As someone that has no access to the physical TCG, master duel is amazing, not perfect (maxx c for example) but is a way to experience Yu-Gi-Oh that is surprisingly F2P friendly. I can see how for people who play TCG/OCG primarily is way less than ideal.
Speaking as a long time tcg player, I do like master duel overall but mbt hit it on the head when he mentioned how tcg players essentially go back to a old meta when they go to master duel, I don't really do much past the dailies anymore purely because each meta is more or less just one I've played before and already was sick off
Yeah I mean if master duel didn't exist I wouldn't be playing Yu-Gi-Oh at all. But there's pretty much no community in my area as far as I'm aware of so no chance I'm paying hundreds for the cardboard
Even with no access to the physical game, Idk why anyone plays Master Duel when so many good simulators does exist, that offer way more content, works much faster and are updated way more faster and which are COMPLETELY free. I dont see any reason why master Duel even exists in the first place tbh
In my country there are ZERO stores where I could buy Yugioh packs. For me MD is the only way to play Yugioh, I've tried Duel Links and played for actually some time but then I quit then where was a one year or more of Harpie/Blue-eyes meta.
I think the main problem that most people ignore is how pricy and difficult is to build a decent deck in tcg. I have met alot of people in locals that started playing master duel and then they bought a structure deck only to get completely obliterated by everyone else even rogue decks. For most people its not easy to spend 15-20 euros to buy a playset of handtraps if they are just starting the game. And even for older non meta decks its not uncommon to have to spend 100 euros to buy them. And even if you have the money most of the time you have to order online which is just another roadblock. And don't get me started on packs. The way they are its almost impossible to pull something playable by buying casually. But those problem are ignored by youtubers and all they talk about is banlists and different formats ignoring that their point of view is completely different from someone new to the game. The guy who bought a crystal beast structure deck and came to locals for first time is not gonna care if he can play maxx C or not.
This. Everytime I want to try to build a purrely deck I'm met with a roadblock of having to pay 80~90 euro just for a playset of my friend purrely. And then whenever someone complain about the ridiculous price someone will literally tell you to go buy the structure deck while completely ignoring whether the person even want to play that deck or not
The booster structure is terrible in the tcg. Single cards having multiple rarities in the ocg is missed in the tcg and makes cards more expensive than they have any right to be.
So like the whole cost thing for top teir play has to be looked at in the context of the card market as a whole and hobbies in general. Yugioh reprints the good cards within about a year anyway so when looking at other games that do not reprint aggressively, it’s relatively cheaper to play yugioh if you want to watch the market. It’s also a trading card game so locals peeps may have crazy deals for you if you ask. The biggest issue with this is that konami power creeps every set and then bans the cards that prevent them from selling the new cards so it’s a continual 3 month loop of buying the next best deck. In the context of hobbies and what else you could do in your free time other than yugioh, all hobbies have a cost for entry and a higher cost for the top levels. You wanna play guitar? $300 for an entry level starter. you wanna fish? Gotta buy a rod and some bait and a hook. wanna get to higher levels with both? $600 for a decently loud amp. gotta buy a boat.
Basically. You're giving people an easier to learn format and something to do part of the work for them, then wondering why they struggle to use something that is completely reliant on you and is also probably more expensive to use over the automatic format.
@@colossaldonut5190I fear that they draw the wrong conclusion from the very real price difference issue and raise the price point of Master Duel instead of lowering the price point of TCG. Because lowering that could get me back into paper Yu-Gi-Oh! but at the moment I don't want to take my 7 year old Monarch deck to locals and I also don't want to spend 200-400€ on cardboard.
For me it’s 5 main factors (I reentered the TCG through MD) 1. The fact that the MD Cardpool is not up to date, but I dont think it is even that important, since I personally didn’t have a hard time adjusting to the new meta (Plants was my favourite deck in MD and I only needed to learn the interactions with the new cards, which wasn’t hard). 2. Yugioh has become too complex for casual new players to learn. You either need to be really dedicated or have some friends that teach you the ins and outs. I suspect that after 3-4 duels most newbies stopped playing. 3. It’s much more convenient and easier to just sit in your room and play some games in your free time instead of searching and travelling to a local store and having to interact with people. (For example the next store is 2hours away from me) 4. Most importantly the prize, MD is free to play.Why would a new player want to spend at least 100€ and 400+ for a good deck if you can play the game for free? It doesn’t matter that you play older formats if you don’t play OCG or TCG. 5. IMO playing on MD is much easier and comfortable than paper. The game looks nice, tells you what to do and you basically don’t need to learn the rules. It’s a very big step to actually learn these things to play in paper. I think Konami should permanently add Old formats to MD (like an Edison ladder mode). It would make the reentry to Yugioh for older players much easier (since the games are much simpler) and give the current players more content.
For point 2,imo Its because the interaction itself became even faster than ever thats make casual hate yugioh to its root I know this because i have a lot of friend in social media that actually playing other cardgame (shadowverse,digimon card game,etc) and everytime yugioh topic resurface from nowhere,they always complain about their opponent could interact with them just right when they start to make move (ash,other handtrap issue etc)
@@daedalus5253 well,thats the point,also why they even bother to make 2 anime season for that Its look good at first But complexity issue might running later (considering rush also had its own degen combo/setup that led into banlist)
The price is always going to be the biggest pain point. People who don't play card games will wonder why they need to spend hundreds on cardboard and people from other games are already invested in their card game and therefore can't justify spending that much on a new game.
The expensive cards also disincentivize experimentation and exploring the more fun parts of the game. Even on the low of a decent deck will cost 100 dollars, ignoring things like expensive staples. If you are someone who likes to experiment a lot, this will bankrupt you pretty quick and a paper player will look at the mountains of cards they have no interest in and just give up buying cards. It’s what I did
32:20 god chat is so WRONG about this take, making good structure decks that are playable out of the box would NOT lose konami money, it would be the other way around. If you make ygo more accessible to a wider audience then that translates to more customers willing to spend money to get more product = more cards, you need to create addicts to your product that are going to translate to long time customers but this will NEVER happen if the game is too difficult to get into for them. Besides that, konami is fully capable of making money with product while also making the game accessible, take a look at the pokemon tcg, the core and side sets print money because it's filled with cards in multiple special rarities that are actually worth chasing for, but at the same time these expensive cards also exist in lower rarities that are accesible to most players and have actually good cheap alternatives...AND they release good structure decks and introductory products ALL.THE.TIME, seriously getting into the pokemon tcg is super cheap and konami is frankly STUPID for not copying and pasting what they're doing.
Ironically Konami releases structure decks that are playable from time to time namely the salad structure and traptrix decks are pretty much playable outside of a few staples
@@razielfaustus9733 These aren't playable out of the box though, which is the biggest issue. If i were a new player, having to buy 3 of a product, watch videos online of how to use the cards in that product (i.e. build a deck from it) and buy a few singles to actually make it playable, i just wouldn't bother. Why isn't there just a ready-to-play (for example) swordsoul deck, thats just a cookie-cutter swoso tenyi list (maybe minus baronne, lets be realistic) for like 25-30$, throw in some dice, some tokens, a deck box and a pack of sleeves, put it in a nice box you can use to store your future cards and make it 45$. That way you can actually buy a singular product, sit down with someone who plays the game, and expect to have a fair matchup all things considered. And not get clapped by war rocks because you thought the 'structure deck' you bought was a complete deck.
@@razielfaustus9733 the thing is that they aren't playable at all since they only have 1 copy of each card, in the pokemon tcg and magic structure decks are LITERALLY playable right out of the box by having multiple of most cards included
For anyone reading comments before/while watching. Do not read Twitch chat, I'm only 5 mins into the video and I'm already losing braincells on those people.
God I was about to say that. "MASTER DUEL IS SUPPOSED TO BE ITS OWN FORMAT REEEEEEEEE MBT STUPID" on a video where literal shareholders are concerned that MD's popularity isn't selling paper cards
Why would your average MD player shift to paper? Going from quick pick up and play phone game that is free, to a super expensive physical card game that requires travel and interaction with other people, and where an normal BO3 game can take 40+ minutes is a big hurdle. Yu-gi-oh is Yu-gi-oh but while there is obviously overlap between the two formats, I also think the two audiences are very different.
Ive found myself interested in paper play cuz of master duel. It's not impossible, if master duel really sells you on the yugioh experience, wouldn't you ever wonder what it's like to play with real people and have some old fashioned fun? Issue is the game is too expensive to really get into.
@@reservationatdorsias3215 It definitely is, even if it's not as big of an issue. A top tier deck in the OCG still costs a few hundred dollars. That's very small compared to the TCG. But even if you just buy a $10 structure deck, for a lot of players, going from spending $0 to spending any amount no matter how small is a large mental hurdle. A lot of master duel players just want to play as low investment as possible.
i write this quick i dont know how to spell labrynth 3 lady each 100-150k idr around 7usd 1 lovely 70-100k idr 5-7usd 3 big welcome 10k idr 3 welcome 30-50k a labyrinth core only cost around 30-40usd in my country. the rest like chaos angel etc are dirt cheap, your store might just gave the furnitures for free.
I think that's a big thing too. The crossover between the audience of Master Duel and the physical game is fairly small in terms of people who want to become actual players. Besides, why would I play the paper format when I've already committed time and money into Master Duel? We get updates every month and the game is way easier to play casually, not to mention that I have actual goals and achievements to go for when playing Master Duel casually compared to the paper format which offers nothing outside of a competitive level. It's like telling a guy who's in driving a car to go tame a horse and ride that instead of driving.
They should make a game tutorial where they get Dan Green to explain hand traps with kuriboh and get Jaden to flub to a "when/if" card text. Well, it's better than tutorials explaining Ally of Justice lore at least
I feel like it's hard to translate from a game where you have to pay nothing, interact with nobody to a game where you have to extensively do both things. The paper market and the digital game market are completely different and attempting to translate one into the other is going to be very difficult.
Telling Yugioh players "You need to buy 3 copies of this structure deck" when just about every TCG released in the last 5 or 10 years have their structure/starter decks include all the important cards at max copies certainly doesn't help.
@@Dehalove Pokemon does? I only know Magic through Commander where playsets arent a thing but I know for a fact Pokemon starter decks do have playsets or multiples of certain cards. They don't give you playsets of every card but that isn't necessary, you get a playable deck right out the gate. I see no reason why Yugioh cant do similar.
What's crazy to me is that almost all of these problems have already happened, and they happened with Konamis other big mobile game/pseudo sim, Duel Links. There was a notable period during Duel Links prime when Fur Hire was the best deck, and a lot of users really enjoyed the deck, so they bought the deck in paper, and tried to take it to locals/irl tournaments and simply got stomped. Those players never played paper again, and stuck to Duel Links. It is shocking that Konami have not learned from this very important lesson.
DL is good if you want to learn the basics quickly i guess. Even then, the anime structure decks that basically play themselves have long been powercrept.
duel links is a little more abstracted from paper ygo, so I am not surprised they didn't take too much stock of that situation. master duel SHOULD translate better onto paper, and I'm sure they thought the same thing. but yeah, definitely should have taken DL as a warning if nothing else, pretty clear they are a little out of touch with what's actually going on with the IP as a whole
Konomi missed the biggest issue.... Money. This game is stupid expensive for no reason. And you want people who started on master duel, probably spent money there and then come out to paper and spend hundreds if not thousands? Yeah that's not going to happen.
Even more jarring if you play MD completely free (like me) going from a game you don’t have to spend lonely on to dropping thousands to keep up is like whiplash
Joshua Schmidt failed to realise KONAMI isn’t chasing profits, it’s chasing short term profits, because they know YGO players will keep eating regardless and that the community is growing. I think this is one of the rare cases where the company actually addresses the long term sustainability of the game.
I disagree. Konami hasn't been chasing short term profits, they're in a holding pattern and have never felt the need to change up since this same system has been working for them for the past seven years or so through TCG/OCG/digital (Duel Links and now MD). If you want to see short term profit seeking look at Magic the Gathering. They've burned a lot of their playerbase chasing whales and brand deals.
@@geek593 That may be, but i'm not gonna lie: the LOTR set has been fun to play commander with. Granted, i enjoy Ashiok, so Sauron (both the character design and the deck mechancs) just scratches that itch for me.
The community is not growing lmao new players come in thinking its fun and casual then see how absolutely messed up it is and run away. Ive even seen something similar in competitive players. I've even quit for a while because I wasnt having fun against Altergeist and the abysmal pricing of cards. I just wish the game was at least more affordable. It's ridiculous they expect players to pay $100s or even $1000s on a deck that probably wont live to see past 6 months.
In a lot of fighting game communities they host beginner brackets where once you make top 3 you cannot enter that bracket again. I wonder if we could adopt something like that
Man, I feel like I need Bachelor Degree to fully understand ruling, like a Lawyer in YuGiOh. MD makes my life so much easier. I am a monkey kind of person, so I learn through trial and error; I can or I can't do something with certain cards; the program let me activate a card or not. Sometimes, I click buttons to see what happens, and I do not read all the cards. In paper, I would not call a judge, and if I'd do it, I would probably not understand the resolution. Maybe the problem is thinking of MD as the bridge to paper instead of taking advantage of its real potential as a new market, a testing platform, a channel to listen the voice of customer, etc.
If I have learnt something about the game in paper and about ruling is because of experimented players that are content creators in MD, just like Joshua. So, the bridge cannot be MD alone; it might be the combination already mentioned. But maybe Konami is just too blind to see that. Look at Dkayed being banned instead of making the most out of his capabilities.
@@armandonoriega681the old mindset that still wanted paper as main resources of income, while in this modern era digital property are crucial. That being said i still agree paper and MD need to co exist, doesnt need to convert MD for paper or vice versa.
This! I stsrted returning to YGO in EDOPro and boy i got mentally hit vs Kashtira and Tear, because i play casual like Chronomaly and Suship Then i went to MD and i have fun for the first time. Climbing up rank and story mode using Qliphort, then getting lucky to craft trains, watching YGO, MD or not, videos on the tutorial...MD is easier for returnees and newbies, i swear!
As a MD only player, I don't really agree with MBT here. He is looking at things from the perspective of a paper player playing MD, NOT the perspective of a MD player thinking about paper play. I don't care about the format. The reason I don't translate to paper is because imo paper is inferior. - I like that the online simulator knows all the weird rulings and interactions for me. It means I spend more time playing and less time trying to remember interactions or waiting for judge rulings etc. - I like that I don't have to travel all over the place to find people to play against - I like that I can play WAY more games in MD than I ever could going to a tournament or a game store. - I like that the game is cheaper. I have about 20 decks in MD and have spent at most 300 on the game. I don't even think I could get all the staple cards for that amount in paper, let alone 20 competitive decks. - I also have no desire to rebuy all the cards I already own online, plus all the new cards. I can see why an OCG or TCG player might not like playing an older format, and might dislike bo1, but as a MD player I don't really care about that. We get new cards monthly and 1-2 ban lists a month so things are always fairly fresh for us. I also really like the fact that we have a different meta, so everything isn't completely solved the moment we get new cards. Maybe that doesn't translate well to paper play, but I genuinely don't understand why anyone would want paper play. It's more expensive, less convenient, and less efficient to play.
