISTENLY SUMMON IT IN ITS OWN ARCHETYPE. Unless we get new support Azalea will be used more in purrely than in striker.
Pretty good video, any opinions about Vanquish Soul? Seems to be doing pretty well in the OCG and I’m actually surprised at how it is such a balanced midrange deck with consistent soft interaction and just massive value game.
First 3 turns have no battle phase, the field must end with at least 3 cards on it and the turn player has a choice between drawing during their draw phase and mulliganing their hand. This way the first 3 turns will be interactive and require players to hold back cards for follow up and the mulligan allows the hands to be consistent enough that the outs get drawn.
We need a massive community boycott of product until we get multiple rarities similar to the ocg. If it's an issue with materials then maybe substitute something like starlights/collectors/most super rares in the last 3 years, etc.
So either you have more decks like Tear going forward, where the dice role meant very little due to Havnis and Kelbek allowing both to play in turn 1; Or we get rule changes that limit turn 1 even more - already no battle phase of course, and only 5 cards - another option would be to have board breakers in the extra deck so that deck building for going second may be less cringe... rumors are that konami is working on adding a new zone and extra deck type - so maybe they go there -> like Maser Rule 4 where you were limited with the "amount" of extra deck plays you could potentially do; If you can generally do less in a single turn, then that will also affect turn 1 boards...
I think an interesting suggestion is to ban accesscode and borrelsword, and perhaps increase the lifepoints to 12k or 16k. Doing so removes the ability of just any random deck to OTK and forces the game to go into turns 4-5, making the idea of follow-up more valuable and freeing up design space
I like the idea of having a generic extra deck monster whose sole purpose is to do damage, specifically to help decks that lack firepower. I think generic extra decks monsters should fill 1 specific role. But yes, accesscode can burn in hell.
Ironically, the best approach would be to completely power creep the meta, by only making cards that have 3 effects: their normal effects, effects when they get negated and 'hand trap effects' that can be activated in turn 0. It wouldn't be cancerous if all decks had access to turn 0 cards and hands were significantly less bricky (by each card having multiple uses depending on the situation), a lot of interaction is a given.
Its also that effects that in a older format would have been an actual drawback for a good effect aka "activate x but now you got to drop y cards from your hand or destroy Z cards on your field" is with most Archetypes now just worked into the playstyle and becomes an advantage because those cards then usualy just activate more effects allowing you to either just summon them rigth back, draw a card, search etc. Aka you dont just get a card with 1 good effect rigth out ,you can even trigger 3-4 more good effects. Giving you a easy + in card advantage. With a single move. While if your opponent doesnt have a handtrap out is basicly guranteed. And dont even get me started on the "But then you can only play cards of x archetype" Its an Archetype. There wont be many non Archetype cards in that deck. Thats not a drawback thats an excuseto make it look like one.
I think what they will do (and we are allready seeing that with Tears, Bystials and not nearly as good as the first two but also Ghoti) are decks that can play on your opponents first turn too. And honestly I don't think that is a bad thing. Instead of one player setting up and the other one trying to break there bord we will see a lot of back and forth on the verry first turn. Wich could be good, it could mean a lot of interaction and room for good decissions. I belive Tearelemts were one of the first decks with this new design philosiphy and people enjoyed that deck, the main problem was, that no other deck could do what tears can right now. But I think that is where the game is going and maybe also where it needs to go. Legends of Runetera plays like that too and it works great for that deck.
@@greenhillmario Agreed. Tear was really powerful but it wasn't that bad and the mechanic and gameplay was interesting and fun. The realy problem were the Ishizu cards. Those things are just stupid beyond any reasoning.
@@nlm7033 Casuals are the majority of the sales, Konami is a for-profit they won't ignore the complaints of most of their costumers. People hate cards that don't let them play *their deck*, which is why handtraps are seen as so toxic unlike board breakers and why so many people think they ruined yugioh.
Prob remains on T1 player making a field where they win on turn 3, after opponent is forced pass after failing to establish board presence. So 2 options. 1) limit t1 player more e.g; 4 card start or a cap on special summons allowed 1st turn. This wld upset players. 2) make it harder to get OTK'd; increasing LP of T2 player. This wld prolong games upsetting tournament organisers
I got into advanced after getting into goat / edison as a returning player. I built a fairly budget deck (ninja) and kept playing it at locals for a bit. I thought I would probably hate it, but it's more enjoyable than I expected. But overall I feel that edison or even HAT are the most enjoyable.
What I've noticed about modern yugioh is that your deck has to have many "one card combos" to really compete. You cram your deck full of hand traps and going second cards to make it so you don't auto lose going second, but in a weird way that effectively means you start with a 2-4 card hand, the rest of your hand being hand traps and going second cards.
Those cards have to be capable of building a powerful board all on their own. My Ninja deck can do that, and I've actually done fairly well at locals after playing for a bit, but the main problem with my deck that I've noticed is that there are just too many cards that can't pop off on their own, so I often open hands with a bunch of hand traps and 2 "extenders" that can't create a powerful board on their own. My deck has plenty of powerful cards, even 1 card OTKs, but there's just too many "bad but you have to play it" cards in the deck.
Even budget and rogue decks can do insane things, but the top meta decks are the ones that brick the least. I've noticed that that means that in some sense, all their cards have to be almost the same card to be reliable. Look at a deck like Kashtira. Fenrir and Unicorn both special summon themselves, search an extender, etc. They can search each other. Both can be searched by the field spell and Theosis. So you have a bunch of cards that are *almost* the same card + a bunch of hand traps and going second cards. I think this leads to boring designs for achetypes. What I love about my ninja deck is all the cards feel unique, but that's kind of what makes it bad, lol.
It's more fun than I thought it would be, but just not quite as fun as those older formats. But there's a part of me that misses getting new archetypes and cards, and that's what ultimately drew me to it. Wish they could start over and be more strict about maintaining a certain power level. It feels like a shame, because there are so many cool decks that people could be having fun playing that get left by the wayside. I hope as time goes on that yugioh players begin to act more like Magic commander players and just have conversations about power level and casual play.
Agreed
I agree with this so much, and it's the reason I prefer 2008 - 2015 Yu-Gi-Oh. I still enjoy the modern game, but it was better when the game didn't end on turn 1 effectively. This also makes your opening hand and who wins the die roll much more important, which just makes the game more RNG.
Agree. That time period was peak yu-gi-oh. Sure there were times during that period where some formats were not as good. But overall it was a golden age.
Also duels not lasting 1 turn allows more room to try goofy shit.
@@dudono1744 was more like chess in those days. now its more like a western shootout duel of whoever shoots first wins
@@umitencho The very fast pace comes from combo decks with enough negates to ensure otk turn 3. Usually the negates are the same monsters (baronne, appolousa,...)
The problem with the game is Link and XYZs because they allow you to pull monsters virtually out of thin air. Another big problem with them game is that you have a lot more cards that allow you to add cards to your hand with no costs and drawbacks. For example, you have spell cards that let you add a Ritual Monster and the Ritual Spell to your hand, so it's basically drawing two cards. I understand the older game needed just a tad bit more speed, but the game is so broken now that it's no longer fun. You just better hope you don't get OTK'd on the first turn.
One thing I recently noticed is that more and more spell/trap searchers are printed with effects that set those cards from the deck (sometimes even face-up) instead of adding them to the hand to avoid Ash Blossom
This has been happening more often since thunder dragon colossus was released.
Yeah I noticed that with Albion in branded decks, which helps because ash kills branded fusion already it doesn’t need more good targets 😂
Just means ulti ash is coming
@@Ragnarok540 and for that reason collosous was banned and will have to be errata to even remotely be considered coming off the ban list. So his effect would have to be changed to effect both sides or have a once per turn prevention of searching of one card to make him able to come back. Personally I think just having a once per turn search stopping card effect would be the best way to solve his text to not be so op. just like kirin should be errata to only be able to bounce on your turn and it be a hard once per turn.
@@JustSumIdiot Can't you Ash Albion because it has the option to add the card to hand as well as set it?
Joshua Schmidt is the biggest problem of Modern Yu-Gi-Oh (from his opponents point of view)
They can get the game back to full circle in terms of power creep.
The 1st stage of yugioh was about big beaters and economical cards that took away cards from your opp or gained card advantage.
The 2nd stage of yugioh had more toolbox removal effects specifically destruction. So to equalize the amount of destruction cards we had back in 2008-2010s we had more cards that floated to offset that power creep.
Then 3rd stage of the game's evolution was about making more interruptions/negates and the card design to offset that power creep was cards like dark ruler/droplets/ talents, board breakers, kaijus, Now I think Konami still hasn't matured their offsetting for this 3rd wave of power creep. They need to create more cards that float or have additional utility effects that allow someone to skillfully maneuver around negate/interrupt boards so that decks that can grind and rebuild their board are the decks that have the advantage. Tears are a great example of this. Tears are a heavily interactive deck, only problem is it outclasses every other deck, but if every deck rose up to the level of Tears, we would have interaction that can still play through many disruptions and it would give more opportunities for the better player to make better decisions to affect the longer the game continues.
The game of yugioh is just like a quickdraw gun fight instead of a sword wielding duel. It's all about who draws 1st blood, and despite any player skill differences you can still lose more often than not than a meta where you have more turns and opportunities to outplay your opponent.
Every deck should play like Tear. And we would have peace.
I agree for the most part, but the thing i dont like for tear (and spright to a lesser degree) is that they dont only play around negates and interact a lot--they do so while building (or reinforcing) their own unbreakable board *during your turn* while youre trying to START building your own
I dont really enjoy the idea of every deck playing all cards, constantly, to the point that turns dont actually matter
Quickdraw take skill though 🤣 yugioh doesnt seem skill based
Personally, I believe the biggest issue with modern yu gi oh is the artificial prices of cards. It would be so easy for Konami to just print multiple rarities of cards in the same set
The prices aren't artificial, but the rarities and bad ratios sure are.
