Personally I want a channel that just does a 2+ hour deep dive on each deck. What hands it likes. Matchups guidance. Side deck advice. Etc but god now’s who would be able or willing to do it
IF there is an audience, I would attempt to ask one of the pro player streamers. Pak, Josh, or PRRJ. But i really doubt it would be worth the investment without patreon support
One of the problems with making that type of content is that people often over express their interest in it and don't follow through watching. Its similar to people who say they "want to go to the gym" or "want to get in shape" but then don't show up.
I feel like that kind of content has been a huge gap in the yugioh content market since around the start of the pandemic. Or at the least something like the What a Decks Hardleg did, giving a bigger sample of games to look at.
I remember asking why Big Welcome Labrynth was better than the original since it’s one of those cards that’s effect doesn’t make much sense without the full context of the archetype. I specifically remember the guy responded with “It’s better because it can let you [literally just the first effect of Big Welcome Labrynth verbatim].” And that was it. That was all he said.
Its difficult to explain. Basically both Big Welcome and Welcome offer different functions but Big Welcome is more explosive being able to trigger the maids' effects and/or allow for a retreat of getting something safe in your hand. Bouncing a Maid or piece of Furniture can have its applications. Hell, i've bounced by Ash'd Soul Resonator to get 'em out of harm's way. That's evne before the GY effect to QUICKIE Bounce anyithing ou want as a good means to out a majour threat of even the pivital choke point in a combo. Labyrnth is great in the grind game but struggles getting there, like a lot of backrow decks. The value of regular Welcome is better than Big Welcome, at the start of the game but as it goes on, the reverse is true, as you start to value Big Welcome's GY effect more and more. This is upset by labyrnth being consistent enough to always set regular Welcome with either a Maid or Furniture piece on turn 1. I will admit it is a little counter intitutative, though.
As much I appreciate being treated as the Chad Magic player who intuitively understands the nuances of limited play, I can say with good authority that Magic players suck at card evaluation as well. I would argue the reason Magic players are better at talking about it is that it is much easier to do so, as the game has built in guardrails to help facilitate discussions that Yugioh doesn’t. Magic cards have mana costs, power and toughness values, and well defined colors to meaningfully differentiate one card from another. In stark contrast, Yugioh has systematically stripped away the ways players were taught to evaulate cards, as monster cards’ levels and attack and defense points haven’t mattered since the XYZ era. Trying to evaluate Circular in a vacuum is a fool’s errand, because reading the card does not explain the potential end boards you can create with your other cards and extra deck. That requires you to actually play the archetype, and no one has time for that. Thus, it is much easier to rely on whatever youtuber you watch has cooked up, because rote memorization is less time consuming than experimentation and iteration. In Magic, generally what you see on the card is what you get, making it much easier to discuss the roles and relative powers levels of specific cards in a vacuum. Even then, Magic players routinely misidentify which cards are actually strong, from Oko to Astrolabe to Ledger Shredder. It’s not that Magic players are better at card evaluation, it’s just easier to talk about
You bring up a very good point here, but I do think it's a bit of both. People are always going to miss things, that's the nature of games like this, but I think it's also fair to say that Magic players have been trained to think more about card evaluation. Limited in particular forces you to deckbuild and not just netdeck, so you have to make very conscious decisions about what's in your deck and why. In Yugioh, there's often little room to deviate from a standard build, and like MBT says some decks can go years without significantly updating their lists. In particular, combos are often so complex that if you try to experiment and change parts of the deck you're going to ruin the entire thing, so the risk is huge if you want to try something new. In Magic there's often a lot of "flex space" in your deck, in that you don't need specific cards, just cards that fit a role (aside from certain "core" cards of a deck, like colossus hammer in hammer time, or arclight phoenix in izzet phoenix). With that and the game pace being slower, it's significantly less likely that swapping any given card out will cripple the deck. It might make it worse, but not to the same extent that swapping a card out can make a deck worse in Yugioh. Magic is just easier to experiment in, IMO. And, since experimentation is less risky (and if you play limited some experimentation is basically forced), you can get a lot more experience understanding cards. That all being said, you're right in that the way Yugioh design has evolved just makes single card evaluation really, really hard. You don't have to evaluate the card itself, you have to look at every card it can interact with. spellbook of judgement is a great example; it was super, super broken back in the day because of the insane advantage it generates. Nowadays the card technically functions exactly the same, but all the cards it interacts with, the spellbooks, aren't really playable, so judgement isn't seeing much, if any, play. If new spellbooks are printed and they're good, judgement suddenly becomes super busted again. Judgement's legality doesn't depend on how strong judgement is, it depends on how strong spellbooks as a whole are. Basically, almost every part of a Yugioh card is worthless in examining its power. Attack, defense, and level barely matter (and of those level matters most because of extra deck plays/pend/ritual/etc), and sometimes even the effect is meaningless. Runick stun vs runick combo is a good example; you could use the runick cards to summon monsters that stall out the game, or you could use runick cards as a bunch of instant fusions and go off, in which case the effects of the runick monsters you summon are mostly meaningless (probably? Not intimately familiar with runick but that's my understanding of it). Funnily enough, the name is often one of the most important parts of a card; something named "Superheavy Purrely Kashtira Tearlaments Blue Eyes Dark Magician Tarmogoyf" is already better than "Tarmogoyf".
True that. I still remember when Magic Origins came out...so many MTG players called Jace, Vrynn's Prodigy (aka literal, actual Baby Jace) unplayable garbage not worth the price of the physical cardboard it was printed on. Fast forward a few weeks later and it had turned into a multi-format staple that was being sold on the secondary market for 80€ a pop. Still the most egregious example of this I can think of off the top of my head lol
@@tinfoilslacks3750 Notably not barrinmw, who gave him a 2/10 in modern and stated “I hope he sees play.” And really, everyone else’s opinions don’t matter
Yeah but you also don't have MTG bitching about a card being expensive after they all bought it purely based on theory when the card isn't even available yet
Back when I played the game a lot I would just build whatever deck seemed interesting to me at the time. This lead to me playing a lot of garbage, but also really helped me be able to pick out when stuff was decent. I remember as soon as my friend showed me to new sword soul cards I said “these would work well with Tenyi.” He said that I was stupid and that Tenyi was bad. 5 months later he was telling me about his new “Tenyi Sword Soul” deck.
Real talk the mathmech primer video is one of my favorite vids on this channel. I want so badly to see more videos in that style that deep dive and analyze each piece and option for a strategy. Yu-Gi-Oh needs more of that
It's a shame Joshua poisoned the well on Mathmech. Now the only thing you ever see being discussed around the deck is how obscenely broken Circular is and how everyone should hate it and how terrible for card design it is and blah blah blah. No one actually tries to evaluate what the deck really does. They just parrot a meme, say RIP bozo, and move on to the next comments section.
Just wanted to say that I think you're spot on in your evaluation about how we talk about Yugioh. At the end of the day I want us to be able to have more quality conversations about the competitive game in our community, and right now those kinds of conversations are so scattered and isolated in pockets. And while there are many things Konami needs to do in order to make the game feel more accessible, I think the lack of quality competitive discussion also contributes to that issue. It feels to me like a lot of the times the community-wide conversations are either memes or gripes and I just want to talk about something else... ANYTHING else for a change. In any case it was a great video MBT, looking forward to the next one as always! :)
i literally have more fun and learn more from talking to my polycule abt ygo (they play once a month and are not very good) than trying to engage online has ever gotten me. Trying to get competitive is a frustrating experience right now.
Cimo published an interview with Johnny Li and I think every competitive yugioh player should watch it. It breaks down card roles beautifully and massively teaches you how to deck build off of those card roles.
There was one interview forever ago (it might be the one you are talking about) definitely improved my deck building but causes a rift with other people who look at my deck. Putting all of the "searchers" together and separating them from "garnets", "starters", "extenders", etc. A lot of people just put monsters in lowest level to highest level, and/or archetype cards together so they think my deck looks like a mess when I lay it out.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 I don’t think there’s a problem with sorting your deck either way but you should definitely build it with the philosophy of that 2 hour video. Doesn’t matter what other people think, as long as you know your cards roles and how consistent/powerful it makes the deck who cares how the cards are sorted
I'm surprised the "personality" part didn't cover how more yu-gi-oh players are just the type of people to find it difficult to get their thoughts on a deck/card/format across in a more calm and logical way. This isn't a "yu-gi-tubers of the last 5 years problem". This is a cultural problem. Yu-gi-oh has a reputation for its players to be loud, brash and generally a bit "inner-city-kid-esque". Compared to the average MTG player, who is usually older and tend to be from more middle-class backgrounds. Not saying one is better than the other. But, from my years of interactions with both playerbases, they are fundamentally two different groups of people, and I encountered a lot of yu-gi-oh conversations that boiled down to something like "Yo! Rescue Rabbit got banned? GOOD! F*ck that noise! I hated it!"
I think the issue is actually twofold: As you alluded to towards the end, there are players who are cognitive of these things and can articulate it, but instead use that knowledge for themselves only. You have even mentioned before how pro players in Yugioh used to just give out patently wrong information on purpose to throw other players off and sure up their own wins. Secondly, even when the format has been "solved" and the best decks are known, it has usually been in those times players running something different from the normal builds of those decks that has made the difference. That is where the meme of "spicy tech" originated from, and in a game with so much hidden information and assumption, having these variances in your deck and your opponent assuming the standard, gives you a significant competitive edge. Honestly, it is a lot more complex than what can be fit into a UA-cam comment, but overall I think those are the main reasons why there is not more of that content. There are thousands of cards in this game that are legal for play. No one is going to be an expert at them all, with every single playstyle and strategy. Heck, retro formats have shown us that many formats where not "solved" in the first place as there is just far too little information and time (and players actually working at it) to solve them. And, much like retro formats in Pokémon video games, they may never truly be solvable, as when a new strategy emerges that was not thought of at the time and the meta adapts around it, then new strategies form to counter those assumptions as well. To not specialize in a particular deck or playstyle is asking a lot from most players, given the nature of Yu-Gi-Oh! and how many cards are legal, let alone asking them to give up their advantage to help others, and so you end up with something you mentioned in another video: groups of people making up what they think the meta will be and playtesting based on those assumptions with each other, with those groups not having any crossover whatsoever.
From a competitive perspective there is absolutely no incentive to disclose information. Fenrir search scare kash in mannadium for example was the only way to ever play the deck and I had told Trif about it since before the cards even came out, but was not picked up on until after it topped.
@@EuroMIX2 Iirc there was a case of this back in 2013 or 2014 with Sylvans, where pros were saying that Mermail was the only real deck to play and then these same pros brought Sylvan combo decks to the next big event and trounced them. I believe I heard this in the Sylvan episode of History of Yugioh, and I'm not 100% certain how true it is.
@@maxmaus4402 MBT cited this in a stream one time when talking about Road to the King (basically the only resource actually writing out the type of content MBT is talking about).
Competitive YGO content has been honestly pretty baffling to me. If I see an MTG video about a deck, I will find a link to a deck building website and often times if this is a thorough deck builder, they will include a written primer to the deck and both the list as well as the primer will be updated as they go. YGO on the other hand has about a billion deck tech videos where people present their list in real life, which makes it a lot harder to parse to begin with unless you know the cards, and MAYBE add some context to their card picks. 9 times out of 10 there is no link to any deck building website, and even if there were, you would most likely not find a primer, let alone a brief description. In a way this is kinda charming how scuffed this all is, but since I'm used to a way more streamlined kind of competitive card game content, I'm surprised that people even get good at this game. There seems to be an incredibly small amount of knowledge sharing between players. Not that it doesn't exist, but it's incredibly cumbersome to parse or you have to go out of your way to even find it rather than it being the default. At least that's my experience, I'm totally ready to be told I'm just not looking in the right places.
Yeah its honestly why I don't feel encouraged to learn new decks as much. It's just huge paragraphs of text that doesn't teach me how to use the deck and just list the cards ability. MTG is pretty easy to look at a deck someone posted with 1 paragraph and I can instantly say "Oh sweet I can instantly understand why this deck works."
You could argue that modern formats like GOAT and Edison are comparable to some of the Magic formats. In that place, you know as well as I do that the list is set but the meta is dynamic. I understand your complaints with YGO (as I'm a bigger fan of Rush Duels nowadays), but still. There is a special place in my heart for unplayable messes that become broken in certain situations. I played Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Pokemon TCG (if you love casual coin flips lol) and I have to say that there is an insane amount of creativity in the YGO community compared to other tcgs
Ngl, I feel like very few people actually get good because of any resources and are entirely dependent on the local/discord community they happen to be in. Don't know how prevalent coaching is in mtg, but I feel like everyone in yugioh is trying to push people towards their streams and coaching sessions instead of sharing knowledge and improving the community. I follow Chinese ocg videos a tiny bit, and while both upload frequency and production quality are severely lacking, the pure passion is something else. You don't get 30min videos of a random guy talking about banlist implications with a pen and paper.
Part of the problem is that Yu-Gi-Oh players watching those videos complain about that stuff. You have to keep in mind that the Yu-Gi-Oh community on UA-cam comes from the abridged dub, memelords, and gimmick strategies. Rata explained it in one of his videos where he talks about how people will complain if he goes into detail about specific combos, interactions, and ratios, which is why he keeps it to a minimum with a joke-filled description of the card, a brief explanation as to why it's good/bad, then a conclusion of "Don't run this," or "Run 1-2 copies," or "You need to run 3 in this deck."
Deck primers dont have to be complicated. Sajam managed to do 2 minute intro primers on fighting game characters by simplifying it down to "Here's your basic gameplan, Here's your 2-3 options once you establish advantage, here's what your opponents are likely to try when you do your thing." Also, 2 minutes of playing Kashtira taught me more about the deck than two months of people talking about Kashtira.
The mentality of most players I find tends to be centered around knowing what specific individual cards do, rather than what the deck does in unison, which is, admittedly, probably due to the fact that at any given time there are over 10 thousand cards legal. This itself can often lead to a lack of legitimate and valuable commentary on any given deck, format, or the game as a whole really. In recent memory the two instances that standout to me are the discussions around the Tear mirrors, and the Kashtira zonelocking. Conversations would quickly devolve into posting that one edit of the Tear mirror as a legitimate attempt at a gotcha moment because most players that only have a one way relationship with the competitive side of the game might not know that it was, in fact, an edit. The same happened with the widespread belief that every Kashtira duel would end with a full zonelock every time because it happened a handful of times (not to say that Kashtira is or was healthy for the game, just that there was a lot of misinformation about the consistency of the lock). We try to dumb down an incredibly complicated game into one or two paragraphs and it always just ends in discussions that have no real substance to them.
Completely agree, how many times do you hear "Mannadium is the King Calamity deck" vs any actual discussion of what it does to get there. It also leads to weird things like IKEA Labyrinth being a big innovation to Labyrinth by... playing the other Labyrinth archetype cards.
Not for nothing, but I think a big issue with the evaluation problem is the cards themselves. A modern yugioh card, in isolation, is a wholly nonsensical pile of references, particularly when compared to (to use your example) a Magic the Gathering card. Even if you don't yet have a firm grasp on the ins and outs of what an actual game plays out like, a Fury or a Ravenous Chupacabra is something you can grok if you'd ever played any game before. 'I get this unit and it can kill opposing units. Great.' Even something as common as a Mathmech Circular comes with a lot of baggage about what is happening in the game that is not intuitive to a player taking their first steps from finding a list they like online into being able to evaluate cards on their own. Even an enfranchised player might still make a lot of incorrect assumptions about the precise way Circular does what it does, which portion of the text is a cost, what the "if" means, what have you. Take that problem and project it onto any number of currectly-legal or soon-to-be-printed cards with effects far more noodley, specific, or verbose and you can start to see that even though 90% of playable cards truly just search, dump, or put a guy on the board they're still a lot more convoluted to tease out a use-case for. Even if I don't know how much toughness is prevalent in the format, I can guess that Fury is gonna be pretty good against 1 toughness guys, sight unseen, and then I can start to work out what other things would be good with it. The barrier to that is much higher when each card comes with 3 to 4 other cards implicitly stapled to them via archetypal synergy or names before they even enter the card pool. A common refrain is that constant "more than 10000 legal cards" but last I checked the modern format for MTG has over 15k legal cards in it. Legacy has more still. Raw card quantity is not necessarily the barrier to understanding, especially when a huge portion of both examples is "2/2 with no text" or "Dark Impus of the Grandark," a 5 star Insect monster with 1200 attack from the Bush administration. On the other side of that is a much small pool of cards that are even in competitive contention that themselves have the potential to synergize some obscure card from when all of our skulls were still soft and bring it into the conversation. That is not wholly unreasonable. Overall though, when every card has had to compete with every other card for deck space over the last 2 decades, you get the difference between a Cyber Dragon and Circular, or the difference between a Flametongue Kavu and a Fury. Not to tip my hand too much, but blanket eternal legality is a root cause of the two divergent strains of powercreep. To continue with the magic comparison you drew, part of it rests on Konami's shoulders for how awful they are at communicating. I think Patrick Sullivan talking about ban announcements on his podcast is really cogent here, where he discusses the gap between the recent bans in modern and pauper on the grounds of how they were communicated. He argues that no matter what someone is going to be mad at you, because you banned someone's favorite card, you banned literally hundreds of dollars out of someone's collection, or because you got it wrong and failed to fix the problem. The goal, then, is messaging-- communicating that you not only have an understanding of the ecosystem you're disturbing, but that you've considered all of the alternatives, and that you are sensitive to the investment, both financial and emotional, of your playerbase. He felt that, while the Modern banlist team failed to be rhetorically convincing and came across as misguided, the video produced for a single ban in Pauper managed to convey understanding, passion, a careful hand, and a genuine desire to put the game in a better place while not disturbing the core traits of the format. Konami has never done that. On the occasions when they have given banlist explanations their choices and reasoning were so off-base and out of touch that rather than setting a tone for signaling moving forward, they just reinforced the player sentiment that they are inept at managing their own game. Besides that, we have, what, a guy on the Pojo forums arguing with people and saying "Hope is a girl's name"? MD ban announcements that we have to do close readings of to tease out what their desired game experience is? What other takeaway of how to talk about the game are players supposed to get other than "don't take this shit seriously, even they don't care"? They treat the game like a kusoge, so the community is like that of a kusoge.