I agree completely, coming from the same background. I don't really care about the cards being much older than other formats as I hardly ever played the Tcg to begin with, so every is new to me, if anything it gives me extra contents of people from the Tcg testing cards out and get excited to what's coming next and get to put together the most optimized version on day 1 since all the work has been done by them. I used to play with friends then on dueling book, the experience has been terrible, either the players were rude and willing to call judge at the slightest missplay even if you say you are a newplayer, or just pure trolling and being mean, you often end up arguing more than playing the game. Also I hate that there are rules that are not set in stone so different judges can rule differently, that to me is unacceptable for a game like Yugioh where the rule should be clear and unified. I also heard stories from Tcg players where judges can have clear biases against you and can ban you for silly reasons. I think Masterduel should be treated as its own thing. I'm tired of Tcgs players acting smug and see Masterduel as an inferior format that eventually when given a chance players will change to the "real game" of Tcg when it's not. It sucks for tcgs players to have to play cards that they already played a few months ago, I feel sorry for them but at the same time I don't really care as it's not my problem
Cant we know the future meta from looking at the tcg or ocg? Or are banlist really different? In that case we can save gems for future decks and know how much time they will stay meta, that sounds much better and help us on what decks to invest in
master duel being more than a year behind product release and how that affect the experience of translating MD players to paper play is ABSOLUTELY a master duel issue.
i think the alarming thing about the future of yugioh and why people should be at least somewhat spooked is the fact that *shareholders* are starting to raise issues with yugioh of all things that belong to konami
Tbh this more feels like a guy in his 50's to 60's doing a little bit of research, maybe has a family member that plays the game and he tagged along with him to a tournament. Not unreasonable but not exactly the biggest problem for an already established tcg to have.
@@shawnjavery shareholders are what run companies. if they’re raising concerns to the future of yugioh then there is reason to be concerned. whether or not yugioh actually is/does decline, shareholders have the power to call for konami to phase out anything that they see as stagnant or etc. shareholders should be taken very seriously.
A big point that was missing in mbts video is the price point of in paper yugioh. Staples like baronne, accescode, triple tactics, dusk dragon, pot, garura, the adventure engine etc are still really expensive. Spending 200+ euros to get competive is a big hurdle for new players. This could be prevented by good reprints in all rarities (common versions). Yugioh is even expensive compared to other cardgames like yugioh.
The problem with this is that for like over a decade now folks always say its about the money its about the money and then neglect to mention that we've had a number of lower cost formats throughout those ten years and it has never had a demonstrable effect on new player onboarding so its very obvious that the problem is more complex or simply not as much about the money. Yeah, YGO is expensive compared to the cheaper games, but it isn't compared to its main competitor Magic the Gathering (Pokemon exists on its own really since so many people buying those cards are collectors and their tournament series is entirely insulated and for a variety of other reasons.)
I don't think there's anything konami can do about that other than completely eschew the pull ratios of those staples. Take ash blossom, ash was reprinted 3 times last year alone but before that it had like 5 or 6 reprints including a common, still the common was 30 bucks. Give it a year or so with no reprints and it will rise in price again even with all the recent reprints. You can't really expect konami to reprint the same deck month after month just because it's good, they have new cards to sell. A yearly duel devastator would be nice but the original duel devastator was stuck on shelves because you only has to buy 3 for a full playset, and aside from the ghost girls which you can find in common somewhere else, it hasn't aged well.
@@vaxel0068 Ash is currently four dollars for the cheapest copy my guy, she isn't expensive anymore...because they have since reprinted her in multiple structure decks in the last six months. And she's about to get another reprint in the Quarter Century Collection to drop the now abundant structure deck commons even more.
@@vaxel0068 They don't? Dude was right about common Ash being 30 dollars like a year ago; it used to be a problem. Its just a problem that Konami has since fixed and the fact he's fixating on it means he probably isn't keeping up with the prices before defaulting to saying the price of Ash is the problem like it used to be. The reason the old Structure common Ash was 30 bucks is that they put her in one structure and then never again for years, but now they've literally put her in two of the last three (with the third being Dark World, which doesn't even play Ash fully built lol) and she's confirmed for another reprint at higher rarity, which will dilute the pool of lower rarity copies even more. Also, the two structures she came in are still easy to pick up at an LGS or a Walmart. Ash is everywhere now.
29:05 As MBT pointed out (in reverse), fighting games have a similar problem to Yugioh where attracting new players is concerned. Note that I am biased, but playing a fighting game with intentionality is extremely fun, and their complexity contibutes substantially to this fact. But that same complexity makes playing with intentionality very difficult for new players, resulting in games that are very fun to play but take a lot of effort to learn. This reality is the reason why so many people in the FGC say that the thing the genre needs most is very good tutorials. This is why people go out of their way to critique FG tutorials, and point out the best ones - we want the people who make our games to recognise that there is a ton of value in making good tutorials, and we want to show them what a good tutorial looks like. Regarding Yugioh, I think you're exactly correct for requesting the same from Konami. If they're going to sell a complicated game, they need to respect that fact and teach newcomers how to play their game. They can't sweep complexity under a rug and hope the player will figure it out on their own - that's what "standard" FG tutorials do, and it does not work in either case. They need to show their players that the game is complex, show them what the decision points in a game tend to look like and how to navigate them,¹ and walk them through at least the basic theory of their game (what card advantage is, why smaller decks are good & why upstart goblin was an incredibly good card for a time, etc.). Ideally, they'd have something like a product for beginners that links to online strategy guides for intermediates - this way, they can teach the basics immediately, and introduce more advanced (but still fundamental) concepts later (e.g. the concepts of combos with chokepoints, sidedecking, etc.). This is along the lines of what the best FG tutorials do, _and it works._ The games are still hard to learn, but that's their nature. The tutorials/introductory products at least do their job this way. On a related note, the FGC gets upset when games do not have any "proper" training mode features, like frame advance, hitbox visualizers, frame advantage displays, etc. We also tend to praise games that go above and beyond the minimum. There's good reason for this: the details which such features give us are part of the fundamental rules of the game. Those rules matter, and understanding them is a necessary thing above some level of play. The complexities of fighting games can only be understood by one who understands their rules. Yugioh is similar in many ways, an obvious example being that one can only understand that Book of Moon will stop the effect that affects "that target" if one understands the difference between "target ..;.. that target..." and "target ..;.. it..." as provided by the rules. A fighting game which lacks good training mode features is like a physical game without a rulebook. Y'know, like Yugioh! You can certainly learn all the rules by looking around online but it'd be _much_ better if all the rules were in one place, provided by the game - this applies in all cases! TL;DR: Josh is right,² the solution to Yugioh's complexity is teaching the game better. This can be done by respecting the game's complexity, not trying to hide it, and showing new players the game as it truly is while walking them through it. Lastly, Yugioh's complexity makes its lack of a rulebook inexcusable - if it weren't already inexcusable based on the game being run by the humans who play it alone. ¹One effective way to do this is to construct a pair of stacked decks, and provide instructions on how to play a game - or at least a first turn - with them. Those instructions should include the reasons why particular decisions are made at particular times. Ideally, I'd want to see them include mistakes, and explain at the end how one can look back and recognise where one made a suboptimal choice, using the built-in mistakes as examples. "Yugioh's a hard game, but with practice, you'll learn to master it!" Or maybe that'd discourage new players, what do I know. ²to everyone's shock, I'm sure
Smash Bros is a fighting game too, but has wider appeal because of its simplicity. It works as a competitive combo heavy fighter or a party game. Complexity is an issue when it limits accessibility because most people aren't playing games to compete, but to have a good time. It's why Konami has catered largely to the causal, nostalgia crowd over the years. They make up the majority of the player base. Nobody likes to read a rulebook like a thesis, except the overly invested. Konami recognizes this and I think the competitive community needs to follow suit.
@@spicymemes7458 Thank you for mentioning SSB, because _even it_ contains a rulebook. Sure, its training mode isn't ideal, but it's easily sufficient, and useful for its purpose. Yugioh's rules distribution fails to inform its players on how the game is played. That is a problem, no matter how you spin it. Bear in mind that one can print a basic rulebook, and then have a longer document for reference on specifics. If you've never seen MtG's comprehensive rules, take a look at them - they don't expect anyone will sit down and read through them. They're structured to answer questions that come up in play as quickly as possible, while letting players learn to understand the complexities in a straightforward way as they encounter these edge-cases. (Addendum: to be blunt, even Yugioh's basic rulebook fails at being a basic rulebook. Its structure is poor, resulting in e.g. people not understanding that tokens can't be used as XYZ matetial, and it doesn't even break down the fundamentals of how to read effect text. At minimum, Yugioh should have a good beginner's rulebook) I understand your point about complexity being an issue, but it's not objectively currect. It's not objectively wrong either, to be clear, and the point about complexity reducing accessibility is itself objectively correct - it's just not objectively _bad_ for games to be complex. Regarding Yugioh specifically, since this complexity conversation is necessarily case-by-case, there is one thing I want to point out: What selling point does Yugioh have as a game, if complexity and its resulting combos aren't it? The extra deck? That serves the purpose of making the game more consistent and giving you more options at any given time, but so do other gimmicks like Digimon's removal of the inherent cost of playing some cards (said cost being the loss of a card in hand). In fact, gimmicks like Digimon's are better at giving you more options, because extra deck mon's are often limited in when you can use them and how they are used - many of them are played at specific times for specific purposes in combos, not as a deliberate choice based on gamestate. The way Yugioh uses its ED is unique, certainly, but it isn't all that dissimilar from things found in other games. I know you didn't reference it as a premptive response to this point, but I'll address it: nostalgia cannot be the selling point of a long-lasting game, I won't waste our time explaining why (unless you ask). Ultimately, if I were to play Yugioh _(which I probably would,_ were I to decide I wanted to play a TCG), I would do so because I like its combos, I like its complexity, and I like how the two go hand-in-hand. I don't see why else one would prefer it over its competitors. All that said, there are ways to reduce the problem of complexity - that it makes being a new player hard. This problem and the accesibility argument share similarities with motion inputs in fighting games, and I think SF6 has handled that problem admirably. In short, give new players the option to play a less-complicated game, but make it the same game everyone else plays. In a TCG, you can do this by creating decks that are relatively simple to pick up and play, but still have interesting decisions, and are competitive with other good decks. If you want an example, Dragon Rulers probably fits that description up to power level. It's easy to understand what that deck wants to do - activate each ruler once per turn, spam large momsters, optionally use two to make a monster which improves your position, and conserve resources effectively (this last part + deciding what to search being what give the deck interesting choices). The cards are individually powerful, their synergy is clear, and the games are interesting. I'd call it a good deck for beginners up to power level. Last and least, a pair of minor notes: While invested players are the minority, they buy a lot more product than the rest. Creating and pleasing them is worthwhile for this reason. Regarding "most players aren't playing games to compete, but to have a good time," please don't list these as distinct activities. Most players don't have a good time competing. People who play competitively will, for the most part, do so because they have the best times playing that way. Furthermore, "playing to have a good time" does not preclude wanting to get better at the game. Even "casual" players play their games to win, and for the most part have more fun as they learn to play their games better. The divide between casual and competitive isn't deep on that axis. Helping people learn and understand your game is good for everyone. (minor edits: "a number of things" ended up being "one thing," and I didn't spot that before sending. "individually powerful" was "inherently powerful" previously)
What I think Smash does very well is “trick” its players into wanting to learn the more complex stuff. A lot of the things that people complain about with regards to complexity still exist in Smash (tight links, combo driven gameplay, frame data, annoying movement tech), but in my personal experience, I’ve seen way more Smash players end up being converted to competitive play simply because the game does a very good job backloading complexity until after the player is already hooked on the basic gameplay loop. I think Smash proves that this concept of shifting complexity to the background is the most important for growing the playerbase in a sustainable way, since the franchise has historically had terrible tutorials, training modes, and net play.
@@wdililn I agree with you in almost all regards, but I'd phrase it differently: many players go from playing SSB casually to competitively because it leaves enough on its surface to show casuals¹ how to play with intentionality. It's not hard to pick one of those games up, learn the controls, and make decisions without being burdened by excessive mental overhead. When one has learned to play a fighting game at all, one can then learn a new character, a new concept, a new combo, or whatever else while still playing the game in the way that's fun - by making decisions and plans, quickly adapting to one's opponent, and performing the inputs corresponding to one's ideas. If a casual player continues playing for long enough, gets curious about and researches how other people play the game, and tries to learn to play the game better, one will learn the skills of a competitive player. From there, whether they become a competitive player or not is simply up to whether they think tournaments are fun or not. What I think SSB demonstrates is that the most important thing for a complicated game to do is to get its players playing the game as quickly as possible, where "playing" is done with a meaningful level of understanding. The way SSB does so is what you said: it gets people playing in that way by making sure its basic mechanics don't have gaps; by ensuring that one only needs to understand the complicated stuff to improve their game, rather than needing that understanding to have their game exist at all. ¹I do not like that word's connotations, but I don't have a better word for this purpose.
@@delta3244 I think a great example is Street Fighter 6. The game has a LOT of complex stuff in it but the World Tour mode acting as a long form tutorial plus the training modes like combo trials and just the training room in general are phenomenal. Not to mention the incredible use of the Modern control scheme that allows new players to get in and play imminently. It has really shown a lot to the FGC what we need in our games which ties into YGO, imagine if instead of getting some shitty combo mode for Ally of justice they released a Tear one. Tear is such a strong deck and they know what decks are going to be strong so release a tutorial along side them to teach people about them, id reckon it would also increase sales since more people would have their hands on the deck and thus would want to play it.
They have people shelling out 50 bucks each for structures instead of 15, why would they make their decks more consumer friendly now? It's literally the Pokemon sales tactic. If you want everything, well you better buy the exact same product again, bud.
@@TheKnightOfBuquicious Yeah, the new Dracoslayer support dropped in Darkwing Blast, and at that point Kashtira wasn't a complete deck yet, all they had was the first wave of main deck support and Shangri-Ira. No Ariseheart, no Tear Kash or Scareclaw Kash, etc. This is another thing that happens a lot in MD and can stop certain decks from being a thing on the client. Another example is all of the pre-Ishizu Tear decks like Danger! Tear; they got Ishizu before Tear so they never got to play with any of them being decent.