They do it in the OCG so there is no reason not to do it in the tcg.
I agree with the printing, it's hard to argue against it when you go to Japan and see access code talker for 50p and even maxx c is affordable for a few £. I think they should print every card as a common from the start and include other rarities and have a collector's pack too. Price shouldn't be a barrier to entry for players who want to play.
@@Duelists-Den There is one, and it is the most important reason for KONAMI, and why it would not change, and it is Money
Konami doesn’t make the prices vendors do lol
I think the problem with modern Yu-Gi-Oh is you get way too much value off of in archetype starter cards. If your hand is Aluber + 4 random cards you have full combo. If you have spright starter + 4 cards that's full combo. Every good deck nowadays has a 1 or 2 card combo that also has a searcher and a searcher for the searcher which means you need less in engine cards to make a powerful board which means you have more room for generic hand traps and board breakers making your deck even more powerful. "Back in the day" if you wanted to play an otk strategy you would have to play few to no trap cards because you needed almost your whole hand to break your opponents board and push through your otk. If you played a control strategy your offensive power was low because you were running so many traps and one for one removal. Modern decks don't have to choose if they want to be otk or control oriented they can be it all.
I recently got back into the game after a decade+ of being away. I embraced all the new cards and changes that I experienced. Pendulum, links, xyz, I've played with and tested all I could get my hands on. What I find throughout it all though is that there are just some types/setups that allow for so much recursion, you basically have to play them to have a chance at anything. Which if those are your favorite cards, is great, because you can play them often and win condition on top of it. But if that isn't the case for you, your favorite cards or type of cards just get chewed up on the field. And there is only so much deck-building one can do against an objectively more powercrept deck.
The factor of fun and cool is taking more of a backseat to the stun/lock/negate meta styles of today. Even card destruction effects are starting to lose It's oomph because protections prevent it from happening or the card will just return to the field momentarily. The ability to even set up a board or be able to do much against an established one is getting harder and harder.
Both this and the side channel have been such critical aspects of my work day. I adore listening to your insight while I work on office stuff. Thank you so much!
Well boss you see I haven't gotten much work done today but the upcoming format? I got you covered. You wanna see a combo as well?
Generic extra deck monsters and power creep are the two biggest problems in Yugioh. Decks have no only lost their identity due to generic ED monsters making a lot of end boards similar, but it's also had a big impact on power creep, since new cards have to compete with the busted generics in the ED.
Power creep is definitely a huge issue. It's one thing for a 2001 deck to be unable to compete with a 2023 deck, but we've gotten to the point where meta relevant decks from 2020 can't compete with 2023 decks.
Wasnt tri spright decent in ocg
The game really is so much better and decks are so much more unique when you don't see every game ended by Accesscode Talker.
with POTE bringing more main deck combo starter monsters with 3 or more effects, the future of the game is bleak. next thing we know, we are looking at the possibility of a combo starter with lv 1, 3k attack and 5 effects or a link 1 that can search Triple tactic thrust
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 i mean if you reached the point where ur opponent is going for accesscode, they were in a better position than you and you were not winning it anyway. the problem wouldnt be accesscode there, it is the fact that you lost control of the game.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 THANK YOU! I hate that virtually every deck can shit out a 5300atk Dark Armed from the extra deck that cannot be responded to. So often I just didn't have enough oomph to kill an opponent after breaking their board. And then they kill me through a board full of monsters and full lifepoints because Accesscode exists.
I think ishizuTear is the indication of where the game is going which is worrying. A deck with endless resources, powerful starters, able to go first or second and with very few weaknesses or areas where it can be blown out. It obviously needed the Ishizu cards to reach that level but eventually it'll be an in-archtype version which is terrifying.
It's interesting when talking about hand traps being the first attempt to combat power creep, maybe that is the reason why I enjoy Dino Rabbit format so much (once they dealt with the hunter hand loop). I feel like that was a format where you could go first or second and still be in the game. Everyone played MaxxC, Effect Veiler, Dark Hole, Heavy Storm and Monster Reborn. All cards that were realistically great going second but the turn 1 boards weren't unbeatable. You also had such an array of tier 1 and tier 2 decks that made the format diverse enough that deck building was interesting since you had Dino Rabbit, Inzektor, Wind Ups, Chaos Dragon, Hero Beat, Hieratics, etc. You almost had a perfect balance of going first powerful starters, resource management and going second tools.
I'm not sure when it started but once the game went from"big guys go boom" and have a lot of damage on the board where battle phase actually matters to this devolved "how do I make my opponent not be able to play the game" that's when this game became less interactive and less fun. There is a reason why a lot of people are clamoring for legacy formats because it's a time in which Yu-Gi-Oh was a five to six turn game, and not a one to three to turn game. if you ask me, that basically happened when dragon ruler format happened, if not when necroz format happened. Because it became less about I have big guys that you have to beat over or destroy and it turned into non-targeting, destruction immune, negates that are just obnoxious. 5 maybe 10 years ago, nobody would have ever guessed that solemn judgment, raigek,i or change of heart would ever get unbanned or unlimited. now they are known as bad cards, well two of them are bad cards, and that speaks a lot of volumes to what this game is turned into
Because modern Yugioh's turn 1 threats nearly always come from the easy access Extra and turn 2 answers mostly come more randomly from the Main; going 2nd is significantly harder. Carefully designed answers from the Extra could help, partly because they'd be easier to access, but also as their inclusion means less space for threats, and less necessity on hand traps and board-breakers in the main.
You talking about hand traps, but in the extra deck? Because otherwise you're not getting to those cards the fair way going second.
Not Quick Effects in the Extra, but more like 2 monsters can make a (not too generic) Ultimate Slayer effect.
I like to joke that one day we'll get "Extra Spells" (i.e., some way to activate spell cards out of the extra deck). I've never taken the idea seriously enough to wonder if it could actually help the game, but anything is possible.
@@MetallicityMore like Extra Traps. Konami could test the water by making a bunch of those belonging to a same archetype and all sharing a once per turn (something like "You cannot activate the effects of [archetype name] monsters for the rest of the turn")
If you made a custom rule where you banned the extra deck from being used in duels most top tier decks would be absolute dogwater its a fact
I still think it's kinda incredible that ishizu tear was THE perfect deck, where its only big weakness was shifter and bystials, but anything else it could manage to survive and workaround.
Just the fact that it had so much access to its engine on the opponent's first turn, could probably be a sign of what's to come for future archetypes.
Personally I'm glad ishizu tear doesn't exist anymore at full power, because I didn't like how it restricted deck building so much, but I hope konami takes notes from ishizu tear on how to implement ways for deck to grind, play through floodgates and have interesting ways to fight back going second, that don't rely just on drawing blowouts or multiple handtraps
for meta i play kash-scarclaw, and 2 other variants i try to make, and or traditional kash, my rouge deck is gravekeepers, its so funny when i just put the enitre combo, shaman, necro, hidden temple, supernaturalis and some links and xyz are just freaking crazy watch how aloot of deck just surrnder, no special summon, all the graveyard banish, effect of the GY negated with the shaman,
Konami has basically the player base in some sort of arms race that doesn't stop. They first print handtraps that let you interact when going second, then they release call by the grave, to nullify that interaction. When it was at three I'm sure everyone who played decks that were hurt by handtraps, and I think most are, had three call by the grave in their decks.
honestly, this is the best video I've ever seen that discuss this topic with such clarity and impartiality, you analyzed the history of the meta game and the problems that went with it with a very interesting way, I'm definitely want more of these videos
The mystical deck you are wondering about that beats all the handtraps and all the boardbreakers is called tearlaments. It puts up multiple bosses and multiple backrow interruptions. It answers everything. Thats what a deck that answers every going second card looks like. It has strength in 3 areas after setting up. Hand, monsters, set spells and traps.
+ a loaded graveyard with interuptions (if we include the Ishizu stuff. I mean, come on, those were clearly designed as Tearlament support from the beginning), on-the-fly extension and follow-up.
Yea konami clearly designed em too powerful, YGO not ready for em yet lol, maybe in few years after they being powercreeped. Thats why they being murdered in all formats, excpt master duel. But it will too soon enough.
@Dimitri Le Pain I think they were actually meant to work with Vernusylphs specifically. They printed a bunch of Earth support (such as Naturia, Morphtronic, Amazoness, etc) all around the same time, across many products, similar to how they are releasing a ton of fire stuff and unbanning Blaster all at the same time in the OCG now.
Like, they were excellent in Tearlaments, but I think that was somewhat incidental.
shifter?
Tbh my biggest issue is the way that cards nowadays don't just have good effects, they have 2-3 good effects. It makes it so that the effect of one-off negates don't cut it anymore. So then they just escalate the offense then escalate the defense to deal with that. There needs to be some way to push things back towards multiple turn games that doesn't involve floodgates. There needs to be some way to bounce back on turn 3 and continue playing when your resources are spent.
Except that won’t work because we’ve seen “comeback cards” before and they often don’t stay comeback cards, they’re extenders.
Soul charge is a great example. You pay LP to reborn an entire GY, but you don’t get your battle phase. But thats not going to be used on turn 3 to bring your board back, it’s going to be used on turn 1 to remake your board after a nib or to extend your plays after playing through handtraps. Giving you more advantage doesn’t work.
What about taking away your opponent’s advantage? That’s what the blowout cards do. Evenly matched is quite literal with its name and even then it’s incredibly powerful.
