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cr47t

Long-term future of modern YGO

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it could just be me, but i get the feeling that increasing power creep so steadily and so much is going to make it harder for modern/mainline ygo to grow or to maintain its market as more players move on to more balanced card games (mtg, pokemon, or more niche TCGs.) last time it was comparably bad IMO was with whatever you call the format with perfoma-pal/-ge, where they actually stepped in with an emergency banlist. nowadays with konami taking their time to move the new years banlist to us guys here in north america, it feels kind of like they're hanging us to dry (more so when you consider how maxx c at3, etc. over there affects how cards are designed around them, which trickles down to us.)
another factor i think is going to make it harder for YGO to attract new players (besides sweats) to replace outgoing veterans is how complicated konami makes everything just to sustain the power creep escalation. even as a veteran player myself i probably couldn't recite a single entire tear card's effects to you, how is a newbie going to last if their locals are competitive? you have to make room for all these different rules and conditions added over the years (just look at how many extra deck strats there are) just to know how to play, memorize the opposing deck strats just to play against them, know their weak spots to stop combos at the right time, to build your side deck, etc, and that's assuming you got both the dollars to spare and the will to put it in, and even then it could get upended in ❤️ months time when new meta or new banlist comes in. in the meantime if you come across a deck that you can't counter, or has its own counter you can't get around, whoop de fucking do.

compare all this to something like chess where yes, there's a lot to remember if you wanna go far, but you can depend on more of it more of the time as you always get the same starting situation every game (more or less) so it's skill against skill alone. or even compare it to the other games i mentioned, where the effects are kept relatively simple (or at least, not walls of text) and there are resource systems (pokemon's energy cards, mtg's mana system, etc.) to keep power creep in check.

maybe it's just that i'm asking myself why i've been playing along with this problem for so many years, as i begin planning to pivot to other hobbies, but why do we play ygo? (i know some of the veteran forum members here don't, but im gonna go ahead anyway.) for some it's nostalgia, which i would get more of if i was hanging out with my former ygo buddies than by playing against more modern crowds. for some it's strategy, but in that case it's so luck based and one-sided you might as well play solitare (i know this is a common joke but roll w/ me for now) or some other oneplayer game that you'd probably get more fulfillment out of. for some it's habit which, i get it, change is hard to do on your own when it regards throwing out a 5+ yr constant. in the end though i don't see how its gonna be worth it at all, now or in the future.

please share your thoughts on the subject here, would really like to hear what the consensus is here

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First things first: Other card games are not inherently more balanced. Pokemon has wild issues with powercreep and set design, and MTG has plenty of complexity creep. Especially in modern times as they march onward to people's wallets alone, it is not a great time to be saying MTG is more balanced.

Next up, as far as the Performapal Performage format went... It was entirely kneejerk. The deck is widely accepted to be the weaker variant between Dracopal and itself, despite the former surviving and thriving even after PePe died. Not to mention, they were strong cards printed into a power vacuum after everything else had been hit. For Christ's sake, Kozmo was a premiere deck. People wanted Kozmo to be nerfed into the ground and, not long after, for Blue-Eyes to get bans because it was the "best deck"... ignoring that these were cases of decks being good in formats where the actual good cards got hit. Not to say the Pal variants weren't good, just that the "Tier 0" nature was due to the vacuum they sat in, not due to their power level being creep.

A lot of the ZeXal and VRAINS era decks were far worse game environments than PePe or Dracopal ever were. People just hate pendulums and have since launch, so it was easy to kneejerk when they were good.

Complexity is a thing in yugioh, but we have (for the most part) hit a peak with it. Unlike other card games that have marched on with complexity creep in recent times. Yugioh has it bad in wording for sure, and that's an issue that's been around for a long time, not anything new. I'd like to codify it more, but it's largely an issue with the rather strict rules that yugioh is built upon, as opposed to looser rules of other card games. This is a major structural issue, but please do not act as if it is only yugioh that has pushed forward with complexity.

You're also making a false equivalency with a game like Chess as a comparison. They are day and night, and there's not much of any point in saying "but does it have the longevity of chess", when Chess is a solved and static game. This is not to call it a bad game by any means, but it is absolutely incomparable.

Saying that it's too luck based to be strategic is also just incorrect. I know you stated it as a joke, but it's... not a joke that needs to keep being brought up. Yes, sometimes you just lose, because one hand was better than the other. But that is not nearly as common as it is implied to be. There's a lot about matchups to learn, not to mention about how other players play if you're going to be regularly participating against them.

To answer why I play yugioh... not even close to just nostalgia. I enjoy the openness of the card game, despite its strict rules, and the ability to solve and go through things. Sure, combos that start with Firewall Defender and use almost all of your ED for one "strong" board aren't good, but they are uniquely Yu-Gi-Oh. And that's not even all that I find fun. I tend towards Midrange, which ygo has in spades, but it has its fair share of control, stun, and even combo or beatdown. The game is more varied and open than it is given credit for at many points. Sure, there are decks I fucking hate playing against (as does anyone else), but that doesn't mean that the game is ruined due to them or any such drivel.