I’m so mad at this as well. It should of been released with tear as a great way to counter the tear 0 meta since the deck has a way to search necrovalley easily. Lame move by komoney but it’s to be expected
@@daedalus5253 Either before, then wait 3-4 months at least, or after. I don't want them to release it together with Kashtira which basicly hardcounters most pendulum decks by locking their S/T zone. If Konami is smart they preban Diablosis
Imagine how hype it would be if a card was revealed on OCG Twitter, then put into Master Duel just a few hours later before it becomes paper legal, even for OCG. It would not only be hype af but fanatical people would probably rashly spend UR dust/money and such to craft the cards immediately (possibly even before it's featured in a selection pack), generating more revenue for MD
I said this already on MBT's video, but its worth repeating here: This is the fighting game of TCGs, and as such it has a stupidly high skill floor that prevents people from getting into it. If MTG is Smash Ultimate, Yugioh is Melee. However, while a proper TCG simulator is something we need eventually, its honestly not what I think is entirely preventing people from getting into paper Yugioh. I got into this game through Duel Links, and I had no trouble learning the TCG. It just took time, and while emulators like YGO Omega helped, it still took me about a year to really grasp this game. But i was commited because I had a friend with me the whole time. My primary solution to this problem is to do what Pokemon has been doing for a while now with its TCG World Championship Decks: release select YCS deck builds as standalone, high-end, pre-constructed products. It would be preferable if the deck came with some sorta "strategy guide" with tips on how to operate the deck correctly, as well as providing card suggestions for constructing a side deck. MTG does something similar with its commander deck products. They don't come with a guide or some shit given that Magic is a stupidly simple game, but the deck lists are still pretty competent for pre-constructed builds and provide plenty of room for making modifications. The recent Sauron commander deck pretty much convinced me to start playing again (it reminded me of Ashiok in terms of play style, which is a favorite of mine), so they're clearly doing a good job. I'm telling you: if Konami did this, new players willing to learn this game would pick up on everything fast. Like, seriously: make a Rikka Sunavalon YCS deck product or some shit. Hell, we just put Engage to 2 and Multirole to 3. Make a Sky Striker deck product, weebs would eat that shit up and it'd be much less embarrassing to pilot than Traptrix. Another good solution would be to require duelists to release their deck lists in general after an event. Its incredibly annoying as a viewer watching a YCS to see some guy piloting a really strong deck and then not be able to see his deck list. Show that shit in between rounds, consumers like me would want to either build that deck or try to push it further, and that makes Konami money. Finally, I'd highly recommend YGOPaisano's recent video on the topic of YCS coverage. He mentions a lot of stuff about Master Duel that Joseph ended up repeating here, but his takes on the awful livestreams is some pretty good criticism.😮
the skill floor in fighting games is not actually high though, it’s artificially inflated because fighting games do a shit job of teaching you the game. the ONLY one i’ve seen do well is street fighter 6, where you can get things specifically for the character you want to play that ACTUALLY are helpful. It actually tells you “you can use these buttons to poke at your opponent from a distance. if they jump at you, you can use these moves. This character you’re playing is very weak to projectile spam, watch and try to block or parry them.” While it has combo trials, it doesn’t teach you how to learn your own combos, how to theorize, how to ADAPT. It can’t teach you complex strategy, meter management, and these abstract thoughts, but these are not the skill floor, they’re the learning curve. What fighting games and ygo have in common is being low skill floor, extremely high learning curve, and no perceived skill CEILING. the cardinal sin both have is sucking horribly at teaching the basics and the learning process. We can talk about the need to actually practice too, because god knows beginners hate the idea of even TOUCHING a practice mode, but practicing a fighting game is infinitely easier than practicing ygo.
The easiest solution is to stop bullshitting and just say “hey, this shit is hard. We as the devs do not know everything possible, and frankly, some of the players have put out good videos regarding different things, here’s the link to the videos, and a few websites that players contribute additional information to. There’s more, but these are the most important, feel free to search for more on your own time. ” It’s really just that easy. A better tutorial and direct links to online resources changes things dramatically.
as someone who stopped playing paper at synchros, getting back on masterduel was really an experience of being "this does WHAT?" constantly for the first few months, then i caught on to most rulings and new cards and know what to watch for now, but still the learning curve comes at losing to cards that appear out of nowhere for sure.
Im an OCG player, it is really frustrating to play MD because these are really old cards. They just recently released Traptrix, which was released months ago. It sucks. You cant even practice with the new cards so you have to use a different online simulator instead.
Shoutouts to Dkayed for helping keep me interested in Master Duel. Whether it be new card releases, tournaments or just having by far the best website for aggregating deck lists and data that dude is an MVP for Master Duel's western audience. That isn't to say other content creators don't do anything for the game of course, the Yugitube community has done great Master Duel content in general but nobody has helped introduce me and keep me entrained by Master Duel like Dkayed has.
As a 17yo living in a "relatively big but not the biggest city there is" in Brazil who got into yugioh due to masterduel: Fuck, a meta deck can cost upwards of 3 monthly minimun wages over here, but that doesn't concern me much as I generally don't enjoy playing wathever is META at the moment, but then, even rogue decks can cost quite a bit too, specially talking staples. My best bet is building something with 3x structures or some older deck with cheap cards (something like a yosenju pendulum nemleria can cost under 30$) But then, if I do build my deck, preferably a cheap one since I'm a student and can't afford the more expensive decks, what now? I would have to go to a locals to play since most my friends have no interest in playing (there's like two guys I know who play, one doesn't want to play and the other guy isn't even from the same school as me so only sometimes we get to hang out anyway). And about locals, there's exactly 1 shop within 100km from where I live that is official and appears on konami locals searcher thingy and it's a MTG specialized shop (and doubles as a board and card game shop). From what I could see online they don't seem to have a lot going for yugioh. And what's worse, it's 28 fucking kilometers away from where I live. So it's hard for me to even get there as a teenager without infinite money to spend on services like uber or even trying my luck with public transport. Other than that, I could try to teach my other friends yugioh, as I've tried a little bit with masterduel, but most just gave up almost instantly, literally the deck that I showed to make my friend even show some kind of interest was crusadia since you just make a 10k monstrosity and attack for game. Currently I'm thinking if it's even worth trying to play a lower power format to start them off, because that's not really easy to do in masterduel due to some old cards being high rarity for no reason, so I would have to keep making new accounts in order to keep myself f2p. And if I do try to get them on an unnoficial sim, I'm afraid it wouldn't be flashy or satisfying enough to get then interested for long IDK where I wanted to go with this, but fuck, playing a card game is hard for no frickin reason
I think what MBT hinted at in the complexity of the game is a problem that revolves around card text. What is a trigger effect, an ignition effect, missing the timing, etc. isn't intuitive for new players. Konami can help by redesigning card text and, if need be, make a spreadsheet for new players to read for clarification. Edit: basically make it less daunting to read the cards for new players
It's weird they didn't keep certain promises. They did say, before the game came out, that MD would support OCG and TCG. On top of that they said it would be possible to play older formats. Neither of these things came true. Especially not supporting the old format right from the get go easily lost them 40k permanent players (in the first days the game had 120k players, now we have like 20k I believe) because so many of that initial 120k players wanted to play what they played 15+ years ago. Maybe to them duel rooms with friends are the representation for older formats, but that's not what people asked for.
They still don't give us access to every banned card, so you can't even play some legacy formats properly in duel rooms. Erratas also screw it up, but we need to take things one step at a time. Konami is just a small indie company. :^)
Another thing to consider regarding being "spooked" about the future of Yugioh, is that MBT made this video in the context of this shareholder's meeting, where a shareholder raised similar concerns. Attracting new players is an investment, one that will typically pay off in the long run, as you said. But if efforts that were expected to attract new players don't work as well as hoped, then the people pulling the strings may decide that it's a problem of the game rather than just an issue with MD. As a result they could decide that even though the game is currently growing, that it's just not worth it to invest in new players. Then decisions are likely to become even more focused on squeezing cash out of existing players rather than attracting new players, that growth is then likely to slow to a halt, or even drive existing players away, causing the company to squeeze even harder, etc. So it's not just a concern that these issues are too big, it's also a concern of how will the shareholders interpret these issues.
Another problem is that TCG/OCG players* are looking for MD to be a sim of their formats, when I think it wants to be looked at as its own separate game with its own metas
@@abdurachmanromzy4778 I mean, when the banlists don't align, when we don't get cards in a timely manner, when the format is different (bo1) I assume they're doing their own thing. No one needs to say this about Duel Links, people just accepted it because it was a smaller board.
24:00 This is literally me at my local about a month ago, I asked what Fenrir does and my opponent (who knew what I was playing) just said “you’re not going to like where this ends up”. Turns out he was right
The ocg no surrender thing I believe is part of why in no banlist tournaments that have happened with ocg dragonlink adjacent decks were semicompetitive by doing the match win effect
I find it weird there was little to no mention of price. To me, price is the biggest barrier of entry when it comes to Yugioh. At the end of the day anything else is secondary to price. If you can’t afford the cards in the first place what motivation is there to learn the game at all? The game could be super easy to learn etc. but people still wouldn’t play unless it became more affordable.
Konami not having an official simulator and the fact that they are treating MD as a low cost maintenance game is wild. MD had a huge launch, in PC, Consoles and Mobile and they simply lost that momentum by not supporting the game correcly. Specially on mobile
I get what you guys are trying to say however, a lot of these videos are created from the perspective of people who have been playing IRL for a very long time and i think a lot of you see it from that side and not the non TCG/OCG playing perspective. i dont believe most people who play master duel, want to play the paper game. people just play one or two games for fun. and it is the same with every game a majority of street fighter players don't intent to go to EVO or attend a local tournament, just want one or two games online and that's that. I think the mistake we are making is assuming MD's intention is to get people playing the paper game, however, i think they gave up on that a while ago and started treating it like its own entity, much like duel links which is why at worlds it is its own thing. Yeah the number of paper players are not increasing as expected, but to be honest it's existence has indirectly resulted in people getting interested in the OCG and TCG who otherwise wouldn't have.
Fully agreed. If you are a returning or a new player and you start with MD, is the format up to date, or a few months behind the paper game, is of little relevance to you, and won't push you to transition to paperplay, aside from having something to look forward to.
Rush Duel is a uniquely Japanese minded product. The only format I could see it working on in the West is digital. People are very reluctant to pick up separate card games here.
@@geek593 worth noting you can buy Rush decks for dirt cheap in Japan. Like 600 Yen (~4 USD) for a complete starter deck. No shot we get products at that kind of price point in the west.
The fact the dueling book is still the primary sim is a travesty and shows how poorly the tcg is supported when we need to resort to netplay client that would have been considered jank 10 years ago
It's not consideredably jank, it was jank(I joined it's predecessor DuelingNetwork during Sept 2012). But it was the most accessible platform with the easiest implentation back in 2010s.
I think they could implement something similar to fighting games where we have a rematch option turning the best of 1 into a best of 3 with side deck. That'd be cool
and of course he'd bring up Set Rotation To be honest, if people can't give Speed Duel more attention, then what good would shutting down over 15 years of card making brings?
I went to a couple of in person tournaments after primarily playing master duel since release date, and a lot of the people I played with were rude and got annoyed that I was adjusting to the physical card game. Might not be a universal experience, but so many players are not welcoming so I prefer playing online lol.
I experienced cheating, stealing, rule sharking, kids scammed out of trades, spectators who can't shut up, all for a handful of booster packs. I'm either playing with friends or online, but I won't bother with locals anymore.
@skypirate7833 idk anything about the lore, yet everyone else does. Is there Manga or anime that I don't know about? Where is everyone getting the story for these cards?
honestly i believe that for a chunk for players such as myself i quite frankly dont want to invest that much time/effort master duel is chill also way easier to access and play plus it is f2p friendly for irl you need a few hundred dollars at the minimum while i am fully f2p on masterduel (also dont get me into how much easier it is just to see a glowing yellow thing rather than understand 100 different cards of your own and 1000 more of your opponents)
31:30 The Traptrix deck is probably the closest thing to this, as it's literally a HAT deck, and it gave you basically everything minus like 2 one-of trap holes
when you like bystial in master duel and then go to the ocg and see your opponent special summoning fenrir and you go what the hell is that just for them to add tear kash and you realize this exactly the same format as it is in master duel
The Maxx "C" "problem" can be easily solved by having the TCG unbanning the card. It's a FAIR card anyways and both OCG and MD have it at 3. Might as well have some consistency between formats by making TCG do the easy job of unbanning it.
I feel like Konami can implement aspects of what Smogon does for the singles Pokémon tournaments to Master Duel. Master duel does something unique that none of the other simulators do and that it tracks card usage rates and win rates. Konami can literally create official Tiers besides the diamond/gold/etc system they currently have that gets unlocked as soon as you hit the highest rank. This way the banlist can be updated regularly once a deck becomes too much and players can utilize easier strategies so they can go up the more familiar they get with the game. Another thing is they can preview new archetypes in MD before they get released in the card game so people can get excited for a set to being released. Realistically, the cards should be getting updated anywhere from a week to a month from physical release since you know, they literally can update the MD department as soon as the cards are finished with development. They have the capacity to do this better than Edopro, and yet, Edopro is able to implement cards into their simulator faster than Konami can with a head start.
As someone who got into YGO with Master Duel a couple months ago this list comes off to me more as things veteran TCG players don't like about MD rather than issues any actual new MD players have moving to OCG/TCG. I think he's really overrating the importance of the different formats. It would be convenient if they were the same, yes, but cards important to your strategy getting banned/limited/powercrept and having to adapt to a new metagame is something MD players are already familiar with. As for the time argument I feel like I misunderstood something. Why would I care that the MD meta is stale to other players? Complexity I can't argue with, though for me is more an issue in the core rules rather than the individual cards. If/then/missing timing/pendulums/ignition effect or whatever, genuinely after ~300 hours I couldn't tell you how this shit works. MD doesn't do a good job teaching YGO, but it's automated so you don't really need to know it if you're fine with being surprised by interactions sometimes. My top 3 reasons for not getting into TCG are: price, not wanting to support western Konami doing stuff like inflating rarities from OCG to TCG, and the rules feeling too difficult without MD's assistance.
completely agree. Somewhere in the middle MBT started making arguments about why TCG/OCG players don't like to play in MD, but I thought the entire issue was MD players not translating to real card play, so what does that have to do? Like you mentioned I think biggest hurdles are price, complexity of having to do all actions by yourself (remembering all possible actions) and I think also there may just be people that don't want the social interaction aspects. I'd imagine there is a fair share of people that would rather play at home than attend a live event.
I felt the same way, that MBT was explaining why paper players like himself aren't throwing themselves into Master Duel when I was under the impression that the concern is MD players aren't converting to paper. Like, why would a new player care about getting beaten by Kash in paper when they just learned Tear exists? Every couple weeks Konami releases new cards that add to the paper format but that's not fundamentally a bad thing. I would actually guess that players who care enough about the newer cards would be more invested in adopting paper play over MD as a result, which I thought was what Konami wanted here. I think the major questions Konami should be asking is: why MD was able to attract so many new players, what has historically attracted players to OCG/TCG, what benefits does OCG/TCG supply over MD and are they enough to funnel players over. And to mine eyes, price and complexity are the biggest answers to these questions.
Facts, I look at the TCG like I view books, they are nice, expensive and certainly have a charm to them but I'm not going to start collecting entire libraries when my only goal is to enjoy stories. MD may not be the real deal to gatekeepers but I like it and it's accessibility to users like me is the only thing that brought yugioh back into my life.
While listening to this discussion, on top of all the solutions which were already provided, I think I have one which could help. What if Master Duel was actually ahead of the curve? What if people were allowed to test the cards and strategies they wanted on the simulator before purchasing and playing the decks in paper if they want to continue playing the format? Part of me feels like that would actually be helpful
@@cryomancer2768 Maybe not, but the way I see it it’s already currently not doing a lot. At least this way people could test decks online they know they’ll like on paper so they’ll be more willing to buy them, and Konami can alter rarities and other details about the cards based on which cards are likely to be the biggest chase cards.
I legitimately thought that Konami would add new sets by making brand new secret packs every so often but no, they have to do every few months adding a selection pack and putting the rest of the cards in the master pack.
konami really needs to look more after what the other tcgs do. it was officially stated by wizards that kitchen table is the most played mtg format followed by commander the casual exclusive format. yugioh needs to realize that there needs to be something directly targeted at new players that is from a complexity standpoint on the same level as competitive play and master duel is just a different flavor of competitive so it really only is for people who already would play yugioh and can't really convert new people
@@avagrim9891 if your talking about land based, first you only need fetches once and second you don't need them. You can easily build a high powered commander deck for 100€ and that's when you own 0 cards for 100 cards and my original comment was about exactly casual formats and how wizards knows they are the most played do explain me where the problem with prizes are when an actively supported format is at that price range
@@yirash47the only problem is that a MD Dragon Link player will have to learn to play the deck slower in the TCG since Dragons in the TCG (Right now) is a mid-rangey/control deck
If Konami wants more people, they need to promote older formats. It will be easier for new people to learn the game and understand the basics. Those new players will eventually look for newer cards and newer formats and learn at their own pace until they get to the most advanced format of yugioh. PS: I think YGO OMEGA is a very good simulator. Have you tried playing in that platform?