There is no way to make a viable comeback card. If it’s not useful in early turns, nobody will play it because it’s literally a brick until those later turns. Cards like that in an archetype are played at 1 or not at all, let alone generic cards. If it’s not effective, but can be played earlier, nobody will use it because it’s not strong enough. Yugioh has a very strong snowball when it comes to winning; the greater your advantage over the opponent, the exponentially better your chances of winning are. And quite frankly, that’s okay.
We don’t need individual cards to bounce back with. You need decks that work well with keeping up their steam throughout the game. That’s the main issue with slower control and stun decks compared to combo. Combo can scrape their way back into the game because they’re designed to generate as much gas as possible with as few cards as possible. They can get stuff from the Gy, the deck, the banished pile, even the extra deck. Let’s also not forget float effects or backrow that gives protection or effects that prock when your cards go bye bye. Control doesn’t have that. Some decks have very good float effects, like krawler. Some decks have incredible flexibility with lots of floodgates, like subterror. Some make their backrow into even more effective cards by adding additional effects and triggering archetypal cards, like labyrinth and traptrix. But none of these decks can play through or stop the common blowouts to their deck. Dlink and swordsoul can make savage and baronne, but we won’t see a traptrix player combo out of their mind to end on either of those cards to answer the blowouts. If there was a control archetype that was both good and could play through or around common board breakers, they’d be a great deck.
I've been playing this game for 8 years now, and since then every year when a broken archetype or card is released, in the first few years I thought it couldn't get any worse, they wouldn't release a stronger archetype or card, and they always do, they don't know how much is enough. In my personal opinion, if the power ceiling of yu gi oh cards stayed the same as the toss format with decks like orcust without mermaid, salamangreat and sky striker, where there is a grind game and resource management matters, that would be great.
While I prefer using aggressive/OTK decks, I like to have some comeback capacity if hitting my opponent with whatever big thing I have out fails.
Aside from everything you just said, which I mostly agree with, another big one would be that the game is not beginner friendly and the community has to be more welcoming and friendly to new players in order to keep the game alive.
Most of the topics you touch on certainly hit home. Dang near spot on with some of my views. Some of it does rely on the players too though. The whole meta vs unmeta. I feel like meta players in general do have the options to break boards, have outs and in return also have those same unfun and un-interactive gameplay mechanics. And then you have me, who plays Ojamas, Crystal Beasts and Giant Ballpark on Master Duel. And somehow I consistently rank in Diamond, but I think that's because I'm forced to run Maxx C and Ash Blossom.
To me, the fun in Yu-Gi-Oh is to find all of these weird and amazing strategies and make them work, but when you actually play the game, you only see maybe 150 cards? Like, my matches in Master Duel is really only 3 decks and with Tear, it's only 2 decks now. I can play a game with over 10,000 cards and only see 1 deck for 5 hours. The entire meta game is completely stale and the only time you see someone not running meta, it's because they're trying to counter the meta with other unfun cards.
That's not to say I don't like modern Yu-Gi-Oh, far from it. I like Sky Strikers, I love Sprights, I don't even mind playing against Branded, but these top tier decks don't actually feel that dominant. My Ojama-ABC deck can consistently take wins against these guys. And that's fun. When the top tier meta isn't built around negate boards and are instead all about value generation, it becomes incredibly fun to play and play against. These are the meta decks that allow me to get addicted to this game for 12-14 hours on my day offs.
I'm someone who came back into the game at late 2015, after a 10 year hiatus, and observing deck building mentality and card design from that time until today, I noticed that a lot of powerful cards no longer have an adequate cost of drawback in comparison to the power they have. The first negation on an extra deck boss monster, Quazar, required a synchro tuner and 2 non-tuner synchro monsters, now you have a synchros like Borreload Savage Dragon or Baronne that simply require a generic tuner and a generic non-tuner to make, and they are omni negates to boot where a card like Crystal Wing was monster negate only. Mechaba is a boss monster I see as good card design as it is 1 normal summon = 1 negate and it is a negate that requires a specific discard, which makes it break even and not generate advantage to the boss monsters that negate and destroy. That is another design choice I have my gripe with, monster summoned from the extra deck that negates should not remove the monsters they negate. Then you have cards like Apollousa that needlessly increase the ceiling of decks or insulate decks against interaction.
Another problem is the critical mass of generic powerful turn 1 monsters in the extra deck. The first time this actually became a problem was with PePe, a deck that was able to summon those monsters from the extra deck during the first turn and make an unbreakable board. Unfortunately the problem was laid primarily at the feet of PePe's main deck and not the monsters in the extra deck it summoned and Konami continued printing powerful turn 1 boss monsters, and making them generic. If these monsters were not generic, but locked within their archetype then this would not have been a problem. The monsters that you want to have as generic are the toolbox monsters, not the boss monsters. When it comes to the extra deck, Konami needs to be much more pro-active with the banlist and ban cards like Apollousa, Baronne, Borreload Savage Dragon, Accesscode Talker and Zeus to lower the ceiling of this game, instead of having them linger around, and stop making more cards like them. It doesn't matter if your deck can go +10 on turn 1 and play through 4 hand traps, if what your deck can end on is limited by what you can make from the extra deck. The less generic boss monsters in the extra deck, the lower the ceiling of that deck will become.
If Konami wants to continue selling generic turn 1 boss monsters, then they should not have proactive quick effects effects like Baronne but reactive effects like Stardust Dragon or the new Gate Guardian boss monster, effects that respond to your opponent interacting with your board.
I agree boss monsters should be specific to decks. Negates can exist on generic ED monsters but need to be very specific (like stardust's negate)
The Problem I see specificly is , to make a very old school example: If I run into a mirror force or man eater bug : That was my choice. I saw a set card, I took that risk during my turn to potentialy trigger it but until I actualy chose to interact with those cards, I could still actualy play the game. There was a interaction there. But with modern ED cards and hand traps? For Hand traps, you had no real way of seeing that coming ( Besides well just assuming everyone plays handtraps of course) or with generic negating ED card boards where theres n nothing realy I do during my turn that I could point to and say: "Jup I allowed my opponent to trigger that effect by doing X or Y" because they basicly just fry whatever you throw out. The only out Iyou had was using your own negates in the form of hand traps during their turn before that board ever came up or having the hand traps to counter their negates. Wich then is a gamble regarding if you draw any as even if they were easily searchable... again theres a bunch of negates for everything likely already on the board so whatever you could use to search for a hand trap... wont go through.
@@Eagle93Writer That's true, to keep the speed of the current game we'd need to be able to combo/setup with handtraps (basically give some semi-generic (to avoid printing 1000 new cards) Havnis to everyone).
Really good video. I think the hardest problem YGO has to deal with right now is that its speed and power creep choices are almost unanswerable without making a huge and massive change - no matter what you do, things will make someone mad. I come from other games where I feel like the only thing that can really allow for a massive power level decrease is something like a major rules change or a rotation, but even then I have to admit that when games rotate their power levels to be way lower a lot of people get frustrated even if there remains an "eternal" format where people can still play all their old cards. Konami seems more interested in constantly inventing new alternate formats that start from 0 like Duel Links, Speed Duels, and even Rush Duels, and I think so long as they do that they're probably gonna run on the idea of just power creeping "real yugioh" until it stops working finally, without much of a plan for what they're gonna do when that happens. I think that Tear Ishizu was a sign that we're gonna hit a new era where every deck is like that and the entire game becomes the first turn with both players able to play, and then after that, who knows what's going to happen. Very curious to see what happens next.
Back in the days when Pot of P was over 100 buckets, lol, since that i always build only rogue decks, cheap and fun sometimes.
Fun fact: TCG Accesscode is minimum 40 buckets when in ocg u can buy it for 4 buckets or low sometimes
You can build something like Branded for under $200.
My biggest hope for yugioh is that someday Konami starts to print every card as a common in the set and then we would have rarities and alt arts in the same set of some of those cards instead of how we currently have to hunt for the high rarity cards to even play the new archtypes. it would be amazing to be able to own 3,4,5 or even 6 decks and switch up every week at locals if you feel like it.
I mean, OCG Yugioh is almost this way, but decks like kashtira are the best example that they bump up the rarities in the TCG on purpose. It's sad, but Konami is a well known money hungry pachinko/gambling overlord in the east for a reason...
@@soaprobot3609
Is not on purpose.
Blame the correct people: TCG players. At some point we had the same exact set as OCG.
Game was dying in TCG, casually after introducing chase cards like Heraklinos, dark armed dragon, eradicator virus, etc. Sales started ramping up.
OCG players buy a bunch of packs no matter how bad the set is, TCG players only buy packs when you are guaranteed decent pulls like gold series.
This changes the way they have to print the game in TCG. Do you want cheaper cards? Buy more packs at retailers.
Change the behaviour where vendors are the ones opening packs
For me the biggest issues are just the way cards are designed leading to going first becoming OVERWHELMINGLY strong. This has trickled down to a million "necessary evils" that act like poor band-aid fixes for deeply systemic issues with the way Konami makes cards. Handtrap, floodgates, unresponsive board breakers, and etc have to exist because of the massive advantage turn 1 player has, but since there's nothing stopping the turn 1 player from using these things to their full potential as well, it just makes the problem worse.
Another problem that's separate from balancing issue (but still goes back to poor card design), is that no one at Konami cares about how it actually FEELS to have to play against certain strategies and they are way more concerned about whether the cards will sell packs or not. A modern example is of Course Kash. That deck is not enjoyable to have to play against whatsoever. Its designed in a way that leads to most games being decided by a coinflip and whether or not the opponent had something like sphere mode in thier hand. Its a deck that guarantees (lose or win) that you WILL NOT have an interesting game of Yugioh and decks like it are becoming more and more common(scythe, floo, runick) .
