Although there are definitely other barriers like seperate hobbies and not having time, every time i consider picking up a physical deck and trying paper play the only thing that stops me is pricing. When basically rogue budget meta decks cost 100+ dollars just to be able to actually be capable of playing a competitive game I just think the investment would never return. Imagine paying 100 dollars for a live service game just to be at a disadvantage and have to pay for paid dlc every update just to keep playing on top of that.
Crazy how people love master duel for the most part. But people insist on resale value, and the ability to profit off playing when it comes to the paper version. Every step master duel took away from those things only improved it
Yeah i would just rather play master duel where i can build my decks by simply playing the game and doing missions/solo duels. Why pay $100+ to play a game (plus costs of admission fees and travel not to mention taking up my free time) when i can just sit down on my console in front of the TV and boot up a free to play, easy to access version of the same game. The only benefit really is the TCG having a more up-to-date card pool. Other than that you need tons of money and free time to be able to play TCG, both of which are things I'm lacking. Also im not the person to get into buying and reselling cards for a profit, it takes too much time and isnt worth the money it brings in. I just want to play the game, not go on a side quest to ensure i get value out of my investments. If i buy a deck its because i wanna play it consistently, not just once or twice per format then resell it. If I buy these things its so that i am able to play with others, not to spend time listing them online for resale at a mark-up. Im not gonna buy a mathmech deck for one format then sell it so i can get into unchained the next. If i buy a deck, its to own it permenantly. Not just for one format. Even if that deck is no longer viable even by rogue standards.
@@chaosjoey123 The big difference is there's no secondary market and cards don't have any actual value. In MD you either buy packs from Konami to try and pull a card or you pay them directly with virtual currency that's not worth anything to get the card. Now imagine that all the staple handtraps cost 120 UR a copy and cards for the current meta decks cost 180 UR a copy and, on top of that, during each new patch the cards have a chance to shoot up in price or crash down to 10 UR. All of a sudden making decks in MD seems a lot less fun. Turn that virtual currency that's not worth anything into actual real life money and you have the TCG.
@kotzenderkeks61 RA2 is 55% more expensive in the UK vs RA1 with the same cards per pack/same number of packs per case. They upped the price for prints with less packs/more cards per pack to justify the price hike, but in the EU is just price hiked with no additional cards per pack/case. £9 per booster is nuts
I mentioned the Nintendo Switch bit today and people were saying "that's insane, why would Konami spend 60 grand a year on Nintendo Switches for those who make it to top 8" not understanding that they're already doing that. This game is so fucked, and none of us can agree on what to do to fix this.
Well actually yah there are things to agree on to fix it. One don't over complicate the game, stop putting so many words in one text box. And three stop making combos too long. And cards that flat out prevent people from playing the game. Cause I don't know about you but I'm tired of dragging a box of cards and a mat to sit there and watch somebody else play the game only to get to my turn and either scoop or either pass and let them end me on the following turn. Then play round two where I'm met with interruption and scoop and game over. So tell me how is that braindead type of playing is healthy for any game.
@@AaronHeininger The problem is that you won't be able to get everyone to agree on what 100+ cards need to be banned to facilitate games with more turns on average and more back and forth. If I say "ban Spright Blue", you'll get a bunch of defenders telling me i'm just bad at the game lmao.
You say "none of us" as if players had any say on this, as if it was the players' responsability. It's not up to the players to decide how things go; it's up to the people who actually work in the important positions. Truth is, over 99% of the players take the game less seriously than the incompetent idiots who run it. None of you can agree, because none of you know everything, and you don't need to know anything to be the consumer of this product. You cannot do anything about the game, but you can do everything about your own experience.
I always find the "super agressive reprint policy" to be a really funny joke because at best its getting reprinted a year later at which point most stuff released becomes ass
@rickmel09 infimp and ash famously were still very expensive years after their first print and several reprints. Both were reprinted in structure decks and both were more expensive as singles (!!) than the msrp of the deck.
@kinoalove5817 it's about the manipulation, if Rudy had been dealing in stocks instead of trading cards he'd probably have caught some criminal charges for it.
They are lest every set be a Legacy of Destruction. If you don’t entice people to buy and open a set in bulk for a few chase cards to serve as a return on investment, no one buys any product and it’s left to rot on store shelves. Everything in that product inflates as a result. LEDE didn’t have anything you could invest in. No one buys it as a result and now Tenpai Dragon Paidra is a $20 card despite being only a super rare.
@@thedigitaldummy3098 its why pokemon has managed to keep game pieces not too expensive. putting seperate collectors cards in gets more poeple to open the set.
Sadly, it also likely saved the game. Players *revolted* after _Chronicles_ was printed, and creating the Reserved List was the only way to keep established players from leaving en masse. I hate it too, since it keeps me from experimenting with some Legacy brews that I wanted to try.
@@willooo09 in all honesty 30th anniversary wasent really anything lmao. like sure, bad PR and a shitty product, but thats all it was. reserved list continues to plague prices for legacy/vintage/cEDH and will do so unless the reserve list is abolished. there are 0 long term problems caused directly by 30th anni, its apples to oranges.
TCG Konami has trudged on with their practices for core sets, ignorant that people are slowly realizing how terrible core set design for the wider community. We wouldn't need the degree of reprints if we were to follow OCG core sets which have multiple rarities for the super and ultra rare cards (Secret rare is one of those alternate rarities, OCG uses rares instead of super rares). Prizing for big events could be special alt prints for desirable cards in the metagame. This would drive the price of the market towards giving value to these exclusive cards, cards reserved for the top players and players who attend big events. This would push down the price of core set prints, making them more accessible. Of course TCG Konami wouldn't change this, since they don't really see an obligation to improve the game with so many current players at this point. They'll probably take some action against Snake-Eye in a couple months to maybe bring back some players, but by then Fiendsmith will be there to fill the void and the Snake-Eye problem with persist.
which means completely follow ocg, quess what tcg players hate to play in ocg format and cards, we players outside japan have to learn japanese before asian english release, you all tcg players complain too much, its irritiating,
@@r3zaful Konami fixing their print policy outside Japan doesn't mean everyone has to play ocg format, what are you on about? And even if it was the same format you don't need to learn Japanese, MTG and Pokémon have world tournaments where everyone can have different language cards and it isn't an issue
Everyone brings up the rarity thing and that's true and all but OCG packs are also like $1.50. That's dramatically going to change how accessible the game is and the fact is TCG players get so fleeced on sealed product lol.
@@r3zaful OCG has English sets, much like TCG has German, Spanish, and French translated prints. I also find OCG sets to be far more appealing to purchase as they are far more pro customer with rarities and distribution.
@@lamiaprincess6371Even with the brief period of adjustment, it'd ultimately be a net positive for the playerbase. There'd be less need for reprint sets as the necessary prints would be in abundance in the release sets.
Its also really frustrating that prizing for YCS' and such are so abysmal BECAUSE of unique situation that the side events have going on. Giant cards and uncut sheets are so unique and cool so WHY ARE THEY PRIZING FOR SIDE EVENTS. I can guarantee that people would love to receive a Giant card or uncut sheet of secrets/starlights instead of 7 year old console and a rubber mat.
The LODT reprint being rear-ended by Substitoad's reprint in the new BOL set makes me think there's like three different teams at KOA and they don't communicate.
It's the same odditie that gave us OTS 25 Ulti Diviner and then a week and some change later it's in the Battle of Legends set. Never seen so many head scratchers happen in such a short time
Hey guys we need Lightsworn reprints. Employee 1: "Sure boss, BLC1 is a perfect place to put them. We can throw a few into RC02 as well! While we're at it we can put Substitoad in Battles of Legend to tick off another Edison reprint." Employee 2: "Sure boss, LODT reprint on the way! We can get Substitoads out too, after all it's still on the banlist right? Right? Anyway LODT coming up!" Employee 3: "Where's the structure deck for this quarter? KoJ hasn't talked to me in months. Ah yeah sure boss I'll get the 2014 Lightsworn structure deck rewaved."
Honestly, when you think about it a little more, the reprint policy is just bad for everyone. Expensive cards getting reprinted is great for the players, but you're looking at probably close to an entire YEAR after release for that reprint to come and, by then, the cards are powercrept and/or new staples have been released and now you have to start the wait all over again for those cards. It's just an endless cycle of waiting for reprints and it sucks. I would have loved to play Spright during POTE format. It's really great that I can finally pick up the deck for a reasonable price 2 YEARS later and at a time where the deck is mostly irrelevant as well. Sometimes it doesn't even matter if a card gets reprinted if Konami decides to put it in a garbage set, short print it, etc. Prosperity didn't become an affordable card until 3 entire years after it's initial release. The reprint policy is bad for vendors/sellers because if they aren't able to move their stock within that timeframe before the reprint, then they have to start selling those cards at a loss. This makes investing in Yugioh to begin with really risky and, for a lot of people, not even worth it. This sorta thing has only gotten worse over the last couple years especially for local card shops when it comes to getting rid of product. It's been mentioned a billion times at this point, but going with the OCG printing style would benefit EVERYONE. The players can get their hands on the cheaper versions of cards immediately because they are actually affordable. Vendors/sellers are fine because they can sell the chase rarity of cards to those who want to bling out their deck and don't have to worry about those cards losing a ton of value within a year due to reprints being less common. Collectors similarly don't have to worry about their shiny cardboard becoming worthless for the same reason. Knowing that you are guaranteed to pull some cards you want from a box would entice players to actually buy boxes so local card shops don't have tons of product just wasting away on their shelves. Everything about the current reprint policy is just so bad for everyone involved.
Konami would never go with OCG printing style in the TCG, they enjoy how much money they reap from a continually shrinking playerbase too much to care about the future of the game
100% took the words out of my mouth, especially the Spright issue. Great, can build it for super cheap and have another casual deck I can play but 2 years after the deck was released is actually ridiculous. The deck came and went and hasn't really been an actual contender since mid 2023
the lack of seperation really does not help. the collectors cards can't be too rare since they have to be game pieces but they can't be accessible to not lose the collectors value. just seperating ultra rare + into collectors cards and common to super into collectors cards solves the issue.
@@DoorMatt-Live I think they just enjoy milking it right now and don't worry much about it getting smaller in the long run in the west, as long as OCG stays strong. Happens all the time with stuff like asian mmo's ad things like that.
actually no, the ocg printing of sets wouldnt help, it would just make vendors stay away from the game. why would i invest in a box thats flat neg everytime, always, you cant make profit with it? even the chase raritys are to lil to less to make it worth and they even reprint the collectors stuff every now in then in the same rarity. its flat out worse. it would be better for the playerbase but if u cant get your singles anymore decently its getting even worse than now
I had a moment where my brain kinda broke on ygo recently where someone told me I could choose between building a deck to be competitive for no prizing OR i could just buy a ps5 and several games for a couple $100 less 💀 i love playing the game man but the math on that equation just doesn't add up
problem is, you have to grind with these decks, you either win or top every display tournament/giant ots stuff/and so on or you just flat out lose money and even when you do that, its not for sure you can make + with it.
I think I was higher in the past. Dad, prophecy, mermils, cyber stein. I seem to recall those way more expensive. Like people say snake eyes is expensive, but just the witch and wanted are “expensive “ ash/oak/pop are less then 5. Dragon like 10-15? Princess was 15 but I think it’s 20 now. Bonfire was high at presale and abit after but it’s 40.
