Stun should always prevent only specific interactions and apply to both players properly. I see stun as a type of strategy that makes both players abandon their advanced modern weapons and is forcing them to grab bats instead. while you playing as a stun based strategy, you are hoping that you are gonna be more experienced with the bat than your opponent and win in this bat fight. So stun should be downgrading your opponent to your bat level rather than making him play with a bat while you keep all of your good modern weapons to fight him. This is the definition of a poor designed floodgate
@@shien-ryu4395but you see, the thing is, stun does not downgrade your opponent and hoping your own experience would prevail. Stun requires no skill because it involves no skill, its a game of luck, when you summon dyna, equip moon mirror shield, play morganite and flip anti spell, your opponent will not get even a chance to play in the first place. This is the idea of stun, a complete lock down of your opponent, to the point where they cannot do anything but watch. The “sacrifice” for this is that stun has 0 play when going second and has no room for growth or improvement. A true game of coin flip where you go first and draw enough floodgates, or go second and scoop immediately, this is why the more competitive variants of stun have to incorporate a deck that is already decent on its own, most notable of these being runick. Stun is no more a deck than a jumbled mess of badly designed cards that piled up over time thanks to the brilliant banlist decisions from konami Edit: what you were describing sounds closer to a control deck than stun
@@OsirusHandle theoretically, THAT scenario is the same. In reality, a control deck consistently gets to their cards while drawing cosmic cyclone or hfd is nowhere near as consistent. Runick is a good example, they would almost always have runick cards (due to deck ratio) that get out fountain and whittle away at your deck, stun can only hope that they drew dyna + moon mirror shield + floodgate / protections
Every Stun player is required to be really chill and nice. Like I was in the final round of day 1 of YCS Raleigh and I would have made day 2 if i won this match. The guy I played against and I talked for a good 10 minutes before the round and I thought to myself "Wow this guys is really chill. I think I will look foreword to this game" . He wins die roll and proceeded to summon Imano Iwato and activate runick fountain. Was not a fun game but I can't hate the guy because he was so nice.
@@JustDatOneGuy wdym I don’t understand. Josh and Farfa definitely got into their rooms at Seattle, those rooms are 100% identical to their rooms at home, and recorded this episode right before Josh has to play his first round.
The only reason Stun is problematic is because a) the game is so fast now that floodgates are way more devastating if you only have 3 turns to play and b) almost every deck is super reliant on extra deck monsters and special summoning 5+ monsters a turn. Yes, stun existed before but it was way less degenerate. Even looking at stun decks that affected the meta in the past like T.G. Stun, it played a fair midrangey control strategy because the format was infinitely slower than it is right now and you had time to find your outs. I feel like trying to tackle Stun is just putting a bandaid over a much widespread issue that, in my opinion, is bleeding the game.
Completely agree. I also think this is a big part of a lot of people’s frustration with generic extra deck end board pieces. The game is fast enough that every deck can make its dream end board on the first turn every game, which means that if your opponent goes first, then the end board is the only part of your opponent’s deck that you ever get to interact with outside of throwing down a handtrap here or there. Different decks can have all different kinds of ways to *make* their desired end board, and that might be interesting for the player making the end board, but if they end on the same bosses as every other deck, then that’s all the other player will ever care about. Maybe the only solution left is to double down on “our turn,” so the player going second gets to play more before the first player’s built a board and ended their turn.
It's insane to me that people are still saying things like "why are you playing this? You're not having fun." You don't fucking know that. You're projecting your own feelings onto them. You literally described a guy who seemed to have childlike glee when flipping a Mirror Force on you. Did you still think he wasn't having fun? The guy who goes "Damage step? :3" every time you get a monster to stick to the board? "You're not even having fun playing this" is a john of the highest calibre, it is said only to stop yourself from having to think about other people and what they get out the game. Absolutely no different from the kinds of people who scrub out hard in fighting games and go "why are you throwing fireballs man, you're not even having fun"
My experience has been that the loudest group of TCG players are people who want to play solitaire and make their opponent watch. Their tyranny of fun is that players stare at each other and take turns playing cards until one of them wins and only interacting when they absolutely have to. The worst part is, because things like stun and control look like they keep your opponent from playing more making them sit through a combo just to kill them, they get to paint those other kinds of strategies as incorrect, unfun, or cheesy. All that to say, I think you're right its a tactic to push stuff they don't like out of games.
I think you are absolutely right. But honestly I don't think yugioh belongs in a best of one format in general. Best of 3 with side Deck is mandatory for this game. I remember the first time my friend introduct me to MD, I was excited until I realized it was just random best of 1 duels. The first thing I thought was: what if I lose the coin flip and my opponent plays Stun or ftk? No side Deck, no best of 3, no redemption? Just insta surrender and demotion?
@@shien-ryu4395 ye YGO is way too dicey for bo1. Its strength actually is fighting different decks with your fixed side deck. Its so much fun irl. Definitely 1 of my top reasons why i like playing tcg.
Floodgates are high risk, high reward removal cards. They turn playable cards into bricks, however their impact is dependent on how many applicable playable cards your opponent has.
I think yugioh is best when you don't need to be "up to date" with the meta to do well. Smart deck building and sequencing should always be rewarded over buying into the new strategies.
The difference between stun and control is simple. Stun pre-emptively locks you out of playing. Control reacts to your plays with answers. Certainly the line can get blurred.
I do not like the fact that cards like Prosperity, or anything else thats like "you cant battle phase/do damage" do not have real downsides turn one, and its odd to me that they're legal to activate turn one when other things that require a cost to actually be paid need that payment to actually exist in the first place.
At least from my perspective, stun is often a reaction to not being allowed to participate in the game. Negates can feel as toxic as stun. It can be incredibly satisfying to flip a Skill Drain on an opponent you know otherwise is just going to crush you with card advantage and then negate everything you do.
I was playing Runick Stun on Omega a few days ago and i played against an Gimmick Puppet FTK who wins Game 1 by FTKing, Games 2 and 3 i Stun him and win and got insulted for playing stun and i was like "you're playing an FTK, Game 1 You didn't let me play, is that not toxic?" In the end the game has just become degenerate where half the games between combo decks are just comparing hands for Board Breakers or Hand traps, don't hate the players for the cards they choose to use, hate Konami for not caring for the balance of the game
stun is boring and I hate it. If I'm sitting down at a table, I want to PLAY the game and not just slap down an Inspector Border, setting 4, watching my opponent scoop because they can't play and then get evenly'd and/or full comboed game 2. Staying at home and rolling die would give me the same experience. You're now probably asking: so whats the solution? Decks like Tear, Puppetless Branded, Vanquish Soul, fuck even Lab when you take out stuff like DBarrier or Eradicator. I absolutely LOVE all these decks, because they don't intend on winning turn 1 and have tools to play an interactive game and disrupt your opponent WITHOUT comepletely stopping them from playing.
I got back into playing with Master Duel by starting with Stun moving onto Eldlich, Numeron, Swordsoul, 3-Axis, playing some meta and settling on enjoying Swordsoul and experimenting with it. Starting with Stun before moving onto a more control deck then midrange than combo meaned I had to go up the ladder of learning interactions of choke points
Commenting before I watch this. Stun is really maligned in YGO because of how all or nothing everything is. In MtG, a creature that increases the cost of non-Creature cards by 1 is an effective, deck defining Stax/Stun card while being fair. Stun pieces in YGO just can't work like this because of the lack of knobs and how play patterns work out. Either the limit/tax does almost nothing to a turn 1 end board, or it stops it somewhere and therefore, no end board is made. All or nothing. I very much blame the game being unable to handle them over the actual cards. Here's the rub though, Konami will never remove Stun from the game because it's mandatory in two ways. One, it's THE gap closer between the skilled and unskilled and their banlist is definitely balanced for a casual-competitive player over full on competitive one. Second, without it, there's very few macro playstyles left in the core game loop at the current power level. While a lot of people hate Stun, fundamentally repetitive play is another thing designers need to minimize.
Okay, commenting on the actual pod now. To help Josh articulate the difference, Control vs Stun is mostly reactive vs proactive defense. Negation and Removal vs Floodgates. Floodgates need you to fully tempo out your opponent and win before they get access to the cards you're prohibiting. Control just weathers out those cards. Ultimately though, I think playstyle distinctions in YGO are increasingly meaningless. "Cringe Midrange" deck like Kash that has a Floodgate as the central end board piece and a bunch of rattlesnakes that punish plays. It combos, it stuns, it does everything. Everything increasingly does everything. Pointing to my comments above regarding Lingering vs Continuous. Lingering is more powerful cause it's often attached to quick effects but it's all the same fundamental problems with the game itself. May add more as I continue watching..
yea, stun will always exist. you can see it with how, with some exceptions, most floodgates get limited to 1 instead of outright banned. its clear they want stun to exist in some form
A big part is also how a lot of decks are either A - All engine, no non-engine or B - the non-engine being played doesn't interact with stun cards (like most hand traps). All-in combo is the main way to play the game so there's no incentive to prepare for stun at all which results in people getting mad when their deck is not prepared. Back in the day people could play triple MST or Dust Tornado because those were just generically good cards not just vs stun but also vs other decks. Nowadays though these simple types of interaction have become completely invalidated in every other matchup that isn't specifically stun.
I think the best definition of stun is a deck that don't want your opp to play at all. By setting 5, you're expecting your opp to play, and reacting to their stuff. By summoning Boarder or Amano, you're clearly saying NO to your opp.
People often forget that stun is that is not always about setting continuous traps and flipping them on the opponents turn, floodgates come in all sort of shapes. Hero is very often play as a combo deck that ends in floodgate monsters like Plasma and Dark Law, Branded just wants to lock the opponent from special summoning using Sanctifire and a floodgate like gimmick puppet nightmare, people include Iblee in their combos from time to time in many different decks, Vaylantz is a pendulum combo deck that can easily search and summon fossil dyna, Majespecter searches Secret Village of the Spellcasters, the whole point of Kashtira at full power was to summon macrocosmos, and the list continues, including decks that summons monsters that skip the opponents turn or deal more than 8000 damage before the opponent has a chance to play, those are stun as well.
