my friend is trying to get me into it despite me not having played it at all before or watching the anime (online version only, tcg on omega, it’s not like i can buy the cards or anything) and i feel so fucking dumbfounded. is this a children’s card game? why is there a turn mechanic when you won’t be making it past turn 2? every goddamn card comes with two paragraphs of text and the fun part is the punctuation fucking changes the gameplay, and your opponent will lay them on you nonstop. and even if they are a good sport and allow you to read you will lose the plot with the third card they pull.
your opponent will keep adding and removing cards back and forth and you can’t keep up how things have been stacked and what effects are active or not and by the end of turn one your opponent has probably pulled out 15 to 20 cards out of their 60 card deck, and those are just repeats so in reality they’ve basically done all of their combos. i know preparing a good deck for combos is part of the game but come on how can a new player even keep up? this is insane.
It’s almost impossible to break into yugioh at this point. The people playing it today are mostly the same people who kept playing it since childhood. The powercreep is so bad that it’s all a sequence of different “archetype” decks that do their own specific thing and if you’re not familiar with each one, you’re gonna have to do a lot of reading either on the spot (great gameplay experience) or get a master’s degree in yugioh on your own time.
Card text length, phrasing, esoteric rulings etc all make it very inaccessible unless you’re willing to devote a lot of time to the game. I came to the conclusion that’s it’s not worth it for me right now but you could try playing some of the older video games to gradually learn the new mechanics and cards and then spend time in Master Duel if you’re willing to put in the time.
i heard master duel (the official steam game i suppose) is also really bad. i guess there’s really no escape if i want to play this damn game.
I haven’t played it much because I didn’t get that far but I did watch some gameplay and it’s basically the paper game but with guardrails so you can’t do illegal stuff. Supposedly it’s also possible to build meta decks as a free to play player if you use your free currency well.
Legacy of the duelist might be a better choice to jump into on PC because its single player even though its a bit older.
is this a children’s card game?
no. yugioh is like that because of decades of strange and bad design decisions from Bandai-Namco. they don’t want to do keywords, so you have a wall of text. they don’t want to have a rotating standard, so they have a banlist that’s a mile long. there’s also several instances of them making cards that don’t actually work by the rules of the game. i like card games, i appreciate the different design decisions of the basic game of yu-gi-oh, but my god do the actual design decisions of cards themselves have flaws. it’s not a good game to pick up casually. just on the basis of card availability and price for meta decks, pokemon is by far the most accessible card game in paper right now.
they don’t want to do keywords
they don’t want to have a rotating standard
These two things always baffled me about YGO. You can do so much cleanup and provide clear templating with keywords. And the non-rotating format is just asking for problems. Do young people even pick up the game anymore? How do you come into YGO at 12 or 13 years old when everyone is playing bullshit? I don’t think they have limited formats, either.
You can do so much cleanup and provide clear templating with keywords
You say that, but a lot of YGO effects are kinda built around the wording and what words they use for a long time now, e.g. there’s a huge difference between when and if, not to mention what cards target or don’t target.
Though a large part of the problem is that the TCG refuses to adopt the OCG effect formatting, though that one can be put at Konami of Japan’s feet because it has always felt like KoJ treats KoA (the US branch) and thus the TCG as an afterthought.
i can’t play the physical version so price doesn’t really matter to me but like YGO is the second most popular tcg in japan after pokemon there’s gotta be something in there, but the design is just god awful. is capturing an audience early this important? none of the power creep up until this point has been a deal breaker for the community? it’s baffling.
Last time I checked it out (like a decade ago?) I was turned off just by the fact that the “summon 1 monster per turn” rule might as well not exist because everything’s just a special summon. Fundamentally, I think Konami is just not interested in making a well-written or good game.
I kind of like that rule, since the special summons work on such varied conditions. I think it’s more interesting than just having it gated by X amount of mana.