Yeah I do think that MBT and other content creators calling decks that aren't meta viable or otherwise bad "completely unplayable" and other hyperbolic terms does contribute to this issue. A lot of the time when seeing reactions to new cards it can seem like a card is either "cracked broken you win the game" or "completely unplayable dogwater" with little to no in-between
I remember long time ago during the early Zexal era, I was watching Cimo's meta analysis that he used to do a lot. He'd just straight up call like every card except the very best deck and the few cards they use really really bad. It triggered me specifically, because Six Sams was still kinda viable at the time, and Cimo wouldn't even tier it saying it's just trash now, without saying why exactly. It was still decently strong as a rank 4 spam engine and summoned the Naturia synchros, which were basically FTKs back in the days. Well, it basically won a YCS right after, and I felt a bit vindicated. To be fair, I saw the winner's deck profile, and frankly, I thought it sucked. He didn't really touch on the more interesting aspect of Six Sams, instead talked about how good Asceticism was while talking about basic Asceticism chain that everybody already knew. I saw the finals, and he just drew the limited Gateway like 2 out of 3 duels and won off the infinite loop, which he didn't even talk about in his deck profile. The point was, I was tired of Cimo's commentary I think, for the very reason MBT described here. I unsubscribed and didn't resubscribe til I saw his masochism MD series, which I thought was fun enough. I just don't want to hear people say a card is bad and just end the sentence there, ever again.
And yes, he even lampshaded that he (and other creators) were a part of the issue. But the audience parroting their words and not forming their own opinion also didn't help.
Konami releases a card that has niche use Yugituber: Peepeepoopoo bad how is this supposed to be meta! We need better cards! Konami releases over tuned card: OMG WHY KONAMI BAN THIS CARD ALREADY. I don't know why this happens but there is no in-between when it comes to card reveals. Is it because the clickbait os too good not to use?
I feel like I would be so much more into yugioh if some people sat down and put in the same effort into researching and explaining how much engine vs non-engine it makes sense to play and what the specific statistical drawbacks and advantages are to changing that percentage, what the hit to consistency actually is when inserting garnets into your deck, etc. that magic the gathering people did to the mana curve.
That data exists but it's sporadic across the Internet and not all related to specifically Yu-Gi-Oh but card games as a whole. Imo what most players miss from being a semi competent player to a potentially great player is practice. The amount of people who go to locals but don't know lines or even have a basic understanding of rulings for their specific deck is crazy.
Jesse Kotton has a video that goes over a lot of the math behind ratios like explaining why 3 desires is optimal, why 5 normal summons is usually optimal, stuff like that. I forget what he called it, something clickbaity about heart of the cards iirc. I think it was supposed to be part of a series but idk if he did more
Are we gonna see MBT opinion articles anytime soon? I find some of the Master Duel Meta guides grope towards this more calm discussion of cards, but they don't really get all the way there yet. At the very least, they explain the combos.
A friend on mine explained deck building in yugioh to me like this 12-18 combo starters 12-15 hand trap/board breakers Rest combo tools/tech Extra deck is combo piecesa and boss monsters Side deck is anti meta hand traps/board breakers
To be fair, there's almost no incentive or reward for the MDM guide writers to actually put in the work, bless their hearts. Have you seen the comments on that website? Not to say everyone needs to have a huge audience, but MBT is right that a lot of the feedback is just "Pend best deck".
It will never not be funny to me that the main reason, imo, we get no insight into why Konami makes the banlist the way they do is because they tried doing it once, were mocked ruthlessly because their reasons were bad, and have never done it again. I mean they tried in duel links even if the reasoning was bog standard things like “we feel this card is fine for the power level of the format” and “we have limited this card to reduce the power of this deck”. Like of course your takes we’re going to get slammed. EVERYONES TAKES ARE!! It’s the point. The only difference is that konamis takes are actually enforcable.
they also chose the worst list possible for it, where the only real reason was greed. The format was choked by three decks and the banlist hit two different decks that were doing nothing. Vanguard owes part of it's success to that list
Not much to talk about when the reason is money...also the community should have expectations for a good reasoning coming from a multibillion company managing their game. So very rightfully slammed back in the day cause their reasoning was horrendous.
You mentioned Magic: The Gathering and the Twitch chat in my brain that shows up whenever I watch your videos without the chat on screen was suddenly filled with scatter emotes
Personally I always analyze new cards almost subconsciously, but that may be because I just love making Custom Cards and Custom Archetypes, so a lot of times I analyze them in term of design rather than use and power level. And when I do, is almost always on the lens of "And how can I use this in Zombies?" Like, no joke, my first reaction when Vaalmonica was revealed was "Oh, they discard to complete their scales, can be use to Pend Summon your multiple Level 4s that get stuck on hand and the self damage enables Ghost Fusion"
I get this lmao. A few years ago I was really into making custom cards for a while and I actually learnt a lot from it. I'd now have a pretty good understanding of PSCT, card design and like you said what makes cards and decks good or not. At least way better than I did before despite having been playing on and off since 2005.
Well there's also that very often it's impossible to actively look at cards in a vacuum because of how oriented the game became about archetypes and combos. You can't talk about Circular as being good without also talking about what card it dumps, what card it searches, and what card you make with it. I seem to recall when they were first announced that there were at least a few people saying R-ACE was pack filler for instance because in order to actually understand what the deck is you need to conceptualize getting out Turbulence and setting 4 backrow which requires analyzing not just Turbulence (although a free +4 is pretty obviously ridiculous) but also the 4 backrow cards you're going to set and ideally ALSO the in-archetype ways to get out Turbulence.
I actually really liked this video for multiple reasons, but I think my favorite part was the explanation at 4:49-5:07. I feel that is completely true and is most assuredly why I'm far better at gauging a magic card's value/viability over a Yugioh card. And to touch on the allergic to non engine part, I think that just comes down to weird archetypal quirks that you have to build AROUND rather than WITH. In magic you're like "I'm in blue that means I get counterspell/card draw/flicker etc". In Yugioh its like playing with all the colors but each game piece limits you on what color you're playing for the turn. Its this weird top down vs bottom up approach to deck building that I just cant seem to wrap my head around. Overall 10/10 video I hope this gets some attention by the competitive players in the community. I'd love to learn how to improve at the game that isnt "slam 3 maxx c , 3 ash , and 3 imperm into every deck"
7:15 The problem with pokemon is also that the message of the marketing and the story-telling with the games themselves is all about using whatever pokemon you like the most and that any pokemon can be great. The meta game and main game of pokemon are diametrically opposed in their ideology.
To your third (and first) point I think because a decks play-style is based around one of a thousand archetypes rather than a few colors, if an archetype is unviable there’s no need to learn what it does; and when you’re favorite archetype becomes obsolete you don’t want to pay several hundred dollars to buy an archetype you may or may not like.
I will say one thing completely unrelated, cuz I know Joseph has been talking about diversifying content over on Twitch, it's this Joseph. This is what I want. I could have listened to another 6 and a half hours of that while sorting through bulk and been utterly content. This is a great video. Thank you for posting this video.
If I had a cent for each video released today by a yugituber talking about how players need a better vocabulary to talk about the game, I would have two cents (see Hardleg). Which isn't a lot, but is weird that it happened twice.
@@spicymemes7458usually the content creators also happen to play the game so it includes them. And if you watched this video MBT says at least twice he is part of the problem. Now the question is, what are the steps to get better at what they are talking, and, does it even matter for most of the players/audience?
BTW, it matters to me quite a bit, but my gut feeling is a lot of people don't care. I think it matters because I would like to see players be better at deck building, or at least be able to netdeck better decks, because there is a lot of crap out there.
After a 10 year hiatus MD got me back into the game. I began reading _every single card_ I opened from booster packs and after a good week I was mentally exhausted. Once I got back into the swing of things my card analysis abilities improved, but I still actively choose to ignore reading certain cards for my own brain capacity and sanity. At this point I netdeck and run some duels to understand ratios and why some cards are excluded before mixing things up. This is all to say a limited format world solve a lot of this... though I'm still partial to "spicy tech".
Honestly, that's my favorite part of YGO. Analyzing cards and seeing how they fit into decks is one of my favorite things to do, not just in deckbuilding, but in general. It's crazy to me how many people just netdeck and end it there.
I agree. Net decking is fine, like it isn’t an unforgivable sin or anything, but if you just netdeck whatever deck you’re trying to play, you’re shorting yourself. It’s funny how people netdeck as if they have absolutely nothing they can add or change about the deck that might make it better in general or against specific matchups. It’s like, every deck profile has accesscode and it isn’t even the optimal Choice, it’s just a “generic staple boss monster that can help clear a board” even though they play 3-4 link monsters max that are all dark attribute. There are other, probably better options to put in that slot
I netdeck alot but I always end up changing a few cards here and there because I think it makes the deck better, it is definitely crazy ppl just take the deck as is without modifying it all, you never really learn anything that way
I do say that youtubers may be part of the problem. Remember that one guy that said that people can legally cheat? Dkayed. Yeah, dude was a big name in duel links before he switched to master duel and started shitting on the hand that feed him. A lot of shit he said, which was either incorrect, or taken incorrectly, ended up affecting the game. There was this 1 deck that used coin tosses, despacito, which used desperado barrel dragon with the skill "master of destiny", said skill makes the first 3 of *YOUR* coin tosses be heads if requirements are met. Said deck had this 1 continuos trap, headjudging, when the opponent activates a monster effect, *the opponent* calls and tosses a coin, if they are correct, the trap is destroyed, if they are wrong, negate the effect and switch the control of his monster to you. Said trap was added to the game at start of 2020, f2p trap, anyone could use it, but was dubbed a "trash card" and wasnt used at all. Long story short, at tail end of said year he lost once specifically to that trap and made a video -bitching- ranting about coin toss and that trap. After that, everyone and their grandmother started running that trap as some "mystical staple forgotten by time", or as i like to call it: "the format i got many easy wins because people were running this 50/50 card over actual good staples". Turns out that his ranting got that card hit in a ban list, and most of the arguments about "how op" that card was came from the opinions of his fans. Now, before i talk about those opinions, remember the 2 points i made early in bold? How master of destiny works for *your coin tosses* , and the trap makes *the opponent* call and toss a coin... Yeah... Their opinion was that "master of destiny" made the card op because "all the coin tosses were heads". Like... "Master of destiny DOESNT WORK ON THAT TRAP" was something those morons couldnt understand, they couldnt even grasp how: "IF THE SKILL WORKED ON THAT CARD YOU CAN STILL JUST CALL HEADS AND WIN THE COIN TOSS". Like, fr, i know some of the stuff his fans says isnt the fault of that idiot (dkayed), but man, he did nothing to correct them. And the worst is, that was only one of the times where he used his influence to fuck over the game. My favorite skill, what grows in the graveyard (starts with a dark verge in the gy), was hit because he though a rank 3 turbo was op... When we only had wind up zen maity and grenosauros as the best targets for that deck... The deck he used as an example wasnt even popular or tiered, not even rogue! But his word alone got those drones of his speaking about how the skill needed a nerf, and he got what he wanted. Rikka being released also contributed to that, but even with the skill rikka was a super floop in dl.
The problem is that we have to compare with the other head/tail options because most were terrible... But even then the card loses to Raigeki (Time wizard) and Kuriboh (The only arcana monster in an arcana deck. Never summoned btw). It has awful playpatterns, BUT is not really deserving of a banlist.
This very sentiment was why a while back when Jesse Kotton was soliciting video ideas on Twitter, I suggested breaking down why and how to play format staples well. As a relative outsider who really enjoys content about the game but is intimidated to start playing for real, knowledge of the how to play, why to play, and interactions between the pieces of a format, would really help me dive further into enjoyment of this hobby.
I think that this is a real problem. I think there are multiple factors that play into what is being said. Firstly, in the past, professional players have been more than willing to intentionally spread misinformation about a format. We've seen this when people thought Mermail was a top strategy, propagated by professional players, only to have Sylvans clean sweep tournaments. While this issue has gotten better, more players are more forthcoming with their information, and most of them have even taken up the mantle of being a competitive voice in the sphere, like Jesse Kotton, Pak, and Joshua, there's still a lot of professional players that do withhold information that could be invaluable to an ever-growing meta game. There's also a lack of discussion on what constitutes the ratios people play, why they even play certain cards, or their thought process of picking up a deck in the first place. Again, the community has gotten a little better at this, but it's far from ever being worth noting in the grand scheme of things. Secondly, there is simply not enough time or events to perpetuate a more flushed out metagame. With ban lists appearing pretty frequently, or the community getting bored with a format a couple of months in, not a lot of testing can be done before players move on, or the format drastically shifts. Also, the amount of new cards being pumped into the card game at any given time also contributes to this issue. The average core set has like, 100 plus cards, side sets like Valiant Smashers, has an additional 40-50 new cards, structure decks can have new cards, reprint sets can have new cards in them, etc. Magic, to my knowledge, is experiencing a similar gripe, with products being more common and less interspersed throughout the year. New products will bog down and rapidly change formats at a moments notice. The lack of events also makes it hard to solve a format, as well. Even if ban lists were more spread out, the lack of events ensures that a format is doomed to be unsolved. The more people that have access to YCS or even Regional level events, the more information that will be readily available. Also, Konami doesn't do a very good job, at least in the western hemisphere, at reporting deck lists, techs, and individual players and why they topped. The EU is definitely better at doing this. Thirdly, the casual and competitive spaces are constantly at odds with each other. On one hand, there's a ton of vitriol from casual players in regards to topping decks, and whether it takes skill to top with a deck that everyone else is playing. Conversely, competitive players can be pretty vitriolic towards lesser experienced players in a similar sense. Why should they take Blue-Eyes seriously when Tearlament blows them out of the water, etc. In the same vain, why should casual players take Fire King seriously when its the same build as the next guy with almost no variation, etc. I think this is less of a problem than the other two, but still worth mentioning. Fourthly, competitive content can be extremely dry. Unless the person has a pretty decent personality, or is generally an entertaining person, most players will tune out competitive discussions and breakdowns. They're also not popular enough to be worth it for the individual making the content. Fifthly, the OCG is a far more accessible card game there than it is here. With engines ranging in the $400 price range, to individual cards being $50-100, it's really hard to test in person since those cards are expensive. They also seem to take cards more seriously, and test with the majority of them, which is why you'll see lists from the OCG play single or double copies of a random card you've never heard of. We actually have a pretty sweet position when it comes to testing individual cards in a one format game, at least here in the TCG. We know when sets and cards come out months in advance. We can, though some choose not to, sift through cards much easier than the OCG or probably any other card game, we just opt to not do so because, it's not relevant to the current format. Not only that, we can have actual tournament results with new cards before they're actually released. We can see several months in advance why Fire King and Rescue-ACE are good decks. Sure, we're separated by different ban lists, but usually, the format there is typically the same one here, with some minor variance.
I hope people realize how important this video and the discussion it brings up is to the game as whole. I haven't really played the game since 2023 started and have recently quit the game due to the direction it has taken ever since, but I still have some stuff to say about this situation: (and yes, I made a very similar comment on farfa's reaction) I always thought that the fact that you can pick up a deck you like, learn it and not have to know the whole meta in order to have fun is not only a good thing for the game but also a gateway to facilitate the new player experience. When I joined the game back in 2012, I picked up a deck that I thought looked cool and went with it, then, after quitting during 2017, when I came back to the game in 2019 I picked up cyber dragon OTK and Orcust because I thought the decks looked cool and went with it. But I never connected the dots to realize that if you don't eventually move on from that "starter deck" you chose, you're also refusing to educate yourself on what the meta is and how the game functions, and on a game that has been historically built on competitive and semi-competitive play that becomes a huge issue. I always thought that moving on from your initial deck pick was natural move for everyone in all card games, but I guess the overwhelming amount of variety in yugioh paired with the lack of actually good competitive and semi-competive content, especially after the release of Master Duel, makes ygo's case a little different. Personally, I think that content creators are the ones that have the most power to change something like this, and, even though I don't play the game anymore, I'd love to see that change in content happen, and if does happen, it will definitely get a lot of players that have recently quit (and when you look at the numbers, that is a LOT of players) back into the game (myself included), even if it happens slowly. Not only that, but it'll probably make it so that the community is able to build a better relationship with Konami, which would both produce more educated feedback from the community and a Konami that is more willing to communicate and listen to feedback.
I just wanted to point out I find the dissonance between "Staying by your chosen deck is a virtue" here, and the "Yugioh players swap their deck like underwear so none of them know how it really plays" from (I think) the last of these videos amusing.
Honestly a good exercise to learn more about YGO is to pick a boss monster you like, and then just from scratch create a combo to summon it. If you like a level 8 Synchro monster for example, step 1 would be picking a tuner to use. Then you pick a monster to go with that tuner. Then you figure out how to get both of them on the board, etc. It doesn't matter how good the combo is in the end, as long as it gets the monster on the board, because the main purpose is to get an understanding of how YGO actually works. Another good thing to do is playing other games. Creating a deck in YGO, that makes proper use of the game's mechanical interactions, is very similar to what you do in many other build centric games, most notably RPGs. Think about the complex and gimmicky builds people make in games like say Path of Exile. There is a lot of overlap in RPG videogames and YGO that you wouldn't necessarily recognize until you pay attention to it.
Agreed, optimizing a YGO deck really has the same vibe to me as making gimmicky stuff work in Battletech or League. You're always one innovation away from an absolute breakthrough. When you hit that breakthrough, it's either revolutionary or just good enough to keep up with the existing meta, and either way it feels great. Your method has basically been my thought process trying to break Shiranui for the last year or so. Using Smith for a synchro play is theoretically insane going first since it searches the newest Ghost Meets Girl, and I've spent far too long trying to find methods to enable this without running more than one Smith. Right now I'm at something like 10 2-3 card combos that do it, and it's still kinda terrible in the grand scheme of things but it's given me a ton more insight into my favorite deck of all time.