@@Xana17my bro áll of those cards are expensive for me cental Europe plays structures or stapeless plant link or you have money or budget exteremly budget decks
As others have pointed out these prices aren’t completely unheard of in yugioh but they used to be an exception. There’s been many points in yugiohs history where just 3 structure decks slapped together was a tier 1 deck, like dark world. All that to say the price of ygo formats would fluctuate alot more from format to format, where as now we seem to be in a perpetual cycle of expensive deck after expensive deck
My theory that Konami is running the numbers, isn’t liking what they’re seeing in regards to the health of Yugioh, and are just trying to milk people for everything they can before the game collapses under its own weight feels less and less crazy with every decision Konami makes. My local doesn’t even stock Yugioh anymore, all the local Walmarts had for weeks now is “Legendary Decks 2” and some of those packs of 30 cards that were likely found on a warehouse floor - it’s a Bad Time for Yugioh. I’m just happy the people I play with mostly play various Pet Decks that they’ve built over the years…
It's not Yugioh, retailers are killing their TCGs because they are one of if not the easiest thing to steal in the entire store. I was going around Walmarts looking for TrapTrix structures and only one had any, and all their cards were behind a manned register like cigarettes. One didn't have any trading card section whatsoever.
@@AverageInternetCitizen maxx c is no worse than not having enough outs to a snake eye combo, both of them lose you the game. Called by to 2 maybe 3 and some cross outs and maxx c ain’t that much of a problem
@@JamieFlett-b6n the problem is that maxx c dominates deck building. as soon as it is legal you have to play all the outs. Also Crossout is limited in formats where maxx c is legal, otherwise you would run three. in the end a single card determines 1/4 (or more) of your whole deck.
@@JamieFlett-b6nthe issue with Maxx C is the only answer to it is to “draw the out” as well as it’s power going first and second. Going first? Do your combo, end on your negates. Your opponent goes, you drop Maxx C, they attempt to stop you with called by or ash, just negate, lol. And going second, your opponent does literally anything on their first turn, drop Maxx C, they have to either set and pass or let you draw a shit ton of cards.
I feel like a lot of the responses to stuff generalized as "yugioh is dying" has been "what do you mean, it's not dead". A lot of people don't seem to get that long before something as huge as yugioh dies there are going to be problems with it, and that leaving problems unfixed will hurt the game. I think part of what's changing is that more new card games are actually popular. It used to be you played magic or yugioh, or Pokémon if you were 8,but now I see a lot of competitive Pokémon, as well as new comer tcgs like one piece and lorcana doing a lot to entice people that are unhappy with the current state of yugioh. And the numbers are clear, event attendance is way down, and with no ycses in Europe for what we essentially know will be an entire year, there is little incentive for players to keep up with the game on that entire continent. It's not dead, and it's not too late to do anything, and it's not even wrong or bad if you're having fun, but there are a ton of potentially existential problems to the game right now.
Making a bold claim with attendance is down when recently they broke a Guinness record for most attendes. I agree there are problems that need fixing and more support for alt formats from Konami and the playerbase so that cards have more worth, but if you make a claim with attendance numbers being low, have a source to back it up. No EU YCS can be a reason different from no players. Remember that events aren't profitable, they're really a big advert for competetive play.
@@MrYouSerious>broke a Guinness world record for attendance. Yeah IN JAPAN. But in the west??? NO euro YCS’S but yet BREAKING ATTENDANCE RECORDS, almost like less YCS= MORE PEOPLE
@@johnathanlemus5584 Or maaaybe there have been some other factors to include in the organisation for a large scale tournament? And nowhere did they mention specifically the west market? And even now Nationals in Europe have a large number of players. For example, Italy had 1307 players (while MTG standard had 808 players in May 25th) and apparently German Nats has 2000 players registered. I understand that stores are losing on YGO as a product, but to say there are no eu YCS's simply due to "low attendance numbers" would be a lie in my opinion. To organize an event, you need to secure a whole lot more than just people that will attend.
2:38 I used to work at a card vendor, and the worst people around were the MTG "investors". They were like, "what if a human had all joy surgically removed from their body".
In regards to prize money: they really should start making prize cards with unique one of a kind card art so the winner can at least sell them for a profit if they wanted to.
As a vendor I would say the lottery style chase cards are actually the thing that is ruining the profitability of the game. They have resulted in all of the value in sets being heavily weighted towards a few rare pulls and the base sets being largely worthless, so the expected value of an average box is abysmal, far lower even than the distribution price of a box. Cracking cases even at an industrial scale now feels like a horrendous gamble rather than something that will provide a reliable return, so I find myself skipping more and more sets completely. It's no wonder so many stores are dropping Yu-Gi-Oh entirely when customers don't want to risk opening the product themselves and stores are basically being asked to take massive losses on 90% of sets to provide customers with the singles that they need.
Komoney should do it like pokemon or their own OCG, keep the extremely rare chase cards for those who want it but throw in a common/uncommon print for those who just want to play the card game and not treat the cards as their own stock market.
Lorcana and Flesh & Blood's prize support is pretty staggering, especially where Yugioh has to give rewards around a cash amount rather than just giving money. I think Flesh & Blood handles it's competitive circuit so much better than Yugioh does, and has excellent coverage. It also gives a lot of information and opportunities for players getting into the higher tier events as well.
@@ziltoid984 Its doing very well in my local area, and interest seems at an all-time high from what I've noticed. I don't have any numbers from any of the tier 2+ events to support this though. I also really like how they handle their Pro Tour invites, it makes it so people will want to keep attending events even if they get an invite.
@@ziltoid984 I was really excited for FaB and bought multiple blitz decks (warrior, shadow brute, runeblade, mechanologist, and ranger), but the gameplay just felt bland once i finally got to play. I never felt like I was doing anything interesting.
@@RedGalbothonestly the biggest issue FaB has is the new player experience. Blitz decks are very low power and not even in the premier format. The current format is probably the most yugioh it's ever been with the top deck having huge 15 card combo OTKs available to it. Not every class does that but there are definitely ones in there for the Yugioh players like me.
I think Yu-Gi-Oh has two problems when it comes to card pricing. One, there just aren't very many collectible cards. In any given set there aren't very many cards that are clearly for collectors outside of maybe the chase rarity (starlight/ultimate rare) which are often just meta cards in a higher rarity. Two, the important meta cards are often secret rares and hard to pull. The combination of these two means the meta cards often end up being sought after by everyone. You look at Pokémon and there is a clear divide between cards for collectors (alternate arts, illustration rares) and cards for players. Yu-Gi-Oh lacks that clear divide, so the meta cards are effectively the chase cards.
A card game for a franchise marketed towards kids has cheaper to play meta decks (the most expensive to top cut NAIC was $107 compared to the cheapest deck to top cut YCS Indy being $209), gives out significantly better payouts, and treats the top players in the game like they're the top players in the game. (Players in stream matches have their previous tournament placings listed on stream, in between rounds will have recorded segments of players talking about themselves, their careers, and goals for the current world championship circuit) on occasion. Meanwhile the more mature game gives you a switch if you win and a mat that is slightly more unique than the one being sold by a vendor outside for $60
Yugioh for a long time has been stagnant in terms of the general size of its player base. It can bring back old players pretty consistently, but very, VERY rarely does someone completely new enter into the game and stick with it. There’s always been a constant leaking of players quitting the game for whatever reason, but the core base of dedicated long term fans and the nostalgia fueled stubbornness of returnees have kept it afloat. But as things are going, the leaking is getting worse, and even the dedication is fading away. If this game dies, and I surely hope it doesn’t, if will be a slow and painful decline
As far as I'm aware that issue is primarily present in the TCG, where Konami of America are being very greedy assholes. The OCG looks comparatively better as Konami of Japan seems way less greedy than KoA, allowing the sought after cards to be printed in different rarities, and thus making them far more accessible to get (as well as not putting too much filler in the sets) So if anything, the game would only die in the TCG if KoA doesn't get their heads out of their asses and make the game far more accessible for us, while the OCG continues to stick around no problem
It's called a negative growth curve very common event (more people leave than are coming in)in MMOs before what's called a cascade event that causes the sudden collapse of a game
Being honest, as long as Duelingbook exists and has Goat ladder, I don't care. I've not had any interest in modern YGO! since the mid to late 2010s, just for how out of control the gameplay and power creep are, and how expensive it is. So as long as DB and Goat exist... no skin off my back.
@@DragonBallsolosyourverse it doesn't help there is a rather bad case of blending like when was the last time you saw decks at the top where they all played on very different axis and weren't just different flavors of swarm and extra deck spam
"700 dollars" tells far from the full story. Playing yugioh in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, hell even the Balkans is reserved to higher class. You want to buy an S:P Little Knight in Brazil? 900 reais. Trident Dragon? 500. Ash Blossom? 100 for a playset. A full Snake-Eyes deck? You're looking at 3k-5k. Note: Minimum salary is currently 1400 reais.
WotC comp MTG scene died when they first stopped caring years ago and using FIRE printing philosophy and then changing the scene to almost kill it. Then Hasbro being found out that WotC makes most of the money of a product in the company and then shoving commander down every pack released after that which basically seems to have murdered the pro scene completely except those with sunk cost fallacy and content creators that are stuck playing it.
I'm primarily a fighting game player, but my girlfriend has been teaching me Yu-Gi-Oh. It's been very fun, but good lord I thought fighting game monetization of kinda wack. Wanting to play a deck like Vanquish Soul and learning that in order to build solid lists I need to spend more money than it takes to buy an entire fighting game and its DLC passes is really disheartening and does not wanna make me play Yu-Gi-Oh. I'm stuck putting together scrimblo decks for pennies that interest me like Libromancer, or bumming a Spright list off of one of my friends. I wanna be able to play in person and experiment with different decks and archetypes, but the price point is just too insane to justify it.
The main issue i think is that even konamy has no clue of ehat the fuck they are doing and where they are going, except "i really hope players buy this product"
Somethings gotta change at Konami. Basically bullied my fav card shop into dropping yugioh all together and it was the only day of the week I could find the time to play.
Cristian Urena, Andres Torres, and Raphael Nevans, are some well known pro players who have appeared to have left yugioh. Urena recently tweeted how Ygo is so far behind other TCG's in prizing. He's since played Lorcana like 2 weeks ago. Andres Torres only came back to play the UDS championship because Konami asked all previous UDS winners to do a tourney. His deck profile afterwards, he stated he's not even playing ygo atm. Nevans is playing One Piece now I believe. Pak recently was selling his ygo collection for 50k, and said Lorcana & OP is where it's at (he may have been joking but who knows).
It still seems that Yu-Gi-Oh is in a weird spot market wise. Crazy expensive to play meta because they insist in rarity bumping all the staples in top tier archetypes followed by collections depreciating massively due to reprints. The only thing they have going for them is the high end chase cards(collector rare etc) but if collectors loose faith in those because of reprints......damn. Pokémon do it best, all the value is in alt art chase variants of other cards in the set. People chase those and sell the game pieces for cheap(yes people do play 😂) the result is a strong collectables market and a really cheap to play game. Wouldn't hurt for konami to take note maybe
Having been unemployed for the last year and counting, I couldn't afford to play paper even if it were in a healthy state economically. Meanwhile on Master Duel I have over 30 fully built decks and just recently crafted a Little Knight because I didn't happen to pull it out of the packs. Videos like these really feel like they're talking about a game from another universe as a MD-only player.
Hey I've a question since I'm early and you might read this: Would you rather have a Tier 0 format where the top tier deck is extremely cheap (~50$) or a varied, highly varied metagame where the barrier to entry is at least 500 USD? Because with a Tier 0 format with highly expensive cards and staples feel like it's the worst of both worlds...
@@N12015 Nah the perception of Tear 0 has been shifting from "it sucked" to "it wasn't that bad even if i really didn't enjoy it" like i undertand why people disliked it at the begginig it was just the best deck ever and you needed to play it, but also it was not like the full power Kashtira format that had 0 interaction, or like Super Heavy format, or teh current Snake Eye format which relays so heavely of drawing the out that is almost a coin flip.