The biggest problem of MD is that it's sooooooooo behind in cards. We're playing a resolved format for TCG and OCG (we don't talk about the last OCG report here, that doesn't exist) everyone is sick and tired about Spright (saying this as a Spright enjoyer as well) and Tearlament most of the time and if you're not playing that you probably would get stucked in Platinum. Also the "C" with Snow and Pepega Ruler just feel so wrong to have them all legal in the same format.
Yeah people are so sick of sprite and tear but ooooh boy are they going to be excited with Kashtira. I honestly think they should skip Kash because that deck is horrible if you want new players to join. MD has a problem converting people to the txg not because of the format but because people see how unfair THE GAME IS and give up it'll be worse if they release one of the most toxic decks yugioh has ever seen Also snow and pepega ruler are nowhere near an issue I have no idea why people are so against them they are not these busted game winning cards. Pepega ruler is rarely used in top decks besides dragonlink and they don't need it so hitting it won't do anything
I'm not sure how they release cards in other tcgs but a big killer for me is that cards release in the OCG before TCG by several months. Not every strategy performs as well over there as it does here and vice versa, but its still a hype killer for me when I'm excited about a deck and I see OCG play it months before I can. It takes the fun out of deckbuilding and learning a deck for me.
I think a thing that can help people learn the complexity of yugioh is somewhat similar to what Cimoo ist doing with his history of yugioh series. I have tried teaching a lot of people yugioh by now and the thing I found most successful is to start with Goat Format and work your way up through old formats as these were less complex as todays format. And then as time progresses, the formats get more complex slowly so that the new player has time to adapt to that. That is something Konami could do 100%. Just put a story mode into their online simulator for the TCG (that doesnt exist sadly) where you would play through old formats and step by step get immersed into the newer formats until they are ready to play the actual modern tcg
I am a new paper yugimon player started in 2023. I never played a card game before when I first started the game I hated handtraps but rn I feel it's more fun to interact with your opponent and build a board useing one card my only issue is that most time the board is really had to interact against and kill the game I wish if like end board be weaker or interact in different way . I got into paper through master duel
The best way to input best of three in masterduel is looking at fighting games because when you lose you decide to do a rematch or not and if you do decide to rematch you go to a passive lobby where you can change the decklist but can only change whatever the amount the side deck is so no one can just change to a different deck
I hope Josh read my comment so he could understand and may be discuss a perfect example. As a master duel only player who lives in a country where yu gi oh is not a thing , the only way for me to play TCG is DB. dont get me wrong DB is cool for me and I realy think It is the step 2 after master duel for people like me because It is "semi autou". And even though I see all TCG yugitubers and aware of what is good in TCG and the general play style of these decks, when I tried the TCG on DB after playing master duel since it realse (higest rank every season and tried every meta deck except plant and runick naturia ) it was sooooo bad because (although I was up to date on tcg) there were many many new things that you need to understand at once so the end result was me playing Runick Rpright (which is different and bad without elf but I did not know that and had to learn it the hard way )against Kash and asking my oppoenet to slow down every time they did something
I'll just quickly repeat the points I made on MBT's video: 1. Maxx "C" not nearly as big of an issue as he makes it out to be. Guess what, a format where Maxx "C" is banned already exists, it's called "TCG" and people still find plenty of stuff to complain about, its not that different. Besides, if they did ban it in MD, it would be more in line with the TCG, but stray away from the OCG, so that's really a matter of perspective. 2. If MD had the same format as the TCG, I probably would never buy a physical card ever again. The TCG is expensive where I live and MD is just a much cheaper, and convenient, alternative. Besides, I do think the MD is a good introduction to the game. Sure, it's not the same format, but it's still the same game and a lot of what you learn is transferable. If adapting to a new format was so hard, people would quit the game whenever a new powerful set, like POTE, or harsh banlist droped. 3. When it comes to new player retention the lack of material for new players and cost are probably the major issues. Look at the starter decks from MD. Those are not only terrible, but don't reflect how the game is actually played nowadays. Even loaner decks for events are usually not competitive builds of the archetypes they're promoting and lack most staples. Konami could, and should, improve on that front.
Average deck price is 700 dollars. A youtuber did the math comparing tcg prices to each other. Cheap formats are 350 , expensive ones 1100. 700 average
@@shakeweller That video was made so close to PHHY release that it's heavily skewed. Kash was particularly expensive and certain reprints hadn't happened yet and people were experimenting with cards like Thrust which fell out of use pretty fast. His methodology wasn't amazing either. He took a snapshot of five performing decks at the time and averaged them while controlling for playsets of 3. Staples at the moment are fairly cheap making the buy-in for competitive not nearly as expensive as it was awhile back. Deck cores for pushed archetypes can run between 200-300 USD, usually lower.
I think a tutorial teaching new players to ash blossom branded fusion would be 1) effective 2) relevant-that’s always going to be a choke point for Branded 3) relating to a deck that will exist in the meta at various points for up to a year and 4) funny
master duel is simply goated for a lot of people because number one reason is you can play it on your phone.. you can just hop into md and leave anytime if you dont like the format..
One thing not pointed out (I think) is price. Pokémon TCG has meta decks that cost $60-$100 at min rarity while shit like bystial lubellion chills in that price range for one copy
People acting like Masterduel players having to adjust to new cards and banlist is a big problem when on average master duel's ladder has way more deck variety than the tcgs and ocgs so they are much more at home with seeing unknown cards for the first time, if not more than tcg players if they have not been playing consistently through out the years. Between the cost and other aspect of the game, card pool difference is the least of the problem
25:54 Josh, this is ultimately still a reason against this timenshift. Why would you leave it up to luck that the format you relive is one you like, when you can just turn the formats you do like into Time Wizard events? The formats that are missed once they are over can, just as with Edison, Goat, and others, be supported on the side anf implementing that in Master Duel might actually be trivial. (The devs should have plenty of experience with alternative formats now after all the events with special banlists.) The mere existence of the chance that the format you relive is bad makes the timeshifted release worse than the alternative: up-to-date cardpool with a kind of permanent event on the side for older formats. Though, I agree that this isn't MBT's strongest argument (then again, the whole video doesn't make _that_ strong a case and might just be another pitch for one of his own projects).
Master Duel is probably fine. It's the TCG/OCG that are fked. OCG/TCG should be on the same release schedule and share banlists at the very least. Master duel should also be very close to that. As Josh said, no side-decking in Master Duel is good because master duel should be a more accessible.
@17:15 I really wish he Joshua didnt even make this statement. As he is just guessing and has nothing to reference this opinion on. As a duel links player, I can tell you that it is quite difficult to transition into considering a side deck when you never had to previously. Not only considering the different strategies side decking allows, but also how to implement it. Assessing the format to know which cards to side is not intuitive. Do you run cards to counter specific decks, or do you run cards for going 1st/2nd instead, and if you do, are they board breakers or HT's. Then, once you choose a side, even if you netdeck and skip that stage, knowing what cards you can swap out of your main deck depending on the matchup is aslo not intuitive. You know to run DRNM, Dark Hole, etc when going 2nd, you have never had to consider what cards you dont need depending on the matchup. And, there is no resource or outlet readily covering this. Like there are videos explaining what are popular HT's, or if this is a boardbreaking meta. So you can learn that. But, there are no video telling you, "If you are running X deck, side out cards 1, 2, 3, when facing A deck. Side out card 10, 11, 12, and 13, when facing B deck for this reason. etc. etc." So I feel he is really underestimating the barrier that creates.
Imagine if they released lets say 3 starter decks that all are different meta decks with play sets off every card + stables like 3x ash, lightning storm, some one off stable extra deck monsters, etc. with a guidebook that teaches you how to utilize ash in choke points, push for game with accesscode, the decks combo lines and how to utilize side deck with lightning storm, feather duster in g2 if you know your going second. Sure they wouldnt be able to sell as much reprint packs with stables but I think it would make starting yugioh a much better experience if you could just buy the starter deck or if you start with a friend he picks 1 and you pick the other started deck and you can just start playing. If they really want to squeeze some more money out of the new players I would even be fine with a started deck that has the meta deck with play sets of everything and then another set which is something like a "tech" set you can buy to boost your deck with generic stables
I was a master duel only player for a year and the only thing that really was stopping me was prices honestly i can play whatever i want in master duel I just have to grind long enough but in tcg i have to pay 100+€ for every deck i want to play and its really frustrating. I found a nice budget variant of marincess that i am playing currently on locals and after the first local where I got shit on because i didnt know my combos (imagine reading and not just click buttons lmao) and played for the first time against decks i knew existed but never played before, it went well and i can convert my master duel skill to tcg.
i honestly enjoy tcg even more than master duel because best of three tournament is way more fun than best of 1 ladder with a shitty ladder system that rewards luck and playtime more than everything else
Honestly, I don't think it's on Konami to teach people who want to get into YGO competitively how to do it. Anytime I ask someone if they like yugioh more often than not if they say yes they mean they remember the cartoon as a kid, think any variation of the yugi summoning exodia on kaiba meme is funny, and thinking anything from synchros onward is sacrilege. As I imagine people who would be watching either MBTs video or this reaction to it are competitive players, we think the only people who play yugioh are in it for the competitive nature of it, but honestly there's way more people who do care about "how cool the world chalice lore is". I myself was a yugiboomer when Master Duel first came out and did exactly "lose over and over again to cards I didn't even know existed" and yeah it felt bad but that's how every game should be if you want to get really good. I started as a soypog BEWD player stuck in gold who was afraid of combo decks and now I can play Spright and get Master rank. There's plenty of resources for people who want to get into YGO competitively. The Master Duel subreddit and Discord are super nice and help new players all the time.
Just turn Omega into an official sim, ez Tbh, I don't play in the TCG as much, I don't care about the difference in formats or even card pool, actual cardboard isn't as F2P and I can't do it without moving somewhere else
For a new player who is learning the yogioh game, it is very complex and there are many tutorials online on how to play the game, But no one explains to you the difference between, HARD ONCE PER TURN AND A SOFT ONCE PER TURN, when a card misses its time, etc.
Agree on the starter products I thought they really could of done a full Dino deck instead of all the reprints in Wild Survivors it's not a super competitive deck but it they print you a full deck you could buy one product and start playing and probably not get destroyed at a local event or even against a friend that started before you
29:33 , eh kinda disagree, joshua is coming from a place of a high end player which is what the, 15% - .001% of players? While the other 70-85% would probably say that the game needs something else to slow the game down or make it not only new player friendly but also returning/ current player friendly.
I'm still surprised that cards in Masterduel still have this cramped cardtexts. It's an Simulator, you have all space in the internet, just make some visual spaces and breaks. Try to make second effects and requierments more visible. Mabe make the cost in a different colour. And include Tooltipps. Just like Wikipedia does it for years. You should be able to click on the word "target" and get an explanation what target is, that there are cards that don't target etc. This could help a lot of new players. Like we all thought at one point ChaosMax was OP.
I think a cool fix could be a rematch option kind of like how street fighter 6 does it. This way you could enter a best of 3 with a side deck after a duel on ladder without creating a separate ladder to climb.
I think the closest thing Konami has ever made to an actually good onramp to learning more complex YGO is Duel Links, which worked for me back in like 2020. The thing is, though I was only able to grow through reading a lot on Duel Links Meta... It was a useful format for learning the basics of YGO comboing and how the rules work without having to handle quite so much insanity. Of course, that was pre-Link and early Pendulum, I don't really know how the format looks nowadays.
I think we CAN make the game easier. There are various rulings and interactions that could be simplified. -ATK modifiers -battle/damage step -missing timing -negate effect vs activation and once-per-turn "activate" vs "use" It just makes the game more intuitive
A very unrelated thing, but please don't use music for clips if the video Joshua is watching already has music in it, it's very distracting to hear them overlapping 😖
Money is indeed a problem, probably the biggest one. A single Hugin where i live costs 12% of minimum wage, how the hell am i supposed to buy 3 of her + the rest of the deck + staples? I simply cannot play paper YuGiOh, even though I would love to, because it is way too expensive
I can't be the only one who would absolutely pay a monthly subscription for an official online simulator, literally exactly like master duel, but with all the bell and whistles we get from the unofficial sims, like the entire card pool and the option to choose different formats, banlists, best of 1 or 3, etc. That would absolutely be amazing. I guess the issue Konami would have is then maybe no one would play in paper, so they would not run tournaments on said simulator.
As someone that has no access to the physical TCG, master duel is amazing, not perfect (maxx c for example) but is a way to experience Yu-Gi-Oh that is surprisingly F2P friendly. I can see how for people who play TCG/OCG primarily is way less than ideal.
Speaking as a long time tcg player, I do like master duel overall but mbt hit it on the head when he mentioned how tcg players essentially go back to a old meta when they go to master duel, I don't really do much past the dailies anymore purely because each meta is more or less just one I've played before and already was sick off
@Ragnarok540 me too! It's great overall, even if not perfect
Yeah I mean if master duel didn't exist I wouldn't be playing Yu-Gi-Oh at all. But there's pretty much no community in my area as far as I'm aware of so no chance I'm paying hundreds for the cardboard
Even with no access to the physical game, Idk why anyone plays Master Duel when so many good simulators does exist, that offer way more content, works much faster and are updated way more faster and which are COMPLETELY free. I dont see any reason why master Duel even exists in the first place tbh
In my country there are ZERO stores where I could buy Yugioh packs. For me MD is the only way to play Yugioh, I've tried Duel Links and played for actually some time but then I quit then where was a one year or more of Harpie/Blue-eyes meta.
I think the main problem that most people ignore is how pricy and difficult is to build a decent deck in tcg. I have met alot of people in locals that started playing master duel and then they bought a structure deck only to get completely obliterated by everyone else even rogue decks. For most people its not easy to spend 15-20 euros to buy a playset of handtraps if they are just starting the game. And even for older non meta decks its not uncommon to have to spend 100 euros to buy them. And even if you have the money most of the time you have to order online which is just another roadblock. And don't get me started on packs. The way they are its almost impossible to pull something playable by buying casually. But those problem are ignored by youtubers and all they talk about is banlists and different formats ignoring that their point of view is completely different from someone new to the game. The guy who bought a crystal beast structure deck and came to locals for first time is not gonna care if he can play maxx C or not.
just BUY ASIAN english in november, give tcg konami middle finger.
@@r3zaful this is illegal for tournament play. found this out because i bought ocg cards in the philippines but i can't play them at locals even.
This. Everytime I want to try to build a purrely deck I'm met with a roadblock of having to pay 80~90 euro just for a playset of my friend purrely. And then whenever someone complain about the ridiculous price someone will literally tell you to go buy the structure deck while completely ignoring whether the person even want to play that deck or not
The booster structure is terrible in the tcg. Single cards having multiple rarities in the ocg is missed in the tcg and makes cards more expensive than they have any right to be.
So like the whole cost thing for top teir play has to be looked at in the context of the card market as a whole and hobbies in general. Yugioh reprints the good cards within about a year anyway so when looking at other games that do not reprint aggressively, it’s relatively cheaper to play yugioh if you want to watch the market. It’s also a trading card game so locals peeps may have crazy deals for you if you ask.
The biggest issue with this is that konami power creeps every set and then bans the cards that prevent them from selling the new cards so it’s a continual 3 month loop of buying the next best deck.
