I am ocg player. In OCG ultra rare card worth around 7-10$. It is very surprising to me that simple bonfire searcher card worth 70$+ in tcg. In OCG we could've get full meta deck in 200$(including all staple maxx c ash etc/excluding extra).and extra less than 200$. If the card price is that expensive as TCG in OCG,most of us would've just simply quit.
That’s cuz us tcg players are stupid we spend 130 dollars on a pre order bonfire lol so we literally are the issue and I said that ppl in the ocg won’t put up for those prices
I 100% believe both collection rare sets were made because Twitter users got yugioh trending by threatening to leave the game due to the prices of the 2HM getting absurd from Kanami's rarity bumping cards in the TCG.
bonfire is 30$ too tho in ocg so i'm surprised you are surprised by it's tcg prices considering sinful spoil engine did far worse before, like wanted being 100 time more expensive than ocg price and S-P is 10 time more expensive so bonfire being 2 time more expensive look normal to me after that
We should honestly ask our selves what is it about yugioh that we like so much because no matter what the prices are people still play, and the game has always been expensive so this isn’t new,
The argument where "every hobbies are expensive" pisses me off because yes i have more than 3k€ worth of musical stuff but it will never fall down to like 20€ because of a musical powercreep
It's also a poor argument because basically every other game is less expensive. You can get a ps4 and Strive or SF6 for half the cost of Diabellestar engine and that's all you need to compete other than practice
I want the pokemon system. Print all cards in several rarities and shortprint the highest rarity. In which we could also have something like full arts which people still want to get over commons.
@@RedundantQuestion Yeah, pretty Much. But using the Pokémon way would not work for yugioh because of the difference in players and buyers. Most people who buy Pokémon cards don't play the game whatsoever and the number of people at events is way lower than yugioh.Pokemon not only is pretty much the moat famous franchise in the world, a lot of kinds buy Pokémon cards, cannot say the same for yugioh at the moment. Most importantly, the number of collectors of Pokémon cards helps even the field in terms of money for each booster pack.
I’ve been running Witchcrafter Adventure for a whole year. An engine like Wanted/Diabellastarr is something I’m willing to wait for. There’s so many cheaper decks to have fun but competitive wise I can understand why this has become a popular topic
Personal experience right here: I've been playing Yu-Gi-Oh through Master Duel and Duel Links for about 4 years and I have never touched the TCG but always wanted to get into it. I'm also a big fighting game fan for more than a decade and, when Vanquish Soul was announced, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to start playing, I loved how the cards played around with fighting game tropes (Specifically the Marvel VS Capcom series). To my surprise, I was completely blown away by the prices of the cards themselves, I wasn't even planning on going to locals or anything, I just wanted to collect the cards, so staples weren't even included. So yeah, I guess I'm just another example of someone getting gatekept from even collecting the cards
As a blazblue fan, i caved in and bought into VS, because the designs of the cards are most heavily inspired by blazblue. Now I continue playing it to justify my purchase despite owning better decks. Fun deck, but not the most competent
I do feel bad that you cant afford/justify the purchase, because it affecting all of us right now, however, i find it very difficult to sympathise with collectors taking playable copies of cards out of the total pool to put them in a binder, non-player collectors are part of the problem with pricing IMO (although a very small part).
You answered it yourself at the very beginning of your statement: just play the digital game, who fkn cares about overpriced paper and smelly events. Most of the world is in front of their screens anyway, time to embrace the future fully and stop complaining. Besides now that every deck does 87 combos in one fkn turn who the hell (especially tournament officials) are gonna keep track of this convoluted hot mess. In short, playing the digital version costs zero bucks, womp womp.
And people wonder why some of us like playing MD instead of playing tcg. MD does have its issues but at least my T1 MD deck doesnt cost me a third of my monthly rent.
ye In TCG i don't have any way to buy all the heavy high rarity cards for VS or the core for Rescue Ace but im MD i'm chilling with both decks and in my alt account i'm chilling as well with the Gold Pride/Punk decks
That's exactly how I feel. There's still that investment cost don't get me wrong, but at least it feels reasonable y'know? Not to mention I can directly earn rewards by playing the game and overall the game is fairly generous with its events. I feel like it's still got that level of investment and reward that other online simulators like Edopro and Dueling Book do not have while not completely breaking the bank if you do decide to shell out a bit for a specific pack (with the gem sales ideally). Master Duel isn't perfect. But there's definitely a lot of good in there that I wish more people would recognise instead of just parroting "Maxx C Bad".
@@emerydergro5332 It's not free if you want to experiment constantly with many decks; but compared to other official card games simulators, Master Duel is extremely generous.
@@emerydergro5332 not really. There are so many ways to get free gems in MD to get started. And once you do get started you are still earning thousands of free gems a month just by playing
s:p and ty-phon felt like a design philosophy change to make going second generically better and create more grind games, it makes no sense to me that they'd gatekeep that behind a paywall when s:p would've still hit £20 as a super rare like magnamhut was, and would actually incentivise the general playerbase choosing to buy product, there's no point buying a box as a player when the only things you know you're getting a playset of are the useless commons
@@Griffonz i cant call that gate keeping. Konami does asign rarity which does cut frequency of pulling x card. But we asign value to those cards. Making singles higher or lower. If a secret is cheap no one says anything if its high they blame konami.
@@GuessWhatHappened1 While yes the player base can also be blamed for accepting these kinds of prices, it is not right to say Konami isn't to blame. They intentionally switch card rarities after the ocg gets them in order to profit more, as they are now much harder to pull leading to their prices inflating substantially due to people having to spend more money to open more packs to pull these cards, so they can then be put on a tcg marketplace such as TCG Player, Card Trader, etc. Card Prices on the secondary market are decided by several factors in which Konami has control over and most of the time deliberately influences, the main factors being Supply and Demand: Demand) How many players want the new card Supply) How much money / how many packs are required to be opened to get the card in order for it to be then put on a secondary market This isn't including the times when Konami will Short Print a card as they did to Triple Tactics Thrust in Maze of Millenia.
We need to get the OCG threatment. Nice rarity prints + common/rare prints as well I'm not a rarity player, i don't care if 90-95% of my deck is made with common rarity cards, i just want to play
i saw someone bring up how the ocg model is just unfeasible for konami cause of the the differences in the game between the regions which makes sense, But in the tcg something needs to be done
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock. lets look at rarity collection, virtually every card in that set that once had any sort of value is now worthless unless you pull one of like 3-4 specific QCRs. Its great for people who want cheap stuff sure but shops still need to make money selling you sealed product. And there is no reason for me to spend $70-90 on a box to pull cards worth cents. Therefore shops lose money and eventually close down or stop supporting yugioh altogether. Multiple UA-camrs covered this last year. It would not be as sustainable here because the biggest win of opening product is pulling that $60 card so you can at least break even or plus. The OCG does multiple rarities because the economy and competition there is drastically different in asian countries specifically Japan.
I think the reason the rarity collection only came up now is probably as an entryway for people to transition from Master Duel to paper play. I think that's one thing they've been trying to cash in on, but have been struggling with due to the obvious difference between a (mostly generous) free to play model and a (mostly predatory) pay to win model.
I agree, master duel/ duel links has done a lot more for competitive play just due to ease and the free grind available and physical card collecting has been more like a stock market for collectors or players that do or dont want to pull 50 packs for what they need
@@Lucky2DAmax I still think the paper play format is far more suited to proper competitive play, and it definitely brings super cool community dynamics that are essential to this kind of game... but yeah ; whether you love or hate its format and banlist it it's undeniable that Master Duel has been the best thing to happen to YuGiOh in a VERY long time and has brought in a TON of new players (myself included) since its release.
@@LS-qs9ju this is 100% exclusively about TCG yeah. I don't know how things are going in the OCG but they wouldn't even need rarity collections to make things affordable for the most part, also YuGiOh was already far more widespread there before Master Duel, which meant its release had diminished impact there. Here, it's a game changer. The vast majority of YuGiOh players I talk to either started (or restarted after a long period of absence) with Master Duel, or are still exclusively Master Duel players. What's their main reason for not playing TCG then? Price, 99% of the time. Let's hope the conclusion Konami reaches after this second TCG Rarity Collection makes the game more accessible for everyone!
I'm from a third-world BEM country. Thanks to my career, I moved to Japan to get my doctorate and then got a job in academia. Before coming here, I sold my entire TCG Yu-Gi-Oh collection back home. It consisted of an Invoked Shaddoll deck, with Shaddoll structure loosies, a fully optimized Swordsoul deck, 20-25 other non-engine cards and 6 speed duel deck products I used to play with my non-Yu-Gi-Oh friends who had anime nostalgia. I separated the money I made from this as my budget for buying OCG cards during my Doctorate, since I wouldn't be getting paid too well by my scholarship. To this day, I still haven't spent the amount of money I had initially budgeted.
2:00 Arguments like "Oh it was worse in X format" reminds me of old people saying that we shouldn't have student loan forgiveness because they were able to pay off they never got loan forgiveness for their education.
If the TCG got the OCG rarity system, it would solve 3/4 of Yu-Gi-Oh’s problems. The only problem that would remain would be to make good introduction products that help new players learn the game. If they did BOTH, Yu-Gi-Oh would be in an extremely healthy spot and would see its player-base grow a lot. Good video, Josh. I agree with you.
@@darkelite824 The problem there is a bit different: because the OCG is ahead in the release schedule, the TCG would need to pre-ban every unreleased card and un-ban on release.
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock.i think he meant that we shouldve be allowed to use OCG ver of vards that already "TCG legal". But yes that will be resulting in no one buying TCG anymore for sure. Thats why konami wont do that
Not really, it's a TCG. It's going to be hard esp when Little Timmy is now 40 and can't be bothered to read. New players (I mean actual players who want to play and not DM junkies) don't quit because it's hard (under that logic, chess wouldn't be popular), they quit because they think they need wanted and bonfire when they really don't.
As a vendor, I open 3 cases per set (if the set is good), and make about $200 - $300 profit per case through singles. I opened a case and a half of Rarity Collection and made $1000 profit. The set was insanity.
The fact that we are reaching Tele-Dad level of prices is the problem, and we have higher availability and better pull rates from back in the day. This sucks, prices should be reasonable.
😂 do you remember the prices of Nekroz, In tier zero formats people have no choice but to buy in to be competitive but this isn't that there are many decks doing well right now
Sets also had less bloated rarity bumps, sets had like 2 secret rares between retail and hobby boxes, and with no short prints in core sets, but now there's 12 secret rares, the odds of pulling a playset of 1 secret, is abysmal, where's back then if you pulled a secret in PSV, it was Jinzo or Imperial Order, you didn't pull the TCG exclusive archetype that isn't good or won't be good for another 6 months cause they only released half the archetype
Things like this make grateful that the format is diverse. Imagine if the ONLY decks that were competitively viable are the ones that require a $600 engine. Having the option of going for something significantly cheaper and still being able to compete is something I'll always appreciate.
The problem is that staple cards break this still. A format can be diverse, sure, but if every deck in that format still has to run the $100 S:P Little Knight then that still makes things quite pricy just for one card.
@@Cybertech134still is the fact ots arguably will be best deck in the format by miles and gated behind expensive price. Expect disadvantage if u dont play those deck. Also not to mention, even non fire decks that will be competitive. Manadium, centurion, voiceless voice, lab arent cheap either, at least compared to OCG prices. SP alone already $100 while OCG SP is $10, there is also thrust still. We dunno voiceless price yet but expect vanquish soul and centurion lvl of expensive lol. Only cheap ones i can see maybe floowandereeze as usual. Floo indeed best deck that keep being relevant for years.