Both of these problems lead right into something else. IT FEELS BAD TO LOSE IN THIS GAME. Nearly every time you lose its because your opponent either set up so much interaction that you cant feasibly play through it or they flip a funny purple card that just locks you out of playing that game. this entire game feels like its designed around the idea that "only the person winning should be allowed to interact with or enjoy that game" and more often than not its whoever is allowed to go first.
Prob only new master rule can fix this game. The ones that actually trying to slow the game down. Limiting what ppl can do in 1 turn, activating effects limit or special summon limit etc, at least for few first turns, then u can be free vomiting all ur stuffs on turn 4-5 or something.
Something for konami to think carefully about i guess. Or....they will just keep doing what they do atm. Releasing powerfuk turn 1 decks, then ban em, then release board breaker, handtrap and floodgates in between as bandaids.
That's what I miss. I'm not saying yugioh was perfect and the fundamental design kinda just came back to haunt the game. I just wish the game encouraged actually feeling like a battle with strategy focus. I liked the anticipation that yugioh builds with its face down card mechanics. It's very unique game that I hope doesn't die out.
I think at this point, it's very hard to go back in design philosophy. We are at a point where every single engine card in your hand will do a lot for you, and it's very hard to formulate rules that would restrict your access to the cards in your hands. And the core problem is, in the end, simply that too much revolves around turn 1. This is definitely a big issue that's very hard to tackle, but I have a few hot takes that I would at least consider.
Least hot take: Going second player starts with 6 cards in hand and also doesn't draw for turn. That way, you will more consistently see handtraps that stop your opponent; you are more likely to see e.g. Nib + Imperm, you also don't draw Nib for turn anymore.
Mid hot take: The above, but combine with Mulligan only for the second player.
However, I can totally see that what would happen here is that we simply move the power of the first turn from the going first player to the going second player, i.e. games are still decided on turn 1/2, we just move the weight more towards going second instead of going first. Therefore:
Hot take: Reduce starting hand sizes to 3 or 4 (potentially combined with my least hot take, i.e. going second player gets the extra card). This would hugely offset the balance of the game, as you are less likely to see e.g. certain starter cards, but it also means that hands are more likely to run out of gas against fewer interactions since you draw fewer extenders, and this goes for both sides (i.e. the going second player will also lose steam more quickly against fewer interactions). This would (probably) force the game to be far slower. Other side effects: decks with 1 card combos would be better, especially in a top decking situation. I think this might actually be worth a shot.
Take I personally don't really like: Make every new deck like Tear. The result is that turn 1 and 2 are super interactive, however, I really think this would overload the interactions in this game. Going to chain link 5 or higher on a regular basis is, to me, not fun to play or watch and makes the game even more inaccessible to new players.
I think using "fair" and "unfair" is also something that constantly changes for each card because it depends on the format. Like if my opponent is playing a goat deck then tenki-bear-pop would be extremely unfair, but then from 2015 that just didn't do anything.
I think what YGO really need is different formats just like MTG. You could have something like:
Standard: The most popular format where only cards printed/reprinted in the last 4 box releases are permitted.
Modern: The current YGO format.
Legacy: YGO with no ban list.
All formats would also have their own ban lists (except legacy in my example). That way, you could pick your favorite format, a faster or a slower one. Also, that solves the power creep problem, since the standard would only be the last 4 releases, Konami wouldn't have to power creep all collections before to make players buy the new set. That also solves players' burnout: when you get tired of seeing Kash every single match, you just hop into a different format.
Anyways, those formats I've listed are just an example, I'm sure people in chat can come up with smarter ideas, but I do believe this would make yugioh a better game.
i think tier-based formats would be better (like OU, RU formats in Pokemon Showdown, without considering the year in which the card was printed, but only considering how it would affect the game), but it's probably hard to analyze all cards of evey archetype and non
I completely agree that there being so much emphasis on the first turn is a core issue with the game. I myself have wondered if a lot of that could be rectified by increasing the total life points to say 10,000, maybe even 12,000. If you can survive being attacked by 3x 3000 attack monsters (which I'd say feels like an average amount of damage a good deck can put out) then you will need to consider your follow up plays more. Of course we'd need to ban cards like Ancient Leaf, but that's quite easy. Bumping up the starting life points just seems like a nice straight forward fix that wouldn't require a huge, sudden shift in game design or an acpocalypic ban list.
I'd say a good example of this would be the gimmick puppet lock in Branded. That play would be far less devastating when it succeeds if Branded didn't immedaitely OTK you on the next turn.
Slight LP increase wont change game at all tbh, they wont really change how u play the game. Unless u make pretty big jump of LP. Like 20k++ then there might be some difference even then i still doubt.
doesn't do anything. even if the number is let's say 50k lp, it means nothing, because card advantage and boardstate means everything. if i have 3 negations up that can negate each turn, and you have no cards on hand or field and no ignitions in gy, it doesn't matter how many turns pass, i will win the game
I had a match with a friend a few days ago he was on Dinos and I was using Dark World…after 3 games I felt sick at how disgusting dark worlds are also my friend wasn’t having fun (I also did the hand loop) so I went to Labyrinth x Dinomorphia…after putting up skill drain(the card and the boss monster) 3 games in a row I swapped to Exosisters…he actually had a good time which I was glad
Ok I'm gonna spit out my thoughts before listening to your takes so I can compare and maybe hear something I didn't think about.
-Going 1st is generally too powerful, being able to set up something your opponent needs a specific out in order to play makes little sense and makes the game "not fair"
-In order to fix the first issue you have to go even worse with the "unfair" state of the game printing cards that are able to address the board your opponent can set up, so the gamestate becomes "Ok I draw my out I win because if I Evenly/Duster/Dark Ruler my opponent he is gonna have a really hard time to come back into the game or I just instascoop"
-Broken cards for going 1st are even a bigger problem because once I know my matchup after siding I can just instawin with stuff like Anti-Spell or Skill Drain
-Enablers are fuckin crazy, every time a card like Isolde, Fiber, Chaos Ruler, Kitkallos, Auroradon, Linkross, Mermaid or Elpy is prevalent in the meta you know that some crazy bullshit is right around the corner
-Tools are just too generic and flexible, look at how many decks could fit the Brave engine or Runick, or how control decks can just play almost every Floodgate because the strategy usually revolves around turboing out a boss Monster that does 90% of the work for the Archetype, or even Extra Deck stuff, like why Accescode Talker or Borrelsword can give a guaranteed win con to every deck?
-Card design is very lazy in general. Every deck, even the ones with cool gimmick in paper like Floo (the migration of birds that return to your hand) or Dinomorphia are kinda flat because they just put a giant Skill Drain boss monster on field that like 95% of archetypes got as lecacy support or payoff for their combo
-We have too many counter to the counter kind of effects. Really why stuff like Called By The Grave or Crossout is even allowed to exist in the first place?
-The game is hard. For a returning/new player learn the rules, the interactions, the combos, the activation conditions of some cards and all the other shananigans is just very difficult and you kinda need some preparation to get into the game, I don't think it's possible to just go to a local and straight up play the game for the first time and not get a million warnings or look at your opponent and going like "what the hell is happening here?"
Amazing video, i see a lot of people being angry at combo decks and board it makes. However, every time i play sky strikers, deck without floodgates and plan to outresource opponent; they still complain about how it is worst deck ever to play against. People will complain whatever the current state of Yu-Gi-Oh is.
sky strikers did play floodgate, its called mystic mine
People who complain about Mine-less Striker are dumb. Ignore them.
I've been saying since 2020 that powercreep in yugioh has accelerated to a point where new archetypes are so fast and so resourceful that they're close to the breaking point. There's virtually no cost anymore and every deck can do everything. If Konami (or the community) doesn't rein the game in a little bit, soon everyone will be making combos without even using the field or GY or banished zone. And then what?
Let's start prefacing with the statement that game design and game balance are not easy things to get right, so anyone that thinks there's a easy fix to those problems, think harder. With that said, I see 2 main problems with Yugioh:
1. Yugioh is too reliant on specific outs. That's a problem that is not exclusive to Yugioh, if I'm playing Hearthstone I may make a board where my opponent has to draw a specific removal spell to survive, but since most minions don't have a lot of protection and are reliant on their health, you can counter boards in a variety of ways, you can make a board of your own to contest the opponent's board, you can use single-target removal, AoE spells or more expensive mass removal, you can use minions with efficient Battlecries or with Rush, etc. With the exception of combo decks, usually there's a pletora of ways to deal with what your opponent throws at you, and the best players know how to get creative and best use their resources. The luck of the draw still plays a role in the game, but you're usually not reliant on drawing a single out.
Yugioh on the other hand, is somewhat problematic, in that you're reliant on drawing specific outs. Cards like Lava Golem exist because you usually cannot out a board with engine alone, and because you have so few of those cards in your deck they have to be so powerful to be worth it, but having your chances of playing rely solely on if you draw the out or not is not fun or skillful gameplay. If you could contest whatever your opponent is doing with your own engine, then handtraps and going second cards becomes way less of a necessity, which is why Runick decks can get away with very few non-engine, as a lot of their engine can be used as removal. Having the extra deck as a toolbox is a potential way to minimize that problem, but when you're opponent is able to set up properly, chance are that they're going to interrupt you before you can get to your ED.
2. Decks are unidimensional. Now, this doesn't apply to all decks, but most archetypes have a set combo they go for that you always do. In other card games, is usual that you adapt your play and strategy to best counter whatever the opponent is playing, whatever cards you drew and maybe play around some outs, but in a lot of Yugioh decks that's not possible, you either play the standard combo or you make a objective weaker board, so most decks don't have a option to adapt, they either work or they don't, you either brick or you don't, your opponent either has the out or he doesn't, there's no in-between. Even Kashtira, that currently has the whole dilemma of playing around Nibiru or not, usually feels like is just sheer luck what the best way to play is, as you can't really know what outs your opponent has, but a lot of decks can't even do that much.