@@Ms666slayer People have softened on it because it's no longer fresh, they've had this dumb gaslighting meme that it was actually great forced down their throats, and they're separated from the consequences of how terrible it was for the game by a year and a half. Two shops in my region who were all-in on Yugioh shuttered because of Tear format. 2022 was already not doing so hot, Tear format dried up attendance and card sales, and what should have been a recovery in 2023 finally strung them up. There was a decline in post-COVID but an abrupt freefall during Tear Zero and players and sales simply didn't return for the garbage Konami was slinging out of distribution.
@@Ms666slayer i maintain that tear format blew and the "lol it doesn't end on negates tho" quip that it spawned has done lasting damage to how people talk about these cards. if an unbreakable omni-negate board is a nuke, then ishizu tear was sugar ray robinson. like ok you got me dude, i admit i will be able to get into the ring and blink a few times against sugar ray cause he doesn't negate my city block before the match starts and so i guess it's infinitely more interactive, but there is no universe where i win in a fight against fucking sugar ray.
Speaking about Konami giving players reasons to invest in decks, why I as a european tcg player should even consider getting a competitive deck with little to no ycses in the near future? Like I'm super happy about the quality of our ycses but I'd actually like to have one to attend
I got sort of interested into Yu-Gi-Oh! again after finding you and Cimo on The History of Yu-Gi-Oh! series back in 2020 but I mean, it was COVID. My interest in playing was renewed when Master Duel was released. The reason I haven't actually bought any cardboard yet however is basically this: Yu-Gi-Oh! is an expensive hobby, and I don't want to put that kind of money into a manufactured product where the viability shifts with the feelings of its producer which has to balance both tournament policy and what is effectively *monetary* policy. I just don't get the sense they're particularly good at responding to either demand, like a central bank with a dual mandate. Blegh.
My old lgs tried to get into yugioh cause 10 players asked, he bought product, they never showed up to the lgs ever and he felt so burnt due to how hard it is to move sealed product he won't buy yugioh anymore
this makes me wonder if konami of japan is aware of the tcg mindset like we don't play tourney for "pride and honor" with a switch & playmat we'd rather get cash for winning
Konami japan just sees America as their cash cow because the world economy basically runs around the american dollar. They gonna milk NA for all their worth especially with the yen being so weak.
It's crazy to see that nothing has changed. I quit the competitive scene near the Geargia otk/Fire Fist/hat meta and the problem started around the end of this area. It's almost been a decade and I've been following Yu-Gi-Oh! from the shadows for years. Nothing has changed, it's only got worse and worse. People will complain until they quit.
saying ygo has the best reprint policy is just false. pokemon reprints whole deck cores with multiple copies of key cards as intro decks for p cheap, along with having several rarities of the same card in release sets that keep the playables cheap and the collectibles less cheap. i havent played with thrust in my deck cause we've been waiting for affordable reprints, while it's dodged several reprint sets at his point only coming as an ots ulti.
I will always remember talking to someone around the time castator the synchro was in a Tin, apparently Konami at the time didn't follow the secondary market.
I left yugioh back in 2012 to grind the mtg scene for good. I was able to make over $4000 in the course of a year from just a few events from top finishes w magic. I had a top 64 nationals finish for yugioh back in 2009 that netted me a playmat... woohoo. I had 5 top 64 finishes in mtg that netted me $250-300 each time. Its not hard to see why the change was done. Pokemon gives out even better prizing compared to my top 8 finish in 2007. I didnt get cash at the time but today they get a strong payout. my regionals win netted me a $50 gift card to best buy, a binder, and a playmat. Ygo just doesnt give players real incentives to try and compete outside for the love of the game. Although i think magic has been the better game, ive missed the older days of ygo. I play edison from time to time to remember those days. I will never be able to get back into the competitive side of yugioh again. I have no interest.
Sickness can quickly turn to death if left unchecked. Switched to OP back in November after noticing I don't really matter anymore (in terms of gameplay mostly, as every deck did the same thing and skill expression was minimal for anyone remotely advanced/competitive in this game) and the diceroll decides 90% of games, never been happier. Seeing how things got even worse since then and every competitive deck has devolved to one-card combos and 20 non-engine, I don't see things getting better. Will probably never come back to YGO unless major changes happen and I have 0 regrets or complains about that.
@@exalted8571 Depends on what you'll like to play, but most decks are very affordable and there are high-rarity versions that can go astronomical, but in general, a competitive deck (with which you'd be able to consistently win events) will run you ~200$ and depending on you go for, most of the cards will be reusable for other decks, as long as it's the same color. Let me put it this way - My first deck back then I spent ~200$ and played it for 4 months. That same deck is now soon viable again (it wasn't for a format due to some cards being a direct counter, no need to go into details) and I can play it again with no investment and could upgrade it with ~60$ to make it even better, but I don't have to. My second deck is ~200$ (with 3x the same card being 130$ and a staple that you can play in every yellow deck) so basically you could run that deck for 50$ as well if you don't wanna spend 130$ for 3 cards. One of my friends did that and was topping events with a 60$ deck, basically. My third deck is ~150$, you can buy the entire deck for less than that now and is going to be 1 of the 3-4 Tier 1 decks for the next ~6 months. There are other Tier 1 decks, depending on what you like, that run on a similar budget but in general, a decent deck runs you 100, competitive decks run you ~150-250$ and depending on your choice will last you a long time. And obviously, if you wanna play fun/less competitive decks, those are naturally cheaper. Similar to YGO, once you get your "staples" and "handtrap sets", most of those will be reusable in other decks with appropriate colors. Generally, I'd say the game is much more affordable and most importantly, it has great prize support and is actually fun, interactive and skill expression matters in almost every decision you have to make, despite the game being "simpler". In my ~8 months of playing, I've paid for like 70-80% of my total collection with tournament prizes without even topping any big events (a regional top64 is ~700$, top 32 ~1500$, top 16 ~3k, top 8 is easy 10k$ and even participaing in such events is a win even if you go 0-10).
@@exalted8571 Much more affordable than YGO, you'd have to, like in most card games, get some of the "staples" etc, but once you get going it's fine. The best part is that prizing is actually amazing. I spent ~200$ on my first deck, ~220 on my second one and 150 on the third (which is 1 of the upcoming 3-4 Tier 1 decks for the next 6 months, at least). All 3 of those decks are currently perfectly playable and competitive and I could upgrade them a bit as well if I wanted to. In my short time playing, I've made back like 80-85% of everything I've spent so far in tournament prizes, which were almost entirely locals. For example, a Regional top64 is ~800, 32 is ~1500, 16 is ~3k and top8 is easy 10k+ - let's not even talk about winning those events or worlds. That's basically impossible in YGO, regardless how and where you compete.
I do think something barely mentioned here is that Yugioh is suffering from the COVID era speculation drive. The speculation drive on anything that people could have fun with from TCGs to retro games has resulted in a dramatic inflation of pricing across the board. I've been playing for 11 years and the pricing of decks from COVID onward has been high but not uncharacteristic. I know MBT you probably started playing around 2016 which was more of a low point, but for example New Challengers Qliphort was $1000. There were several really pricy Secret rares in that deck. Dragon Ruler variants consistently topped out at $800 or so in part because of Dracossack. But what doesn't make sense is that Dracossack, a Secret Rare from one set that was a mandatory 3 of for over a year's worth of time, from a set that was harder to pull specific secret rares out of than modern sets, is still like $20 less than a one-of that you might run two on occassion that also has a speculative rarity printing. The only good reason for that is that the playerbase is bigger in 2024 than it was in 2013 or 2014, but like look at the comments, clearly nobody believes that. We certainly don't have data. It's not even like the pricing of core sets has really gone up either. There's just a ton of speculation going on because that's what COVID did, and with Yugioh's aggressive reprint policy, which is a good thing 95% of the time, it turns cards into S:P Little Knight into a stock market. How high can you get away with selling it before it gets reprinted? The entire landscape is just very weird to me now. It's weird to think that one ofs are going to just be more expensive than incredibly relevant meta staples like Infinite Impermenance or Ash Blossom EVER were.
It's worst in third world countries that are not affiliated with Konami like where I'm from (Morocco) The prices are really high for us since you can only get cards hy having them shipped and sellers rarely ever seel cards with a lower value when they get reprintee plus our average salary is 500 USD.
Slow down the power creep. Lessen the number of sets. Move around the rarities of cards that would be 50 - 100 dollars form ultra/secret to super. No more short prints. Do these three things and i feel you'll start to see a recovery but thats only a good start. Konami will need to do much much more.
@@denman2991it's pretty sad really. The idea of maximizing profit is creating the illusion that scarce yet super powerful cards will always sell a set. While I get the idea in practice I don't think it is the best or even most profitable way. I genuinely believe that if the packs had better odds for high value cards, Konami would see more sales and are in the long run only making their situation worse.
Konami's just being Konami. Wring as mich profit out of an IP as possible until it no longer is making enough to be worth producing at high amounts, shelve it, then bring it back when people are nostalgic for it. However, that doesn't work for a card game, but you can tell that's the approach they're trying for when comparing to their other franchises. Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid have both been dead for years, only for SH2 and MGS3 to get remakes, all while Castlevanis has gotten 3 retro game collections in the past 5 years and we just got a new Contra game that hearkens back to the old titles for the NES/SNES. If someone really wants to do an analysis as to why it seems like Yu-Gi-Oh is going down the drain right now, they just need to look at Konami's previous business practices and treatment of fans of other IPs that they own.
I feel like they watched Kaiba rip up Blue-Eyes and wanted to keep doing that. They wanna keep vendors in the play, but when they do that with super powerful cards, the pricing goes crazy and players stop buying.
I work at an lgs. I'm also a judge. We're having less and less players and the store owner (which sells mainly pokémon) sees the issue and complains constantly about it, paired with doing little to nothing to bring new players he's threatening to stop hosting yugioh events as a whole. In a year we went from a store that was a contender for regionals and now we're about to close the game here. The worst part is that we don't have other lgs in my town, so if we close yugioh here, the game WILL die in the region and i will probably have to stop playing as well. we're living dark times.
To be fair, old prints are easy to distinguish from modern prints, being far more beautiful. The format of cards, the material quality and such makes them so much more valuable in my eyes than the cheat plastic-looking reprints we get nowadays. On that basis, I think collectors will do just fine.
You forgot to mention the fake high rarity “QCRs” destroying the starlight market essentially making it very hard for collectors to invest into current high rarities and I agree with you how with the retro pack reprint on the way it’s now no longer safe to invest in the vintage market as well. Collectors just get punished no matter what they invest in.
There are two LGS in my area. Up until 2019 I had a local on both saturdays and sundays. 2020 saw the first stop holding locals (obviously) which in turn meant it had trouble moving products, so it stopped holding YuGiOh products altogether. The second LGS, a few months ago, decided it would no longer be opening boxes as everytime they did so, they were losing out on profits. No amount of singles they could sell from it would outweigh the price of the box itself, and the unsold cards were taking up too much space. They still hold locals... for now.
I think its ok to ignore kazahashi's prizing wishes for the health of the game. However i dont think that fixes the problems for the players or vendors. The sets are the number 1 issue, bad sets or overloaded sets thats it. we either get is AGOV or LEDE where there are a large number of good high rarity cards or 3 good cards that concentrate the value for vendors and players. Case in point phantom of yubel is 8-9X the value of everything else in battles because its the best card in their, they reprinted mirrorjade as an Ultra why? It could have been a secret like branded fusion was
Yeah, I feel you. I got back into YGO in 2020 and played a lot of Dueling Book ever since. Recently I enjoyed Centur-Ion a lot and as I have a job now, I thought I could take that deck to locals. But my dreams were shattered when the cost was like 400 €. Now I don't own any staples so, I guess it make some sense, but even just buying the core for 150 - 200 € for a deck that many don't even consider META is baffling to me.