Until now I never heard/read such good takes from a competitor/content creator in this community. Basicly everything you explained is so right. I used to worked at a local store (without the service of selling singles) so we had to THINK thrice as much about sets and HOW much we want to invest in those. And guess what...all of those side sets (Legendary Duelists, Maze's, Battle of Legends, etc pp) we ordered MUCH less then from core sets. The Rarity Collection was a huge success (as the vendors in your chat also said) and so will the next one, which got announced today. But even if I am mostly agreeing without takes, I have to bring one thing up, which triggered me in this discourse over the last weeks. I read so many times "if you cannot afford the best deck, take a break or play the deck you think is cool and you like" So one question (and I use an older format as example): I think the mechanics, playstyle and card artworks of Tearlaments is great. I tested them online on a sim and really like this deck. Then the cards come out and cost half of a rent in total. I do not really think that this would be great either, since this would force me to take a break even if I not really want to. So your argument of the archetypes or one archetype could cost more, but at least make staples affordable, is somewhat right but also not. Based on this specific example, which could come up now and then (*cough* Vanquish Souls for one of our local player) But I will say that staples need to change in their distribution. I think Magnamhut and Fenrir (maybe even I:P) are extremely good examples of lower rarity staples. Sure they all did cost a fair amount on release. But imagine they were printed in secret rare.... And credits for pointing out that NO ONE should be forced to do stock marketing just to afford their hobby.
The Flamberge thing in twitter is worse than disingenuous, it is actively predatory. The only reason he was able to profit from his prior purchases _was exactly because other people was forced to buy high later._ It’s a zero-sum game, if those people had bought flamberge before, he wouldn’t have sold any. It is beyond stupid to assume everyone is dumb and he’s the only enlightened one. The flipping systems PREYS on people not knowing what to buy and when, because your margins don’t come from resellers/konami, but from players… Absolutely scum shit, if everyone bought out on speculation, everyone would lose with a pile of spares no one needs rotting in stock.
I agree with the sentiment that more people being able to play the better, it really is that simple. And although you could say things like "you don't have to shill out hundreds of dollars to play meta, you can play budget builds", it still is fun to play a better version of a deck that you also like. Good decks and "bad" decks still play powerful staples and consistency cards. I feel like if you really care about competitive anything your first priority should be everyone having access to the same tools as much as possible so that the deciding factor in a game is always skill, and not people being paywalled just to participate. Based as always, Mr. Schmidt
I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh! in 2021. I loved the game because it felt unique compared to other TCGs. However, recently, the cost to become a more competitive player became too expensive. I decided to quit the game and try another TCG, like Pokémon, where I obtained a tier one deck for a third (or even less) of the cost of a Yu-Gi-Oh! tier one deck, and I've had great performance in tournaments.
S:P Little Knight is still the most expensive card I've ever bought at $130. There's a Regional in my city this saturday and will shoot up to $150 just for the weekend. I didn't want to bite the bullet at that price tag, but given their usual reprint patterns, we could get a higher rarity print before anything else.
Don't let FOMO get you. Not with Yugioh. I got Pot of Dualities when they dropped at $120 per copy. It was a 20 dollar tin promo in a year. No matter how much you want it, never buy it top dollar. Be patient. Competitive yugioh is such a scam.
i bought the jp super rare for like 8 euros on ebay. i don't find the secret rare good looking tbh and this isn't cope. the artwork is just really average imo and if i'm able to buy a "lesser" version/reprint that's better looking and/or more fitting (personal preference) then i always buy those.
Been saying something similar for a year+. And with Rarity Collection 2 already set to come out in May, clearly it was a huge success. Hopefully, Konami TCG realizes that they can just adapt a similar model for other sets moving forward
If valuable staples were set as lower rarities, it would actually give more incentive for people to open boxes. Many local game stores stop selling product because it doesn't sell. Well, if people weren't paying 80-100 bucks to gamble for a single card, maybe they'd feel more comfortable opening a box. Rarity Collection, on the other hand, is paying 80-100 bucks for a bunch of cards you know you can make use of. If you already had a playset for a staple, you now have plenty of extras to go around for your other decks. My friends and I came back to the game exactly because of Rarity Collection, not because of SP Little Knight. And you know what? Sure, we might not buy the 80 dollar card, but we would gladly spend more than that amount to build more decks - something we wouldn't have done had we not come back to the game in the first place.
Ironic that this video comes out right before Rarity Collection 2 got announced. While reprints of meta staples are always welcome, we still shouldn't NEED these big reprint sets for good cards to be affordable years after they're printed, your point still stands.
Man is always refreshing too see someone arguing so well and really thinking in the whole picture including players ,collectors , sellers and even the company you can see the passion of the game in you.
The card prices are what is keeping me from picking up paper YGO. Currently I only play MD. I used to play paper MTG and I quit because of the price point. I thought about start Flesh and Blood but again, the prices are too high for me as well. I enjoy competitiveness, i enjoy tournament play. But I can't justify paying 50€+ for a single piece of cardboard to myself. Specially in a game like YGO where power creep such a huge part of the business model.
I believe it is perfectly OK for people to get fakes. So long as they look the same with the real card, then there's no shame saving $800+. It would be nice having the real stuff, but there just isn't a cheaper alternative.
A lot of my yugioh boys say we gotta deal with it which really sucks. I love yugioh and it really sucks seeing it go this way, especially when you look at ocg and their printing practices.
Cards wouldn't be so expensive if we as a collective community didn't buy sealed product that is upcharged 2, 3, even 4 times what OCG costs. Until we tell Konami we're not paying BS prices, sealed product will be higher with bad ratios, which makes cards extremely expensive. It doesn't help they take rares and supers from OCG sets and makes them secret for us. That's complete BS. Wanted is a f*cking RARE in OCG-land. OG droplet was a super. SP Little Knight is a super. Why is it okay for them to be secrets for us? And why are we okay with it? Because we'll complain but we won't take action, that's why. If we follow the OCG box layout and format, our product would be cheaper, we'd have comparatively less sealed product to have to go through to get what we need. But players would be even more inclined to buy the sealed than buy singles, which would ultimately put more money in Konami's pocket. So many YugiTubers, especially the ones Konami-sponsored, REFUSE to have these discussions via video. Oh, to top it off: OCG product is also vastly higher quality and it's still cheaper. Hold up our rarity collection cards next to OCG's, and our product looks like utter garbage. The "ultimates" have print lines all over, there's no grainy texture that OCG ultimates are known for, they have no patterns or etching, the "PCRs" use cheap varnish on the card resulting in the dots coming off on sleeves, they also have no etching or patterning (it's EXTREMELY subdued), the edges don't gleam like the OCG ones do; the OCG ones straight up SHINE and display amazing patterns. Oh, and they literally lied about what our platinum secret rare was.
The thing that annoys me the most about this situation is how many people hold the opinion that it's totally fine because THEY just "play for fun," or "its not a big deal because you don't need to buy the engine," or "well I CAN afford it, so it's not an issue." I'm sorry, but to roll over and be fine with the blatant shitty business tactic is adjacent to boot licking. If we, as a community, come together and voice that this shit isn't OK, we have a higher chance of something changing, and it's worth a shot. But for some reason, there's people that think it's necessary to essentially defend it. I'll never understand the mentality of defending multi-million dollar companies for the sake of looking smart or being different - or "Konami notice me please :)" in the hopes of being on the correct side of some extremely minor, non-existent YGO history. "Just don't buy the cards?" - This doesn't make you look smart, it makes you look like a boot licking idiot. What do you gain by spewing the philosophy that this is completely fine, and telling everyone that they should be fine with it, is the OK thing to do? I seriously need to know why some players are fine with this. I agree with Joshua - the more people that can play this game, the better. And competitiveness is a huge part of YGO. To ostracize people away from it because we want to be complacent with absolutely insane prices/release is something I'll never be able to understand.
SP super is like $10 and wanted is like $2 in OCG btw, 2 SP costed u $20 and 3 wanted at $6 and in TCG they are like $200 and $300 lol. Imagine spending $500 for intially $26 cards.
Soulburning Volcano was basically an OCG set ported over to the TCG except for no extra rarities for super and ultra rares. Shame it was so niche (I still love it for what it did). As it is, TCG packs are terrible for players, a TCG set will contain like 50% unique cards printed as common, 25% printed as super rare, 15% as ultra and 10% secret. The issue with this model is that packs are 8 commons and 1 super rare or better meaning your box will have an overwhelming amount of extra copies of commons with a underrepresented selection of other rarities. OCG sets are about 50% common, 25% rare, 15% super, and 10% ultra with secret being higher rarity variants of super and ultra rare cards. Packs are 3-4 commons with 1-2 rare or better (no duplicate higher rarity prints so a pack won't have two rares but a rare and super) this leads ro a better distribution of access to rarities. 75% of the set is almost guaranteed in each pack and boxes will have like 90% of the set within at any given rarity. OCG has been with this rarity for 20 years to regular success, TCG Konami has been fudging things since 2020 when they dropped the rare print from core sets.
I only play Edison format and stopped playing current format literally for the money, it doesn’t feel good always be behind in a competition because you have less money (yeah yeah once in 4 years there is a format with a budget option that makes you go x-2 instead of x-4 with a €50 deck), I love the fast pace current YuGiOh, but don’t being able to play it because of card prices it’s kinda sad
I'm a returning player (I used to play 12 years ago in small tournaments, around the time of dragon rulers). ATM I'm learning the game again with YGO Omega and duellingbook. I want to join some locals, but the price barrier to afford a decent deck is prohibitive. I'm forced to go for rogue decks or suboptimal strategies. I'm fine with spending 50 euros to build a budget deck and play around with it. I'm fine with spending more for upgrades to the deck (like adding prosperities) once it becomes a hobby. But spending 300 euros for a diabellstar engine is a joke to me. A lot of casual players like me are completely put off by prices. I mean, I like playing and I'm willing to spend but within the budget of some that doesnt play ygo as a job. Back then the reason i left ygo was exactly because i couldn't afford the game anymore (also I thought that balancing was very poorly done). I was able to play only one format with the lightsworn structure x3, but as soon as new archetypes came out it was impossbile to play. Since building a new deck (HAT became the tier 0 at the time) was too expensive, i just dropped the game entirely. I have a feeling it's gonna be the same this time around, but at least I'm having some fun online.
I agree with everything you said, and used to be an ocg player as well, but what people don't realise is that if Konami changes the rarity setup in most sets, they can't sell other sets throughout the years, as there will be minimum chase reprints. If sp little knight is a $10-15 card on average, they aren't going to reprint it in future and have people lose their mind at trying to get another copy, because it's already affordable. So this would change their whole business model, and mean they make less money in side/reprint sets. I think theyd make more money, but maybe konami just doesn't want to do this
I just looked up the whole actual Playable Fire Deck actually cost for half a year of my country annual salary minus the shipping. NO I'M NOT KIDDING, YOU HAVE TO SPEND ZERO MONEY FOR HALF A YEAR JUST TO BUY THE WHOLE DECK
Hearing the "all hobbies are expensive" Argument just makes me so mad, like do people just copy paste it to add nothing in the argument or do they think and then say it? You know I can pay the same money for a musical instrument as the full wanted engine and guess what one of them wont be banned or powercrept next year 🤔 Also as Josh said the DAD prices too, i don't know anyone who says that and is happy to pay the full prices of the new expensive cards rather than pay like 15-20% of their current value
Honestly feel bad for those trying to keep up competitively. I just have a casual pet deck and only update it with reprints or cheap new cards that actually help.
People got spoiled with a diverse format, which is naturally more affordable, but now a dominating strategy is on the rise again, and thus, demand concentrates on the same cards, resulting in driving up its prices.
Joshua : *posts a video explaining how good rarity collection was* Konami 1 hour later : *announce rarity collection 2* This guy is officially an undercover Konami agent 🕵♂️
Yeah but sadly not the cards we need...it boost the average competitive player and new player if they atleast included a engine that could compete like the horus engine (not saying both but least 1) it would balance out the field at tad somewhat
Here's all what Konami needs to do to print money: print good and/or interesting cards. Rarity Collection made Konami a lot of money because it pointed good cards and were generous with rarity slots. Print good and/or interesting cards only at rarities you need to open multiple boxes for doesn't make money except from the people who begrudgingly buy the product to chase high-tier cards
Great to watch this, and not an hour later see Rarity Collection 2 announced! Hopefully a sign of recognition from Konami on exactly what you verbalized here.