In the context of hobbies and what else you could do in your free time other than yugioh, all hobbies have a cost for entry and a higher cost for the top levels. You wanna play guitar? $300 for an entry level starter. you wanna fish? Gotta buy a rod and some bait and a hook. wanna get to higher levels with both? $600 for a decently loud amp. gotta buy a boat.
People cant even tell that this is literally a Yu-Gi-oh problem its not master duel problem.
Why did you add "literally" to your sentence ?
@@clownworld3382 To show that it's not met metaphorically, and remove possible ambiguity .
THIS!!! This, all of it, is a game problem. It keeps coming up because the game is in disarray.
"These kids are learning to drive automatic. Why aren't they all converting to manual!?" - Konami, probably
Basically. You're giving people an easier to learn format and something to do part of the work for them, then wondering why they struggle to use something that is completely reliant on you and is also probably more expensive to use over the automatic format.
That's pretty good.😂
@@colossaldonut5190I fear that they draw the wrong conclusion from the very real price difference issue and raise the price point of Master Duel instead of lowering the price point of TCG. Because lowering that could get me back into paper Yu-Gi-Oh! but at the moment I don't want to take my 7 year old Monarch deck to locals and I also don't want to spend 200-400€ on cardboard.
For me it’s 5 main factors (I reentered the TCG through MD)
1. The fact that the MD Cardpool is not up to date, but I dont think it is even that important, since I personally didn’t have a hard time adjusting to the new meta (Plants was my favourite deck in MD and I only needed to learn the interactions with the new cards, which wasn’t hard).
2. Yugioh has become too complex for casual new players to learn. You either need to be really dedicated or have some friends that teach you the ins and outs. I suspect that after 3-4 duels most newbies stopped playing.
3. It’s much more convenient and easier to just sit in your room and play some games in your free time instead of searching and travelling to a local store and having to interact with people. (For example the next store is 2hours away from me)
4. Most importantly the prize, MD is free to play.Why would a new player want to spend at least 100€ and 400+ for a good deck if you can play the game for free? It doesn’t matter that you play older formats if you don’t play OCG or TCG.
5. IMO playing on MD is much easier and comfortable than paper. The game looks nice, tells you what to do and you basically don’t need to learn the rules. It’s a very big step to actually learn these things to play in paper.
I think Konami should permanently add Old formats to MD (like an Edison ladder mode). It would make the reentry to Yugioh for older players much easier (since the games are much simpler) and give the current players more content.
True. I've been asking for N/R, edison, and goat events/formats on basically every survey now lol
For point 2,imo
Its because the interaction itself became even faster than ever thats make casual hate yugioh to its root
I know this because i have a lot of friend in social media that actually playing other cardgame (shadowverse,digimon card game,etc) and everytime yugioh topic resurface from nowhere,they always complain about their opponent could interact with them just right when they start to make move (ash,other handtrap issue etc)
About the complexity: Rush duels seems to try to deal with this and long confusing text with its small reboot.
@@daedalus5253 well,thats the point,also why they even bother to make 2 anime season for that
Its look good at first
But complexity issue might running later (considering rush also had its own degen combo/setup that led into banlist)
Agree with these points.
The price is always going to be the biggest pain point. People who don't play card games will wonder why they need to spend hundreds on cardboard and people from other games are already invested in their card game and therefore can't justify spending that much on a new game.
The expensive cards also disincentivize experimentation and exploring the more fun parts of the game.
Even on the low of a decent deck will cost 100 dollars, ignoring things like expensive staples.
If you are someone who likes to experiment a lot, this will bankrupt you pretty quick and a paper player will look at the mountains of cards they have no interest in and just give up buying cards.
It’s what I did
32:20 god chat is so WRONG about this take, making good structure decks that are playable out of the box would NOT lose konami money, it would be the other way around.
If you make ygo more accessible to a wider audience then that translates to more customers willing to spend money to get more product = more cards, you need to create addicts to your product that are going to translate to long time customers but this will NEVER happen if the game is too difficult to get into for them.
Besides that, konami is fully capable of making money with product while also making the game accessible, take a look at the pokemon tcg, the core and side sets print money because it's filled with cards in multiple special rarities that are actually worth chasing for, but at the same time these expensive cards also exist in lower rarities that are accesible to most players and have actually good cheap alternatives...AND they release good structure decks and introductory products ALL.THE.TIME, seriously getting into the pokemon tcg is super cheap and konami is frankly STUPID for not copying and pasting what they're doing.
Ironically Konami releases structure decks that are playable from time to time namely the salad structure and traptrix decks are pretty much playable outside of a few staples
@@razielfaustus9733 These aren't playable out of the box though, which is the biggest issue. If i were a new player, having to buy 3 of a product, watch videos online of how to use the cards in that product (i.e. build a deck from it) and buy a few singles to actually make it playable, i just wouldn't bother.
Why isn't there just a ready-to-play (for example) swordsoul deck, thats just a cookie-cutter swoso tenyi list (maybe minus baronne, lets be realistic) for like 25-30$, throw in some dice, some tokens, a deck box and a pack of sleeves, put it in a nice box you can use to store your future cards and make it 45$. That way you can actually buy a singular product, sit down with someone who plays the game, and expect to have a fair matchup all things considered. And not get clapped by war rocks because you thought the 'structure deck' you bought was a complete deck.
@@razielfaustus9733 the thing is that they aren't playable at all since they only have 1 copy of each card, in the pokemon tcg and magic structure decks are LITERALLY playable right out of the box by having multiple of most cards included
@@MrGshinobi true i do forget that you need to buy three so yea they could improve on that end
@@fruechteteex3 true i do feel like konami could vastly improve the way they release structure decks
For anyone reading comments before/while watching.
Do not read Twitch chat, I'm only 5 mins into the video and I'm already losing braincells on those people.
Thats just a rule of life in general.
Like yt comments lmao
God I was about to say that. "MASTER DUEL IS SUPPOSED TO BE ITS OWN FORMAT REEEEEEEEE MBT STUPID" on a video where literal shareholders are concerned that MD's popularity isn't selling paper cards
I was in the twitch chat and I approve of this message 😂
agree and that Omni_pt person is so fucking ignorant to the problems and coping so fucking hard
Why would your average MD player shift to paper? Going from quick pick up and play phone game that is free, to a super expensive physical card game that requires travel and interaction with other people, and where an normal BO3 game can take 40+ minutes is a big hurdle. Yu-gi-oh is Yu-gi-oh but while there is obviously overlap between the two formats, I also think the two audiences are very different.
Ive found myself interested in paper play cuz of master duel.
It's not impossible, if master duel really sells you on the yugioh experience, wouldn't you ever wonder what it's like to play with real people and have some old fashioned fun?
Issue is the game is too expensive to really get into.
Price is not an issue in OCG
@@reservationatdorsias3215 It definitely is, even if it's not as big of an issue. A top tier deck in the OCG still costs a few hundred dollars. That's very small compared to the TCG. But even if you just buy a $10 structure deck, for a lot of players, going from spending $0 to spending any amount no matter how small is a large mental hurdle. A lot of master duel players just want to play as low investment as possible.
i write this quick i dont know how to spell labrynth
3 lady each 100-150k idr around 7usd
1 lovely 70-100k idr 5-7usd
3 big welcome 10k idr
3 welcome 30-50k
a labyrinth core only cost around 30-40usd in my country. the rest like chaos angel etc are dirt cheap, your store might just gave the furnitures for free.
I think that's a big thing too. The crossover between the audience of Master Duel and the physical game is fairly small in terms of people who want to become actual players. Besides, why would I play the paper format when I've already committed time and money into Master Duel? We get updates every month and the game is way easier to play casually, not to mention that I have actual goals and achievements to go for when playing Master Duel casually compared to the paper format which offers nothing outside of a competitive level.
It's like telling a guy who's in driving a car to go tame a horse and ride that instead of driving.
They should make a game tutorial where they get Dan Green to explain hand traps with kuriboh and get Jaden to flub to a "when/if" card text.
Well, it's better than tutorials explaining Ally of Justice lore at least
I hope they can get his marijuana psa in there too.
I feel like it's hard to translate from a game where you have to pay nothing, interact with nobody to a game where you have to extensively do both things. The paper market and the digital game market are completely different and attempting to translate one into the other is going to be very difficult.
Telling Yugioh players "You need to buy 3 copies of this structure deck" when just about every TCG released in the last 5 or 10 years have their structure/starter decks include all the important cards at max copies certainly doesn't help.
But what's more cheaper and convenient? I would tell my friend to buy 3 $10 structure decks vs numerous $65 set boxes
What game has starter decks with playsets? Pokemon and Magic certainly don't
@@Dehalove Pokemon does? I only know Magic through Commander where playsets arent a thing but I know for a fact Pokemon starter decks do have playsets or multiples of certain cards. They don't give you playsets of every card but that isn't necessary, you get a playable deck right out the gate. I see no reason why Yugioh cant do similar.
What's crazy to me is that almost all of these problems have already happened, and they happened with Konamis other big mobile game/pseudo sim, Duel Links. There was a notable period during Duel Links prime when Fur Hire was the best deck, and a lot of users really enjoyed the deck, so they bought the deck in paper, and tried to take it to locals/irl tournaments and simply got stomped. Those players never played paper again, and stuck to Duel Links. It is shocking that Konami have not learned from this very important lesson.
"With 2 magicians in my pendulum scales I activate my skill raging pendu- what? What do you mean I can't do that?"
DL is good if you want to learn the basics quickly i guess. Even then, the anime structure decks that basically play themselves have long been powercrept.
@@CarbonMalite bro when have you last played duellinks?
@@Otzkar I don't play enough where 'set Magician's Nav and pass' isn't a 3rd of the ranked playerbase, you've got me there.
duel links is a little more abstracted from paper ygo, so I am not surprised they didn't take too much stock of that situation. master duel SHOULD translate better onto paper, and I'm sure they thought the same thing. but yeah, definitely should have taken DL as a warning if nothing else, pretty clear they are a little out of touch with what's actually going on with the IP as a whole
Konomi missed the biggest issue.... Money. This game is stupid expensive for no reason. And you want people who started on master duel, probably spent money there and then come out to paper and spend hundreds if not thousands? Yeah that's not going to happen.
Even more jarring if you play MD completely free (like me) going from a game you don’t have to spend lonely on to dropping thousands to keep up is like whiplash
Joshua Schmidt failed to realise KONAMI isn’t chasing profits, it’s chasing short term profits, because they know YGO players will keep eating regardless and that the community is growing. I think this is one of the rare cases where the company actually addresses the long term sustainability of the game.
I disagree. Konami hasn't been chasing short term profits, they're in a holding pattern and have never felt the need to change up since this same system has been working for them for the past seven years or so through TCG/OCG/digital (Duel Links and now MD). If you want to see short term profit seeking look at Magic the Gathering. They've burned a lot of their playerbase chasing whales and brand deals.
@@geek593 That may be, but i'm not gonna lie: the LOTR set has been fun to play commander with. Granted, i enjoy Ashiok, so Sauron (both the character design and the deck mechancs) just scratches that itch for me.
The community is not growing lmao new players come in thinking its fun and casual then see how absolutely messed up it is and run away. Ive even seen something similar in competitive players. I've even quit for a while because I wasnt having fun against Altergeist and the abysmal pricing of cards. I just wish the game was at least more affordable. It's ridiculous they expect players to pay $100s or even $1000s on a deck that probably wont live to see past 6 months.
@@thedog7494 Bro YCS counts have been increasing consistently for the past 5 years
@@thedog7494This
In a lot of fighting game communities they host beginner brackets where once you make top 3 you cannot enter that bracket again. I wonder if we could adopt something like that
Man, I feel like I need Bachelor Degree to fully understand ruling, like a Lawyer in YuGiOh.
MD makes my life so much easier. I am a monkey kind of person, so I learn through trial and error; I can or I can't do something with certain cards; the program let me activate a card or not. Sometimes, I click buttons to see what happens, and I do not read all the cards. In paper, I would not call a judge, and if I'd do it, I would probably not understand the resolution.
Maybe the problem is thinking of MD as the bridge to paper instead of taking advantage of its real potential as a new market, a testing platform, a channel to listen the voice of customer, etc.
If I have learnt something about the game in paper and about ruling is because of experimented players that are content creators in MD, just like Joshua. So, the bridge cannot be MD alone; it might be the combination already mentioned. But maybe Konami is just too blind to see that. Look at Dkayed being banned instead of making the most out of his capabilities.
@@armandonoriega681the old mindset that still wanted paper as main resources of income, while in this modern era digital property are crucial. That being said i still agree paper and MD need to co exist, doesnt need to convert MD for paper or vice versa.
This! I stsrted returning to YGO in EDOPro and boy i got mentally hit vs Kashtira and Tear, because i play casual like Chronomaly and Suship
Then i went to MD and i have fun for the first time. Climbing up rank and story mode using Qliphort, then getting lucky to craft trains, watching YGO, MD or not, videos on the tutorial...MD is easier for returnees and newbies, i swear!
No, you don't yugioh is far simplier than people give it credit for. It's like complaining because you have to read highway signs.
As a MD only player, I don't really agree with MBT here. He is looking at things from the perspective of a paper player playing MD, NOT the perspective of a MD player thinking about paper play. I don't care about the format. The reason I don't translate to paper is because imo paper is inferior.
- I like that the online simulator knows all the weird rulings and interactions for me. It means I spend more time playing and less time trying to remember interactions or waiting for judge rulings etc.
- I like that I don't have to travel all over the place to find people to play against
- I like that I can play WAY more games in MD than I ever could going to a tournament or a game store.
- I like that the game is cheaper. I have about 20 decks in MD and have spent at most 300 on the game. I don't even think I could get all the staple cards for that amount in paper, let alone 20 competitive decks.
- I also have no desire to rebuy all the cards I already own online, plus all the new cards.
I can see why an OCG or TCG player might not like playing an older format, and might dislike bo1, but as a MD player I don't really care about that. We get new cards monthly and 1-2 ban lists a month so things are always fairly fresh for us. I also really like the fact that we have a different meta, so everything isn't completely solved the moment we get new cards. Maybe that doesn't translate well to paper play, but I genuinely don't understand why anyone would want paper play. It's more expensive, less convenient, and less efficient to play.
I agree completely, coming from the same background. I don't really care about the cards being much older than other formats as I hardly ever played the Tcg to begin with, so every is new to me, if anything it gives me extra contents of people from the Tcg testing cards out and get excited to what's coming next and get to put together the most optimized version on day 1 since all the work has been done by them. I used to play with friends then on dueling book, the experience has been terrible, either the players were rude and willing to call judge at the slightest missplay even if you say you are a newplayer, or just pure trolling and being mean, you often end up arguing more than playing the game. Also I hate that there are rules that are not set in stone so different judges can rule differently, that to me is unacceptable for a game like Yugioh where the rule should be clear and unified. I also heard stories from Tcg players where judges can have clear biases against you and can ban you for silly reasons. I think Masterduel should be treated as its own thing. I'm tired of Tcgs players acting smug and see Masterduel as an inferior format that eventually when given a chance players will change to the "real game" of Tcg when it's not. It sucks for tcgs players to have to play cards that they already played a few months ago, I feel sorry for them but at the same time I don't really care as it's not my problem
Cant we know the future meta from looking at the tcg or ocg? Or are banlist really different? In that case we can save gems for future decks and know how much time they will stay meta, that sounds much better and help us on what decks to invest in
This isn't a problem with master duel, it's a problem with Yu-Gi-Oh
Master duel has a wider appeal. That's why it was used as a title instead.
master duel being more than a year behind product release and how that affect the experience of translating MD players to paper play is ABSOLUTELY a master duel issue.