I would have to drive 45 minutes to the nearest locals in order to play paper yugioh. I'd be willing to do that. What I'm not willing to do is pay $150 for a spright deck that doesn't even have elf so I can play a decently competitive deck that I enjoy. It's just way too expensive and cumbersome to play in paper
$150 for a deck is super cheap. I just spent $1600 building two. Yes, I regret, but now I can actually top a tournament unlike when I was playing triple dark world structure deck back in the day 😂 Plus I can just sell the decks at probably 80% value if I want to stop playing.
Another really big thing when it comes to Yu-Gi-Oh is the inability for many LGS's to get product it seems like konami's process of becoming an OTS compared to wizards process of getting product is way more complicated and less guaranteed
Start a rotating format and leave the eternal format alone while still holding some kind of tournies for it. Let the rotating format become the new thing that resets the game and if you want to be a degenerate just play the eternal format.
I agree with all your statements, except the one about yugi being the best TCG in the world. I've had much more fun playing Pokemon and now MTG than all those years having to endure YGO's excruciating state.
yugioh has a quite a medicore high end with what other card games are doing. the lack of full arts is noticable, they could totally make textboxless full arts to realy show of the shinyness of the art but they havent at all. the closest is the astral utopia.
Yu-Gi-Oh! needs to make major changes to prizes. They need to offer money to the top talents in tournaments. They will continue to lose players until they change their policy for prizes.
This is especially sad for rural players who don't have the luxury of choice, for example I'm a player stuck in a rural area where the nearest city is an hour's drive away, and I don't write off Pokemon, Digimon, One Piece and Lorcana on the face of it because I'm some snob who insists Yugioh can't be beat, I write them off on the face of it because they're straight up not supported in my area, leaving me with Yugioh, Magic or Magic Commander aa my only options And I've tried Magic multiple times but it just doesn't hold me, I want to try these other card games but because of geographical challenges I can't
It’s worth saying that when you compare to Pokémon, you might say that YuGiOh has a better reprint policy, but Pokémon has a better Print policy with almost every meta relevant card having multiple rarities and right now the most expensive card in standard is $20 and it’s limit one per deck and isn’t even needed for every deck. Yeah yeah you can say this is just because Pokémon has a bigger collector market driving down the prices but that’s a chicken or egg situation because Pokémon also has high rarity cards worth a damn that collectors like
Exactly this. Collectors open boxes for chase cards and sell the bulk to locals where us that want to play the card game can buy them at such low prices because there are so many of them.
idunno, the magic pro scene looks kinda lame too, feel like you're moreso referencing the 00s-10s scene. PTs come across as an afterthought even to wizards since they usually focus more on announcing sets than actual tourney coverage during the event. And the game sure as heck isn't any more affordable, especially its older formats because of the RL.
MTG is actually having it way worse than yugioh Cards are way more expensive, and due to rotation you cant buy staples and build a new deck for way cheaper like yugioh
@@SaragossiDeer Even the former "eternal formats" have turned into rotational formats with how much Hasbro wants to milk the shit out of the game now. And even then it's the same as YGO, print broken ass mythic rares in which people need to buy them to stay competitive then ban the shit out of them in 6 months when they've realized how insane the cards were and rinse and repeat.
I’ve had a strange experiences last few months. I’ve been getting so tired of the format in master duel that normally I’m super excited to play a game or two, but when the format is either predictable or you’re facing against decks that you hate with a burning passion, you tend to start looking at other games, other games that aren’t even card games. I’m only playing at this point because I need to finish the dual pass and unless the next dual pass has some awesome mates, I might not be buying the dual pass or continuing to play for a long time
Kazuki Takahashi’s wishes HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH PRIZE SUPPORT-He never wanted Yugioh to turn into a digital game because he felt it went against the point of meeting and bonding with new people but that didn’t stop Konami from doing what they want
Yugioh needs an official casual way of playing, maybe it was supposed to be speed duels, but that kinda feels like ‘not really yugioh’ I feel like the only real way to play yugioh outside of self set up games with friends, is competitive tournaments, and that leads to everyoen needing and wanting expensive cards exclusively, I just wish there was a way or a reason for me to bring some rogue trash deck to an event and try to have fun
My first and last foray into paper play was the traptrix structure deck. I had a ton of fun when the deck could reasonably appear to compete, but when the time came for me to be like "hey I should probably be playing something stronger for the format," I couldn't justify the price. Now i'm a filthy Master Duel player exclusively, but at least there i can experiment with deckbuilding and strategies and it costs me maybe like 40 bucks to hard buy an entire new deck instead of a $100+ for a playset of a single card
I don't own most of the staples because of how expensive they are so I play the waiting game while I wait for example for a $30 XYZ Zeus card to get a reprint and be sold for $10. Even that price is too expensive for me and I won't get a card going for over $100 and just wait for the low rarity reprint. Which is awful because there are new deck archetypes that I would to play but a card in the theme will be very pricey to get and especially in multiple copies and so I play the waiting game again.
I could spend $600 on cardboard, to play maybe once a week at my local card shop, or I can pay actually $0 and be able to duel online, drunk, at 3AM, with pretty much any 2 decks I want to build per season. Master Duel really can't be beat value-wise.
As a Yugi boomer, just here to say that during Edison era when I played? Same things were being said and even back then new games were “enticing” players away but look at us now? 14 years later and yugioh is still king of the castle and we’ve gone through how many “new” games that are better? 🤔
I think MTG's commander format or Pokemon TCG is way more of a king than YGO is. It's not about new games it's about looking at ones that have existed just as long as seeing if your investment is worth it. World is expensive now a days and casual commander decks and Pokemon decks are way cheaper than what comp YGO decks are.
Yugioh is the most successful tcg of all time in raw sales, largest tournaments, and so many other metrics. Idk what other metric would make a competitor king lol
My dad walked in to me watching a Yugioh vid and asked "Oh do people still play with the regular cards" i told him yea but im too broke to even get into it and showed him the difference in creating a deck online in master duel compared to havin the real deck. Shit was bout a $500 difference smh
You can build every deck in MD for free. The difference is zero cost for MD. Just by playing the events and what not you can get enough gems to pull enough stuff to build whatever deck for free. It is what I do and I barely play at all these days. Still can build whatever I want and I only spent money on the game launch Gem deals over two years ago.
"Cards that are super powerful and expensive are ROUTINELY reprinted at the earliest possible convenience" Say WHAT????? Dude, Dragoon was expensive for a long time, reprinted, still expensive, the link 3 BLS was 90 bucks then got reprinted as an ultimate, Ash and Imperm were secrets, then reprinted in high rarity, it took 3 reprints to bring the price down, Barone was 80 bucks, got reprinted in RA01 finally making it affordable, then got immedietly banned. Tell me you're a paid actor without telling me you're a paid actor
Speaking as a player who started truly playing the game and “competitively” (locals) playing the game in February of 2022 and as somebody who wants to spend “reasonable” amounts of money on the game….. being priced out of winning or “topping” at locals on top of the insane power creep of this game makes it hard for a player like me to to keep trying my little rouge decks that I can afford against full power Tear, Unchained, Snake Eye, etc.
It's important to note that Konami only licenses the rights to produce the card game from Japanese rights holders like Shoenen Jump's parent company Shueisha as well a couple of other Japanese companies like NAS and TV Tokyo. They don't own it, meaning that even if Konami of Japan wanted to do cash prizes, unless those companies say yes. Then Konami's hands are tied. Whereas Pokemon doesn't have that problem all three owners (Game Freak, Nintendo, and Creatures) work on a different side of the franchise as well as all having an equal say in it through the Pokemon Company.
Wanted to get a Madolche deck for funnsies. 2 of the key cards in the deck (Madolche Salon and Madolche Anjelly) run at $33 and $12 each. Those cards are typically run at 2 and 3 copies respectively. This is not a very consistent or competitively viable archetype in today's meta. WHY IS IT OVER $100 FOR 5 CARDS. This isn't including ash, imperm, book of moon, or any other popular, 'splashable' cards. It's actually insane.
As someone who works at a small collectibles store (aka I work for a vendor), I can tell you my long term friend/boss just wont ever personally touch Yugioh or sell it in our storefront. We do have a Yugioh guy of sorts, who handles any Yugioh product we DO get, but we have largely no Yugioh presence at our store. MTG and Pokemon though thrive, because both games have somewhat healthy reprint policy and have their fair share of whalish collectors willing to spend hundreds of dollars on cards to keep us a float. As much as lots of people hate to admit it and as douchey as it seems, Whales keep the collectible market flowing, it's by selling to the Whales that it lets us sell to the average card buying at a cheaper price.
Print every card in every rarity It makes the game accessible for everyone and makes blinged out cards rarer as a whole You want that meta relevant CR? Well now it's even harder to find, reducing the supply even further.
Just because we aren’t dead- doesn’t mean you’re not killing us.
very true
catchy, albeit exaggerative.
oh boo hoo 😂
Although there are definitely other barriers like seperate hobbies and not having time, every time i consider picking up a physical deck and trying paper play the only thing that stops me is pricing. When basically rogue budget meta decks cost 100+ dollars just to be able to actually be capable of playing a competitive game I just think the investment would never return. Imagine paying 100 dollars for a live service game just to be at a disadvantage and have to pay for paid dlc every update just to keep playing on top of that.
last part described Destiny 2 pretty well sadly, and quite a few games.
Crazy how people love master duel for the most part. But people insist on resale value, and the ability to profit off playing when it comes to the paper version.
Every step master duel took away from those things only improved it
@@LilyApus I was just about to say "This sounds like why I quit Destiny 2"
Yeah i would just rather play master duel where i can build my decks by simply playing the game and doing missions/solo duels. Why pay $100+ to play a game (plus costs of admission fees and travel not to mention taking up my free time) when i can just sit down on my console in front of the TV and boot up a free to play, easy to access version of the same game. The only benefit really is the TCG having a more up-to-date card pool. Other than that you need tons of money and free time to be able to play TCG, both of which are things I'm lacking.
Also im not the person to get into buying and reselling cards for a profit, it takes too much time and isnt worth the money it brings in. I just want to play the game, not go on a side quest to ensure i get value out of my investments. If i buy a deck its because i wanna play it consistently, not just once or twice per format then resell it. If I buy these things its so that i am able to play with others, not to spend time listing them online for resale at a mark-up. Im not gonna buy a mathmech deck for one format then sell it so i can get into unchained the next. If i buy a deck, its to own it permenantly. Not just for one format. Even if that deck is no longer viable even by rogue standards.
@@chaosjoey123 The big difference is there's no secondary market and cards don't have any actual value. In MD you either buy packs from Konami to try and pull a card or you pay them directly with virtual currency that's not worth anything to get the card. Now imagine that all the staple handtraps cost 120 UR a copy and cards for the current meta decks cost 180 UR a copy and, on top of that, during each new patch the cards have a chance to shoot up in price or crash down to 10 UR. All of a sudden making decks in MD seems a lot less fun. Turn that virtual currency that's not worth anything into actual real life money and you have the TCG.
The newest Rarity collection was $430 a box in Australia. For context, a Brand new Playstation 5 is $800. that is why yugioh is dying
thats a au problem
@@kotzenderkeks61 no its a pricing problem, rarity collection 1 was well under HALF that price.
How is PS5 still this expensive
@kotzenderkeks61 RA2 is 55% more expensive in the UK vs RA1 with the same cards per pack/same number of packs per case.
They upped the price for prints with less packs/more cards per pack to justify the price hike, but in the EU is just price hiked with no additional cards per pack/case. £9 per booster is nuts
The rarity collection 2 at my local wants to charge $180 per box
I mentioned the Nintendo Switch bit today and people were saying "that's insane, why would Konami spend 60 grand a year on Nintendo Switches for those who make it to top 8" not understanding that they're already doing that.
