I don’t admire Schmidt’s ignorance of who the “mid core player” is. He mentioned that essentially the super competitive players that are bringing heavy competitiveness to their small scaled tournaments do it because they enjoy doing it. What’s left out of that fact is that the player on the receiving end is NOT getting any enjoyment out of being a test dummy for the super competitive player. THAT is the mid core player. It’s so bad to the point that it’s not pet deck users that are losing drive to continue playing, it’s the players that are just on a deck that’s just a smidge below tier 1 that are getting decimated and CANNOT keep up that are getting blown out the water and losing motivation to stay in the game.
I am grateful that there’s a reaction to Paul’s vid that’ll rack up a lot of attention but the lack of awareness for the other side sucks to see. Wasn’t it about fun? Where’s the passion? Noticing this comment is getting some traction so I’m just leaving some extra 2 cents here. And a solution is most definitely not “put your six sams together and you’ll do fine at locals” Locals are where these top cut decks are ending up now. It’s not the casual setting that it once was considered.
Exactly this. I also play magic and you can play jank decks and still get to play and compete. Yugi is so fast you just don't even get to resolve your effects.
This is how anything competitive is and always will be, I don't care what game it is. Yugioh was exactly the same at the beginning, but with even less diversity. A good locals has always had meta decks. If you don't want to lose then play meta.
@bladthebozo9630 Again, there has always been meta played at a good locals. Nothing has changed in this regard. Nobody is topping with booty ass decks, and nobody ever was. Ideally, the same handful of players should be winning every week because they are simply better than everyone else.
@ honestly would love for Paul (the person in video being reacted to) to react to this reaction LOL. I think Schmidt’s a bit far gone on the topic. Love his content though and I still huff copium and compete with Melodious because I refuse to break the paywall of fiendsmiths’ engine. (2017 returnee where toss format was in baby stages)
@@Austin-l1jIt's not drastically losing, the playerbase still there but there are some people who stop playing because they don't like the current meta or don't have any deck to build currently and waiting for new support in the future. There are always players who come back when certain pack or card released
@@Austin-l1j how many by percwentage though? There are programs out there that allow you to bot the game so anytime a new version comes out, so every update, it's bound to lose a lot of botters, at least temporarily, also people who get out for a format or two. Overall nobody, or almost nobody quits ygo forever. With Master Duel, if the player has had an account from the start and spent a significant amount of time playing it's highly unlikely the person will quit forever because they will have pet decks with rare foils and rare cosmetics, all these things are like magnets for players to return.
Josh im not gonna sugar coat it, your out of touch. Skill ≠ Deck Investment or Meta Adoption, Many skilled players may not have the resources to constantly acquire top-tier meta decks or chase after new releases, but that doesn't diminish their game knowledge or strategic prowess. Players often perform exceptionally with non-meta or rogue decks simply because of deep familiarity and expertise with their chosen strategy. Skill and deck choice are not always directly correlated. Strong local communities provide critical environments for players to improve through practice, discussion, and competition. Many top players(including yourself) began by dominating local scenes before transitioning to larger tournaments. (SUPPORT YOUR LOCALS) A local player's skill level isn't inherently inferior just because they don’t compete at nationals or YCS events. Some choose to play locally for various reasons Comments like "You expect to just pick up any deck and win a ycs with it playing against better players and playing worse then them." diminish the diverse paths to success in the game. It implies that only the most financially or meta-invested players deserve respect, ignoring the hard work and dedication of others. The comment reflects a narrow view that overlooks the diversity of player experiences and the critical role local communities play in competitive ecosystems. The real answer is we need a format to support these lower fan favorite decks, this product line could also allow them innovate in terms of design where yugioh has been sorely lacking.
I don't know about others but Master Duel is a midcore heaven. To define mid core, mid core is the guy who may be playing a garbage deck but he is playing to win. He will use good cards, he will try to optimize his garbage no matter what anyone else says. It's a shitty position, cause casuals tell you you're playing good cards in your garbage deck and hardcore will tell you you're playing garbage with your good cards. Master Duel Ladder is everything a mid core needs. M1 is a respectable achievement and if you want there is an ELO ladder on top, DC is also good in that aspect. We also have events which allows people to innovate their decks and adjust it for a new format. Something else that helps is that you're not in a rush to reach the top. You can put goals, you can say this time I reached D1 next time I'll reach M5 etc..
This, I have had an Endymion deck since week 1 or 2 of MD, and stupidly had to grind for it because I went with structure decks first as I wanted to compete before starting to acquire more expensive decks. It was a huge investment at first, and I wasn't even able to optimize it until at least 1 month after that, but it was worth all the gems and dust I spent on it. It's rogue enough that it never got a direct hit on the banlist, still gets the occasional bit of support either from banlist liberated cards or a rare new release that fits the theme and it is able to compete in every format, provided I myself am not just clowning and clicking buttons mindlessly. I see lots of people doing the same every format with other decks like Heroes or some stuff that used to be meta but fell off due to hits or powercreep, or stuff that got boosted by legacy support like Spright in former case or Salamangreat in the latter. All these decks are crazy expensive, but so long as you make that initial investment you are pretty safe. I play that deck because I like it a lot and MD also happened to have launched already with a banlist that is way more friendly towards it than the tcg. The tcg format is just trash, there's no other way around it, it's not about all decks getting good legacy support because that's mostly down to Konami in Japan, and I think most decks have actually been getting great support when they get anything new, at the very least most new legacy support tends to be modern enough that it's not just useless, which was definitely not true even 5 years ago. What's really bad about the tcg though is that decks that were good and accessible, like Endymion and Salad (both released on the same date as structure decks) got shafted really quick because they were from structure decks, while the ocg never did anything that drastic, the Endymion nerf in particular was so drastic and pre-emptive that it felt like an emergency banlist that happened before the deck could even do anything, very few people were using it and the tcg just decided that they couldn't have a pendulum deck be good for a month after they murdered TOSS format in that one banlist, and then we get a clown like Jerome telling us that Electrumite has to stay banned forever because all pendulum decks just go to it (which isn't a complete lie but it's like saying all the X decks just play the Y card which would also be true for entire game mechanics and covering far more cardss and decks). This is why MD has a better format, and sure it has its own issues, but it's better than the other formats because it's adjusted every month without skipping, it's adjusted every time the biggest competitive event it has comes and goes, Konami gets to test a lot of stuff and players have way more options because cards like Maxx "C" do put the meta more in check in the sense that the meta decks don't always win by simply winning the coin toss, which is definitely true for formats without cards like that which Josh and most "pros" so seem to enjoy for God knows what reason outside of making the format extremely, excel spreadsheet-like, predictable.
I find it impressive how Josh manages to just completely miss the point of the initial argument. Saying "just go to locals with your bad deck and play out of your ass against the top meta decks" is not a reasonable or sustainable answer to the problem of pack filler cards having no place to be played at a high enough number to which the printing of those cards isn't a waste. It also doesn't foster the kind of gameplay that would exist in this kind of lower power format, because even if YOU are playing something like six sam, if your opponent is playing something like ryzeal or maliss the overall power level of that given format exists at whatever the most powerful deck does.
I completely understand what you are saying and I agree. I think that we need to look at what you are saying though and just point out that meta at a local level is an option. I think the decline in this kind of player doesn’t come from this specific format though. I think that this comes with the past few formats being way above any power level the decks we are talking about can compete at. I’m honestly this “mid level” Yugioh player. I just don’t have the time like I used to and when I did have the time I didn’t want to go play against yubel, snake eye etc. don’t get me started on tenpai. Whoever designed that deck needs to be talked to about card design. Now though I am returning to locals and I’ve gone a good bit over these past few weeks and I’ve had a lot of fun playing voiceless or chimera or buster blader. I think that a better question is should someone be able to walk into a locals with a deck like fabled (with no new support) and compete with ryzeal or maliss? I don’t know. I see both sides. I think that if that could happen the game would be dead because that means that card design has probably become stale. Idk. Just wanted to play devils advocate
Konami should definitely study implementing tournaments with a format like those you see in Master Duel's side events, where you get a custom banlist where not only are certain carrds banned like in the regular banlist, but also complete archetypes, or most cards within some archetypes, or entire mechanics are banned. This would require them to pre-announce with enough time ahead that such a tournament is scheduled, but I think it could bring in a lot of interest, especially if they play their cards right, like making it at least as rewarding as a regular main event, use Master Duel to organize testing, invite only tournaments to promote it even.
All of that has much more to do with tournaments just being a bad place to play for fun. Locals can be tolerable depending on the amount of meta players at your locals but anything else is gonna be just meta. Thats why master duel is the solution to all these problems because it has a ladder that pretty much matches you with the type of player you wanna play with. Gold and Plat are heaven for these types of players but with a little effort you can take most of these pet decks to diamond or masters. The difference between MD and in-person tournaments is obviously both the cost, travel requirements and the amount of games you can play. Going to locals and playing like 3-4 rounds its much more likely for most of those games to be bad and thus it not feeling worth the effort as opposed to MD where you can just queue up another game.
It basically comes down to other card games cutting into locals scenes. A "Midcore" Yugioh player basically wants to be able to play their slightly above jank to rogue tier deck in environments where they play even games against other middling decks for a few rounds once or twice a week. Paul is basically lamenting the decline of locals.
Its funny cuz Joshua Schmidt has been experiencing a similar problem in recent formats himself like getting FTKed by Yubel end boards. From a rogue player's perspective that is what is happening to us too but far more soul crushing. And no it wasn't always like this, cuz the very definition of rogue deck is an anti meta lower tier deck that has a strat that can counter the meta, so as long as you encounter what you are prepared for you will have some good match ups. Now just look at Joshua's duelist cup game play and tell me how playing rogue decks worked out. And this is what you go against every day for example in masterduel ranked. Rogue decks don't get you to play the game anymore right now, you just get completely destroyed and that is a very noticeable power creep spike.
@@nachohangover5104 more than that, i dont want to build a new deck every season. i want to build a deck and use it for a couple of years with a few upgrades every once in a while. I dont give a shit about most new architypes. i bought my deck for big chunk of change already, im not spending more money.
Locals are definitely a mixed bag. In my experience as a competitive player myself, every locals I've been to has featured nothing less powerful than legit rogue, with most duelists Tier 2 and up with the occasional young kid beginner with a structure deck in a sandwich bag. Sometimes I wish I could find the legendary locals where the supposed Ghostrick, Digital Bug and Chemicritter "communities" that manifest in YT comments hang out so I don't need to stress so much
@ Sure you may get paired with the local competitive player for round one but after getting that loss out of the way you'll probably be paired with either worse players or players with worse decks and can proceed to have fun.
This has definitely missed the point I think. It's not about people with less than meta decks wanting to win tournaments, it's about having a reasonable chance of playing the game. If your deck isn't at least pretty good you usually don't actually get to play your first turn at all. Do 10 games of that in a row with a deck where, even if you did play your first turn it doesn't guarantee a win, and you'll get burnt out and disinterested pretty fast.
I might be wrong, but what I think is being discussed and Josh seems to be having a hard time understanding is that people want to play lower power level decks against decks of similar strength, but there is no "legitimate" agreed upon way to do it outside of time wizard which doesn't allow a big pool of cards with the same power because they weren't released in the date picked. So someone who thinks the current power level of the game is a little too high feels like they don't have a place in the game considering the unlikeliness of Konami banning enough cards to make something like current nouvelles viable
Farfa said on stream, people like josh or ryan are too good at the game where its normal when they are having hard time discussed this kind of issue since they always compete in highest level of gameplay
People should play lower power decks with the understanding that if they do not incorporate good cards or try hard to face better decks then they lose, as much as it sucks certain decks will not ever be functional in a competitive environment sometimes even at locals.
".........time wizard which doesn't allow a big pool of cards with the same power because they weren't released in the date picked............" I literally want to play as close as possible anime deck but due to Fang of Critias not being available during GOAT and Edison times even if part of the Anime I cant use those cards .... sucks.
@@MiyaoMeow588 Stopped taking Josh's chat seriously when they constantly made dogshit judgments on the DMaid support (direct and Regis). Feels like MBT's chat sometimes but somehow worse
People who are just casually competitive just want strong tier 2 options. But apparently Josh can't grasp that? It isn't people just want to play a pet deck, but more so, this much support can't push decks into simi playable. I just don't see how Josh is struggling with this concept.
I consider myself a mid core Yugioh player, but not by choice. I literally can’t afford to keep up with the most expensive best decks. I’d like to take this game more seriously but I can’t. I don’t have the luxury to not have to question whether or not to pick up expensive staples. And I used to take this game super seriously but i literally did not have the disposable income to spend on it. All my Yugioh friends moving away and not having a locals was the nail in the coffin.
@@Eru_3ruit takes so long to get any good cards and decks. I wanna be able to play the decks I want now. I tried getting back into it and I just can’t be bothered. Also it’s not TCG. It’s not real Yugioh.
@@dpacula63 it will not take you a week to get one or mutiple competetiv decks to play with, you just need to be smart about it, like buying the stapple one time packs, duelist pass and do some of the decent story arcetypes maybe for some good starting cards to build off. I havent spend a cent and played snake eyes and own yubel
@dpacula63 it takes literally a few hours to build a meta deck on a fresh account. If that's too much of an investment you should seek other forms of entertainment or be prepared to spend $$$
Josh I love your content and i still watch even though I no longer actively play Yugioh. But I don't know if it was possible to be more off the mark with what you're saying in this vid. I'd consider myself a 'mid-core' Yugioh player, I'm a player who used to play locals every week even during tier 0 formats like tearlaments. But now I've switched to playing One piece because I dont enjoy the current state of Yugioh, the difference between top tier decks and the rest is far too great now and if you're playing at a competitive locals there's no way you can beat a top meta deck with even a good deck that's been printed in the last 2 years. I'm not going to beat someone like Trif or Jesse Kotton without playing the new expensive decks/staples. Also with the cost of living getting significantly higher too, it isn't really justifiable to buy a new $500-$1000 deck every 6 months.
im confused, you played during tear format which is arguably the strongest deck ever but weaker formats you don't play bc somehow the gap is wider than the best deck ever printed??
@@Kildykild I do agree that full power Tear was much stronger than the current/recent decks and gate kept most graveyard based decks because of the ishizu cards, but the tear format was a far more interactive and skill based format, compared to what we've had for the last year. I didn't need to play 20 hand traps in my main deck to stop the exact same combo line from happening anyways. But to be fair I was playing Branded and Dragon Link at the time with a heavy bystial count during Tear format, so I probably had a better time then a lot of people because of that. Also even if I lost to Tear I usually had a fun interactive game, so I was still enjoying it. I do think Ryzeal is a step in the right direction, but the Fiendsmith engine just seems too good imo.
Chat is totally missing the point that midcore players want to play against midcore players. That's not possible in master duel, and you'll rarely see it at locals because everybody is playing for ante due to the buy-in
@@dannycristen7505 just playing a very non meta deck like ghoti or suships will get you out of gold easily. There's no way to stay in gold unless you purposely concede dozens of games which is not fun
@@starjadiancloneinvestigato1772 Ok well them that leaves Duel Rooms and Casual Match, you will undoubtedbly.find ppl playing mid decks in either of them. I'd know personally because I frequent both of them.
@@starjadiancloneinvestigato1772 Yeah I play Shiranui Zombie World cause I like it, and I liked my games against Suships for example cause we had nice back-and-forths without full domination, handtraps, or anything really out there. Then I somehow managed to rank up and next set I felt outclassed immediately With no easy way to go back down if I wanted o.
58:25 . Its not that the fact that there are good and bad decks that is the problem, its the sheer gap between those decks. Even the best rogue decks have a waaayyyyy harder time in yugioh than in other tcgs. Also how you make that hypothetical format is by banning whole archetypes instead of individual cards.
When I began playing yugioh back in 16/17 the gap wasnt even close to as big as today. Now that every meta deck has 12 starters and have room to play 15 handtraps its just to big of a gap now. Its just a fact
@@BaxsStudios right? There's literally only so much skill can do, and I refuse to play a deck I don't like the aesthetic of. Ofc Amazoness ain't gonna stomp snake eyes, but decks should at least have tools that make winning a match possible. Top players like Josh love it when there are as few decks as possible for you to play, or more accurately as few decks as possible for them to play against. When a meta is open they talk about how "the right people aren't getting to the top" and "too much rng" but when it's a one deck format everybody else hates it's all "skill issue" and "built different". I love Josh but he's a top .01% player with a mindset to match. His comments on healthy formats are some of the most out of touch things I have ever heard. Maybe it's because magic ruined my brain, but a healthy format should have more than 2 decks with maybe a budget option for the poors.
Yeah. Best you can do is a hypothetical scenario of setting up different tiers like fan competitive pokemon with the smogon list, where stuff is categorized into how much something is played in each tier. But we probably won't get something like that ever.
I'd say it's the opposite. In yugioh any bad deck can win against good decks as long as you go first, the most degen going 1st decks are even "bad" decks. In other card games try playing a bad deck, against good player with a good deck, in a bo3....