Master duel still sucks on android, that's one thing 😂.
I have a pc, it's just not really inclusive of them to make md play as scuffed as possible in android devices.
So… what’s the problem with yugioh?
i think the alarming thing about the future of yugioh and why people should be at least somewhat spooked is the fact that *shareholders* are starting to raise issues with yugioh of all things that belong to konami
Tbh this more feels like a guy in his 50's to 60's doing a little bit of research, maybe has a family member that plays the game and he tagged along with him to a tournament. Not unreasonable but not exactly the biggest problem for an already established tcg to have.
@@shawnjavery shareholders are what run companies. if they’re raising concerns to the future of yugioh then there is reason to be concerned. whether or not yugioh actually is/does decline, shareholders have the power to call for konami to phase out anything that they see as stagnant or etc. shareholders should be taken very seriously.
A big point that was missing in mbts video is the price point of in paper yugioh. Staples like baronne, accescode, triple tactics, dusk dragon, pot, garura, the adventure engine etc are still really expensive. Spending 200+ euros to get competive is a big hurdle for new players. This could be prevented by good reprints in all rarities (common versions). Yugioh is even expensive compared to other cardgames like yugioh.
The problem with this is that for like over a decade now folks always say its about the money its about the money and then neglect to mention that we've had a number of lower cost formats throughout those ten years and it has never had a demonstrable effect on new player onboarding so its very obvious that the problem is more complex or simply not as much about the money. Yeah, YGO is expensive compared to the cheaper games, but it isn't compared to its main competitor Magic the Gathering (Pokemon exists on its own really since so many people buying those cards are collectors and their tournament series is entirely insulated and for a variety of other reasons.)
I don't think there's anything konami can do about that other than completely eschew the pull ratios of those staples. Take ash blossom, ash was reprinted 3 times last year alone but before that it had like 5 or 6 reprints including a common, still the common was 30 bucks. Give it a year or so with no reprints and it will rise in price again even with all the recent reprints.
You can't really expect konami to reprint the same deck month after month just because it's good, they have new cards to sell. A yearly duel devastator would be nice but the original duel devastator was stuck on shelves because you only has to buy 3 for a full playset, and aside from the ghost girls which you can find in common somewhere else, it hasn't aged well.
@@vaxel0068 Ash is currently four dollars for the cheapest copy my guy, she isn't expensive anymore...because they have since reprinted her in multiple structure decks in the last six months. And she's about to get another reprint in the Quarter Century Collection to drop the now abundant structure deck commons even more.
@@Nocturne989 I bet people said the same thing with every reprint.
@@vaxel0068 They don't? Dude was right about common Ash being 30 dollars like a year ago; it used to be a problem. Its just a problem that Konami has since fixed and the fact he's fixating on it means he probably isn't keeping up with the prices before defaulting to saying the price of Ash is the problem like it used to be.
The reason the old Structure common Ash was 30 bucks is that they put her in one structure and then never again for years, but now they've literally put her in two of the last three (with the third being Dark World, which doesn't even play Ash fully built lol) and she's confirmed for another reprint at higher rarity, which will dilute the pool of lower rarity copies even more. Also, the two structures she came in are still easy to pick up at an LGS or a Walmart. Ash is everywhere now.
29:05 As MBT pointed out (in reverse), fighting games have a similar problem to Yugioh where attracting new players is concerned. Note that I am biased, but playing a fighting game with intentionality is extremely fun, and their complexity contibutes substantially to this fact. But that same complexity makes playing with intentionality very difficult for new players, resulting in games that are very fun to play but take a lot of effort to learn. This reality is the reason why so many people in the FGC say that the thing the genre needs most is very good tutorials. This is why people go out of their way to critique FG tutorials, and point out the best ones - we want the people who make our games to recognise that there is a ton of value in making good tutorials, and we want to show them what a good tutorial looks like. Regarding Yugioh, I think you're exactly correct for requesting the same from Konami. If they're going to sell a complicated game, they need to respect that fact and teach newcomers how to play their game. They can't sweep complexity under a rug and hope the player will figure it out on their own - that's what "standard" FG tutorials do, and it does not work in either case. They need to show their players that the game is complex, show them what the decision points in a game tend to look like and how to navigate them,¹ and walk them through at least the basic theory of their game (what card advantage is, why smaller decks are good & why upstart goblin was an incredibly good card for a time, etc.). Ideally, they'd have something like a product for beginners that links to online strategy guides for intermediates - this way, they can teach the basics immediately, and introduce more advanced (but still fundamental) concepts later (e.g. the concepts of combos with chokepoints, sidedecking, etc.). This is along the lines of what the best FG tutorials do, _and it works._ The games are still hard to learn, but that's their nature. The tutorials/introductory products at least do their job this way.
On a related note, the FGC gets upset when games do not have any "proper" training mode features, like frame advance, hitbox visualizers, frame advantage displays, etc. We also tend to praise games that go above and beyond the minimum.
There's good reason for this: the details which such features give us are part of the fundamental rules of the game. Those rules matter, and understanding them is a necessary thing above some level of play. The complexities of fighting games can only be understood by one who understands their rules. Yugioh is similar in many ways, an obvious example being that one can only understand that Book of Moon will stop the effect that affects "that target" if one understands the difference between "target ..;.. that target..." and "target ..;.. it..." as provided by the rules. A fighting game which lacks good training mode features is like a physical game without a rulebook. Y'know, like Yugioh! You can certainly learn all the rules by looking around online but it'd be _much_ better if all the rules were in one place, provided by the game - this applies in all cases!
TL;DR: Josh is right,² the solution to Yugioh's complexity is teaching the game better. This can be done by respecting the game's complexity, not trying to hide it, and showing new players the game as it truly is while walking them through it. Lastly, Yugioh's complexity makes its lack of a rulebook inexcusable - if it weren't already inexcusable based on the game being run by the humans who play it alone.
¹One effective way to do this is to construct a pair of stacked decks, and provide instructions on how to play a game - or at least a first turn - with them. Those instructions should include the reasons why particular decisions are made at particular times. Ideally, I'd want to see them include mistakes, and explain at the end how one can look back and recognise where one made a suboptimal choice, using the built-in mistakes as examples. "Yugioh's a hard game, but with practice, you'll learn to master it!" Or maybe that'd discourage new players, what do I know.
²to everyone's shock, I'm sure
Smash Bros is a fighting game too, but has wider appeal because of its simplicity. It works as a competitive combo heavy fighter or a party game. Complexity is an issue when it limits accessibility because most people aren't playing games to compete, but to have a good time. It's why Konami has catered largely to the causal, nostalgia crowd over the years. They make up the majority of the player base. Nobody likes to read a rulebook like a thesis, except the overly invested. Konami recognizes this and I think the competitive community needs to follow suit.
@@spicymemes7458 Thank you for mentioning SSB, because _even it_ contains a rulebook. Sure, its training mode isn't ideal, but it's easily sufficient, and useful for its purpose. Yugioh's rules distribution fails to inform its players on how the game is played. That is a problem, no matter how you spin it. Bear in mind that one can print a basic rulebook, and then have a longer document for reference on specifics. If you've never seen MtG's comprehensive rules, take a look at them - they don't expect anyone will sit down and read through them. They're structured to answer questions that come up in play as quickly as possible, while letting players learn to understand the complexities in a straightforward way as they encounter these edge-cases.
(Addendum: to be blunt, even Yugioh's basic rulebook fails at being a basic rulebook. Its structure is poor, resulting in e.g. people not understanding that tokens can't be used as XYZ matetial, and it doesn't even break down the fundamentals of how to read effect text. At minimum, Yugioh should have a good beginner's rulebook)
I understand your point about complexity being an issue, but it's not objectively currect. It's not objectively wrong either, to be clear, and the point about complexity reducing accessibility is itself objectively correct - it's just not objectively _bad_ for games to be complex. Regarding Yugioh specifically, since this complexity conversation is necessarily case-by-case, there is one thing I want to point out:
What selling point does Yugioh have as a game, if complexity and its resulting combos aren't it? The extra deck? That serves the purpose of making the game more consistent and giving you more options at any given time, but so do other gimmicks like Digimon's removal of the inherent cost of playing some cards (said cost being the loss of a card in hand). In fact, gimmicks like Digimon's are better at giving you more options, because extra deck mon's are often limited in when you can use them and how they are used - many of them are played at specific times for specific purposes in combos, not as a deliberate choice based on gamestate. The way Yugioh uses its ED is unique, certainly, but it isn't all that dissimilar from things found in other games. I know you didn't reference it as a premptive response to this point, but I'll address it: nostalgia cannot be the selling point of a long-lasting game, I won't waste our time explaining why (unless you ask).
Ultimately, if I were to play Yugioh _(which I probably would,_ were I to decide I wanted to play a TCG), I would do so because I like its combos, I like its complexity, and I like how the two go hand-in-hand. I don't see why else one would prefer it over its competitors.
All that said, there are ways to reduce the problem of complexity - that it makes being a new player hard. This problem and the accesibility argument share similarities with motion inputs in fighting games, and I think SF6 has handled that problem admirably. In short, give new players the option to play a less-complicated game, but make it the same game everyone else plays. In a TCG, you can do this by creating decks that are relatively simple to pick up and play, but still have interesting decisions, and are competitive with other good decks. If you want an example, Dragon Rulers probably fits that description up to power level. It's easy to understand what that deck wants to do - activate each ruler once per turn, spam large momsters, optionally use two to make a monster which improves your position, and conserve resources effectively (this last part + deciding what to search being what give the deck interesting choices). The cards are individually powerful, their synergy is clear, and the games are interesting. I'd call it a good deck for beginners up to power level.
Last and least, a pair of minor notes: While invested players are the minority, they buy a lot more product than the rest. Creating and pleasing them is worthwhile for this reason.
Regarding "most players aren't playing games to compete, but to have a good time," please don't list these as distinct activities. Most players don't have a good time competing. People who play competitively will, for the most part, do so because they have the best times playing that way. Furthermore, "playing to have a good time" does not preclude wanting to get better at the game. Even "casual" players play their games to win, and for the most part have more fun as they learn to play their games better. The divide between casual and competitive isn't deep on that axis. Helping people learn and understand your game is good for everyone.
(minor edits: "a number of things" ended up being "one thing," and I didn't spot that before sending. "individually powerful" was "inherently powerful" previously)
What I think Smash does very well is “trick” its players into wanting to learn the more complex stuff. A lot of the things that people complain about with regards to complexity still exist in Smash (tight links, combo driven gameplay, frame data, annoying movement tech), but in my personal experience, I’ve seen way more Smash players end up being converted to competitive play simply because the game does a very good job backloading complexity until after the player is already hooked on the basic gameplay loop.
I think Smash proves that this concept of shifting complexity to the background is the most important for growing the playerbase in a sustainable way, since the franchise has historically had terrible tutorials, training modes, and net play.
@@wdililn I agree with you in almost all regards, but I'd phrase it differently: many players go from playing SSB casually to competitively because it leaves enough on its surface to show casuals¹ how to play with intentionality. It's not hard to pick one of those games up, learn the controls, and make decisions without being burdened by excessive mental overhead. When one has learned to play a fighting game at all, one can then learn a new character, a new concept, a new combo, or whatever else while still playing the game in the way that's fun - by making decisions and plans, quickly adapting to one's opponent, and performing the inputs corresponding to one's ideas. If a casual player continues playing for long enough, gets curious about and researches how other people play the game, and tries to learn to play the game better, one will learn the skills of a competitive player. From there, whether they become a competitive player or not is simply up to whether they think tournaments are fun or not.
What I think SSB demonstrates is that the most important thing for a complicated game to do is to get its players playing the game as quickly as possible, where "playing" is done with a meaningful level of understanding. The way SSB does so is what you said: it gets people playing in that way by making sure its basic mechanics don't have gaps; by ensuring that one only needs to understand the complicated stuff to improve their game, rather than needing that understanding to have their game exist at all.
¹I do not like that word's connotations, but I don't have a better word for this purpose.
@@delta3244 I think a great example is Street Fighter 6. The game has a LOT of complex stuff in it but the World Tour mode acting as a long form tutorial plus the training modes like combo trials and just the training room in general are phenomenal. Not to mention the incredible use of the Modern control scheme that allows new players to get in and play imminently. It has really shown a lot to the FGC what we need in our games which ties into YGO, imagine if instead of getting some shitty combo mode for Ally of justice they released a Tear one. Tear is such a strong deck and they know what decks are going to be strong so release a tutorial along side them to teach people about them, id reckon it would also increase sales since more people would have their hands on the deck and thus would want to play it.
Man if I could buy largely complete decks to go play at locals I might actually play at locals. What a concept
They have people shelling out 50 bucks each for structures instead of 15, why would they make their decks more consumer friendly now? It's literally the Pokemon sales tactic. If you want everything, well you better buy the exact same product again, bud.
We STILL dont have the new Dracoslayers support in MD. Its unbelievable. If they release them together with Kashtira, ill fuggin scream.
was it released before them in physical?
@@TheKnightOfBuquicious Yeah, the new Dracoslayer support dropped in Darkwing Blast, and at that point Kashtira wasn't a complete deck yet, all they had was the first wave of main deck support and Shangri-Ira. No Ariseheart, no Tear Kash or Scareclaw Kash, etc. This is another thing that happens a lot in MD and can stop certain decks from being a thing on the client. Another example is all of the pre-Ishizu Tear decks like Danger! Tear; they got Ishizu before Tear so they never got to play with any of them being decent.
I’m so mad at this as well. It should of been released with tear as a great way to counter the tear 0 meta since the deck has a way to search necrovalley easily. Lame move by komoney but it’s to be expected
So… you want them to do it after kash?
@@daedalus5253 Either before, then wait 3-4 months at least, or after. I don't want them to release it together with Kashtira which basicly hardcounters most pendulum decks by locking their S/T zone. If Konami is smart they preban Diablosis
Imagine how hype it would be if a card was revealed on OCG Twitter, then put into Master Duel just a few hours later before it becomes paper legal, even for OCG. It would not only be hype af but fanatical people would probably rashly spend UR dust/money and such to craft the cards immediately (possibly even before it's featured in a selection pack), generating more revenue for MD
I said this already on MBT's video, but its worth repeating here: This is the fighting game of TCGs, and as such it has a stupidly high skill floor that prevents people from getting into it. If MTG is Smash Ultimate, Yugioh is Melee. However, while a proper TCG simulator is something we need eventually, its honestly not what I think is entirely preventing people from getting into paper Yugioh. I got into this game through Duel Links, and I had no trouble learning the TCG. It just took time, and while emulators like YGO Omega helped, it still took me about a year to really grasp this game. But i was commited because I had a friend with me the whole time.
My primary solution to this problem is to do what Pokemon has been doing for a while now with its TCG World Championship Decks: release select YCS deck builds as standalone, high-end, pre-constructed products. It would be preferable if the deck came with some sorta "strategy guide" with tips on how to operate the deck correctly, as well as providing card suggestions for constructing a side deck.
MTG does something similar with its commander deck products. They don't come with a guide or some shit given that Magic is a stupidly simple game, but the deck lists are still pretty competent for pre-constructed builds and provide plenty of room for making modifications. The recent Sauron commander deck pretty much convinced me to start playing again (it reminded me of Ashiok in terms of play style, which is a favorite of mine), so they're clearly doing a good job.
I'm telling you: if Konami did this, new players willing to learn this game would pick up on everything fast. Like, seriously: make a Rikka Sunavalon YCS deck product or some shit. Hell, we just put Engage to 2 and Multirole to 3. Make a Sky Striker deck product, weebs would eat that shit up and it'd be much less embarrassing to pilot than Traptrix.