Fun fact. The ocg set number for last years rarity collection is rc04. Why? Because its in fact not the one! Just the first in the tcg. Rarity collection was already an amazing set and concept konami had at their disposal, but for reasons 🤨 not for the tcg
Its good poduct and step into eight direction, but doesnt solve core issue of YGO box rsrity distribution, for core and side set. Not to mention TCG box price almost double of OCG but with more junks and rarity bumps. Cracking open box in OCG much2 worrh more. In TCG only really worth honestly just RC,
I haven't owned a competitive deck for Yugioh's standard format in over 7 years. But I've still been playing with and building retro format decks and playing the standard format online all this time because retro yugioh costs almost nothing (most of the time) and online costs nothing. I literally have 37 full competitive decks (main, side and extra) made for various retro formats and over 70 deck cores just sitting around incase I wanna play them as well as several sets of staples for these formats that aren't in use in case I need them. This has cost me thousands of dollars over many many years, but if I had been playing standard format all this time instead I would have probably spent more on just keeping up with the meta while only have 1 deck built at a time, maybe 2.
My problem is that I don't flip cards for a profit because I don't have a locals near me. I just build shit IRL for a homebrew format i'm developing. I probably should've bought WANTED copies when they were 50 something, but I also need to buy food. So i'm fine proxying cards for at home play until it gets reprinted. At least I bought 4 copies of Diabellstar when it was cheap (i run a 2 Dia 2 Wanted ratio in one of my decks, and i have 2 in my Fire King deck to grab the Snake Eyes spell for my Ponix line). Although at this point, i'm probably just gonna invest in building decks for Bologna format. I could see it being the next Edison or TOSS, that format was really fun.
I used to play casually as a kid and quit after high school. When I started playing again after 7 years, I couldn’t believe how fast the speed of the game ramped up and how expensive it was to have a half decent deck in an ever changing meta game. Yugioh is really the only hobby/luxury I put money into and this last set is finally where I drew the line. I like the snake eyes cards and want to build a deck, but I don’t want to spend a couple hundred dollars just to have a few cards that may or may not be meta relevant, I finally did splurge on a little knight but I had to save for a month and I didn’t really feel good about getting it. I think the different rarities/art works to help diversify prices is a great idea especially for some players that really want to compete but simply can’t afford to keep up with the game. Sorry for the essay, thank you for the video.
I don't think the rarity collection model is a long term solution. Part of the reason it's so popular is because the scarcity on the market. Using alt arts as the chase on only only shifts the burden of profit on to those alt arts which in turn makes them more expensive which in turn makes them a niche market which means you're relying on what 10% of player base to carry the other 90% which doesn't seem sustainable. The other issues with that model is the bureaucracy in importing IP. The material itself is probably inexpensive but the regulations in moving the product will inflate the price. The transportation of the items will inflate the price. If Konami had a stateside factory to print its cards, the product would also be less expensive. The biggest issue in my opinion is card quality. Bonfire is so expensive because it is in large part the only meta viable card in the set. If the pack had a higher concentration of platable cards, vendors could recoup some of their losses on lower rarity cards because their customers would have am actual incetive to buy them.
I think Konami needs to have a playerbase voting/survey for things to get reprinted. Then, when they do have reprints, they just have to look at their list and use that. Or what pokemon does where when someone wins, they reprint the deck to be affordable. It'll solidfy the meta, give them better reasons for banlists, and can help new people get in.
konami doesnt care about any of those things and they dont have any reaon to change the way they do things, unfortunatelly.. also they dont communicate.
They just announced rarity collection 2, so yeah I think konami tests how good those work and will probably adapt their system in to the core/side sets in the future.
If there are no shortprinted cards and everything is available from start simultaneously at low and high rarities like I've heard it is in OCG, that should encourage more people to buy product. I'd play IRL if I was in an OCG region.
KONAMI IS SO TOXIC people just stopped buying its cards and migrating to card games that actually feel them feel good instead a loser. Also stores were closing for the game. Bad, predatory products when FAB, for instance, performs so well? Konami might be shotgunning its own foot like this.
Unfortunately mantaining the different rarity system also has its flaws, but it would be such a good move in the right direction. You just have to see the ocg. Magic the gathering is also an example of having different rarities but there are expensive cards cause of low supply. Sheoldred, the apocalypse is a 100€ card that you need 3 of in almost every black deck for example.
Playing yugioh in OCG because their prices are low is a dream. The actual prices in TCG made me to take the decision to stop playing and only consume content of especifics things around. Is sad but bruh, konami in the side TCG is trashhhhhh
The whole thing reminds me of that conversation that came up some time ago where there were some reveals regarding questions from the investors in the Yugioh card game, and among them was a question regarding concerns that Yugioh has a decent existing playerbase but does not excel at attracting new players, and how the company was going to address that. The current situation with card prices is definetly NOT a good way to attract new players lol.
one of the major points that gets left out of this discussion is what does a player have to gain for their struggle to play the best cards and decks. Yugioh prizing is so piss poor players are blowing the bag for bragging rights basically. Look I play at a competitive locals with worlds qualifiers so I only see players winning our locals that are playing these decks at full clip. They buy the best cards no matter the cost, so if i want to play at all thats what I’m up against and unless I want to break the bank to compete (at my locals) I just hard lose. Not fun, and can’t even buy product to get the better cards either. And for what the 1% chance of winning a prize card.
on the question of how well the OCG does: a company called Media Create releases sales data for the TCG market. For the past 5+ years, Yugioh has consistently been THE #1. practically every month. Within the past year, Pokemon has taken #1 after a huge explosion of growth, but Yugioh is still seeing consistent positive growth. Should be noted that this data does not distinguish between OCG and Rush Duel, but yeah, Yugioh does extraordinarily well in Japan with this model.
the situation of yugioh has always been quite terrible, some times staples were 30 bucks a copy, other times 90 or 90. I remember during TOSS I could play decently with a cheap salaman deck. then cynet mining came out at like, 30 $ a copy. I was a student, I couldn't spend that much for 3 cards. The only possible way is to stop buying products or just trying to have something like a massive backlash on comoney, something like #makeitcommon or similar, like japan. I hated how in cardfight vanguard in my country, for some reason i had to spend 100/150 euro for ANY deck, even if it was a tier 4 deck just because of the rarities of certain cards. We need some backlash otherwise they will never give a fuck.
When people are like oh remember teleDad, my only thought is, bro, we haven’t even got the prices/rarities for populus and princess, if they are both secrets you sure as hell bet we have another $100 card so it’ll be worse than teleDad. Decks will be like $1500-$2000 minimum.
2 people in my locals quit the game because they said it’s too expensive now. Personally I only play rouge decks so I’m not that serious, but some people need to play the meta and they struggle :(
Nobody at the local level "needs" to play meta and that's what people aren't grasping. Most people aren't playing at the tiers where spending $600+ on cards is even remotely necessary.
@@Cybertech134 That depends on how much you want to win/play the game at Locals. Locals being the lowest level sets a baseline of entry, if you even want to get a Match off somebody. A diverse format helps with players feeling like they can play what they want and win, but if that diversity also comes with a ovbiously higher power floor and ceiling, your Rogue deck almost auto-loses unless you are playing Silver_Bullet.dek. Nobody goes to locals to get their entry OTS packs, play 3 blowout sets and expressly go 0-3. Keeping up with Konami's banlist, print run and reprint policies has hit another breaking point, more so because the most playable engines are now running you more than half a grand, and that's before the Main Deck that you want to play and new Extra Deck staples like Chaos Angel, S:P, and others. No other game besides maybe Commander has manditory Quartely Upkeep to not fall behind.
@@Cybertech134 This might be true where you're from, but in my home city's locals in Brazil you literally couldn't top if you didn't play meta. Largest city in the country + few OTSs all in the same neighborhood = you play against regional and YCS winners every week. Different scenes have different experiences, believe it or not. Not only that, but I *don't care* whether or not I *need* to play meta. If even one game was lost by an otherwise good player because they were using the affordable alternative instead of the meta pick, then the game has a fundamental problem, period. I've won in the past due to my opponent not being able to afford Baronne and having to end on Qixing. It didn't feel good for either of us.
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock. Your opponent didn't lose because they couldn't afford Baronne; they should've adapted their strategy to play without it since they didn't have it. What a stupid way to think.
I wholeheartedly agree on the issues with the rarity system and printing cards in multiple rarities like other card games do. And I have been playing other card games instead of Yugioh for years now mainly because they were substantially cheaper. As someone who enjoys playing and optimizing top tier decks, I've been wanting to get back into Yugioh for quite some time now and just playing online doesn't keep me engaged for long. While there were many decks that I genuinely liked during this time, none of them came anywhere close to what I would be willing to pay for it. Whether it's S:P, thrust, prosp, talents, some engine like adventure, droplet, imperm, ash... the list goes on and on and on and it's always the fking same. There is always something that most competitively viable decks need thats just way overpriced. And playing a suboptimal version of something or an entirely worse deck because you arent crazy enough to drop hundreds of bucks on cardboard, that could randomly lose it's value because of a banlist and likely won't keep it long term because of powercreep, just sucks. Even if I can afford it - and many others simply can't - it's just not worth it to me. And thats coming from a person that's been very interested in this game their entire life. What do you think would be the perspective of someone looking into the game for the first time? And its not like modern Yugioh would be easy to get into even if it was free...
Just for context: Out of the two locals I go to they run Digimon, One Piece, Shadowverse, Vanguard, some osbcure thing I have no idea what it is, then the obvious Magic and Pokemon. As for YGO, the best you see is 2 boxes of some very old set at the deepest corner of the shelf full of dust and whenever the locals owner post their weekly tournament schedules it is rare to see YGO get any dates.
I was thinking about that. This is a problem going back a few years, with it obviously getting worse. The pandemic, along with cost/benefit drove a lot of now former OTS stores to Drop Yu-Gi-Oh. 4 years ago, I could have found 2 or 3 places within 15 minutes of me doing tournaments. Today, the closest is about 30 minutes. That's living in the large(ish) city of Cincinnati. This goes back to something I've commented elsewhere. OTS stores do not make much money off of boxes (as MSRP and wholesale prices are not far apart) and definitely not tournaments. They rely on large quantities of product to make money. The rise of online singles buying made things more difficult. Many stores simply do not see profit in Yu-Gi-Oh anymore.
I think this is a huge issue, but its rather easy to fix. If Konami just prints the cards at the same rarity as in the OCG, with the cards appearing in multiple raritys in each set, i think this is solved. We even got a example that proves that in the release of the rarity collection. The pull rate of the cards in the current sets and rarity selection is so abysmal i stopped buying sealed products a long time ago. I just buy the singles. Back in the day i used to buy a display or two, with a new set, and then buy the missing singles later. I dont think what konami pulled with centurion is fine. That is supposed to be a deck build set. At best you get 1 card for centurion per booster, and even if you want to play valmonica you arent better of. Most of the cards in the pack are just a waste of paper, because most of the new cards are locked to the single holo slot. I dont really play in tournaments, but only with friends here and there, but if they keep doing this i might stop buying cards at all and just play in Omega for free. On the other hand, if Konami changes things for the better, i will consider buying sealed again.
I genuinely find it so funny that people keep forgetting that *drum roll* ITS JUST CARDBOARD!!! How are people even justifying paying 100$+ for a piece of fucking cardboard. Rarran was right, the yugioh community just justify everything.
Rarran was just angry he couldn't instantly master Yu-Gi-Oh and his skills from an easy card game didn't transfer to Yu-Gi-Oh too. Let's be honest here. And before you make up shit, I only play master duel and also DON'T own cards because I don't need them to play the deck I want.
I think there should be a distinct discussion between making the game consumer friendly and making the highest echelons of competition be more consumer friendly. I don't know if someone "on the outside," so to speak, would immediately try to play at a high level. There are decks that have a nice power level that have a cheap price (floo comes to mind), and they aren't the best, but they allow the person to compete. I can't contribute much to the discussion since I play cards I like thematically and I'm working on a college budget, but there should be some sort of difference between those two things to me.