This game is so fucked, and none of us can agree on what to do to fix this.
Well actually yah there are things to agree on to fix it. One don't over complicate the game, stop putting so many words in one text box. And three stop making combos too long. And cards that flat out prevent people from playing the game. Cause I don't know about you but I'm tired of dragging a box of cards and a mat to sit there and watch somebody else play the game only to get to my turn and either scoop or either pass and let them end me on the following turn. Then play round two where I'm met with interruption and scoop and game over. So tell me how is that braindead type of playing is healthy for any game.
@@AaronHeininger The problem is that you won't be able to get everyone to agree on what 100+ cards need to be banned to facilitate games with more turns on average and more back and forth.
If I say "ban Spright Blue", you'll get a bunch of defenders telling me i'm just bad at the game lmao.
@@AaronHeininger Exactly stranger, exactly!
You say "none of us" as if players had any say on this, as if it was the players' responsability.
It's not up to the players to decide how things go; it's up to the people who actually work in the important positions.
Truth is, over 99% of the players take the game less seriously than the incompetent idiots who run it.
None of you can agree, because none of you know everything, and you don't need to know anything to be the consumer of this product.
You cannot do anything about the game, but you can do everything about your own experience.
The game is fucked in the tcg, the ocg just has way better products and in turn its way cheaper to play.
Konami: "If you're a broke boy just say sooo." *Bites overpriced card*
Team APS showed it the best 😂😂
I always find the "super agressive reprint policy" to be a really funny joke because at best its getting reprinted a year later at which point most stuff released becomes ass
@rickmel09 "most"
@rickmel09 infimp and ash famously were still very expensive years after their first print and several reprints. Both were reprinted in structure decks and both were more expensive as singles (!!) than the msrp of the deck.
After watching what speculators did to TCGs, especially Pokemon, around 2020, I have a tough time believing that they are a net positive.
Heck, the Alpha Investments scandal surrounding MetaZoo should prove speculators are a hard negative in any game.
tbf Metazoo wasn't made to last, who the fuck looks at metazoo and says "yeah, this one of the next big 3"
@kinoalove5817 it's about the manipulation, if Rudy had been dealing in stocks instead of trading cards he'd probably have caught some criminal charges for it.
They are lest every set be a Legacy of Destruction. If you don’t entice people to buy and open a set in bulk for a few chase cards to serve as a return on investment, no one buys any product and it’s left to rot on store shelves. Everything in that product inflates as a result.
LEDE didn’t have anything you could invest in. No one buys it as a result and now Tenpai Dragon Paidra is a $20 card despite being only a super rare.
@@thedigitaldummy3098 its why pokemon has managed to keep game pieces not too expensive. putting seperate collectors cards in gets more poeple to open the set.
Wizards greatest mistake was the reserve list
Sadly, it also likely saved the game. Players *revolted* after _Chronicles_ was printed, and creating the Reserved List was the only way to keep established players from leaving en masse.
I hate it too, since it keeps me from experimenting with some Legacy brews that I wanted to try.
This gets harder and harder to say is true as time goes on tbh
*laughs in 30th anniversary *
@@willooo09 in all honesty 30th anniversary wasent really anything lmao. like sure, bad PR and a shitty product, but thats all it was. reserved list continues to plague prices for legacy/vintage/cEDH and will do so unless the reserve list is abolished. there are 0 long term problems caused directly by 30th anni, its apples to oranges.
@@willooo0930th anniversary is something that only could have happened because of the reserved list.
TCG Konami has trudged on with their practices for core sets, ignorant that people are slowly realizing how terrible core set design for the wider community. We wouldn't need the degree of reprints if we were to follow OCG core sets which have multiple rarities for the super and ultra rare cards (Secret rare is one of those alternate rarities, OCG uses rares instead of super rares).
Prizing for big events could be special alt prints for desirable cards in the metagame. This would drive the price of the market towards giving value to these exclusive cards, cards reserved for the top players and players who attend big events. This would push down the price of core set prints, making them more accessible.
Of course TCG Konami wouldn't change this, since they don't really see an obligation to improve the game with so many current players at this point. They'll probably take some action against Snake-Eye in a couple months to maybe bring back some players, but by then Fiendsmith will be there to fill the void and the Snake-Eye problem with persist.
which means completely follow ocg, quess what tcg players hate to play in ocg format and cards, we players outside japan have to learn japanese before asian english release, you all tcg players complain too much, its irritiating,
@@r3zaful Konami fixing their print policy outside Japan doesn't mean everyone has to play ocg format, what are you on about? And even if it was the same format you don't need to learn Japanese, MTG and Pokémon have world tournaments where everyone can have different language cards and it isn't an issue
Everyone brings up the rarity thing and that's true and all but OCG packs are also like $1.50. That's dramatically going to change how accessible the game is and the fact is TCG players get so fleeced on sealed product lol.
@@r3zaful OCG has English sets, much like TCG has German, Spanish, and French translated prints.
I also find OCG sets to be far more appealing to purchase as they are far more pro customer with rarities and distribution.
@@lamiaprincess6371Even with the brief period of adjustment, it'd ultimately be a net positive for the playerbase. There'd be less need for reprint sets as the necessary prints would be in abundance in the release sets.
Its also really frustrating that prizing for YCS' and such are so abysmal BECAUSE of unique situation that the side events have going on. Giant cards and uncut sheets are so unique and cool so WHY ARE THEY PRIZING FOR SIDE EVENTS. I can guarantee that people would love to receive a Giant card or uncut sheet of secrets/starlights instead of 7 year old console and a rubber mat.
The LODT reprint being rear-ended by Substitoad's reprint in the new BOL set makes me think there's like three different teams at KOA and they don't communicate.
It's the same odditie that gave us OTS 25 Ulti Diviner and then a week and some change later it's in the Battle of Legends set. Never seen so many head scratchers happen in such a short time
Hey guys we need Lightsworn reprints.
Employee 1: "Sure boss, BLC1 is a perfect place to put them. We can throw a few into RC02 as well! While we're at it we can put Substitoad in Battles of Legend to tick off another Edison reprint."
Employee 2: "Sure boss, LODT reprint on the way! We can get Substitoads out too, after all it's still on the banlist right? Right? Anyway LODT coming up!"
Employee 3: "Where's the structure deck for this quarter? KoJ hasn't talked to me in months. Ah yeah sure boss I'll get the 2014 Lightsworn structure deck rewaved."
Honestly, when you think about it a little more, the reprint policy is just bad for everyone. Expensive cards getting reprinted is great for the players, but you're looking at probably close to an entire YEAR after release for that reprint to come and, by then, the cards are powercrept and/or new staples have been released and now you have to start the wait all over again for those cards. It's just an endless cycle of waiting for reprints and it sucks. I would have loved to play Spright during POTE format. It's really great that I can finally pick up the deck for a reasonable price 2 YEARS later and at a time where the deck is mostly irrelevant as well. Sometimes it doesn't even matter if a card gets reprinted if Konami decides to put it in a garbage set, short print it, etc. Prosperity didn't become an affordable card until 3 entire years after it's initial release.
The reprint policy is bad for vendors/sellers because if they aren't able to move their stock within that timeframe before the reprint, then they have to start selling those cards at a loss. This makes investing in Yugioh to begin with really risky and, for a lot of people, not even worth it. This sorta thing has only gotten worse over the last couple years especially for local card shops when it comes to getting rid of product.
It's been mentioned a billion times at this point, but going with the OCG printing style would benefit EVERYONE. The players can get their hands on the cheaper versions of cards immediately because they are actually affordable. Vendors/sellers are fine because they can sell the chase rarity of cards to those who want to bling out their deck and don't have to worry about those cards losing a ton of value within a year due to reprints being less common. Collectors similarly don't have to worry about their shiny cardboard becoming worthless for the same reason. Knowing that you are guaranteed to pull some cards you want from a box would entice players to actually buy boxes so local card shops don't have tons of product just wasting away on their shelves. Everything about the current reprint policy is just so bad for everyone involved.
Konami would never go with OCG printing style in the TCG, they enjoy how much money they reap from a continually shrinking playerbase too much to care about the future of the game
100% took the words out of my mouth, especially the Spright issue. Great, can build it for super cheap and have another casual deck I can play but 2 years after the deck was released is actually ridiculous. The deck came and went and hasn't really been an actual contender since mid 2023
the lack of seperation really does not help. the collectors cards can't be too rare since they have to be game pieces but they can't be accessible to not lose the collectors value. just seperating ultra rare + into collectors cards and common to super into collectors cards solves the issue.
@@DoorMatt-Live I think they just enjoy milking it right now and don't worry much about it getting smaller in the long run in the west, as long as OCG stays strong. Happens all the time with stuff like asian mmo's ad things like that.
actually no, the ocg printing of sets wouldnt help, it would just make vendors stay away from the game. why would i invest in a box thats flat neg everytime, always, you cant make profit with it? even the chase raritys are to lil to less to make it worth and they even reprint the collectors stuff every now in then in the same rarity. its flat out worse.
it would be better for the playerbase but if u cant get your singles anymore decently its getting even worse than now
I had a moment where my brain kinda broke on ygo recently where someone told me I could choose between building a deck to be competitive for no prizing OR i could just buy a ps5 and several games for a couple $100 less 💀
i love playing the game man but the math on that equation just doesn't add up
problem is, you have to grind with these decks, you either win or top every display tournament/giant ots stuff/and so on or you just flat out lose money and even when you do that, its not for sure you can make + with it.
The cards still work and have value without internet, the playstation becomes a worthless brick that doesn't even perform basic functions without it
As someone who got into the game in the 2020s I just assumed current deck pricing was always the norm...
I think I was higher in the past. Dad, prophecy, mermils, cyber stein. I seem to recall those way more expensive. Like people say snake eyes is expensive, but just the witch and wanted are “expensive “ ash/oak/pop are less then 5. Dragon like 10-15? Princess was 15 but I think it’s 20 now. Bonfire was high at presale and abit after but it’s 40.
you never experienced lower prices, it IS the norm. As said prices would never return to pre-covid era
@@Xana17my bro áll of those cards are expensive for me cental Europe plays structures or stapeless plant link or you have money or budget exteremly budget decks
Just ask the veterans how much was TeleDAD and/or Lightsworn worth back in the day, perhaps Nekroz as well which had the worst short-printing ever.
As others have pointed out these prices aren’t completely unheard of in yugioh but they used to be an exception. There’s been many points in yugiohs history where just 3 structure decks slapped together was a tier 1 deck, like dark world. All that to say the price of ygo formats would fluctuate alot more from format to format, where as now we seem to be in a perpetual cycle of expensive deck after expensive deck
And it all started with that damn Platinum/Silver Masterpiece Dark Magician for $1400…
that's collector shit who cares don't but it fool
If you take into account the prize support problem, it actually began with the Exodia Riot in Japan almost 25 years ago.
My theory that Konami is running the numbers, isn’t liking what they’re seeing in regards to the health of Yugioh, and are just trying to milk people for everything they can before the game collapses under its own weight feels less and less crazy with every decision Konami makes.
My local doesn’t even stock Yugioh anymore, all the local Walmarts had for weeks now is “Legendary Decks 2” and some of those packs of 30 cards that were likely found on a warehouse floor - it’s a Bad Time for Yugioh. I’m just happy the people I play with mostly play various Pet Decks that they’ve built over the years…
It's not Yugioh, retailers are killing their TCGs because they are one of if not the easiest thing to steal in the entire store. I was going around Walmarts looking for TrapTrix structures and only one had any, and all their cards were behind a manned register like cigarettes. One didn't have any trading card section whatsoever.