I don't agree all that much. At the very least I can't make a competitive deck well in the slightest. Despite making tons of "turbo" or "wacky" decks for fun. Making a Cracking Dragon turbo deck didn't get me closer to understanding ratios for a protect the tower deck. Nor did having to make a nerfed version of Six Sam that is competitive with a scuffed Blue Eyes list, make me understand combo ratios. And building + testing every variant of Guru control that I can get my hands on (Thunder Dragon, Madolche, Token Collector, Amazement, Dogmatika, Vernusylph, Rainbow Neos, Eldlich, Dragoon, floodgate stun, normal trap control, and combinations of any of these) lead to me understanding proper control deck ratios. Just building decks doesn't teach you much on competitive deck building. Not having a results-based mindset goes a long way (removing cards even if you won a few games because of them), having a dedicated group of other competitive players is super important, having an education in math (a lot of high-level players have engineering degrees), and just building + testing with a mindset critical of every choice. Is probably the way to get good at competitive deck building.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 Well it's not about making a competitive deck, it's about understanding cards. When you're talking about ration and whatnot, that's basically the next step. When you design combos the most important part is that you're reading cards and thinking about what the words mean. Most people don't read their cards very well, as they have ready made decks of which they only need to get the gist. This is why they don't understand the cards they play, and therefore cannot talk about them accurately. It's an exercise in understanding the fundamentals of the game's mechanics, not actual competitive deck building.
@@DaShikuXIits honestly mind boggling how there is so many who dont actually understand the fundamentals of the mechanics theyre utilizing and is soemthing that definitely needs to be corrected considering ive seen someone complained about things like material less fusions (runick) or xyz summoning synchro monster (tzolkin and bishbaalkin) of all things making it very clear said person is just parading around a preemptive assumption
I know I’ll sound like a massive simp, but I want to emphasize how in this problem, Joshua Schmidt is such a great public face. He’s a massive personality that people listen to, but he’s especially skilled at the game and understands how cards interact well. He also actively does lots to educate the yugioh community. For a good while now he’s been streaming his testing of every new meta deck and sharing his thought process. This gives a much wider perspective on the whole format from a professional competitive angle. There was a time when he dedicated several hours to demonstrating Rikka Sunavalon just to educate his chat and especially the EU players among them so that they would know how to deal with Jessica Robinson
My issue is that it's very slanted toward the competitive community. The fact that so many hang on his every word creates a more hostile space for all of us.
8:40 when I played Vanguard (before the 2nd reboot) a friend of mine once said almost the exact same thing and following that philosophy has affected and carried over to yugioh and is honestly such a useful thing to have in the back of your head
Trying to learn Yugioh feels exactly like trying to learn a fighting game with no quality written resources. You're kind of just stuck operating on vibe and watching what other people do which can send you down massive red herrings because nobody is definitively explaining what the game or deck you're playing even is.
I think its also a matter of the venue for the discussion itself. How many people communicate on twitter or large discord servers where you have to type your opinion in a limited window, either because of text limit, or due to wanting to post before the discussion moves on. I think in the case of the YGOrg opinion piece its also a matter of the venue doing the opinion piece a disservice. People aren't expecting their opinions from the place where they get news or rulings, and think its more egregious than it is because its not as technical as the things they usually expect from the site itself.
Jason Grabher-Myer’s articles were the peak of discussing cards. Part of me died when he stopped publishing his set reviews. I still go back to his old reviews just because the discussion was robust and enjoyable. Overall I just miss the era of written Yu-Gi-Oh content being so robust thanks to tcgplayer and even ARG
I feel like a lot of it comes from good players not wanting to tell people how to counter them effectively on top of bad players just getting frustrated when their gameplan doesnt work out and not figuring out what would work better/how to play around these outs better. I frequently try to discuss my games at locals afterwards about what i think they could have done better and ask what their thought process was in making certain plays/actions. You will not get better at yugioh and the game will suck if you dont help other people get better.
The MTG comparison falls flat in my opinion. Yugioh cards are hard to evaluate because you can't evaluate them on a card-by-card basis like MTG where each card does a very limited, but usually powerful effect on its own. For example: A "quick effect omni-negate" is usually a single card from hand for a cost that is often telegraphed in MTG. You evaluated them based on their cost and other attached utility in the context of the format. In yugioh a single omni can take a myriad of forms, from extra deck monsters generic or otherwise, to counter traps and graveyard effects. All of which usually require a branching path of combo lines to get to. All of the combo lines can involve any 1-10+ cards from a selection of 13k+. The different decks having different levels of difficulty making them etc. etc. You can still attempt to make an evaluation, but it's never going to reach the level of objectivity that you can with an MTG card. Why was Hot Red Dragon Archfiend King Calamity only recently banned when the card itself never changed? I feel like yugioh as a game just can't be evaluated like that. You can pretend to and succeed to an extent, but you have to limit the scope of of the evaluation to even make an attempt. It's a similar argument to what many yugitubers made before about the possibility of there being a ton of decks that could be meta contenders, but there is just not enough brain power put towards exploring them.
I think the King Calamity example kinda misses the mark because that becomes a matter of what changes in the metagame via new releases and the same happens in Magic as well. Mycosynth Lattice in Modern being the best example to compare to, a 6 mana do nothing artifact that went from casual jank in EDH to an oppressive and unfun piece of multiple of the strongest formats up to even deserving a ban in one.
@@DualSwordBesken It serves as an example for how in yugioh a cards need to be evaluated in a different way entirely compared to magic cards. Maybe I shouldn't have used it, fair.
@@TemporalDelusion I do agree that the evaluation skills are different to a degree. The example choice just seemed like an awkward one. Maybe Ursarctic Radiation would have been a possible example given a basically draw 7 on paper sounds good but you'd need to understand the inherent weaknesses that you have to subject yourself to just to play it, which is a different skill than evaluating why Overflowing Insight is bad despite also reading "draw 7". That said, I don't think the evaluation skills are completely different and the main overlap falls into the generic cards available in Yu-Gi-Oh. Evaluating why Dark Hole is only fringe playable in a given meta will use similar skills to evaluating why Supreme Verdict is weak in a meta. I also feel that the initial statement undervalues cards that need to be evaluated in the context of a combo in Magic. Colossus Hammer or Amulet of Vigor are cards that looked at individually don't read as good cards. A 1 drop that costs 8 to equip with only a stat boost upside or a "do nothing" that makes things come in untapped both read like casual jank, add 1 card to each (Sigarda's Aid and Ravnica bounce lands respectively) and you can see something but without the extra combo pieces that they require you aren't going to see that they are core pieces of tier 1 decks.
Part of the reason is that the game is far too complex for its own good and has too much old baggage due to not having any form of curated format. The only time you can really sit down and fully evaluate a card is in simpler past formats that aren't going to be changing next week when a new set drops.
I remember when I was forced to do card evaluation way back while I was playing the tag force series with no one else to talk about it. I guess you can tell how well that went when I built my deck around the Pyramid of Light thinking it was the best thing available in there. And there was no bias involved because I had never watched the movie yet.
Yeah, as a relatively new player it's really noticable how evaluating and understanding cards and the wider game environment is a skill that isn't really demanded or rewarded in new players. Just pick the best-looking lists you can afford and mash them together like you're making your dolls kiss, then dive in to some ladder games. I love the resources out there that try to dig into that a bit more - Hardleg's video series is a good example - but with no officially supported limited formats it's just something that you have to do for your own entertainment and hope one day you'll pick up enough critical skill to make a difference.
I mean one other factor I will mention is just the complexity of decks and archetypes makes it hard to get a massive depth in knowledge for multiple decks. I can look at a top 16 of magic read the general strategy of the deck (i.e. aggro, combo, mid range, control) and though on a quick glance I may not be able to tell you all the reasons why the player selected X over Y it is clear how X helps accomplish the goal of the deck with a few odd ball cards that stick out. In comparison for yugioh to learn insert top 16 requires a far greater amount of understanding of each archetype to be able to analyze past saying oh this player selected this hand trap for this match up. I also think the notion of believing in your deck is partially due to the complexity of many strategies as well but also it was mentioned in a prior talk that people too readily jump from deck to deck so I am not sure where that balance is.
I don't know if there's a profound difference between someone who is riding Pend or die and someone who is no-lifeing Mono-Blue Tron in Modern but I do get your point there. As much as I love progression, and progression honestly helped me get a lot better at the game, you can really pinpoint the exact moment where it felt like content creators on UA-cam really fell off. The transition from more competitive focused content to endless casual series, series that don't do their topics enough justice, videos that are entirely bad faith shitposts or shitty stream highlights. There's a time and a place for this kind of stuff obviously, but I don't believe that we've really hit any kind of golden era in Yugioh content despite ostensibly better production quality. Joe Giorlando is really one of the only Yugitubers I actively watch anymore. I actually feel like I learn something from his videos most of the time that isn't...present in many other places.
Just because you do not enjoy that content doesn’t mean the content “fell off”. You are not the intended audience for it, just like joe is not the intended audience for a lot of people. People enjoy different things, shocker i know.
@@eleonarcrimson858 Believe it or not you can choose to accept and believe that while vocalizing why it doesn't work. Chalking up everything to "well people just LIKE different things" doesn't help a conversation: it ends it.
@@eleonarcrimson858 Well believe it or not you're in the comment section of a video describing a problem in Yugioh and directly brought up content creation as a part of it. I am describing what is, to me, a problem with content creation since a certain point in time. It's fine if you don't agree and it's fine if people like Progression and Master Saga and whatever. But I've been around long enough to watch the competitive content disappear from Yugitube as a whole. It's like seeing a bunch of reality TV shows pop up on a channel you used to like. Sure, people are allowed to have preferences, but don't smother conversations about why those preferences exist.
@@lamiaprincess6371 And you related the part about “the content” in the video to you personally putting yourself as someone who consumes the “better content” which is classic elitism. So I am here to call out your cringe behavior regardless of time in the community. Be better.
In all honesty I’m happy that you’ve made this kind of video as I know I am an example of basing my deck choices based off of influencers without doing any real research of my own such as going to a Yugioh simulator like dueling book and etc. What is very important is formulating your opinions based on the different builds and avenues from your own creative mind and while it is natural at times to lazily pick up a deck someone tells you is “good” it is without a doubt up to the duelist to play it to its full potential in order to win (depending on how ambitious you are). All in all practice and time into the game will always prevail.
I think there's a bit of chicken-or-egg issue where the audience doesn't really want to read well-written articles and content creators not really wanting to write them. Also, in journalism in general it is just the modern viewpoint of "bad articles with a lot of engagement earn better than good content with no comments".
Well this is one of the rare times that I agree with an MBT video. Though here is the main reason above all others. Yugioh format solving is super slow because of the vast card pool. A card from 20 years ago can become easily a meta card without having any effects just because it is searchable as a discard tool in a deck that searches it naturally and needs a random +1 to discard for something. This actually happened several times with normal monsters that were searchable or special summonable from the deck with a new card. Hell a card like halq made it so that a lot of tuners were limited or banned. The thing is a yugioh card unlike other card games cards does not exist in a vacuum. The value of a yugioh card depends on what else is playable. A great example is king of the swamp. It saw very little play until tearlements since 2013 yet it instantly became broken with them and in a vacuum it is not even that strong. A game like magic the gathering doesn't have the level of card synergy that yugioh has and thats why it doesn't apply as an experinece.
I just want to back up MBTs point about how personality based engaging with YGO is. I used to play YGO casually on MD and eventually moved on to MTG commander. I still come back and watch MBT videos regularly because I like HIM and his opinions, I dont even care about the game and I'm here so I really agree that personalities and content are a HUGE part of YGO. To the point that it is 100% the way I engage with YGO
It's cool, but too many people become starf*ckers for content creators. Like they are still people at the end of the day and some hang on their every word to dictate their opinions.
7:15 I actually want to just say that I have found the discourse surrounding “genning” when it comes to competitive Pokémon VGC to be very funny when looking at it from an outsiders perspective and how much it seems to come from a casuals viewpoint like with yugioh. For those who don’t know, “genning” refers to artificially generating a Pokémon with the correct stats, moveset, etc, without having to go through training and breeding. There’s a set of people who view genning as ok because the main point of competitive Pokémon is the strategy and teambuilding not how long it took to get a perfect IV charizard. The other side of the discussion in my limited exposure to the discourse has 2 points. The “better” point is just that it’s cheating both in the rules but also in the fact that some people can’t gen so it grants a competitive advantage. But the point I wanted to draw with this is that the “worse” argument against genning is that people believe it “ruins the spirit of Pokémon because Pokémon is about arching your favorites, training hand in hand with them, and showing the fruits of your labor in battle.” Like not realizing that if the meta changes, you aren’t necessarily going to stick with a team because you “put so much time and effort into it.” Honestly the comparison in yugioh would be if people complained that you aren’t a true duelist because you just built your deck by buying singles on a site like YGOpro, rather than buying individual packs and pulling for your cards.
One thing I've thought about and wished I had the funds for personally would be merging the "van life" youtube style with a "pro yuigioh player" into 1 channel. A pro player that travels the states going to a new locals or regionals every weekend and discussing the ideas also giving insight to people (like me) who live in really remote areas and dont have a locals to play at that people actually play competitive decks at. My only competitive scene is online and it blows. This new channel idea could fill a void for people in low population areas like me. Could have an hour long podcast type video and smaller videos at the same time. I wish I could do that, I think it would be a ton of fun. Maybe someday :)
It is very easy to say "look they do it better over there!" Without providing any solutions or specific examples of what you are actually talking about.
Yeah, I definitely get the "play your favorites" issue. I started when Master Duel launched, discovered Thunderdragons, and while I have branched out a bit, they are the deck I use every chance I get. Funny enough the recent Wyvern hit now has me looking at the deck scratching my head because it was excellent and proc'ing banish triggers on the dark attribute cards while also putting a body on the field to link away into verte because it's almost 2024 and I'm still running an anemic DPE engine because I like it.
I don't see the "play your favorites" aspect as a problem, if you can correctly analyze the weaknesses of your deck in the current format and try to do something to shore them up. As it's a good skill-building exercise.
"Play your favorites" isn't an issue if it leads you to have a very deep understanding of all the possible variations of lines and plays the deck can offer you, and if you have an open mind and are willing to experiment and innovate with alternative options and "spicy techs".
This is a very interesting video that that also applies why a card is not included in a deck. My favorite deck is Adamancipator and I have liked it synce its release. I thoughtit was pretty cool that it could use the rock type Otomat cards(gogogo's). After block dragon got banned, the Otomat cards vanished, especially after Prank-Kids meow-meow mew got banned so all of the other rock engines disappeared. I saw deck lists using Revival Golem and Tackle Crusader, cards that suck and don't fit this archtype not even just more koa'ki meru targets. I find it weird that the Gogogo engine for this deck dissappeared with no explanation especially synce theres not many other good rock targets that the deck is not already using.
Here's a question: What do you mean "If yugioh wants to be taken as seriously as magic when it comes to competitive play"? Yugioh tournaments fire just fine. Magic is the game slowly devolving into Casual 4-player, draft, or gtfo. I think there's this weird desire in the yugioh community to be seen as more "serious," but like... the game is serious.
I can certainly attest to not knowing why I play the cards I do in the decks I play when I first pick them up, but as I learn combo lines I usually come to understand what everything does and why they’re good. But that’s more on an individual level rather than something I can do on the fly
Was not expecting a competitive Pokemon video game section in a Yugioh video, gave me war flashbacks of when I used to play back in gen 7. One of the few things I can give Konami is that at least they know to give a format time to grow naturally rather than just succumb to the whims of the masses every few weeks
I was thinking the other day how I wished Yugioh had a podcast like Hearthstone does with the Vicious Syndicate podcast. One that is less opinion, and much more talking about the statistics and math behind decks. Obviously opinion is always gonna be part of it, and it's way harder to get statistical data to talk about in a physical format than it is a digital one, but even just a Yugioh podcast that weekly goes into one meta deck and discusses the key pieces, the popular out of engine choices, and the whys for those choices and how they interact with the other meta decks.
I think we also need more "adult" voices discussing Yu-Gi-Oh. We need more people seriously explaining the meta-game or creating beginner guides speaking as if they were giving a lecture for a classroom (e.g., heavy focus on information and ease of understanding, little to no swearing and sex/bathroom/fandom humor). We need our equivalent of Wolfe Glicke.
I love this take. As someone who tried to get back in the game and learn creative deck building skills, (only played as a kid ignorant to this skill) I found it quite difficult. I would love an official draft format/limited format that required players to become more acquainted with other cards
I think something like Cimo's Master Duel Masochist does a great job of this. He pulls random cards, makes a random deck, pulls new cards if he wins, and then has to see how those make some sort of strategy that he can build with.
@@Trey50Daniel Agreed. It would just be nice to have something official like that. Honestly, I wouldn’t hate a draft format with a large card bank like a battle pack 3. You could even mark them like speed duel marks there cards “speed duel”. I think it’d be fun if you were randomly given a number of those cards from the pool, have 10-20 minutes before a match to decide the ones you want and the ones you don’t, then build a deck
I think a lot of what has allowed Magic content to focus on in-depth strategic content & card evaluation is that for most of the games history there was a really robust tournament structure that produced a large number of players whose jobs were to grind tournaments and write articles aimed at fellow tournament grinders; which is something that as I understand it Yugioh has never had to the same extent. And now Magic content is seeing a similar shift towards what Yugioh looks like with the tournament system having been gutted for a few years and the huge surge in a more casual audience that is more interested in following content creator personalities than reading a modern sideboard guide.
the content creators thing is really funny as someone who is interested enough in yugioh to rewatch half of rata's catalogue of videos every single time he uploads and also yours a decent amount of the time, but not interested enough to play the actual game unless it's with friends (not a frequent occurrence)
Not having to learn other cards is so real. I got back into Yu-Gi-Oh after a few years hiatus and have been playing Labrynth for a few months and I have not learned how any of the new top decks work. All I do is ask people what the best ash/imperm target is for the big decks and then side in catch all cards like nibiru and d-barrier. I still have no clue what any of the new decks do.