@ But there are plenty of budget options that can win a locals. This is what he talked about with players that refuse to put the barest modicum of effort into learning the game
I literally can’t stand when Josh does this. He will play super defense for Konami even when he knows these cards are incredibly overpriced when it’s a MUST use. It’s oppressive on us “mid tier” players. Every single deck I find and wanna try even old and outta meta is over 100 bucks. It’s criminal
Its simple the midrange problem comes from one thing Konami does wrong and its not defendable. Pricing and reprints. It cant be that we have short printed secret rare staples pr even secret rare staples at all. We need ocg type Pricing and midrange would bloom. Its all we really ask for its ok for your malise and cards archetype cards to be expensive but not for staples, that should not be a thing. We should have rare versions of those staples like full arts, high rare and Alt arts maybe all in combination and whales still would buy cases. I knew enough players playing more expensive full bling decks even if there is cheaper alternatives. And this is not only a ohh no furwallos is 150 bucks a playset (only "thiw cheap because of the reprint comming) this problem is prevalent since for ever. Give us gems for Master duel when buying a booster per qr code, give us different options and chase cards, give more nostalgia bate reprints in high rarity for collectors but Konami will never change that because that Company doesnt care, they dont care about their video game they dont care about yugioh and that wont change.
I love Josh, but he is slowly becoming the meme of 'leave the billion dollar company alone'. Just keeps justifying horrible decisions that are good business wise but bad for the consumer. Then he typically resorts to saying well that's just the way it is, okay and? It doesn't mean it should be that way.
As a 'mid core' player, I disagree to an extent with people's argument on pricing. Yes, fuwaloss and engravers are expensive, but you don't need to play with them or certain staples to win. Last year I picked up a voiceless deck for around 120 USD when it was at its highest price, played with all the staples they reprinted in rarity collections which costed not much and bubbled a YCS, came 2nd at a state championship, bubbled my nationals and won an ots championship. I wanted to play Maliss when it was released which cost me around 160 USD, but the cards were announced in Japan 3 months before they released here so I had plenty of time to have money to pick it up. People get like 3-4 months notice from Japan if cards will be expensive and can plan ahead if they really really want it but think it'll be a financial problem. If in 3-4 months you can't potentially save 160 USD for a Maliss/whatever deck you want to play, then consider either not being as competitive, or play a different deck
IMO the most off putting part from YGO in the last two years is how pronounced the gap has become between competitively viable and completely garbage. The power of newer meta archetypes is so bonkers with 1 card starters and infinite recursion that you get pigeonholed into playing one of 3-4 decks to even remotely have a chance at being taken seriously at even a local level. I wish there were more support for underdog from Konami as a real format, the game is so interesting but only having one format to play seriously hurts the players and I'd argue actively limits who their audience can be.
@@DragonTank1400 it's as simple as them starting to seriously organize events that work like Master Duel side events with their custom banlists, you can extract so much juice out of a format like that with near infinite fresh formats. Mind that any format will always coalesce into its own meta regardless of what you ban and limit, but at the very least it's an easy way to get people to compete in something that you know issn't just gonna be won by the same decks you see week in week out in modern format tournaments.
Current format does not fit this description at all. If anything it's the lowest to the ground its ever been save for Maliss, and that has silver bullet counters galore
You sound like somebody who didn't play YGO at all 15-10 years ago. This is not at all true. YCS Bologna had eight different decks in top 8, ffs. The diversity of choice is absolutely there. Calling the game expensive, fair. Saying you only play against the same decks because nothing else is viable, utter nonsense.
@@alexb2656 brother balonga was almost 3 months ago. Ycs Anaheim had exactly 2 players in top 32 that weren't playing Ryzeal, Maliss, yubel, tenpai or snake eyes. CRBR sucked a lot of the air out of the room and will likely continue to do so outside of some niche tops here and there. SUDA doesn't bring anything to the table, and the only new deck we have on the horizon is BEWD. Just off memory, in the last 2 years we have spright, branded, purrely, chimera, VS, voiceless, plants, mannadium, unchained and fire king all fell behind in their ability to keep up with the game. Let alone all the failures to launch with legacy support. I feel the need to defend the game because I truly love Yu-Gi-Oh, but it's obvious how far power creep has taken us with little signs of slowing down. It's cute that we see striker make some comebacks and ocg has Orcust again, but that seems to be the exception to the rule that your deck has a shelf life and only some random broken support will ever breathe life into it. In an evergreen format it feels pretty damning that 90%+ of the card pool isn't even worth giving the consideration to play if you want reasonable odds of doing well.
I believe that what Josh said about taking six sam to locals and youll do fine as a "skilled pilot" isnt necessarily true. Almost all locals around my area are chock full of sweats who are all playing tier 1 beat your ass decks and there isnt really any recourse. For example i enjoy playing Ursarctic and while im aware that the deck is weak and im not expexting it to be tier 1 i threw in an ice barrier package into the deck featuring some of the new ice barrier cards from last years battles set to patch some of the weaknesses. The problem despite me being a skilled player isnt price, its that locals isnt a casual place anymore to play shit like that. I cue up Ursarctic Ice Barrier against anyone playing any current tier 1 deck and im getting shit on no matter how much of a better player i am or not. Like Paul says, the mid core player doesnt have a place to play random jank decks. The local scene isnt casual anymore. I cannot go there and play Libromancer, or Myutant, or Vendread, or Evil Eye for example. All of which are decks i have profiles for on my own channel. It just seems like outside of master duel there isnt a place to go to use decks such as those mentioned.
Yeah, the other option is looking for shops that have a jank format. There’s one 15-20 mins away from where I used to live that has a jank format every Friday for decks like Ursarctic
@STEPHxCA yea which as far as I know, none in my area do. Doesnt matter what day or which locals i go to, I bring some rogue deck out and my matchups are constantly against tier 1 decks. It was snake eye garbage last format and it's ryzeal and fiendsmith nonsense now.
I keep seeing this and i agree to a point but to me this feels like a community issue not just konami issue. Like more casual locals need to exist, but how many locals actually have heart of the under dog tournaments to let these decks feel playable in a given format. The tool exists but i know of 1 underdog tournament firing in the last 12 months where i live.
I pretty much align myself with the midcore player that Paul is describing here. For me, the biggest problem is the pace of the game’s evolution. I can barely learn how to play against the current meta decks that new sets with new op strategies and cards come out and it feels like an uphill battle almost impossible to win. If you are an amateur poker/chess player and you take a little break from the game, when you return maybe you’ll be a little rusty, but your level will be more or less the same; with YGO, even short periods of absence or periods with less practice will feel like huge impairments when you come back
@@stefanokic406 nah, the gap in games like OP TCG is not nearly the same. In OP if you bad draw you dont auto lose. If the opponent's deck is tier 1 and yours is not you can still win. Even if you have a hard matchup you have guaranteed 5-6 turns of being able to play.
@@lucaderighetti7653 you can still win in yugioh if your deck is worse. It really is heavily matchup dependent. And again i said if you know what you are dooing and your deck has some sort of a gameplan you can compete with most decks. Yes it feels awfull to lose to a full yubel combo but itt also felt awfull dying to face hunter in HS on turn 4. These kind of things happen
I see this a lot when people talk about the gap difference between OP and yugioh. I don’t agree with this take having played one piece. If you play against someone who doesn’t know what they are doing then sure I can see it, but not against people who know what they’re doing. The tempo lost is really big.
Its just that the gap between meta and casual decks has become bigger then ever. My casual friend group stopped with yugioh, we were this kind of midcore players. Going to locals occasionaly and playing games together. It was a combination off the price (even on staples in casual decks), the gap between meta and casual decks and the fact that they ban cards just after a reprint (taka appolousa, baron, diabellstar etc). So now we kinda play Pokemon / Digimon since there you can get several cheap decks for the price of 1 casual yugioh deck. So even tho I at least prefer yugioh over those, the price difference is insane. Yugioh needs the pokemon rarity system, so the casual players can get cheap commons and the whales can get expensive cards.
~12:20, I feel like most people that watch Yu-Gi-Oh content don't actively play and aren't interested in playing. I'm one of those people. The content creators for this game make the game way more interesting than actually playing games of Yu-Gi-Oh. The content creators are thoughful, fun, interesting. While the game feels too flippy, and/or you need to be so invested to have a reasonable game. I'd much rather just live vicariously through the people who have built the knowledge, or find ways to have fun in another tier-0 format.
I stopped playing because it turned into 34 and a half hand traps + your Actual deck. So it felt like for casual players like me, you go first and get; Veileered Drolled Infinite Imp Ash'd Opponent has one card or 2 in hands They draw their 1 card combo, end with 10 cards in hand, 20 cards on field, then they OTK me. If I go second I'm facing a board of 30 negates and a follow up turn There's no fun in it so I just play casually and accept the auto lose if the Tier 1 deck does not brick or I open relatively good. Cannot be bothered to go to locals with a $30 deck when the 5 guys there are running upwards of $700 decks and ending My turn on My turn without even getting a chance to play.
There is a locals near me that runs a custom rogue format. You can only use decks that are not currently Tier 1 or 2. They update the list regularly but fundamentally its a home for a lot of people who want to play with decks that are outside of the meta like six sam. Thats the solution to help the mid core player feel like they can also play the card game imo.
What happens when a player keeps winning week after week with the same deck? Do you just ban that deck because it's just marginally better than the rest of the room? That's my main gripe with HoTU/custom list formats when someone decides that you're being too much of a sweat and then punishes you for trying to optimize your pet deck.
What happens if someone shows up with their maliss or Ryzeal deck? Because that's why we couldn't do heart of the underdog at our locals. The shop owner said they're not allowed to just tell people they can't enter if they're playing legal cards.
@@ItzMajinTCGIf they're saying they can't because of Konami policy then that's not true. Heart of the Underdog is an official format now for this exact reason.
Id love to play casual Yu-Gi-Oh at a store every week but there isn't a community for it. I just wanna play my jank decks I enjoy. But every body at the shop is a sweat with too much time and money
I also think you misunderstood the argument. I don't want my gusto deck to be tier zero. But the gap between my deck and a competitive deck is a chasm. I auto lose
@@lincolnpertuset2980 Lets say we are talking about exactly Gusto. Gusto was always bad. Ever since release it was bad. It was a deck build on a foundation of sponge
@@lincolnpertuset2980 This is like saying my Dreamcast controller doesn't work on my PS5. It's time to either sit down and just play Dreamcast or upgrade to a new controller, whether that be the Sony product (meta) or an Aliexpress that still does the job but has flaws (rogue). Bringing literal unplayable cannon fodder that wasn't even great shakes in its time and expecting to have fun is just ridiculous
I think the main point in everyones argument is that we mid core players want a space to sit down and play the game without needing to sweat every game just to win against a teir 1 deck I really enjoy going to locals with a rouge deck and playing to the best of ability, and winning it feels really good. But a lot of times i want to go to locals with the same deck and just chill weather i win or lose i want the game to feel even and without it being an uphill battle but theres no space for it especially at my locals where im one of a few who arent on top meta
There is a reason why commander is more popular than standard in magic. Because you can play w/e you want and still not feel like the game is unwinnable. Red eyes will pretty much never be a winnable archtype in standard yugioh, but you can see results with a cat deck in a commander pod
Commander is a result of player innovation and dedication to have a format like that tbf. And even that has its massive ups and downs. Just look how messy the bans can be on top of the rule zero stuff.
that is not entirely true though, playing a jank deck in commander vs a tq commander deck is still as unwinnable as in yugioh, people do what josh suggested which is to play with friends and agree on a specific power level
I think the most annoying thing is the clear favorites konami has in each sets. Yes I can understand that every deck can't be meta and it's fine with me but when you look at springan sargas that can only pop during the opponent's turn(why not both?), the new Raidraptor Rank up that makes one of its 2 common targets miss its activation condition when its already worse than the other target 80% of the time or ashened that, as an archetype, is barely functionnal. (these are examples, there are many more.) All this while the all ultra, shiny new toys can do more, with less and with half the restrictions. It just feels like konami doesn't care about the gameplay. Why don't the snake eyes have any restrictions at all? Why could the ishizu cards be the end all be all of GY control when its stupidly hard to mill otherwise in archetypes designed to work around the GY? I can see the point of cards producing good gameplay, but you can't tell me in the face of fuwalos that my combo deck that needs 3 times more summons to end on a weaker board than a standard ryzeal board deserved to get basically thrown out of the game due to its own mecanics. You cannot tell me that a card that murders combo decks should be introduced bc konami failed to remove what makes combo decks unbearable to play against (besides long turn time). Why even bother printing cards that you can't allow to be good when you clearly know what's wrong and what has been wrong with these deck since forever. My classic example is Raidraptor, Towers are fundamentaly uninteractive and produce bad gameplay. Then why the hell do you give them another tower as their new form of interaction when the deck already has a special summon hate identity based on destructions and floating of destruction, towers being the thing you aim for on turn 3 to seal the deal. And after they're like "oh weird, this card is degenerate, we now must print a card to reign this tier 5 deck down. Btw here's our new deck that does everything better and doesn't die to the new card". Hypocrits.
I play midcore cuz i actually wanted to play maliss but 50% of locals is playing maliss and i don't feel good winning or losing a mirror based on wallet or opening hand
Josh the problem is that *everything* that is not meta is basically garbage at this point, not just old ones getting new support, but new ones like mimighoul too. And almost everyone who is playing Yu-Gi-Oh irl is playing a competitive deck at this point. Yes, even at locals. The power gap between meta deck and other decks didn't use to be so wide. There used to be tiered decks from 1-3 that you could play at locals or a regional and do ok with, not necessarily win the whole tournament but at the least not lose in 1-2 turns every single game. These days you might as well not show up to an event if you're not playing a competitive deck, you won't win a single round, much less a game. Competitive players generally just play whatever the best deck of the format is or the few options close to it. But most other players want the option to play the deck that they have the most fun with even if it's not the most viable, especially when it gets new support. Why bother buying physical cards when every deck you find fun or interesting can't beat Ryzeal or Maliss? Even if you remove the cost of buying cards out of the equation, those non meta decks still wouldn't be viable with expensive staples, and it doesn't make the competitive decks much more appealing for people who weren't already interested in them. There are literal *dozens* of archetypes both new and old that will literally never see play in person because they can't beat a competitive deck and i find that incredibly sad. Yes, you can play some of these with more success in MD but that shouldn't be the only way these decks can exist imo. Not everyone can just find friends who live near them who also want to play rogue decks. A new format that excluded the highest tiered decks would help this situation a little bit but there's also tons of generic staples that contribute to the problem as well. This is a symptom of yugiohs purposeful and rampant powercreep. Yes, Konami needs to sell packs, but other card games have proven time and time again that you don't need to keep making new decks better or ban old decks to get people interested in buying new cards. You just need to make new decks fun, interesting, and viable against current decks. The only real solution is to surgically remove all the problem cards from the new potential format. But the chances of Konami doing this are slim to none, we barely got time wizard and it feels like Konami actively resents doing it. Obviously no one knows what goes on at Konami HQ but it feels like they stopped caring about the actual game a while ago and just want to squeeze as much money out of it as possible.
then how do you explain that voiceless voice got third place at the spanish open this weekend? it's a very cheap non meta deck and it won 7 out of 8 rounds against ryzeal, maliss, and all the other meta decks of the format.
@ShroomOfSorrow a single outlier doesn't represent the game as a whole. Jesse Kotton could win a ycs with grave keepers tomorrow but that wouldn't mean grave keeper is now a deck that is meta competitive. It just means that incredibly skilled pilots can pull off things that very few others can with the same cards.
@@rushxanthemtcg5607that is the most braindead answer anyone could come up with. You dont need to reply to everything, shut up holy… and the other 2 npc upvoting you. Many LGS have dropped yugioh, actual head in the sand mf
I'm a midcore player to some degree because i played and have done decently well with Hero for a long time , people forget that eventually you have to let your pet deck go and play something better if you want to compete. I put Hero down for better decks last year and haven't looked back. Other card games have this problem too but they are cheaper with better prize support which is why yugioh players are switching over. If yugioh ever got cash prizing or something on the same level of it like exclusive rarities for winning YCS and etc , i can guarantee you a lot of those same players who switched over would come right back.
What if we don't want to compete and just play the game? Your solution is just "forget low power decks and play meta". I don't want to. Many people don't want to. We want a place where we can just play HERO and have some fun. But there will be that person at locals or on Master Duel that brings full power Maliss and suddenly that fun time isn't anymore. That's what we're saying. And there's nothing wrong with being more competitive but if there is going to be this giant gap between decks, then let those decks have a space where they can shine. Just like the meta decks have.
@7thHourFilms you can always play casually with some buddies without entering locals. When games like magic had its broken formats and he'll even when I was a kid players used to play casual 2v2 and 1v1 all the time.