The worst is that nearly all of these problems can be solved by simply copying the OCG but no, we need to be “different” for some reason.
Yeah, that reason is called Maxx C. Nobody wants to play a format with that card in it.
@@AverageInternetCitizen Master Duel.
@@AverageInternetCitizen maxx c is no worse than not having enough outs to a snake eye combo, both of them lose you the game. Called by to 2 maybe 3 and some cross outs and maxx c ain’t that much of a problem
@@JamieFlett-b6n the problem is that maxx c dominates deck building. as soon as it is legal you have to play all the outs. Also Crossout is limited in formats where maxx c is legal, otherwise you would run three. in the end a single card determines 1/4 (or more) of your whole deck.
@@JamieFlett-b6nthe issue with Maxx C is the only answer to it is to “draw the out” as well as it’s power going first and second. Going first? Do your combo, end on your negates. Your opponent goes, you drop Maxx C, they attempt to stop you with called by or ash, just negate, lol. And going second, your opponent does literally anything on their first turn, drop Maxx C, they have to either set and pass or let you draw a shit ton of cards.
thats what happens when a cassino company owns a trading card game i guess
Omg it is a casino company ! I had to google this
YEP literally stopped making actual MGS games to make MGS pachinco machines instead
I feel like a lot of the responses to stuff generalized as "yugioh is dying" has been "what do you mean, it's not dead". A lot of people don't seem to get that long before something as huge as yugioh dies there are going to be problems with it, and that leaving problems unfixed will hurt the game. I think part of what's changing is that more new card games are actually popular. It used to be you played magic or yugioh, or Pokémon if you were 8,but now I see a lot of competitive Pokémon, as well as new comer tcgs like one piece and lorcana doing a lot to entice people that are unhappy with the current state of yugioh. And the numbers are clear, event attendance is way down, and with no ycses in Europe for what we essentially know will be an entire year, there is little incentive for players to keep up with the game on that entire continent. It's not dead, and it's not too late to do anything, and it's not even wrong or bad if you're having fun, but there are a ton of potentially existential problems to the game right now.
Making a bold claim with attendance is down when recently they broke a Guinness record for most attendes.
I agree there are problems that need fixing and more support for alt formats from Konami and the playerbase so that cards have more worth, but if you make a claim with attendance numbers being low, have a source to back it up.
No EU YCS can be a reason different from no players. Remember that events aren't profitable, they're really a big advert for competetive play.
@@MrYouSerious>broke a Guinness world record for attendance.
Yeah IN JAPAN. But in the west??? NO euro YCS’S but yet BREAKING ATTENDANCE RECORDS, almost like less YCS= MORE PEOPLE
@@johnathanlemus5584 Or maaaybe there have been some other factors to include in the organisation for a large scale tournament?
And nowhere did they mention specifically the west market? And even now Nationals in Europe have a large number of players. For example, Italy had 1307 players (while MTG standard had 808 players in May 25th) and apparently German Nats has 2000 players registered.
I understand that stores are losing on YGO as a product, but to say there are no eu YCS's simply due to "low attendance numbers" would be a lie in my opinion. To organize an event, you need to secure a whole lot more than just people that will attend.
@@MrYouSerious a guiness record? their mom must be very proud
@@joplin4434 idk, ask them, it is a fun fact.
2:38 I used to work at a card vendor, and the worst people around were the MTG "investors". They were like, "what if a human had all joy surgically removed from their body".
"we are not dying. We are gonna live forever!" "I didn't say that. I just said we weren't filled with tumours"
In regards to prize money: they really should start making prize cards with unique one of a kind card art so the winner can at least sell them for a profit if they wanted to.
Not trying to be rude, but you say "investors" and all I hear is scalpers.
As a vendor I would say the lottery style chase cards are actually the thing that is ruining the profitability of the game. They have resulted in all of the value in sets being heavily weighted towards a few rare pulls and the base sets being largely worthless, so the expected value of an average box is abysmal, far lower even than the distribution price of a box. Cracking cases even at an industrial scale now feels like a horrendous gamble rather than something that will provide a reliable return, so I find myself skipping more and more sets completely. It's no wonder so many stores are dropping Yu-Gi-Oh entirely when customers don't want to risk opening the product themselves and stores are basically being asked to take massive losses on 90% of sets to provide customers with the singles that they need.
Komoney should do it like pokemon or their own OCG, keep the extremely rare chase cards for those who want it but throw in a common/uncommon print for those who just want to play the card game and not treat the cards as their own stock market.
In OCG, winning once or twice in locals and selling the mats and sleeves you win will recoup the price for your deck
Lorcana and Flesh & Blood's prize support is pretty staggering, especially where Yugioh has to give rewards around a cash amount rather than just giving money. I think Flesh & Blood handles it's competitive circuit so much better than Yugioh does, and has excellent coverage. It also gives a lot of information and opportunities for players getting into the higher tier events as well.
I believe in FaB supremacy I just wish others did too
@@ziltoid984 Its doing very well in my local area, and interest seems at an all-time high from what I've noticed. I don't have any numbers from any of the tier 2+ events to support this though.
I also really like how they handle their Pro Tour invites, it makes it so people will want to keep attending events even if they get an invite.
@@ziltoid984 I was really excited for FaB and bought multiple blitz decks (warrior, shadow brute, runeblade, mechanologist, and ranger), but the gameplay just felt bland once i finally got to play. I never felt like I was doing anything interesting.
@@RedGalbothonestly the biggest issue FaB has is the new player experience. Blitz decks are very low power and not even in the premier format. The current format is probably the most yugioh it's ever been with the top deck having huge 15 card combo OTKs available to it. Not every class does that but there are definitely ones in there for the Yugioh players like me.
I think Yu-Gi-Oh has two problems when it comes to card pricing. One, there just aren't very many collectible cards. In any given set there aren't very many cards that are clearly for collectors outside of maybe the chase rarity (starlight/ultimate rare) which are often just meta cards in a higher rarity. Two, the important meta cards are often secret rares and hard to pull. The combination of these two means the meta cards often end up being sought after by everyone. You look at Pokémon and there is a clear divide between cards for collectors (alternate arts, illustration rares) and cards for players. Yu-Gi-Oh lacks that clear divide, so the meta cards are effectively the chase cards.
A card game for a franchise marketed towards kids has cheaper to play meta decks (the most expensive to top cut NAIC was $107 compared to the cheapest deck to top cut YCS Indy being $209), gives out significantly better payouts, and treats the top players in the game like they're the top players in the game. (Players in stream matches have their previous tournament placings listed on stream, in between rounds will have recorded segments of players talking about themselves, their careers, and goals for the current world championship circuit) on occasion. Meanwhile the more mature game gives you a switch if you win and a mat that is slightly more unique than the one being sold by a vendor outside for $60
Yugioh for a long time has been stagnant in terms of the general size of its player base. It can bring back old players pretty consistently, but very, VERY rarely does someone completely new enter into the game and stick with it.
There’s always been a constant leaking of players quitting the game for whatever reason, but the core base of dedicated long term fans and the nostalgia fueled stubbornness of returnees have kept it afloat.
But as things are going, the leaking is getting worse, and even the dedication is fading away. If this game dies, and I surely hope it doesn’t, if will be a slow and painful decline
As far as I'm aware that issue is primarily present in the TCG, where Konami of America are being very greedy assholes.
The OCG looks comparatively better as Konami of Japan seems way less greedy than KoA, allowing the sought after cards to be printed in different rarities, and thus making them far more accessible to get (as well as not putting too much filler in the sets)
So if anything, the game would only die in the TCG if KoA doesn't get their heads out of their asses and make the game far more accessible for us, while the OCG continues to stick around no problem
It's called a negative growth curve very common event (more people leave than are coming in)in MMOs before what's called a cascade event that causes the sudden collapse of a game
The game is unappealing at a wide market
Ether cause long special summon turns
Cost of cards
Extreme power creep
And so on
Being honest, as long as Duelingbook exists and has Goat ladder, I don't care. I've not had any interest in modern YGO! since the mid to late 2010s, just for how out of control the gameplay and power creep are, and how expensive it is. So as long as DB and Goat exist... no skin off my back.
@@DragonBallsolosyourverse it doesn't help there is a rather bad case of blending like when was the last time you saw decks at the top where they all played on very different axis and weren't just different flavors of swarm and extra deck spam
"700 dollars" tells far from the full story. Playing yugioh in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, hell even the Balkans is reserved to higher class. You want to buy an S:P Little Knight in Brazil? 900 reais. Trident Dragon? 500. Ash Blossom? 100 for a playset. A full Snake-Eyes deck? You're looking at 3k-5k.
Note: Minimum salary is currently 1400 reais.
Think you're overestimating a bit how much WotC actually cares about pro players or a pro scene in general anymore.
It has been on more of an upswing, but yeah, hasn't really recovered since the pre-COVID times tbh.
It's still more than YGO
WotC comp MTG scene died when they first stopped caring years ago and using FIRE printing philosophy and then changing the scene to almost kill it. Then Hasbro being found out that WotC makes most of the money of a product in the company and then shoving commander down every pack released after that which basically seems to have murdered the pro scene completely except those with sunk cost fallacy and content creators that are stuck playing it.
Its kinda crazy how expensive yugioh is like unironically just unplayable if your not stupidly rich
I'm primarily a fighting game player, but my girlfriend has been teaching me Yu-Gi-Oh. It's been very fun, but good lord I thought fighting game monetization of kinda wack. Wanting to play a deck like Vanquish Soul and learning that in order to build solid lists I need to spend more money than it takes to buy an entire fighting game and its DLC passes is really disheartening and does not wanna make me play Yu-Gi-Oh. I'm stuck putting together scrimblo decks for pennies that interest me like Libromancer, or bumming a Spright list off of one of my friends. I wanna be able to play in person and experiment with different decks and archetypes, but the price point is just too insane to justify it.
The main issue i think is that even konamy has no clue of ehat the fuck they are doing and where they are going, except "i really hope players buy this product"
Somethings gotta change at Konami. Basically bullied my fav card shop into dropping yugioh all together and it was the only day of the week I could find the time to play.
Cristian Urena, Andres Torres, and Raphael Nevans, are some well known pro players who have appeared to have left yugioh. Urena recently tweeted how Ygo is so far behind other TCG's in prizing. He's since played Lorcana like 2 weeks ago. Andres Torres only came back to play the UDS championship because Konami asked all previous UDS winners to do a tourney. His deck profile afterwards, he stated he's not even playing ygo atm. Nevans is playing One Piece now I believe. Pak recently was selling his ygo collection for 50k, and said Lorcana & OP is where it's at (he may have been joking but who knows).
It still seems that Yu-Gi-Oh is in a weird spot market wise. Crazy expensive to play meta because they insist in rarity bumping all the staples in top tier archetypes followed by collections depreciating massively due to reprints. The only thing they have going for them is the high end chase cards(collector rare etc) but if collectors loose faith in those because of reprints......damn.
Pokémon do it best, all the value is in alt art chase variants of other cards in the set. People chase those and sell the game pieces for cheap(yes people do play 😂) the result is a strong collectables market and a really cheap to play game. Wouldn't hurt for konami to take note maybe
Having been unemployed for the last year and counting, I couldn't afford to play paper even if it were in a healthy state economically. Meanwhile on Master Duel I have over 30 fully built decks and just recently crafted a Little Knight because I didn't happen to pull it out of the packs.
Videos like these really feel like they're talking about a game from another universe as a MD-only player.
I have only played MD F2P and is insane to hear how many thousands of dollars would cost to have all the decks IRL that I have in the game virtually.
So what do we do about it?
MBT: First, there is no we. Second, Do About it?!! I just gave you a black pill. Swallow...
There's nothing WE can do about it outside of bitching on twitter loud enough until Konami of America stops being stupid.