Theres no problem with sticking with your fav deck and using it instead of stronger ones. You just need to know that its not the strongest. Also, dont tell anyone that.
Limited in MTG is 100% the reason that the community is as good as it is at card evaluation generally. Before commander it was the most popular way to play the game and the easiest way to get a new player into the game. Almost everyone who played MTG for decades HAD to learn some level of card evaluation and deck building skill. Even if you net decked your list for standard and modern you still needed to put a list together yourself in sealed at a prerelease or on day 2 draft of any major event.
It doesn't help that a certain UA-camr whose name is similar to: ScheM SchBee SchTee is a very funny individual that very rarely does purely informational content. Mostly because the fans are so conditioned to that style content they really can't deal with another, and a bunch of other points Mr. BT pointed out precisely. As always he is very keen to find and point out these details. However, it is also important to note that any change from this issue can only really leave the fringes of the fanbase with the help of the various already established content creators. Sadly new ones simply won't get enough draw to introduce people to this way of seeing the game. So yes, I'm asking for the big yugitubers to tank their views for what could be months to try and make the change happen.
I can't wait for other YugiTubers to take this message to heart and start considering preparing longform, intricate, and well-thought out discussion pieces on their preferred formats and/or decks. ... and by that, I mean they'll make 25 minute reaction videos where half of it is just pausing and repeating the same points with different words.
The layout took a grand total of one day to adjust to. If anything the new one is slightly easier on me than a big long list and pages in case a surprising news day arrives.
I decided in the new year I want to start going to locals instead of just playing master duel and I've realized I straight up don't know how to deck build or side deck. I've relied on just looking up deck lists for stuff I wanna play and now I have no idea how to evaluate why someone would play certain cards in a deck, despite that I watch a lot of content about competitive Yu-Gi-Oh, it's all mostly surface level coverage
I think the other part of the problem is thay of all the big card games out right now, yugioh has BY FAR the highest skill floor to get into a new deck. Playing mathmech and playing tear have very few transferable skills combared to playing orzohv humans and rakdos discard
MtG has a different culture which (coming from yugioh) I find strange to be honest. Don't know if Joseph is just used to it and that is why he always draws comparisons giving MtG a favourable look. As someone who plays mtg but is relatively new at it, I have to say this as a response to mbt constantly making it sounds like information is easily available and easy to understand in magic: *It isn't*. I'd go further, it is *significantly* harder to get straight answers and beginner help from mtg players than it is from yugioh players and mtg is an awful lot more confusing than people (especially yugioh players) think. Mtg very quickly goes from slow one-two cards a turn gameplay to incomprensible with dozens of cards doing different things covered in seemingly meaningless words that people just expect you to understand without ever explaining. And I am talking in casual environements don't even worry about competative ones. I can't help but think MBT has some kind of rose-tinted glasses or grass is greener (or both) mentality regarding MtG and how it is over there. Because it just ain't as simple and easy to into in comparsion to yugioh as he makes out.
Thing is such resources aren't a causal thing, so primers like that outside of competit decks is rare. Commander (also known as EDH) is "causal" format due to it rarely being played as a one on one game, but due to sheer amount of cards in the game can wildly have different power levels. Imho the most common problems come up from things like layer effecting cards like Magus of the Moon with some form of removal, not removing it from the board, and stuff like humility and opulence, making everything 1/1 no effects monster other then enchantment players 4/4 enchantment monsters.
You played commander, didn't you. That ain't a beginners format. Magic is undergoing a pretty big thing right now with the previous several years' over-centralization of commander to it's identity, which does suck for newbies, but that just means you may have entered in the wrong place. Try playing jumpstart, or try playing standard on Arena. Magic is seriously and genuinely significantly easier to get into, unless you just have issues dropping your Yu-gi-oh-isms and embracing the stack.
@@Asmodean1111 Frankly, I wish Commander was never made official. It was perfect (as Elder Dragon Highlander) for established players to play legacy level cards watered down to the point of playing like a big silly sealed deck. If new players were funneled to standard or, like, jumpstart, shit would be so much easier.
8:38 Yeah that's true. Not helped that, sometimes, you only learn WHY you play each card, but as a case of "a repetetive pattern", not really understanding each card.
I picked up yugioh at the age of 6 thanks to some friends of mine, and have played card games ever since. I say card "games" cause it didn't take us very long to branch to ALL of the major card games, at least at the time. It felt natural, fun and easy, but for some reason all of the other friends I've gotten in the past 15 years refuse to learn more then one of them, so I have some friends who play exclusively yugioh, some that only play magic and even a pokemon fanboy. And guess what, they all suck at card evaluation. Yes even the magic players, they are not special in the slightest. And if you try to ask their opinion on a card from another game, you will see why. All of them have their own concept on what a strong card looks like. And I don't mean like "oh this card would be broken in magic cause its free mana AND draws you a million". Sure thats a part of it, but more importantly players who don't branch out into other tcgs won't learn how to evaluate a card objectivly as a card in or despite the game it's in. I could tell most if not all of the broken LoR, HS or Flesh cards as soon as I looked at them, and once I learned the games, I could tell you how the game takes advantage of those qualities. I am not trying to "flex" or whatever, just pointing out how easy card evaluation gets if you both learn and understand the core principle of these games.
I'm personally a player that tries to play a different deck every format. Usually it's the top deck, but of the top deck is something I don't like I try somthing else And even then, I've noticed that I gravitate towards a particular playstyle: midrange, where it is a "combo" based deck that trades resources with the opponent like a control deck does. Think Vanquish Soul, salamagreat or purrely for example. So while I have more experience evaluating the value of specific cards in case-by-case situations because I play dynamically, I absolutely suck at determining the value of cards in combination with each other or mutiple steps of interaction down the chain. I can't play multi-divergent combo decks because I can't wrap my head around the 50+possible combo lines a given hand can make, let alone decide which route to take (I just can't handle branded or Dragon Link). At most I can handle a linear combo deck with one or two lines at most like matchmech. No joke, it took me almost a month to understand why Jiaolong is so good and Mad Love is not. I was convinced madlove was critical because it searches snow devil, not realizing Jiolong also searches it. If I have such problems with a deck that I play regularly, decks that play nothing like it are hopeless to me. And so, everytime a new card comes out, I can only successfully evaluate it in terms of the midrange decks. I say all of this to say that I think this is another main reason players are so bad at evaluating how good cards are. This game wires your brain to work towards one type of playstyle. It trains a midrange player like me to to evaluate one-for-one trade ability, a combo player to evaluate posible combo lines and end points, a control player to evaluate capability for disruption, etc. And while sometimes there is some overlap with a given card's abilities, players trying to discuss how good a card is in this game is like experts of different scientific fields trying to argue the validity of X research paper. You can't expect a biologist, a mathematician and a theologist to be able to talk in comprehensive terms with each other about the same thing. Each knows most about their field and practically nothing about the other fields. They might as well not talk at all, they won't understand each other anyway.
With 10k legal cards with newer sets dropping every Friday, it's easier to just let someone else do the thinking and maybe work over it. I think Master duel, of all places, offers a little space to exercise playing in a different format with monthly events, even the duelist cup makes people look at decks differently.
I truly feel like a lot of games have this issue of a lack of reporting and/or card evaluation. It's a problem I've noticed with DIGIMON big time, where the only content covering the game is people looking at an individual deck for 20 minutes and saying nothing insightful about it beyond "This helps you find a combo piece" or whatever.
I didn't understand why Pankratops was good for YEARS! until I realized it Special Summoning itself combined with a Quick Effect that sacs it means Pankratops effectively can't be targeted by Veiler/Imperm or removal before its effect goes off. No source I read or videos I watched ever explained this to me; I only ever saw people say "it's good!" haha.
I like how MBT is holding up MtG as this shining example of competitive play/ enlightenment considering the state of competitive magic the gathering has been in Hell for the last 4 years thanks to the dismantling of the pro tour and MtG arena’s failed MPL system coinciding with article writers/mtg UA-camrs either stopping or talking less and less about the competitive formats in favor of Casual content like Edh/Commander. BUT SURE, let’s pretend it’s still 2018; before mtg arena, before controversial sets like Modern horizons and covid uprooted and flip the status quo of magic the gathering forever.
Real talk I've been getting into MtG over the last 12 months or so becasue my friends play it and finding information or getting answers on things is HARD. Much harder than I am used to and certainly much harder than either yugioh or pokemon.
Honestly just because the MTG he is holding up as an exemple isn't the one we have today, doesn't mean his point is false. I left MTG over a year ago because it was just becoming unbearable to play and found in YGO a much more friendly game, yes even with all the problems it has to new players. But even if i'm a lot happier playing YGO than i have been in the last few years i had playing Magic, i still miss the amazing structure of competitive content i could read and watch about a tech for deck X or the best cards in Draft Y or just a very well mabe primer for a new tournament winning deck i probably wouldn't have money to buy.
@@valvadis2360 I was never a competitive player and got in and stick around as a commander player with magic but I still feel pretty bad for everyone that cared about 60 card formats. I can respect people wanting to preserve that history and accumulated knowledge and shake my head at how wotc seems to just hedge their bets towards commander players and collectors for universe beyond crossovers over the rest of the playerbase. It just annoys me whenever I’ve gotta hear Joseph bring up mtg like it’s can and could do no wrong.
@@vinnythewebsurfer I'm exactly the kind of guy who wishes commander players would learn "real Magic" and thinks whoever first floated universes beyond has no soul, but those issues aren't really inherent game issues, but issues of WotC's stewardship. I think the fact that MtG has changed AND gotten worse actually strengthens Joseph's point. Like, Magic had it in the bag and massively fumbled, right? So what they were doing was actually pretty effective beforehand? Unless you think that the change was unavoidable, which would be interesting. Otherwise, if you're just annoyed about Joseph leaving that out, honestly fair enough. But god damn do I love Magic as a game engine.
my personal thought about the topic is there is so many diverse opinions on the cards due to how they are used or how it feels to play against them. the people who play the cards will say "it's fair because your opponent has a way to stop it. just draw the out. just have the counter. just play the right deck" where as the people who play against the cards will have very negative opinions if it's, lets say... Kashtira at full power zone lock... and will complain at every point about it without saying exactly WHY they hate to play against it without a proper reason. sure, zone lock sucks but it takes a lot of time to actually get it off... with how diverse the opinions are, there's always going to be someone who says that the opinion/thoughts on a card is wrong and will fight tooth and nail to prove their point. it's like trying to explain to a kid how important it is to grow up and find a job when they are very young... they won't understand and they will fight back. no matter the points you make, it will never get through to everyone. despite that... I do believe that, with enough time, the community will learn how to get better with it... that or get so toxic that it'll never grow. leaning more on the former cause i do love the game. my favourite deck is witchcrafter, icejade and solfacorde. they are not amazing but i enjoy them despite that. i know they have a lot of flaws, especially witchcrafter because of their reliance on spells, icejades with banishing FACE UP cards for their equips... and solfacord being a pendulum deck that relies on even and odd scales. I love the cards, i love the design around them and i understand that they will never be meta. to finish... yugioh players are bad at talking about the cards due to their own personal opinions on said cards and should be more open to discussion about others views on it... and perhaps try to understand how the card could be seen outside of their view. we're all passionate about the game and should try to be more inclusive with it. and I am sorry if my point is... hard to understand. hope 2024 treats all of you well
I think the fact of their being a bazillion cards in the pool of yugioh, that and there being a different way to interpret and interact with a significant portion of the cards, is what makes it really easy for a contradicting opinion to come up, and if the person writing/speaking about how something is the way it is doesn't say or spout exactly what the viewer is thinking/feeling about a certain card or deck, yugioh's community has enough of a vocal community/people who are willing to go to bat so to speak, and they are more than willing to speak up for something or against something. It is a human nature thing, all communities have it definitely not exclusive to any community, as it is a person thing. Likewise it is very easy to get lost in why something is wrong, rather than just making a blanket statement that "X" is wrong, we all want to try to explain our reasoning behind why something is bad/wrong, we humans tend to be pretty good about pointing out when something is wrong or off, but explaining the why, and the nitty gritty and having a majority of people who agree with our statement on the exact why something is bad/wrong is harder than finding the holy grail. (Exaggerating a bit lol) Often times we spew out a sentence/or set of words that will be in combat with feelings or facts, and getting those two to play nice with each other, would be like winning the lottery, nice and awesome in the moment, but the high/benefits of it likely won't last, it would all be fleeting sadly. Perhaps the fact that magic doesn't appeal to a larger pool of potential players is also why they can often find a reasonable conversation about what is and what isn't healthy for the game they love, it is far easier for them to be calm and rational about things, as they are more able to leave emotions at the door/in check compared to yugioh and pokemon players. In other words they are not constantly comparing other aspects of the franchise to what they see in the game they play. Comparison is the thief of happiness, it also doesn't help when so many of us humans (and make no mistake about it magic has these players too) are so inconsistent about both our inferiority complexes and superiority over others. As soon as emotions come into play in any of the games, our rationale/calmer minds take a back seat to things, and it makes it that much harder to not only be a competent player, but also to be able to be objective about what is and what is not healthy/good for "our" game. Yes emotions can be a powerful thing, and we have to hear those out every now and again, though if a fact comes in that contradicts our emotions we have to be able to find a happy medium that works for not only us but everything as a whole, there can and should be a balance for things. They have to live in harmony, as emotions can allow passion to take hold, and once passion takes hold it can lead to a very beautiful outcome on some level or another. There has to be a stopping point a good defined line where things need to cease, as it isn't fair to always allow emotions or facts to rule out in the end, my emotions should not supersede any emotions someone else has just because it is my emotion, and likewise just because something is a fact it doesn't mean it is right or just. - At the end of the day though a lot of it is just plain arbitrary, if others wish to argue/compare something then I say let them, I say my energy is better spent else where, and I wish them the best of luck with things regardless.
This is so true, and I see it in myself. I play Digimon Card Game and there I can tell you exactly what card does what, why its there, why there's as many copies of it etc. But in YuGiOh, I am unable to do that. I cannot tell you why some deck has that ammount of starters or extenders, or what defensive cards that deck needs for what reason etc. I like playing RAce, and Ive watched a lot of combo guides for the deck, and none of them have done a proper explanation and examination of the deck itself, just mindless one-card, two-card combos, here is what the deck can do, done, thanks for the views. It creates this narrative that all there is to YuGiOh is combo lines and negates and no acctual interaction between players, that there's no depth to the card game, when YuGiOh is so much more than that.
As an MTG player, YGO is impossibly frustrating to learn. Every single time I want to check out some deck or archetype, there's a days-long struggle of actually learning what the hell the deck is trying to do, you have about twenty builds where no one explains even one line and the one deck that has a primer is an overly complex combo showcase that barely even explains the order of plays, let alone anything else, At some point I figured out Earth Machines and that's my favorite deck purely because I was able to blend archetypes, make what felt like meaningful deck decisions that weren't "but you gotta run these fifteen cards", and find more than one line to win games. It's so bad that I legitimately have more fun trying to make a bastardized Machina Live Twin deck work than I do actually muddling my way through hours and hours of button-clicking because at least then NO ONE knows how that's supposed to work.
This might be my favorite yugioh video in a while. Coming from competitive magic to yugioh, it was baffling to me how hard it was to find solid information on what I should play. Even just as simple as a tier list I could only find random UA-cam videos which had conflicting information sure the first couple decks were usually the same but everything below that just felt kinda arbitrary. Basic strategy on how to play the game (what hand traps existed, when to time your own and how to play around your opponent's, etc) was scarce at best. Everyone's lists (especially for rogue decks) seemed to be completely different and no one would explain why they're playing this variation vs that one or thas supporting engine and not this one. Combos seemed to be completely different from deck to deck with no explanation on what the core combos in the deck are without cross archetype extension. It was grueling and frustrating to sift through and I've always felt like a worse player for it even to this day.
i really wish we had comprehensive writing like how hearthstone does for its game vicious syndicate is a good example of that, having information about deck winrates and playrates data while also having nice and neat articles on each deck/class is really helpful to accurately grasp the metagame. Hearthstone is also a memey and silly game when it come to content creation so i don't see how yugioh also cant have this.
Personally I want a channel that just does a 2+ hour deep dive on each deck. What hands it likes. Matchups guidance. Side deck advice. Etc but god now’s who would be able or willing to do it
IF there is an audience, I would attempt to ask one of the pro player streamers. Pak, Josh, or PRRJ. But i really doubt it would be worth the investment without patreon support
That kind of content is really hard to make because nobody has that kind of info on more than a handful of decks.
That and it just isn't profitable.
One of the problems with making that type of content is that people often over express their interest in it and don't follow through watching.
Its similar to people who say they "want to go to the gym" or "want to get in shape" but then don't show up.
I feel like that kind of content has been a huge gap in the yugioh content market since around the start of the pandemic. Or at the least something like the What a Decks Hardleg did, giving a bigger sample of games to look at.
Two Hour Testing?
I remember asking why Big Welcome Labrynth was better than the original since it’s one of those cards that’s effect doesn’t make much sense without the full context of the archetype.
I specifically remember the guy responded with “It’s better because it can let you [literally just the first effect of Big Welcome Labrynth verbatim].”
And that was it. That was all he said.
Its difficult to explain. Basically both Big Welcome and Welcome offer different functions but Big Welcome is more explosive being able to trigger the maids' effects and/or allow for a retreat of getting something safe in your hand. Bouncing a Maid or piece of Furniture can have its applications. Hell, i've bounced by Ash'd Soul Resonator to get 'em out of harm's way. That's evne before the GY effect to QUICKIE Bounce anyithing ou want as a good means to out a majour threat of even the pivital choke point in a combo.
Labyrnth is great in the grind game but struggles getting there, like a lot of backrow decks. The value of regular Welcome is better than Big Welcome, at the start of the game but as it goes on, the reverse is true, as you start to value Big Welcome's GY effect more and more. This is upset by labyrnth being consistent enough to always set regular Welcome with either a Maid or Furniture piece on turn 1.