This is why I'm sticking to YGOmega or dueling nexus. Like 1 copy of Chaos Angel more than doubled the total cost of my The Agents deck, and it barely makes the deck rogue.
Check the prices for the new set there are multiple new decks with multiple expensive cards that you need multiple of it's not just expensive for meta decks. And it's been that way for a long time now the only truly cheap decks are ones you probably won't win with and that's not counting staples.
@@Junior2000625u have meta relevant decks that are cheap but u will need staples. Floo,kashtira,hero,drytron… floo is the cheapest here for sure but u see my point.
The fact that people are expected to buy 3 structure decks instead of 1 is already enough evidence. This shit is another level. I will refuse to buy any product until they slash prices by at least 50%.
It is not only the meta decks. I could unverstanden it, when we have a tier 0 Format and the best deck is expensive. But even most tier 2 or 3 decks are way to expensive. It does not make sense. Look at every topping decks. Maybe there are 1 or 2 decks, which are about 100 €s ...but most of them are over 300€s. This is not healthy for the game.
As a very inactive player, every time a new set release, I think about whether or Not I should buy a card before it is too late because of price jumps. Which really sucks. Thrust is one example. As an inactive player, 70€ per copy is just not worth it for the times I play with the card. Here we are with MZMI and Thrust being a 40€ Reprint. And it sucks that I think “yeah, it is a staple, it will be worth it”. That’s what they want us to think and it is one reason why they keep practicing it like this. In the end, I think it more and more keeps casual players away from the game. I know that there is no reason to go to locals not owning a S:P or the Wanted Engine. Maybe it is just my locals, but it’s kinda frustrating. Having every card in many rarities would certainly have the benefit that you don’t have to think too hard about the market and just enjoy the game.
I got the best quote to sum up TCG; TCG Konami should be embarrassed of what they do to the card quality, short prints, and making starlight/collectors rare, quarter century rares, but as long as we keep buying it. Money hungry mothertrucker in TCG Konami is going to continue to produce this crap and load their pockets, while we the player base continue to buy this crap and then we sit back and wonder why we're getting scammed with short prints, removal of low rarity staples in future structure decks, bumping soon to be meta-archetypes with higher rarities, super difficult in pulling starlight rares, etc. But at the end of the day we're all responsible for what we buy, because we can get mad all we want at TCG Konami for making this crap. But they're gonna continue to make this crap and make a lot of money as long as we the player base continue buying it so if we stop buying their products and stop playing TCG and play OCG or yugioh games which doesn't cost any money or edison formats, they will stop making money and hopefully we will be a little bit happier.
Did anyone notice the slogan on cardmarket for Maze of Millennia? " This Bonfire burns throuh all - even your wallet." - so hilarious that even cardmarket makes fun of it.
what is different on the ocg system that makes their prices not escalate like ours? Its just offer and demand at they end of the day and in that regard their market should be just like ours
@@florianvo7616they reprint their "chase" cards in lower rarities in the same sets to have both a high and low rarity version. Cards are still expensive but we're talking 10 dollar cards.
@@florianvo7616 the ocg prints cards at multiple rarities. So as an example you could get a bonfire at either super rare or ultra rare. Which makes chase cards easier to obtain in the ocg.
@@florianvo7616 The Ocg gets cards in multiple rarities like we got in the rarity collection. So budget players can just buy the cheap version of the cards
Ya I think you hit the nail on the head. I only play yugioh formats in paper when there's a deck I absolutely love AND it's seen enough reprints where picking up the core + new staples would cost me less than 150-200 dollars. I only play like 0-1 formats a year, and buy 0 product. When I played digimon for a few months, I bought multiple boxes of every set, just because opening them felt worth it: more cards can be used in more creative ways and the rarities weren't ridiculous. If every set was rarity collection, I would buy so much more product and be able to support my LGSes more consistently.
I play for 2-3 years now. I never bought a display but rarity collection i opened two. Its so much better because the cards are almost all useful in the longrun and hold value for that reason.
In so glad you made this video. I love Yugioh but the price point is the reason I don't play physical TCG. I would easily buy product if the TCG adopted the OCG rarity method.
I think past formats are a good example of this. You can play Edison Lightsworn or Blackwings for like $100 and a lot of that is old Extra Deck cards that haven't been reprinted in 10+ years. Or, if you want to bling it out, you can spend 5 figures on these decks. My personal opinion on the problem is how bad the ratios are on our boxes. Pulling only 4 bonfires per case is a problem. Pulling 2.4 Wanted per case is a problem. Obviously it sucks that the presellers are charging so much for these cards, but from their perspective, I understand that they need to justify opening those boxes rather than just selling them for $70 on TCG Player. Changing to an OCG system will help out our pull rates a ton, which will help a lot. And the chase cards will still carry the set. I also think that we just get to many sets. More than 1 new release a month is to much, and even that is kinda pushing it. By pushing so many sets, by having to create so many new cards, they are diluting our card pool with bad cards. If they released fewer new cards, they can concentrate the good cards into the same sets, and you get more products like POTE, DABL, and AGOV where they sell on the backbone of the cards being awesome.
People forget that OCG prices are also lower because they have less disposable income. Japan, the wealthiest nation in OCG territory, has an average income about half that of the US. Compare to any of the smaller countries in the OCG, and it becomes even more disparate. A $30 card is the same to them as a $60 card is to us. That's why we are wowed when looking at their prices. I think Konami is doing an ok job keeping the prices relatively appropriate for each market. There's always room for improvement, of course.
I wish we had a mass printed basic rarity set. Like just "common rarity bundle" with all the modern cards for a good price, not a single holo in the set. We need that budget rarity that eliminates the need to do reprints that destroy the collectable value of old, high rarity pulls.
I can see both as secret already lol. At least one of em will be ultra and 1 secret. And then we will see more video complaining about this all over again lol
If we had s:p in rare, super, ultra, and secret, people will want to get the secret rare, but Timmy can play the rare he pulled out of his entry packs. We all hapi.
I've been playing Master Duel basically since it came out and can say that it is definitely the thing that actually got me into playing YuGiOh again. And it's made me interested in trying the TCG because as a Master Duel player, I see all these new cards being announced and know that we won't get to try those in MD for what? a whole year? But for me, the barrier to entry isn't how complicated the game is, I've learned most of what I need to know about modern YGO from MD. No, the issue I have with the TCG is 2 fold; I'm extremely timid and find it hard to like...essentially muster up the courage to go attempt to play a card game at a card shop with strangers, and when you pair that with the prices I see on TCGplayer for most anything I'd want to play...I definitely ain't trying it any time soon. And with how shitty so many of the sets are, only having like 1 good reprint chase card, I'm not even interested in buying packs just to have fun opening them. From what I can tell, anything Fire atm is basically a no-go for me, the only deck I'd maybe even attempt building in paper is Branded Despia, because I already do own a good portion of it since it had that structure deck that made a lot of key cards pretty cheap, I know how to play it, and Cartesia and Lubellion were both reprinted in the last tin. Wouldn't really have to get S:P. Seems fine, except I don't have Quem, who is $60 from what I can tell quickly checking on TCGplayer atm because she was printed as a Secret in CYAC. And then, that's also not factoring in any staples I'd want to throw in with it. Thrust in particular is still expensive, another $50-60 a pop. That's like $200+ for 4 cards. To me, that sounds ridiculous. But most other staples that actually were in the Rarity Collection became a lot more affordable, like Imperm, Evenly Matched, Baronne, Lightning Storm, Nibiru, Ash Blossom, etc. I'd be far more willing to try being brave and go to a locals if it was easier to afford the cards in paper I already know I'd need to play against modern decks. And even I bought a box of Rarity Collection to open because the rarities look nice, and I knew that no matter what I pulled, there would be good staples among the commons I could maybe use one day. That shit sells, and I hope they see that and make more products like it.
Pokemon TCG does exactly that. They have multiple printings of the same card in different rarities. That's how they can have multiple meta decks that cost less than $100 for whole decks. Staples included. If you want to bling out decks, there's different rarities for that.
Making every card in a set have a common print and adding rare additions of some of those same cards would be amazing. I wouldn't mind having both the option to build a budget meta deck with mostly common copies while also having the option to spend $$$$ to bling the entire thing out.
Thank you for using your platform this way and for making the point about Age of Overlord vs. Rarity Collection. Both sets made vendors happy, but one of those (Rarity) made *everybody* happy. Multiple rarities in mainline sets is the way forward. Great word of mouth + players buying tons of sealed product = win for Konami. More people playing at the highest level in the current format because it's affordable = more excitement over the game = win for Konami. It feels like a no-brainer.
Let's imagine this: S.P. Little Knight is a staple that we all know every deck needs to play. So everyone will be chasing for it. Let's say it's a card so good that the lowest rarity will be Ultra Rare. From there there'll be a Secret, an Ultimate, a Quarter Century and a Starlight rare. Let's say as well that the Quarter Century and the Starlight will have an alternative art that only comes in those rarities. Everyone will be chasing for the rarest cards that are the alternative art in the highest rarity. However there will be many normal art in lower rarity that are not collectables but playables. That means the rarest will be expensive, but the ultras would be affordable for the casual player. I'd rather pay $10 or $15 for an ultra staple, than can't pay $100 for a secret rare that I know will be reprinted in 2 years. I'd rather wait the 2 years for the reprint.
Ban all the good cards from last set, Print overpowered staples in new set. Short print and rarity boost those cards to all hell and ignore people saying the game is too expensive
I am ocg player. In OCG ultra rare card worth around 7-10$.
It is very surprising to me that simple bonfire searcher card worth 70$+ in tcg.
In OCG we could've get full meta deck in 200$(including all staple maxx c ash etc/excluding extra).and extra less than 200$.
If the card price is that expensive as TCG in OCG,most of us would've just simply quit.
That’s cuz us tcg players are stupid we spend 130 dollars on a pre order bonfire lol so we literally are the issue and I said that ppl in the ocg won’t put up for those prices
I 100% believe both collection rare sets were made because Twitter users got yugioh trending by threatening to leave the game due to the prices of the 2HM getting absurd from Kanami's rarity bumping cards in the TCG.
bonfire is 30$ too tho in ocg so i'm surprised you are surprised by it's tcg prices considering sinful spoil engine did far worse before, like wanted being 100 time more expensive than ocg price and S-P is 10 time more expensive so bonfire being 2 time more expensive look normal to me after that
That’s the best valid point just quit and play something else. Problem solved .
We should honestly ask our selves what is it about yugioh that we like so much because no matter what the prices are people still play, and the game has always been expensive so this isn’t new,
The argument where "every hobbies are expensive" pisses me off because yes i have more than 3k€ worth of musical stuff but it will never fall down to like 20€ because of a musical powercreep
Or musical reprint lol
Hahaha imagine the next woodwind meta? Or even percussion format?
Musical powercreep lmao
It's also a poor argument because basically every other game is less expensive. You can get a ps4 and Strive or SF6 for half the cost of Diabellestar engine and that's all you need to compete other than practice
I regret to inform you that theyve released Guitar Unleashed, a retrain of Guitar, and its vastly superior
I want the pokemon system. Print all cards in several rarities and shortprint the highest rarity. In which we could also have something like full arts which people still want to get over commons.
Am I wrong or didn't the last deck that won the Pokemon TCG World Championship cost like $40 total ?
@@RedundantQuestion Yeah, pretty Much. But using the Pokémon way would not work for yugioh because of the difference in players and buyers. Most people who buy Pokémon cards don't play the game whatsoever and the number of people at events is way lower than yugioh.Pokemon not only is pretty much the moat famous franchise in the world, a lot of kinds buy Pokémon cards, cannot say the same for yugioh at the moment. Most importantly, the number of collectors of Pokémon cards helps even the field in terms of money for each booster pack.