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That's a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side". The other respective games have their own cases of powercreep and complexity creep going on for a while. 

Pokemon's stats have been going up over time. Back in its first set Charizard at 120 HP was king in stats. Nowadays you see 330 HP pokemon with similar difficulty to play as back then's Stage 1 pokemon. There's also special mechanics that essentially are akin to "you get a stronger pokemon" but "if it dies your opponent can claim 2 prizes". We even have some triple prize mons like Tag Team and VMAX. This all comes with stronger attacks as well where you can one-shot an opponent with the right type machup or a particularly well charged move. I like Pokemon card arts in recent history though, just look at full arts and alt arts... xD

MTG is going through pure chaos. Even if you ignore all the issues out of the actual gamplay like the bad customer service, bad product quality control, bad PR moves, etc. you still have a game that's been getting more complex and fast. Powercreep is a thing even in rotation formats because the developers still feel the need to "keep things fresh". From what I heard they very much have 1 good format left in the form of Commander, while Standard and Legacy are suffering and sanctioned play in general iirc has been eliminated altogether in recent history. I'm no MTG player but I like purchasing sample decks of card games and testing them out, and I haven't been able to find non-commander decks for like 2 or 3 years, other than in a Comic Book store that has this weird looking product that costs like 3 times the price of a Yugioh deck.

Let me tell you that from my experience being taught a bit of MTG back in like 2012-2014-ish. They can be just as combo-licious as Yugioh but they go an extra step for everything to harness more mana and speed up the placing of Basic Land cards. It also has some less limitations, like the field size (which in MTG is infinite) so if you ever get trapped in a snowball effect believe me it can be dreadful.

Yugioh's tier 0 problem is objectively speaking arguably not an issue. I don't like it at all myself but I think Konami tries to have one sometimes throughout history. Usually there's an audience that wants to play against a much more predictable opponent (and it doesn't get better than against the same deck). Well this is so long as the mirror match of the tier 0 deck is skillfull enough. Dragon Ruler format, TeleDAD, and currently Tearlaments I've seen have people that advocate for them. Not so much something like the Frog FTK from back in the day so being tier 0 doesn't inherently make things skillful either.

The polar opposite is players that want a diverse format where they can homebrew and customize a bit more things. During these "eras" of the game the side deck is very different, trying to cover for the deck's own potential weaknesses rather than to hard counter a specific part of the more narrow choices of a tier 0 environment. It is temporary..... although I agree power creep in Yugioh has been picking up lately. This I say based on how early in 2022 we had stuff like Virtual Worlds, Sword Souls, even some stuff like Sky Strikers popped up, and by December those relevant decks weren't even making it to tier 3 according to most pie charts I got to see of event tops. 

Another thing to note from Yugioh I noticed is that archetypes have been shying away from having their own omni-negate options. There are the decks use stuff like Fleur or Toadally Awesome but those cards were already there before. Despite the powercreep aspect Konami seems to be attempting somewhat of a change in direction here. I haven't even seen as many floodgate effects beyond the odd Sythe or Barrier Statue. Still the game is in somewhat of a transition point so it might or might not turn bad. Honestly I've been having stuff to complain about since almost the start of the game. TeleDAD felt like the definitive deck, the pinacle of evolution, the "we can't go further" point in the game... have you tried building it nowadays? It feels often weaker than a deck you'd build from buying 3 modern era structure decks. 

Chess is never the best comparison. Chess is unchanging and uncustomizable and eliminates as much luck from it as possible. TCGs are a never-ending piling of pieces into a card castle, and demands a balance between skill and luck. Too much luck and no informed move from the player will seem to matter, but luck is a little fun and makes the game sometimes be just unpredictable enough to alter the way you manage your resources or flip things around.



It doesn't hurt to try out other games, but keep in mind often enough even when a card game pops up that seems to be doing better, they tend to not be able to keep up in the long run. I know of at least 1 overhaul that CardFight Vanguard had. Wixoss is I believe also in its 3rd incarnation. I lost track of Force of Will altogether. And some indie games have popped up to weird results... have you seen MetaZoo? I think it's awful but that's just me....

 

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19 hours ago, Sleepy said:

 Legacy [is] suffering

On one hand, a quick check shows that the best deck is delver, which is a good sign for the format, but then I saw like four or five different initiative variants and aw man oh jeez.

At least cephalid breakfast is still a thing.

 

As for the topic itself, criticizing ygo for power creep as well as pepe shows ignorance. PePe being the best deck in the capacity it was, was the result of a lack of (necessary) power creep, creating in a stagnating format where decks were eliminated by banlists.

Blake probably already said that but there's a lot of words here and I'm not very good at reading.

Edited by (o ×)

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I have spent the last hour and a half carefully reading this post and pointing out all the instances in which you're probably wrong. Excluding the PePe thing, which Blake already covered in detail.