Stun is never leaving. It is a pain but It is a beginner stage for most, the only thing that needs to be done a card or two that can be sided that destroys monsters and back row. If Stun was erased it wouldn't kill the players but it make it so a few more players would leave who, for some just don't have the time or even the money of learning combo, or more so like, 99% likely your stun deck is more repairable then the top meta deck per format. If the game was more affordable on the highest level, like partial they made some staples lower, but the engines are pricey, why invest there if it'll be cycled out? While any annoyance at stun I get, but it isn't always like a person is always unskilled or just being a pain. A lot of layers. In closing, I feel stun should be played under two conditions. You enjoy the deck. Hey to each their own. Or it it precise counters the meta, who wouldn't do that?
Imagine they had a WCQ or the championship itself where if you win Konami makes the deck you won with all Royal rare 😅 so when you're out in the wild people will know
As an only occasional MD player, I think of stun similarly to how I think of dumb OTKs like Cusadia or Numeron: it’s a reasonably easy and reliable way to pick up some gems if I’ve been away for a while, so I can build a deck I actually want to play. Then again, MD rarely holds my interest for too long, so I’ll often never get to the point of building the deck I want to play. I think maybe another advantage of stun for more casual players is that it’s a deck that doesn’t evolve much. TCBOO and Gozen and Pachy and the like are unlikely to ever become bad. Even if a floodgate you like gets hit on the list, you can just replace it with the next best one, so it will take a lot of hits to meaningfully alter stun’s viability. Other decks can come and go, but stun will always be at least playable.
Hot take: we don’t need better traditional trap cards since going 1st is already so insane that giving people crazy traps to make going 1st even better would end horribly If anything we need more traps like imperm that can work going first but also can be used going second aswell
They could put a random card generator into Neuron and everybody had acess to it... Id be so down for this too. Maybe in a seperate format with new random effects...
I think the difference between Stun and control is that Stun is built around stopping your opponent from playing the game entirely. Stun decks generally end on two or more floodgates. Control decks at their best are built around large numbers of smaller 1 for 1 interactions and a strong advantage engine. Sometimes they will play a floodgate, but ideally thats not happening. A good control deck should always have more access to resources than other decks, but those resources may be less powerful than individual cards in other decks or be more conditional to access their power.
Just as a disclaimer, my perspective is from someone who only plays BO1 Master Duel, not BO3 TCG. As frustrating as Stun is, there is a reason why it exists in Yugioh, and the people that get the most frustrated about it tend to play decks that are hard-countered by Stun- combo decks that vomit out Special Summons, etc. They aren't accustomed to having the game slow down and having to grind, they are more used to going all-in in the first turn or 2 to try to overwhelm their opponent, so when their deck's main wincon isn't immediately accessible they start to complain. I feel like I play better when I play against Stun, because it's not just me doing typical plays with my deck, with common negates/interactions to deal with. It forces me to think about my deck and my gameplay in a completely different way. Yes it's frustrating to not be able to do specific actions under floodgates but I also know I have ways to get rid of them in my deck. Obviously I won't always draw the out, which can be frustrating, but it's also frustrating to not have all the tools you need in your hand to play around a full combo set-up even when you know they exist in your deck. That's just how it goes in card games. The worst and most toxic application of Stun cards for me is an opponent doing a typical turn 1 combo to end on multiple interactions and negates, and then their last move before passing to you is activating or summoning a floodgate or pseudo-floodgate like Maxx C. Things like that Vaylantz Stun deck that does an intricate Vaylantz combo and then ends on Fossil Dyna with that Pend card that protects it.
12:24 I was building lightsworn Tear today and for the deck u need Visas Amaratara. Crafted it and got a royal. I know have the slight urge to build Visas combo pile. I never will, but the urge to flex royals makes people build decks and spend money they wouldn’t have done otgerwise. I pulled a royal infernity archfiend, so I built infernity. I think have them be uncraftable is the right move since it makes them more valuable. We all wish we could craft them, but if we have that desire to have them more easily, then it proves how much we like them. I just wishthere were more variations, like neon, millennium or glitch effects. Just do something cool without going over the top like a certain program .
I always looked at it as control decks have multiple points of interaction that slow the opponent down into a grind game and stun lacks those points of interaction taking them away instead
Runick is stun. The goal of the deck is to banish your opponents deck. While purposely skipping your own battle phases. Stun I would say is a deck that focuses on winning the game by all other means other than LP. Obviously there are stun decks that can kill moon mirror shield all the way down. But the way stun players play. They wanna lock you out of everything. And wanna deck you out rather than play the back and forth game to win.
The thing that makes a stun deck a stun deck is if its bad. Basically every good meta deck can pivot into some sort of floodgate to stun the opponent, Iblee, puppet lock, winda, calamity turn skip or transaction rollback sheningans the list is endless. Stun isnt even a real deck, just a collection of synergies that have no real consistency or follow up. If you play a card to shut the opponent out you are a stun deck and if its branded or something else with similar power level you just have the luxury of other gameplans.
I think they nailed it in terms of engine and win condition. A meta deck can probably barf out over 8000 damage using Accesscode, Borrelsword, or Raging Phoenix into Zealantis and Promethean Princess, when they have an opening. Stun has to get there attacking for 1000 at a time and hoping the opponent stays helpless.
When I played MTG I loved a deck called Lantern Control, Runick Stun plays a lot like it, they have a lot of the same goals. I think it's neat that a game can allow for a deck that seeks for neither player to play it at all. It's not 1-1 since hand info is hard to come by, and top deck info is almost non-existent, but they seek the same end. The Lock™
The thing that i don't understand is Combo Decks that end 6 Negate Board that evolves to 10 Negates During the opponents turn is not considered STUN? It achieves the same thing. Why don't you just hand trap their combo? In response: Well why don't you just carry Cosmic with you, why don't you carry MST's? Why don't you pull the out on the floodgate? I'm not a Floodgate Advocate but its a must at the current game level.
One more thing that bugs me about certain floodgates is that they act with more information than they realistically should operate on. Stuff like TCBOO, Gozen, Colosseum etc is that they somehow restrict even you future summons if that makes sense? Like if I have two monsters of certain types, I can't even attempt to go into a Knightmate Phoenix which may still satisfy the condition of the floodgate. Like instead of checking on summon they just prevent the summon whatsoever which just feels so unnatural. Summon limit like effects too which somehow count the summons even before they were flipped which imo just doesn't make sense. Sorry if my wording is confusing. English ain't my first language so I probably wasn't able to phrase that properly 😅
The problem I have with Stun, is not a problem at a competitive level, it's the social situation. I didn't drive an hour to locals the 1-2 day(s) I get off a month that yugioh is available to come play yugioh, and know I'm going to have 1 to 2 out of the 5 matches I get that night to likely just not even be actual games unless I'm on an extremely strong deck (And no I'm not expecting crazy weak decks to do anything, my typical judgment is based on how TOSS decks would do since they are relatively modern decks and have always been decent) where I have to deal with Amano Iwato > Gozen > Tip each game and then even if i scoop early on a lost game state the match i still have to wait another 15 minutes to complete, or oh you're Calamity/Gimmick Puppet locked turn 1 welp guess were going to be sitting around doing nothing in game or postgame for the last 15 minutes of the round. It's less so about anything regarding the balance or competitiveness of it, and more you're literally just wasting people's time who don't likely get to play Yugioh maybe more than once a month. Stun is kinda the reason I just stopped going to locals, because I don't want to have to drive an hour and then have two matches totaling to 40 minutes together where neither of us are really playing a match. It just isn't worth the time, and why I swapped to only playing MTG Modern in person now that Grief is banned in Modern, it's just not worth the time investment knowing it's going to happen because of the higher density of stun players in yugioh, and why i dont particularly mind it in MD, I'm not losing a time investment, if i lose early i can just scoop and move to another game. It's the same issue as older unlimited omni-negate boards. I'm glad Konami grew out of that design space with decks like Vanquish Soul, Snake Eye, etc.
Honestly stun can be a fine MU in a tournament, _if_ you're in a format where you can afford to play the tools to out stun boards. It kind of turns the game into a puzzle game which can actually be pretty fun if your deck actually has a solution. Now there are some issues with it though. For one, stun outs are typically unsearchable and inefficient. You can't play a lot of them, and actually getting to them takes a lot of effort, and most stun decks can deal with one or two outs. The other issue is unfortunately Runick. I love Runick, I think they're one of the coolest archetypes that have released in recent years, but Runick Stun in particular is extremely annoying since they not only stun you, they constantly refill making it harder to break their board over multiple turns, they have a high chance of just removing your outs before you can even play them and they put you on a clock while doing that too. I still think games again them can be fun still, but it does feel a little unfair if you get unlucky against them. Re: royals, I don't mind they're not craft able, I do mind how boring they are. Idk what's going on at Konami HQ, already the TCG bling is the least interesting out of any card game out there ("oohh slightly different foiling pattern, wow that's so cool" - seriously compare to any other card game, it's embarrassing, buy a display of Pokémon boosters and you'll get like 10 cards that look better than anything in Yu-Gi-Oh from the past 20 years), I don't get why they do this in the digital game too where the cost of producing bling is so much lower (you literally just need to design it, no production line to set up, no constraints based on cost or realisability) - why is the top end still a generic foiling pattern? What's going on? Where is all that booster money going?
I agree that a deck that uses a stun card is a stun deck, but then what is a stun card? is macro cosmos a stun card? if yes, then is arise heart a stun card? if no why? I would define a stun card as; a card that prevents your opponent's ability to use a game mechanic in such a way that your opponent can no longer Interact with said mechanic. by that definition I can say that macro cosmos invalidates me from using the GY therefore it is a stun card, arise heart prevents me from using the GY therefore it is a stun card. By that definition and using your definition of a stun deck (a deck that uses a stun card) I would say that Kashtira is a stun deck.
There's a difference between a tech card like one skill drain in combo darkworld as on oh shit option and normal dino equip moon mirror. 3 of crack down with a mothod to accel syncro is not the same as double barrier.