@@RedundantQuestion Yep it was a mew Vmax arena deck. :)
I’ve been running Witchcrafter Adventure for a whole year. An engine like Wanted/Diabellastarr is something I’m willing to wait for. There’s so many cheaper decks to have fun but competitive wise I can understand why this has become a popular topic
@@RedundantQuestionthe last 2 worlds winner cost about that much
Personal experience right here: I've been playing Yu-Gi-Oh through Master Duel and Duel Links for about 4 years and I have never touched the TCG but always wanted to get into it. I'm also a big fighting game fan for more than a decade and, when Vanquish Soul was announced, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to start playing, I loved how the cards played around with fighting game tropes (Specifically the Marvel VS Capcom series). To my surprise, I was completely blown away by the prices of the cards themselves, I wasn't even planning on going to locals or anything, I just wanted to collect the cards, so staples weren't even included. So yeah, I guess I'm just another example of someone getting gatekept from even collecting the cards
As a blazblue fan, i caved in and bought into VS, because the designs of the cards are most heavily inspired by blazblue. Now I continue playing it to justify my purchase despite owning better decks. Fun deck, but not the most competent
I’m sorry king that was a fucked ass deck to have to pick up when it released took so long to be “cheaper” still 200-300 for the core
I do feel bad that you cant afford/justify the purchase, because it affecting all of us right now, however, i find it very difficult to sympathise with collectors taking playable copies of cards out of the total pool to put them in a binder, non-player collectors are part of the problem with pricing IMO (although a very small part).
You answered it yourself at the very beginning of your statement: just play the digital game, who fkn cares about overpriced paper and smelly events. Most of the world is in front of their screens anyway, time to embrace the future fully and stop complaining.
Besides now that every deck does 87 combos in one fkn turn who the hell (especially tournament officials) are gonna keep track of this convoluted hot mess.
In short, playing the digital version costs zero bucks, womp womp.
And people wonder why some of us like playing MD instead of playing tcg. MD does have its issues but at least my T1 MD deck doesnt cost me a third of my monthly rent.
ye
In TCG i don't have any way to buy all the heavy high rarity cards for VS or the core for Rescue Ace but im MD i'm chilling with both decks and in my alt account i'm chilling as well with the Gold Pride/Punk decks
master duel is expensive too
That's exactly how I feel. There's still that investment cost don't get me wrong, but at least it feels reasonable y'know? Not to mention I can directly earn rewards by playing the game and overall the game is fairly generous with its events. I feel like it's still got that level of investment and reward that other online simulators like Edopro and Dueling Book do not have while not completely breaking the bank if you do decide to shell out a bit for a specific pack (with the gem sales ideally).
Master Duel isn't perfect. But there's definitely a lot of good in there that I wish more people would recognise instead of just parroting "Maxx C Bad".
@@emerydergro5332 It's not free if you want to experiment constantly with many decks; but compared to other official card games simulators, Master Duel is extremely generous.
@@emerydergro5332 not really. There are so many ways to get free gems in MD to get started. And once you do get started you are still earning thousands of free gems a month just by playing
s:p and ty-phon felt like a design philosophy change to make going second generically better and create more grind games, it makes no sense to me that they'd gatekeep that behind a paywall when s:p would've still hit £20 as a super rare like magnamhut was, and would actually incentivise the general playerbase choosing to buy product, there's no point buying a box as a player when the only things you know you're getting a playset of are the useless commons
Who is gatekeeping?
@@GuessWhatHappened1 He's talking about Konami gatekeeping the cards at secret rare instead of giving some of the good generic cards lower rarities
@@Griffonz i cant call that gate keeping. Konami does asign rarity which does cut frequency of pulling x card.
But we asign value to those cards. Making singles higher or lower. If a secret is cheap no one says anything if its high they blame konami.
@@GuessWhatHappened1 konami prints cards at higher rarities on purpose to sell sets. it is directly their fault, not the player base's
@@GuessWhatHappened1 While yes the player base can also be blamed for accepting these kinds of prices, it is not right to say Konami isn't to blame. They intentionally switch card rarities after the ocg gets them in order to profit more, as they are now much harder to pull leading to their prices inflating substantially due to people having to spend more money to open more packs to pull these cards, so they can then be put on a tcg marketplace such as TCG Player, Card Trader, etc. Card Prices on the secondary market are decided by several factors in which Konami has control over and most of the time deliberately influences, the main factors being Supply and Demand:
Demand) How many players want the new card
Supply) How much money / how many packs are required to be opened to get the card in order for it to be then put on a secondary market
This isn't including the times when Konami will Short Print a card as they did to Triple Tactics Thrust in Maze of Millenia.
We need to get the OCG threatment.
Nice rarity prints + common/rare prints as well
I'm not a rarity player, i don't care if 90-95% of my deck is made with common rarity cards, i just want to play
i saw someone bring up how the ocg model is just unfeasible for konami cause of the the differences in the game between the regions which makes sense, But in the tcg something needs to be done
that never happening lol
@@ryionizer3622 Can you give one reason why that model would be unfeasible for the TCG?
@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock. it would be really smart if they did, but it's not gonna happen. The split came in 2007, starting with TAEV.
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock. lets look at rarity collection, virtually every card in that set that once had any sort of value is now worthless unless you pull one of like 3-4 specific QCRs. Its great for people who want cheap stuff sure but shops still need to make money selling you sealed product. And there is no reason for me to spend $70-90 on a box to pull cards worth cents. Therefore shops lose money and eventually close down or stop supporting yugioh altogether. Multiple UA-camrs covered this last year. It would not be as sustainable here because the biggest win of opening product is pulling that $60 card so you can at least break even or plus. The OCG does multiple rarities because the economy and competition there is drastically different in asian countries specifically Japan.
I think the reason the rarity collection only came up now is probably as an entryway for people to transition from Master Duel to paper play. I think that's one thing they've been trying to cash in on, but have been struggling with due to the obvious difference between a (mostly generous) free to play model and a (mostly predatory) pay to win model.
I agree, master duel/ duel links has done a lot more for competitive play just due to ease and the free grind available and physical card collecting has been more like a stock market for collectors or players that do or dont want to pull 50 packs for what they need
@@Lucky2DAmax I still think the paper play format is far more suited to proper competitive play, and it definitely brings super cool community dynamics that are essential to this kind of game... but yeah ; whether you love or hate its format and banlist it it's undeniable that Master Duel has been the best thing to happen to YuGiOh in a VERY long time and has brought in a TON of new players (myself included) since its release.
In TCG? Probably.
But it's already fourth RC in OCG.
Not really. Rarity collection exists way before Masterduel
@@LS-qs9ju this is 100% exclusively about TCG yeah. I don't know how things are going in the OCG but they wouldn't even need rarity collections to make things affordable for the most part, also YuGiOh was already far more widespread there before Master Duel, which meant its release had diminished impact there. Here, it's a game changer. The vast majority of YuGiOh players I talk to either started (or restarted after a long period of absence) with Master Duel, or are still exclusively Master Duel players.
What's their main reason for not playing TCG then? Price, 99% of the time. Let's hope the conclusion Konami reaches after this second TCG Rarity Collection makes the game more accessible for everyone!
I'm from a third-world BEM country. Thanks to my career, I moved to Japan to get my doctorate and then got a job in academia. Before coming here, I sold my entire TCG Yu-Gi-Oh collection back home. It consisted of an Invoked Shaddoll deck, with Shaddoll structure loosies, a fully optimized Swordsoul deck, 20-25 other non-engine cards and 6 speed duel deck products I used to play with my non-Yu-Gi-Oh friends who had anime nostalgia. I separated the money I made from this as my budget for buying OCG cards during my Doctorate, since I wouldn't be getting paid too well by my scholarship.
To this day, I still haven't spent the amount of money I had initially budgeted.
2:00 Arguments like "Oh it was worse in X format" reminds me of old people saying that we shouldn't have student loan forgiveness because they were able to pay off they never got loan forgiveness for their education.
If the TCG got the OCG rarity system, it would solve 3/4 of Yu-Gi-Oh’s problems. The only problem that would remain would be to make good introduction products that help new players learn the game. If they did BOTH, Yu-Gi-Oh would be in an extremely healthy spot and would see its player-base grow a lot.
Good video, Josh. I agree with you.
Or just let us use OCG cards in tcg tournaments
@@darkelite824 The problem there is a bit different: because the OCG is ahead in the release schedule, the TCG would need to pre-ban every unreleased card and un-ban on release.
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock.i think he meant that we shouldve be allowed to use OCG ver of vards that already "TCG legal". But yes that will be resulting in no one buying TCG anymore for sure. Thats why konami wont do that
Not really, it's a TCG. It's going to be hard esp when Little Timmy is now 40 and can't be bothered to read.
New players (I mean actual players who want to play and not DM junkies) don't quit because it's hard (under that logic, chess wouldn't be popular), they quit because they think they need wanted and bonfire when they really don't.
@@darkelite824 That would cause a problem for the OCG instead, as we'd start to overbuy their cards and make their price get overinflated as a result.
As a vendor, I open 3 cases per set (if the set is good), and make about $200 - $300 profit per case through singles.
I opened a case and a half of Rarity Collection and made $1000 profit. The set was insanity.
The fact that we are reaching Tele-Dad level of prices is the problem, and we have higher availability and better pull rates from back in the day. This sucks, prices should be reasonable.
😂 do you remember the prices of Nekroz, In tier zero formats people have no choice but to buy in to be competitive but this isn't that there are many decks doing well right now
@@antonionieto7214 oh my oh my i was there with 3xBrionac $100 each, 2 Valk $80 each and Trishula for about $20-30 LOL
@@antonionieto7214 we might not be in one though.
tell me you didnt play during tele dad without saying it
Sets also had less bloated rarity bumps, sets had like 2 secret rares between retail and hobby boxes, and with no short prints in core sets, but now there's 12 secret rares, the odds of pulling a playset of 1 secret, is abysmal, where's back then if you pulled a secret in PSV, it was Jinzo or Imperial Order, you didn't pull the TCG exclusive archetype that isn't good or won't be good for another 6 months cause they only released half the archetype
Things like this make grateful that the format is diverse. Imagine if the ONLY decks that were competitively viable are the ones that require a $600 engine. Having the option of going for something significantly cheaper and still being able to compete is something I'll always appreciate.
This is why it's silly that people are complaining about the prices
@@Cybertech134 its okay to not know any better but with the snake eye engine release, the format WONT be diverse
@@manleyfgc7981 It's okay not to know any better, but you don't HAVE to play a fire deck. You're just making excuses for your lack of creativity.
The problem is that staple cards break this still. A format can be diverse, sure, but if every deck in that format still has to run the $100 S:P Little Knight then that still makes things quite pricy just for one card.
@@Cybertech134still is the fact ots arguably will be best deck in the format by miles and gated behind expensive price. Expect disadvantage if u dont play those deck.
Also not to mention, even non fire decks that will be competitive. Manadium, centurion, voiceless voice, lab arent cheap either, at least compared to OCG prices. SP alone already $100 while OCG SP is $10, there is also thrust still.
We dunno voiceless price yet but expect vanquish soul and centurion lvl of expensive lol. Only cheap ones i can see maybe floowandereeze as usual. Floo indeed best deck that keep being relevant for years.
Until now I never heard/read such good takes from a competitor/content creator in this community. Basicly everything you explained is so right.
I used to worked at a local store (without the service of selling singles) so we had to THINK thrice as much about sets and HOW much we want to invest in those. And guess what...all of those side sets (Legendary Duelists, Maze's, Battle of Legends, etc pp) we ordered MUCH less then from core sets.
The Rarity Collection was a huge success (as the vendors in your chat also said) and so will the next one, which got announced today.
But even if I am mostly agreeing without takes, I have to bring one thing up, which triggered me in this discourse over the last weeks. I read so many times "if you cannot afford the best deck, take a break or play the deck you think is cool and you like"
So one question (and I use an older format as example): I think the mechanics, playstyle and card artworks of Tearlaments is great. I tested them online on a sim and really like this deck. Then the cards come out and cost half of a rent in total.
I do not really think that this would be great either, since this would force me to take a break even if I not really want to.
So your argument of the archetypes or one archetype could cost more, but at least make staples affordable, is somewhat right but also not. Based on this specific example, which could come up now and then (*cough* Vanquish Souls for one of our local player)
But I will say that staples need to change in their distribution. I think Magnamhut and Fenrir (maybe even I:P) are extremely good examples of lower rarity staples. Sure they all did cost a fair amount on release. But imagine they were printed in secret rare....