I think there heading in a really good direction with the structure decks, the recent ones have been really good. I do think they need to support older formats though, some people don’t want to deal with the complexity of the modern game and they never will it’s that simple.
*what?* dark world is not a fucking hero right now haha
YES! Finally someone seems to understand. The go second cards don’t fix the issue of going first being busted
6:36 I agree 100%. With such a weak format as we are in right now, for the middle pack decks to be able to keep up, they have to rely on lots of handtraps and floods.
Good examples of decks like that are the one card cyberse decks(Mathmech and Marincess). If Mathmech didn't have the ability to play 15 handtraps and rivalry, the deck would be utterly unplayable. If Marincess wasn't able to play 15 handtraps and gozen match, it would be garbage tier unplayable.
Thankyou for the Joshua schmidt plus. I like being able to view your thoughts but i dont always have time to watch your streams.
4 am will watch fully in morning, just some off the top of my head.
Banlists often times miss key elements, banlists often times have cards that, 1 or 3 (beatrice, infernity archfiend, miragestallio etc *yes stallio is free now*) change nothing, or cards that are still locked up in the tcg, despite having a decade of freedom in the other region (Zenmaity is banned in a world Gigantic Spright exists) the "whenever we want" is also insane that they can get away with that.
Product availability in certain regions, Australia still doesn't have the most recent ots, which is nearing 2 months of age.
Card availability, cards are all rarity bumped to hell and back for the consuuumers instead of for the players, perhaps while we have the 25th secrets, they may actually be *somewhat* alleviating compared to the ocg, who frankly speaking have higher end cards than we do, but then also have 5 aud baronnes.
it used to be difficult to bring out boss monsters pre 5ds era but now you get multiple turn 1, the problem with yu-gi-oh is way to many things going on and not enough counters to go around making the game horribly unstable
My current issue with modern Yugioh is having to sit down and just watch somebody play by themselves for 5 minutes on turn one and then flood the board. I’m sure I sound like a boomer but this new style of yugioh just isn’t fun to me. I don’t mind losing but I gotta be able to participate in the actual duel.
Biggest problems are omninegate bossmonsters that every deck can summon, preventing your enemy from using their field zones and that there’s no real back and forth anymore. You either win on your first turn or you scoop
i think seeing more in-archetype handtraps that play on your opponent's first turn could REALLY help with this, like rescue-ace impulse or tearlaments havnis. this way, decks could inherently be designed to go second a little easier, i think? it's one of the things people liked most about tear format, that really the only deciding factor between going first or second was who made abyss dweller
Those decks did too much in a single turn though, so they don't really fit the criteria of allowing say, slower decks where you set normal traps, etc etc, to play without floodgates. They are more of a bandaid idea than anything.
Havnis is one of the things people hated about tear format.
In archetype handtraps are fine, like kelbek is a fine in archetype handtrap. But the shear inconsistency about havnis is what made it awful. Your opponent could mill no names, or your opponent could mill 2+ names and you just lose because of that.
Yeah more archetype HTs but more Mercuorier, less Havnis.
Also give some HT to older archetypes (that acgually fit with the playstyle of the deck)
My biggest problem with modern yugioh is the Auto-win cards. Over the past recent years konami has both unlimited/printed a lot of ridiculously powerful board breakers, and also unlimited some of the older floodgates like dimensional fissure, macro, skill drain, etc. All of these can create non-games and remove the healthy back and forth. I honestly think that if they banned lightning storm, evenly, duster, and even raigeki (and probably a couple others im not remembering), the game would be much better. Same goes for either banning or re-limiting the floodgates that they unlimited for no good reason. None of these cards are particularly meta defining, aside from maybe evenly matched and duster, but none of them create healthy gamestates when they resolve.
I also really despise the design of the positive feedback loop cards. Mo Ye is always my go to since that card is a plus 3 when not interacted with, but is just as easy to stop as any other generic normal summon. Card design like that forces you to play cards that "negate" on your turn 0, where your opponent can generate a second full hand of cards just because you didn't draw a hand trap. And if you did, they get none/less of those resources.
Finally a good comment on this section.
I would just add that along with banning these auto-win cards, they need to make archetypes with a much lower ceiling, either in power (interruptions, negates and card advantage), or in resilience, so it is not necessary to have at least 2 cards of non-engine to be able to play, as Josh himself said, current decks are made to play for multiple interruptions turn 1.
Both reducing auto-win cards and lowering the cap need to be implemented together.
Both floodgates and board breakers need to be as powerful as they are (or maybe even more for board breakers) to combat nowdays power lvl and speed of the decks. So they all needed for modern YGO.
If u want ban em all, u need to really create new master rule that limiting ehat ppl can do, especially first few turns and really slow the game down.
Raigeki is fine I think, destruction protection and floating effects are fairly common.
Hope you are enjoying your holiday Josh and Id love for more conversation videos like this
I love your second channel. I never have time to watch your streams, because of university, but im very interested in competetive yugioh. Your content gives me so much knowledge about the game thanks for that. In German: Bildungsauftrag Erfüllt
Haven't watched the video yet. But the new/returning player experience is so hard. I topped regional and a ycs back in the day and I have been working to come back for 6 months. It's still impossible to understand all the interactions.
The game has so many game actions and little interactions. The game isn't that much different then summon laggia set 4 pass and you just lose... but it takes 10 minutes of tiny interactions to get to a comparable board.
I feel like Yugioh's card pool has reached a critical mass which means if they made newer, slower archetypes the game would probably find an older strategy that was just better.
It's also a reason I think most archetypes are too reliant on archetype specific cards or are now centered around smaller card pools, like spright being level 2, Kashtira being psychic, or swordsoul being wyrms
Kashtira is centered on lvl 7s, the cards could all have different types it would not change a thing
Thanks man I really enjoy these kinds of videos really help someone who is relatively new to the game to get a closer look at everything
Pot of greed: "ban, it's too OP"
Summoning 76 Monsters
in 1 turn: "nah that's fine"
Konami 👌
Forbidden memories XD
I didn't remember that we had a draw phase when going first.
Personally, for me, a big problem with modern YGO is the amount of luck needed to play a game is too high sometimes. Regardless of whether you and your opponent is playing combo or floodgate, You always need to open both engine and interation, or lack of better term "the nuts" in the first 2 turns in order to have good interactive games. Otherwise you could end up having a one-sided game, and the same is applied to your opponent. I've always enjoyed games where me and my opponent were going off in my locals, but never enjoyed either opening no handtraps or opening no engine.
I think this partially comes back to the 2-3 turn game to some degree. Hand luck is so crazy in yugioh because you just don't get turns to draw card. Cards also need to make an immediate impact on the game it's so easy to brick on even relatively solid cards because they need to make an immediate impact you can't save that card until the time is right, it's do or die from turn 1.
To be fair there was a huge amount of luck involved in old Yu-Gi-Oh with praying you draw the pot of greed/graceful charity/BLS/the summoning materials for it.
A year on and the problem is worse the condensation of all decks into a mono turn 1 spam style is pretty much complete and rogue or casual players are tired and leaving for less oppressive games.
Out of the 5 card shops in my city 4 are gone no one plays anything but casual friend vs friends or something like that no one is interested as far as I can see in my local scene which is concerning to see.
Only halfway of video and this is very good take from u as usual. Those blowout cards and oppresive floodgates are necessary to the game now more than ever before coz game speed is being too fast right now, adn those card helps slow down a game a bit to some extent, and punish turn 1 players.
At this point too late to slow game down, maybe need new master rule that limits what players can do on few first turns. Limit special summons / effect activated, that maybe a start. If not, well just keep making bandaids like floodgates and blowout cards also can i guess, like they have done for years now
Limiting extra deck summons make more sense since these (outside of fusion which requires a spell) are free ways to turn multiple monsters into 1 like a tribute summon.
Returning player here (after 18 years). The issues for me personally are that 1 turn can be 15 min +, unbreakable board, and literally one type of deck regardless of the archetype (combo). There are no aggro and mid-range styles of play and it's literally all combo control style that tries to set up the same type of board with omni-negates. Also, on the company side of things are blatant greed by crazy power creeping to sell sets (literally banned Tearlament because it was destroying the upcoming Kash supports in OCG). The community is saying that set rotations are dumb, but fail to see that we are pretty much in a set rotation because in order to play "competitively" you need to use the newer archetype. It just creates an illusion of choice but in order to be competitive you have to get the newer set. (Tears, Kash, Spright, and Branded) Not to mention the rarity bumps from OCG to TCG to boost sales. At this point, I think the only thing that will make the game more fun will be Master Duel because it will allow Konami to pool all the communities together so it will be big enough to host legacy formats for a variety of play styles. Also, not to mention this will also generate way more money for Konami.
You made a lot of solid points, but Master duel is a cesspool
Would…would you rather they have not banned Tear?
Banning a Tier 0 deck inherently boosts sales, because it makes the game more fun to play. If you want to say it’s bad on that basis, then you’ve exited the realm of ideas that purport to describe reality.
Honestly, some of my most enjoyable games have been when I’ve gotten evenly matched after creating an unbreakable board pretty much. I don’t have any more resources and he can’t do a whole lot and this kind of brinks brings it back to old-school Yugi.
11:19 THIS. Combo going first be like this. You never know what opponent has on their hands so you have to summon negates as much as you can COPE that some will survive from Kaiju, LarvaG, or Ra ball.