I will admit it is a little counter intitutative, though.
As much I appreciate being treated as the Chad Magic player who intuitively understands the nuances of limited play, I can say with good authority that Magic players suck at card evaluation as well. I would argue the reason Magic players are better at talking about it is that it is much easier to do so, as the game has built in guardrails to help facilitate discussions that Yugioh doesn’t. Magic cards have mana costs, power and toughness values, and well defined colors to meaningfully differentiate one card from another. In stark contrast, Yugioh has systematically stripped away the ways players were taught to evaulate cards, as monster cards’ levels and attack and defense points haven’t mattered since the XYZ era. Trying to evaluate Circular in a vacuum is a fool’s errand, because reading the card does not explain the potential end boards you can create with your other cards and extra deck. That requires you to actually play the archetype, and no one has time for that. Thus, it is much easier to rely on whatever youtuber you watch has cooked up, because rote memorization is less time consuming than experimentation and iteration. In Magic, generally what you see on the card is what you get, making it much easier to discuss the roles and relative powers levels of specific cards in a vacuum. Even then, Magic players routinely misidentify which cards are actually strong, from Oko to Astrolabe to Ledger Shredder. It’s not that Magic players are better at card evaluation, it’s just easier to talk about
You bring up a very good point here, but I do think it's a bit of both. People are always going to miss things, that's the nature of games like this, but I think it's also fair to say that Magic players have been trained to think more about card evaluation. Limited in particular forces you to deckbuild and not just netdeck, so you have to make very conscious decisions about what's in your deck and why. In Yugioh, there's often little room to deviate from a standard build, and like MBT says some decks can go years without significantly updating their lists. In particular, combos are often so complex that if you try to experiment and change parts of the deck you're going to ruin the entire thing, so the risk is huge if you want to try something new. In Magic there's often a lot of "flex space" in your deck, in that you don't need specific cards, just cards that fit a role (aside from certain "core" cards of a deck, like colossus hammer in hammer time, or arclight phoenix in izzet phoenix). With that and the game pace being slower, it's significantly less likely that swapping any given card out will cripple the deck. It might make it worse, but not to the same extent that swapping a card out can make a deck worse in Yugioh. Magic is just easier to experiment in, IMO. And, since experimentation is less risky (and if you play limited some experimentation is basically forced), you can get a lot more experience understanding cards.
That all being said, you're right in that the way Yugioh design has evolved just makes single card evaluation really, really hard. You don't have to evaluate the card itself, you have to look at every card it can interact with. spellbook of judgement is a great example; it was super, super broken back in the day because of the insane advantage it generates. Nowadays the card technically functions exactly the same, but all the cards it interacts with, the spellbooks, aren't really playable, so judgement isn't seeing much, if any, play. If new spellbooks are printed and they're good, judgement suddenly becomes super busted again. Judgement's legality doesn't depend on how strong judgement is, it depends on how strong spellbooks as a whole are.
Basically, almost every part of a Yugioh card is worthless in examining its power. Attack, defense, and level barely matter (and of those level matters most because of extra deck plays/pend/ritual/etc), and sometimes even the effect is meaningless. Runick stun vs runick combo is a good example; you could use the runick cards to summon monsters that stall out the game, or you could use runick cards as a bunch of instant fusions and go off, in which case the effects of the runick monsters you summon are mostly meaningless (probably? Not intimately familiar with runick but that's my understanding of it). Funnily enough, the name is often one of the most important parts of a card; something named "Superheavy Purrely Kashtira Tearlaments Blue Eyes Dark Magician Tarmogoyf" is already better than "Tarmogoyf".
True that. I still remember when Magic Origins came out...so many MTG players called Jace, Vrynn's Prodigy (aka literal, actual Baby Jace) unplayable garbage not worth the price of the physical cardboard it was printed on. Fast forward a few weeks later and it had turned into a multi-format staple that was being sold on the secondary market for 80€ a pop. Still the most egregious example of this I can think of off the top of my head lol
Everyone IMMEDIATELY identified Oko was busted. ...except the playtesters.
@@tinfoilslacks3750 Notably not barrinmw, who gave him a 2/10 in modern and stated “I hope he sees play.” And really, everyone else’s opinions don’t matter
Yeah but you also don't have MTG bitching about a card being expensive after they all bought it purely based on theory when the card isn't even available yet
Back when I played the game a lot I would just build whatever deck seemed interesting to me at the time. This lead to me playing a lot of garbage, but also really helped me be able to pick out when stuff was decent. I remember as soon as my friend showed me to new sword soul cards I said “these would work well with Tenyi.” He said that I was stupid and that Tenyi was bad. 5 months later he was telling me about his new “Tenyi Sword Soul” deck.
Real talk the mathmech primer video is one of my favorite vids on this channel. I want so badly to see more videos in that style that deep dive and analyze each piece and option for a strategy. Yu-Gi-Oh needs more of that
It's a shame Joshua poisoned the well on Mathmech. Now the only thing you ever see being discussed around the deck is how obscenely broken Circular is and how everyone should hate it and how terrible for card design it is and blah blah blah. No one actually tries to evaluate what the deck really does. They just parrot a meme, say RIP bozo, and move on to the next comments section.
Just wanted to say that I think you're spot on in your evaluation about how we talk about Yugioh. At the end of the day I want us to be able to have more quality conversations about the competitive game in our community, and right now those kinds of conversations are so scattered and isolated in pockets. And while there are many things Konami needs to do in order to make the game feel more accessible, I think the lack of quality competitive discussion also contributes to that issue. It feels to me like a lot of the times the community-wide conversations are either memes or gripes and I just want to talk about something else... ANYTHING else for a change.
In any case it was a great video MBT, looking forward to the next one as always! :)
hex lex my GOAT
I can't wait til you speak on this too. This was a good video. Lots of solid points.
We need a hex & mbt collab
i literally have more fun and learn more from talking to my polycule abt ygo (they play once a month and are not very good) than trying to engage online has ever gotten me. Trying to get competitive is a frustrating experience right now.
we love hex lex
Cimo published an interview with Johnny Li and I think every competitive yugioh player should watch it. It breaks down card roles beautifully and massively teaches you how to deck build off of those card roles.
There was one interview forever ago (it might be the one you are talking about) definitely improved my deck building but causes a rift with other people who look at my deck.
Putting all of the "searchers" together and separating them from "garnets", "starters", "extenders", etc. A lot of people just put monsters in lowest level to highest level, and/or archetype cards together so they think my deck looks like a mess when I lay it out.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 I don’t think there’s a problem with sorting your deck either way but you should definitely build it with the philosophy of that 2 hour video. Doesn’t matter what other people think, as long as you know your cards roles and how consistent/powerful it makes the deck who cares how the cards are sorted
I'm surprised the "personality" part didn't cover how more yu-gi-oh players are just the type of people to find it difficult to get their thoughts on a deck/card/format across in a more calm and logical way.
This isn't a "yu-gi-tubers of the last 5 years problem". This is a cultural problem. Yu-gi-oh has a reputation for its players to be loud, brash and generally a bit "inner-city-kid-esque". Compared to the average MTG player, who is usually older and tend to be from more middle-class backgrounds.
Not saying one is better than the other. But, from my years of interactions with both playerbases, they are fundamentally two different groups of people, and I encountered a lot of yu-gi-oh conversations that boiled down to something like "Yo! Rescue Rabbit got banned? GOOD! F*ck that noise! I hated it!"
I think the issue is actually twofold:
As you alluded to towards the end, there are players who are cognitive of these things and can articulate it, but instead use that knowledge for themselves only. You have even mentioned before how pro players in Yugioh used to just give out patently wrong information on purpose to throw other players off and sure up their own wins.
Secondly, even when the format has been "solved" and the best decks are known, it has usually been in those times players running something different from the normal builds of those decks that has made the difference. That is where the meme of "spicy tech" originated from, and in a game with so much hidden information and assumption, having these variances in your deck and your opponent assuming the standard, gives you a significant competitive edge.
Honestly, it is a lot more complex than what can be fit into a UA-cam comment, but overall I think those are the main reasons why there is not more of that content. There are thousands of cards in this game that are legal for play. No one is going to be an expert at them all, with every single playstyle and strategy. Heck, retro formats have shown us that many formats where not "solved" in the first place as there is just far too little information and time (and players actually working at it) to solve them. And, much like retro formats in Pokémon video games, they may never truly be solvable, as when a new strategy emerges that was not thought of at the time and the meta adapts around it, then new strategies form to counter those assumptions as well. To not specialize in a particular deck or playstyle is asking a lot from most players, given the nature of Yu-Gi-Oh! and how many cards are legal, let alone asking them to give up their advantage to help others, and so you end up with something you mentioned in another video: groups of people making up what they think the meta will be and playtesting based on those assumptions with each other, with those groups not having any crossover whatsoever.
From a competitive perspective there is absolutely no incentive to disclose information. Fenrir search scare kash in mannadium for example was the only way to ever play the deck and I had told Trif about it since before the cards even came out, but was not picked up on until after it topped.
Do you have examples of pro players giving false info? Not doubting you, just curious.
@@EuroMIX2 Iirc there was a case of this back in 2013 or 2014 with Sylvans, where pros were saying that Mermail was the only real deck to play and then these same pros brought Sylvan combo decks to the next big event and trounced them. I believe I heard this in the Sylvan episode of History of Yugioh, and I'm not 100% certain how true it is.
@@maxmaus4402 MBT cited this in a stream one time when talking about Road to the King (basically the only resource actually writing out the type of content MBT is talking about).
A really good example in Pokemon is how Moltres is now OU in the RBY meta where before people would say it's NU.
Competitive YGO content has been honestly pretty baffling to me. If I see an MTG video about a deck, I will find a link to a deck building website and often times if this is a thorough deck builder, they will include a written primer to the deck and both the list as well as the primer will be updated as they go. YGO on the other hand has about a billion deck tech videos where people present their list in real life, which makes it a lot harder to parse to begin with unless you know the cards, and MAYBE add some context to their card picks. 9 times out of 10 there is no link to any deck building website, and even if there were, you would most likely not find a primer, let alone a brief description.
In a way this is kinda charming how scuffed this all is, but since I'm used to a way more streamlined kind of competitive card game content, I'm surprised that people even get good at this game. There seems to be an incredibly small amount of knowledge sharing between players. Not that it doesn't exist, but it's incredibly cumbersome to parse or you have to go out of your way to even find it rather than it being the default. At least that's my experience, I'm totally ready to be told I'm just not looking in the right places.
Yeah its honestly why I don't feel encouraged to learn new decks as much. It's just huge paragraphs of text that doesn't teach me how to use the deck and just list the cards ability. MTG is pretty easy to look at a deck someone posted with 1 paragraph and I can instantly say "Oh sweet I can instantly understand why this deck works."
Nono, you are correct on this.
You could argue that modern formats like GOAT and Edison are comparable to some of the Magic formats. In that place, you know as well as I do that the list is set but the meta is dynamic. I understand your complaints with YGO (as I'm a bigger fan of Rush Duels nowadays), but still. There is a special place in my heart for unplayable messes that become broken in certain situations. I played Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Pokemon TCG (if you love casual coin flips lol) and I have to say that there is an insane amount of creativity in the YGO community compared to other tcgs
Ngl, I feel like very few people actually get good because of any resources and are entirely dependent on the local/discord community they happen to be in. Don't know how prevalent coaching is in mtg, but I feel like everyone in yugioh is trying to push people towards their streams and coaching sessions instead of sharing knowledge and improving the community. I follow Chinese ocg videos a tiny bit, and while both upload frequency and production quality are severely lacking, the pure passion is something else. You don't get 30min videos of a random guy talking about banlist implications with a pen and paper.
Part of the problem is that Yu-Gi-Oh players watching those videos complain about that stuff.
You have to keep in mind that the Yu-Gi-Oh community on UA-cam comes from the abridged dub, memelords, and gimmick strategies. Rata explained it in one of his videos where he talks about how people will complain if he goes into detail about specific combos, interactions, and ratios, which is why he keeps it to a minimum with a joke-filled description of the card, a brief explanation as to why it's good/bad, then a conclusion of "Don't run this," or "Run 1-2 copies," or "You need to run 3 in this deck."
Deck primers dont have to be complicated. Sajam managed to do 2 minute intro primers on fighting game characters by simplifying it down to "Here's your basic gameplan, Here's your 2-3 options once you establish advantage, here's what your opponents are likely to try when you do your thing."
Also, 2 minutes of playing Kashtira taught me more about the deck than two months of people talking about Kashtira.
Ah yes the false equivalence anecdote what ever would we do without you
@@chevoyingram9589 Just press your buttons but your buttons are paragraph long cards with way more lines than an fgc combo.
The mentality of most players I find tends to be centered around knowing what specific individual cards do, rather than what the deck does in unison, which is, admittedly, probably due to the fact that at any given time there are over 10 thousand cards legal. This itself can often lead to a lack of legitimate and valuable commentary on any given deck, format, or the game as a whole really. In recent memory the two instances that standout to me are the discussions around the Tear mirrors, and the Kashtira zonelocking. Conversations would quickly devolve into posting that one edit of the Tear mirror as a legitimate attempt at a gotcha moment because most players that only have a one way relationship with the competitive side of the game might not know that it was, in fact, an edit. The same happened with the widespread belief that every Kashtira duel would end with a full zonelock every time because it happened a handful of times (not to say that Kashtira is or was healthy for the game, just that there was a lot of misinformation about the consistency of the lock). We try to dumb down an incredibly complicated game into one or two paragraphs and it always just ends in discussions that have no real substance to them.
Completely agree, how many times do you hear "Mannadium is the King Calamity deck" vs any actual discussion of what it does to get there. It also leads to weird things like IKEA Labyrinth being a big innovation to Labyrinth by... playing the other Labyrinth archetype cards.
Not for nothing, but I think a big issue with the evaluation problem is the cards themselves. A modern yugioh card, in isolation, is a wholly nonsensical pile of references, particularly when compared to (to use your example) a Magic the Gathering card. Even if you don't yet have a firm grasp on the ins and outs of what an actual game plays out like, a Fury or a Ravenous Chupacabra is something you can grok if you'd ever played any game before. 'I get this unit and it can kill opposing units. Great.'
Even something as common as a Mathmech Circular comes with a lot of baggage about what is happening in the game that is not intuitive to a player taking their first steps from finding a list they like online into being able to evaluate cards on their own. Even an enfranchised player might still make a lot of incorrect assumptions about the precise way Circular does what it does, which portion of the text is a cost, what the "if" means, what have you. Take that problem and project it onto any number of currectly-legal or soon-to-be-printed cards with effects far more noodley, specific, or verbose and you can start to see that even though 90% of playable cards truly just search, dump, or put a guy on the board they're still a lot more convoluted to tease out a use-case for. Even if I don't know how much toughness is prevalent in the format, I can guess that Fury is gonna be pretty good against 1 toughness guys, sight unseen, and then I can start to work out what other things would be good with it. The barrier to that is much higher when each card comes with 3 to 4 other cards implicitly stapled to them via archetypal synergy or names before they even enter the card pool.
A common refrain is that constant "more than 10000 legal cards" but last I checked the modern format for MTG has over 15k legal cards in it. Legacy has more still. Raw card quantity is not necessarily the barrier to understanding, especially when a huge portion of both examples is "2/2 with no text" or "Dark Impus of the Grandark," a 5 star Insect monster with 1200 attack from the Bush administration. On the other side of that is a much small pool of cards that are even in competitive contention that themselves have the potential to synergize some obscure card from when all of our skulls were still soft and bring it into the conversation. That is not wholly unreasonable. Overall though, when every card has had to compete with every other card for deck space over the last 2 decades, you get the difference between a Cyber Dragon and Circular, or the difference between a Flametongue Kavu and a Fury. Not to tip my hand too much, but blanket eternal legality is a root cause of the two divergent strains of powercreep.
To continue with the magic comparison you drew, part of it rests on Konami's shoulders for how awful they are at communicating. I think Patrick Sullivan talking about ban announcements on his podcast is really cogent here, where he discusses the gap between the recent bans in modern and pauper on the grounds of how they were communicated. He argues that no matter what someone is going to be mad at you, because you banned someone's favorite card, you banned literally hundreds of dollars out of someone's collection, or because you got it wrong and failed to fix the problem. The goal, then, is messaging-- communicating that you not only have an understanding of the ecosystem you're disturbing, but that you've considered all of the alternatives, and that you are sensitive to the investment, both financial and emotional, of your playerbase. He felt that, while the Modern banlist team failed to be rhetorically convincing and came across as misguided, the video produced for a single ban in Pauper managed to convey understanding, passion, a careful hand, and a genuine desire to put the game in a better place while not disturbing the core traits of the format.
Konami has never done that. On the occasions when they have given banlist explanations their choices and reasoning were so off-base and out of touch that rather than setting a tone for signaling moving forward, they just reinforced the player sentiment that they are inept at managing their own game. Besides that, we have, what, a guy on the Pojo forums arguing with people and saying "Hope is a girl's name"? MD ban announcements that we have to do close readings of to tease out what their desired game experience is? What other takeaway of how to talk about the game are players supposed to get other than "don't take this shit seriously, even they don't care"? They treat the game like a kusoge, so the community is like that of a kusoge.
Yeah I do think that MBT and other content creators calling decks that aren't meta viable or otherwise bad "completely unplayable" and other hyperbolic terms does contribute to this issue. A lot of the time when seeing reactions to new cards it can seem like a card is either "cracked broken you win the game" or "completely unplayable dogwater" with little to no in-between
I remember long time ago during the early Zexal era, I was watching Cimo's meta analysis that he used to do a lot. He'd just straight up call like every card except the very best deck and the few cards they use really really bad. It triggered me specifically, because Six Sams was still kinda viable at the time, and Cimo wouldn't even tier it saying it's just trash now, without saying why exactly. It was still decently strong as a rank 4 spam engine and summoned the Naturia synchros, which were basically FTKs back in the days. Well, it basically won a YCS right after, and I felt a bit vindicated. To be fair, I saw the winner's deck profile, and frankly, I thought it sucked. He didn't really touch on the more interesting aspect of Six Sams, instead talked about how good Asceticism was while talking about basic Asceticism chain that everybody already knew. I saw the finals, and he just drew the limited Gateway like 2 out of 3 duels and won off the infinite loop, which he didn't even talk about in his deck profile.