Lingering floodgates are good if they are niche and not detrimentally crippling Look at Threatening Roar. Niche, floodgate that currently 1 deck in the format will complain about and maybe 1 pet deck (paleo) would consider running.
on another note all through history but more so earlier in the game it was always peak watching the stun player melt game 2 n 3 watchin u know the right 6 cards to side vs stun to completely blank them lol
Regarding the discussion of continous vs lingering effects. Continous effects are tied to cards on the field and can be interacted with. Once a card like shifter resolved you are past the point of interacting with it. Therefore i much rather have lingering stuff gone then continous. I like stun for the fact that it changes deck building. I dont like playing against it though. But in the grand scheme of things i dislike when everything revolves around monster for everything. Negates --> Monster (e.g. blazar) Floodgates --> Monsters (e.g. ariseheart) Searching --> monsters (e.g. snake eye Ash) Removal --> monsters (e.g. kuibelt) Etc. Thats why skill drain hurts so much but its not that skill drain is the problem. The problem is that most relevant effects are on monsters. The best spells are just additional Starter/extenders by searching a monster.
Control when you play and try to go for grinde game and interupt enough your opponent is fine (when it does not become a 5+ huge interruptions/omni negates) when you just does not allow your opponent to play like the awful Mystic Mine, fossil/boarder or floodgate spam than some played at some point is just horrible. It's seems unfair and is especialy unfun to play/play agaist. Take Generaider, he can make a good board ... Or ripping 2-3 cards from your hand before your first Main Phase + having 4 interruptions on board if play the good extra deck and Runick going first. Or D/D/D turbo Kali Yuga I tried it for one local it was like a turn skip under Summon limit + Ash and skull meister ... On the other hand, huge combo that lead to unfair boards with too many to take care off like Yubel with the sacred beast and unchain package does isn't more healthy for the game in general for one reason : the issue is the same : your opponent cannot play or just try but cannot do anything more than being destroy before having a beginning of board. Yes going second have advantage and huge boards breakers, but you need to "draw the out" which isn't a good argument to me, it make this luck base and with just a good negate it's useless For thr Runick part ... As much as I don't like the archetype structure it would be fine if the mill by bannishing the opponent deck IN ADDITION to interrupt is what others does not like in it, you get negate/have your cards destroy and you loose your deck really fast ith 1 to 4 ban for only one spell making it a 1 card rip of 5. + too easy accès to drawn 1 to 3 every turn and recovery tools because of the field spell that make the archetype immune to spell destruction. with a bit more restrictions, field spell less OP or just deck bannishing being his own effect you can activer apart from the others two, less peoples would be frustated
Honestly I don't mind stun a whole lot on master duel as compared to in person. On master duel, I didn't waste time sleeving up a deck, decking my list, driving 30 minutes to get to the store etc just to sit down and not be allowed to play the game. On master duel, if I go second against stun, if I don't immediately have an out to their "board" just scoop and play the next game no big deal
Stun Andy here. Im sorry but there is something hilarious about a 50$ stun deck dunking on a 1000$ deck. That was a huge appeal for me back in the day.
Whether its my opponent jacking off with cardboard, or setting a bunch of lock pieces in five seconds and smugly picking their hand up and saying go, I’m not playing the game and having fun. It’s this entire game.
I know that, when I get frustrated with the meta (which has been pretty often lately, SOMEHOW), I play stun/hyper control to ensure the meta sheep hate their games as much as everyone else does.
Nothing wrong with stun decks I quite like stun , let people play what they want without being personal to the other player , can play anything you want as Konami printed it and they are more than enough cards to easily get by stun don’t see the issue at all
Because modern yugioh players want to play epic solitaire and stun prevents them from doing that. The way they derive enjoyment from this game now is at odds with the older ethos stun represents.
@@yourdagan it’s good way for people to challenge better decks in a easier way , there’s plenty of cards to oppose stun , meta players just don’t like it when the the game doesn’t go there way or lose to it , but if someone played a deck not good enough the other player would be just sit and watch to
I'm a card Game player, i play all the boring archetype in every game, i love to do it, my friends say me the Anti fun, i play wailord stall in pokemon, mystic mine in yugioh, spartial collapse in goat format, in mtg i play ponza and i make a game of Commander +2 hours long because i stax the table and nobody can play anything, even me hahaha
I've been playing nothing but stun since the second week of Snake-Eyes on MD because I found SE extremely boring. I hate linear, tier-0 combo decks. If we're just going to play solitaire anyway, I guess I'll slow the game down.
Honestly floodgates are healthy and good for the game as something that exists. The problem is floodgates basically don't see play unless they are doing something degenerate or you are going back to the early history of the game. Like Jinzo is LITERALLY a floodgate... Who actually wants Jinzo banned in 2024? Necrovalley even wouldn't raise any eyebrows if it ACTUALLY required playing GK by having the same type of condition as secret village, despite the fact its been despised and been hit multiple times. Honestly so many floodgates would be perfectly fine in the game as continuous spell cards with "You can only activate this card at the beginning of the first main phase of your turn." Or "Activate only if you control no other cards and your opponent controls a monster." Or if they actually tied them to specific intended archetype when they are made for one thing.
By nature floodgates will be toxic, they completely stop some form of gameplay so decks that dont rely on that specific part are basically unaffected by the floodgate. If floodgates were to ever be fair, i think they would need to have restrictions where the person who activate it should at least be hindered on way or another. Maybe you could also add an effect like if you control multiple continuous spell/traps then you must send 1 of those as cost to activate the floodgate, this should at least ensure no set 3 floodgates shenanigans can happen, though this does not solve the issue of floodgates being very oppressive. Archetypal floodgates are on of the most annoying ones since they are extremely consistent (arise heart and empen to name a few). Lingering floodgates also meed to go asap. At the end of the day though, stopping a part of the game from being played is just not good design and should exist, interruptions are fine as long as they are not overly generic but lockdown effect are just too oppressive to be fair
@@bruhbruh4348 stopping parts of the game is not toxic, your deck was not intended to rely entirely on one specific part of the game but to as a norm do a bit of everything. Jinzo is a floodgate, Jinzo is a healthy and important part of the meta in one of the largest retro formats of the game for a reason. There is a healthy amount of answers that he does no stop and while traps are strong back then and you do want a chunk of them, you also want spells and monsters that answered Jinzo and other strong monsters. The reality is floodgates existing is not and never has actually been a problem. The quality of them has been at times, but not floodgates themselves. Droll is even a floodgate. You say archetypal floodgates are one of the most annoying ones... But that's not actually true if you look at the history of the game. It's been generic ones and ones MEANT for an archetype but not actually restricted to them that have been the problem more often than not. Archetypal ones rarely have been and when they have it's largely been due to massive stats + strong floodgate+tutorable/in the extra not simply due to being a floodgate similar to why Infernity Guardian has never been a problem on the level of Towers. Necrovalley was never a problem because Gravekeepers running it and they could hit you with it AND get rid of all the monsters in your hand before you could even do anything about it so you would be open without being able to even use monsters. Floodgates are an important thing for the health of the game. Summon Limits effect was never the problem... Being able to activate it in response to a summon locking your opponent out of doing any additional summons AFTER you already did so was. If you had to activate it at the start of MP1 as a continuous spell... Nobody would be complaining, it's not because it's a floodgate that pisses people off. It's that the person going 1st can do everything they want and use floodgates that either would have stopped them from making their board or make breaking it astronomically less likely. There are a TON of floodgates in YGO that have never been a problem. Floodgates are best for the game when they don't say you can't play to the meta, but demand you use different but reasonable answers. You turn Summon Gate into a continuous spell even keeping the text the same, and it's a healthy summon limit. The reality is blaming floodgates is simply dismissing the reality that decks are OVER COMMITTING to things and deserve to be punished for it, instead Konami actively tries to push it more.