@@mateusrp1994 WE can stop giving konami money until it fixes these issues.
Hey I've a question since I'm early and you might read this:
Would you rather have a Tier 0 format where the top tier deck is extremely cheap (~50$) or a varied, highly varied metagame where the barrier to entry is at least 500 USD?
Because with a Tier 0 format with highly expensive cards and staples feel like it's the worst of both worlds...
Ironically, this is pretty much exactly how Tearlament went. Ishizu Tearlament was a ~$400 deck in a sea of metagames dominated by >$1000 ones.
@@MBTYuGiOh And everyone seemed to hate it bar you. So I guess the answer is that tier 0 is even worse of an experience.
@@N12015 Nah the perception of Tear 0 has been shifting from "it sucked" to "it wasn't that bad even if i really didn't enjoy it" like i undertand why people disliked it at the begginig it was just the best deck ever and you needed to play it, but also it was not like the full power Kashtira format that had 0 interaction, or like Super Heavy format, or teh current Snake Eye format which relays so heavely of drawing the out that is almost a coin flip.
@@Ms666slayer People have softened on it because it's no longer fresh, they've had this dumb gaslighting meme that it was actually great forced down their throats, and they're separated from the consequences of how terrible it was for the game by a year and a half. Two shops in my region who were all-in on Yugioh shuttered because of Tear format. 2022 was already not doing so hot, Tear format dried up attendance and card sales, and what should have been a recovery in 2023 finally strung them up. There was a decline in post-COVID but an abrupt freefall during Tear Zero and players and sales simply didn't return for the garbage Konami was slinging out of distribution.
@@Ms666slayer i maintain that tear format blew and the "lol it doesn't end on negates tho" quip that it spawned has done lasting damage to how people talk about these cards. if an unbreakable omni-negate board is a nuke, then ishizu tear was sugar ray robinson. like ok you got me dude, i admit i will be able to get into the ring and blink a few times against sugar ray cause he doesn't negate my city block before the match starts and so i guess it's infinitely more interactive, but there is no universe where i win in a fight against fucking sugar ray.
Speaking about Konami giving players reasons to invest in decks, why I as a european tcg player should even consider getting a competitive deck with little to no ycses in the near future? Like I'm super happy about the quality of our ycses but I'd actually like to have one to attend
I got sort of interested into Yu-Gi-Oh! again after finding you and Cimo on The History of Yu-Gi-Oh! series back in 2020 but I mean, it was COVID. My interest in playing was renewed when Master Duel was released. The reason I haven't actually bought any cardboard yet however is basically this: Yu-Gi-Oh! is an expensive hobby, and I don't want to put that kind of money into a manufactured product where the viability shifts with the feelings of its producer which has to balance both tournament policy and what is effectively *monetary* policy. I just don't get the sense they're particularly good at responding to either demand, like a central bank with a dual mandate. Blegh.
My old lgs tried to get into yugioh cause 10 players asked, he bought product, they never showed up to the lgs ever and he felt so burnt due to how hard it is to move sealed product he won't buy yugioh anymore
Never thought I’d see a Blazing Saddles reference in a Yugioh video.
Unless they’re referencing Sheriff Bart…
You need to read the Yin to Das Kapital's Yang: Atlas Shrugged to claim to be an expert in yuginomics
this makes me wonder if konami of japan is aware of the tcg mindset
like we don't play tourney for "pride and honor" with a switch & playmat
we'd rather get cash for winning
Konami japan just sees America as their cash cow because the world economy basically runs around the american dollar. They gonna milk NA for all their worth especially with the yen being so weak.
It's crazy to see that nothing has changed. I quit the competitive scene near the Geargia otk/Fire Fist/hat meta and the problem started around the end of this area. It's almost been a decade and I've been following Yu-Gi-Oh! from the shadows for years. Nothing has changed, it's only got worse and worse. People will complain until they quit.
saying ygo has the best reprint policy is just false. pokemon reprints whole deck cores with multiple copies of key cards as intro decks for p cheap, along with having several rarities of the same card in release sets that keep the playables cheap and the collectibles less cheap. i havent played with thrust in my deck cause we've been waiting for affordable reprints, while it's dodged several reprint sets at his point only coming as an ots ulti.
I will always remember talking to someone around the time castator the synchro was in a Tin, apparently Konami at the time didn't follow the secondary market.
I left yugioh back in 2012 to grind the mtg scene for good. I was able to make over $4000 in the course of a year from just a few events from top finishes w magic. I had a top 64 nationals finish for yugioh back in 2009 that netted me a playmat... woohoo. I had 5 top 64 finishes in mtg that netted me $250-300 each time. Its not hard to see why the change was done. Pokemon gives out even better prizing compared to my top 8 finish in 2007. I didnt get cash at the time but today they get a strong payout. my regionals win netted me a $50 gift card to best buy, a binder, and a playmat. Ygo just doesnt give players real incentives to try and compete outside for the love of the game. Although i think magic has been the better game, ive missed the older days of ygo. I play edison from time to time to remember those days. I will never be able to get back into the competitive side of yugioh again. I have no interest.
Sickness can quickly turn to death if left unchecked.
Switched to OP back in November after noticing I don't really matter anymore (in terms of gameplay mostly, as every deck did the same thing and skill expression was minimal for anyone remotely advanced/competitive in this game) and the diceroll decides 90% of games, never been happier. Seeing how things got even worse since then and every competitive deck has devolved to one-card combos and 20 non-engine, I don't see things getting better. Will probably never come back to YGO unless major changes happen and I have 0 regrets or complains about that.
how affordable is One Piece?
@@exalted8571 Depends on what you'll like to play, but most decks are very affordable and there are high-rarity versions that can go astronomical, but in general, a competitive deck (with which you'd be able to consistently win events) will run you ~200$ and depending on you go for, most of the cards will be reusable for other decks, as long as it's the same color.
Let me put it this way - My first deck back then I spent ~200$ and played it for 4 months. That same deck is now soon viable again (it wasn't for a format due to some cards being a direct counter, no need to go into details) and I can play it again with no investment and could upgrade it with ~60$ to make it even better, but I don't have to.
My second deck is ~200$ (with 3x the same card being 130$ and a staple that you can play in every yellow deck) so basically you could run that deck for 50$ as well if you don't wanna spend 130$ for 3 cards. One of my friends did that and was topping events with a 60$ deck, basically.
My third deck is ~150$, you can buy the entire deck for less than that now and is going to be 1 of the 3-4 Tier 1 decks for the next ~6 months.
There are other Tier 1 decks, depending on what you like, that run on a similar budget but in general, a decent deck runs you 100, competitive decks run you ~150-250$ and depending on your choice will last you a long time. And obviously, if you wanna play fun/less competitive decks, those are naturally cheaper.
Similar to YGO, once you get your "staples" and "handtrap sets", most of those will be reusable in other decks with appropriate colors.
Generally, I'd say the game is much more affordable and most importantly, it has great prize support and is actually fun, interactive and skill expression matters in almost every decision you have to make, despite the game being "simpler". In my ~8 months of playing, I've paid for like 70-80% of my total collection with tournament prizes without even topping any big events (a regional top64 is ~700$, top 32 ~1500$, top 16 ~3k, top 8 is easy 10k$ and even participaing in such events is a win even if you go 0-10).
@@exalted8571 Much more affordable than YGO, you'd have to, like in most card games, get some of the "staples" etc, but once you get going it's fine.
The best part is that prizing is actually amazing.
I spent ~200$ on my first deck, ~220 on my second one and 150 on the third (which is 1 of the upcoming 3-4 Tier 1 decks for the next 6 months, at least). All 3 of those decks are currently perfectly playable and competitive and I could upgrade them a bit as well if I wanted to. In my short time playing, I've made back like 80-85% of everything I've spent so far in tournament prizes, which were almost entirely locals. For example, a Regional top64 is ~800, 32 is ~1500, 16 is ~3k and top8 is easy 10k+ - let's not even talk about winning those events or worlds. That's basically impossible in YGO, regardless how and where you compete.
I do think something barely mentioned here is that Yugioh is suffering from the COVID era speculation drive. The speculation drive on anything that people could have fun with from TCGs to retro games has resulted in a dramatic inflation of pricing across the board. I've been playing for 11 years and the pricing of decks from COVID onward has been high but not uncharacteristic. I know MBT you probably started playing around 2016 which was more of a low point, but for example
New Challengers Qliphort was $1000. There were several really pricy Secret rares in that deck. Dragon Ruler variants consistently topped out at $800 or so in part because of Dracossack.
But what doesn't make sense is that Dracossack, a Secret Rare from one set that was a mandatory 3 of for over a year's worth of time, from a set that was harder to pull specific secret rares out of than modern sets, is still like $20 less than a one-of that you might run two on occassion that also has a speculative rarity printing. The only good reason for that is that the playerbase is bigger in 2024 than it was in 2013 or 2014, but like
look at the comments, clearly nobody believes that. We certainly don't have data. It's not even like the pricing of core sets has really gone up either. There's just a ton of speculation going on because that's what COVID did, and with Yugioh's aggressive reprint policy, which is a good thing 95% of the time, it turns cards into S:P Little Knight into a stock market. How high can you get away with selling it before it gets reprinted?
The entire landscape is just very weird to me now. It's weird to think that one ofs are going to just be more expensive than incredibly relevant meta staples like Infinite Impermenance or Ash Blossom EVER were.
It's worst in third world countries that are not affiliated with Konami like where I'm from (Morocco)
The prices are really high for us since you can only get cards hy having them shipped and sellers rarely ever seel cards with a lower value when they get reprintee plus our average salary is 500 USD.
Slow down the power creep.
Lessen the number of sets.
Move around the rarities of cards that would be 50 - 100 dollars form ultra/secret to super. No more short prints.
Do these three things and i feel you'll start to see a recovery but thats only a good start. Konami will need to do much much more.
the first 2 may happen one day but the 3rd never will unless Konami somehow loses the rights to the game
@@denman2991it's pretty sad really. The idea of maximizing profit is creating the illusion that scarce yet super powerful cards will always sell a set. While I get the idea in practice I don't think it is the best or even most profitable way.
I genuinely believe that if the packs had better odds for high value cards, Konami would see more sales and are in the long run only making their situation worse.
Konami's just being Konami. Wring as mich profit out of an IP as possible until it no longer is making enough to be worth producing at high amounts, shelve it, then bring it back when people are nostalgic for it. However, that doesn't work for a card game, but you can tell that's the approach they're trying for when comparing to their other franchises. Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid have both been dead for years, only for SH2 and MGS3 to get remakes, all while Castlevanis has gotten 3 retro game collections in the past 5 years and we just got a new Contra game that hearkens back to the old titles for the NES/SNES. If someone really wants to do an analysis as to why it seems like Yu-Gi-Oh is going down the drain right now, they just need to look at Konami's previous business practices and treatment of fans of other IPs that they own.
underrated comment. Great point
I feel like they watched Kaiba rip up Blue-Eyes and wanted to keep doing that. They wanna keep vendors in the play, but when they do that with super powerful cards, the pricing goes crazy and players stop buying.
I work at an lgs. I'm also a judge.
We're having less and less players and the store owner (which sells mainly pokémon) sees the issue and complains constantly about it, paired with doing little to nothing to bring new players he's threatening to stop hosting yugioh events as a whole. In a year we went from a store that was a contender for regionals and now we're about to close the game here. The worst part is that we don't have other lgs in my town, so if we close yugioh here, the game WILL die in the region and i will probably have to stop playing as well.
we're living dark times.
Laughs in Tier 1 $60 Dollar Pokemon deck.
To be fair, old prints are easy to distinguish from modern prints, being far more beautiful. The format of cards, the material quality and such makes them so much more valuable in my eyes than the cheat plastic-looking reprints we get nowadays. On that basis, I think collectors will do just fine.