And credits for pointing out that NO ONE should be forced to do stock marketing just to afford their hobby.
Video drops mentioning rarity collection and rarity collection 2 announced. Josh works for Konami confirmed for like the fifth time 😂.
He’s a Konami plant lmao 🤣
The Flamberge thing in twitter is worse than disingenuous, it is actively predatory. The only reason he was able to profit from his prior purchases _was exactly because other people was forced to buy high later._ It’s a zero-sum game, if those people had bought flamberge before, he wouldn’t have sold any. It is beyond stupid to assume everyone is dumb and he’s the only enlightened one. The flipping systems PREYS on people not knowing what to buy and when, because your margins don’t come from resellers/konami, but from players…
Absolutely scum shit, if everyone bought out on speculation, everyone would lose with a pile of spares no one needs rotting in stock.
I agree with the sentiment that more people being able to play the better, it really is that simple. And although you could say things like "you don't have to shill out hundreds of dollars to play meta, you can play budget builds", it still is fun to play a better version of a deck that you also like. Good decks and "bad" decks still play powerful staples and consistency cards. I feel like if you really care about competitive anything your first priority should be everyone having access to the same tools as much as possible so that the deciding factor in a game is always skill, and not people being paywalled just to participate.
Based as always, Mr. Schmidt
This thumbnail has "I'm not disappointed, I'm mad" energy.
and he's still cute looking. it's adorable.
I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh! in 2021. I loved the game because it felt unique compared to other TCGs. However, recently, the cost to become a more competitive player became too expensive. I decided to quit the game and try another TCG, like Pokémon, where I obtained a tier one deck for a third (or even less) of the cost of a Yu-Gi-Oh! tier one deck, and I've had great performance in tournaments.
S:P Little Knight is still the most expensive card I've ever bought at $130. There's a Regional in my city this saturday and will shoot up to $150 just for the weekend.
I didn't want to bite the bullet at that price tag, but given their usual reprint patterns, we could get a higher rarity print before anything else.
last time i paid those money was for dracossack in d.ruler format
Don't let FOMO get you. Not with Yugioh. I got Pot of Dualities when they dropped at $120 per copy. It was a 20 dollar tin promo in a year. No matter how much you want it, never buy it top dollar. Be patient. Competitive yugioh is such a scam.
Never buy expensive cards imo unless u are competitive players who sttend big tournament often. Like regional or YCS. Its just not worth it overall.
i bought the jp super rare for like 8 euros on ebay. i don't find the secret rare good looking tbh and this isn't cope. the artwork is just really average imo and if i'm able to buy a "lesser" version/reprint that's better looking and/or more fitting (personal preference) then i always buy those.
@@bayar_ The problem is that you can't use it for locals or regionals, at that point isn't it just better to create proxy for personal use?
Been saying something similar for a year+. And with Rarity Collection 2 already set to come out in May, clearly it was a huge success. Hopefully, Konami TCG realizes that they can just adapt a similar model for other sets moving forward
If valuable staples were set as lower rarities, it would actually give more incentive for people to open boxes. Many local game stores stop selling product because it doesn't sell. Well, if people weren't paying 80-100 bucks to gamble for a single card, maybe they'd feel more comfortable opening a box. Rarity Collection, on the other hand, is paying 80-100 bucks for a bunch of cards you know you can make use of. If you already had a playset for a staple, you now have plenty of extras to go around for your other decks. My friends and I came back to the game exactly because of Rarity Collection, not because of SP Little Knight. And you know what? Sure, we might not buy the 80 dollar card, but we would gladly spend more than that amount to build more decks - something we wouldn't have done had we not come back to the game in the first place.
Ironic that this video comes out right before Rarity Collection 2 got announced. While reprints of meta staples are always welcome, we still shouldn't NEED these big reprint sets for good cards to be affordable years after they're printed, your point still stands.
Man is always refreshing too see someone arguing so well and really thinking in the whole picture including players ,collectors , sellers and even the company you can see the passion of the game in you.
The card prices are what is keeping me from picking up paper YGO. Currently I only play MD. I used to play paper MTG and I quit because of the price point. I thought about start Flesh and Blood but again, the prices are too high for me as well.
I enjoy competitiveness, i enjoy tournament play. But I can't justify paying 50€+ for a single piece of cardboard to myself. Specially in a game like YGO where power creep such a huge part of the business model.
I believe it is perfectly OK for people to get fakes. So long as they look the same with the real card, then there's no shame saving $800+. It would be nice having the real stuff, but there just isn't a cheaper alternative.
A lot of my yugioh boys say we gotta deal with it which really sucks. I love yugioh and it really sucks seeing it go this way, especially when you look at ocg and their printing practices.
Cards wouldn't be so expensive if we as a collective community didn't buy sealed product that is upcharged 2, 3, even 4 times what OCG costs. Until we tell Konami we're not paying BS prices, sealed product will be higher with bad ratios, which makes cards extremely expensive. It doesn't help they take rares and supers from OCG sets and makes them secret for us. That's complete BS. Wanted is a f*cking RARE in OCG-land. OG droplet was a super. SP Little Knight is a super. Why is it okay for them to be secrets for us? And why are we okay with it? Because we'll complain but we won't take action, that's why.
If we follow the OCG box layout and format, our product would be cheaper, we'd have comparatively less sealed product to have to go through to get what we need. But players would be even more inclined to buy the sealed than buy singles, which would ultimately put more money in Konami's pocket. So many YugiTubers, especially the ones Konami-sponsored, REFUSE to have these discussions via video.
Oh, to top it off: OCG product is also vastly higher quality and it's still cheaper. Hold up our rarity collection cards next to OCG's, and our product looks like utter garbage. The "ultimates" have print lines all over, there's no grainy texture that OCG ultimates are known for, they have no patterns or etching, the "PCRs" use cheap varnish on the card resulting in the dots coming off on sleeves, they also have no etching or patterning (it's EXTREMELY subdued), the edges don't gleam like the OCG ones do; the OCG ones straight up SHINE and display amazing patterns. Oh, and they literally lied about what our platinum secret rare was.
The thing that annoys me the most about this situation is how many people hold the opinion that it's totally fine because THEY just "play for fun," or "its not a big deal because you don't need to buy the engine," or "well I CAN afford it, so it's not an issue." I'm sorry, but to roll over and be fine with the blatant shitty business tactic is adjacent to boot licking. If we, as a community, come together and voice that this shit isn't OK, we have a higher chance of something changing, and it's worth a shot. But for some reason, there's people that think it's necessary to essentially defend it. I'll never understand the mentality of defending multi-million dollar companies for the sake of looking smart or being different - or "Konami notice me please :)" in the hopes of being on the correct side of some extremely minor, non-existent YGO history.
"Just don't buy the cards?" - This doesn't make you look smart, it makes you look like a boot licking idiot. What do you gain by spewing the philosophy that this is completely fine, and telling everyone that they should be fine with it, is the OK thing to do? I seriously need to know why some players are fine with this.
I agree with Joshua - the more people that can play this game, the better. And competitiveness is a huge part of YGO. To ostracize people away from it because we want to be complacent with absolutely insane prices/release is something I'll never be able to understand.
SP super is like $10 and wanted is like $2 in OCG btw, 2 SP costed u $20 and 3 wanted at $6 and in TCG they are like $200 and $300 lol.
Imagine spending $500 for intially $26 cards.
Soulburning Volcano was basically an OCG set ported over to the TCG except for no extra rarities for super and ultra rares. Shame it was so niche (I still love it for what it did).
As it is, TCG packs are terrible for players, a TCG set will contain like 50% unique cards printed as common, 25% printed as super rare, 15% as ultra and 10% secret. The issue with this model is that packs are 8 commons and 1 super rare or better meaning your box will have an overwhelming amount of extra copies of commons with a underrepresented selection of other rarities. OCG sets are about 50% common, 25% rare, 15% super, and 10% ultra with secret being higher rarity variants of super and ultra rare cards. Packs are 3-4 commons with 1-2 rare or better (no duplicate higher rarity prints so a pack won't have two rares but a rare and super) this leads ro a better distribution of access to rarities. 75% of the set is almost guaranteed in each pack and boxes will have like 90% of the set within at any given rarity.
OCG has been with this rarity for 20 years to regular success, TCG Konami has been fudging things since 2020 when they dropped the rare print from core sets.
I only play Edison format and stopped playing current format literally for the money, it doesn’t feel good always be behind in a competition because you have less money (yeah yeah once in 4 years there is a format with a budget option that makes you go x-2 instead of x-4 with a €50 deck), I love the fast pace current YuGiOh, but don’t being able to play it because of card prices it’s kinda sad
I'm a returning player (I used to play 12 years ago in small tournaments, around the time of dragon rulers). ATM I'm learning the game again with YGO Omega and duellingbook. I want to join some locals, but the price barrier to afford a decent deck is prohibitive. I'm forced to go for rogue decks or suboptimal strategies. I'm fine with spending 50 euros to build a budget deck and play around with it. I'm fine with spending more for upgrades to the deck (like adding prosperities) once it becomes a hobby. But spending 300 euros for a diabellstar engine is a joke to me. A lot of casual players like me are completely put off by prices. I mean, I like playing and I'm willing to spend but within the budget of some that doesnt play ygo as a job. Back then the reason i left ygo was exactly because i couldn't afford the game anymore (also I thought that balancing was very poorly done). I was able to play only one format with the lightsworn structure x3, but as soon as new archetypes came out it was impossbile to play. Since building a new deck (HAT became the tier 0 at the time) was too expensive, i just dropped the game entirely. I have a feeling it's gonna be the same this time around, but at least I'm having some fun online.
I agree with everything you said, and used to be an ocg player as well, but what people don't realise is that if Konami changes the rarity setup in most sets, they can't sell other sets throughout the years, as there will be minimum chase reprints. If sp little knight is a $10-15 card on average, they aren't going to reprint it in future and have people lose their mind at trying to get another copy, because it's already affordable. So this would change their whole business model, and mean they make less money in side/reprint sets. I think theyd make more money, but maybe konami just doesn't want to do this
I just looked up the whole actual Playable Fire Deck actually cost for half a year of my country annual salary minus the shipping. NO I'M NOT KIDDING, YOU HAVE TO SPEND ZERO MONEY FOR HALF A YEAR JUST TO BUY THE WHOLE DECK
Hearing the "all hobbies are expensive" Argument just makes me so mad, like do people just copy paste it to add nothing in the argument or do they think and then say it? You know I can pay the same money for a musical instrument as the full wanted engine and guess what one of them wont be banned or powercrept next year 🤔
Also as Josh said the DAD prices too, i don't know anyone who says that and is happy to pay the full prices of the new expensive cards rather than pay like 15-20% of their current value
Impressive, Josh is 100% correct on his take
Itd crazy this video dropped the day they announced rarity collection 2
Honestly feel bad for those trying to keep up competitively. I just have a casual pet deck and only update it with reprints or cheap new cards that actually help.
People got spoiled with a diverse format, which is naturally more affordable, but now a dominating strategy is on the rise again, and thus, demand concentrates on the same cards, resulting in driving up its prices.
That too. Thats why diversiry is the best
Joshua : *posts a video explaining how good rarity collection was*
Konami 1 hour later : *announce rarity collection 2*
This guy is officially an undercover Konami agent 🕵♂️
Yeah but sadly not the cards we need...it boost the average competitive player and new player if they atleast included a engine that could compete like the horus engine (not saying both but least 1) it would balance out the field at tad somewhat
Accesscode reprint is really really badly needed, that card is *still* 45 bucks
Then he puts the idea out to find the positive in it 😂😂😂🕵
Here's all what Konami needs to do to print money: print good and/or interesting cards. Rarity Collection made Konami a lot of money because it pointed good cards and were generous with rarity slots. Print good and/or interesting cards only at rarities you need to open multiple boxes for doesn't make money except from the people who begrudgingly buy the product to chase high-tier cards
Great to watch this, and not an hour later see Rarity Collection 2 announced! Hopefully a sign of recognition from Konami on exactly what you verbalized here.