Here's what I think is the biggest problem and it's not more formats. As a "mid core" player. I have twin 4 year Olds. I don't get to go to locals as much as I'd like nor do I have the cash on hand to keep up with top tier meta. But when konami let's a deck run rampant for a whole year with no reprints. Then give reprints for 2 weeks before a ban list comes out and KILLS the decks those reprints are in. It's hard to stay engaged. We all saw ryzeal and maliss become the "new decks" even with OSS unbanned. So why ban OSS now? Literally banning that one card ruined my chances after finally getting the reprints like wanted and promethious to go to locals and see if my kash/snake eye deck can work. So now I'm sitting here with a deck well into rogue. Looking at power creep put snake eyes to rogue level. Because they wanna sell the new decks. And now all that time I spent waiting for reprints was for nothing. Now I'm sitting on a snake eyes core that's worth nothing and can't be played at any higher competitive level than my codetalker/firewall pet deck. They need to put meta relevant cards on the reprint list sooner than 2 weeks before the new set comes out. Which btw... since they create the damn decks. They know before EVERYONE else when the new meta will shift and even then, they wait to reprint until the absolute last moment. Then either release mew meta decks that make the reprints obsolete, or they finally hit something on a ban list that the community has been dying for all year 2 days after the new meta is released to the public for play. The biggest problem is konamis cash grab. Yeah they need to make money. But how much money was lost for them by waiting to bad OSS at a ryzeal/maliss ycs rather than with the list at the end of August. Or the reprints come out in August as compared to November. The "midcore" player has been priced out by the company's actions. Not the game itself.
Exact same thing happened to me, the reprints came out, ordered the deck so I could finally learn it and play it, then the banlist dropped BEFORE THE CARDS EVEN ARRIVED. Game straight up just feels like "oh you're one of those poors or you have financial responsibilities other than buying expensive pieces of cardboard? Get out of my sight, peasant".
As that mid-competitive player who pivoted to one piece, i’m never coming back. The grass is too green here. One piece is my favorite ip and it sucks because i miss my old yugioh friends who didnt pivot to one piece with us but the game has been a haven away from yugioh Edit: And before anyone makes any assumptions based on this. My locals is home to 2023 world champion pauly aronson. We had the talent, I had access, it didnt matter.
Man, i want to learn that TCG, how do I do that ? I have faith in Bandai games after being introduced to Digimon from a friend, it's awesome & a good alternative should the format be garbage in YGO.
A bunch of guys left for one piece, but imo it doesn't scratch the itch Yu-Gi-Oh hits. It's a fine game, cheap enough to take seriously; but grinding the formats doesn't feel as good as getting really good at Yu-Gi-Oh
Some of my friends quit TCG because of the enormous numbers of handtraps, and they're right. When the opponent throw at you Ash, Veiler, Impulse it's not fun, definitely. It's basically like play against a stun deck but in your first turn. Tenpai format was truly a nightmare, in MD I can't stand again another 4 handtrap then normal Paidra.
yeah the hand traps are almost not even 100% of the problem its that most meta decks have game ending 1 card combos. so its like a feedback where you can run more hand traps because you have 1 card combos then everyone else needs 1 card combos to compete with the hand traps. 1 card combos need to be completely banned or neutered
I think you're right, but I don't think it's just handtraps. Everything that keeps you from playing the game at all, like omninegates or generic removal, is just killing the fun.
@@deboltteamenlight3480 yes, I agree with you, of course handtraps are not the only problem here, the free omni negates are as well. I'm still having fun using my decks but against Tenpai it's really hard to stay calm. And yes, 1 card combo must be deleted as soon as possible to make the game much more fun.
I haven’t “quit” but I stoped when the multichummys and dominus cards came out… Less because I care about the hand trap numbers… but more because it makes it hard to even play my preferred decks optimally without them which does bother me and because I don’t want to go through the hassle of acquiring expensive staples again.
Master Duel had the solution, which is events. As much as people love bitching about every single event meta, they're nevertheless generally very very different from the main ladder. Also because several things don't exist, my pet deck that is adjusted for the new banlist is significantly more powerful than if they were fighting a meta deck. I know this for a fact because I theorycraft for every single event and most of the time I don't see a single person run the decks I did. I generally walk away with like 80%+ WR in most events because of people's non-familiarity with my strategy and choke points and also because my read was more unique and logical than just using a meta deck without any of the fangs or just going floodgate or ben kei turbo or using the precon decks
I don’t know why I’m typing this because it probably won’t be read. However, I believe a point that may run semi parallel to the competitive argument of new support is that if Konami had the time to make new support for an archetype like six samurai and mermail, they at least could have made them competitively viable at a ycs level. Instead of always coming up with new archetypes that run the meta they could invest their time and money into making support of older archetypes that are good enough to compete at the higher levels. I think it’s just disheartening and insulting to players when they wait for 5+ years for support of their favorite archetypes and then when it finally comes out it’s subpar. That just means that they’ll probably never get to play their favorite archetypes at a high level again and that I believe could feel pretty crappy.
But on the other side they made yubel support and everybody hated it. Im fine with how they are dooing legacy support cause i ok with these old deck not beeing meta but good enough. And i think they did a deacent job reacently of making old decks good enough to play in the current meta. Like you can genuinely play BA in MD and do fine
@@stefanokic406 bro its not because they made yubel meta support it was because yubels playstile is incredibly badly designed and unfun to play against.
The problem is that because of the power creep the weaker archetypes have a lot smaller chance to compete(Not even to win to just compete). If you go 10 years in the past a Paleozoic or a six samurai deck could have a 10-20% chance to beat a tier 1 deck but now what can you do with Battling Boxer or Goblins against a competitive deck. Every year Konami makes over 10 archetypes that are completely unplayable in the advanced format. Solution is simple. A different format with a massive ban list where you could compete if you want with your War Rock Deck if you want.
Its all about how sharp the drop-off is. Mid-Core is at its peak when it can go 60-40% or even 65-35% against a meta-deck with equally skilled players. In Tearlament format, if you brought a non-shifter rogue deck you'd have a 5-10% chance of winning against a full-power Tear deck. In the subsequent Unchained/Kashtira etc format, if you brought a non-tier 1 deck, you'd have a significantly better chance of winning against the current best decks in the format. The most recent formats Snake-Eyes / Yubel / Tearlament formats have had the top decks eating every other deck alive until they have their kneecaps broken by a banlist. This is why Ryzeal / Maliss format feels so much better for the Mid-Tier players because you have a solid shot against those decks as long as you build properly.
I don’t stick to a “pet deck” because I love playing an older deck. It mainly because I don’t want to justify buying a new meta deck every 6 months when they are sometimes $700+. I haven’t bought or played tcg in like 2 years. YGO is genuinely my favorite card game, and nothing really comes close. But I’m not getting milked for every penny Konami can try and get from me.
Pretty insane that your take boils down to "you're just bad at the game because you don't think about the game every waking moment so that's why you can't compete in a place that's supposed to be reserved for casuals but isn't". Literally delusional
I don’t think I’ll ever come back to Yugioh as someone who liked to go to locals every so often. Game is complex (compared to others), power creep is through the roof, which then makes purchasing product super unfun because either you pull op cards or you lost money. Too many tier one formats really made me lose interest (quit around snake eyes). Yugioh is also one of the rare games where the strategy is to completely prevent your opponent from doing anything with negates. So deck diff (and cash diff) is felt most strongly in my opinion. Also, why waste my time playing a game where the game producer disrespects my time and money? I’ve got a career and bills to pay, and my free time is also something i want to spend wisely. This game doesn’t reward me for it, especially when they short print good cards and/or bundle it in shitty products as a cash grab. So why stay?
@@Dinner407 ygo has thankfully gotten away from the infinity negate meta. The biggest offenders have been banned and all the new stuff is hard once per turn and most decks can only end on one or two, but largely play for much more engaging interactions with pops and sticky boards.
agree with all but not on the complex part. sure you can play complex decks but that's not a negative, plus yu-gi-oh has so many archetypes that you can find a simple deck for yourself. power level though, that's another question
Hardcore (or “midcore” I guess) Madolche player here; Paul is 1,000% correct. I’ve tested extensively the deck on DB with about 20 different builds, theories, ratios, approaches etc to make it competitively viable. It just isn’t. This is NOT me complaining about my satellarknight deck that hasn’t seen support since 2017, I’m talking about a deck that received major buffs in 2020 and 2024. I’m thankful for the support, but it seems like a carrot; cashing in on hopefully committed players who don’t want to just be another “meta slave” without actually providing them the tools to be competitive. Don’t get me wrong, I own fiendsmith Ryzeal and am forced to play it at regionals, case tourneys etc and can place / top just fine. But it’s disheartening to see support created for a deck that DOES boost the absolute power level of the deck, but DOESN’T take into consideration the ecosystem into which the deck is being placed. Like, yes, madolches are now stronger after 2024 than they were in 2020, but they’re still about 2/3 years behind. This is not a complaint about current meta (I think we are currently in one of the healthiest metas we’ve seen since the release of the Ishizu cards), but rather the decision by Konami to give buffs to decks that only lead the player to increased frustration and disappointment once realizing that the deck still can’t keep pace with the literal meta the support cards were released into.
I’d say that I originally was one of the players that Paul is describing. I started playing Yugioh around 2010, and stopped playing around 2014-2015, shortly after the introduction of Pendulums. The cards were too weird for me, and I just didn’t enjoy Yugioh anymore. I tried picking back up Yugioh around 2020-2021, and the power level of the game had risen so exponentially that it just didn’t feel fun anymore. However, I tried one more time because I genuinely love this game and got back in about a year after Master Duel’s release, and I haven’t left since. There are definitely valid reasons to dislike the direction of Yugioh, as well as the power level, but honestly I feel the reason most people have left Yugioh in that “midcore” level is because they simply just don’t like it. Like, I’ve had people at Locals constantly genuinely raging and malding over playing against relatively mediocre decks by modern standards like Fur Hire Runick just because it beat their Nemleria deck or whatever. The thing about other card games vs Yugioh is that other card games don’t have the interactivity that Yugioh does. And before anyone rushes to the comments to complain: be genuine with yourselves. Having multiple turns isn’t interactivity. I tried learning Digimon, and while the game isn’t BAD, it is by NO means interactive. You just do whatever you want on your turn, and if you win, you win. There is nothing your opponent can do about it. Card games like Yugioh and Magic have ACTUAL interactivity and people don’t like when they can’t just “do whatever I want.” That’s why so many people complain about stuff like Hand Traps, despite them being INHERENTLY interactive.
I always thought local Master Duel events would be the perfect way to accommodate midcore players. I love showing off stupid jank decks that are objectively bad/bricky but are funny to play when they pop off. Even after getting dumpstered by someone's $700 meta deck. But since it's kind of a pain in the ass to carry around multiple decks in TCG for those hardcore players to "play down to the midcore level", they're always going to beat you. In MD, they can always carry around dumb pet decks/lower tier decks in the palm iof their hand. Though there really isn't much incentive for these game stores to want to host anything for MD. Those MD players aren't buying products there, they're swiping their cards, if anything to Apple/Google/Steam.
@@dannycristen7505 I wholeheartedly agree. Like, I don’t mind people playing their pet decks, favorite archetypes, etc. What I do mind is people willingly bringing a tier 3 deck to Locals, losing to a tier 2 deck, then go “YUGIOH SUCKS UGH I HATE ASH BLOSSOM I HATE HANDTRAPS I HATE BLAH BLAH BLAH” because there was 1 point of interaction. Those types of people genuinely just want to play a single player game
So true, I don't play yu-gi-oh on paper since there is no place near me that allows me to do so, so I only play MD, but I do play magic irl in a casual environment and it's exactly the same, people complain about top decks being uninteractive but don't you dare play any sort of interaction or removal on their turn or they'll get salty. At the end of the day some people's ego is too big to actually see themselves mirroring the same kind of behavior they whine about
Why do so many of these become people having arguments no one is saying... No people dont want every legacy support to be tier 1 work but not to hard infinite loops like WTF are we even talking about anymore. Please make legacy support playable. Battlin boxer support is printed spends over a year in ocg and printed again knowing it is completely unplayable or unallowed in every single format. The game design is obviously very privy to what works and doesnt and yet makes cards that are completely worthless on release.
Me as a forced midcore player (Priced out of every format) can relate with Paul's argument. Every now or then, there used to be a random madolche top sneaking, plunder patrol too; rogue decks that are not out of this world, but just ok, succesing into competitive environment because of the skillfulness of their players, so on local levels they were the famous "local legend". But now, people that want to have fun even at locals, are forced to play tiered strategies, the power creep right now is insane. The best example i can think of is crafting hands. If I play for example, sky striker, craft me a hand in a standard non specific counter list that wins against a maliss full board. Heck, even against non-actual meta stuff like melodious... every deck make a combo that practically makes towers turbo, because if you don't have an out of a board in your list, you don't have the slightlest posibility to beat one of this decks even against the worst player in the world. All of that effort getting new combos and theoricrafting goes to waist against post-POTE decks, it just becomes. Did you draw Lancea? Did you draw dark ruler + evenly? Did your opponent brick? Did you draw d-barrier? That's makes the games that we experience insainly frustrating and boring, just forced to play the 1-4 decks of choice even the causal spaces, because why would you spend your money in a deck that would lose to everything and won't let you have fun?
Been a Striker andy my whole life and don't agree. If anything, this format has been a breath of fresh air for the deck and almost any board save for Maliss (which is a nightmare) can be shredded to bits. Practice practice practice
@@ak47dragunov i mean, didn't striker in particular get second at a ycs during the past format? and with none of the new cards except impulse in the side deck, literally just the most vanilla striker list ever
I feel this is a long winded way of saying rogue players are dying since power creep is way too insane rn They just needa make the best decks not completely gap everything like obviously let the meta decks be better just not infinitely better they should have weaknesses
I don't think he understands midcore here. Midcore players play to win but they also play for enjoyment. Sure they know about the meta and keep up with competitive play but they themselves don't value trying their hardest to gain titles and prestige. Games like League of Legends, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, etc. all have ranked but most players who play them only play quick play, not because they're casual, they still play to win, but because they don't value rank and find it frustrating to be put in these tense and for lack of a better word "sweaty" environments where it feels like they have little agency. I like tcg format more than masterduel but I don't go to locals often because my locals is competative, and if I want to come with runick spright fur hire, ice barrier, or melodious, I will probably not have a great time. Because I know almost every game will be against Maliss and ryzeal. Your opponent activating more cards on your turn than you get to is extremely frustrating and very prominent in modern yugioh since we have 1 card combo decks that play a large amount of handtraps that benefit them going first and second. New top tier decks feel as though they are playing a completely different game and essentially force anyone interacting with them to be playing "ranked" when midcore players want to play quickplay. And this doesn't even delve into the price issue that for many players makes the game feel pay to win. Your cards activate to summon from hand? Unfortunately for you your opponent was able to afford donimus impulse, if only you spent your money on ryzeal cards that inherently summon themselves. Formats like the one in YCS Bologna 2023 are HEAVENLY for midcore players because no clear best deck means you have genuine viable options.
I think the real problem is there are too many non games in yugioh. Especially if you're playing with a worse deck. Getting hand trapped 3 times and then one card combo game doesn't make you want to play again. I think that's what people mean by competitive. Games where it actually feels like you got to play.
A problem is also the meta of the game in MD. Many mid tier players want diversity in gameplay and even chances. Momentarly it is just like the DC where you either play against Tenpai or against decks which simply put a board up which to difficult to beat because white forest centurion and snake eyes put up 6 interactions and every deck over platin is exactly this deck. And off course we newly got maxx c³ which makes it even more rng heavy.
Id say with the new maxx c meta we are seeing decks with fewer disruptions but with a heavier focus on building disruption on as few summons as possible. Voiceless voice and Labrynth seem to be getting more popularity. I think its not as RNG heavy as people think, the lab and voiceless decks can beat tenpai much easier now that they have 3 less extenders. But the problem is that it also creates unfun metas that heavily promote floodgates. I have been seeing way more traps like dimension barrier and there can be only one and thats purely because the new maxx c meta basically guarantees that your triple tactics thrust will work and that you will often be going first.
I wouldn't say the meta in MD is a problem. It has been the only format in which decks like centurion, VS, VV (albeit its making a comeback in paper) and some other low tiered decks have had more success or a stronger impression. Now if you mean a pet deck then that's a different story. You either modify it enough to beat the meta or just accept that it can't keep up. Zombie players are a good example of people that despite Konami leaving them to die for years have always found ways to make zombie piles work out.
@@Phantom770G yeah and some decks just wont work in certain metas. I like evil eye and have played it in couple of DC cups and did okay. But when branded was really a thing and everybody and their mother played bystials i had to switch. So understand your decks know what they are good and bad at and sometimes just leave them at a side because its not the time for them
Speaking from my own perspective, locals in the last 2 years have gotten to the point where you must be playing the Tier 1 decks, or else you’ll get stomped with no competition. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course, but that’s I think what Paul is saying about legacy support for old decks. From 2023-now, I’ve been two 10 different locals several times in my state, and it was all the same environment despite being different people. Locals are not casual, not any more. What happens is one person will get a top tier deck, and then stomp everyone and one of two things happen. Next week, everyone leaves, or everyone has to get new decks to compete and it destroys the casual format.