I think the ideal game would be something like 6-7 turns, each player has about 3-4 turns to play. Also, on game design, Eldlich and Branded triggering most of their resource management effects during the End Phase are IMO a clear design attempt to slow the game down artificially (imagine all branded extra-deck monsters triggering immediatly). Since those two decks were highly succesful, I would not find it strange if Konami kept playing with decks that while really strong, have slower trigger effetcts (next standby, ep, opponents x phase, etc)... This would maybe help extend the average game from turns 2-3 to 4-5, which would be a win already I guess.
EDIT: I think make decks resource intensive (like Eldlich), but not so powerful (like Branded, Tear, etc), and then both players will play a longer game.
The last fair and strong deck they made was swordsoul after that they kept release stupidly broken cards that for some reason are generic.
To be honest, I think Mathmech post Cyberstorm Acess has really high potential to play around almost everything.
Just like tear back in the day, putting up layered interruptions is so strong and Mathmech (thanks to the new cyberse support) can now use every recourse available in the game.
Interruptions in hand/field/gy and backrow. :D
God is this deck really getting better? I already hate it so much lmao.
Which cards out of cyac makes it better?
what card(s) that makes Mathmech even better?
@@6210classick the new "firewall defenser" is a great one card starter for the deck + "cyberse sage" and "cyberse disabwurm" not only give you access to a 4 Negate "Dark fluid dragon", the fusion "cyberse disabwurm" also provides a spell trap negate that can be used from the graveyard.
+ not having to play I:P to end on a decent endboard makes you play around Talents (Talents cooks mathmech so hard if you play anything thats not heatsoul pass)
@@alexanderpech7302 the new "firewall defenser" is a great one card starter for the deck + "cyberse sage" and "cyberse disabwurm" not only give you access to a 4 Negate "Dark fluid dragon", the fusion "cyberse disabwurm" also provides a spell trap negate that can be used from the graveyard.
+ not having to play I:P to end on a decent endboard makes you play around Talents (Talents cooks mathmech so hard if you play anything thats not heatsoul pass)
i just love hearing josh talk about ygo
I agree with your points. They definitely need to slow the game down a bit and add a way to sandbag players from comboing all the way similar to how other cards games have resources such as mana to do so. The change in card design with a lot of cards being able to be used only once per turn was a step in the right direction imo.
Sometimes I wonder if the speed counters in the anime duels could be the solution as that could be a form of resource that limit too much cards being played and if they design it right, there should be a balance of counter generation and cards that use said counters so that they can be played...
As a “Yugi boomer”, my biggest problem is how “slowly speedy” the current game is.
I want a genuinely slower game but not in the way the current game is played where we sit around and wait for our opponent to take 5 minutes comboing out a full board and it’s still only their first turn.
I want that 5 minutes to consist of a lot more back and forth. Maybe it’s my ignorance to how the current game is played and I’m sure my skill level plays a part but it’s just nowhere near as fun as it used to be because of this shift.
There are 2 solutions to this problem :
- nerfing decks that take shit ton of time
- giving most decks the ability to play turn 0
I prefer the 2nd option
This is why I always go to bat for stun or control decks. Combo decks have far and away taken off as the most popular ones, and I wouldn’t mind it so much if players of those decks didn’t turn around and vilify decks that don’t match up well with theirs. I play Snake Eyes too, but I also love to play Runick because I don’t always want to set up a big stupid board of beatsticks.
In modern YGO every single "problem" card of today is just a solution to a problem card of yesteraday and sometimes I dread of what tomorrow will bring.
At this point, I just assume that future boss monsters will have the text "This card cant be tributed" to play around Kaijus/Golem/Sphere Mode
Thank for this discussion Josh!
What I find interesting is that there are a lot of videos and articles popping up about issues of modern yugioh.
Moist Critical had an interesting reaction video up a few days ago.
I think that whatever opinion you have, it’s quite objectively true that the state of yugioh and possible problems of the tcg is a topic that is gaining attention as more people talk about that topic.
Yeah, even up to today, the devs of YGO have been entirely reactionary to their own missteps. The almost lack of rules and complete open-endedness of the game just gravitates towards explosive turn 1. The game is mostly built on the exceptions in the rules text of various monsters/spells/traps and not from any inherently interesting rules interactions. Devs have no other knobs to tweak than to just release better card that beats last year's card, which just exacerbates power creep, complexity creep, and 'speed' creep.
I personally don't see a permanent solution that isn't just 'make a new game' when there's no inherent penalty to overusing resources. This is why I think Konami JPN have Rush Duel now.
New master rule maybe? Severely limiting what ppl can do in few first turns. That could slow down the game, tho im not sure whats the best way of doing it.
Most games don’t have “inherently interesting rules interactions”. You generally don’t want those in card games.
You want interesting card interactions and strategy interactions, and Yugioh has generally delivered on that very well.
It’s also worth noting that the people designing most cards are at Konami of Japan. TCG exclusives generally show much better design than OCG cards, and TCG banlists are generally much better at dealing with problems than OCG banlists (which have left broken and unfun cards like Gumblar legal far after they should’ve been banned).
EDIT: “TCG exclusives generally shown” -> “TCG exclusives generally show”
@@cephalosjr.1835 Let me clarify what I mean by 'rules interactions' (I probably should have said something like 'Rules based Interactions'). If you were to strip a game down to it's barebones (ex: french vanilla creatures, basic lands, & simplest instant/sorceries for MtG) it's still interesting to play because the rules of the game motivate dynamic strategies. That's what I mean.
I find YGO is the opposite, where the strategy of the game comes almost exclusively from the exceptions produced by card effects. The interesting parts of the game are X hand trap exists, I must play around it, or Z boss monster invalidates some part of my strat. I will concede the extra deck has been an inherent dynamic mechanic (I love the level management Synchros/XYZ introduced to the game).
This all to say that designing this game is weirdly tough because. . . I feel like the devs have no choice but to pile on these powerful warping cards to make the game interesting, there is nothing to downscale to. The game would be less cool if these busted cards didn't exist and warp things around them. Konami understood that and has made it the central appeal of the game for almost a decade now.
@@TheNotableNobody This is a feat of insight, and I thank you for sharing it with me.
What I was mostly disagreeing with were the ideas that the game devs don’t have design levers and knobs that don’t induce powercreep and that there’s no inherent penalty to overusing resources.
For the second one, there actually is an inherent penalty: If you use a resource, you lose it and so can’t use it again. The game does have attrition, it just takes place over the course of a few turns rather than, like, 10.
For the first, game developers in general can’t avoid powercreep: If you print cards that aren’t entirely competitively unplayable, they will fit into some deck, increasing its power, and powercreep will have occurred.
Yugioh devs also don’t just release cards that are better than last year’s; OCG releases a lot of archetypes that aren’t clearly better than last year’s meta and also aren’t terrible, and TCG exclusives almost never cause power sprint.
EDIT: That said, I do think OCG devs have problems with going over the power level they’re targeting. That along with letting their mistakes stay for too long shows a worrying lack of skill at balancing.
(Please forgive me, the spacing of this post is a little wonky and I'm working on editing it.)
This turned way longer than I intended, but I just wanted to say, I love the fact you are bringing this topic to light in a constructed and educated way. You give fair points to both sides and are not biased in your constructed criticism. I am personally of the opinion that I find the game not to be fun anymore, given the importance of the first turn, and that's okay, we can disagree on certain aspects of the game but so long as we can understand one another that is what truly matters.
My hopes for the game personally are (and yes this might be a hot take) to really dial back what decks are able to do on their first turn, targeting the end result of what you go up against. And exactly like you said when you deal with the main issues the side issues or band-aids that were created to deal with that main issue can be addressed as well. Without writing a full essay I think what is most difficult for players is identifying what the real problem is. And that in order to really fix these issues you cannot take just one single action but multiple things have to be changed to get the result you wish for. (I will touch on this at the end)
My personal wish for the game is that we could return to a speed and level of interaction during the first half of the Arc V Era, the area of time from Duelist Alliance to till the end of the Nekroz format. This was a point and time when decks were fast, but not too fast, they were able to float into other cards or gain back resources rather well or even have effects that activated in the grave to give you more options to a card after it was destroyed, but all of this did not happen in the first turn of the game but over the course of several turns going back and forth with the opponent. But hand traps were powerful but they could not truly shut off a deck's ability to play, it might have been greatly hindered, but you were most likely not going to lose if you got Vielered, or dare we say it (Maxx C ed). (Personal take here) This was a time before kaijus, Ash and Imperm, Dark Ruler and Nibiru, or omni negating extra deck monsters such as Borreload Savage or Apoulsa and personally, I find the exclusion of such cards to be much more enjoyable.(and Yes I understand that there were still extra deck negating monsters and I'm not saying those were fine back then, they were not, but they were much less prevalent in that era of the game, not every deck made a Herald or a Hope Harbinger, this could happen but it was not the gameplan of every deck to outright negate the opponent's board and kill them next turn)
But I will not lie, compared to what decks do nowadays, this is child's play, the idea of playing Dante and setting some cards is unthinkable when you can just play your entire hand on your first turn. Players have gotten used to doing more and more with their decks and simply because their cards do more because they HAVE to do more because the game realistically will not last as long as it once did.
To be frank, if the options are there the players will use them. I'm not saying it's useless to talk about these issues, far from it, but Konami and their design team really are in charge of this issue. And to be fair their band aid fixes only go so far. The introduction of hand traps and board breakers are these band aids in order to handle the unchanged might that is made from decks establishing multiple negates on their first turn or flipping floodgates to gain an advantage in their favor.