We're gonna keep having the same conversation for the next half decade before Konami considers doing anything.
You forgot to mention the fake high rarity “QCRs” destroying the starlight market essentially making it very hard for collectors to invest into current high rarities and I agree with you how with the retro pack reprint on the way it’s now no longer safe to invest in the vintage market as well. Collectors just get punished no matter what they invest in.
Good. Until komoney prints those cards at lower rarity like they do in the OCG collectors can go kick rocks.
There are two LGS in my area. Up until 2019 I had a local on both saturdays and sundays.
2020 saw the first stop holding locals (obviously) which in turn meant it had trouble moving products, so it stopped holding YuGiOh products altogether.
The second LGS, a few months ago, decided it would no longer be opening boxes as everytime they did so, they were losing out on profits. No amount of singles they could sell from it would outweigh the price of the box itself, and the unsold cards were taking up too much space.
They still hold locals... for now.
I think its ok to ignore kazahashi's prizing wishes for the health of the game. However i dont think that fixes the problems for the players or vendors. The sets are the number 1 issue, bad sets or overloaded sets thats it. we either get is AGOV or LEDE where there are a large number of good high rarity cards or 3 good cards that concentrate the value for vendors and players.
Case in point phantom of yubel is 8-9X the value of everything else in battles because its the best card in their, they reprinted mirrorjade as an Ultra why? It could have been a secret like branded fusion was
Why would a holographic 1st edition blue eyes be devalued by a reprint non holographic blue eyes ? People still pay to have 1st edition stuff …
Yeah, I feel you.
I got back into YGO in 2020 and played a lot of Dueling Book ever since. Recently I enjoyed Centur-Ion a lot and as I have a job now, I thought I could take that deck to locals.
But my dreams were shattered when the cost was like 400 €. Now I don't own any staples so, I guess it make some sense, but even just buying the core for 150 - 200 € for a deck that many don't even consider META is baffling to me.
Did he just say he’s a Rothschild?
There changes on sleeves and game mats also aren't helping there case either...
I would have to drive 45 minutes to the nearest locals in order to play paper yugioh. I'd be willing to do that. What I'm not willing to do is pay $150 for a spright deck that doesn't even have elf so I can play a decently competitive deck that I enjoy. It's just way too expensive and cumbersome to play in paper
$150 for a deck is super cheap. I just spent $1600 building two. Yes, I regret, but now I can actually top a tournament unlike when I was playing triple dark world structure deck back in the day 😂 Plus I can just sell the decks at probably 80% value if I want to stop playing.
Another really big thing when it comes to Yu-Gi-Oh is the inability for many LGS's to get product it seems like konami's process of becoming an OTS compared to wizards process of getting product is way more complicated and less guaranteed
Set Rotations would atleast help with old cards without reprints going for big money as those would become illegal to play.
Start a rotating format and leave the eternal format alone while still holding some kind of tournies for it. Let the rotating format become the new thing that resets the game and if you want to be a degenerate just play the eternal format.
I agree with all your statements, except the one about yugi being the best TCG in the world. I've had much more fun playing Pokemon and now MTG than all those years having to endure YGO's excruciating state.
Actual title of the video “YUGIOH TCG’s MONEY PROBLEM”
yugioh has a quite a medicore high end with what other card games are doing. the lack of full arts is noticable, they could totally make textboxless full arts to realy show of the shinyness of the art but they havent at all. the closest is the astral utopia.
Yu-Gi-Oh! needs to make major changes to prizes. They need to offer money to the top talents in tournaments. They will continue to lose players until they change their policy for prizes.
This is especially sad for rural players who don't have the luxury of choice, for example I'm a player stuck in a rural area where the nearest city is an hour's drive away, and I don't write off Pokemon, Digimon, One Piece and Lorcana on the face of it because I'm some snob who insists Yugioh can't be beat, I write them off on the face of it because they're straight up not supported in my area, leaving me with Yugioh, Magic or Magic Commander aa my only options
And I've tried Magic multiple times but it just doesn't hold me, I want to try these other card games but because of geographical challenges I can't
It’s worth saying that when you compare to Pokémon, you might say that YuGiOh has a better reprint policy, but Pokémon has a better Print policy with almost every meta relevant card having multiple rarities and right now the most expensive card in standard is $20 and it’s limit one per deck and isn’t even needed for every deck.
Yeah yeah you can say this is just because Pokémon has a bigger collector market driving down the prices but that’s a chicken or egg situation because Pokémon also has high rarity cards worth a damn that collectors like
Exactly this. Collectors open boxes for chase cards and sell the bulk to locals where us that want to play the card game can buy them at such low prices because there are so many of them.
idunno, the magic pro scene looks kinda lame too, feel like you're moreso referencing the 00s-10s scene. PTs come across as an afterthought even to wizards since they usually focus more on announcing sets than actual tourney coverage during the event. And the game sure as heck isn't any more affordable, especially its older formats because of the RL.
MTG is actually having it way worse than yugioh
Cards are way more expensive, and due to rotation you cant buy staples and build a new deck for way cheaper like yugioh
@@SaragossiDeer Even the former "eternal formats" have turned into rotational formats with how much Hasbro wants to milk the shit out of the game now. And even then it's the same as YGO, print broken ass mythic rares in which people need to buy them to stay competitive then ban the shit out of them in 6 months when they've realized how insane the cards were and rinse and repeat.
I’ve had a strange experiences last few months. I’ve been getting so tired of the format in master duel that normally I’m super excited to play a game or two, but when the format is either predictable or you’re facing against decks that you hate with a burning passion, you tend to start looking at other games, other games that aren’t even card games.
I’m only playing at this point because I need to finish the dual pass and unless the next dual pass has some awesome mates, I might not be buying the dual pass or continuing to play for a long time
Real talk, are we going to talk about the fact that Dragon Magia Master is a short-printed starlight? That's the most Konami thing I've ever heard.
Kazuki Takahashi’s wishes HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH PRIZE SUPPORT-He never wanted Yugioh to turn into a digital game because he felt it went against the point of meeting and bonding with new people but that didn’t stop Konami from doing what they want
Yugioh needs an official casual way of playing, maybe it was supposed to be speed duels, but that kinda feels like ‘not really yugioh’
I feel like the only real way to play yugioh outside of self set up games with friends, is competitive tournaments, and that leads to everyoen needing and wanting expensive cards exclusively, I just wish there was a way or a reason for me to bring some rogue trash deck to an event and try to have fun
My first and last foray into paper play was the traptrix structure deck. I had a ton of fun when the deck could reasonably appear to compete, but when the time came for me to be like "hey I should probably be playing something stronger for the format," I couldn't justify the price. Now i'm a filthy Master Duel player exclusively, but at least there i can experiment with deckbuilding and strategies and it costs me maybe like 40 bucks to hard buy an entire new deck instead of a $100+ for a playset of a single card
Need a longer form video of this.
I just want to play my cool master duel brew in paper sadly without extra the deck is around 800 USD
Because Konami just doesn't care about their stuff other than their pachinko games. they've said this in the past and it's showing.
I havent been able to afford any playable deck in years and i doubt i ever will again. Which is kinda sad.
I don't own most of the staples because of how expensive they are so I play the waiting game while I wait for example for a $30 XYZ Zeus card to get a reprint and be sold for $10.
Even that price is too expensive for me and I won't get a card going for over $100 and just wait for the low rarity reprint.
Which is awful because there are new deck archetypes that I would to play but a card in the theme will be very pricey to get and especially in multiple copies and so I play the waiting game again.
I could spend $600 on cardboard, to play maybe once a week at my local card shop, or I can pay actually $0 and be able to duel online, drunk, at 3AM, with pretty much any 2 decks I want to build per season. Master Duel really can't be beat value-wise.
As a Yugi boomer, just here to say that during Edison era when I played? Same things were being said and even back then new games were “enticing” players away but look at us now? 14 years later and yugioh is still king of the castle and we’ve gone through how many “new” games that are better? 🤔
I think MTG's commander format or Pokemon TCG is way more of a king than YGO is. It's not about new games it's about looking at ones that have existed just as long as seeing if your investment is worth it. World is expensive now a days and casual commander decks and Pokemon decks are way cheaper than what comp YGO decks are.
Yugioh is the most successful tcg of all time in raw sales, largest tournaments, and so many other metrics. Idk what other metric would make a competitor king lol
My dad walked in to me watching a Yugioh vid and asked "Oh do people still play with the regular cards" i told him yea but im too broke to even get into it and showed him the difference in creating a deck online in master duel compared to havin the real deck. Shit was bout a $500 difference smh
You can build every deck in MD for free. The difference is zero cost for MD. Just by playing the events and what not you can get enough gems to pull enough stuff to build whatever deck for free. It is what I do and I barely play at all these days. Still can build whatever I want and I only spent money on the game launch Gem deals over two years ago.
"Cards that are super powerful and expensive are ROUTINELY reprinted at the earliest possible convenience"
Say WHAT?????
Dude, Dragoon was expensive for a long time, reprinted, still expensive, the link 3 BLS was 90 bucks then got reprinted as an ultimate, Ash and Imperm were secrets, then reprinted in high rarity, it took 3 reprints to bring the price down, Barone was 80 bucks, got reprinted in RA01 finally making it affordable, then got immedietly banned.
Tell me you're a paid actor without telling me you're a paid actor
Speaking as a player who started truly playing the game and “competitively” (locals) playing the game in February of 2022 and as somebody who wants to spend “reasonable” amounts of money on the game….. being priced out of winning or “topping” at locals on top of the insane power creep of this game makes it hard for a player like me to to keep trying my little rouge decks that I can afford against full power Tear, Unchained, Snake Eye, etc.
It's important to note that Konami only licenses the rights to produce the card game from Japanese rights holders like Shoenen Jump's parent company Shueisha as well a couple of other Japanese companies like NAS and TV Tokyo. They don't own it, meaning that even if Konami of Japan wanted to do cash prizes, unless those companies say yes. Then Konami's hands are tied.
Whereas Pokemon doesn't have that problem all three owners (Game Freak, Nintendo, and Creatures) work on a different side of the franchise as well as all having an equal say in it through the Pokemon Company.
Duelist Kingdom tournament prize was $3 Million. So prize money was always apart of Yu-Gi-Oh! LoL
Wanted to get a Madolche deck for funnsies. 2 of the key cards in the deck (Madolche Salon and Madolche Anjelly) run at $33 and $12 each. Those cards are typically run at 2 and 3 copies respectively. This is not a very consistent or competitively viable archetype in today's meta. WHY IS IT OVER $100 FOR 5 CARDS. This isn't including ash, imperm, book of moon, or any other popular, 'splashable' cards. It's actually insane.
Off topic, but Dire, I see you with that gravity rush music
I left yugioh for Digimon last year, and I couldn't be happier. And I'm not even a competitive player, I always go 2-2/2-3 at locals.
As someone who works at a small collectibles store (aka I work for a vendor), I can tell you my long term friend/boss just wont ever personally touch Yugioh or sell it in our storefront.
We do have a Yugioh guy of sorts, who handles any Yugioh product we DO get, but we have largely no Yugioh presence at our store.
MTG and Pokemon though thrive, because both games have somewhat healthy reprint policy and have their fair share of whalish collectors willing to spend hundreds of dollars on cards to keep us a float.
As much as lots of people hate to admit it and as douchey as it seems, Whales keep the collectible market flowing, it's by selling to the Whales that it lets us sell to the average card buying at a cheaper price.
Print every card in every rarity
It makes the game accessible for everyone and makes blinged out cards rarer as a whole
You want that meta relevant CR? Well now it's even harder to find, reducing the supply even further.
i like that MBT acknowledged how people love to say yugioh is dying all the time