A thing that is very common in my mind now with rogue decks is the fact that people also like the "Dark Souls" Deck. Isnt very competitive and any minimal missplay you do with that deck is more unforgivable comparing other strategies, or having a less powerfull board implying u have to use your interruptions at the perfect spot or u lose. Some people like playing those kind of decks and winning with them just to prove the fact that they can beat your meta deck with their Dark Souls deck.
Were you really trying to understand why m̶i̶d̶d̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶ midcore players are evaporating? Or did you just want to tell everyone they're wrong for feeling bad about the game's current state? You can't just explain away a feeling if it comes from a real place even if they don't understand where it actually stems from themselves.
I may actually be the midcore Yu-Gi-Oh! player, and the reason I left the game this time was Snake-Eye, and the reason I left the game last time was Tearlament. Honestly, these broken tier 0 formats get old real fast, I'm genuinely excited for like Maliss and Ryzeal to hit Master Duel, but when the format is bad I stop playing for a while
It’s called heart of the underdog. Ban all tier 0 and 1 decks. But support the format and make it a common thing. My locals does it once a year if we’re lucky. Josh was pretty tone deaf in his response
I think the issue in Yugioh is less "why can't my pet decks compete" and more so "where can I play lower power formats irl?" And yes, locals comes to mind. But, an issue with that of late is that a lot of the locals in peoples areas are no longer catering to Yugioh or the spaces that do are having a trickle down experience where players are shifting over to the better and better decks and not providing much room for the lower ceiling players. And yes, Master Duel is a good alternative to playing Yugioh. Only issue is that you don't really get to interact with the people on MD as you could IRL so like you cant trade cards or talk about things Other issues kind of push midrange players out like the uptick in price points, the hyper optimization of modern Yugioh (half a deck being interruptions just in the hopes of getting to play, or this combo line and so and so) and even there still being a part of the community that's unironically toxic and telling people "well if ur not good enough you should play something else. this game might not be for you" which just sucks
konami needs to support more formats, that gives lower tier archetypes a chance to be used seriously, like the format where they made nuclear banlists and you had to pick an "era" to play.
Unless I’m attending a string of ycs’s, I don’t go out of my way to attend locals the way I used to. I can see his point. Most locals are just ycs prep, not particularly fun for the player who plays once a week to unwind. The pet deck comment I disagree with. You can absolutely master a rogue deck and do well at locals, the games just more complex than it was in the past, so that’s a longer and more difficult process. Great points and discourse all around though!
I think one of the unfortunate problem with Yugioh, is that unlike most other TCG, cards come as archetype. This is a lot more restrictive than just colors. There's entire archetype, with interesting gameplay loops and gimmick that will never really see the light of day since they cannot attach to existing gameplay loops or stand on their own. A lot of effort is put to giving these cards an identity that people ends up enjoying but having no place to play them. It's a real shame for those cards designer making interesting gimmick for their archetype be labeled pack filler.
i agree its not exactly a new problem, but its still a pretty big problem that stops a lot of players from really getting back into the game or staying, and i agree its not just old decks not being good anymore but a combination of everything for a "midcore" player Every single game has meta decks but at least the big ones have ways to make it not as bad. In pokemon meta decks are dirt cheap so midcore players can pick up good decks and be competitive with hardcore players, in magic theres lots of different formats so you can go play older decks in an older format, more casual pet decks in commander or play draft without so much money and deck/meta learning investment. I think if ygo decks were affordable, i'd be happy to pick up new good decks, play it without feeling like the game is p2w, and enjoy the flavour of the deck without being too hardcore about the gameplay. The combination of a hardcore player being more invested in being good at a deck and the deck being new and expensive just doesnt feel great, when you take out the expensive part and its just the person winning because they were a better player then it feels like you got what you put in. And also if ygo had draft, then i would be able to go to locals more casually, enjoy the game, open some packs and not worry about the thousand dollar meta decks for hardcore players that i would've have had to play against with my budget rogue deck.
To me the worst thing will never be not having the top deck. I can usually find some sort of rogue I can enjoy in the format. It is a combination of the frequency of staples being printed in the $80+ range I need 3 copies of each, and when they take away tools that rogue decks hinged on to mildly hit the top decks (cards like Baron de Fleur, Apollousa, Borrel Savage, etc). For a lot of rogue decks they just get binned on the spot when they lose certain cards. The aforementioned Barrone de Fleur and Appolousa for example being the only way a rogue deck doesn't lose to Nibiru. So the rogue decks get worse with time often at a 2x-3x negative while the best decks just get pegged a .5/1. Taking something using Superheavy Samurai for example who could establish Baronne before 5th summon. You can use the argument that "it is better for the game" when they ban cards like Baronne but it's like the ducktape for rogue decks. They definitely aren't doing it for a balance reason (suggesting they are banning omni-negates when they go and print theme-based omni negates in things like Azamina right after). They could definitely do a better job of keeping the relative power level closer together, less curve, as well as better accessibility for people. There is literally no excuse for this.
I understand this. I've always been a competitive player but oddly enough, I despise this format. I feel it's too unenjoyable to WANT to spend the money on it, despite going to large tier events regularly. I also understand the support argument; Mermail is my favourite deck, and the new support was fabulous but it also feels like it's been powercrept out of the game within a single set. How is anybody meant to enjoy their favourite decks, even when their new support can only elevate them to tier 2 at best. I feel playing as a competitive player constantly just bottlenecks you into playing 1 or 2 options, which is okay, until you hit a format where you absolutely find no enjoyment in either. (which is the case for me!)
I am a semi-competitive Yugioh Player and besides expensive staples, it's really good. I am competitve in locals and sometimes I go to the German championship, which is enough for me.
HEY MOM! I am in the video! STREAMER ADRESSED ME THRICE! XD 1:06:55 , 1:13:11 , 1:16:25 So I want to say a few things. First of all thanks to Josh for actually zeroing me out and adressing the first 2 times, 1 with time wizard formats and the other with pricing and how OCG has less complaints incomparisson to us. I do feel privilaged for him actually adressing me twice. Also obviously I dont hate or dislike Josh, I never met him IRL so how could I XD? He is just a dude online and also hating someone or disliking someone while you have never met them is a dumb thing anyways. So returning back to the matter at hand. I undestand what he is saying about people complaining about pricing only and not seeing the gameplay being actually good right now. Unfortunately though I feel he is somewhat blinded by the fact that he never truly has expirienced the other side of the coin or if he did it was quite a bit back in his past as such he doesnt fully connect with peoples fraustrations on the matter nowadays. If you are a budget player/midcore player its pretty obvious to you that yugioh not only suffers from extreme powercreep but also a pricing problem. Which makes it VERY difficult as that type of player to get excited for new archetypes or releases. Since you know that there is nothing there for you or even if there are options they are so underpowered that you cant realisticly participate in the modern game in a meaningfull manner i.e. true back and forth gameplay or finishing locals with a 2-2 score, so you feel some satisfaction. This has been getting worse and worse over the last 4 years and with people seeing how much better treated OCG players are and how Konami still makes more money in OCG terrotories while treating them better makes people understandably fraustrated. For time wizard formats now. In my case I am a very old player I have been playing from 2012, so I started playing edison since I had all the old cards to actually play the format. Though I have to be honest, the format in my eyes is barely supported and the few reprints konami does in bananza or the side events they do in YCSs are just not enough to allow for a true second way to expirience the game. Time wizard formats have the disadvantage for Konami that they are frozen in time as such they cant print new support for them, but what they can do is reprint stuff. As we have seen in Edison collectors do not mind reprints, since the old cards will always hold collectible value for being the OGs and also in most cases the highest rarity versions, so they hold their value amazingly well. So it fraustrates me very much that Edison unfortunately gets gate kept, with their not being a product were you can literaly pick up and start playing. So even if you point new players to edison, they have to go through the hoops and loops to actually get a deck to play/learn and some cards in edison are legit still quite expensive even for being commons/supers some of them. Also modern players alot of the time even if they did play yugioh for 4 or even 5 years they just never had these edison cards in their collections, so even for them its still a bit of a challenge to understand what they need or what is actually worth to play in edison. Since edison in many ways is legitimately a VERY different game from modern or post-modern yugioh, it takes time even for them to collect everything or understand the format unless they have friends to help them out. That is why I feel time wizard formats are not truly supported and just given the bare minimum, reprints in bananza were nice and a YCS side event is cool and all, but were are the edison specific products like a black wing stracture deck or an actually accessible big event like a time wizards regional or even more realisticaly a konami supported monthly shop challenge event with mat/sleeve prizes and promos of much needed cards? A lot may consider what I am saying unfisable, but I dont think it is considering Konami is such a huge company and all the suggestions and wants people have dont really fall off from what konami did in the past to get were they are now or what they are currently doing in the OCG. This last part goes directly to Josh and that goes for around the end of the video were I tagged you and that was legitemately my bad, I got fraustrated by the chat calling for my ban and me feeling that you kinda strawmaned me for the "yugioh expensive so yugioh bad" meme. After watching it again now I can clearly see and understand you were fraustrated your self cause looking the comments in chat I understood that you must have felt dog piled like I felt at that moment. As such I do apologize it was childish of me to act the way I did in my comment tagging you. I look forwards to see more videos of you on those topics 'cause I do feel you actually have a powerfull enough voice to influence ACTUAL change in the game and the community. For now good day/night/evening to anyone that had read this and also again a thank you to Josh for actually giving me the time of day and also a sorry if I fraustrated you at the end. Adios!
My pastime now has become figuring out the meta in Master Duel and finding ways to beat it with rogue decks. There are some which are just SOL in certain formats tho. The midcore players are what YGO needs to thrive
I love the vid but i don't appreciate the frequency of "oh just go to locals to play your deck" but completely ignoring that there are players like myself who don't have access to locals for one reason or another. Sure those kinds of players are fewer than the ones who can, but i can't take my pet deck to a locals that doesn't exist and i can't bring it to a ycs either because it won't do anything.
I would say an easy fix is just more formats where you don't have to play against the top decks all the time. Heart of the Underdog was a nice idea for a format that I would love to see expanded upon.
The most simple solution I can see is something that some organized online communities have been doing for years, which is to create an alternative competitive format where aside from, or instead of, a banlist with specific cards you also have certain archetypes banned, thus creating a new meta that is perhaps balanced from the bottom if you balance what is banned well enough. Basically what Master Duel does in its side events, I think that is a great idea and those MD events have been one of the greatest drivers in recent years for people to try out different decks.
Sounds like people just want to be able to play in a regulated and standardized heart of the underdog format. I dont know why youre pulling it to so many different directions, its a pretty straight forward message. You`re making it seem like an unreasonable argument.
The best way for konami to solve the games price issue is to print all cards in all rarities. That way, anybody can pick up any deck, and collectors can show off by getting their deck in max rarity.
I think a reason less decks are explored is because the ocg play tests this all for us and this most people look at the more successful stuff first. It's possible for a less successful deck to get recognition, but there's a barrier
This video was kinda awful, i belive Josh misses almost every point of pauls video, and directs the conversation to a perspective that is overly exageratted. the worst thing to me is this thing with "playing a bad deck and playing worst than your opponent and expecting to win" who said that?
5:40 Yeah i can see this point. Lately like the lore dump deck de jour gets nibiru'd with support meanwhile decks that do different and interesting things like... idk...uh...Lets go with Ice Jade; That don't just ceaselessly throw up infinite negates or have 5 one card combo starters are just left in the dust after like a single wave of support instead of developed like say a fking dark magician or blue eyes deck that gets a trillion new garbage support cards before Konami finally gives up and gives them an omni-negate cause that's all they're good at doing to make any given deck strong and viable. So basically if your deck isn't Anime or the Lore dump deck, You're gonna get a grand maximum of one support wave then your deck is thrown into the ocean to fend for itself which probably really does get mega disheartening to the guys that just...wanna do something else besides setting up 10 omni negates just to get dark rulered and otk'd xD Like some middle tier decks have more restrictions on a single card than the lore dump/T1 decks have in an entire archetype xD I feel like fun decks are just over balanced while the meta decks are the decks that aren't balanced at all xD
@@default9314It is, but it's such a small part of the Albaz lore most people don't even know. I can guarantee most people at locals don't even know swordsoul and ice jade are directly related. People don't even realize spright is part of the same lore.
YEESSS ICEJAADES thank you it instantly made me hyped seeing someone mention my pet deeeck ^^ also about not doing a 5 negate endboard... weeell... ^^" my kyoto waterfront infinite negate version kind of does it with summoning gameciel to your side of the field turn one buuut you have to hard open the waterfront field spell so it's only 33% of the time. But I still LOOOVE IIIT ^^
@@Laflamme78 I think most people do know, simple because of Spright Smashers having the Therians, The Sprigans, And the Sprights on both the card art and effect
Around 42:00, you talk about how cards and archetypes are just Nibiru resistant. I think cards these days are printed specifically to be Ash resistant. Things like Garunix destroying from deck, Mitsurugi tributing from deck, and Diabelstar setting instead of searching is just blatantly ignoring that Ash Blossom should be able to stop these cards. It's crazy.
Some competitive people just don’t want to pay out of the ass to play tier 2 deck. Why pay upwards of $400 for Mermail when you can hop onto one piece, buy 2 structure deck for $30 and have a tier 1.5 or even tier 1 deck. The effort and time commitment is not the issue for these midcore players like you think it is.
I think the problem here is that not only is there a huge gap between the viability of decks in yugioh, but there's also no rotation and the way yugioh is designed as a card game just leaves individual decks to rot as the game progresses unless they are somehow miraculously brought back to life by legacy support. Decks in other card games aren't left to rot, they're either just rotated out or a specific deck is more based around certain concepts rather than an actual set cards that you have to inject super steroids into every couple for years for it to start running like usain bolt for like 9 months and then just fade back into the lower tiers. Like mono red aggro will always have a place in mtg because it's a concept rather than a set couple of cards that absolutely must be played for that deck to be called what it is called. Pokemon, on the other hand, will just take charizard ex out back and shoot it after the next rotation. I think yugioh is the very very late stage of having a card game be an eternal format. One piece is an eternal format, but it's way too young of a game for the gap between low tier petdeck and tournament meta threat to be so insanely wide. Yugioh feels like a fighting game that keeps getting stronger dlc characters, but then only ever buffs some old characters every once in a while, and most of the time the old characters don't get buffed enough for them to compete so the roster is like 95% unplayable bottom tiers, 3% playable mid to high tiers, and 2% top tiers.
yugioh is also really difficult to " keep up with" because if you are playing against a deck for the first time, its almost impossible to predict how the archetype cards interact with each other and what to look for, this can be a taxing endeavor for a lot of people, imagine a returning player trying to play against snake eyes for example, there is 0 chance they would know where to interact with the opponent to have the most impact.
I don’t admire Schmidt’s ignorance of who the “mid core player” is. He mentioned that essentially the super competitive players that are bringing heavy competitiveness to their small scaled tournaments do it because they enjoy doing it. What’s left out of that fact is that the player on the receiving end is NOT getting any enjoyment out of being a test dummy for the super competitive player. THAT is the mid core player. It’s so bad to the point that it’s not pet deck users that are losing drive to continue playing, it’s the players that are just on a deck that’s just a smidge below tier 1 that are getting decimated and CANNOT keep up that are getting blown out the water and losing motivation to stay in the game.
I am grateful that there’s a reaction to Paul’s vid that’ll rack up a lot of attention but the lack of awareness for the other side sucks to see. Wasn’t it about fun? Where’s the passion? Noticing this comment is getting some traction so I’m just leaving some extra 2 cents here. And a solution is most definitely not “put your six sams together and you’ll do fine at locals” Locals are where these top cut decks are ending up now. It’s not the casual setting that it once was considered.
Exactly this. I also play magic and you can play jank decks and still get to play and compete. Yugi is so fast you just don't even get to resolve your effects.
This is how anything competitive is and always will be, I don't care what game it is. Yugioh was exactly the same at the beginning, but with even less diversity. A good locals has always had meta decks. If you don't want to lose then play meta.
@bladthebozo9630 Again, there has always been meta played at a good locals. Nothing has changed in this regard. Nobody is topping with booty ass decks, and nobody ever was. Ideally, the same handful of players should be winning every week because they are simply better than everyone else.
@ honestly would love for Paul (the person in video being reacted to) to react to this reaction LOL. I think Schmidt’s a bit far gone on the topic. Love his content though and I still huff copium and compete with Melodious because I refuse to break the paywall of fiendsmiths’ engine. (2017 returnee where toss format was in baby stages)
in my opinion, mid-core yu-gi-oh! players gravitate towards master duel. this is why it is popular and well populated.