@@nykthosacolyte5710 i phrased my comment quite badly there, what i meant to say is that taking away crucial aspects of the game is not healthy at all. You say decks should do a bit of everything but what about floodgate decks? I dont agree with the idea of decks having to involve everything into its strategy and i also dont like how a floodgate deck can be unaffected by its own floodgate. If a deck runs anti spell fragrance for example, that deck wouldnt be running a spell strategy or any spell for that matter and not suffer from it at all. This shouldnt be possible, if you run a floodgate, you should also be hindered in some way. How would you punish a trap deck that runs anti spell? You said that modern decks over commit but in what way exactly? I mean its not like meta alone dies to shifter or skill drain or macro cosmos, even rogue decks with different play styles die to these floodgates. Meta decks are very powerful in an unhealthy way but thats more so because they have near infinite recursion and removal, not over commitment. Floodgate effects are hard to balance because they are almost never future proof, barrier statues werent good on release but anyone could see that a future deck can (and a future deck did) abuse them I see your point about jinzo but this is modern yugioh, jinzo was healthy because back in goat, his floodgate effect is double edged, running less trap is actually detrimental and not a benefit, he also requires a tribute to summon and is unsearchable. For archetypal floodgates, i did say that they are annoying because of consistency, old archetypes are more loose than modern ones so consistently bringing out a macro cosmos was not a big worry. To top it off, achetypal floodgates, like many other cards, are protected by their archetype, arise heart has a wall of banish before you get to him and empen is next to impossible to beat over traditionally Now that i read it again, your mp1 restriction sounds really good actually, it also stops the multiple floodgates issue too. Im not too sure how this would work out in practice though, its easy to put that line on a spell/trap but how do you go about floodgate monsters? Dyna + moon mirror shield + solemn/dark bribe is already enough to cripple most decks I guess this discussion will ultimately be quite pointless however, MD is a bo1 format and the "play a bit of everything" applies mostly to the side deck where you actually counter your opponent's deck
@@bruhbruh4348 since a big part of this is about the little bit of everything and what I a talking about by being overcommitted to one thing. Prior to I want to say around 2014ish the standard approach was about 20-10-10 between the card types as the norm. It was expected that in the main deck you had traps like bottomless, torrential, judgement , etc. A few pieces of back row removal you could quickly fire off on your turn such as MST, most extra decks has at least 1 easy to access source of removal either directly or that searched into something that answered problematic boards things like black rose, stardust, mist wurm , exciton knight, etc. You weren't really expected as the norm to actually be heavily tied into one type of summoning. Dragon rulers often still ran lava golem at least in the side, despite being a deck that made powerful XYZ monsters, was common to see a few synchros you could make that were either level 8 or 9 due to the tubers ran, and even included Obby as a common side card for the mirror because it was so hard to answer by the deck. Electric Virus became a common tech piece to include to disrupt them. Decks like Paleo losing hard to royal decree is intended, instead encouraging having a number of monsters or spell cards to remove those cards or let you ignore them such as MST or silent insect (which lets you still fire off your traps and then once you have removed it can be used for a rank 2). Or decks like Blackwings losing hard in many cases if you limit their summons despite having a literal hand trap, and several powerful easy to access high level synchros and main deck monsters available to them. Decks losing hard to things like deck lockdown or droll having people view the cards meant to encourage NOT having too many searchers especially when there are so many extra deck answers as the problems instead of the decks like Snake Eyes being able to go full combo off of one card of needing that level of punishment to discourage abusing. The thing is though that there is always the possibility that a card meant to punish a specific type of play is too strong in general, and you need to be willing to hit them when they stop being checks on a glass cannon weak point and start to become widespread "you can't play" instead. Summon Limit was fine in an era where the NORM was decks not summoning 5+ times and decks like Six Sam and black wings were the exception and very strong as a result, while in the modern day summon limit has the issue that it's the turn 1 player can use it to deny you the chance to actually try to break their board in many decks. While something like Summon Gate, still punishes decks that want to climb into link 4+ cards quickly or that want to synchro a ton, but most decks can reasonably play around to find removal but does mean ending on a weaker board. Or one of my favorite floodgates in the modern era... Legacy of the duelist. It places a restriction on both players, if you are using a monster from the extra deck you have to wait to attack, we both can only set 1 back row a turn, BUT I can recycle my monsters in my yard instead of drawing and I can pop back row when I attack. Which means if you are playing Lab you are HEAVILY restricted if you don't choose to run back row removal to immediately fire off on your turn same with Paleo BUT not you can't play levels of doing so and against most decks it still has potential benefits since there are times you do want to set multiple cards even in the modern day. And the main deck that really gets to use it is MM which get to activate back row from their hand so MOSTLY bypass it but do have some back row they actually need to set so while not impacted AS much is still impacted, and the ability to recycle their monsters means they can ash every turn to make searching much harder, or they can get back cards like Max or Casper to find answers still but prevent drawing undesirable cards for the matchup. There are a lot of levers to play with when it comes to floodgates. The game becoming this fast is a failure caused by power creep. However, they need to decide if they want to embrace the speed which means that we end up with floodgates that are outright you can't do or use X are a major problem OR floodgates need to be more towards "you can only do so much of X." Like Anti Spell is too much now in some ways but a card that does something like "activate only if your opponent activated a spell card from their hand this turn. Neither player can activate spell cards from their hand during the first main phase of their turn" would probably be fine. You get 1 spell from your hand still because it doesn't negate and requires you using 1 already, but locks you out of using a series of spells before combat. So you instead have something to evaluate which is more important instead of outright being denied access. Sorry if this is a bit rambly I'm on about 3 hours of sleep 😂
@@nykthosacolyte5710 Just wanted to say your comment has been very high quality so far, it really is refreshing to see a comment advocating for floodgates that isnt from someone who says "stun is just like meta but faster". I could never function on your level of sleep lol, my best was 4 hours with at least 1L of coffee every night for a week during my last exam season I get your point about 2014 ygo, few archetypes back then has the level of synergy you see today, but i think the kind of 20/10/10 is somewhat skewed due to staples, mst was run because there wasnt a better option for example, its like running 3 imperm today. Old decks seem more balanced because the staples of the time just happened look balanced. After all, you can turn crossout and called by into traps and make it so that they can activate from the hand and boom, modern yugioh decks have a relatively balanced card type ratio. Mst and other classic staples were replaced by similar extra deck options, the diversity is still there but in a different card type. I like how decks now fulfill their own niche with a dedicated playstyle, this is not over commitment but just a result of konami not wanting cards to be too generic. Other card games have a resource system so generic cards are less of an issue, this is why mtg can have like 5 cards that do the exact same thing, just with a different mana color. I also dont think every deck must run a certain ratio of card type just because some floodgates exist, there is nothing inherently bad about a spell/trap heavy deck if certain floodgates never existed, runick would be a genuinely fun and skillful deck if not for things dyna, summon limit, rivalry, tcboo, ....... I wanna say over commiting is like intentionally leaving an obvious weakness, hoping your opponent doesnt know about it Paleo doesnt over commit, in theory they can run an out to royal decree, but doing so weakens the deck so much that its basically like having royal decree flipped on you already. Matchups can play a big roll in a duel, like swoswo wouldnt do too hot agaisnt ghoti or weather painter but a singular card shouldnt have the ability to completely shut down a whole deck, anti spell can literally erase pendulum as a concept (i play pendulum, anti spell is the biggest joever for me, even more than IO). When i said the floodgatex deck should also be hurt, i meant it like floodgates need restrictions on them to ensure kash/floo + macro cosmos/d fissure is not possible, yes some decks can play them in a balanced way but there is nothing stopping a different deck from abusing it in a very toxic way. I forgot to mention this earlier, another reason why i think floodgates are inherently toxic is that they need to be continuous which requires them being on the field, that hasnt been an issue until recently where more and more decks are coming out with the ability to send their floodgates as cost to start their play, completely breaking the already broken gimmick of floodgate, afaik the only deck that could consistently do this (and not even that good at it) was true draco. So floodgates now need to be even more restrictive so you cant send them as cost, hopefully this is a temporary change in direction from konami and doesnt stick as a permanent philosophy. The existing collection floodgates include every kind of locking effect, this makes it hard to even think of printing a new kire balanced one since there will always be a stronger option hiding somewhere. It doesnt help that most of these floodgates are olf af, making any kind of errata unlikely at best. Even then how would you future proof them, the ability to shut down an important part of the game means there will always exist a chance that a future deck will abuse it, every legal barrier statue is just 1 good searcher away from being banned Also just a quick question, can i assume we agree that lingering floodgates shouldnt be a thing? Like even ignoring what floodgate effect they have, you literally just cant get to an out unless you drew it
Honestly the problem with entry level decks these days is the non engine. You can build a pretty good salad list for dirt cheap if you dont take hand traps and such into account
You can play cheap substitutes that are good going 1st or 2nd, like Forbidden Chalice (veiler/imperm with damage step shenanigans) or My Body As a Shield (negate and destroy? NO U)
ive heard the same arguments for AI use as for stun, that it "allows" players who dont want to, or "cant", learn the game proper to take some wins. In t0 formats we see stun returning purely because it lets you win like 40% of your games by just going first and opening good, whereas playing a bad non stun deck is just gonna lose every game to snake. Or maybe like handicap in golf or something. I think its an issue within ableism and so on, consider that the valuation of playing "yugioh properly" is a valuing of ability, that being good is a good thing and being bad is a bad thing: Stun, as AI does, neutralises this by making winning a matter of luck rather than skill. Most people dislike it because they like the enjoyment-structure of "being good" at the game having value, a value which is degraded by stun existing. Is this wrong, is it right, is it something we must tolerate, idk.
Idk if my discord is bugged but ive been paying for the patreon the past month or so and Im technically in the discord but the only channel I see is the “boost” one idk if im missing something or what
I always feel like stun in yugioh has always been the baseline deck like your deck must at least beat stun to be considered competitive. The problem is that stun FEELS really bad to play against. I find that the people who play stun around me are people who just don’t want to deal with the meta. Stun is cheap, stun is easy, stun can make people scoop completely winnable games from frustration. So I guess that’s the draw?
Stun is a part of this game and people should just accept that. By now it should be pretty clear that Konami's plans for YGO do not coincide with what the vocal crowd of floodgate haters wants the game to be.
Control is a deck you trade interactions while stun is a deck that prevents any interactions from your opponent.
Just playing the game VS not allowing the other player to
Stun should always prevent only specific interactions and apply to both players properly. I see stun as a type of strategy that makes both players abandon their advanced modern weapons and is forcing them to grab bats instead. while you playing as a stun based strategy, you are hoping that you are gonna be more experienced with the bat than your opponent and win in this bat fight. So stun should be downgrading your opponent to your bat level rather than making him play with a bat while you keep all of your good modern weapons to fight him. This is the definition of a poor designed floodgate
@@shien-ryu4395but you see, the thing is, stun does not downgrade your opponent and hoping your own experience would prevail. Stun requires no skill because it involves no skill, its a game of luck, when you summon dyna, equip moon mirror shield, play morganite and flip anti spell, your opponent will not get even a chance to play in the first place. This is the idea of stun, a complete lock down of your opponent, to the point where they cannot do anything but watch. The “sacrifice” for this is that stun has 0 play when going second and has no room for growth or improvement. A true game of coin flip where you go first and draw enough floodgates, or go second and scoop immediately, this is why the more competitive variants of stun have to incorporate a deck that is already decent on its own, most notable of these being runick. Stun is no more a deck than a jumbled mess of badly designed cards that piled up over time thanks to the brilliant banlist decisions from konami
Edit: what you were describing sounds closer to a control deck than stun
theoretically these are the same, eg. set 5 skill drains, you gotta trade 5 cosmic cyclones for them.
@@OsirusHandle theoretically, THAT scenario is the same. In reality, a control deck consistently gets to their cards while drawing cosmic cyclone or hfd is nowhere near as consistent. Runick is a good example, they would almost always have runick cards (due to deck ratio) that get out fountain and whittle away at your deck, stun can only hope that they drew dyna + moon mirror shield + floodgate / protections
Every Stun player is required to be really chill and nice. Like I was in the final round of day 1 of YCS Raleigh and I would have made day 2 if i won this match. The guy I played against and I talked for a good 10 minutes before the round and I thought to myself "Wow this guys is really chill. I think I will look foreword to this game" . He wins die roll and proceeded to summon Imano Iwato and activate runick fountain. Was not a fun game but I can't hate the guy because he was so nice.
The worst part about playing control decks is falsely being labeled as a stun player.
Amen brother
Yep. Been there
Josh having the time to do podcast while also competing at Worlds is definitely insane.