Another good solution would be to require duelists to release their deck lists in general after an event. Its incredibly annoying as a viewer watching a YCS to see some guy piloting a really strong deck and then not be able to see his deck list. Show that shit in between rounds, consumers like me would want to either build that deck or try to push it further, and that makes Konami money.
Finally, I'd highly recommend YGOPaisano's recent video on the topic of YCS coverage. He mentions a lot of stuff about Master Duel that Joseph ended up repeating here, but his takes on the awful livestreams is some pretty good criticism.😮
the skill floor in fighting games is not actually high though, it’s artificially inflated because fighting games do a shit job of teaching you the game. the ONLY one i’ve seen do well is street fighter 6, where you can get things specifically for the character you want to play that ACTUALLY are helpful. It actually tells you “you can use these buttons to poke at your opponent from a distance. if they jump at you, you can use these moves. This character you’re playing is very weak to projectile spam, watch and try to block or parry them.” While it has combo trials, it doesn’t teach you how to learn your own combos, how to theorize, how to ADAPT. It can’t teach you complex strategy, meter management, and these abstract thoughts, but these are not the skill floor, they’re the learning curve. What fighting games and ygo have in common is being low skill floor, extremely high learning curve, and no perceived skill CEILING. the cardinal sin both have is sucking horribly at teaching the basics and the learning process. We can talk about the need to actually practice too, because god knows beginners hate the idea of even TOUCHING a practice mode, but practicing a fighting game is infinitely easier than practicing ygo.
The easiest solution is to stop bullshitting and just say “hey, this shit is hard. We as the devs do not know everything possible, and frankly, some of the players have put out good videos regarding different things, here’s the link to the videos, and a few websites that players contribute additional information to. There’s more, but these are the most important, feel free to search for more on your own time. ” It’s really just that easy. A better tutorial and direct links to online resources changes things dramatically.
as someone who stopped playing paper at synchros, getting back on masterduel was really an experience of being "this does WHAT?" constantly for the first few months, then i caught on to most rulings and new cards and know what to watch for now, but still the learning curve comes at losing to cards that appear out of nowhere for sure.
Im an OCG player, it is really frustrating to play MD because these are really old cards. They just recently released Traptrix, which was released months ago. It sucks. You cant even practice with the new cards so you have to use a different online simulator instead.
What Sims are good For ocg Decks? I mainly Play in YGO Omega and the OCG matchmaking there is dead
@@yazanqubaja7464 thats the fun part, you dont. You ask your OCG buddy to play with you in YGOpro or you duel with them via remote duels.
Shoutouts to Dkayed for helping keep me interested in Master Duel. Whether it be new card releases, tournaments or just having by far the best website for aggregating deck lists and data that dude is an MVP for Master Duel's western audience. That isn't to say other content creators don't do anything for the game of course, the Yugitube community has done great Master Duel content in general but nobody has helped introduce me and keep me entrained by Master Duel like Dkayed has.
As a 17yo living in a "relatively big but not the biggest city there is" in Brazil who got into yugioh due to masterduel:
Fuck, a meta deck can cost upwards of 3 monthly minimun wages over here, but that doesn't concern me much as I generally don't enjoy playing wathever is META at the moment, but then, even rogue decks can cost quite a bit too, specially talking staples. My best bet is building something with 3x structures or some older deck with cheap cards (something like a yosenju pendulum nemleria can cost under 30$)
But then, if I do build my deck, preferably a cheap one since I'm a student and can't afford the more expensive decks, what now? I would have to go to a locals to play since most my friends have no interest in playing (there's like two guys I know who play, one doesn't want to play and the other guy isn't even from the same school as me so only sometimes we get to hang out anyway). And about locals, there's exactly 1 shop within 100km from where I live that is official and appears on konami locals searcher thingy and it's a MTG specialized shop (and doubles as a board and card game shop). From what I could see online they don't seem to have a lot going for yugioh. And what's worse, it's 28 fucking kilometers away from where I live. So it's hard for me to even get there as a teenager without infinite money to spend on services like uber or even trying my luck with public transport.
Other than that, I could try to teach my other friends yugioh, as I've tried a little bit with masterduel, but most just gave up almost instantly, literally the deck that I showed to make my friend even show some kind of interest was crusadia since you just make a 10k monstrosity and attack for game. Currently I'm thinking if it's even worth trying to play a lower power format to start them off, because that's not really easy to do in masterduel due to some old cards being high rarity for no reason, so I would have to keep making new accounts in order to keep myself f2p. And if I do try to get them on an unnoficial sim, I'm afraid it wouldn't be flashy or satisfying enough to get then interested for long
IDK where I wanted to go with this, but fuck, playing a card game is hard for no frickin reason
I think what MBT hinted at in the complexity of the game is a problem that revolves around card text. What is a trigger effect, an ignition effect, missing the timing, etc. isn't intuitive for new players. Konami can help by redesigning card text and, if need be, make a spreadsheet for new players to read for clarification.
Edit: basically make it less daunting to read the cards for new players
It's weird they didn't keep certain promises. They did say, before the game came out, that MD would support OCG and TCG. On top of that they said it would be possible to play older formats. Neither of these things came true. Especially not supporting the old format right from the get go easily lost them 40k permanent players (in the first days the game had 120k players, now we have like 20k I believe) because so many of that initial 120k players wanted to play what they played 15+ years ago.
Maybe to them duel rooms with friends are the representation for older formats, but that's not what people asked for.
They still don't give us access to every banned card, so you can't even play some legacy formats properly in duel rooms. Erratas also screw it up, but we need to take things one step at a time. Konami is just a small indie company. :^)
@FakeHeroFang Yeah, if you really want to play older formats, you also can not get a sixth card as the turn one player.
People really jumped on the shareholder question thing to talk about stuff that has nothing to do with what was actually asked, huh?
Another thing to consider regarding being "spooked" about the future of Yugioh, is that MBT made this video in the context of this shareholder's meeting, where a shareholder raised similar concerns. Attracting new players is an investment, one that will typically pay off in the long run, as you said. But if efforts that were expected to attract new players don't work as well as hoped, then the people pulling the strings may decide that it's a problem of the game rather than just an issue with MD. As a result they could decide that even though the game is currently growing, that it's just not worth it to invest in new players. Then decisions are likely to become even more focused on squeezing cash out of existing players rather than attracting new players, that growth is then likely to slow to a halt, or even drive existing players away, causing the company to squeeze even harder, etc.
So it's not just a concern that these issues are too big, it's also a concern of how will the shareholders interpret these issues.
My man be pausing it at the perfect time. Those faces are funny
Another problem is that TCG/OCG players* are looking for MD to be a sim of their formats, when I think it wants to be looked at as its own separate game with its own metas
They should announce this from first place imo
Otherwise its both side fault for having higher expectation
@@abdurachmanromzy4778 I mean, when the banlists don't align, when we don't get cards in a timely manner, when the format is different (bo1)
I assume they're doing their own thing. No one needs to say this about Duel Links, people just accepted it because it was a smaller board.
24:00 This is literally me at my local about a month ago, I asked what Fenrir does and my opponent (who knew what I was playing) just said “you’re not going to like where this ends up”. Turns out he was right
The ocg no surrender thing I believe is part of why in no banlist tournaments that have happened with ocg dragonlink adjacent decks were semicompetitive by doing the match win effect
Yeah and not just Dragonlink, some decks like Tear found a way to use Reprodocus and Elpy to summon Victory Dragon from the deck
There needs to be an official and simplified ruling database.
the OCG problem is the MD banlist and cardpool is a year behind
I find it weird there was little to no mention of price. To me, price is the biggest barrier of entry when it comes to Yugioh. At the end of the day anything else is secondary to price. If you can’t afford the cards in the first place what motivation is there to learn the game at all? The game could be super easy to learn etc. but people still wouldn’t play unless it became more affordable.
Konami not having an official simulator and the fact that they are treating MD as a low cost maintenance game is wild.
MD had a huge launch, in PC, Consoles and Mobile and they simply lost that momentum by not supporting the game correcly. Specially on mobile
it is the biggest card game in the market, LITERALLY MADE 100 millions last year, are you smoking
@@r3zaful yeah last year was also the launch
If they want more MD players to play the physical game they should include digital pack codes in the physical products like Pokemon and MTG do
I get what you guys are trying to say however, a lot of these videos are created from the perspective of people who have been playing IRL for a very long time and i think a lot of you see it from that side and not the non TCG/OCG playing perspective. i dont believe most people who play master duel, want to play the paper game. people just play one or two games for fun. and it is the same with every game a majority of street fighter players don't intent to go to EVO or attend a local tournament, just want one or two games online and that's that. I think the mistake we are making is assuming MD's intention is to get people playing the paper game, however, i think they gave up on that a while ago and started treating it like its own entity, much like duel links which is why at worlds it is its own thing. Yeah the number of paper players are not increasing as expected, but to be honest it's existence has indirectly resulted in people getting interested in the OCG and TCG who otherwise wouldn't have.
Fully agreed. If you are a returning or a new player and you start with MD, is the format up to date, or a few months behind the paper game, is of little relevance to you, and won't push you to transition to paperplay, aside from having something to look forward to.
For complexity, konami should have print rush duel for EN player, since that format is closer to old yugioh compared to modern yugioh.
What about speed duel?
Rush Duel is a uniquely Japanese minded product. The only format I could see it working on in the West is digital. People are very reluctant to pick up separate card games here.
@@geek593 worth noting you can buy Rush decks for dirt cheap in Japan. Like 600 Yen (~4 USD) for a complete starter deck. No shot we get products at that kind of price point in the west.
The fact the dueling book is still the primary sim is a travesty and shows how poorly the tcg is supported when we need to resort to netplay client that would have been considered jank 10 years ago
It's not consideredably jank, it was jank(I joined it's predecessor DuelingNetwork during Sept 2012). But it was the most accessible platform with the easiest implentation back in 2010s.
Dueling Book and it's predecessor, Dueling Network were far less jank than sims before it like Byond, YVD, and KCVDS.
I think they could implement something similar to fighting games where we have a rematch option turning the best of 1 into a best of 3 with side deck. That'd be cool
As a business owner, it pays to have more recurring clients and do things to keep them
and of course he'd bring up Set Rotation
To be honest, if people can't give Speed Duel more attention, then what good would shutting down over 15 years of card making brings?
Speed Duel is so far removed from the modern game that it's a novelty at best. It's sitting on the Time Wizard shelf, not the modern one.
Modern Yu-Gi-Oh sucks
Master duel could easily be a tcg/ocg emulator by just making those formats legal and seperate and then keep master duel format the same (best of 1).
I went to a couple of in person tournaments after primarily playing master duel since release date, and a lot of the people I played with were rude and got annoyed that I was adjusting to the physical card game. Might not be a universal experience, but so many players are not welcoming so I prefer playing online lol.
I experienced cheating, stealing, rule sharking, kids scammed out of trades, spectators who can't shut up, all for a handful of booster packs. I'm either playing with friends or online, but I won't bother with locals anymore.
I brought 3 albaz structure decks and feel like I can't even learn how to play
@skypirate7833 idk anything about the lore, yet everyone else does. Is there Manga or anime that I don't know about? Where is everyone getting the story for these cards?
@@spicymemes7458 I think duel terminal it’s an arcade machine in Japan. Only official manga with card story is for Sky Striker
My problem with yugioh is floodgates, and unlimited amount of special summons. Ban all flood gates and limit special summons.
honestly i believe that for a chunk for players such as myself i quite frankly dont want to invest that much time/effort master duel is chill also way easier to access and play plus it is f2p friendly for irl you need a few hundred dollars at the minimum while i am fully f2p on masterduel (also dont get me into how much easier it is just to see a glowing yellow thing rather than understand 100 different cards of your own and 1000 more of your opponents)
31:30 The Traptrix deck is probably the closest thing to this, as it's literally a HAT deck, and it gave you basically everything minus like 2 one-of trap holes
when you like bystial in master duel and then go to the ocg and see your opponent special summoning fenrir and you go what the hell is that just for them to add tear kash and you realize this exactly the same format as it is in master duel
Tear got fenrir banned in the ocg already
The Maxx "C" "problem" can be easily solved by having the TCG unbanning the card. It's a FAIR card anyways and both OCG and MD have it at 3. Might as well have some consistency between formats by making TCG do the easy job of unbanning it.
🍌
I feel like Konami can implement aspects of what Smogon does for the singles Pokémon tournaments to Master Duel. Master duel does something unique that none of the other simulators do and that it tracks card usage rates and win rates.
Konami can literally create official Tiers besides the diamond/gold/etc system they currently have that gets unlocked as soon as you hit the highest rank. This way the banlist can be updated regularly once a deck becomes too much and players can utilize easier strategies so they can go up the more familiar they get with the game.
Another thing is they can preview new archetypes in MD before they get released in the card game so people can get excited for a set to being released. Realistically, the cards should be getting updated anywhere from a week to a month from physical release since you know, they literally can update the MD department as soon as the cards are finished with development.
They have the capacity to do this better than Edopro, and yet, Edopro is able to implement cards into their simulator faster than Konami can with a head start.
As someone who got into YGO with Master Duel a couple months ago this list comes off to me more as things veteran TCG players don't like about MD rather than issues any actual new MD players have moving to OCG/TCG.
I think he's really overrating the importance of the different formats. It would be convenient if they were the same, yes, but cards important to your strategy getting banned/limited/powercrept and having to adapt to a new metagame is something MD players are already familiar with. As for the time argument I feel like I misunderstood something. Why would I care that the MD meta is stale to other players? Complexity I can't argue with, though for me is more an issue in the core rules rather than the individual cards. If/then/missing timing/pendulums/ignition effect or whatever, genuinely after ~300 hours I couldn't tell you how this shit works. MD doesn't do a good job teaching YGO, but it's automated so you don't really need to know it if you're fine with being surprised by interactions sometimes.
My top 3 reasons for not getting into TCG are: price, not wanting to support western Konami doing stuff like inflating rarities from OCG to TCG, and the rules feeling too difficult without MD's assistance.
completely agree. Somewhere in the middle MBT started making arguments about why TCG/OCG players don't like to play in MD, but I thought the entire issue was MD players not translating to real card play, so what does that have to do?
Like you mentioned I think biggest hurdles are price, complexity of having to do all actions by yourself (remembering all possible actions) and I think also there may just be people that don't want the social interaction aspects. I'd imagine there is a fair share of people that would rather play at home than attend a live event.
I felt the same way, that MBT was explaining why paper players like himself aren't throwing themselves into Master Duel when I was under the impression that the concern is MD players aren't converting to paper.
Like, why would a new player care about getting beaten by Kash in paper when they just learned Tear exists? Every couple weeks Konami releases new cards that add to the paper format but that's not fundamentally a bad thing. I would actually guess that players who care enough about the newer cards would be more invested in adopting paper play over MD as a result, which I thought was what Konami wanted here.
I think the major questions Konami should be asking is: why MD was able to attract so many new players, what has historically attracted players to OCG/TCG, what benefits does OCG/TCG supply over MD and are they enough to funnel players over.
And to mine eyes, price and complexity are the biggest answers to these questions.
Facts, I look at the TCG like I view books, they are nice, expensive and certainly have a charm to them but I'm not going to start collecting entire libraries when my only goal is to enjoy stories. MD may not be the real deal to gatekeepers but I like it and it's accessibility to users like me is the only thing that brought yugioh back into my life.