It’s losing players on steam tho
@@Austin-l1jIt's not drastically losing, the playerbase still there but there are some people who stop playing because they don't like the current meta or don't have any deck to build currently and waiting for new support in the future. There are always players who come back when certain pack or card released
@@kabayanlovesleep281 that’s true but it’s still bleeding overall players
That’s even worse .. spending money on virtual cards that I can’t even sell/ trade
@@Austin-l1j how many by percwentage though? There are programs out there that allow you to bot the game so anytime a new version comes out, so every update, it's bound to lose a lot of botters, at least temporarily, also people who get out for a format or two. Overall nobody, or almost nobody quits ygo forever. With Master Duel, if the player has had an account from the start and spent a significant amount of time playing it's highly unlikely the person will quit forever because they will have pet decks with rare foils and rare cosmetics, all these things are like magnets for players to return.
Josh im not gonna sugar coat it, your out of touch.
Skill ≠ Deck Investment or Meta Adoption, Many skilled players may not have the resources to constantly acquire top-tier meta decks or chase after new releases, but that doesn't diminish their game knowledge or strategic prowess.
Players often perform exceptionally with non-meta or rogue decks simply because of deep familiarity and expertise with their chosen strategy. Skill and deck choice are not always directly correlated.
Strong local communities provide critical environments for players to improve through practice, discussion, and competition. Many top players(including yourself) began by dominating local scenes before transitioning to larger tournaments. (SUPPORT YOUR LOCALS) A local player's skill level isn't inherently inferior just because they don’t compete at nationals or YCS events. Some choose to play locally for various reasons
Comments like "You expect to just pick up any deck and win a ycs with it playing against better players and playing worse then them." diminish the diverse paths to success in the game. It implies that only the most financially or meta-invested players deserve respect, ignoring the hard work and dedication of others.
The comment reflects a narrow view that overlooks the diversity of player experiences and the critical role local communities play in competitive ecosystems. The real answer is we need a format to support these lower fan favorite decks, this product line could also allow them innovate in terms of design where yugioh has been sorely lacking.
I don't know about others but Master Duel is a midcore heaven. To define mid core, mid core is the guy who may be playing a garbage deck but he is playing to win. He will use good cards, he will try to optimize his garbage no matter what anyone else says. It's a shitty position, cause casuals tell you you're playing good cards in your garbage deck and hardcore will tell you you're playing garbage with your good cards.
Master Duel Ladder is everything a mid core needs. M1 is a respectable achievement and if you want there is an ELO ladder on top, DC is also good in that aspect. We also have events which allows people to innovate their decks and adjust it for a new format.
Something else that helps is that you're not in a rush to reach the top. You can put goals, you can say this time I reached D1 next time I'll reach M5 etc..
100% agree.
I'm only got back to YGO thanks to MD.
its because of the large playerbase and rating system
This, I have had an Endymion deck since week 1 or 2 of MD, and stupidly had to grind for it because I went with structure decks first as I wanted to compete before starting to acquire more expensive decks. It was a huge investment at first, and I wasn't even able to optimize it until at least 1 month after that, but it was worth all the gems and dust I spent on it. It's rogue enough that it never got a direct hit on the banlist, still gets the occasional bit of support either from banlist liberated cards or a rare new release that fits the theme and it is able to compete in every format, provided I myself am not just clowning and clicking buttons mindlessly. I see lots of people doing the same every format with other decks like Heroes or some stuff that used to be meta but fell off due to hits or powercreep, or stuff that got boosted by legacy support like Spright in former case or Salamangreat in the latter. All these decks are crazy expensive, but so long as you make that initial investment you are pretty safe. I play that deck because I like it a lot and MD also happened to have launched already with a banlist that is way more friendly towards it than the tcg.
The tcg format is just trash, there's no other way around it, it's not about all decks getting good legacy support because that's mostly down to Konami in Japan, and I think most decks have actually been getting great support when they get anything new, at the very least most new legacy support tends to be modern enough that it's not just useless, which was definitely not true even 5 years ago. What's really bad about the tcg though is that decks that were good and accessible, like Endymion and Salad (both released on the same date as structure decks) got shafted really quick because they were from structure decks, while the ocg never did anything that drastic, the Endymion nerf in particular was so drastic and pre-emptive that it felt like an emergency banlist that happened before the deck could even do anything, very few people were using it and the tcg just decided that they couldn't have a pendulum deck be good for a month after they murdered TOSS format in that one banlist, and then we get a clown like Jerome telling us that Electrumite has to stay banned forever because all pendulum decks just go to it (which isn't a complete lie but it's like saying all the X decks just play the Y card which would also be true for entire game mechanics and covering far more cardss and decks).
This is why MD has a better format, and sure it has its own issues, but it's better than the other formats because it's adjusted every month without skipping, it's adjusted every time the biggest competitive event it has comes and goes, Konami gets to test a lot of stuff and players have way more options because cards like Maxx "C" do put the meta more in check in the sense that the meta decks don't always win by simply winning the coin toss, which is definitely true for formats without cards like that which Josh and most "pros" so seem to enjoy for God knows what reason outside of making the format extremely, excel spreadsheet-like, predictable.
so true
Yeah but Maxx C
I find it impressive how Josh manages to just completely miss the point of the initial argument. Saying "just go to locals with your bad deck and play out of your ass against the top meta decks" is not a reasonable or sustainable answer to the problem of pack filler cards having no place to be played at a high enough number to which the printing of those cards isn't a waste. It also doesn't foster the kind of gameplay that would exist in this kind of lower power format, because even if YOU are playing something like six sam, if your opponent is playing something like ryzeal or maliss the overall power level of that given format exists at whatever the most powerful deck does.
This is so true.
I completely understand what you are saying and I agree. I think that we need to look at what you are saying though and just point out that meta at a local level is an option. I think the decline in this kind of player doesn’t come from this specific format though. I think that this comes with the past few formats being way above any power level the decks we are talking about can compete at. I’m honestly this “mid level” Yugioh player. I just don’t have the time like I used to and when I did have the time I didn’t want to go play against yubel, snake eye etc. don’t get me started on tenpai. Whoever designed that deck needs to be talked to about card design. Now though I am returning to locals and I’ve gone a good bit over these past few weeks and I’ve had a lot of fun playing voiceless or chimera or buster blader. I think that a better question is should someone be able to walk into a locals with a deck like fabled (with no new support) and compete with ryzeal or maliss? I don’t know. I see both sides. I think that if that could happen the game would be dead because that means that card design has probably become stale. Idk. Just wanted to play devils advocate
suprised nobody making the ecological argument. konami printing pack filler is literally manufacturing trash, directly. it goes immediately in the bin
Konami should definitely study implementing tournaments with a format like those you see in Master Duel's side events, where you get a custom banlist where not only are certain carrds banned like in the regular banlist, but also complete archetypes, or most cards within some archetypes, or entire mechanics are banned. This would require them to pre-announce with enough time ahead that such a tournament is scheduled, but I think it could bring in a lot of interest, especially if they play their cards right, like making it at least as rewarding as a regular main event, use Master Duel to organize testing, invite only tournaments to promote it even.
All of that has much more to do with tournaments just being a bad place to play for fun. Locals can be tolerable depending on the amount of meta players at your locals but anything else is gonna be just meta.
Thats why master duel is the solution to all these problems because it has a ladder that pretty much matches you with the type of player you wanna play with.
Gold and Plat are heaven for these types of players but with a little effort you can take most of these pet decks to diamond or masters.
The difference between MD and in-person tournaments is obviously both the cost, travel requirements and the amount of games you can play.
Going to locals and playing like 3-4 rounds its much more likely for most of those games to be bad and thus it not feeling worth the effort as opposed to MD where you can just queue up another game.
It basically comes down to other card games cutting into locals scenes. A "Midcore" Yugioh player basically wants to be able to play their slightly above jank to rogue tier deck in environments where they play even games against other middling decks for a few rounds once or twice a week.
Paul is basically lamenting the decline of locals.
Well yeah when Yugioh top decks cost as much as building top decks for multiple other games no surprise people are jumping ship.
Its funny cuz Joshua Schmidt has been experiencing a similar problem in recent formats himself like getting FTKed by Yubel end boards.
From a rogue player's perspective that is what is happening to us too but far more soul crushing.
And no it wasn't always like this, cuz the very definition of rogue deck is an anti meta lower tier deck that has a strat that can counter the meta, so as long as you encounter what you are prepared for you will have some good match ups.
Now just look at Joshua's duelist cup game play and tell me how playing rogue decks worked out. And this is what you go against every day for example in masterduel ranked.
Rogue decks don't get you to play the game anymore right now, you just get completely destroyed and that is a very noticeable power creep spike.
@@nachohangover5104 more than that, i dont want to build a new deck every season. i want to build a deck and use it for a couple of years with a few upgrades every once in a while. I dont give a shit about most new architypes. i bought my deck for big chunk of change already, im not spending more money.
Locals are definitely a mixed bag. In my experience as a competitive player myself, every locals I've been to has featured nothing less powerful than legit rogue, with most duelists Tier 2 and up with the occasional young kid beginner with a structure deck in a sandwich bag. Sometimes I wish I could find the legendary locals where the supposed Ghostrick, Digital Bug and Chemicritter "communities" that manifest in YT comments hang out so I don't need to stress so much
@ Sure you may get paired with the local competitive player for round one but after getting that loss out of the way you'll probably be paired with either worse players or players with worse decks and can proceed to have fun.
This has definitely missed the point I think. It's not about people with less than meta decks wanting to win tournaments, it's about having a reasonable chance of playing the game. If your deck isn't at least pretty good you usually don't actually get to play your first turn at all. Do 10 games of that in a row with a deck where, even if you did play your first turn it doesn't guarantee a win, and you'll get burnt out and disinterested pretty fast.
Definitely your deck doesn't need to be at least pretty good to have your first turn
That is more like the minimum
I might be wrong, but what I think is being discussed and Josh seems to be having a hard time understanding is that people want to play lower power level decks against decks of similar strength, but there is no "legitimate" agreed upon way to do it outside of time wizard which doesn't allow a big pool of cards with the same power because they weren't released in the date picked.
So someone who thinks the current power level of the game is a little too high feels like they don't have a place in the game considering the unlikeliness of Konami banning enough cards to make something like current nouvelles viable
Farfa said on stream, people like josh or ryan are too good at the game where its normal when they are having hard time discussed this kind of issue since they always compete in highest level of gameplay
People should play lower power decks with the understanding that if they do not incorporate good cards or try hard to face better decks then they lose, as much as it sucks certain decks will not ever be functional in a competitive environment sometimes even at locals.
".........time wizard which doesn't allow a big pool of cards with the same power because they weren't released in the date picked............"
I literally want to play as close as possible anime deck but due to Fang of Critias not being available during GOAT and Edison times even if part of the Anime I cant use those cards .... sucks.
"does he want everybody to be as bad as he is" - one of the chat comments
Cannot stand this BS. Yugioh community is so elitist
Any money Paul would frog stomp this commenter in a duel too.
farfa chat is just weirdchamp but josh chat is just intolerably bad
I blame MBT
Started paying attention to chat because of this comment and holy crap, Josh has ton of these guys. He should seriously try to tone them down
@@MiyaoMeow588 Stopped taking Josh's chat seriously when they constantly made dogshit judgments on the DMaid support (direct and Regis).
Feels like MBT's chat sometimes but somehow worse
People who are just casually competitive just want strong tier 2 options. But apparently Josh can't grasp that?
It isn't people just want to play a pet deck, but more so, this much support can't push decks into simi playable.
I just don't see how Josh is struggling with this concept.
Holy shit, buddy. You really missed the core of the discussion. I mean I know we are all peasants from your perspective, but holy molly.
I consider myself a mid core Yugioh player, but not by choice. I literally can’t afford to keep up with the most expensive best decks. I’d like to take this game more seriously but I can’t. I don’t have the luxury to not have to question whether or not to pick up expensive staples. And I used to take this game super seriously but i literally did not have the disposable income to spend on it. All my Yugioh friends moving away and not having a locals was the nail in the coffin.
play master duel and become a high lvl ygo competitor, its free
@@Eru_3ruit takes so long to get any good cards and decks. I wanna be able to play the decks I want now. I tried getting back into it and I just can’t be bothered. Also it’s not TCG. It’s not real Yugioh.
@@dpacula63 it will not take you a week to get one or mutiple competetiv decks to play with, you just need to be smart about it, like buying the stapple one time packs, duelist pass and do some of the decent story arcetypes maybe for some good starting cards to build off. I havent spend a cent and played snake eyes and own yubel
@dpacula63 it takes literally a few hours to build a meta deck on a fresh account. If that's too much of an investment you should seek other forms of entertainment or be prepared to spend $$$
@@Eru_3ru some people want real cards.
Josh I love your content and i still watch even though I no longer actively play Yugioh. But I don't know if it was possible to be more off the mark with what you're saying in this vid. I'd consider myself a 'mid-core' Yugioh player, I'm a player who used to play locals every week even during tier 0 formats like tearlaments. But now I've switched to playing One piece because I dont enjoy the current state of Yugioh, the difference between top tier decks and the rest is far too great now and if you're playing at a competitive locals there's no way you can beat a top meta deck with even a good deck that's been printed in the last 2 years. I'm not going to beat someone like Trif or Jesse Kotton without playing the new expensive decks/staples. Also with the cost of living getting significantly higher too, it isn't really justifiable to buy a new $500-$1000 deck every 6 months.
im confused, you played during tear format which is arguably the strongest deck ever but weaker formats you don't play bc somehow the gap is wider than the best deck ever printed??
@@Kildykild I do agree that full power Tear was much stronger than the current/recent decks and gate kept most graveyard based decks because of the ishizu cards, but the tear format was a far more interactive and skill based format, compared to what we've had for the last year. I didn't need to play 20 hand traps in my main deck to stop the exact same combo line from happening anyways. But to be fair I was playing Branded and Dragon Link at the time with a heavy bystial count during Tear format, so I probably had a better time then a lot of people because of that. Also even if I lost to Tear I usually had a fun interactive game, so I was still enjoying it. I do think Ryzeal is a step in the right direction, but the Fiendsmith engine just seems too good imo.
Chat is totally missing the point that midcore players want to play against midcore players. That's not possible in master duel, and you'll rarely see it at locals because everybody is playing for ante due to the buy-in
It is possible in MD its called making a duel room or gold rank
@@dannycristen7505 just playing a very non meta deck like ghoti or suships will get you out of gold easily. There's no way to stay in gold unless you purposely concede dozens of games which is not fun
@@starjadiancloneinvestigato1772 Ok well them that leaves Duel Rooms and Casual Match, you will undoubtedbly.find ppl playing mid decks in either of them. I'd know personally because I frequent both of them.
I so agree with this. I go to locals and it’s like everyone is solely there to wreck the “ rogue” players to have a TH-cam profile.
@@starjadiancloneinvestigato1772 Yeah I play Shiranui Zombie World cause I like it, and I liked my games against Suships for example cause we had nice back-and-forths without full domination, handtraps, or anything really out there. Then I somehow managed to rank up and next set I felt outclassed immediately With no easy way to go back down if I wanted o.
58:25 . Its not that the fact that there are good and bad decks that is the problem, its the sheer gap between those decks. Even the best rogue decks have a waaayyyyy harder time in yugioh than in other tcgs. Also how you make that hypothetical format is by banning whole archetypes instead of individual cards.
When I began playing yugioh back in 16/17 the gap wasnt even close to as big as today. Now that every meta deck has 12 starters and have room to play 15 handtraps its just to big of a gap now. Its just a fact
@@BaxsStudios right? There's literally only so much skill can do, and I refuse to play a deck I don't like the aesthetic of. Ofc Amazoness ain't gonna stomp snake eyes, but decks should at least have tools that make winning a match possible. Top players like Josh love it when there are as few decks as possible for you to play, or more accurately as few decks as possible for them to play against. When a meta is open they talk about how "the right people aren't getting to the top" and "too much rng" but when it's a one deck format everybody else hates it's all "skill issue" and "built different". I love Josh but he's a top .01% player with a mindset to match. His comments on healthy formats are some of the most out of touch things I have ever heard. Maybe it's because magic ruined my brain, but a healthy format should have more than 2 decks with maybe a budget option for the poors.
Yeah. Best you can do is a hypothetical scenario of setting up different tiers like fan competitive pokemon with the smogon list, where stuff is categorized into how much something is played in each tier.
But we probably won't get something like that ever.
I'd say it's the opposite. In yugioh any bad deck can win against good decks as long as you go first, the most degen going 1st decks are even "bad" decks. In other card games try playing a bad deck, against good player with a good deck, in a bo3....
@ But there are plenty of budget options that can win a locals. This is what he talked about with players that refuse to put the barest modicum of effort into learning the game
I literally can’t stand when Josh does this. He will play super defense for Konami even when he knows these cards are incredibly overpriced when it’s a MUST use. It’s oppressive on us “mid tier” players. Every single deck I find and wanna try even old and outta meta is over 100 bucks. It’s criminal
Its simple the midrange problem comes from one thing Konami does wrong and its not defendable. Pricing and reprints. It cant be that we have short printed secret rare staples pr even secret rare staples at all. We need ocg type Pricing and midrange would bloom. Its all we really ask for its ok for your malise and cards archetype cards to be expensive but not for staples, that should not be a thing.