Fun fact. The ocg set number for last years rarity collection is rc04. Why? Because its in fact not the one! Just the first in the tcg. Rarity collection was already an amazing set and concept konami had at their disposal, but for reasons 🤨 not for the tcg
And hours later after this upload, Rarity Collection 2 was announced!
Except it doesn't arrive til May. So I guess we kick rocks for 3 and a half months xd
@@NononFPS I can’t complain. At least we’re getting it as early as we are instead of like, 5 years later like mst thought would happen
Its good poduct and step into eight direction, but doesnt solve core issue of YGO box rsrity distribution, for core and side set.
Not to mention TCG box price almost double of OCG but with more junks and rarity bumps. Cracking open box in OCG much2 worrh more.
In TCG only really worth honestly just RC,
I haven't owned a competitive deck for Yugioh's standard format in over 7 years. But I've still been playing with and building retro format decks and playing the standard format online all this time because retro yugioh costs almost nothing (most of the time) and online costs nothing.
I literally have 37 full competitive decks (main, side and extra) made for various retro formats and over 70 deck cores just sitting around incase I wanna play them as well as several sets of staples for these formats that aren't in use in case I need them. This has cost me thousands of dollars over many many years, but if I had been playing standard format all this time instead I would have probably spent more on just keeping up with the meta while only have 1 deck built at a time, maybe 2.
My problem is that I don't flip cards for a profit because I don't have a locals near me. I just build shit IRL for a homebrew format i'm developing.
I probably should've bought WANTED copies when they were 50 something, but I also need to buy food. So i'm fine proxying cards for at home play until it gets reprinted. At least I bought 4 copies of Diabellstar when it was cheap (i run a 2 Dia 2 Wanted ratio in one of my decks, and i have 2 in my Fire King deck to grab the Snake Eyes spell for my Ponix line).
Although at this point, i'm probably just gonna invest in building decks for Bologna format. I could see it being the next Edison or TOSS, that format was really fun.
I used to play casually as a kid and quit after high school. When I started playing again after 7 years, I couldn’t believe how fast the speed of the game ramped up and how expensive it was to have a half decent deck in an ever changing meta game. Yugioh is really the only hobby/luxury I put money into and this last set is finally where I drew the line. I like the snake eyes cards and want to build a deck, but I don’t want to spend a couple hundred dollars just to have a few cards that may or may not be meta relevant, I finally did splurge on a little knight but I had to save for a month and I didn’t really feel good about getting it. I think the different rarities/art works to help diversify prices is a great idea especially for some players that really want to compete but simply can’t afford to keep up with the game. Sorry for the essay, thank you for the video.
I don't think the rarity collection model is a long term solution. Part of the reason it's so popular is because the scarcity on the market. Using alt arts as the chase on only only shifts the burden of profit on to those alt arts which in turn makes them more expensive which in turn makes them a niche market which means you're relying on what 10% of player base to carry the other 90% which doesn't seem sustainable.
The other issues with that model is the bureaucracy in importing IP. The material itself is probably inexpensive but the regulations in moving the product will inflate the price. The transportation of the items will inflate the price. If Konami had a stateside factory to print its cards, the product would also be less expensive.
The biggest issue in my opinion is card quality. Bonfire is so expensive because it is in large part the only meta viable card in the set. If the pack had a higher concentration of platable cards, vendors could recoup some of their losses on lower rarity cards because their customers would have am actual incetive to buy them.
I think Konami needs to have a playerbase voting/survey for things to get reprinted. Then, when they do have reprints, they just have to look at their list and use that. Or what pokemon does where when someone wins, they reprint the deck to be affordable. It'll solidfy the meta, give them better reasons for banlists, and can help new people get in.
konami doesnt care about any of those things and they dont have any reaon to change the way they do things, unfortunatelly.. also they dont communicate.
They just announced rarity collection 2, so yeah I think konami tests how good those work and will probably adapt their system in to the core/side sets in the future.
If there are no shortprinted cards and everything is available from start simultaneously at low and high rarities like I've heard it is in OCG, that should encourage more people to buy product.
I'd play IRL if I was in an OCG region.
Honestly ngl… got to thank that person in chat who kept on disagreeing with Josh. Made Josh’s arguments look even better 😅💀
FACTS
KONAMI IS SO TOXIC people just stopped buying its cards and migrating to card games that actually feel them feel good instead a loser. Also stores were closing for the game. Bad, predatory products when FAB, for instance, performs so well? Konami might be shotgunning its own foot like this.
Unfortunately mantaining the different rarity system also has its flaws, but it would be such a good move in the right direction. You just have to see the ocg. Magic the gathering is also an example of having different rarities but there are expensive cards cause of low supply. Sheoldred, the apocalypse is a 100€ card that you need 3 of in almost every black deck for example.
Playing yugioh in OCG because their prices are low is a dream. The actual prices in TCG made me to take the decision to stop playing and only consume content of especifics things around. Is sad but bruh, konami in the side TCG is trashhhhhh
Konami please listen to Joshua just like how you listened to him for the circular ban. 😂
Josh says make Rarity Collection again. 3 hours later: announced RC 2 xD
The whole thing reminds me of that conversation that came up some time ago where there were some reveals regarding questions from the investors in the Yugioh card game, and among them was a question regarding concerns that Yugioh has a decent existing playerbase but does not excel at attracting new players, and how the company was going to address that.
The current situation with card prices is definetly NOT a good way to attract new players lol.
one of the major points that gets left out of this discussion is what does a player have to gain for their struggle to play the best cards and decks. Yugioh prizing is so piss poor players are blowing the bag for bragging rights basically. Look I play at a competitive locals with worlds qualifiers so I only see players winning our locals that are playing these decks at full clip. They buy the best cards no matter the cost, so if i want to play at all thats what I’m up against and unless I want to break the bank to compete (at my locals) I just hard lose. Not fun, and can’t even buy product to get the better cards either. And for what the 1% chance of winning a prize card.
on the question of how well the OCG does: a company called Media Create releases sales data for the TCG market. For the past 5+ years, Yugioh has consistently been THE #1. practically every month. Within the past year, Pokemon has taken #1 after a huge explosion of growth, but Yugioh is still seeing consistent positive growth.
Should be noted that this data does not distinguish between OCG and Rush Duel, but yeah, Yugioh does extraordinarily well in Japan with this model.
Is there anywhere that posts their numbers online in English? I used to keep up with their game sales numbers religiously.
the situation of yugioh has always been quite terrible, some times staples were 30 bucks a copy, other times 90 or 90. I remember during TOSS I could play decently with a cheap salaman deck. then cynet mining came out at like, 30 $ a copy. I was a student, I couldn't spend that much for 3 cards. The only possible way is to stop buying products or just trying to have something like a massive backlash on comoney, something like #makeitcommon or similar, like japan. I hated how in cardfight vanguard in my country, for some reason i had to spend 100/150 euro for ANY deck, even if it was a tier 4 deck just because of the rarities of certain cards. We need some backlash otherwise they will never give a fuck.
When people are like oh remember teleDad, my only thought is, bro, we haven’t even got the prices/rarities for populus and princess, if they are both secrets you sure as hell bet we have another $100 card so it’ll be worse than teleDad. Decks will be like $1500-$2000 minimum.
Yugi's the only game still doing oldschool normal rarities lol
2 people in my locals quit the game because they said it’s too expensive now. Personally I only play rouge decks so I’m not that serious, but some people need to play the meta and they struggle :(
Nobody at the local level "needs" to play meta and that's what people aren't grasping. Most people aren't playing at the tiers where spending $600+ on cards is even remotely necessary.
@@Cybertech134 That depends on how much you want to win/play the game at Locals. Locals being the lowest level sets a baseline of entry, if you even want to get a Match off somebody. A diverse format helps with players feeling like they can play what they want and win, but if that diversity also comes with a ovbiously higher power floor and ceiling, your Rogue deck almost auto-loses unless you are playing Silver_Bullet.dek. Nobody goes to locals to get their entry OTS packs, play 3 blowout sets and expressly go 0-3. Keeping up with Konami's banlist, print run and reprint policies has hit another breaking point, more so because the most playable engines are now running you more than half a grand, and that's before the Main Deck that you want to play and new Extra Deck staples like Chaos Angel, S:P, and others. No other game besides maybe Commander has manditory Quartely Upkeep to not fall behind.
@@Cybertech134 This might be true where you're from, but in my home city's locals in Brazil you literally couldn't top if you didn't play meta. Largest city in the country + few OTSs all in the same neighborhood = you play against regional and YCS winners every week. Different scenes have different experiences, believe it or not.
Not only that, but I *don't care* whether or not I *need* to play meta. If even one game was lost by an otherwise good player because they were using the affordable alternative instead of the meta pick, then the game has a fundamental problem, period. I've won in the past due to my opponent not being able to afford Baronne and having to end on Qixing. It didn't feel good for either of us.
@@Cybertech134 No one "needs" to react poorly to a company spitting in their eye! They have another eye without spit in it.
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock. Your opponent didn't lose because they couldn't afford Baronne; they should've adapted their strategy to play without it since they didn't have it. What a stupid way to think.
Is Konami the new Niantic?! The Pokemon Go Community is in the same situation
I wholeheartedly agree on the issues with the rarity system and printing cards in multiple rarities like other card games do. And I have been playing other card games instead of Yugioh for years now mainly because they were substantially cheaper.
As someone who enjoys playing and optimizing top tier decks, I've been wanting to get back into Yugioh for quite some time now and just playing online doesn't keep me engaged for long. While there were many decks that I genuinely liked during this time, none of them came anywhere close to what I would be willing to pay for it.
Whether it's S:P, thrust, prosp, talents, some engine like adventure, droplet, imperm, ash... the list goes on and on and on and it's always the fking same. There is always something that most competitively viable decks need thats just way overpriced. And playing a suboptimal version of something or an entirely worse deck because you arent crazy enough to drop hundreds of bucks on cardboard, that could randomly lose it's value because of a banlist and likely won't keep it long term because of powercreep, just sucks.
Even if I can afford it - and many others simply can't - it's just not worth it to me. And thats coming from a person that's been very interested in this game their entire life. What do you think would be the perspective of someone looking into the game for the first time? And its not like modern Yugioh would be easy to get into even if it was free...
Just for context: Out of the two locals I go to they run Digimon, One Piece, Shadowverse, Vanguard, some osbcure thing I have no idea what it is, then the obvious Magic and Pokemon.
As for YGO, the best you see is 2 boxes of some very old set at the deepest corner of the shelf full of dust and whenever the locals owner post their weekly tournament schedules it is rare to see YGO get any dates.
I was thinking about that. This is a problem going back a few years, with it obviously getting worse. The pandemic, along with cost/benefit drove a lot of now former OTS stores to Drop Yu-Gi-Oh. 4 years ago, I could have found 2 or 3 places within 15 minutes of me doing tournaments. Today, the closest is about 30 minutes. That's living in the large(ish) city of Cincinnati.
This goes back to something I've commented elsewhere. OTS stores do not make much money off of boxes (as MSRP and wholesale prices are not far apart) and definitely not tournaments. They rely on large quantities of product to make money. The rise of online singles buying made things more difficult. Many stores simply do not see profit in Yu-Gi-Oh anymore.
@@DG_Raizen And people would much rather play tcgs where a workable tournament viable deck isn't more expensive than your salary.
@@elin111 Agreed. I don't think these rarity collections are going to fix that problem if the meta warping cards are still being short printed.
I think this is a huge issue, but its rather easy to fix.
If Konami just prints the cards at the same rarity as in the OCG, with the cards appearing in multiple raritys in each set, i think this is solved. We even got a example that proves that in the release of the rarity collection.
The pull rate of the cards in the current sets and rarity selection is so abysmal i stopped buying sealed products a long time ago. I just buy the singles. Back in the day i used to buy a display or two, with a new set, and then buy the missing singles later.