The point was, I was tired of Cimo's commentary I think, for the very reason MBT described here. I unsubscribed and didn't resubscribe til I saw his masochism MD series, which I thought was fun enough. I just don't want to hear people say a card is bad and just end the sentence there, ever again.
And yes, he even lampshaded that he (and other creators) were a part of the issue. But the audience parroting their words and not forming their own opinion also didn't help.
this a thousand times, content creators are so fcking negative is downright depressing at times
Konami releases a card that has niche use
Yugituber: Peepeepoopoo bad how is this supposed to be meta! We need better cards!
Konami releases over tuned card: OMG WHY KONAMI BAN THIS CARD ALREADY.
I don't know why this happens but there is no in-between when it comes to card reveals. Is it because the clickbait os too good not to use?
People give influencers too much credit in this community
I feel like I would be so much more into yugioh if some people sat down and put in the same effort into researching and explaining how much engine vs non-engine it makes sense to play and what the specific statistical drawbacks and advantages are to changing that percentage, what the hit to consistency actually is when inserting garnets into your deck, etc. that magic the gathering people did to the mana curve.
That data exists but it's sporadic across the Internet and not all related to specifically Yu-Gi-Oh but card games as a whole. Imo what most players miss from being a semi competent player to a potentially great player is practice. The amount of people who go to locals but don't know lines or even have a basic understanding of rulings for their specific deck is crazy.
Jesse Kotton has a video that goes over a lot of the math behind ratios like explaining why 3 desires is optimal, why 5 normal summons is usually optimal, stuff like that. I forget what he called it, something clickbaity about heart of the cards iirc. I think it was supposed to be part of a series but idk if he did more
@@AndrewCrimefighter I recently watched that vid. The title was "The Heart Of The Cards is a Load of Rubbish! How to Improve at Yugioh #1"
Me: Man this video has a Tolarian Academy vibe to it.
MBT: Starts talking about MTG.
MANY Yugioh players ask: is my deck good?
Are we gonna see MBT opinion articles anytime soon?
I find some of the Master Duel Meta guides grope towards this more calm discussion of cards, but they don't really get all the way there yet. At the very least, they explain the combos.
A friend on mine explained deck building in yugioh to me like this
12-18 combo starters
12-15 hand trap/board breakers
Rest combo tools/tech
Extra deck is combo piecesa and boss monsters
Side deck is anti meta hand traps/board breakers
To be fair, there's almost no incentive or reward for the MDM guide writers to actually put in the work, bless their hearts. Have you seen the comments on that website? Not to say everyone needs to have a huge audience, but MBT is right that a lot of the feedback is just "Pend best deck".
Too true, too true.
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock.
It will never not be funny to me that the main reason, imo, we get no insight into why Konami makes the banlist the way they do is because they tried doing it once, were mocked ruthlessly because their reasons were bad, and have never done it again. I mean they tried in duel links even if the reasoning was bog standard things like “we feel this card is fine for the power level of the format” and “we have limited this card to reduce the power of this deck”.
Like of course your takes we’re going to get slammed. EVERYONES TAKES ARE!! It’s the point. The only difference is that konamis takes are actually enforcable.
they also chose the worst list possible for it, where the only real reason was greed. The format was choked by three decks and the banlist hit two different decks that were doing nothing. Vanguard owes part of it's success to that list
They couldn't stand by their decisions even in the face of massive backlash. If they are easily bullied, they shouldn't be in a gaming business.
@@joplin4434 I'll be more charitable and say that was a poor rationalization for the terrible shared banlists with the OCG they did at the time.
Not much to talk about when the reason is money...also the community should have expectations for a good reasoning coming from a multibillion company managing their game. So very rightfully slammed back in the day cause their reasoning was horrendous.
You mentioned Magic: The Gathering and the Twitch chat in my brain that shows up whenever I watch your videos without the chat on screen was suddenly filled with scatter emotes
Personally I always analyze new cards almost subconsciously, but that may be because I just love making Custom Cards and Custom Archetypes, so a lot of times I analyze them in term of design rather than use and power level.
And when I do, is almost always on the lens of "And how can I use this in Zombies?"
Like, no joke, my first reaction when Vaalmonica was revealed was "Oh, they discard to complete their scales, can be use to Pend Summon your multiple Level 4s that get stuck on hand and the self damage enables Ghost Fusion"
So basically you'll be asking how would a MathMech card would work in a zombie deck?
I get this lmao. A few years ago I was really into making custom cards for a while and I actually learnt a lot from it. I'd now have a pretty good understanding of PSCT, card design and like you said what makes cards and decks good or not. At least way better than I did before despite having been playing on and off since 2005.
@@nickypool415 Kinda, but sometimes the answer to the question "How can Zombies benefit from this?" is "They can't, next"
Well there's also that very often it's impossible to actively look at cards in a vacuum because of how oriented the game became about archetypes and combos. You can't talk about Circular as being good without also talking about what card it dumps, what card it searches, and what card you make with it. I seem to recall when they were first announced that there were at least a few people saying R-ACE was pack filler for instance because in order to actually understand what the deck is you need to conceptualize getting out Turbulence and setting 4 backrow which requires analyzing not just Turbulence (although a free +4 is pretty obviously ridiculous) but also the 4 backrow cards you're going to set and ideally ALSO the in-archetype ways to get out Turbulence.
I actually really liked this video for multiple reasons, but I think my favorite part was the explanation at 4:49-5:07. I feel that is completely true and is most assuredly why I'm far better at gauging a magic card's value/viability over a Yugioh card. And to touch on the allergic to non engine part, I think that just comes down to weird archetypal quirks that you have to build AROUND rather than WITH. In magic you're like "I'm in blue that means I get counterspell/card draw/flicker etc". In Yugioh its like playing with all the colors but each game piece limits you on what color you're playing for the turn. Its this weird top down vs bottom up approach to deck building that I just cant seem to wrap my head around. Overall 10/10 video I hope this gets some attention by the competitive players in the community. I'd love to learn how to improve at the game that isnt "slam 3 maxx c , 3 ash , and 3 imperm into every deck"
7:15 The problem with pokemon is also that the message of the marketing and the story-telling with the games themselves is all about using whatever pokemon you like the most and that any pokemon can be great. The meta game and main game of pokemon are diametrically opposed in their ideology.
To your third (and first) point I think because a decks play-style is based around one of a thousand archetypes rather than a few colors, if an archetype is unviable there’s no need to learn what it does; and when you’re favorite archetype becomes obsolete you don’t want to pay several hundred dollars to buy an archetype you may or may not like.
I will say one thing completely unrelated, cuz I know Joseph has been talking about diversifying content over on Twitch, it's this Joseph. This is what I want. I could have listened to another 6 and a half hours of that while sorting through bulk and been utterly content. This is a great video. Thank you for posting this video.
I eagerly await the day MBT drops a depression fueled 7 hour video essay on why Circular should smooch Multiplication
"Why is this such a problem??"
*continues to contribute to problem*
If I had a cent for each video released today by a yugituber talking about how players need a better vocabulary to talk about the game, I would have two cents (see Hardleg). Which isn't a lot, but is weird that it happened twice.
It's always what we need to do, but rarely content creators saying they are part of the problem, too.
@@spicymemes7458usually the content creators also happen to play the game so it includes them. And if you watched this video MBT says at least twice he is part of the problem. Now the question is, what are the steps to get better at what they are talking, and, does it even matter for most of the players/audience?
BTW, it matters to me quite a bit, but my gut feeling is a lot of people don't care. I think it matters because I would like to see players be better at deck building, or at least be able to netdeck better decks, because there is a lot of crap out there.
After a 10 year hiatus MD got me back into the game. I began reading _every single card_ I opened from booster packs and after a good week I was mentally exhausted.
Once I got back into the swing of things my card analysis abilities improved, but I still actively choose to ignore reading certain cards for my own brain capacity and sanity. At this point I netdeck and run some duels to understand ratios and why some cards are excluded before mixing things up.
This is all to say a limited format world solve a lot of this... though I'm still partial to "spicy tech".
Honestly, that's my favorite part of YGO. Analyzing cards and seeing how they fit into decks is one of my favorite things to do, not just in deckbuilding, but in general. It's crazy to me how many people just netdeck and end it there.
I agree. Net decking is fine, like it isn’t an unforgivable sin or anything, but if you just netdeck whatever deck you’re trying to play, you’re shorting yourself. It’s funny how people netdeck as if they have absolutely nothing they can add or change about the deck that might make it better in general or against specific matchups.
It’s like, every deck profile has accesscode and it isn’t even the optimal Choice, it’s just a “generic staple boss monster that can help clear a board” even though they play 3-4 link monsters max that are all dark attribute. There are other, probably better options to put in that slot
I netdeck alot but I always end up changing a few cards here and there because I think it makes the deck better, it is definitely crazy ppl just take the deck as is without modifying it all, you never really learn anything that way
Because we all got yelled at for saying Fizzle
Oh Ryan Davis. I miss you
I do say that youtubers may be part of the problem.
Remember that one guy that said that people can legally cheat? Dkayed.
Yeah, dude was a big name in duel links before he switched to master duel and started shitting on the hand that feed him.
A lot of shit he said, which was either incorrect, or taken incorrectly, ended up affecting the game.
There was this 1 deck that used coin tosses, despacito, which used desperado barrel dragon with the skill "master of destiny", said skill makes the first 3 of *YOUR* coin tosses be heads if requirements are met.
Said deck had this 1 continuos trap, headjudging, when the opponent activates a monster effect, *the opponent* calls and tosses a coin, if they are correct, the trap is destroyed, if they are wrong, negate the effect and switch the control of his monster to you.
Said trap was added to the game at start of 2020, f2p trap, anyone could use it, but was dubbed a "trash card" and wasnt used at all.
Long story short, at tail end of said year he lost once specifically to that trap and made a video -bitching- ranting about coin toss and that trap.
After that, everyone and their grandmother started running that trap as some "mystical staple forgotten by time", or as i like to call it: "the format i got many easy wins because people were running this 50/50 card over actual good staples".
Turns out that his ranting got that card hit in a ban list, and most of the arguments about "how op" that card was came from the opinions of his fans.
Now, before i talk about those opinions, remember the 2 points i made early in bold? How master of destiny works for *your coin tosses* , and the trap makes *the opponent* call and toss a coin...
Yeah... Their opinion was that "master of destiny" made the card op because "all the coin tosses were heads".
Like... "Master of destiny DOESNT WORK ON THAT TRAP" was something those morons couldnt understand, they couldnt even grasp how: "IF THE SKILL WORKED ON THAT CARD YOU CAN STILL JUST CALL HEADS AND WIN THE COIN TOSS".
Like, fr, i know some of the stuff his fans says isnt the fault of that idiot (dkayed), but man, he did nothing to correct them.
And the worst is, that was only one of the times where he used his influence to fuck over the game.
My favorite skill, what grows in the graveyard (starts with a dark verge in the gy), was hit because he though a rank 3 turbo was op... When we only had wind up zen maity and grenosauros as the best targets for that deck... The deck he used as an example wasnt even popular or tiered, not even rogue! But his word alone got those drones of his speaking about how the skill needed a nerf, and he got what he wanted.
Rikka being released also contributed to that, but even with the skill rikka was a super floop in dl.
Lmao, convincing a significant amount of people that head judging is a powerful card is hilarious in a sad way
The problem is that we have to compare with the other head/tail options because most were terrible... But even then the card loses to Raigeki (Time wizard) and Kuriboh (The only arcana monster in an arcana deck. Never summoned btw). It has awful playpatterns, BUT is not really deserving of a banlist.
This very sentiment was why a while back when Jesse Kotton was soliciting video ideas on Twitter, I suggested breaking down why and how to play format staples well. As a relative outsider who really enjoys content about the game but is intimidated to start playing for real, knowledge of the how to play, why to play, and interactions between the pieces of a format, would really help me dive further into enjoyment of this hobby.
I think that this is a real problem. I think there are multiple factors that play into what is being said. Firstly, in the past, professional players have been more than willing to intentionally spread misinformation about a format. We've seen this when people thought Mermail was a top strategy, propagated by professional players, only to have Sylvans clean sweep tournaments. While this issue has gotten better, more players are more forthcoming with their information, and most of them have even taken up the mantle of being a competitive voice in the sphere, like Jesse Kotton, Pak, and Joshua, there's still a lot of professional players that do withhold information that could be invaluable to an ever-growing meta game. There's also a lack of discussion on what constitutes the ratios people play, why they even play certain cards, or their thought process of picking up a deck in the first place. Again, the community has gotten a little better at this, but it's far from ever being worth noting in the grand scheme of things.
Secondly, there is simply not enough time or events to perpetuate a more flushed out metagame. With ban lists appearing pretty frequently, or the community getting bored with a format a couple of months in, not a lot of testing can be done before players move on, or the format drastically shifts. Also, the amount of new cards being pumped into the card game at any given time also contributes to this issue. The average core set has like, 100 plus cards, side sets like Valiant Smashers, has an additional 40-50 new cards, structure decks can have new cards, reprint sets can have new cards in them, etc. Magic, to my knowledge, is experiencing a similar gripe, with products being more common and less interspersed throughout the year. New products will bog down and rapidly change formats at a moments notice. The lack of events also makes it hard to solve a format, as well. Even if ban lists were more spread out, the lack of events ensures that a format is doomed to be unsolved. The more people that have access to YCS or even Regional level events, the more information that will be readily available. Also, Konami doesn't do a very good job, at least in the western hemisphere, at reporting deck lists, techs, and individual players and why they topped. The EU is definitely better at doing this.
Thirdly, the casual and competitive spaces are constantly at odds with each other. On one hand, there's a ton of vitriol from casual players in regards to topping decks, and whether it takes skill to top with a deck that everyone else is playing. Conversely, competitive players can be pretty vitriolic towards lesser experienced players in a similar sense. Why should they take Blue-Eyes seriously when Tearlament blows them out of the water, etc. In the same vain, why should casual players take Fire King seriously when its the same build as the next guy with almost no variation, etc. I think this is less of a problem than the other two, but still worth mentioning.
Fourthly, competitive content can be extremely dry. Unless the person has a pretty decent personality, or is generally an entertaining person, most players will tune out competitive discussions and breakdowns. They're also not popular enough to be worth it for the individual making the content.
Fifthly, the OCG is a far more accessible card game there than it is here. With engines ranging in the $400 price range, to individual cards being $50-100, it's really hard to test in person since those cards are expensive. They also seem to take cards more seriously, and test with the majority of them, which is why you'll see lists from the OCG play single or double copies of a random card you've never heard of.
We actually have a pretty sweet position when it comes to testing individual cards in a one format game, at least here in the TCG. We know when sets and cards come out months in advance. We can, though some choose not to, sift through cards much easier than the OCG or probably any other card game, we just opt to not do so because, it's not relevant to the current format. Not only that, we can have actual tournament results with new cards before they're actually released. We can see several months in advance why Fire King and Rescue-ACE are good decks. Sure, we're separated by different ban lists, but usually, the format there is typically the same one here, with some minor variance.
This is why I stay subscribed to you MBT. You’ve inspired me to care about this game again, and I’m just a filthy casual.
I hope people realize how important this video and the discussion it brings up is to the game as whole. I haven't really played the game since 2023 started and have recently quit the game due to the direction it has taken ever since, but I still have some stuff to say about this situation:
(and yes, I made a very similar comment on farfa's reaction)
I always thought that the fact that you can pick up a deck you like, learn it and not have to know the whole meta in order to have fun is not only a good thing for the game but also a gateway to facilitate the new player experience. When I joined the game back in 2012, I picked up a deck that I thought looked cool and went with it, then, after quitting during 2017, when I came back to the game in 2019 I picked up cyber dragon OTK and Orcust because I thought the decks looked cool and went with it. But I never connected the dots to realize that if you don't eventually move on from that "starter deck" you chose, you're also refusing to educate yourself on what the meta is and how the game functions, and on a game that has been historically built on competitive and semi-competitive play that becomes a huge issue. I always thought that moving on from your initial deck pick was natural move for everyone in all card games, but I guess the overwhelming amount of variety in yugioh paired with the lack of actually good competitive and semi-competive content, especially after the release of Master Duel, makes ygo's case a little different.
Personally, I think that content creators are the ones that have the most power to change something like this, and, even though I don't play the game anymore, I'd love to see that change in content happen, and if does happen, it will definitely get a lot of players that have recently quit (and when you look at the numbers, that is a LOT of players) back into the game (myself included), even if it happens slowly. Not only that, but it'll probably make it so that the community is able to build a better relationship with Konami, which would both produce more educated feedback from the community and a Konami that is more willing to communicate and listen to feedback.
I just wanted to point out I find the dissonance between "Staying by your chosen deck is a virtue" here, and the "Yugioh players swap their deck like underwear so none of them know how it really plays" from (I think) the last of these videos amusing.
Honestly a good exercise to learn more about YGO is to pick a boss monster you like, and then just from scratch create a combo to summon it. If you like a level 8 Synchro monster for example, step 1 would be picking a tuner to use. Then you pick a monster to go with that tuner. Then you figure out how to get both of them on the board, etc. It doesn't matter how good the combo is in the end, as long as it gets the monster on the board, because the main purpose is to get an understanding of how YGO actually works.
Another good thing to do is playing other games. Creating a deck in YGO, that makes proper use of the game's mechanical interactions, is very similar to what you do in many other build centric games, most notably RPGs. Think about the complex and gimmicky builds people make in games like say Path of Exile. There is a lot of overlap in RPG videogames and YGO that you wouldn't necessarily recognize until you pay attention to it.
Agreed, optimizing a YGO deck really has the same vibe to me as making gimmicky stuff work in Battletech or League. You're always one innovation away from an absolute breakthrough. When you hit that breakthrough, it's either revolutionary or just good enough to keep up with the existing meta, and either way it feels great.