Pre-recorded, this is before TCG banlist announcement, you heard them talk about waiting for banlist
@@JustDatOneGuy wdym I don’t understand. Josh and Farfa definitely got into their rooms at Seattle, those rooms are 100% identical to their rooms at home, and recorded this episode right before Josh has to play his first round.
There’s no way people argue this isn’t a kids game when two children replied pre-recorded to a message that was clearly being sarcastic.
@@kriegpanzer61did you really thought he didn't know ? Geniune question, it's happening so much on the internet and I can't understand why
World champ difference, what can I say
The only reason Stun is problematic is because a) the game is so fast now that floodgates are way more devastating if you only have 3 turns to play and b) almost every deck is super reliant on extra deck monsters and special summoning 5+ monsters a turn. Yes, stun existed before but it was way less degenerate. Even looking at stun decks that affected the meta in the past like T.G. Stun, it played a fair midrangey control strategy because the format was infinitely slower than it is right now and you had time to find your outs. I feel like trying to tackle Stun is just putting a bandaid over a much widespread issue that, in my opinion, is bleeding the game.
Completely agree.
I also think this is a big part of a lot of people’s frustration with generic extra deck end board pieces. The game is fast enough that every deck can make its dream end board on the first turn every game, which means that if your opponent goes first, then the end board is the only part of your opponent’s deck that you ever get to interact with outside of throwing down a handtrap here or there. Different decks can have all different kinds of ways to *make* their desired end board, and that might be interesting for the player making the end board, but if they end on the same bosses as every other deck, then that’s all the other player will ever care about.
Maybe the only solution left is to double down on “our turn,” so the player going second gets to play more before the first player’s built a board and ended their turn.
It's insane to me that people are still saying things like "why are you playing this? You're not having fun." You don't fucking know that. You're projecting your own feelings onto them. You literally described a guy who seemed to have childlike glee when flipping a Mirror Force on you. Did you still think he wasn't having fun? The guy who goes "Damage step? :3" every time you get a monster to stick to the board?
"You're not even having fun playing this" is a john of the highest calibre, it is said only to stop yourself from having to think about other people and what they get out the game. Absolutely no different from the kinds of people who scrub out hard in fighting games and go "why are you throwing fireballs man, you're not even having fun"
My experience has been that the loudest group of TCG players are people who want to play solitaire and make their opponent watch.
Their tyranny of fun is that players stare at each other and take turns playing cards until one of them wins and only interacting when they absolutely have to.
The worst part is, because things like stun and control look like they keep your opponent from playing more making them sit through a combo just to kill them, they get to paint those other kinds of strategies as incorrect, unfun, or cheesy. All that to say, I think you're right its a tactic to push stuff they don't like out of games.
As a MD player, I hate stun with a passion. Just don't think it belongs in a best of one format imo.
It kinda sucks we cant play actual matches in ranked with a sidedeck.
Even if it would "just" be a special mode.
I think you are absolutely right. But honestly I don't think yugioh belongs in a best of one format in general. Best of 3 with side Deck is mandatory for this game. I remember the first time my friend introduct me to MD, I was excited until I realized it was just random best of 1 duels. The first thing I thought was: what if I lose the coin flip and my opponent plays Stun or ftk? No side Deck, no best of 3, no redemption? Just insta surrender and demotion?
@@shien-ryu4395 ye YGO is way too dicey for bo1.
Its strength actually is fighting different decks with your fixed side deck. Its so much fun irl. Definitely 1 of my top reasons why i like playing tcg.
Floodgates are high risk, high reward removal cards. They turn playable cards into bricks, however their impact is dependent on how many applicable playable cards your opponent has.
Re: banlist predictions at the end
The fact that Flamberge survived and Kitkallos died is mindboggling to me.
I'm sorry josh but kashtira IS a Stun deck
I feel like he forgot about the turn 1 Zone Lock
I think yugioh is best when you don't need to be "up to date" with the meta to do well. Smart deck building and sequencing should always be rewarded over buying into the new strategies.
The difference between stun and control is simple. Stun pre-emptively locks you out of playing. Control reacts to your plays with answers. Certainly the line can get blurred.
I am surprised they put kash as not stun, when they put you under macro cosmos and lock all your zones as a goal.
I want Mr. Mirror Force Jonh as a guest for the next episode
I do not like the fact that cards like Prosperity, or anything else thats like "you cant battle phase/do damage" do not have real downsides turn one, and its odd to me that they're legal to activate turn one when other things that require a cost to actually be paid need that payment to actually exist in the first place.
Mirror force John probably lost his mind when mirror force launcher dropped
At least from my perspective, stun is often a reaction to not being allowed to participate in the game. Negates can feel as toxic as stun.
It can be incredibly satisfying to flip a Skill Drain on an opponent you know otherwise is just going to crush you with card advantage and then negate everything you do.
In MTG we call this type of deck Prison. I think "Stun" is a really bad name when trying to find a definition for the deck.
You should have definitely invited my old ass THE GLUE EATER IS HERE LOL
I was playing Runick Stun on Omega a few days ago and i played against an Gimmick Puppet FTK who wins Game 1 by FTKing, Games 2 and 3 i Stun him and win and got insulted for playing stun and i was like "you're playing an FTK, Game 1 You didn't let me play, is that not toxic?" In the end the game has just become degenerate where half the games between combo decks are just comparing hands for Board Breakers or Hand traps, don't hate the players for the cards they choose to use, hate Konami for not caring for the balance of the game
stun is boring and I hate it. If I'm sitting down at a table, I want to PLAY the game and not just slap down an Inspector Border, setting 4, watching my opponent scoop because they can't play and then get evenly'd and/or full comboed game 2. Staying at home and rolling die would give me the same experience. You're now probably asking: so whats the solution? Decks like Tear, Puppetless Branded, Vanquish Soul, fuck even Lab when you take out stuff like DBarrier or Eradicator. I absolutely LOVE all these decks, because they don't intend on winning turn 1 and have tools to play an interactive game and disrupt your opponent WITHOUT comepletely stopping them from playing.
I got back into playing with Master Duel by starting with Stun moving onto Eldlich, Numeron, Swordsoul, 3-Axis, playing some meta and settling on enjoying Swordsoul and experimenting with it.
Starting with Stun before moving onto a more control deck then midrange than combo meaned I had to go up the ladder of learning interactions of choke points
56:22 because Kairyu-Shin is the coolest water monster ever printed
1:09:45
that's some crazy foreshadowing here. a really small detail that only thoughtful viewers will notice. absolute cinema
Commenting before I watch this.
Stun is really maligned in YGO because of how all or nothing everything is. In MtG, a creature that increases the cost of non-Creature cards by 1 is an effective, deck defining Stax/Stun card while being fair. Stun pieces in YGO just can't work like this because of the lack of knobs and how play patterns work out. Either the limit/tax does almost nothing to a turn 1 end board, or it stops it somewhere and therefore, no end board is made. All or nothing. I very much blame the game being unable to handle them over the actual cards.
Here's the rub though, Konami will never remove Stun from the game because it's mandatory in two ways. One, it's THE gap closer between the skilled and unskilled and their banlist is definitely balanced for a casual-competitive player over full on competitive one. Second, without it, there's very few macro playstyles left in the core game loop at the current power level. While a lot of people hate Stun, fundamentally repetitive play is another thing designers need to minimize.
What you say is correct. Feelsgoodman.
This is an analysis of the game that more of the general player base needs to see.
Okay, commenting on the actual pod now.
To help Josh articulate the difference, Control vs Stun is mostly reactive vs proactive defense. Negation and Removal vs Floodgates. Floodgates need you to fully tempo out your opponent and win before they get access to the cards you're prohibiting. Control just weathers out those cards. Ultimately though, I think playstyle distinctions in YGO are increasingly meaningless. "Cringe Midrange" deck like Kash that has a Floodgate as the central end board piece and a bunch of rattlesnakes that punish plays. It combos, it stuns, it does everything. Everything increasingly does everything.
Pointing to my comments above regarding Lingering vs Continuous. Lingering is more powerful cause it's often attached to quick effects but it's all the same fundamental problems with the game itself.
May add more as I continue watching..
yea, stun will always exist. you can see it with how, with some exceptions, most floodgates get limited to 1 instead of outright banned. its clear they want stun to exist in some form
A big part is also how a lot of decks are either A - All engine, no non-engine or B - the non-engine being played doesn't interact with stun cards (like most hand traps). All-in combo is the main way to play the game so there's no incentive to prepare for stun at all which results in people getting mad when their deck is not prepared. Back in the day people could play triple MST or Dust Tornado because those were just generically good cards not just vs stun but also vs other decks. Nowadays though these simple types of interaction have become completely invalidated in every other matchup that isn't specifically stun.
I think the best definition of stun is a deck that don't want your opp to play at all. By setting 5, you're expecting your opp to play, and reacting to their stuff. By summoning Boarder or Amano, you're clearly saying NO to your opp.
So, what is the difference between that and playing into the end board of a random opponent? The 'Illusion' you get to play?
@@mulldrifterz6469 same as the control deck.
Josh when people play stun: I guess not everyone enjoy this game the same way. Josh when people play plants: KILL THEM WITH FIRE!
Hearing Josh talk about Cosmic Cyclone (even as just an example) is pretty funny after the MD World Championship lol 😂
Kinda weird horus being cslled stun as it doesnt play floodgates as much as actual stun deck haha.
People often forget that stun is that is not always about setting continuous traps and flipping them on the opponents turn, floodgates come in all sort of shapes. Hero is very often play as a combo deck that ends in floodgate monsters like Plasma and Dark Law, Branded just wants to lock the opponent from special summoning using Sanctifire and a floodgate like gimmick puppet nightmare, people include Iblee in their combos from time to time in many different decks, Vaylantz is a pendulum combo deck that can easily search and summon fossil dyna, Majespecter searches Secret Village of the Spellcasters, the whole point of Kashtira at full power was to summon macrocosmos, and the list continues, including decks that summons monsters that skip the opponents turn or deal more than 8000 damage before the opponent has a chance to play, those are stun as well.