I don’t like most of their other design decisions, admittedly, but I like that one.
ngl this sounds like poor teaching, newbies should get to make cool monsters punch each other instead of being subjected to combo bullshit
I’m remembering a woman from Japan who started playing ygo and she was turned off instantly by the guy’s smelling bad and bodying her in turn one :yea:
The game used to be a lot slower. Like 15 years ago you might even make it to turn 5. Like I’m sure everyone else said, they had a set of mechanics, and then they kept adding mechanics and adding mechanics and almost never took any mechanic away once it was added (though they banned or restricted individual cards), and that produced power creep that also encouraged general power creep in stat inflation and after a couple of decades, here we are. It’s the classic issue of designing with almost exclusively your existing consumer base in mind, because it’s all very manageable for them to learn this piecemeal over decades, but then a new person comes in and needs to learn all of it at once.
Tell your friend to stop trouncing you with meta decks and just make a deck from like Duelist Kingdom just so you can work with something manageable first.
YGO is just like that, has been for a long time. If you wanna play in person I’m like everyone else here in that I suggest a legacy format.
If you want to play a version of modern YGO, I would suggest giving YGO: Duel Links a try. It’s IMO a much improved format over the base game, with most of the awful turn 1/2 kills taken out back and shot (or at least it was when I played it a few years ago, hopefully they haven’t broken it). It’s a f2p game that you can play on PC or phone and the individual matches don’t take too long so it’s a good toilet or bus stop game.
will do thanks
I would recommend giving goat or Edison a try. Much slower formats
thanks i will check them out
I like Legacy of the Duelist Link Evolution story mode to start learning to play. New mechanics are introduced in a more pleasant pace that way. It is multiplatform. It goes until Vrains tho, I think there are more animes now.
Most of the game’s mechanics come from a time when it was much, much slower paced. It has probably the worst power creep out of any card game I can think of, and they never updated the rules to account for this, so now most games are decided entirely by the first turn and every deck has like 90% identical cards to every other deck.
I honestly don’t know why anyone would want to play it in this state, you might as well just flip a coin and declare victory that way.
It’s been a while, but I did enjoy the reading the card figuring out the overall outcome. Idk. Used to be fun when I had the time. Oh, also I played it with physical cards so you know you had what you had.
I suggest, if possible, try to stick to older cards?
I got back into YGO as an adult, and I can tell you a few things.
Keep your deck simple to start, there are a lot of gimmick decks that can be fun once you’ve got the hang of everything, but the simplest decks are built around just a few cards that you’re trying to get on the field and keep on the field.
There are a ton of cards, but there are also a ton of cards that almost everybody puts in their deck regardless of what they’re running, which can be surprising if you’re coming from something like MTG. Most of them are counters or target specific archetypes.
Xyz is pronounced Ekzeez and it took me a while to figure that out.
Hopefully some of that helped.
Sacrificing your soul explains the card. Or alternatively, learn to trust in the heart of the cards. As I understand it, it also helps to be a billionaire or some sort of magnate?
this is probably a reference to something but to be honest sacrificing my souls seems like a better alternative than trying to decipher this game
Lol yeah. People having their souls stolen or betting them is a common thing in the anime. And heart of the cards is like the power of friendship but for your deck.
The gimmick of yugioh compared to other TCGs is A) it’s very fast paced and B) it’s anime. If you don’t like at least one of those things, you probably will not enjoy competitive yugioh.
damn well i guess that’s it for my YGO career then
Yu-Gi-Oh peaked with the Goat format.I have some goat cards in my irl collection and the power of chaos games are goat iirc, it’s so good. Personally though I’m most comfortable with Yugi Kaiba, since I played around with that a bit back in the day. I have ptsd from raigeki and trap hole.
i love how people say this game peaked in 2005 when i couldn’t even read
I liked Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid but dipped out before synchros were a thing but learning about all the crazy shit that came after is fascinating to me
They really had zero concern for power creep and the mechanics are so stupid lmao
The game went from fusions that were worse than their materials to one turn pendulum combos