While listening to this discussion, on top of all the solutions which were already provided, I think I have one which could help. What if Master Duel was actually ahead of the curve? What if people were allowed to test the cards and strategies they wanted on the simulator before purchasing and playing the decks in paper if they want to continue playing the format? Part of me feels like that would actually be helpful
Would casuals not even invested in TCG/OCG bother playing Paper if they can play it for free and more conveniently
@@cryomancer2768 Maybe not, but the way I see it it’s already currently not doing a lot. At least this way people could test decks online they know they’ll like on paper so they’ll be more willing to buy them, and Konami can alter rarities and other details about the cards based on which cards are likely to be the biggest chase cards.
I legitimately thought that Konami would add new sets by making brand new secret packs every so often but no, they have to do every few months adding a selection pack and putting the rest of the cards in the master pack.
konami really needs to look more after what the other tcgs do. it was officially stated by wizards that kitchen table is the most played mtg format followed by commander the casual exclusive format. yugioh needs to realize that there needs to be something directly targeted at new players that is from a complexity standpoint on the same level as competitive play and master duel is just a different flavor of competitive so it really only is for people who already would play yugioh and can't really convert new people
WOTC has MASSIVE problems man. If you think YGO is too expensive, Well, check out prices for MTG.
@@avagrim9891 if your talking about land based, first you only need fetches once and second you don't need them. You can easily build a high powered commander deck for 100€ and that's when you own 0 cards for 100 cards and my original comment was about exactly casual formats and how wizards knows they are the most played do explain me where the problem with prizes are when an actively supported format is at that price range
17:00 just play dragons, they’ll be rogue at worst and tier 1 at best 😎
Unironically true, they would need to hit it with a targeted nuclear ban list for d-link to dip below rogue tier
@@yirash47the only problem is that a MD Dragon Link player will have to learn to play the deck slower in the TCG since Dragons in the TCG (Right now) is a mid-rangey/control deck
If Konami wants more people, they need to promote older formats. It will be easier for new people to learn the game and understand the basics. Those new players will eventually look for newer cards and newer formats and learn at their own pace until they get to the most advanced format of yugioh.
PS: I think YGO OMEGA is a very good simulator. Have you tried playing in that platform?
I really think master duel should have both best of 3 and best of 1 ladders.
The biggest problem of MD is that it's sooooooooo behind in cards.
We're playing a resolved format for TCG and OCG (we don't talk about the last OCG report here, that doesn't exist) everyone is sick and tired about Spright (saying this as a Spright enjoyer as well) and Tearlament most of the time and if you're not playing that you probably would get stucked in Platinum.
Also the "C" with Snow and Pepega Ruler just feel so wrong to have them all legal in the same format.
Yeah people are so sick of sprite and tear but ooooh boy are they going to be excited with Kashtira. I honestly think they should skip Kash because that deck is horrible if you want new players to join. MD has a problem converting people to the txg not because of the format but because people see how unfair THE GAME IS and give up it'll be worse if they release one of the most toxic decks yugioh has ever seen
Also snow and pepega ruler are nowhere near an issue I have no idea why people are so against them they are not these busted game winning cards. Pepega ruler is rarely used in top decks besides dragonlink and they don't need it so hitting it won't do anything
I find it surprising he didn’t say anything about how expensive the physical card game is compared to MD
They should have both best-of-one and best-of-3 formats.
I'm not sure how they release cards in other tcgs but a big killer for me is that cards release in the OCG before TCG by several months. Not every strategy performs as well over there as it does here and vice versa, but its still a hype killer for me when I'm excited about a deck and I see OCG play it months before I can. It takes the fun out of deckbuilding and learning a deck for me.
I think a thing that can help people learn the complexity of yugioh is somewhat similar to what Cimoo ist doing with his history of yugioh series. I have tried teaching a lot of people yugioh by now and the thing I found most successful is to start with Goat Format and work your way up through old formats as these were less complex as todays format. And then as time progresses, the formats get more complex slowly so that the new player has time to adapt to that.
That is something Konami could do 100%. Just put a story mode into their online simulator for the TCG (that doesnt exist sadly) where you would play through old formats and step by step get immersed into the newer formats until they are ready to play the actual modern tcg
I am a new paper yugimon player started in 2023. I never played a card game before when I first started the game I hated handtraps but rn I feel it's more fun to interact with your opponent and build a board useing one card my only issue is that most time the board is really had to interact against and kill the game I wish if like end board be weaker or interact in different way . I got into paper through master duel
The best way to input best of three in masterduel is looking at fighting games because when you lose you decide to do a rematch or not and if you do decide to rematch you go to a passive lobby where you can change the decklist but can only change whatever the amount the side deck is so no one can just change to a different deck
I hope Josh read my comment so he could understand and may be discuss a perfect example.
As a master duel only player who lives in a country where yu gi oh is not a thing , the only way for me to play TCG is DB.
dont get me wrong DB is cool for me and I realy think It is the step 2 after master duel for people like me because It is "semi autou".
And even though I see all TCG yugitubers and aware of what is good in TCG and the general play style of these decks, when I tried the TCG on DB after playing master duel since it realse (higest rank every season and tried every meta deck except plant and runick naturia ) it was sooooo bad because (although I was up to date on tcg) there were many many new things that you need to understand at once so the end result was me playing Runick Rpright (which is different and bad without elf but I did not know that and had to learn it the hard way )against Kash and asking my oppoenet to slow down every time they did something
I'll just quickly repeat the points I made on MBT's video:
1. Maxx "C" not nearly as big of an issue as he makes it out to be. Guess what, a format where Maxx "C" is banned already exists, it's called "TCG" and people still find plenty of stuff to complain about, its not that different. Besides, if they did ban it in MD, it would be more in line with the TCG, but stray away from the OCG, so that's really a matter of perspective.
2. If MD had the same format as the TCG, I probably would never buy a physical card ever again. The TCG is expensive where I live and MD is just a much cheaper, and convenient, alternative. Besides, I do think the MD is a good introduction to the game. Sure, it's not the same format, but it's still the same game and a lot of what you learn is transferable. If adapting to a new format was so hard, people would quit the game whenever a new powerful set, like POTE, or harsh banlist droped.
3. When it comes to new player retention the lack of material for new players and cost are probably the major issues. Look at the starter decks from MD. Those are not only terrible, but don't reflect how the game is actually played nowadays. Even loaner decks for events are usually not competitive builds of the archetypes they're promoting and lack most staples. Konami could, and should, improve on that front.
Maxx "C" also isn't even relevant to the annual report. The concern was MD to OCG conversion, TCG was not mentioned at all.
Wanna play the best deck on TCG if you are new? Pay at minimum 200dls
Wanna play the best deck on Master Duel if you are new? Grind for 2 hours
Lmao 200? More like 1k
@@merricksilverwolf5366Tear ishizu was cheap, but yeah, Kashtira right now has higher price
Average deck price is 700 dollars. A youtuber did the math comparing tcg prices to each other. Cheap formats are 350 , expensive ones 1100. 700 average
@@457Shadowman how much is kashtira right now
@@shakeweller That video was made so close to PHHY release that it's heavily skewed. Kash was particularly expensive and certain reprints hadn't happened yet and people were experimenting with cards like Thrust which fell out of use pretty fast. His methodology wasn't amazing either. He took a snapshot of five performing decks at the time and averaged them while controlling for playsets of 3. Staples at the moment are fairly cheap making the buy-in for competitive not nearly as expensive as it was awhile back. Deck cores for pushed archetypes can run between 200-300 USD, usually lower.
I think a tutorial teaching new players to ash blossom branded fusion would be 1) effective 2) relevant-that’s always going to be a choke point for Branded 3) relating to a deck that will exist in the meta at various points for up to a year and 4) funny
That would be awesome. And hilarious.
Best of 3 would be fine if you still got the rank points from each duel vs the match.
master duel is simply goated for a lot of people because number one reason is you can play it on your phone.. you can just hop into md and leave anytime if you dont like the format..
One thing not pointed out (I think) is price. Pokémon TCG has meta decks that cost $60-$100 at min rarity while shit like bystial lubellion chills in that price range for one copy
People acting like Masterduel players having to adjust to new cards and banlist is a big problem when on average master duel's ladder has way more deck variety than the tcgs and ocgs so they are much more at home with seeing unknown cards for the first time, if not more than tcg players if they have not been playing consistently through out the years. Between the cost and other aspect of the game, card pool difference is the least of the problem
25:54 Josh, this is ultimately still a reason against this timenshift.
Why would you leave it up to luck that the format you relive is one you like, when you can just turn the formats you do like into Time Wizard events?
The formats that are missed once they are over can, just as with Edison, Goat, and others, be supported on the side anf implementing that in Master Duel might actually be trivial. (The devs should have plenty of experience with alternative formats now after all the events with special banlists.)
The mere existence of the chance that the format you relive is bad makes the timeshifted release worse than the alternative: up-to-date cardpool with a kind of permanent event on the side for older formats.
Though, I agree that this isn't MBT's strongest argument (then again, the whole video doesn't make _that_ strong a case and might just be another pitch for one of his own projects).
Master duel will always have a problems. The problem is master duel can't shuffle.
Uuuhm price?!? The game literally price caps tons of players and budget meta decks get killed in 2 weeks.
Budget meta picks like traptrix and swordsoul are truly dead
Master Duel is probably fine. It's the TCG/OCG that are fked.
OCG/TCG should be on the same release schedule and share banlists at the very least. Master duel should also be very close to that. As Josh said, no side-decking in Master Duel is good because master duel should be a more accessible.
Last tournament streams did not do as well because Joshua was streaming not anything else :))
@17:15 I really wish he Joshua didnt even make this statement. As he is just guessing and has nothing to reference this opinion on. As a duel links player, I can tell you that it is quite difficult to transition into considering a side deck when you never had to previously. Not only considering the different strategies side decking allows, but also how to implement it.
Assessing the format to know which cards to side is not intuitive. Do you run cards to counter specific decks, or do you run cards for going 1st/2nd instead, and if you do, are they board breakers or HT's. Then, once you choose a side, even if you netdeck and skip that stage, knowing what cards you can swap out of your main deck depending on the matchup is aslo not intuitive. You know to run DRNM, Dark Hole, etc when going 2nd, you have never had to consider what cards you dont need depending on the matchup.
And, there is no resource or outlet readily covering this. Like there are videos explaining what are popular HT's, or if this is a boardbreaking meta. So you can learn that. But, there are no video telling you, "If you are running X deck, side out cards 1, 2, 3, when facing A deck. Side out card 10, 11, 12, and 13, when facing B deck for this reason. etc. etc."
So I feel he is really underestimating the barrier that creates.
Imagine if they released lets say 3 starter decks that all are different meta decks with play sets off every card + stables like 3x ash, lightning storm, some one off stable extra deck monsters, etc. with a guidebook that teaches you how to utilize ash in choke points, push for game with accesscode, the decks combo lines and how to utilize side deck with lightning storm, feather duster in g2 if you know your going second.
Sure they wouldnt be able to sell as much reprint packs with stables but I think it would make starting yugioh a much better experience if you could just buy the starter deck or if you start with a friend he picks 1 and you pick the other started deck and you can just start playing.
If they really want to squeeze some more money out of the new players I would even be fine with a started deck that has the meta deck with play sets of everything and then another set which is something like a "tech" set you can buy to boost your deck with generic stables
I was a master duel only player for a year and the only thing that really was stopping me was prices honestly i can play whatever i want in master duel I just have to grind long enough but in tcg i have to pay 100+€ for every deck i want to play and its really frustrating. I found a nice budget variant of marincess that i am playing currently on locals and after the first local where I got shit on because i didnt know my combos (imagine reading and not just click buttons lmao) and played for the first time against decks i knew existed but never played before, it went well and i can convert my master duel skill to tcg.
i honestly enjoy tcg even more than master duel because best of three tournament is way more fun than best of 1 ladder with a shitty ladder system that rewards luck and playtime more than everything else
Honestly, I don't think it's on Konami to teach people who want to get into YGO competitively how to do it. Anytime I ask someone if they like yugioh more often than not if they say yes they mean they remember the cartoon as a kid, think any variation of the yugi summoning exodia on kaiba meme is funny, and thinking anything from synchros onward is sacrilege. As I imagine people who would be watching either MBTs video or this reaction to it are competitive players, we think the only people who play yugioh are in it for the competitive nature of it, but honestly there's way more people who do care about "how cool the world chalice lore is". I myself was a yugiboomer when Master Duel first came out and did exactly "lose over and over again to cards I didn't even know existed" and yeah it felt bad but that's how every game should be if you want to get really good. I started as a soypog BEWD player stuck in gold who was afraid of combo decks and now I can play Spright and get Master rank. There's plenty of resources for people who want to get into YGO competitively. The Master Duel subreddit and Discord are super nice and help new players all the time.
Just turn Omega into an official sim, ez
Tbh, I don't play in the TCG as much, I don't care about the difference in formats or even card pool, actual cardboard isn't as F2P and I can't do it without moving somewhere else
For a new player who is learning the yogioh game,
it is very complex and there are many tutorials online on how to play the game,
But no one explains to you the difference between, HARD ONCE PER TURN AND A SOFT ONCE PER TURN, when a card misses its time, etc.
Agree on the starter products I thought they really could of done a full Dino deck instead of all the reprints in Wild Survivors it's not a super competitive deck but it they print you a full deck you could buy one product and start playing and probably not get destroyed at a local event or even against a friend that started before you
29:33 , eh kinda disagree, joshua is coming from a place of a high end player which is what the, 15% - .001% of players? While the other 70-85% would probably say that the game needs something else to slow the game down or make it not only new player friendly but also returning/ current player friendly.
I'm still surprised that cards in Masterduel still have this cramped cardtexts. It's an Simulator, you have all space in the internet, just make some visual spaces and breaks. Try to make second effects and requierments more visible.
Mabe make the cost in a different colour.
And include Tooltipps. Just like Wikipedia does it for years. You should be able to click on the word "target" and get an explanation what target is, that there are cards that don't target etc.
This could help a lot of new players.
Like we all thought at one point ChaosMax was OP.
I think a cool fix could be a rematch option kind of like how street fighter 6 does it. This way you could enter a best of 3 with a side deck after a duel on ladder without creating a separate ladder to climb.
I think the closest thing Konami has ever made to an actually good onramp to learning more complex YGO is Duel Links, which worked for me back in like 2020. The thing is, though I was only able to grow through reading a lot on Duel Links Meta... It was a useful format for learning the basics of YGO comboing and how the rules work without having to handle quite so much insanity. Of course, that was pre-Link and early Pendulum, I don't really know how the format looks nowadays.
I think we CAN make the game easier. There are various rulings and interactions that could be simplified.
-ATK modifiers
-battle/damage step
-missing timing
-negate effect vs activation and once-per-turn "activate" vs "use"
It just makes the game more intuitive
A very unrelated thing, but please don't use music for clips if the video Joshua is watching already has music in it, it's very distracting to hear them overlapping 😖
Money is indeed a problem, probably the biggest one. A single Hugin where i live costs 12% of minimum wage, how the hell am i supposed to buy 3 of her + the rest of the deck + staples? I simply cannot play paper YuGiOh, even though I would love to, because it is way too expensive
I can't be the only one who would absolutely pay a monthly subscription for an official online simulator, literally exactly like master duel, but with all the bell and whistles we get from the unofficial sims, like the entire card pool and the option to choose different formats, banlists, best of 1 or 3, etc.
That would absolutely be amazing.
I guess the issue Konami would have is then maybe no one would play in paper, so they would not run tournaments on said simulator.
Every time he pauses the video, MBT is making the funniest face