We should have rare versions of those staples like full arts, high rare and Alt arts maybe all in combination and whales still would buy cases. I knew enough players playing more expensive full bling decks even if there is cheaper alternatives. And this is not only a ohh no furwallos is 150 bucks a playset (only "thiw cheap because of the reprint comming) this problem is prevalent since for ever.
Give us gems for Master duel when buying a booster per qr code, give us different options and chase cards, give more nostalgia bate reprints in high rarity for collectors but Konami will never change that because that Company doesnt care, they dont care about their video game they dont care about yugioh and that wont change.
It's simple , he makes a living out of this and he really loves it so he is desperate to do anything he can to make this game prosper.
I love Josh, but he is slowly becoming the meme of 'leave the billion dollar company alone'. Just keeps justifying horrible decisions that are good business wise but bad for the consumer. Then he typically resorts to saying well that's just the way it is, okay and? It doesn't mean it should be that way.
As a 'mid core' player, I disagree to an extent with people's argument on pricing. Yes, fuwaloss and engravers are expensive, but you don't need to play with them or certain staples to win. Last year I picked up a voiceless deck for around 120 USD when it was at its highest price, played with all the staples they reprinted in rarity collections which costed not much and bubbled a YCS, came 2nd at a state championship, bubbled my nationals and won an ots championship. I wanted to play Maliss when it was released which cost me around 160 USD, but the cards were announced in Japan 3 months before they released here so I had plenty of time to have money to pick it up. People get like 3-4 months notice from Japan if cards will be expensive and can plan ahead if they really really want it but think it'll be a financial problem. If in 3-4 months you can't potentially save 160 USD for a Maliss/whatever deck you want to play, then consider either not being as competitive, or play a different deck
If 100 bucks is alot bruv then you need to focus on work and leave cardboard alone. 😅
IMO the most off putting part from YGO in the last two years is how pronounced the gap has become between competitively viable and completely garbage. The power of newer meta archetypes is so bonkers with 1 card starters and infinite recursion that you get pigeonholed into playing one of 3-4 decks to even remotely have a chance at being taken seriously at even a local level. I wish there were more support for underdog from Konami as a real format, the game is so interesting but only having one format to play seriously hurts the players and I'd argue actively limits who their audience can be.
Konami should make a card pool for lower tier formats. It would help the game a ton and give all the filler cards a place to be played.
@@DragonTank1400 it's as simple as them starting to seriously organize events that work like Master Duel side events with their custom banlists, you can extract so much juice out of a format like that with near infinite fresh formats. Mind that any format will always coalesce into its own meta regardless of what you ban and limit, but at the very least it's an easy way to get people to compete in something that you know issn't just gonna be won by the same decks you see week in week out in modern format tournaments.
Current format does not fit this description at all. If anything it's the lowest to the ground its ever been save for Maliss, and that has silver bullet counters galore
You sound like somebody who didn't play YGO at all 15-10 years ago. This is not at all true. YCS Bologna had eight different decks in top 8, ffs. The diversity of choice is absolutely there.
Calling the game expensive, fair. Saying you only play against the same decks because nothing else is viable, utter nonsense.
@@alexb2656 brother balonga was almost 3 months ago. Ycs Anaheim had exactly 2 players in top 32 that weren't playing Ryzeal, Maliss, yubel, tenpai or snake eyes. CRBR sucked a lot of the air out of the room and will likely continue to do so outside of some niche tops here and there. SUDA doesn't bring anything to the table, and the only new deck we have on the horizon is BEWD. Just off memory, in the last 2 years we have spright, branded, purrely, chimera, VS, voiceless, plants, mannadium, unchained and fire king all fell behind in their ability to keep up with the game. Let alone all the failures to launch with legacy support. I feel the need to defend the game because I truly love Yu-Gi-Oh, but it's obvious how far power creep has taken us with little signs of slowing down. It's cute that we see striker make some comebacks and ocg has Orcust again, but that seems to be the exception to the rule that your deck has a shelf life and only some random broken support will ever breathe life into it. In an evergreen format it feels pretty damning that 90%+ of the card pool isn't even worth giving the consideration to play if you want reasonable odds of doing well.
I believe that what Josh said about taking six sam to locals and youll do fine as a "skilled pilot" isnt necessarily true. Almost all locals around my area are chock full of sweats who are all playing tier 1 beat your ass decks and there isnt really any recourse. For example i enjoy playing Ursarctic and while im aware that the deck is weak and im not expexting it to be tier 1 i threw in an ice barrier package into the deck featuring some of the new ice barrier cards from last years battles set to patch some of the weaknesses. The problem despite me being a skilled player isnt price, its that locals isnt a casual place anymore to play shit like that. I cue up Ursarctic Ice Barrier against anyone playing any current tier 1 deck and im getting shit on no matter how much of a better player i am or not. Like Paul says, the mid core player doesnt have a place to play random jank decks. The local scene isnt casual anymore. I cannot go there and play Libromancer, or Myutant, or Vendread, or Evil Eye for example. All of which are decks i have profiles for on my own channel. It just seems like outside of master duel there isnt a place to go to use decks such as those mentioned.
Yeah, the other option is looking for shops that have a jank format. There’s one 15-20 mins away from where I used to live that has a jank format every Friday for decks like Ursarctic
@STEPHxCA yea which as far as I know, none in my area do. Doesnt matter what day or which locals i go to, I bring some rogue deck out and my matchups are constantly against tier 1 decks. It was snake eye garbage last format and it's ryzeal and fiendsmith nonsense now.
I keep seeing this and i agree to a point but to me this feels like a community issue not just konami issue.
Like more casual locals need to exist, but how many locals actually have heart of the under dog tournaments to let these decks feel playable in a given format. The tool exists but i know of 1 underdog tournament firing in the last 12 months where i live.
I pretty much align myself with the midcore player that Paul is describing here. For me, the biggest problem is the pace of the game’s evolution. I can barely learn how to play against the current meta decks that new sets with new op strategies and cards come out and it feels like an uphill battle almost impossible to win.
If you are an amateur poker/chess player and you take a little break from the game, when you return maybe you’ll be a little rusty, but your level will be more or less the same; with YGO, even short periods of absence or periods with less practice will feel like huge impairments when you come back
Brother its a TCG they print new cards its the same in every game ever
@@stefanokic406 nah, the gap in games like OP TCG is not nearly the same.
In OP if you bad draw you dont auto lose. If the opponent's deck is tier 1 and yours is not you can still win. Even if you have a hard matchup you have guaranteed 5-6 turns of being able to play.
@@lucaderighetti7653 you can still win in yugioh if your deck is worse. It really is heavily matchup dependent. And again i said if you know what you are dooing and your deck has some sort of a gameplan you can compete with most decks. Yes it feels awfull to lose to a full yubel combo but itt also felt awfull dying to face hunter in HS on turn 4. These kind of things happen
I see this a lot when people talk about the gap difference between OP and yugioh. I don’t agree with this take having played one piece. If you play against someone who doesn’t know what they are doing then sure I can see it, but not against people who know what they’re doing. The tempo lost is really big.
Its just that the gap between meta and casual decks has become bigger then ever. My casual friend group stopped with yugioh, we were this kind of midcore players. Going to locals occasionaly and playing games together. It was a combination off the price (even on staples in casual decks), the gap between meta and casual decks and the fact that they ban cards just after a reprint (taka appolousa, baron, diabellstar etc). So now we kinda play Pokemon / Digimon since there you can get several cheap decks for the price of 1 casual yugioh deck. So even tho I at least prefer yugioh over those, the price difference is insane.
Yugioh needs the pokemon rarity system, so the casual players can get cheap commons and the whales can get expensive cards.
3:13 I would HOPE 2023 Master Due World Champion Joshua Schmidt considered himself a competitive yugioh player
~12:20, I feel like most people that watch Yu-Gi-Oh content don't actively play and aren't interested in playing. I'm one of those people. The content creators for this game make the game way more interesting than actually playing games of Yu-Gi-Oh. The content creators are thoughful, fun, interesting. While the game feels too flippy, and/or you need to be so invested to have a reasonable game. I'd much rather just live vicariously through the people who have built the knowledge, or find ways to have fun in another tier-0 format.
I stopped playing because it turned into 34 and a half hand traps + your Actual deck.
So it felt like for casual players like me, you go first and get;
Veileered
Drolled
Infinite Imp
Ash'd
Opponent has one card or 2 in hands
They draw their 1 card combo, end with 10 cards in hand, 20 cards on field, then they OTK me.
If I go second I'm facing a board of 30 negates and a follow up turn
There's no fun in it so I just play casually and accept the auto lose if the Tier 1 deck does not brick or I open relatively good.
Cannot be bothered to go to locals with a $30 deck when the 5 guys there are running upwards of $700 decks and ending My turn on My turn without even getting a chance to play.
1+ hour of Josh missing the point. Generational video
There is a locals near me that runs a custom rogue format. You can only use decks that are not currently Tier 1 or 2.
They update the list regularly but fundamentally its a home for a lot of people who want to play with decks that are outside of the meta like six sam.
Thats the solution to help the mid core player feel like they can also play the card game imo.
What happens when a player keeps winning week after week with the same deck? Do you just ban that deck because it's just marginally better than the rest of the room? That's my main gripe with HoTU/custom list formats when someone decides that you're being too much of a sweat and then punishes you for trying to optimize your pet deck.
What happens if someone shows up with their maliss or Ryzeal deck? Because that's why we couldn't do heart of the underdog at our locals. The shop owner said they're not allowed to just tell people they can't enter if they're playing legal cards.
@@ItzMajinTCGIf they're saying they can't because of Konami policy then that's not true. Heart of the Underdog is an official format now for this exact reason.
Id love to play casual Yu-Gi-Oh at a store every week but there isn't a community for it. I just wanna play my jank decks I enjoy. But every body at the shop is a sweat with too much time and money
I also think you misunderstood the argument. I don't want my gusto deck to be tier zero. But the gap between my deck and a competitive deck is a chasm. I auto lose
@@lincolnpertuset2980 Lets say we are talking about exactly Gusto. Gusto was always bad. Ever since release it was bad. It was a deck build on a foundation of sponge
@@lincolnpertuset2980 That is the issue, the gap has gotten too wide where you don't even get to play the game.
@@lincolnpertuset2980 This is like saying my Dreamcast controller doesn't work on my PS5. It's time to either sit down and just play Dreamcast or upgrade to a new controller, whether that be the Sony product (meta) or an Aliexpress that still does the job but has flaws (rogue). Bringing literal unplayable cannon fodder that wasn't even great shakes in its time and expecting to have fun is just ridiculous
@ak47dragunov I can have fun losing. I just don't enjoy having a snowballs chance in hell unless I spend 600$
I think the main point in everyones argument is that we mid core players want a space to sit down and play the game without needing to sweat every game just to win against a teir 1 deck
I really enjoy going to locals with a rouge deck and playing to the best of ability, and winning it feels really good. But a lot of times i want to go to locals with the same deck and just chill weather i win or lose i want the game to feel even and without it being an uphill battle but theres no space for it especially at my locals where im one of a few who arent on top meta
9 minute original video 1 hour 20 reaction thats how you know its good
Asmongold has the genre in a chokehold
There is a reason why commander is more popular than standard in magic. Because you can play w/e you want and still not feel like the game is unwinnable. Red eyes will pretty much never be a winnable archtype in standard yugioh, but you can see results with a cat deck in a commander pod
Commander is a result of player innovation and dedication to have a format like that tbf. And even that has its massive ups and downs. Just look how messy the bans can be on top of the rule zero stuff.
that is not entirely true though, playing a jank deck in commander vs a tq commander deck is still as unwinnable as in yugioh, people do what josh suggested which is to play with friends and agree on a specific power level
I think the most annoying thing is the clear favorites konami has in each sets. Yes I can understand that every deck can't be meta and it's fine with me but when you look at springan sargas that can only pop during the opponent's turn(why not both?), the new Raidraptor Rank up that makes one of its 2 common targets miss its activation condition when its already worse than the other target 80% of the time or ashened that, as an archetype, is barely functionnal. (these are examples, there are many more.)
All this while the all ultra, shiny new toys can do more, with less and with half the restrictions. It just feels like konami doesn't care about the gameplay. Why don't the snake eyes have any restrictions at all? Why could the ishizu cards be the end all be all of GY control when its stupidly hard to mill otherwise in archetypes designed to work around the GY?
I can see the point of cards producing good gameplay, but you can't tell me in the face of fuwalos that my combo deck that needs 3 times more summons to end on a weaker board than a standard ryzeal board deserved to get basically thrown out of the game due to its own mecanics. You cannot tell me that a card that murders combo decks should be introduced bc konami failed to remove what makes combo decks unbearable to play against (besides long turn time).
Why even bother printing cards that you can't allow to be good when you clearly know what's wrong and what has been wrong with these deck since forever. My classic example is Raidraptor, Towers are fundamentaly uninteractive and produce bad gameplay. Then why the hell do you give them another tower as their new form of interaction when the deck already has a special summon hate identity based on destructions and floating of destruction, towers being the thing you aim for on turn 3 to seal the deal. And after they're like "oh weird, this card is degenerate, we now must print a card to reign this tier 5 deck down. Btw here's our new deck that does everything better and doesn't die to the new card". Hypocrits.
I play midcore cuz i actually wanted to play maliss but 50% of locals is playing maliss and i don't feel good winning or losing a mirror based on wallet or opening hand
Josh the problem is that *everything* that is not meta is basically garbage at this point, not just old ones getting new support, but new ones like mimighoul too. And almost everyone who is playing Yu-Gi-Oh irl is playing a competitive deck at this point. Yes, even at locals. The power gap between meta deck and other decks didn't use to be so wide. There used to be tiered decks from 1-3 that you could play at locals or a regional and do ok with, not necessarily win the whole tournament but at the least not lose in 1-2 turns every single game. These days you might as well not show up to an event if you're not playing a competitive deck, you won't win a single round, much less a game. Competitive players generally just play whatever the best deck of the format is or the few options close to it. But most other players want the option to play the deck that they have the most fun with even if it's not the most viable, especially when it gets new support. Why bother buying physical cards when every deck you find fun or interesting can't beat Ryzeal or Maliss? Even if you remove the cost of buying cards out of the equation, those non meta decks still wouldn't be viable with expensive staples, and it doesn't make the competitive decks much more appealing for people who weren't already interested in them. There are literal *dozens* of archetypes both new and old that will literally never see play in person because they can't beat a competitive deck and i find that incredibly sad. Yes, you can play some of these with more success in MD but that shouldn't be the only way these decks can exist imo. Not everyone can just find friends who live near them who also want to play rogue decks. A new format that excluded the highest tiered decks would help this situation a little bit but there's also tons of generic staples that contribute to the problem as well. This is a symptom of yugiohs purposeful and rampant powercreep. Yes, Konami needs to sell packs, but other card games have proven time and time again that you don't need to keep making new decks better or ban old decks to get people interested in buying new cards. You just need to make new decks fun, interesting, and viable against current decks. The only real solution is to surgically remove all the problem cards from the new potential format. But the chances of Konami doing this are slim to none, we barely got time wizard and it feels like Konami actively resents doing it. Obviously no one knows what goes on at Konami HQ but it feels like they stopped caring about the actual game a while ago and just want to squeeze as much money out of it as possible.
then how do you explain that voiceless voice got third place at the spanish open this weekend? it's a very cheap non meta deck and it won 7 out of 8 rounds against ryzeal, maliss, and all the other meta decks of the format.
@ShroomOfSorrow a single outlier doesn't represent the game as a whole. Jesse Kotton could win a ycs with grave keepers tomorrow but that wouldn't mean grave keeper is now a deck that is meta competitive. It just means that incredibly skilled pilots can pull off things that very few others can with the same cards.
There are no locals within an hour of me, and I live in a big city. They all stopped doing yugioh
You probably don't live in a big city.
@@rushxanthemtcg5607that is the most braindead answer anyone could come up with. You dont need to reply to everything, shut up holy… and the other 2 npc upvoting you. Many LGS have dropped yugioh, actual head in the sand mf
I live in the sticks and I could probably go to a different locals every night of the week if I really wanted to.
I love josh but I believe he missed the point on this one
I'm a midcore player to some degree because i played and have done decently well with Hero for a long time , people forget that eventually you have to let your pet deck go and play something better if you want to compete. I put Hero down for better decks last year and haven't looked back. Other card games have this problem too but they are cheaper with better prize support which is why yugioh players are switching over. If yugioh ever got cash prizing or something on the same level of it like exclusive rarities for winning YCS and etc , i can guarantee you a lot of those same players who switched over would come right back.