Stun is never leaving. It is a pain but It is a beginner stage for most, the only thing that needs to be done a card or two that can be sided that destroys monsters and back row. If Stun was erased it wouldn't kill the players but it make it so a few more players would leave who, for some just don't have the time or even the money of learning combo, or more so like, 99% likely your stun deck is more repairable then the top meta deck per format. If the game was more affordable on the highest level, like partial they made some staples lower, but the engines are pricey, why invest there if it'll be cycled out? While any annoyance at stun I get, but it isn't always like a person is always unskilled or just being a pain. A lot of layers. In closing, I feel stun should be played under two conditions. You enjoy the deck. Hey to each their own. Or it it precise counters the meta, who wouldn't do that?
Imagine they had a WCQ or the championship itself where if you win Konami makes the deck you won with all Royal rare 😅 so when you're out in the wild people will know
I have a royal tour guide, pulled randomly when i was trying to build unchained
As an only occasional MD player, I think of stun similarly to how I think of dumb OTKs like Cusadia or Numeron: it’s a reasonably easy and reliable way to pick up some gems if I’ve been away for a while, so I can build a deck I actually want to play. Then again, MD rarely holds my interest for too long, so I’ll often never get to the point of building the deck I want to play.
I think maybe another advantage of stun for more casual players is that it’s a deck that doesn’t evolve much. TCBOO and Gozen and Pachy and the like are unlikely to ever become bad. Even if a floodgate you like gets hit on the list, you can just replace it with the next best one, so it will take a lot of hits to meaningfully alter stun’s viability. Other decks can come and go, but stun will always be at least playable.
Hot take: we don’t need better traditional trap cards since going 1st is already so insane that giving people crazy traps to make going 1st even better would end horribly
If anything we need more traps like imperm that can work going first but also can be used going second aswell
They could put a random card generator into Neuron and everybody had acess to it...
Id be so down for this too. Maybe in a seperate format with new random effects...
I think the difference between Stun and control is that Stun is built around stopping your opponent from playing the game entirely. Stun decks generally end on two or more floodgates. Control decks at their best are built around large numbers of smaller 1 for 1 interactions and a strong advantage engine. Sometimes they will play a floodgate, but ideally thats not happening. A good control deck should always have more access to resources than other decks, but those resources may be less powerful than individual cards in other decks or be more conditional to access their power.
Just as a disclaimer, my perspective is from someone who only plays BO1 Master Duel, not BO3 TCG. As frustrating as Stun is, there is a reason why it exists in Yugioh, and the people that get the most frustrated about it tend to play decks that are hard-countered by Stun- combo decks that vomit out Special Summons, etc. They aren't accustomed to having the game slow down and having to grind, they are more used to going all-in in the first turn or 2 to try to overwhelm their opponent, so when their deck's main wincon isn't immediately accessible they start to complain.
I feel like I play better when I play against Stun, because it's not just me doing typical plays with my deck, with common negates/interactions to deal with. It forces me to think about my deck and my gameplay in a completely different way. Yes it's frustrating to not be able to do specific actions under floodgates but I also know I have ways to get rid of them in my deck. Obviously I won't always draw the out, which can be frustrating, but it's also frustrating to not have all the tools you need in your hand to play around a full combo set-up even when you know they exist in your deck. That's just how it goes in card games.
The worst and most toxic application of Stun cards for me is an opponent doing a typical turn 1 combo to end on multiple interactions and negates, and then their last move before passing to you is activating or summoning a floodgate or pseudo-floodgate like Maxx C. Things like that Vaylantz Stun deck that does an intricate Vaylantz combo and then ends on Fossil Dyna with that Pend card that protects it.
12:24 I was building lightsworn Tear today and for the deck u need Visas Amaratara. Crafted it and got a royal. I know have the slight urge to build Visas combo pile. I never will, but the urge to flex royals makes people build decks and spend money they wouldn’t have done otgerwise. I pulled a royal infernity archfiend, so I built infernity. I think have them be uncraftable is the right move since it makes them more valuable. We all wish we could craft them, but if we have that desire to have them more easily, then it proves how much we like them. I just wishthere were more variations, like neon, millennium or glitch effects. Just do something cool without going over the top like a certain program .
my first experience with Stun was that Obelisk Blue dude from Spirit Caller. iykyk
I always looked at it as control decks have multiple points of interaction that slow the opponent down into a grind game and stun lacks those points of interaction taking them away instead
The First Stun Deck i remember is Dimensional Eatos?
Dimensional Fissure+Macro Cosmos, and all other stun card
I'm with Josh on this traps decks are control not stun
Runick is stun. The goal of the deck is to banish your opponents deck. While purposely skipping your own battle phases.
Stun I would say is a deck that focuses on winning the game by all other means other than LP. Obviously there are stun decks that can kill moon mirror shield all the way down. But the way stun players play. They wanna lock you out of everything. And wanna deck you out rather than play the back and forth game to win.
0:52 oh yeah they would never do such a thing,right? ...right?
hahah
My first royal was the drytron ritual
The spell card
a while back they reduced the amount of rewards you get from the pass so wouldnt be surprised if event rewards lowered too
The thing that makes a stun deck a stun deck is if its bad. Basically every good meta deck can pivot into some sort of floodgate to stun the opponent, Iblee, puppet lock, winda, calamity turn skip or transaction rollback sheningans the list is endless. Stun isnt even a real deck, just a collection of synergies that have no real consistency or follow up. If you play a card to shut the opponent out you are a stun deck and if its branded or something else with similar power level you just have the luxury of other gameplans.
I think they nailed it in terms of engine and win condition. A meta deck can probably barf out over 8000 damage using Accesscode, Borrelsword, or Raging Phoenix into Zealantis and Promethean Princess, when they have an opening. Stun has to get there attacking for 1000 at a time and hoping the opponent stays helpless.
When I played MTG I loved a deck called Lantern Control, Runick Stun plays a lot like it, they have a lot of the same goals. I think it's neat that a game can allow for a deck that seeks for neither player to play it at all. It's not 1-1 since hand info is hard to come by, and top deck info is almost non-existent, but they seek the same end. The Lock™
Still staring at my banned royal king calamity that im not alowed to dismantle
The thing that i don't understand is Combo Decks that end 6 Negate Board that evolves to 10 Negates During the opponents turn is not considered STUN?
It achieves the same thing. Why don't you just hand trap their combo? In response: Well why don't you just carry Cosmic with you, why don't you carry MST's?
Why don't you pull the out on the floodgate?
I'm not a Floodgate Advocate but its a must at the current game level.
One more thing that bugs me about certain floodgates is that they act with more information than they realistically should operate on. Stuff like TCBOO, Gozen, Colosseum etc is that they somehow restrict even you future summons if that makes sense? Like if I have two monsters of certain types, I can't even attempt to go into a Knightmate Phoenix which may still satisfy the condition of the floodgate. Like instead of checking on summon they just prevent the summon whatsoever which just feels so unnatural. Summon limit like effects too which somehow count the summons even before they were flipped which imo just doesn't make sense.
Sorry if my wording is confusing. English ain't my first language so I probably wasn't able to phrase that properly 😅
1:23:31 Tenpai is so coming into MD pre-hit
The problem I have with Stun, is not a problem at a competitive level, it's the social situation. I didn't drive an hour to locals the 1-2 day(s) I get off a month that yugioh is available to come play yugioh, and know I'm going to have 1 to 2 out of the 5 matches I get that night to likely just not even be actual games unless I'm on an extremely strong deck (And no I'm not expecting crazy weak decks to do anything, my typical judgment is based on how TOSS decks would do since they are relatively modern decks and have always been decent) where I have to deal with Amano Iwato > Gozen > Tip each game and then even if i scoop early on a lost game state the match i still have to wait another 15 minutes to complete, or oh you're Calamity/Gimmick Puppet locked turn 1 welp guess were going to be sitting around doing nothing in game or postgame for the last 15 minutes of the round. It's less so about anything regarding the balance or competitiveness of it, and more you're literally just wasting people's time who don't likely get to play Yugioh maybe more than once a month.
Stun is kinda the reason I just stopped going to locals, because I don't want to have to drive an hour and then have two matches totaling to 40 minutes together where neither of us are really playing a match. It just isn't worth the time, and why I swapped to only playing MTG Modern in person now that Grief is banned in Modern, it's just not worth the time investment knowing it's going to happen because of the higher density of stun players in yugioh, and why i dont particularly mind it in MD, I'm not losing a time investment, if i lose early i can just scoop and move to another game.
It's the same issue as older unlimited omni-negate boards. I'm glad Konami grew out of that design space with decks like Vanquish Soul, Snake Eye, etc.
Honestly stun can be a fine MU in a tournament, _if_ you're in a format where you can afford to play the tools to out stun boards. It kind of turns the game into a puzzle game which can actually be pretty fun if your deck actually has a solution.
Now there are some issues with it though. For one, stun outs are typically unsearchable and inefficient. You can't play a lot of them, and actually getting to them takes a lot of effort, and most stun decks can deal with one or two outs.
The other issue is unfortunately Runick. I love Runick, I think they're one of the coolest archetypes that have released in recent years, but Runick Stun in particular is extremely annoying since they not only stun you, they constantly refill making it harder to break their board over multiple turns, they have a high chance of just removing your outs before you can even play them and they put you on a clock while doing that too. I still think games again them can be fun still, but it does feel a little unfair if you get unlucky against them.
Re: royals, I don't mind they're not craft able, I do mind how boring they are. Idk what's going on at Konami HQ, already the TCG bling is the least interesting out of any card game out there ("oohh slightly different foiling pattern, wow that's so cool" - seriously compare to any other card game, it's embarrassing, buy a display of Pokémon boosters and you'll get like 10 cards that look better than anything in Yu-Gi-Oh from the past 20 years), I don't get why they do this in the digital game too where the cost of producing bling is so much lower (you literally just need to design it, no production line to set up, no constraints based on cost or realisability) - why is the top end still a generic foiling pattern? What's going on? Where is all that booster money going?
Hugin is the balaklava store owner, the floodgates are the robber
stun has alt win cons that need to be explored. lock down decks with alt wincons.
Sounds like Runick
I agree that a deck that uses a stun card is a stun deck, but then what is a stun card? is macro cosmos a stun card? if yes, then is arise heart a stun card? if no why?