But in order for this discussion to happen fans need to listen to one another and not dismiss another's opinion on the matter. There is a big divide between the casual and competitive players in this game and it's pretty sad. Players will just jump to conclusions about the opponent's viewpoints and joke about it and that gets us nowhere. Causal players want to interact in the game they enjoy, if they are left sitting there for 5 minutes, either facing down a board of negates, getting their zones locked, having an opponent play on their turn and chain locking them out of their own card's effects, can you blame them for not "enjoying" this? I don't think so. Their only option is to change their deck into something that is better equipped to handle these decks and have to auto-include 9+ hand traps or multiple going second cards just to have a chance on their first turn. This cuts them out of playing their favorite decks and strategies because they simply are not good enough. And there is no place for these lower-powered decks, there is no real format where you can play decks that are not the top ends of the meta and not get stomped.
I personally love coming up with fan-made formats to help fill a need I see in the game. But if we as players cannot come together and listen to each other constructively and give honest critiques of the problems the game faces at hand, then the game may just continue down the same road its been going down and the gap between the two fan bases will grow wider and wider. Simply put, I'm a casual fan that just wants to have a few back-and-forth turns with the opponent, (actually having the game go beyond the third turn, or the game not decided by sometimes the first turn). To have each deck have its own identity and have our boss monsters be the focal point of our deck's strategy. Not to have every single card we play negated and have different and interesting game states and a multitude of possible answers at our disposal
TLDR: Loved your video! While I may have some disagreements I agree with you 95%! We need to get yugioh fans talking about this and actually have constructive conversations! Not just slinging insults at one another or not being open to the other's viewpoints! Have a great day everyone and go enjoy yugioh, in your own way!
Thank you Josh for every content that you creat! And especially thanks for those kinda videos because ist is always a pleasure to hear your thoughts about yugioh in general!
i think that a way to fix the power of a single turn is just to substantially raise the life point counter. if people could not OTK then holding cards for followup turns/plays would be more valuable
How much more tho? Even 20k LP not mean much nowdays if u cant play through opp combo board / floodgated and no outs. Nowdays vomitting 8k on board not that hard, 20k prob just make u live for another 1 turn.
If u mean like 50k LP maybe i agree lol.
Edit: 50k is absurd now i think about it lmao. But yea at least 20k+ maybe good idea if u want to really slow down the game.
This actually drastically changes whats viable since OTKing suddenly becomes impossible. Consider that there are numerous decks with alt wincons rn, eg. kashtira and runick.
Ayo, Josh, can we maybe get a Tear equivalent of that Spright video you made for MD? I really enjoyed seeing you think about the bo1 format and the different banlist, and also loved seeing you notice the Maxx C bounce with frog. Enjoy your vacation, king
I know you are talking about Yu-Gi-Oh in a whole with all the cards released but right now the feeling of tear coming out in master duel has shifted so much. I feel like you either have to play it or play a complete counter to it.
Maybe bc I'm not as good as the game but it just feels oppressive
RE; Decks becoming faster and faster - I will say that I think they had a good idea for a "bandaid fix" with the more recent design philosophy of hard once per turn effects on basically everything. Decks like branded have a built in limit to how much shit they can do a turn and a lot of the interactions they set up aren't hugely oppressive effects like omni-negates or floodgates. I think in an ideal yugioh, basically ever deck would function this way while huge blowout cards and board breakers aren't as needed or (I can hope) absent altogether. A limited engine to sort of get itself started and build a board on turn 1, and a decent amount of archetype specific interactions they can set up that aren't oppressive in gameplay sounds a lot more enjoyable imo. Of course, it would be tricky to find a good base for what effects aren't oppressive in a game like this, but I think that would be a way more enjoyable form of the game - one that is decided purely by interactions instead of shit like dark ruler, super poly, evenly, nibiru, kurikara, etc.
I agree a lot with that! And I do think the good design of decks like Branded is not just coincidental but that they know about the fundamental game design problems the game has and this is a new game design philosophy we are seeing. At least I hope that it is that. But I feel like we see this trend more and more with modern decks.
Thats mostly older YGO where u can still play back and forth and longer than 5 turns. But its too late to comeback to that aside just play other formats ofc.
The best they can do is to limit what players can do in few first turns, by master rule change. Either limiting special summons, or even effects activation limit.
the worst is a lot of boards are actually breakable, even without the blow-out going 2nd cards. the problem is when with a full board, you also have to face 2-3 hand traps; see superheavy samurai: it makes a huge board off 1 card, and other than that, you also have to play through a lot of HTs, making it impossible to beat, going 2nd.
and shs is even unaffected by your own HTs, since it can make a Baronne de Fleur, unaffected by your cards, even before starting its real combo.
i usually watch your vods since i'm out of your streaming time zone. Pretty entertaining. I remember you explained this in MBT's video on floodgate and going second card
Hi Josh, long time no see!
I think the problem is that there is such a big focus on negates, be it in the form lf boss monsters or floodgates. Compare that to back and forth formats that people love to this day like goats, tele dad or dragon rulers, where you had a war of attrition because it was more about generating advantage. In rulers you made a strong board with maybe 2 dracossacks, but the second players could break it because he also had access to his resources.
It would be nice if more boss monsters would focus on generating advantages, especially setting up following turns (search in end phase for example) and not locking opponents out.
Not sure how to get there from this point though 😅
Having interruptions on boss monsters isn't problematic in itself though. I think it's healthy to have some boss monsters that generate advantage, some that interrupt the opponent (not free negates tho) and some that are just big and hard to get out of the field (what you'd want in a more defensive deck).
Another thing that feels like a problem to me that comes from this is that... Often there's no real *reward* for drawing a hand of 4 engine + 1 non-engine? A lot of the time modern decks are designed such that you only need one, two, three at most to make the best endboard that your deck can produce, and at best the extra engine cards are follow up and insulation against handtraps to give you the same board as always. The distinction between starters and extenders and everything makes that worse.
YGO needs a new Master Rule that introduces limits on special summoning. My initial thought is that you have a mana counter system where you accrue 1 counter each turn. Your number of special summons per turn is limited to the number of counters you have during that turn. That way players can't build massive boards on the first or second turns. There would be a ramp up. Of course, Konami could ruin the idea by making effects that allow you to violate the counter limit.
*As much as I love this game there are some things Id like to see get fixed. One issue I have is when konami creates cards like D barrier or combos like Gimmick Puppet lock that don't even allow you to interact with your opponent unless you draw specifics outs if they have any. *Hand loops and consistent FTK are another big issue with the game. It just feels so shitty when you feel like you loose because you didnt open the Hand trap and my opponent went first. *I hate floodgates too but I understand why we have them. The thing I hate about floodgates is when the floodgate only hinders me and not my opponent it seems. A good example of this is skill drain in eldich. I feel like floodgates were fine in older formats because the game was slower and we were main decking staples such as MST and heavy storm but with the game being so much faster now a days you cant afford maining those outs. *Some potential rule changes and alternatives I thought that could fix the game would be allowing you to open your 6th card if you are the player going 2nd and you just wouldn't draw for your first turn ether. At least it would give you a better chance to draw a handtrap to interrupt your opponent if they are comboing and if you are the going first player it would allow for something like tactics to be a little stronger because now youd get to see the 6th card if you look at there hand. *As far as power creeps go it would be nice to see the game slow back down like it was in edison format but if they were to do that I feel Konami would have to hard nerf decks on the banlist and just not power creep the next sets. Thats just my thoughts. Love the channel and thanks for the content.
Handloops and consistent FTKs are usually banned quite quickly.
Going second isn't that bad in the current format, I went 6-2 with a blind second deck in the last regional and if I was more informed in my deckbuilding, I could have won even more matches. The biggest issue imo are the pseudo ftk locks like puppet, iblee, dark angel, Naturia Beast, ... and also powerful floodgates post side like antispell.
You do realize if you lose the dice roll it's basically over. Going second definitely puts you at a huge disadvantage.
@@DonMarzzoni if you build your deck as a going first deck with little going second cards, yes. But my point was if you have enough strong going second cards, you are not in a disadvantage if you go second. duster, storm, dark ruler, evenly, thrust, talents are strong. Prosperity helps as well. Also, Gamma and Shifter are strong handtraps as well.
The more annoying part is the locks or pseudo ftks.
12:50 they already do that in the OCG. Many top tier decks simply just vomit 6-8 interruptions. The "best" 2 decks are Purely (which if you Kaiju the towers monster they recover 3 and SS 1. That guy also draws them 3 on your stand by) and Super Heavy FTK (Lock with Artifact Deathscythe and the actual 8000 dmg true ftk) that often vomits Baronne and other 3 more negators. Your realistic only outs to those boards is to either draw Dark Ruler or a Lava Golem and somehow OTK through a deadscythe.... or use Forbidden Dropplet and play the game with 1 card in hand.
I feel one MAJOR PROBLEM is the crazy power gap between decks, the thing I liked about the anime was how everyone played different decks that were equal in terms of power. Konami needs to either create new cards for archetypes that make them meta or make different formats that let older decks become powerful
Yeah, It's called Edison Format and Time Wizard Format.
@@TheHengKong the problem already existed. Older formata are basically the same as new ones but with different meta decks. Yu-Gi-Oh has never really been like the anime. Might be a shame but anime Yugi and the TCG are almost different games.
@@TheHengKong hell yeah. Can't wait to play my crystal beast deck against vayu turbo. Anything goes in Edison after all
@@unaffectedbycardeffects9152 at least older formats u can actually play interactive back and forth, which can last more thzn 5 turns, unlike YGO nowdays.
@@invertbrid not always true, but I see where you are coming from. The older the format, the slower the game. Except for some specific formats that aren't the ones you mentioned, so they don't count.