What if we don't want to compete and just play the game? Your solution is just "forget low power decks and play meta". I don't want to. Many people don't want to. We want a place where we can just play HERO and have some fun. But there will be that person at locals or on Master Duel that brings full power Maliss and suddenly that fun time isn't anymore. That's what we're saying. And there's nothing wrong with being more competitive but if there is going to be this giant gap between decks, then let those decks have a space where they can shine. Just like the meta decks have.
@7thHourFilms you can always play casually with some buddies without entering locals. When games like magic had its broken formats and he'll even when I was a kid players used to play casual 2v2 and 1v1 all the time.
Here's what I think is the biggest problem and it's not more formats. As a "mid core" player. I have twin 4 year Olds. I don't get to go to locals as much as I'd like nor do I have the cash on hand to keep up with top tier meta. But when konami let's a deck run rampant for a whole year with no reprints. Then give reprints for 2 weeks before a ban list comes out and KILLS the decks those reprints are in. It's hard to stay engaged. We all saw ryzeal and maliss become the "new decks" even with OSS unbanned. So why ban OSS now? Literally banning that one card ruined my chances after finally getting the reprints like wanted and promethious to go to locals and see if my kash/snake eye deck can work. So now I'm sitting here with a deck well into rogue. Looking at power creep put snake eyes to rogue level. Because they wanna sell the new decks. And now all that time I spent waiting for reprints was for nothing. Now I'm sitting on a snake eyes core that's worth nothing and can't be played at any higher competitive level than my codetalker/firewall pet deck. They need to put meta relevant cards on the reprint list sooner than 2 weeks before the new set comes out. Which btw... since they create the damn decks.
They know before EVERYONE else when the new meta will shift and even then, they wait to reprint until the absolute last moment. Then either release mew meta decks that make the reprints obsolete, or they finally hit something on a ban list that the community has been dying for all year 2 days after the new meta is released to the public for play. The biggest problem is konamis cash grab. Yeah they need to make money. But how much money was lost for them by waiting to bad OSS at a ryzeal/maliss ycs rather than with the list at the end of August. Or the reprints come out in August as compared to November. The "midcore" player has been priced out by the company's actions. Not the game itself.
Exact same thing happened to me, the reprints came out, ordered the deck so I could finally learn it and play it, then the banlist dropped BEFORE THE CARDS EVEN ARRIVED. Game straight up just feels like "oh you're one of those poors or you have financial responsibilities other than buying expensive pieces of cardboard? Get out of my sight, peasant".
As that mid-competitive player who pivoted to one piece, i’m never coming back. The grass is too green here. One piece is my favorite ip and it sucks because i miss my old yugioh friends who didnt pivot to one piece with us but the game has been a haven away from yugioh
Edit: And before anyone makes any assumptions based on this. My locals is home to 2023 world champion pauly aronson. We had the talent, I had access, it didnt matter.
One piece is just to good
@@prodmoirai can and do own every single deck in the game for cheaper than staples in yugioh are
Man, i want to learn that TCG, how do I do that ?
I have faith in Bandai games after being introduced to Digimon from a friend, it's awesome & a good alternative should the format be garbage in YGO.
A bunch of guys left for one piece, but imo it doesn't scratch the itch Yu-Gi-Oh hits. It's a fine game, cheap enough to take seriously; but grinding the formats doesn't feel as good as getting really good at Yu-Gi-Oh
I already simply wont get into OP because there is no mobile version like Master Duel. Though it does sound interesting.
Some of my friends quit TCG because of the enormous numbers of handtraps, and they're right. When the opponent throw at you Ash, Veiler, Impulse it's not fun, definitely. It's basically like play against a stun deck but in your first turn. Tenpai format was truly a nightmare, in MD I can't stand again another 4 handtrap then normal Paidra.
Average Tenpai player during your draw phase: *activate Shifter chain Maxx C 👓
yeah the hand traps are almost not even 100% of the problem its that most meta decks have game ending 1 card combos. so its like a feedback where you can run more hand traps because you have 1 card combos then everyone else needs 1 card combos to compete with the hand traps. 1 card combos need to be completely banned or neutered
I think you're right, but I don't think it's just handtraps. Everything that keeps you from playing the game at all, like omninegates or generic removal, is just killing the fun.
@@deboltteamenlight3480 yes, I agree with you, of course handtraps are not the only problem here, the free omni negates are as well. I'm still having fun using my decks but against Tenpai it's really hard to stay calm. And yes, 1 card combo must be deleted as soon as possible to make the game much more fun.
I haven’t “quit” but I stoped when the multichummys and dominus cards came out…
Less because I care about the hand trap numbers… but more because it makes it hard to even play my preferred decks optimally without them which does bother me and because I don’t want to go through the hassle of acquiring expensive staples again.
Master Duel had the solution, which is events. As much as people love bitching about every single event meta, they're nevertheless generally very very different from the main ladder. Also because several things don't exist, my pet deck that is adjusted for the new banlist is significantly more powerful than if they were fighting a meta deck. I know this for a fact because I theorycraft for every single event and most of the time I don't see a single person run the decks I did. I generally walk away with like 80%+ WR in most events because of people's non-familiarity with my strategy and choke points and also because my read was more unique and logical than just using a meta deck without any of the fangs or just going floodgate or ben kei turbo or using the precon decks
I don’t know why I’m typing this because it probably won’t be read. However, I believe a point that may run semi parallel to the competitive argument of new support is that if Konami had the time to make new support for an archetype like six samurai and mermail, they at least could have made them competitively viable at a ycs level.
Instead of always coming up with new archetypes that run the meta they could invest their time and money into making support of older archetypes that are good enough to compete at the higher levels.
I think it’s just disheartening and insulting to players when they wait for 5+ years for support of their favorite archetypes and then when it finally comes out it’s subpar. That just means that they’ll probably never get to play their favorite archetypes at a high level again and that I believe could feel pretty crappy.
But on the other side they made yubel support and everybody hated it. Im fine with how they are dooing legacy support cause i ok with these old deck not beeing meta but good enough. And i think they did a deacent job reacently of making old decks good enough to play in the current meta. Like you can genuinely play BA in MD and do fine
@@stefanokic406 bro its not because they made yubel meta support it was because yubels playstile is incredibly badly designed and unfun to play against.
@@BaxsStudios thats the point ppl love the deck konami makes it meta and unfun ppl hate the deck
@@bradysummers20 and how many things do you think can be meta at the same time 10? 20? No its just couple of decks you will never satisfy ygo players
The problem is that because of the power creep the weaker archetypes have a lot smaller chance to compete(Not even to win to just compete). If you go 10 years in the past a Paleozoic or a six samurai deck could have a 10-20% chance to beat a tier 1 deck but now what can you do with Battling Boxer or Goblins against a competitive deck. Every year Konami makes over 10 archetypes that are completely unplayable in the advanced format. Solution is simple. A different format with a massive ban list where you could compete if you want with your War Rock Deck if you want.
Its all about how sharp the drop-off is. Mid-Core is at its peak when it can go 60-40% or even 65-35% against a meta-deck with equally skilled players.
In Tearlament format, if you brought a non-shifter rogue deck you'd have a 5-10% chance of winning against a full-power Tear deck. In the subsequent Unchained/Kashtira etc format, if you brought a non-tier 1 deck, you'd have a significantly better chance of winning against the current best decks in the format.
The most recent formats Snake-Eyes / Yubel / Tearlament formats have had the top decks eating every other deck alive until they have their kneecaps broken by a banlist. This is why Ryzeal / Maliss format feels so much better for the Mid-Tier players because you have a solid shot against those decks as long as you build properly.
I don’t stick to a “pet deck” because I love playing an older deck. It mainly because I don’t want to justify buying a new meta deck every 6 months when they are sometimes $700+. I haven’t bought or played tcg in like 2 years. YGO is genuinely my favorite card game, and nothing really comes close. But I’m not getting milked for every penny Konami can try and get from me.
Pretty insane that your take boils down to "you're just bad at the game because you don't think about the game every waking moment so that's why you can't compete in a place that's supposed to be reserved for casuals but isn't". Literally delusional
I don’t think I’ll ever come back to Yugioh as someone who liked to go to locals every so often.
Game is complex (compared to others), power creep is through the roof, which then makes purchasing product super unfun because either you pull op cards or you lost money. Too many tier one formats really made me lose interest (quit around snake eyes).
Yugioh is also one of the rare games where the strategy is to completely prevent your opponent from doing anything with negates. So deck diff (and cash diff) is felt most strongly in my opinion.
Also, why waste my time playing a game where the game producer disrespects my time and money? I’ve got a career and bills to pay, and my free time is also something i want to spend wisely. This game doesn’t reward me for it, especially when they short print good cards and/or bundle it in shitty products as a cash grab. So why stay?
@@Dinner407 ygo has thankfully gotten away from the infinity negate meta. The biggest offenders have been banned and all the new stuff is hard once per turn and most decks can only end on one or two, but largely play for much more engaging interactions with pops and sticky boards.
Later bro
agree with all but not on the complex part. sure you can play complex decks but that's not a negative, plus yu-gi-oh has so many archetypes that you can find a simple deck for yourself.
power level though, that's another question
I feel like the entire TCG industry is losing this kind of player, because the grass isn't greener anywhere else (at least not for long)
Investors basically kill any hobby at some point, which sucks.
@@Laflamme78 if it weren't for the investors, the game would've been dead a long time ago.
Magic still has a massive mid core audience. They play commander.
mtg is actually catching these players with commander
Hardcore (or “midcore” I guess) Madolche player here; Paul is 1,000% correct.
I’ve tested extensively the deck on DB with about 20 different builds, theories, ratios, approaches etc to make it competitively viable. It just isn’t. This is NOT me complaining about my satellarknight deck that hasn’t seen support since 2017, I’m talking about a deck that received major buffs in 2020 and 2024.
I’m thankful for the support, but it seems like a carrot; cashing in on hopefully committed players who don’t want to just be another “meta slave” without actually providing them the tools to be competitive.
Don’t get me wrong, I own fiendsmith Ryzeal and am forced to play it at regionals, case tourneys etc and can place / top just fine.
But it’s disheartening to see support created for a deck that DOES boost the absolute power level of the deck, but DOESN’T take into consideration the ecosystem into which the deck is being placed. Like, yes, madolches are now stronger after 2024 than they were in 2020, but they’re still about 2/3 years behind. This is not a complaint about current meta (I think we are currently in one of the healthiest metas we’ve seen since the release of the Ishizu cards), but rather the decision by Konami to give buffs to decks that only lead the player to increased frustration and disappointment once realizing that the deck still can’t keep pace with the literal meta the support cards were released into.
I’d say that I originally was one of the players that Paul is describing. I started playing Yugioh around 2010, and stopped playing around 2014-2015, shortly after the introduction of Pendulums. The cards were too weird for me, and I just didn’t enjoy Yugioh anymore. I tried picking back up Yugioh around 2020-2021, and the power level of the game had risen so exponentially that it just didn’t feel fun anymore.
However, I tried one more time because I genuinely love this game and got back in about a year after Master Duel’s release, and I haven’t left since. There are definitely valid reasons to dislike the direction of Yugioh, as well as the power level, but honestly I feel the reason most people have left Yugioh in that “midcore” level is because they simply just don’t like it. Like, I’ve had people at Locals constantly genuinely raging and malding over playing against relatively mediocre decks by modern standards like Fur Hire Runick just because it beat their Nemleria deck or whatever. The thing about other card games vs Yugioh is that other card games don’t have the interactivity that Yugioh does. And before anyone rushes to the comments to complain: be genuine with yourselves. Having multiple turns isn’t interactivity. I tried learning Digimon, and while the game isn’t BAD, it is by NO means interactive. You just do whatever you want on your turn, and if you win, you win. There is nothing your opponent can do about it. Card games like Yugioh and Magic have ACTUAL interactivity and people don’t like when they can’t just “do whatever I want.” That’s why so many people complain about stuff like Hand Traps, despite them being INHERENTLY interactive.
Ppl will genuinely sit down, read bad cards, and go "hell yeah", bring those bad cards to locals and get mad they lost to something competant
I always thought local Master Duel events would be the perfect way to accommodate midcore players. I love showing off stupid jank decks that are objectively bad/bricky but are funny to play when they pop off. Even after getting dumpstered by someone's $700 meta deck. But since it's kind of a pain in the ass to carry around multiple decks in TCG for those hardcore players to "play down to the midcore level", they're always going to beat you. In MD, they can always carry around dumb pet decks/lower tier decks in the palm iof their hand.
Though there really isn't much incentive for these game stores to want to host anything for MD. Those MD players aren't buying products there, they're swiping their cards, if anything to Apple/Google/Steam.
@@dannycristen7505 I wholeheartedly agree. Like, I don’t mind people playing their pet decks, favorite archetypes, etc. What I do mind is people willingly bringing a tier 3 deck to Locals, losing to a tier 2 deck, then go “YUGIOH SUCKS UGH I HATE ASH BLOSSOM I HATE HANDTRAPS I HATE BLAH BLAH BLAH” because there was 1 point of interaction. Those types of people genuinely just want to play a single player game
Amen
So true, I don't play yu-gi-oh on paper since there is no place near me that allows me to do so, so I only play MD, but I do play magic irl in a casual environment and it's exactly the same, people complain about top decks being uninteractive but don't you dare play any sort of interaction or removal on their turn or they'll get salty.
At the end of the day some people's ego is too big to actually see themselves mirroring the same kind of behavior they whine about
The most shocking thing to me is Joshua does not know how an Hexagon plot works, and keeps saying it's a 1-0 scale, when, by definition, it isn't.
To be far the way it was explained was exactly that. The poster only mentioned in the decks had it or not.
@BamfCross I would have bot explained in the post how tò read the most commonly used graph in games.
Why do so many of these become people having arguments no one is saying... No people dont want every legacy support to be tier 1 work but not to hard infinite loops like WTF are we even talking about anymore.
Please make legacy support playable. Battlin boxer support is printed spends over a year in ocg and printed again knowing it is completely unplayable or unallowed in every single format. The game design is obviously very privy to what works and doesnt and yet makes cards that are completely worthless on release.
Me as a forced midcore player (Priced out of every format) can relate with Paul's argument. Every now or then, there used to be a random madolche top sneaking, plunder patrol too; rogue decks that are not out of this world, but just ok, succesing into competitive environment because of the skillfulness of their players, so on local levels they were the famous "local legend". But now, people that want to have fun even at locals, are forced to play tiered strategies, the power creep right now is insane. The best example i can think of is crafting hands. If I play for example, sky striker, craft me a hand in a standard non specific counter list that wins against a maliss full board. Heck, even against non-actual meta stuff like melodious... every deck make a combo that practically makes towers turbo, because if you don't have an out of a board in your list, you don't have the slightlest posibility to beat one of this decks even against the worst player in the world. All of that effort getting new combos and theoricrafting goes to waist against post-POTE decks, it just becomes. Did you draw Lancea? Did you draw dark ruler + evenly? Did your opponent brick? Did you draw d-barrier? That's makes the games that we experience insainly frustrating and boring, just forced to play the 1-4 decks of choice even the causal spaces, because why would you spend your money in a deck that would lose to everything and won't let you have fun?
Been a Striker andy my whole life and don't agree. If anything, this format has been a breath of fresh air for the deck and almost any board save for Maliss (which is a nightmare) can be shredded to bits. Practice practice practice
@@ak47dragunov i mean, didn't striker in particular get second at a ycs during the past format? and with none of the new cards except impulse in the side deck, literally just the most vanilla striker list ever
Paul brings a lot of valid points to de majority of playes POV, that is not competitive
I believe that instead of dividing the player base further with new archetypes we should get more support for older archetypes
I feel this is a long winded way of saying rogue players are dying since power creep is way too insane rn
They just needa make the best decks not completely gap everything like obviously let the meta decks be better just not infinitely better they should have weaknesses
I don't think he understands midcore here. Midcore players play to win but they also play for enjoyment. Sure they know about the meta and keep up with competitive play but they themselves don't value trying their hardest to gain titles and prestige. Games like League of Legends, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, etc. all have ranked but most players who play them only play quick play, not because they're casual, they still play to win, but because they don't value rank and find it frustrating to be put in these tense and for lack of a better word "sweaty" environments where it feels like they have little agency. I like tcg format more than masterduel but I don't go to locals often because my locals is competative, and if I want to come with runick spright fur hire, ice barrier, or melodious, I will probably not have a great time. Because I know almost every game will be against Maliss and ryzeal. Your opponent activating more cards on your turn than you get to is extremely frustrating and very prominent in modern yugioh since we have 1 card combo decks that play a large amount of handtraps that benefit them going first and second. New top tier decks feel as though they are playing a completely different game and essentially force anyone interacting with them to be playing "ranked" when midcore players want to play quickplay. And this doesn't even delve into the price issue that for many players makes the game feel pay to win. Your cards activate to summon from hand? Unfortunately for you your opponent was able to afford donimus impulse, if only you spent your money on ryzeal cards that inherently summon themselves. Formats like the one in YCS Bologna 2023 are HEAVENLY for midcore players because no clear best deck means you have genuine viable options.