I dont think what konami pulled with centurion is fine. That is supposed to be a deck build set. At best you get 1 card for centurion per booster, and even if you want to play valmonica you arent better of. Most of the cards in the pack are just a waste of paper, because most of the new cards are locked to the single holo slot.
I dont really play in tournaments, but only with friends here and there, but if they keep doing this i might stop buying cards at all and just play in Omega for free. On the other hand, if Konami changes things for the better, i will consider buying sealed again.
The fact that that video dropped right before they announced RA02 is iconic
I genuinely find it so funny that people keep forgetting that *drum roll* ITS JUST CARDBOARD!!! How are people even justifying paying 100$+ for a piece of fucking cardboard. Rarran was right, the yugioh community just justify everything.
Rarran was just angry he couldn't instantly master Yu-Gi-Oh and his skills from an easy card game didn't transfer to Yu-Gi-Oh too. Let's be honest here. And before you make up shit, I only play master duel and also DON'T own cards because I don't need them to play the deck I want.
"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
Why is this concept so lost on you?
I think there should be a distinct discussion between making the game consumer friendly and making the highest echelons of competition be more consumer friendly. I don't know if someone "on the outside," so to speak, would immediately try to play at a high level. There are decks that have a nice power level that have a cheap price (floo comes to mind), and they aren't the best, but they allow the person to compete.
I can't contribute much to the discussion since I play cards I like thematically and I'm working on a college budget, but there should be some sort of difference between those two things to me.
This is why I'm sticking to YGOmega or dueling nexus. Like 1 copy of Chaos Angel more than doubled the total cost of my The Agents deck, and it barely makes the deck rogue.
You should stick with master duel then, although omega is great
Yugioh is expensive if you want to keep playing meta decks. Konami wants to milk as much money from you. They don’t respect you as a consumer.
Check the prices for the new set there are multiple new decks with multiple expensive cards that you need multiple of it's not just expensive for meta decks. And it's been that way for a long time now the only truly cheap decks are ones you probably won't win with and that's not counting staples.
@@Junior2000625u have meta relevant decks that are cheap but u will need staples. Floo,kashtira,hero,drytron… floo is the cheapest here for sure but u see my point.
@@Junior2000625idk runick variants are pretty affordable and all of them are pretty competent
The fact that people are expected to buy 3 structure decks instead of 1 is already enough evidence. This shit is another level. I will refuse to buy any product until they slash prices by at least 50%.
It is not only the meta decks. I could unverstanden it, when we have a tier 0 Format and the best deck is expensive. But even most tier 2 or 3 decks are way to expensive. It does not make sense.
Look at every topping decks. Maybe there are 1 or 2 decks, which are about 100 €s ...but most of them are over 300€s. This is not healthy for the game.
Just a couple hours after Rarity Collection 2 is announced lol
As a very inactive player, every time a new set release, I think about whether or Not I should buy a card before it is too late because of price jumps.
Which really sucks.
Thrust is one example. As an inactive player, 70€ per copy is just not worth it for the times I play with the card.
Here we are with MZMI and Thrust being a 40€ Reprint. And it sucks that I think “yeah, it is a staple, it will be worth it”.
That’s what they want us to think and it is one reason why they keep practicing it like this.
In the end, I think it more and more keeps casual players away from the game.
I know that there is no reason to go to locals not owning a S:P or the Wanted Engine. Maybe it is just my locals, but it’s kinda frustrating.
Having every card in many rarities would certainly have the benefit that you don’t have to think too hard about the market and just enjoy the game.
I got the best quote to sum up TCG; TCG Konami should be embarrassed of what they do to the card quality, short prints, and making starlight/collectors rare, quarter century rares, but as long as we keep buying it. Money hungry mothertrucker in TCG Konami is going to continue to produce this crap and load their pockets, while we the player base continue to buy this crap and then we sit back and wonder why we're getting scammed with short prints, removal of low rarity staples in future structure decks, bumping soon to be meta-archetypes with higher rarities, super difficult in pulling starlight rares, etc. But at the end of the day we're all responsible for what we buy, because we can get mad all we want at TCG Konami for making this crap. But they're gonna continue to make this crap and make a lot of money as long as we the player base continue buying it so if we stop buying their products and stop playing TCG and play OCG or yugioh games which doesn't cost any money or edison formats, they will stop making money and hopefully we will be a little bit happier.
Did anyone notice the slogan on cardmarket for Maze of Millennia? " This Bonfire burns throuh all - even your wallet." - so hilarious that even cardmarket makes fun of it.
I am considering dropping the game after having come back 8 months ago from a 11 year break... these prices are pushing me away.
It seems like there's no end to what's been happening lately with card prices. Konami makes too much to adapt an ocg like system.
what is different on the ocg system that makes their prices not escalate like ours? Its just offer and demand at they end of the day and in that regard their market should be just like ours
ocg is MUCH cheaper @@florianvo7616
@@florianvo7616they reprint their "chase" cards in lower rarities in the same sets to have both a high and low rarity version. Cards are still expensive but we're talking 10 dollar cards.
@@florianvo7616 the ocg prints cards at multiple rarities. So as an example you could get a bonfire at either super rare or ultra rare. Which makes chase cards easier to obtain in the ocg.
@@florianvo7616 The Ocg gets cards in multiple rarities like we got in the rarity collection. So budget players can just buy the cheap version of the cards
Ya I think you hit the nail on the head. I only play yugioh formats in paper when there's a deck I absolutely love AND it's seen enough reprints where picking up the core + new staples would cost me less than 150-200 dollars. I only play like 0-1 formats a year, and buy 0 product.
When I played digimon for a few months, I bought multiple boxes of every set, just because opening them felt worth it: more cards can be used in more creative ways and the rarities weren't ridiculous. If every set was rarity collection, I would buy so much more product and be able to support my LGSes more consistently.
I play for 2-3 years now. I never bought a display but rarity collection i opened two. Its so much better because the cards are almost all useful in the longrun and hold value for that reason.
In so glad you made this video. I love Yugioh but the price point is the reason I don't play physical TCG. I would easily buy product if the TCG adopted the OCG rarity method.
I loved coming into this discussion video after they announced Rarity Collection 2.
I think past formats are a good example of this. You can play Edison Lightsworn or Blackwings for like $100 and a lot of that is old Extra Deck cards that haven't been reprinted in 10+ years. Or, if you want to bling it out, you can spend 5 figures on these decks.
My personal opinion on the problem is how bad the ratios are on our boxes. Pulling only 4 bonfires per case is a problem. Pulling 2.4 Wanted per case is a problem. Obviously it sucks that the presellers are charging so much for these cards, but from their perspective, I understand that they need to justify opening those boxes rather than just selling them for $70 on TCG Player.
Changing to an OCG system will help out our pull rates a ton, which will help a lot. And the chase cards will still carry the set.
I also think that we just get to many sets. More than 1 new release a month is to much, and even that is kinda pushing it. By pushing so many sets, by having to create so many new cards, they are diluting our card pool with bad cards. If they released fewer new cards, they can concentrate the good cards into the same sets, and you get more products like POTE, DABL, and AGOV where they sell on the backbone of the cards being awesome.
People forget that OCG prices are also lower because they have less disposable income. Japan, the wealthiest nation in OCG territory, has an average income about half that of the US. Compare to any of the smaller countries in the OCG, and it becomes even more disparate. A $30 card is the same to them as a $60 card is to us. That's why we are wowed when looking at their prices. I think Konami is doing an ok job keeping the prices relatively appropriate for each market. There's always room for improvement, of course.
I wish we had a mass printed basic rarity set. Like just "common rarity bundle" with all the modern cards for a good price, not a single holo in the set. We need that budget rarity that eliminates the need to do reprints that destroy the collectable value of old, high rarity pulls.
And sadly is not getting better any soon because Promethean Princess and Populous will be coming out and for sure they would be like $80 dollars each.
I can see both as secret already lol. At least one of em will be ultra and 1 secret.
And then we will see more video complaining about this all over again lol
Lol@@invertbrid
Shifting the chase to RARITY over the CARD itself will still work. It works in Rarity collection and in other games.
If we had s:p in rare, super, ultra, and secret, people will want to get the secret rare, but Timmy can play the rare he pulled out of his entry packs. We all hapi.
I've been playing Master Duel basically since it came out and can say that it is definitely the thing that actually got me into playing YuGiOh again. And it's made me interested in trying the TCG because as a Master Duel player, I see all these new cards being announced and know that we won't get to try those in MD for what? a whole year? But for me, the barrier to entry isn't how complicated the game is, I've learned most of what I need to know about modern YGO from MD. No, the issue I have with the TCG is 2 fold; I'm extremely timid and find it hard to like...essentially muster up the courage to go attempt to play a card game at a card shop with strangers, and when you pair that with the prices I see on TCGplayer for most anything I'd want to play...I definitely ain't trying it any time soon. And with how shitty so many of the sets are, only having like 1 good reprint chase card, I'm not even interested in buying packs just to have fun opening them.
From what I can tell, anything Fire atm is basically a no-go for me, the only deck I'd maybe even attempt building in paper is Branded Despia, because I already do own a good portion of it since it had that structure deck that made a lot of key cards pretty cheap, I know how to play it, and Cartesia and Lubellion were both reprinted in the last tin. Wouldn't really have to get S:P. Seems fine, except I don't have Quem, who is $60 from what I can tell quickly checking on TCGplayer atm because she was printed as a Secret in CYAC. And then, that's also not factoring in any staples I'd want to throw in with it. Thrust in particular is still expensive, another $50-60 a pop. That's like $200+ for 4 cards. To me, that sounds ridiculous. But most other staples that actually were in the Rarity Collection became a lot more affordable, like Imperm, Evenly Matched, Baronne, Lightning Storm, Nibiru, Ash Blossom, etc. I'd be far more willing to try being brave and go to a locals if it was easier to afford the cards in paper I already know I'd need to play against modern decks. And even I bought a box of Rarity Collection to open because the rarities look nice, and I knew that no matter what I pulled, there would be good staples among the commons I could maybe use one day. That shit sells, and I hope they see that and make more products like it.
Pokemon TCG does exactly that. They have multiple printings of the same card in different rarities. That's how they can have multiple meta decks that cost less than $100 for whole decks. Staples included. If you want to bling out decks, there's different rarities for that.
2:47 ok arrowofkira how old are you? Because 2008 was literally a worldwide near-economic depression. It was not better than it is now.
Lol he is probably a child. Damn I feel old
If rarity collection is so good why there isnt rarity collection 2?
Making every card in a set have a common print and adding rare additions of some of those same cards would be amazing. I wouldn't mind having both the option to build a budget meta deck with mostly common copies while also having the option to spend $$$$ to bling the entire thing out.
8:25 exactly. For everyone who made bank buying Wanteds at $45, there's someone who took a huge loss buying Revolution Synchrons at $45.
Thank you for using your platform this way and for making the point about Age of Overlord vs. Rarity Collection. Both sets made vendors happy, but one of those (Rarity) made *everybody* happy. Multiple rarities in mainline sets is the way forward. Great word of mouth + players buying tons of sealed product = win for Konami. More people playing at the highest level in the current format because it's affordable = more excitement over the game = win for Konami. It feels like a no-brainer.
It's when it goes from expensive to entirely unaffordable is when this gets really bad.
Let's imagine this:
S.P. Little Knight is a staple that we all know every deck needs to play. So everyone will be chasing for it.
Let's say it's a card so good that the lowest rarity will be Ultra Rare. From there there'll be a Secret, an Ultimate, a Quarter Century and a Starlight rare.
Let's say as well that the Quarter Century and the Starlight will have an alternative art that only comes in those rarities. Everyone will be chasing for the rarest cards that are the alternative art in the highest rarity.
However there will be many normal art in lower rarity that are not collectables but playables. That means the rarest will be expensive, but the ultras would be affordable for the casual player.
I'd rather pay $10 or $15 for an ultra staple, than can't pay $100 for a secret rare that I know will be reprinted in 2 years. I'd rather wait the 2 years for the reprint.
Ban all the good cards from last set, Print overpowered staples in new set. Short print and rarity boost those cards to all hell and ignore people saying the game is too expensive