Your method has basically been my thought process trying to break Shiranui for the last year or so. Using Smith for a synchro play is theoretically insane going first since it searches the newest Ghost Meets Girl, and I've spent far too long trying to find methods to enable this without running more than one Smith. Right now I'm at something like 10 2-3 card combos that do it, and it's still kinda terrible in the grand scheme of things but it's given me a ton more insight into my favorite deck of all time.
I don't agree all that much. At the very least I can't make a competitive deck well in the slightest. Despite making tons of "turbo" or "wacky" decks for fun.
Making a Cracking Dragon turbo deck didn't get me closer to understanding ratios for a protect the tower deck. Nor did having to make a nerfed version of Six Sam that is competitive with a scuffed Blue Eyes list, make me understand combo ratios. And building + testing every variant of Guru control that I can get my hands on (Thunder Dragon, Madolche, Token Collector, Amazement, Dogmatika, Vernusylph, Rainbow Neos, Eldlich, Dragoon, floodgate stun, normal trap control, and combinations of any of these) lead to me understanding proper control deck ratios.
Just building decks doesn't teach you much on competitive deck building. Not having a results-based mindset goes a long way (removing cards even if you won a few games because of them), having a dedicated group of other competitive players is super important, having an education in math (a lot of high-level players have engineering degrees), and just building + testing with a mindset critical of every choice. Is probably the way to get good at competitive deck building.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 Well it's not about making a competitive deck, it's about understanding cards. When you're talking about ration and whatnot, that's basically the next step.
When you design combos the most important part is that you're reading cards and thinking about what the words mean. Most people don't read their cards very well, as they have ready made decks of which they only need to get the gist. This is why they don't understand the cards they play, and therefore cannot talk about them accurately.
It's an exercise in understanding the fundamentals of the game's mechanics, not actual competitive deck building.
@@DaShikuXIits honestly mind boggling how there is so many who dont actually understand the fundamentals of the mechanics theyre utilizing and is soemthing that definitely needs to be corrected considering ive seen someone complained about things like material less fusions (runick) or xyz summoning synchro monster (tzolkin and bishbaalkin) of all things making it very clear said person is just parading around a preemptive assumption
I know I’ll sound like a massive simp, but I want to emphasize how in this problem, Joshua Schmidt is such a great public face. He’s a massive personality that people listen to, but he’s especially skilled at the game and understands how cards interact well. He also actively does lots to educate the yugioh community. For a good while now he’s been streaming his testing of every new meta deck and sharing his thought process. This gives a much wider perspective on the whole format from a professional competitive angle. There was a time when he dedicated several hours to demonstrating Rikka Sunavalon just to educate his chat and especially the EU players among them so that they would know how to deal with Jessica Robinson
My issue is that it's very slanted toward the competitive community. The fact that so many hang on his every word creates a more hostile space for all of us.
8:40 when I played Vanguard (before the 2nd reboot) a friend of mine once said almost the exact same thing and following that philosophy has affected and carried over to yugioh and is honestly such a useful thing to have in the back of your head
Trying to learn Yugioh feels exactly like trying to learn a fighting game with no quality written resources. You're kind of just stuck operating on vibe and watching what other people do which can send you down massive red herrings because nobody is definitively explaining what the game or deck you're playing even is.
I think its also a matter of the venue for the discussion itself. How many people communicate on twitter or large discord servers where you have to type your opinion in a limited window, either because of text limit, or due to wanting to post before the discussion moves on. I think in the case of the YGOrg opinion piece its also a matter of the venue doing the opinion piece a disservice. People aren't expecting their opinions from the place where they get news or rulings, and think its more egregious than it is because its not as technical as the things they usually expect from the site itself.
Jason Grabher-Myer’s articles were the peak of discussing cards. Part of me died when he stopped publishing his set reviews. I still go back to his old reviews just because the discussion was robust and enjoyable.
Overall I just miss the era of written Yu-Gi-Oh content being so robust thanks to tcgplayer and even ARG
I remember JGM. Damn shame.
I feel like a lot of it comes from good players not wanting to tell people how to counter them effectively on top of bad players just getting frustrated when their gameplan doesnt work out and not figuring out what would work better/how to play around these outs better. I frequently try to discuss my games at locals afterwards about what i think they could have done better and ask what their thought process was in making certain plays/actions. You will not get better at yugioh and the game will suck if you dont help other people get better.
The MTG comparison falls flat in my opinion. Yugioh cards are hard to evaluate because you can't evaluate them on a card-by-card basis like MTG where each card does a very limited, but usually powerful effect on its own.
For example:
A "quick effect omni-negate" is usually a single card from hand for a cost that is often telegraphed in MTG. You evaluated them based on their cost and other attached utility in the context of the format.
In yugioh a single omni can take a myriad of forms, from extra deck monsters generic or otherwise, to counter traps and graveyard effects.
All of which usually require a branching path of combo lines to get to. All of the combo lines can involve any 1-10+ cards from a selection of 13k+. The different decks having different levels of difficulty making them etc. etc.
You can still attempt to make an evaluation, but it's never going to reach the level of objectivity that you can with an MTG card.
Why was Hot Red Dragon Archfiend King Calamity only recently banned when the card itself never changed?
I feel like yugioh as a game just can't be evaluated like that. You can pretend to and succeed to an extent, but you have to limit the scope of of the evaluation to even make an attempt.
It's a similar argument to what many yugitubers made before about the possibility of there being a ton of decks that could be meta contenders, but there is just not enough brain power put towards exploring them.
I think the King Calamity example kinda misses the mark because that becomes a matter of what changes in the metagame via new releases and the same happens in Magic as well. Mycosynth Lattice in Modern being the best example to compare to, a 6 mana do nothing artifact that went from casual jank in EDH to an oppressive and unfun piece of multiple of the strongest formats up to even deserving a ban in one.
@@DualSwordBesken It serves as an example for how in yugioh a cards need to be evaluated in a different way entirely compared to magic cards.
Maybe I shouldn't have used it, fair.
@@TemporalDelusion I do agree that the evaluation skills are different to a degree. The example choice just seemed like an awkward one. Maybe Ursarctic Radiation would have been a possible example given a basically draw 7 on paper sounds good but you'd need to understand the inherent weaknesses that you have to subject yourself to just to play it, which is a different skill than evaluating why Overflowing Insight is bad despite also reading "draw 7".
That said, I don't think the evaluation skills are completely different and the main overlap falls into the generic cards available in Yu-Gi-Oh. Evaluating why Dark Hole is only fringe playable in a given meta will use similar skills to evaluating why Supreme Verdict is weak in a meta.
I also feel that the initial statement undervalues cards that need to be evaluated in the context of a combo in Magic. Colossus Hammer or Amulet of Vigor are cards that looked at individually don't read as good cards. A 1 drop that costs 8 to equip with only a stat boost upside or a "do nothing" that makes things come in untapped both read like casual jank, add 1 card to each (Sigarda's Aid and Ravnica bounce lands respectively) and you can see something but without the extra combo pieces that they require you aren't going to see that they are core pieces of tier 1 decks.
Part of the reason is that the game is far too complex for its own good and has too much old baggage due to not having any form of curated format. The only time you can really sit down and fully evaluate a card is in simpler past formats that aren't going to be changing next week when a new set drops.
I remember when I was forced to do card evaluation way back while I was playing the tag force series with no one else to talk about it. I guess you can tell how well that went when I built my deck around the Pyramid of Light thinking it was the best thing available in there. And there was no bias involved because I had never watched the movie yet.
I genuinely love these highly edited discussion videos.
Yeah, as a relatively new player it's really noticable how evaluating and understanding cards and the wider game environment is a skill that isn't really demanded or rewarded in new players. Just pick the best-looking lists you can afford and mash them together like you're making your dolls kiss, then dive in to some ladder games. I love the resources out there that try to dig into that a bit more - Hardleg's video series is a good example - but with no officially supported limited formats it's just something that you have to do for your own entertainment and hope one day you'll pick up enough critical skill to make a difference.
I mean one other factor I will mention is just the complexity of decks and archetypes makes it hard to get a massive depth in knowledge for multiple decks. I can look at a top 16 of magic read the general strategy of the deck (i.e. aggro, combo, mid range, control) and though on a quick glance I may not be able to tell you all the reasons why the player selected X over Y it is clear how X helps accomplish the goal of the deck with a few odd ball cards that stick out. In comparison for yugioh to learn insert top 16 requires a far greater amount of understanding of each archetype to be able to analyze past saying oh this player selected this hand trap for this match up. I also think the notion of believing in your deck is partially due to the complexity of many strategies as well but also it was mentioned in a prior talk that people too readily jump from deck to deck so I am not sure where that balance is.
I don't know if there's a profound difference between someone who is riding Pend or die and someone who is no-lifeing Mono-Blue Tron in Modern but I do get your point there.
As much as I love progression, and progression honestly helped me get a lot better at the game, you can really pinpoint the exact moment where it felt like content creators on UA-cam really fell off. The transition from more competitive focused content to endless casual series, series that don't do their topics enough justice, videos that are entirely bad faith shitposts or shitty stream highlights. There's a time and a place for this kind of stuff obviously, but I don't believe that we've really hit any kind of golden era in Yugioh content despite ostensibly better production quality.
Joe Giorlando is really one of the only Yugitubers I actively watch anymore. I actually feel like I learn something from his videos most of the time that isn't...present in many other places.
Just because you do not enjoy that content doesn’t mean the content “fell off”. You are not the intended audience for it, just like joe is not the intended audience for a lot of people. People enjoy different things, shocker i know.
@@eleonarcrimson858 Believe it or not you can choose to accept and believe that while vocalizing why it doesn't work. Chalking up everything to "well people just LIKE different things" doesn't help a conversation: it ends it.
@@lamiaprincess6371 help the conversation of what? “Why are people not enjoying the content I personally enjoy?”
@@eleonarcrimson858 Well believe it or not you're in the comment section of a video describing a problem in Yugioh and directly brought up content creation as a part of it. I am describing what is, to me, a problem with content creation since a certain point in time. It's fine if you don't agree and it's fine if people like Progression and Master Saga and whatever.
But I've been around long enough to watch the competitive content disappear from Yugitube as a whole. It's like seeing a bunch of reality TV shows pop up on a channel you used to like. Sure, people are allowed to have preferences, but don't smother conversations about why those preferences exist.
@@lamiaprincess6371 And you related the part about “the content” in the video to you personally putting yourself as someone who consumes the “better content” which is classic elitism. So I am here to call out your cringe behavior regardless of time in the community. Be better.
Oh the net decking problem is on full display in MD regularly the biggest Defenders of cards like Maxx C are the ones who only play "the best deck"
1:15
"This card sends one Methmech card from their deck to their graveyard... AND it special summons itself afterwards??? What were they thinking?!"
Some very interesting thoughts, very interesting points. A lot to think about, certainly. Best of luck into the new year, MBT.
In all honesty I’m happy that you’ve made this kind of video as I know I am an example of basing my deck choices based off of influencers without doing any real research of my own such as going to a Yugioh simulator like dueling book and etc. What is very important is formulating your opinions based on the different builds and avenues from your own creative mind and while it is natural at times to lazily pick up a deck someone tells you is “good” it is without a doubt up to the duelist to play it to its full potential in order to win (depending on how ambitious you are). All in all practice and time into the game will always prevail.
I think there's a bit of chicken-or-egg issue where the audience doesn't really want to read well-written articles and content creators not really wanting to write them.
Also, in journalism in general it is just the modern viewpoint of "bad articles with a lot of engagement earn better than good content with no comments".
Well this is one of the rare times that I agree with an MBT video. Though here is the main reason above all others. Yugioh format solving is super slow because of the vast card pool. A card from 20 years ago can become easily a meta card without having any effects just because it is searchable as a discard tool in a deck that searches it naturally and needs a random +1 to discard for something. This actually happened several times with normal monsters that were searchable or special summonable from the deck with a new card. Hell a card like halq made it so that a lot of tuners were limited or banned.
The thing is a yugioh card unlike other card games cards does not exist in a vacuum. The value of a yugioh card depends on what else is playable. A great example is king of the swamp. It saw very little play until tearlements since 2013 yet it instantly became broken with them and in a vacuum it is not even that strong. A game like magic the gathering doesn't have the level of card synergy that yugioh has and thats why it doesn't apply as an experinece.
I just want to back up MBTs point about how personality based engaging with YGO is.
I used to play YGO casually on MD and eventually moved on to MTG commander.
I still come back and watch MBT videos regularly because I like HIM and his opinions, I dont even care about the game and I'm here so I really agree that personalities and content are a HUGE part of YGO.
To the point that it is 100% the way I engage with YGO
It's cool, but too many people become starf*ckers for content creators. Like they are still people at the end of the day and some hang on their every word to dictate their opinions.
7:15 I actually want to just say that I have found the discourse surrounding “genning” when it comes to competitive Pokémon VGC to be very funny when looking at it from an outsiders perspective and how much it seems to come from a casuals viewpoint like with yugioh.
For those who don’t know, “genning” refers to artificially generating a Pokémon with the correct stats, moveset, etc, without having to go through training and breeding. There’s a set of people who view genning as ok because the main point of competitive Pokémon is the strategy and teambuilding not how long it took to get a perfect IV charizard.
The other side of the discussion in my limited exposure to the discourse has 2 points. The “better” point is just that it’s cheating both in the rules but also in the fact that some people can’t gen so it grants a competitive advantage. But the point I wanted to draw with this is that the “worse” argument against genning is that people believe it “ruins the spirit of Pokémon because Pokémon is about arching your favorites, training hand in hand with them, and showing the fruits of your labor in battle.” Like not realizing that if the meta changes, you aren’t necessarily going to stick with a team because you “put so much time and effort into it.”
Honestly the comparison in yugioh would be if people complained that you aren’t a true duelist because you just built your deck by buying singles on a site like YGOpro, rather than buying individual packs and pulling for your cards.
One thing I've thought about and wished I had the funds for personally would be merging the "van life" youtube style with a "pro yuigioh player" into 1 channel. A pro player that travels the states going to a new locals or regionals every weekend and discussing the ideas also giving insight to people (like me) who live in really remote areas and dont have a locals to play at that people actually play competitive decks at. My only competitive scene is online and it blows. This new channel idea could fill a void for people in low population areas like me. Could have an hour long podcast type video and smaller videos at the same time. I wish I could do that, I think it would be a ton of fun. Maybe someday :)
I mean this kind of topic could be applied to any type of online discourse.
It is very easy to say "look they do it better over there!" Without providing any solutions or specific examples of what you are actually talking about.
Yeah, I definitely get the "play your favorites" issue. I started when Master Duel launched, discovered Thunderdragons, and while I have branched out a bit, they are the deck I use every chance I get. Funny enough the recent Wyvern hit now has me looking at the deck scratching my head because it was excellent and proc'ing banish triggers on the dark attribute cards while also putting a body on the field to link away into verte because it's almost 2024 and I'm still running an anemic DPE engine because I like it.
I don't see the "play your favorites" aspect as a problem, if you can correctly analyze the weaknesses of your deck in the current format and try to do something to shore them up. As it's a good skill-building exercise.
"Play your favorites" isn't an issue if it leads you to have a very deep understanding of all the possible variations of lines and plays the deck can offer you, and if you have an open mind and are willing to experiment and innovate with alternative options and "spicy techs".
This is a very interesting video that that also applies why a card is not included in a deck.
My favorite deck is Adamancipator and I have liked it synce its release. I thoughtit was pretty cool that it could use the rock type Otomat cards(gogogo's). After block dragon got banned, the Otomat cards vanished, especially after Prank-Kids meow-meow mew got banned so all of the other rock engines disappeared. I saw deck lists using Revival Golem and Tackle Crusader, cards that suck and don't fit this archtype not even just more koa'ki meru targets. I find it weird that the Gogogo engine for this deck dissappeared with no explanation especially synce theres not many other good rock targets that the deck is not already using.
The long and short of the vid: "Alternative format where/when?"
I didn't expect this video to be what reminded me that Pimpnite existed, but here we are I guess. Early 2010s wifi battle culture was WEIRD.
Here's a question:
What do you mean "If yugioh wants to be taken as seriously as magic when it comes to competitive play"?
Yugioh tournaments fire just fine. Magic is the game slowly devolving into Casual 4-player, draft, or gtfo. I think there's this weird desire in the yugioh community to be seen as more "serious," but like... the game is serious.
Imo less access to metagaming is always preferrable
I can certainly attest to not knowing why I play the cards I do in the decks I play when I first pick them up, but as I learn combo lines I usually come to understand what everything does and why they’re good. But that’s more on an individual level rather than something I can do on the fly
Was not expecting a competitive Pokemon video game section in a Yugioh video, gave me war flashbacks of when I used to play back in gen 7. One of the few things I can give Konami is that at least they know to give a format time to grow naturally rather than just succumb to the whims of the masses every few weeks
I was not ready for the WeedleTwineedle and PIMPNITE reference. My content creator sphere is all connected
I was thinking the other day how I wished Yugioh had a podcast like Hearthstone does with the Vicious Syndicate podcast. One that is less opinion, and much more talking about the statistics and math behind decks. Obviously opinion is always gonna be part of it, and it's way harder to get statistical data to talk about in a physical format than it is a digital one, but even just a Yugioh podcast that weekly goes into one meta deck and discusses the key pieces, the popular out of engine choices, and the whys for those choices and how they interact with the other meta decks.
I'm burned out on podcasts
I think we also need more "adult" voices discussing Yu-Gi-Oh. We need more people seriously explaining the meta-game or creating beginner guides speaking as if they were giving a lecture for a classroom (e.g., heavy focus on information and ease of understanding, little to no swearing and sex/bathroom/fandom humor). We need our equivalent of Wolfe Glicke.
I love this take. As someone who tried to get back in the game and learn creative deck building skills, (only played as a kid ignorant to this skill) I found it quite difficult. I would love an official draft format/limited format that required players to become more acquainted with other cards
I think something like Cimo's Master Duel Masochist does a great job of this. He pulls random cards, makes a random deck, pulls new cards if he wins, and then has to see how those make some sort of strategy that he can build with.