I would define a stun card as; a card that prevents your opponent's ability to use a game mechanic in such a way that your opponent can no longer Interact with said mechanic. by that definition I can say that macro cosmos invalidates me from using the GY therefore it is a stun card, arise heart prevents me from using the GY therefore it is a stun card. By that definition and using your definition of a stun deck (a deck that uses a stun card) I would say that Kashtira is a stun deck.
1:05:42 It's also very satisfying to beat Stun.
There's a difference between a tech card like one skill drain in combo darkworld as on oh shit option and normal dino equip moon mirror. 3 of crack down with a mothod to accel syncro is not the same as double barrier.
Dawg. I want Josh to run it with Runick Stun so bad. Just one YCS. 😂
Lingering floodgates are good if they are niche and not detrimentally crippling
Look at Threatening Roar. Niche, floodgate that currently 1 deck in the format will complain about and maybe 1 pet deck (paleo) would consider running.
on another note all through history but more so earlier in the game it was always peak watching the stun player melt game 2 n 3 watchin u know the right 6 cards to side vs stun to completely blank them lol
I royaled out my unchained deck because I love them so much
Regarding the discussion of continous vs lingering effects.
Continous effects are tied to cards on the field and can be interacted with. Once a card like shifter resolved you are past the point of interacting with it.
Therefore i much rather have lingering stuff gone then continous.
I like stun for the fact that it changes deck building. I dont like playing against it though. But in the grand scheme of things i dislike when everything revolves around monster for everything.
Negates --> Monster (e.g. blazar)
Floodgates --> Monsters (e.g. ariseheart)
Searching --> monsters (e.g. snake eye Ash)
Removal --> monsters (e.g. kuibelt)
Etc. Thats why skill drain hurts so much but its not that skill drain is the problem. The problem is that most relevant effects are on monsters.
The best spells are just additional Starter/extenders by searching a monster.
tactical try tcg variant should be :
1. barrier stun
2. antique gear
3. branded
Control when you play and try to go for grinde game and interupt enough your opponent is fine (when it does not become a 5+ huge interruptions/omni negates)
when you just does not allow your opponent to play like the awful Mystic Mine, fossil/boarder or floodgate spam than some played at some point is just horrible. It's seems unfair and is especialy unfun to play/play agaist.
Take Generaider, he can make a good board ... Or ripping 2-3 cards from your hand before your first Main Phase + having 4 interruptions on board if play the good extra deck and Runick going first.
Or D/D/D turbo Kali Yuga I tried it for one local it was like a turn skip under Summon limit + Ash and skull meister ...
On the other hand, huge combo that lead to unfair boards with too many to take care off like Yubel with the sacred beast and unchain package does isn't more healthy for the game in general for one reason : the issue is the same : your opponent cannot play or just try but cannot do anything more than being destroy before having a beginning of board.
Yes going second have advantage and huge boards breakers, but you need to "draw the out" which isn't a good argument to me, it make this luck base and with just a good negate it's useless
For thr Runick part ... As much as I don't like the archetype structure it would be fine if the mill by bannishing the opponent deck IN ADDITION to interrupt is what others does not like in it, you get negate/have your cards destroy and you loose your deck really fast ith 1 to 4 ban for only one spell making it a 1 card rip of 5.
+ too easy accès to drawn 1 to 3 every turn and recovery tools because of the field spell that make the archetype immune to spell destruction. with a bit more restrictions, field spell less OP or just deck bannishing being his own effect you can activer apart from the others two, less peoples would be frustated
Honestly I don't mind stun a whole lot on master duel as compared to in person. On master duel, I didn't waste time sleeving up a deck, decking my list, driving 30 minutes to get to the store etc just to sit down and not be allowed to play the game. On master duel, if I go second against stun, if I don't immediately have an out to their "board" just scoop and play the next game no big deal
Stun Andy here. Im sorry but there is something hilarious about a 50$ stun deck dunking on a 1000$ deck. That was a huge appeal for me back in the day.
ah yes 3 Prosp and Farfa playing BA, what a well aged podcast
Whether its my opponent jacking off with cardboard, or setting a bunch of lock pieces in five seconds and smugly picking their hand up and saying go, I’m not playing the game and having fun.
It’s this entire game.
Josh just casually called 3/5 right and said that the other 2/5 called are just coping wishes and not predictions.
I know that, when I get frustrated with the meta (which has been pretty often lately, SOMEHOW), I play stun/hyper control to ensure the meta sheep hate their games as much as everyone else does.
Nothing wrong with stun decks I quite like stun , let people play what they want without being personal to the other player , can play anything you want as Konami printed it and they are more than enough cards to easily get by stun don’t see the issue at all
Because modern yugioh players want to play epic solitaire and stun prevents them from doing that. The way they derive enjoyment from this game now is at odds with the older ethos stun represents.
@@yourdagan it’s good way for people to challenge better decks in a easier way , there’s plenty of cards to oppose stun , meta players just don’t like it when the the game doesn’t go there way or lose to it , but if someone played a deck not good enough the other player would be just sit and watch to
Should called talking stun with the stun master himself 😆
Can we get an interview with mirror force John?
Jowgen last turn. I’m that old
Magic arena have an event that it's all random and it's so frustating because the first that generate the biger creature or the one with evation wins
I'm a card Game player, i play all the boring archetype in every game, i love to do it, my friends say me the Anti fun, i play wailord stall in pokemon, mystic mine in yugioh, spartial collapse in goat format, in mtg i play ponza and i make a game of Commander +2 hours long because i stax the table and nobody can play anything, even me hahaha
I've been playing nothing but stun since the second week of Snake-Eyes on MD because I found SE extremely boring. I hate linear, tier-0 combo decks.
If we're just going to play solitaire anyway, I guess I'll slow the game down.
Honestly floodgates are healthy and good for the game as something that exists. The problem is floodgates basically don't see play unless they are doing something degenerate or you are going back to the early history of the game. Like Jinzo is LITERALLY a floodgate... Who actually wants Jinzo banned in 2024? Necrovalley even wouldn't raise any eyebrows if it ACTUALLY required playing GK by having the same type of condition as secret village, despite the fact its been despised and been hit multiple times. Honestly so many floodgates would be perfectly fine in the game as continuous spell cards with "You can only activate this card at the beginning of the first main phase of your turn." Or "Activate only if you control no other cards and your opponent controls a monster." Or if they actually tied them to specific intended archetype when they are made for one thing.
By nature floodgates will be toxic, they completely stop some form of gameplay so decks that dont rely on that specific part are basically unaffected by the floodgate. If floodgates were to ever be fair, i think they would need to have restrictions where the person who activate it should at least be hindered on way or another. Maybe you could also add an effect like if you control multiple continuous spell/traps then you must send 1 of those as cost to activate the floodgate, this should at least ensure no set 3 floodgates shenanigans can happen, though this does not solve the issue of floodgates being very oppressive. Archetypal floodgates are on of the most annoying ones since they are extremely consistent (arise heart and empen to name a few). Lingering floodgates also meed to go asap. At the end of the day though, stopping a part of the game from being played is just not good design and should exist, interruptions are fine as long as they are not overly generic but lockdown effect are just too oppressive to be fair
@@bruhbruh4348 stopping parts of the game is not toxic, your deck was not intended to rely entirely on one specific part of the game but to as a norm do a bit of everything. Jinzo is a floodgate, Jinzo is a healthy and important part of the meta in one of the largest retro formats of the game for a reason. There is a healthy amount of answers that he does no stop and while traps are strong back then and you do want a chunk of them, you also want spells and monsters that answered Jinzo and other strong monsters.
The reality is floodgates existing is not and never has actually been a problem. The quality of them has been at times, but not floodgates themselves. Droll is even a floodgate.
You say archetypal floodgates are one of the most annoying ones... But that's not actually true if you look at the history of the game. It's been generic ones and ones MEANT for an archetype but not actually restricted to them that have been the problem more often than not. Archetypal ones rarely have been and when they have it's largely been due to massive stats + strong floodgate+tutorable/in the extra not simply due to being a floodgate similar to why Infernity Guardian has never been a problem on the level of Towers. Necrovalley was never a problem because Gravekeepers running it and they could hit you with it AND get rid of all the monsters in your hand before you could even do anything about it so you would be open without being able to even use monsters.
Floodgates are an important thing for the health of the game. Summon Limits effect was never the problem... Being able to activate it in response to a summon locking your opponent out of doing any additional summons AFTER you already did so was. If you had to activate it at the start of MP1 as a continuous spell... Nobody would be complaining, it's not because it's a floodgate that pisses people off. It's that the person going 1st can do everything they want and use floodgates that either would have stopped them from making their board or make breaking it astronomically less likely. There are a TON of floodgates in YGO that have never been a problem. Floodgates are best for the game when they don't say you can't play to the meta, but demand you use different but reasonable answers. You turn Summon Gate into a continuous spell even keeping the text the same, and it's a healthy summon limit. The reality is blaming floodgates is simply dismissing the reality that decks are OVER COMMITTING to things and deserve to be punished for it, instead Konami actively tries to push it more.
@@nykthosacolyte5710 i phrased my comment quite badly there, what i meant to say is that taking away crucial aspects of the game is not healthy at all. You say decks should do a bit of everything but what about floodgate decks? I dont agree with the idea of decks having to involve everything into its strategy and i also dont like how a floodgate deck can be unaffected by its own floodgate. If a deck runs anti spell fragrance for example, that deck wouldnt be running a spell strategy or any spell for that matter and not suffer from it at all. This shouldnt be possible, if you run a floodgate, you should also be hindered in some way. How would you punish a trap deck that runs anti spell? You said that modern decks over commit but in what way exactly? I mean its not like meta alone dies to shifter or skill drain or macro cosmos, even rogue decks with different play styles die to these floodgates. Meta decks are very powerful in an unhealthy way but thats more so because they have near infinite recursion and removal, not over commitment.
Floodgate effects are hard to balance because they are almost never future proof, barrier statues werent good on release but anyone could see that a future deck can (and a future deck did) abuse them
I see your point about jinzo but this is modern yugioh, jinzo was healthy because back in goat, his floodgate effect is double edged, running less trap is actually detrimental and not a benefit, he also requires a tribute to summon and is unsearchable.