>it could just be me, but i get the feeling that increasing power creep so steadily and so much is going to make it harder for modern/mainline ygo to grow or to maintain its market as more players move on to more balanced card games (mtg, pokemon, or more niche TCGs.)
Yu-Gi-Oh's release in NA was in 2002, and it's Japanese release was in 1999. The game has been steadily power-creeping for nearly two and a half decades now, so I imagine if power creep was going to be a wall that bars entry for newer players, this would have happened years ago.

>nowadays with konami taking their time to move the new years banlist to us guys here in north america, it feels kind of like they're hanging us to dry
OCG and TCG banlists have never dropped at the same time, or if they have, it was the exception and not the rule. We aren't being "hung to dry", especially with the most recent banlist dropping in December. This isn't a new thing either, so I don't get what you mean by "nowadays".

>more so when you consider how maxx c at3, etc. over there affects how cards are designed around them, which trickles down to us
You may have a point here. But not before discounting archetypes that are released as TCG-exclusive and therefore would logically be designed around TCG's banlist, including but not limited to Kaiju, Kozmo, BA, Myutant, and Ghoti, of which all of them except those last two saw meta relevance at least once. It could also be the case that this best-selling card game with two separate banlists designs cards with both banlists in mind.

>you have to make room for all these different rules and conditions added over the years (just look at how many extra deck strats there are) just to know how to play, memorize the opposing deck strats just to play against them, know their weak spots to stop combos at the right time, to build your side deck, etc
That's every card game. If anything, I would argue that aside from the rulings nightmare that is the Damage Step, Yu-Gi-Oh is one of the easier card games to pick up, despite its lengthy effect texts. Yes, there's a fair bit of reading to start off, but it's not like in Magic where deckbuilding can be so complex that "deckbuilders" and "pilots" are two different entities at some levels of play due to things like mana curves, color distribution etc.

>and that's assuming you got both the dollars to spare and the will to put it in, and even then it could get upended in ??? months time when new meta or new banlist comes in
Again, that's every card game.

>in the meantime if you come across a deck that you can't counter, or has its own counter you can't get around, whoop de fucking do.
That's not just every card game, but every competitive game in general. You can tell us you just don't like Tear without making a mini-essay on power creep, you know.

>compare all this to something like chess where yes, there's a lot to remember if you wanna go far, but you can depend on more of it more of the time as you always get the same starting situation every game (more or less) so it's skill against skill alone
That is a completely invalid comparison specifically because chess always starts in the same situation. Card games deal a random hand at the start, so comparing it to something with the same consistent starting conditions just defeats the purpose. Not to mention one is a board game with the objective of making a specific piece unable to move, while the other is a card game with the objective of dealing 8000 damage to an opponent (usually). You could not have picked a worse game to compare to, as they're completely different genres and mediums. You wouldn't compare Castlevania and Binding of Isaac, would you? No, that'd be silly, so why Yu-Gi-Oh and chess?

>or even compare it to the other games i mentioned, where the effects are kept relatively simple (or at least, not walls of text) and there are resource systems (pokemon's energy cards, mtg's mana system, etc.) to keep power creep in check.
As has been pointed out multiple times already, Pokémon is power crept as hell despite having a resource system. Magic keeps adding new keywords and systems - more frequently than Yu-Gi-Oh at that - making it more and more unforgiving for new players who want to play a format not named Standard, especially when things like night/day, Initiative, and Mutate existed. Magic is also power crept as well, though likely not as much as the other two card games this thread is all about. I wouldn't know.

>it's so luck based and one-sided you might as well play solitare or some other oneplayer game that you'd probably get more fulfillment out of
Say it with me kids. It's. A. Card. Game. Of course luck is going to be a factor; there's a reason "luck of the draw" is a phrase that exists in the English language. It just so happens that Yu-Gi-Oh is designed to be a high-power game with a simple framework (the reason for long effect texts), which leads to faster games. In fact, I'd even argue that Yu-Gi-Oh has luck as less of a factor than Pokémon or Magic, since not only is Yu-Gi-Oh rife with search/draw cards, but you don't need to draw those precious resources you keep hyping up in addition to the cards that use them. That you're getting beaten so one-sidedly as you make it sound makes me think you're building your deck wrong, or that you're building something from 2008 and are shocked it isn't holding up 15 years later.

>please share your thoughts on the subject here
I've been trying to keep things professional up until now, but my honest-to-god, unfiltered thoughts, are that you're mad salty because your pet deck fell off and you're blaming concepts older than the deck itself and/or Tear that happens to be meta right now. Power creep in Yu-Gi-Oh is far from being an issue at present, with the people most affected by it being competitive players who go to tournaments, since they have to buy the packs to get the new meta which is how Konami makes the money to keep the game afloat. I play Yu-Gi-Oh to fuck around with friends, and the game fits that purpose perfectly, far more than the head-scratching complexity of Magic or the explosive nature of Pokémon.

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