@@Trey50Daniel Agreed. It would just be nice to have something official like that. Honestly, I wouldn’t hate a draft format with a large card bank like a battle pack 3. You could even mark them like speed duel marks there cards “speed duel”.
I think it’d be fun if you were randomly given a number of those cards from the pool, have 10-20 minutes before a match to decide the ones you want and the ones you don’t, then build a deck
I think a lot of what has allowed Magic content to focus on in-depth strategic content & card evaluation is that for most of the games history there was a really robust tournament structure that produced a large number of players whose jobs were to grind tournaments and write articles aimed at fellow tournament grinders; which is something that as I understand it Yugioh has never had to the same extent. And now Magic content is seeing a similar shift towards what Yugioh looks like with the tournament system having been gutted for a few years and the huge surge in a more casual audience that is more interested in following content creator personalities than reading a modern sideboard guide.
the content creators thing is really funny as someone who is interested enough in yugioh to rewatch half of rata's catalogue of videos every single time he uploads and also yours a decent amount of the time, but not interested enough to play the actual game unless it's with friends (not a frequent occurrence)
Absolutely agree. This video was great and I hope you keep doing these! Thanks!
Not having to learn other cards is so real. I got back into Yu-Gi-Oh after a few years hiatus and have been playing Labrynth for a few months and I have not learned how any of the new top decks work. All I do is ask people what the best ash/imperm target is for the big decks and then side in catch all cards like nibiru and d-barrier. I still have no clue what any of the new decks do.
Theres no problem with sticking with your fav deck and using it instead of stronger ones. You just need to know that its not the strongest. Also, dont tell anyone that.
So what I am hearing here is the Magical Hats series should come back
7:44 I stick by a/few deck(s) because it is very expensive to buy a new deck for every format that is competitively viable.
Limited in MTG is 100% the reason that the community is as good as it is at card evaluation generally. Before commander it was the most popular way to play the game and the easiest way to get a new player into the game. Almost everyone who played MTG for decades HAD to learn some level of card evaluation and deck building skill. Even if you net decked your list for standard and modern you still needed to put a list together yourself in sealed at a prerelease or on day 2 draft of any major event.
It doesn't help that a certain UA-camr whose name is similar to: ScheM SchBee SchTee is a very funny individual that very rarely does purely informational content.
Mostly because the fans are so conditioned to that style content they really can't deal with another, and a bunch of other points Mr. BT pointed out precisely. As always he is very keen to find and point out these details.
However, it is also important to note that any change from this issue can only really leave the fringes of the fanbase with the help of the various already established content creators. Sadly new ones simply won't get enough draw to introduce people to this way of seeing the game. So yes, I'm asking for the big yugitubers to tank their views for what could be months to try and make the change happen.
I can't wait for other YugiTubers to take this message to heart and start considering preparing longform, intricate, and well-thought out discussion pieces on their preferred formats and/or decks.
... and by that, I mean they'll make 25 minute reaction videos where half of it is just pausing and repeating the same points with different words.
The layout took a grand total of one day to adjust to.
If anything the new one is slightly easier on me than a big long list and pages in case a surprising news day arrives.
I decided in the new year I want to start going to locals instead of just playing master duel and I've realized I straight up don't know how to deck build or side deck. I've relied on just looking up deck lists for stuff I wanna play and now I have no idea how to evaluate why someone would play certain cards in a deck, despite that I watch a lot of content about competitive Yu-Gi-Oh, it's all mostly surface level coverage
I think the other part of the problem is thay of all the big card games out right now, yugioh has BY FAR the highest skill floor to get into a new deck.
Playing mathmech and playing tear have very few transferable skills combared to playing orzohv humans and rakdos discard
MtG has a different culture which (coming from yugioh) I find strange to be honest. Don't know if Joseph is just used to it and that is why he always draws comparisons giving MtG a favourable look.
As someone who plays mtg but is relatively new at it, I have to say this as a response to mbt constantly making it sounds like information is easily available and easy to understand in magic: *It isn't*. I'd go further, it is *significantly* harder to get straight answers and beginner help from mtg players than it is from yugioh players and mtg is an awful lot more confusing than people (especially yugioh players) think. Mtg very quickly goes from slow one-two cards a turn gameplay to incomprensible with dozens of cards doing different things covered in seemingly meaningless words that people just expect you to understand without ever explaining. And I am talking in casual environements don't even worry about competative ones.
I can't help but think MBT has some kind of rose-tinted glasses or grass is greener (or both) mentality regarding MtG and how it is over there. Because it just ain't as simple and easy to into in comparsion to yugioh as he makes out.
Thing is such resources aren't a causal thing, so primers like that outside of competit decks is rare.
Commander (also known as EDH) is "causal" format due to it rarely being played as a one on one game, but due to sheer amount of cards in the game can wildly have different power levels. Imho the most common problems come up from things like layer effecting cards like Magus of the Moon with some form of removal, not removing it from the board, and stuff like humility and opulence, making everything 1/1 no effects monster other then enchantment players 4/4 enchantment monsters.
You played commander, didn't you. That ain't a beginners format. Magic is undergoing a pretty big thing right now with the previous several years' over-centralization of commander to it's identity, which does suck for newbies, but that just means you may have entered in the wrong place. Try playing jumpstart, or try playing standard on Arena. Magic is seriously and genuinely significantly easier to get into, unless you just have issues dropping your Yu-gi-oh-isms and embracing the stack.
@@Asmodean1111 Frankly, I wish Commander was never made official. It was perfect (as Elder Dragon Highlander) for established players to play legacy level cards watered down to the point of playing like a big silly sealed deck. If new players were funneled to standard or, like, jumpstart, shit would be so much easier.
8:38 Yeah that's true. Not helped that, sometimes, you only learn WHY you play each card, but as a case of "a repetetive pattern", not really understanding each card.
I picked up yugioh at the age of 6 thanks to some friends of mine, and have played card games ever since. I say card "games" cause it didn't take us very long to branch to ALL of the major card games, at least at the time. It felt natural, fun and easy, but for some reason all of the other friends I've gotten in the past 15 years refuse to learn more then one of them, so I have some friends who play exclusively yugioh, some that only play magic and even a pokemon fanboy. And guess what, they all suck at card evaluation. Yes even the magic players, they are not special in the slightest. And if you try to ask their opinion on a card from another game, you will see why. All of them have their own concept on what a strong card looks like. And I don't mean like "oh this card would be broken in magic cause its free mana AND draws you a million". Sure thats a part of it, but more importantly players who don't branch out into other tcgs won't learn how to evaluate a card objectivly as a card in or despite the game it's in. I could tell most if not all of the broken LoR, HS or Flesh cards as soon as I looked at them, and once I learned the games, I could tell you how the game takes advantage of those qualities. I am not trying to "flex" or whatever, just pointing out how easy card evaluation gets if you both learn and understand the core principle of these games.
7:44 i can tell you from personal experience that sticking by your favorite Archetype is 100% better for your wallet.
I'm personally a player that tries to play a different deck every format. Usually it's the top deck, but of the top deck is something I don't like I try somthing else
And even then, I've noticed that I gravitate towards a particular playstyle: midrange, where it is a "combo" based deck that trades resources with the opponent like a control deck does. Think Vanquish Soul, salamagreat or purrely for example.
So while I have more experience evaluating the value of specific cards in case-by-case situations because I play dynamically, I absolutely suck at determining the value of cards in combination with each other or mutiple steps of interaction down the chain. I can't play multi-divergent combo decks because I can't wrap my head around the 50+possible combo lines a given hand can make, let alone decide which route to take (I just can't handle branded or Dragon Link). At most I can handle a linear combo deck with one or two lines at most like matchmech.
No joke, it took me almost a month to understand why Jiaolong is so good and Mad Love is not. I was convinced madlove was critical because it searches snow devil, not realizing Jiolong also searches it. If I have such problems with a deck that I play regularly, decks that play nothing like it are hopeless to me.
And so, everytime a new card comes out, I can only successfully evaluate it in terms of the midrange decks.
I say all of this to say that I think this is another main reason players are so bad at evaluating how good cards are. This game wires your brain to work towards one type of playstyle. It trains a midrange player like me to to evaluate one-for-one trade ability, a combo player to evaluate posible combo lines and end points, a control player to evaluate capability for disruption, etc.
And while sometimes there is some overlap with a given card's abilities, players trying to discuss how good a card is in this game is like experts of different scientific fields trying to argue the validity of X research paper. You can't expect a biologist, a mathematician and a theologist to be able to talk in comprehensive terms with each other about the same thing. Each knows most about their field and practically nothing about the other fields. They might as well not talk at all, they won't understand each other anyway.
With 10k legal cards with newer sets dropping every Friday, it's easier to just let someone else do the thinking and maybe work over it. I think Master duel, of all places, offers a little space to exercise playing in a different format with monthly events, even the duelist cup makes people look at decks differently.
I truly feel like a lot of games have this issue of a lack of reporting and/or card evaluation. It's a problem I've noticed with DIGIMON big time, where the only content covering the game is people looking at an individual deck for 20 minutes and saying nothing insightful about it beyond "This helps you find a combo piece" or whatever.
I didn't understand why Pankratops was good for YEARS! until I realized it Special Summoning itself combined with a Quick Effect that sacs it means Pankratops effectively can't be targeted by Veiler/Imperm or removal before its effect goes off. No source I read or videos I watched ever explained this to me; I only ever saw people say "it's good!" haha.
I like how MBT is holding up MtG as this shining example of competitive play/ enlightenment considering the state of competitive magic the gathering has been in Hell for the last 4 years thanks to the dismantling of the pro tour and MtG arena’s failed MPL system coinciding with article writers/mtg UA-camrs either stopping or talking less and less about the competitive formats in favor of Casual content like Edh/Commander.
BUT SURE, let’s pretend it’s still 2018; before mtg arena, before controversial sets like Modern horizons and covid uprooted and flip the status quo of magic the gathering forever.
Real talk I've been getting into MtG over the last 12 months or so becasue my friends play it and finding information or getting answers on things is HARD. Much harder than I am used to and certainly much harder than either yugioh or pokemon.
Honestly just because the MTG he is holding up as an exemple isn't the one we have today, doesn't mean his point is false.
I left MTG over a year ago because it was just becoming unbearable to play and found in YGO a much more friendly game, yes even with all the problems it has to new players. But even if i'm a lot happier playing YGO than i have been in the last few years i had playing Magic, i still miss the amazing structure of competitive content i could read and watch about a tech for deck X or the best cards in Draft Y or just a very well mabe primer for a new tournament winning deck i probably wouldn't have money to buy.
95% of MTG content I've seen on UA-cam is complaining about MTG. It's an even worse ratio than YGO content.
@@valvadis2360 I was never a competitive player and got in and stick around as a commander player with magic but I still feel pretty bad for everyone that cared about 60 card formats. I can respect people wanting to preserve that history and accumulated knowledge and shake my head at how wotc seems to just hedge their bets towards commander players and collectors for universe beyond crossovers over the rest of the playerbase.
It just annoys me whenever I’ve gotta hear Joseph bring up mtg like it’s can and could do no wrong.
@@vinnythewebsurfer I'm exactly the kind of guy who wishes commander players would learn "real Magic" and thinks whoever first floated universes beyond has no soul, but those issues aren't really inherent game issues, but issues of WotC's stewardship. I think the fact that MtG has changed AND gotten worse actually strengthens Joseph's point. Like, Magic had it in the bag and massively fumbled, right? So what they were doing was actually pretty effective beforehand? Unless you think that the change was unavoidable, which would be interesting. Otherwise, if you're just annoyed about Joseph leaving that out, honestly fair enough. But god damn do I love Magic as a game engine.
my personal thought about the topic is there is so many diverse opinions on the cards due to how they are used or how it feels to play against them. the people who play the cards will say "it's fair because your opponent has a way to stop it. just draw the out. just have the counter. just play the right deck" where as the people who play against the cards will have very negative opinions if it's, lets say... Kashtira at full power zone lock... and will complain at every point about it without saying exactly WHY they hate to play against it without a proper reason. sure, zone lock sucks but it takes a lot of time to actually get it off...
with how diverse the opinions are, there's always going to be someone who says that the opinion/thoughts on a card is wrong and will fight tooth and nail to prove their point. it's like trying to explain to a kid how important it is to grow up and find a job when they are very young... they won't understand and they will fight back. no matter the points you make, it will never get through to everyone. despite that... I do believe that, with enough time, the community will learn how to get better with it... that or get so toxic that it'll never grow. leaning more on the former cause i do love the game. my favourite deck is witchcrafter, icejade and solfacorde. they are not amazing but i enjoy them despite that. i know they have a lot of flaws, especially witchcrafter because of their reliance on spells, icejades with banishing FACE UP cards for their equips... and solfacord being a pendulum deck that relies on even and odd scales. I love the cards, i love the design around them and i understand that they will never be meta.
to finish... yugioh players are bad at talking about the cards due to their own personal opinions on said cards and should be more open to discussion about others views on it... and perhaps try to understand how the card could be seen outside of their view. we're all passionate about the game and should try to be more inclusive with it. and I am sorry if my point is... hard to understand. hope 2024 treats all of you well
I think the fact of their being a bazillion cards in the pool of yugioh, that and there being a different way to interpret and interact with a significant portion of the cards, is what makes it really easy for a contradicting opinion to come up, and if the person writing/speaking about how something is the way it is doesn't say or spout exactly what the viewer is thinking/feeling about a certain card or deck, yugioh's community has enough of a vocal community/people who are willing to go to bat so to speak, and they are more than willing to speak up for something or against something. It is a human nature thing, all communities have it definitely not exclusive to any community, as it is a person thing.
Likewise it is very easy to get lost in why something is wrong, rather than just making a blanket statement that "X" is wrong, we all want to try to explain our reasoning behind why something is bad/wrong, we humans tend to be pretty good about pointing out when something is wrong or off, but explaining the why, and the nitty gritty and having a majority of people who agree with our statement on the exact why something is bad/wrong is harder than finding the holy grail. (Exaggerating a bit lol) Often times we spew out a sentence/or set of words that will be in combat with feelings or facts, and getting those two to play nice with each other, would be like winning the lottery, nice and awesome in the moment, but the high/benefits of it likely won't last, it would all be fleeting sadly.
Perhaps the fact that magic doesn't appeal to a larger pool of potential players is also why they can often find a reasonable conversation about what is and what isn't healthy for the game they love, it is far easier for them to be calm and rational about things, as they are more able to leave emotions at the door/in check compared to yugioh and pokemon players. In other words they are not constantly comparing other aspects of the franchise to what they see in the game they play. Comparison is the thief of happiness, it also doesn't help when so many of us humans (and make no mistake about it magic has these players too) are so inconsistent about both our inferiority complexes and superiority over others. As soon as emotions come into play in any of the games, our rationale/calmer minds take a back seat to things, and it makes it that much harder to not only be a competent player, but also to be able to be objective about what is and what is not healthy/good for "our" game.
Yes emotions can be a powerful thing, and we have to hear those out every now and again, though if a fact comes in that contradicts our emotions we have to be able to find a happy medium that works for not only us but everything as a whole, there can and should be a balance for things. They have to live in harmony, as emotions can allow passion to take hold, and once passion takes hold it can lead to a very beautiful outcome on some level or another. There has to be a stopping point a good defined line where things need to cease, as it isn't fair to always allow emotions or facts to rule out in the end, my emotions should not supersede any emotions someone else has just because it is my emotion, and likewise just because something is a fact it doesn't mean it is right or just. - At the end of the day though a lot of it is just plain arbitrary, if others wish to argue/compare something then I say let them, I say my energy is better spent else where, and I wish them the best of luck with things regardless.
This is so true, and I see it in myself. I play Digimon Card Game and there I can tell you exactly what card does what, why its there, why there's as many copies of it etc. But in YuGiOh, I am unable to do that. I cannot tell you why some deck has that ammount of starters or extenders, or what defensive cards that deck needs for what reason etc.
I like playing RAce, and Ive watched a lot of combo guides for the deck, and none of them have done a proper explanation and examination of the deck itself, just mindless one-card, two-card combos, here is what the deck can do, done, thanks for the views. It creates this narrative that all there is to YuGiOh is combo lines and negates and no acctual interaction between players, that there's no depth to the card game, when YuGiOh is so much more than that.
As an MTG player, YGO is impossibly frustrating to learn. Every single time I want to check out some deck or archetype, there's a days-long struggle of actually learning what the hell the deck is trying to do, you have about twenty builds where no one explains even one line and the one deck that has a primer is an overly complex combo showcase that barely even explains the order of plays, let alone anything else, At some point I figured out Earth Machines and that's my favorite deck purely because I was able to blend archetypes, make what felt like meaningful deck decisions that weren't "but you gotta run these fifteen cards", and find more than one line to win games.
It's so bad that I legitimately have more fun trying to make a bastardized Machina Live Twin deck work than I do actually muddling my way through hours and hours of button-clicking because at least then NO ONE knows how that's supposed to work.
This might be my favorite yugioh video in a while. Coming from competitive magic to yugioh, it was baffling to me how hard it was to find solid information on what I should play. Even just as simple as a tier list I could only find random UA-cam videos which had conflicting information sure the first couple decks were usually the same but everything below that just felt kinda arbitrary. Basic strategy on how to play the game (what hand traps existed, when to time your own and how to play around your opponent's, etc) was scarce at best. Everyone's lists (especially for rogue decks) seemed to be completely different and no one would explain why they're playing this variation vs that one or thas supporting engine and not this one. Combos seemed to be completely different from deck to deck with no explanation on what the core combos in the deck are without cross archetype extension. It was grueling and frustrating to sift through and I've always felt like a worse player for it even to this day.
i really wish we had comprehensive writing like how hearthstone does for its game vicious syndicate is a good example of that, having information about deck winrates and playrates data while also having nice and neat articles on each deck/class is really helpful to accurately grasp the metagame. Hearthstone is also a memey and silly game when it come to content creation so i don't see how yugioh also cant have this.