Lets also talk about cards that provides like a plus five if they resolve and basically u autolose if u didnt have a response (branded fusion just as an example)
runick fountain draw 3 : )
@@permabanned3849 that a bit different cuz It doesnt give advantage by itself, it needs othee runik spells, but for sure is a broken card
junk speeder is literally a +5 on summon
Did you play forbidden memories before? I know that the editor probably picks the music but I was still curious if you tried the game
I think the problems with yugioh started when the graveyard was seen as a resource. Then to up that the deck is seen as your 2nd hand. So many cards search now. Take Kashtira. 4 of the cards just add another Kashtira card to your hand. 1 of them just summons one from the deck. I play Branded Blue-Eyes. I have 12 cards in my deck that give me access to my combo. All 12 use the deck as a resource. With 1 of my 12 starter cards I can build a board that has Mirrorjade, Dragostepelia, A Blue-Eyes Jet Dragon and a Blue-Eyes White Dragon on board. With a branded fusion in hand for next turn. All because that first card and every card after uses the deck instead of my hand for resources.
Right now it seems (at least to me) that Konami is trying a lot to make going second a much more viable option.
- Flunder can play going second and people like KeasbeyTCG are trying their hardest to prove that.
- Tearlament (through Havnis, Tearlament Kashtira) and the upcoming dino support are able to play "turn 0" to circumvent actually going second and having to rely on handtraps/ boardbreakers
- Kashtira has built-in going second options in for example Fenrir, who isn't often referred to as "Pankratops at home" for nothing.
- Dinos are slowly but surely making a resurgence with Lithosagym off the list and new support on the horizon and those bad boys are known as a capable going second strategy for a reason.
- Sky Striker keeps rearing it's head with Engage back at 1 and new support coming soon as well, those can go second too (at least in the past, i don't know how feasable that is nowadays but i don't think it's THAT much worse)
- Bystials are handtraps, boardbreakers and playstarters all-in-1 (think for example Magnamhut searching any dragon, like Luster Pendulum, Rokket Tracer, Dragunity Remus, or overlaying 2 into Beatrice sending for example Orcusts or zombies to the grave.
Honestly, i think this is a great development (at least for now) as i often find myself interested in strategies, but then feel bad actually playing them, because all i can do is "draw Dark Ruler or forfeit immediately". To me, a complete strategy has a plan for going second as well and muuuuuch much much more strategies are getting one nowadays. Of course, i know, many people will probably disagree with this sentiment, which is fine. I still like this approach to powercreep, compared to "we'll just make going first EVEN BETTER".
Giga cope post. Floo can't go second, they can sack the opponent with dark ruler evenly but so can any other deck. Tear is dead lol, let it rest. Dinos are capable of going second because of Misc turning the game into single player mode, which is literally everything wrong with yugioh right now. Striker has been long powercrept and the post linkage support is dogsh. .
@@gatocochino5594 In all these cases i'm talking full power variants, because talking about a strategies capabilities in the context of overall game design directions after getting neutered is BS.
Of course Floo can go second. Staples like Evenly, Dark Ruler and Lightning Storm are certainly very helpful and appreciated, but through chainblocking your birds and Unexplored Winds you can definitely pick apart some boards.
Dinos have been more than "Misc for game" even with that boy at 3. Eating your opponents interruptions and then summoning UCT directly from hand has beaten many opponents that thought stopping Misc is all that's necessary + the upcoming Xeno (?) support let's you play turn 0, to make going second actually viable again.
Yes, Tear is dead as of feb13. Tearlament as a strategy does have a plan to play going second nonetheless. Again, we really shouldn't lean on the banlist too much, when trying to assess the situation of Konami's general design trajectory. Nobody would have ever thought, Monkeyboard, Double Iris and Skullcrobat could ever leave the banlist, before Master Rule 5 happened. Didn't even take a year after that went into effect and both Double Iris and Skullcrobat were back to 3, Monkeyboard is now at 1 too.
Sky Striker is able to use and abuse any and every spell card in the game to greater effect than any other strategy virtue of needing spells in grave to activate their in-archetype spells. Triple Tactics Thrust has been a godsent for the strategy, since it let's you pseudo-search Terraforming, Reinforcement Of The Army and even some archetypal cards. Additionally, Raye and her machinery has (some) cross-synergy with Runiks. Are you really trying to tell me, that new Link2 is dogsh. .?
Are any of these strategies in their current situation going to win a YCS? Probably not, tho Tearlament and Floo still topped a couple times after feb13 and the upcoming Dino support is looking pretty good too. But all if this is not what i'm talking about. What i wanted to point out was the general direction the Konami seems to be taking the game: Making going second a little more viable through SOME in-archetype tools (like Unexplored Winds, Misc, Havnis, Fenrir, etc.). Those were never meant to be role models in the current game environment, but mere examples of the past, present and future to showcase a trajectory. But obviously i'm the one on copium.
@@dimitrilepain3821 Damn you are smoking some good copium. Any deck can go second if they draw non-engine, the last YCS london was decided by double kurikara and talents going second. Ish Tear has been the only deck that can win going second with only engine cards in years.
And yes the new striker card sucks BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CONSISTENLY SUMMON IT IN ITS OWN ARCHETYPE. Unless we get new support Azalea will be used more in purrely than in striker.
Pretty good video, any opinions about Vanquish Soul? Seems to be doing pretty well in the OCG and I’m actually surprised at how it is such a balanced midrange deck with consistent soft interaction and just massive value game.
"oh wow cool you're playing fur hires? that's so cool and such a unique deck"
Them: "fûçk you I active runnick fountain"
First 3 turns have no battle phase, the field must end with at least 3 cards on it and the turn player has a choice between drawing during their draw phase and mulliganing their hand. This way the first 3 turns will be interactive and require players to hold back cards for follow up and the mulligan allows the hands to be consistent enough that the outs get drawn.
Too bad Konami not only never listens but actually censors criticism.
We need a massive community boycott of product until we get multiple rarities similar to the ocg. If it's an issue with materials then maybe substitute something like starlights/collectors/most super rares in the last 3 years, etc.
So either you have more decks like Tear going forward, where the dice role meant very little due to Havnis and Kelbek allowing both to play in turn 1;
Or we get rule changes that limit turn 1 even more - already no battle phase of course, and only 5 cards - another option would be to have board breakers in the extra deck so that deck building for going second may be less cringe... rumors are that konami is working on adding a new zone and extra deck type - so maybe they go there -> like Maser Rule 4 where you were limited with the "amount" of extra deck plays you could potentially do; If you can generally do less in a single turn, then that will also affect turn 1 boards...
Or do the exact opposite of that and enable turn 0 for everyone.
I think an interesting suggestion is to ban accesscode and borrelsword, and perhaps increase the lifepoints to 12k or 16k.
Doing so removes the ability of just any random deck to OTK and forces the game to go into turns 4-5, making the idea of follow-up more valuable and freeing up design space
I like the idea of having a generic extra deck monster whose sole purpose is to do damage, specifically to help decks that lack firepower. I think generic extra decks monsters should fill 1 specific role.
But yes, accesscode can burn in hell.
Ironically, the best approach would be to completely power creep the meta, by only making cards that have 3 effects: their normal effects, effects when they get negated and 'hand trap effects' that can be activated in turn 0.
It wouldn't be cancerous if all decks had access to turn 0 cards and hands were significantly less bricky (by each card having multiple uses depending on the situation), a lot of interaction is a given.
Its also that effects that in a older format would have been an actual drawback for a good effect aka "activate x but now you got to drop y cards from your hand or destroy Z cards on your field" is with most Archetypes now just worked into the playstyle and becomes an advantage because those cards then usualy just activate more effects allowing you to either just summon them rigth back, draw a card, search etc. Aka you dont just get a card with 1 good effect rigth out ,you can even trigger 3-4 more good effects. Giving you a easy + in card advantage. With a single move. While if your opponent doesnt have a handtrap out is basicly guranteed. And dont even get me started on the "But then you can only play cards of x archetype" Its an Archetype. There wont be many non Archetype cards in that deck. Thats not a drawback thats an excuseto make it look like one.
I think what they will do (and we are allready seeing that with Tears, Bystials and not nearly as good as the first two but also Ghoti) are decks that can play on your opponents first turn too. And honestly I don't think that is a bad thing. Instead of one player setting up and the other one trying to break there bord we will see a lot of back and forth on the verry first turn. Wich could be good, it could mean a lot of interaction and room for good decissions. I belive Tearelemts were one of the first decks with this new design philosiphy and people enjoyed that deck, the main problem was, that no other deck could do what tears can right now. But I think that is where the game is going and maybe also where it needs to go. Legends of Runetera plays like that too and it works great for that deck.
People absolutely hated Tear and Bystials so I doubt they will continue with that design philosophy in the near future.
I think the truly heinous thing about havnis was hitting an ishizu card, otherwise havnis mill 3 was way less powerful than people thought
@@gatocochino5594 the only ppl who hated tear were casuals. Ppl who actually played it loved it
@@greenhillmario Agreed. Tear was really powerful but it wasn't that bad and the mechanic and gameplay was interesting and fun. The realy problem were the Ishizu cards. Those things are just stupid beyond any reasoning.
@@nlm7033 Casuals are the majority of the sales, Konami is a for-profit they won't ignore the complaints of most of their costumers. People hate cards that don't let them play *their deck*, which is why handtraps are seen as so toxic unlike board breakers and why so many people think they ruined yugioh.
Prob remains on T1 player making a field where they win on turn 3, after opponent is forced pass after failing to establish board presence.
So 2 options.
1) limit t1 player more e.g; 4 card start or a cap on special summons allowed 1st turn. This wld upset players.
2) make it harder to get OTK'd; increasing LP of T2 player. This wld prolong games upsetting tournament organisers
Heyo! where did you get that huge card artwork from? i want one too for my room!