For archetypal floodgates, i did say that they are annoying because of consistency, old archetypes are more loose than modern ones so consistently bringing out a macro cosmos was not a big worry. To top it off, achetypal floodgates, like many other cards, are protected by their archetype, arise heart has a wall of banish before you get to him and empen is next to impossible to beat over traditionally
Now that i read it again, your mp1 restriction sounds really good actually, it also stops the multiple floodgates issue too. Im not too sure how this would work out in practice though, its easy to put that line on a spell/trap but how do you go about floodgate monsters? Dyna + moon mirror shield + solemn/dark bribe is already enough to cripple most decks
I guess this discussion will ultimately be quite pointless however, MD is a bo1 format and the "play a bit of everything" applies mostly to the side deck where you actually counter your opponent's deck
@@bruhbruh4348 since a big part of this is about the little bit of everything and what I a talking about by being overcommitted to one thing. Prior to I want to say around 2014ish the standard approach was about 20-10-10 between the card types as the norm. It was expected that in the main deck you had traps like bottomless, torrential, judgement , etc. A few pieces of back row removal you could quickly fire off on your turn such as MST, most extra decks has at least 1 easy to access source of removal either directly or that searched into something that answered problematic boards things like black rose, stardust, mist wurm , exciton knight, etc. You weren't really expected as the norm to actually be heavily tied into one type of summoning. Dragon rulers often still ran lava golem at least in the side, despite being a deck that made powerful XYZ monsters, was common to see a few synchros you could make that were either level 8 or 9 due to the tubers ran, and even included Obby as a common side card for the mirror because it was so hard to answer by the deck. Electric Virus became a common tech piece to include to disrupt them.
Decks like Paleo losing hard to royal decree is intended, instead encouraging having a number of monsters or spell cards to remove those cards or let you ignore them such as MST or silent insect (which lets you still fire off your traps and then once you have removed it can be used for a rank 2). Or decks like Blackwings losing hard in many cases if you limit their summons despite having a literal hand trap, and several powerful easy to access high level synchros and main deck monsters available to them. Decks losing hard to things like deck lockdown or droll having people view the cards meant to encourage NOT having too many searchers especially when there are so many extra deck answers as the problems instead of the decks like Snake Eyes being able to go full combo off of one card of needing that level of punishment to discourage abusing. The thing is though that there is always the possibility that a card meant to punish a specific type of play is too strong in general, and you need to be willing to hit them when they stop being checks on a glass cannon weak point and start to become widespread "you can't play" instead. Summon Limit was fine in an era where the NORM was decks not summoning 5+ times and decks like Six Sam and black wings were the exception and very strong as a result, while in the modern day summon limit has the issue that it's the turn 1 player can use it to deny you the chance to actually try to break their board in many decks. While something like Summon Gate, still punishes decks that want to climb into link 4+ cards quickly or that want to synchro a ton, but most decks can reasonably play around to find removal but does mean ending on a weaker board. Or one of my favorite floodgates in the modern era... Legacy of the duelist. It places a restriction on both players, if you are using a monster from the extra deck you have to wait to attack, we both can only set 1 back row a turn, BUT I can recycle my monsters in my yard instead of drawing and I can pop back row when I attack. Which means if you are playing Lab you are HEAVILY restricted if you don't choose to run back row removal to immediately fire off on your turn same with Paleo BUT not you can't play levels of doing so and against most decks it still has potential benefits since there are times you do want to set multiple cards even in the modern day. And the main deck that really gets to use it is MM which get to activate back row from their hand so MOSTLY bypass it but do have some back row they actually need to set so while not impacted AS much is still impacted, and the ability to recycle their monsters means they can ash every turn to make searching much harder, or they can get back cards like Max or Casper to find answers still but prevent drawing undesirable cards for the matchup.
There are a lot of levers to play with when it comes to floodgates. The game becoming this fast is a failure caused by power creep. However, they need to decide if they want to embrace the speed which means that we end up with floodgates that are outright you can't do or use X are a major problem OR floodgates need to be more towards "you can only do so much of X." Like Anti Spell is too much now in some ways but a card that does something like "activate only if your opponent activated a spell card from their hand this turn. Neither player can activate spell cards from their hand during the first main phase of their turn" would probably be fine. You get 1 spell from your hand still because it doesn't negate and requires you using 1 already, but locks you out of using a series of spells before combat. So you instead have something to evaluate which is more important instead of outright being denied access.
Sorry if this is a bit rambly I'm on about 3 hours of sleep 😂
@@nykthosacolyte5710 Just wanted to say your comment has been very high quality so far, it really is refreshing to see a comment advocating for floodgates that isnt from someone who says "stun is just like meta but faster". I could never function on your level of sleep lol, my best was 4 hours with at least 1L of coffee every night for a week during my last exam season
I get your point about 2014 ygo, few archetypes back then has the level of synergy you see today, but i think the kind of 20/10/10 is somewhat skewed due to staples, mst was run because there wasnt a better option for example, its like running 3 imperm today. Old decks seem more balanced because the staples of the time just happened look balanced. After all, you can turn crossout and called by into traps and make it so that they can activate from the hand and boom, modern yugioh decks have a relatively balanced card type ratio. Mst and other classic staples were replaced by similar extra deck options, the diversity is still there but in a different card type. I like how decks now fulfill their own niche with a dedicated playstyle, this is not over commitment but just a result of konami not wanting cards to be too generic. Other card games have a resource system so generic cards are less of an issue, this is why mtg can have like 5 cards that do the exact same thing, just with a different mana color. I also dont think every deck must run a certain ratio of card type just because some floodgates exist, there is nothing inherently bad about a spell/trap heavy deck if certain floodgates never existed, runick would be a genuinely fun and skillful deck if not for things dyna, summon limit, rivalry, tcboo, ....... I wanna say over commiting is like intentionally leaving an obvious weakness, hoping your opponent doesnt know about it
Paleo doesnt over commit, in theory they can run an out to royal decree, but doing so weakens the deck so much that its basically like having royal decree flipped on you already. Matchups can play a big roll in a duel, like swoswo wouldnt do too hot agaisnt ghoti or weather painter but a singular card shouldnt have the ability to completely shut down a whole deck, anti spell can literally erase pendulum as a concept (i play pendulum, anti spell is the biggest joever for me, even more than IO).
When i said the floodgatex deck should also be hurt, i meant it like floodgates need restrictions on them to ensure kash/floo + macro cosmos/d fissure is not possible, yes some decks can play them in a balanced way but there is nothing stopping a different deck from abusing it in a very toxic way.
I forgot to mention this earlier, another reason why i think floodgates are inherently toxic is that they need to be continuous which requires them being on the field, that hasnt been an issue until recently where more and more decks are coming out with the ability to send their floodgates as cost to start their play, completely breaking the already broken gimmick of floodgate, afaik the only deck that could consistently do this (and not even that good at it) was true draco. So floodgates now need to be even more restrictive so you cant send them as cost, hopefully this is a temporary change in direction from konami and doesnt stick as a permanent philosophy.
The existing collection floodgates include every kind of locking effect, this makes it hard to even think of printing a new kire balanced one since there will always be a stronger option hiding somewhere. It doesnt help that most of these floodgates are olf af, making any kind of errata unlikely at best. Even then how would you future proof them, the ability to shut down an important part of the game means there will always exist a chance that a future deck will abuse it, every legal barrier statue is just 1 good searcher away from being banned
Also just a quick question, can i assume we agree that lingering floodgates shouldnt be a thing? Like even ignoring what floodgate effect they have, you literally just cant get to an out unless you drew it
They need to make floodgates like lose 1 turn so only stun can play them
Honestly the problem with entry level decks these days is the non engine.
You can build a pretty good salad list for dirt cheap if you dont take hand traps and such into account
You can play cheap substitutes that are good going 1st or 2nd, like Forbidden Chalice (veiler/imperm with damage step shenanigans) or My Body As a Shield (negate and destroy? NO U)
I had royal jurrac meteor. I happily dismantled it for 30 URs
ive heard the same arguments for AI use as for stun, that it "allows" players who dont want to, or "cant", learn the game proper to take some wins. In t0 formats we see stun returning purely because it lets you win like 40% of your games by just going first and opening good, whereas playing a bad non stun deck is just gonna lose every game to snake. Or maybe like handicap in golf or something. I think its an issue within ableism and so on, consider that the valuation of playing "yugioh properly" is a valuing of ability, that being good is a good thing and being bad is a bad thing: Stun, as AI does, neutralises this by making winning a matter of luck rather than skill. Most people dislike it because they like the enjoyment-structure of "being good" at the game having value, a value which is degraded by stun existing. Is this wrong, is it right, is it something we must tolerate, idk.
Idk if my discord is bugged but ive been paying for the patreon the past month or so and Im technically in the discord but the only channel I see is the “boost” one idk if im missing something or what
I think decks like gravekeeper, Malefic, tg stun etc were stun decks it just didn’t feel a egregious as stun does now
Farfa saying this Format is gone aged like milk tbh😂
Can we get Dkayed on as a special guest to see what he has to say about leaking the worlds competitors' deck lists?
full power kash w diablosis was the best deck in ygo history by a good margin i ran the numbers
2nd tear 3rd teledad
I 100% would spend triple dust for garunteed royals
I always feel like stun in yugioh has always been the baseline deck like your deck must at least beat stun to be considered competitive. The problem is that stun FEELS really bad to play against. I find that the people who play stun around me are people who just don’t want to deal with the meta. Stun is cheap, stun is easy, stun can make people scoop completely winnable games from frustration. So I guess that’s the draw?
runick wouldn't be so stun compatible if konami just made hugin only able to protect runicks+set cards
My only real cool royal that I have been able to pull was a royal Chengying
the guy literally jinxed himself 1:09:46
What If Konami print a generic card that draws a card and has the option to destroy 1 spell/trap?
Consistancy and spell/trap removal in one card
16:01 isn't farfa just describing t.g. stun? how the defining deck of the strategy considered control and not stun by josh?
It just takes one bad day…
Stun is a part of this game and people should just accept that.
By now it should be pretty clear that Konami's plans for YGO do not coincide with what the vocal crowd of floodgate haters wants the game to be.
1:09:40 he knew
discord isn’t letting me have access to the channels in the server