I think the real problem is there are too many non games in yugioh. Especially if you're playing with a worse deck. Getting hand trapped 3 times and then one card combo game doesn't make you want to play again.
I think that's what people mean by competitive. Games where it actually feels like you got to play.
Where is my budget meta deck? My budget Tenpai deck was killed
A problem is also the meta of the game in MD. Many mid tier players want diversity in gameplay and even chances. Momentarly it is just like the DC where you either play against Tenpai or against decks which simply put a board up which to difficult to beat because white forest centurion and snake eyes put up 6 interactions and every deck over platin is exactly this deck. And off course we newly got maxx c³ which makes it even more rng heavy.
Diversity certainly varies based on Rank.
Id say with the new maxx c meta we are seeing decks with fewer disruptions but with a heavier focus on building disruption on as few summons as possible. Voiceless voice and Labrynth seem to be getting more popularity. I think its not as RNG heavy as people think, the lab and voiceless decks can beat tenpai much easier now that they have 3 less extenders. But the problem is that it also creates unfun metas that heavily promote floodgates. I have been seeing way more traps like dimension barrier and there can be only one and thats purely because the new maxx c meta basically guarantees that your triple tactics thrust will work and that you will often be going first.
I wouldn't say the meta in MD is a problem. It has been the only format in which decks like centurion, VS, VV (albeit its making a comeback in paper) and some other low tiered decks have had more success or a stronger impression. Now if you mean a pet deck then that's a different story. You either modify it enough to beat the meta or just accept that it can't keep up. Zombie players are a good example of people that despite Konami leaving them to die for years have always found ways to make zombie piles work out.
@@Phantom770G yeah and some decks just wont work in certain metas. I like evil eye and have played it in couple of DC cups and did okay. But when branded was really a thing and everybody and their mother played bystials i had to switch. So understand your decks know what they are good and bad at and sometimes just leave them at a side because its not the time for them
Josh is so blind by his love by yugioh. I Can not understand how he does not understand the problems xd for me is very easy to get it
Speaking from my own perspective, locals in the last 2 years have gotten to the point where you must be playing the Tier 1 decks, or else you’ll get stomped with no competition. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course, but that’s I think what Paul is saying about legacy support for old decks. From 2023-now, I’ve been two 10 different locals several times in my state, and it was all the same environment despite being different people.
Locals are not casual, not any more. What happens is one person will get a top tier deck, and then stomp everyone and one of two things happen. Next week, everyone leaves, or everyone has to get new decks to compete and it destroys the casual format.
A thing that is very common in my mind now with rogue decks is the fact that people also like the "Dark Souls" Deck. Isnt very competitive and any minimal missplay you do with that deck is more unforgivable comparing other strategies, or having a less powerfull board implying u have to use your interruptions at the perfect spot or u lose.
Some people like playing those kind of decks and winning with them just to prove the fact that they can beat your meta deck with their Dark Souls deck.
Were you really trying to understand why m̶i̶d̶d̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶ midcore players are evaporating? Or did you just want to tell everyone they're wrong for feeling bad about the game's current state?
You can't just explain away a feeling if it comes from a real place even if they don't understand where it actually stems from themselves.
I may actually be the midcore Yu-Gi-Oh! player, and the reason I left the game this time was Snake-Eye, and the reason I left the game last time was Tearlament. Honestly, these broken tier 0 formats get old real fast, I'm genuinely excited for like Maliss and Ryzeal to hit Master Duel, but when the format is bad I stop playing for a while
yu gi oh player copes for 2 hours.
It’s called heart of the underdog. Ban all tier 0 and 1 decks. But support the format and make it a common thing. My locals does it once a year if we’re lucky. Josh was pretty tone deaf in his response
I think the issue in Yugioh is less "why can't my pet decks compete" and more so "where can I play lower power formats irl?" And yes, locals comes to mind. But, an issue with that of late is that a lot of the locals in peoples areas are no longer catering to Yugioh or the spaces that do are having a trickle down experience where players are shifting over to the better and better decks and not providing much room for the lower ceiling players. And yes, Master Duel is a good alternative to playing Yugioh. Only issue is that you don't really get to interact with the people on MD as you could IRL so like you cant trade cards or talk about things
Other issues kind of push midrange players out like the uptick in price points, the hyper optimization of modern Yugioh (half a deck being interruptions just in the hopes of getting to play, or this combo line and so and so) and even there still being a part of the community that's unironically toxic and telling people "well if ur not good enough you should play something else. this game might not be for you" which just sucks
konami needs to support more formats, that gives lower tier archetypes a chance to be used seriously, like the format where they made nuclear banlists and you had to pick an "era" to play.
My man Josh fighting Ghosts in the Debate ring on this one while the initial opponent waits for his turn.
Unless I’m attending a string of ycs’s, I don’t go out of my way to attend locals the way I used to. I can see his point. Most locals are just ycs prep, not particularly fun for the player who plays once a week to unwind. The pet deck comment I disagree with. You can absolutely master a rogue deck and do well at locals, the games just more complex than it was in the past, so that’s a longer and more difficult process. Great points and discourse all around though!
I think one of the unfortunate problem with Yugioh, is that unlike most other TCG, cards come as archetype. This is a lot more restrictive than just colors. There's entire archetype, with interesting gameplay loops and gimmick that will never really see the light of day since they cannot attach to existing gameplay loops or stand on their own. A lot of effort is put to giving these cards an identity that people ends up enjoying but having no place to play them. It's a real shame for those cards designer making interesting gimmick for their archetype be labeled pack filler.
Do competive players really just not understand?
i agree its not exactly a new problem, but its still a pretty big problem that stops a lot of players from really getting back into the game or staying, and i agree its not just old decks not being good anymore but a combination of everything for a "midcore" player Every single game has meta decks but at least the big ones have ways to make it not as bad. In pokemon meta decks are dirt cheap so midcore players can pick up good decks and be competitive with hardcore players, in magic theres lots of different formats so you can go play older decks in an older format, more casual pet decks in commander or play draft without so much money and deck/meta learning investment. I think if ygo decks were affordable, i'd be happy to pick up new good decks, play it without feeling like the game is p2w, and enjoy the flavour of the deck without being too hardcore about the gameplay. The combination of a hardcore player being more invested in being good at a deck and the deck being new and expensive just doesnt feel great, when you take out the expensive part and its just the person winning because they were a better player then it feels like you got what you put in. And also if ygo had draft, then i would be able to go to locals more casually, enjoy the game, open some packs and not worry about the thousand dollar meta decks for hardcore players that i would've have had to play against with my budget rogue deck.
this has a strong "misunderstood the point" vibe all over it
To me the worst thing will never be not having the top deck. I can usually find some sort of rogue I can enjoy in the format. It is a combination of the frequency of staples being printed in the $80+ range I need 3 copies of each, and when they take away tools that rogue decks hinged on to mildly hit the top decks (cards like Baron de Fleur, Apollousa, Borrel Savage, etc). For a lot of rogue decks they just get binned on the spot when they lose certain cards. The aforementioned Barrone de Fleur and Appolousa for example being the only way a rogue deck doesn't lose to Nibiru. So the rogue decks get worse with time often at a 2x-3x negative while the best decks just get pegged a .5/1. Taking something using Superheavy Samurai for example who could establish Baronne before 5th summon. You can use the argument that "it is better for the game" when they ban cards like Baronne but it's like the ducktape for rogue decks. They definitely aren't doing it for a balance reason (suggesting they are banning omni-negates when they go and print theme-based omni negates in things like Azamina right after). They could definitely do a better job of keeping the relative power level closer together, less curve, as well as better accessibility for people. There is literally no excuse for this.
My question is: When is Paul gonna appear on the podcast? I think it's overdue.
I understand this. I've always been a competitive player but oddly enough, I despise this format. I feel it's too unenjoyable to WANT to spend the money on it, despite going to large tier events regularly. I also understand the support argument; Mermail is my favourite deck, and the new support was fabulous but it also feels like it's been powercrept out of the game within a single set. How is anybody meant to enjoy their favourite decks, even when their new support can only elevate them to tier 2 at best. I feel playing as a competitive player constantly just bottlenecks you into playing 1 or 2 options, which is okay, until you hit a format where you absolutely find no enjoyment in either. (which is the case for me!)
Performpal has been my favorite archetype since release, my life has been pain for years
i got lucky enough to have vaalmonica then d/d/d as my favorites ,performapal is my 17th and i hope it stays that way
I am a semi-competitive Yugioh Player and besides expensive staples, it's really good. I am competitve in locals and sometimes I go to the German championship, which is enough for me.
HEY MOM! I am in the video! STREAMER ADRESSED ME THRICE! XD
1:06:55 , 1:13:11 , 1:16:25
So I want to say a few things. First of all thanks to Josh for actually zeroing me out and adressing the first 2 times, 1 with time wizard formats and the other with pricing and how OCG has less complaints incomparisson to us. I do feel privilaged for him actually adressing me twice. Also obviously I dont hate or dislike Josh, I never met him IRL so how could I XD? He is just a dude online and also hating someone or disliking someone while you have never met them is a dumb thing anyways. So returning back to the matter at hand. I undestand what he is saying about people complaining about pricing only and not seeing the gameplay being actually good right now. Unfortunately though I feel he is somewhat blinded by the fact that he never truly has expirienced the other side of the coin or if he did it was quite a bit back in his past as such he doesnt fully connect with peoples fraustrations on the matter nowadays. If you are a budget player/midcore player its pretty obvious to you that yugioh not only suffers from extreme powercreep but also a pricing problem. Which makes it VERY difficult as that type of player to get excited for new archetypes or releases. Since you know that there is nothing there for you or even if there are options they are so underpowered that you cant realisticly participate in the modern game in a meaningfull manner i.e. true back and forth gameplay or finishing locals with a 2-2 score, so you feel some satisfaction. This has been getting worse and worse over the last 4 years and with people seeing how much better treated OCG players are and how Konami still makes more money in OCG terrotories while treating them better makes people understandably fraustrated.
For time wizard formats now. In my case I am a very old player I have been playing from 2012, so I started playing edison since I had all the old cards to actually play the format. Though I have to be honest, the format in my eyes is barely supported and the few reprints konami does in bananza or the side events they do in YCSs are just not enough to allow for a true second way to expirience the game. Time wizard formats have the disadvantage for Konami that they are frozen in time as such they cant print new support for them, but what they can do is reprint stuff. As we have seen in Edison collectors do not mind reprints, since the old cards will always hold collectible value for being the OGs and also in most cases the highest rarity versions, so they hold their value amazingly well. So it fraustrates me very much that Edison unfortunately gets gate kept, with their not being a product were you can literaly pick up and start playing. So even if you point new players to edison, they have to go through the hoops and loops to actually get a deck to play/learn and some cards in edison are legit still quite expensive even for being commons/supers some of them. Also modern players alot of the time even if they did play yugioh for 4 or even 5 years they just never had these edison cards in their collections, so even for them its still a bit of a challenge to understand what they need or what is actually worth to play in edison. Since edison in many ways is legitimately a VERY different game from modern or post-modern yugioh, it takes time even for them to collect everything or understand the format unless they have friends to help them out. That is why I feel time wizard formats are not truly supported and just given the bare minimum, reprints in bananza were nice and a YCS side event is cool and all, but were are the edison specific products like a black wing stracture deck or an actually accessible big event like a time wizards regional or even more realisticaly a konami supported monthly shop challenge event with mat/sleeve prizes and promos of much needed cards?
A lot may consider what I am saying unfisable, but I dont think it is considering Konami is such a huge company and all the suggestions and wants people have dont really fall off from what konami did in the past to get were they are now or what they are currently doing in the OCG. This last part goes directly to Josh and that goes for around the end of the video were I tagged you and that was legitemately my bad, I got fraustrated by the chat calling for my ban and me feeling that you kinda strawmaned me for the "yugioh expensive so yugioh bad" meme. After watching it again now I can clearly see and understand you were fraustrated your self cause looking the comments in chat I understood that you must have felt dog piled like I felt at that moment. As such I do apologize it was childish of me to act the way I did in my comment tagging you. I look forwards to see more videos of you on those topics 'cause I do feel you actually have a powerfull enough voice to influence ACTUAL change in the game and the community. For now good day/night/evening to anyone that had read this and also again a thank you to Josh for actually giving me the time of day and also a sorry if I fraustrated you at the end. Adios!
My pastime now has become figuring out the meta in Master Duel and finding ways to beat it with rogue decks. There are some which are just SOL in certain formats tho. The midcore players are what YGO needs to thrive
no Archetype has to be meta or broken but every archetype has to be playable.
Josh, you are such a good boy and Konami's strongest soldier. Your check will be be in the mail shortly. Enjoy!
something that doesn't exist continues to not exist
I love the vid but i don't appreciate the frequency of "oh just go to locals to play your deck" but completely ignoring that there are players like myself who don't have access to locals for one reason or another. Sure those kinds of players are fewer than the ones who can, but i can't take my pet deck to a locals that doesn't exist and i can't bring it to a ycs either because it won't do anything.
I would say an easy fix is just more formats where you don't have to play against the top decks all the time. Heart of the Underdog was a nice idea for a format that I would love to see expanded upon.
The most simple solution I can see is something that some organized online communities have been doing for years, which is to create an alternative competitive format where aside from, or instead of, a banlist with specific cards you also have certain archetypes banned, thus creating a new meta that is perhaps balanced from the bottom if you balance what is banned well enough. Basically what Master Duel does in its side events, I think that is a great idea and those MD events have been one of the greatest drivers in recent years for people to try out different decks.
Someone in twitch chat said "bro was a Siamese cat in his past life" 💀
Sounds like people just want to be able to play in a regulated and standardized heart of the underdog format. I dont know why youre pulling it to so many different directions, its a pretty straight forward message. You`re making it seem like an unreasonable argument.
The best way for konami to solve the games price issue is to print all cards in all rarities. That way, anybody can pick up any deck, and collectors can show off by getting their deck in max rarity.
L takes from the champ. Sad
You can be good with your deck but if your opponent pays the meta deck tax and is decent you still loose . Welcome to yugioh
I think a reason less decks are explored is because the ocg play tests this all for us and this most people look at the more successful stuff first.
It's possible for a less successful deck to get recognition, but there's a barrier
This video was kinda awful, i belive Josh misses almost every point of pauls video, and directs the conversation to a perspective that is overly exageratted.
the worst thing to me is this thing with "playing a bad deck and playing worst than your opponent and expecting to win" who said that?
5:40
Yeah i can see this point. Lately like the lore dump deck de jour gets nibiru'd with support meanwhile decks that do different and interesting things like... idk...uh...Lets go with Ice Jade; That don't just ceaselessly throw up infinite negates or have 5 one card combo starters are just left in the dust after like a single wave of support instead of developed like say a fking dark magician or blue eyes deck that gets a trillion new garbage support cards before Konami finally gives up and gives them an omni-negate cause that's all they're good at doing to make any given deck strong and viable. So basically if your deck isn't Anime or the Lore dump deck, You're gonna get a grand maximum of one support wave then your deck is thrown into the ocean to fend for itself which probably really does get mega disheartening to the guys that just...wanna do something else besides setting up 10 omni negates just to get dark rulered and otk'd xD
Like some middle tier decks have more restrictions on a single card than the lore dump/T1 decks have in an entire archetype xD I feel like fun decks are just over balanced while the meta decks are the decks that aren't balanced at all xD
This doesnt change your point much, but Ice Jade was a lore archetype
@@default9314It is, but it's such a small part of the Albaz lore most people don't even know. I can guarantee most people at locals don't even know swordsoul and ice jade are directly related. People don't even realize spright is part of the same lore.
YEESSS ICEJAADES thank you it instantly made me hyped seeing someone mention my pet deeeck ^^ also about not doing a 5 negate endboard... weeell... ^^" my kyoto waterfront infinite negate version kind of does it with summoning gameciel to your side of the field turn one buuut you have to hard open the waterfront field spell so it's only 33% of the time. But I still LOOOVE IIIT ^^
@@Laflamme78 I think most people do know, simple because of Spright Smashers having the Therians, The Sprigans, And the Sprights on both the card art and effect
Around 42:00, you talk about how cards and archetypes are just Nibiru resistant. I think cards these days are printed specifically to be Ash resistant. Things like Garunix destroying from deck, Mitsurugi tributing from deck, and Diabelstar setting instead of searching is just blatantly ignoring that Ash Blossom should be able to stop these cards. It's crazy.
The closest thing to this kind of desired format is already at events: “Rivalry of the Warlords”.
Some competitive people just don’t want to pay out of the ass to play tier 2 deck. Why pay upwards of $400 for Mermail when you can hop onto one piece, buy 2 structure deck for $30 and have a tier 1.5 or even tier 1 deck.
The effort and time commitment is not the issue for these midcore players like you think it is.
I think the problem here is that not only is there a huge gap between the viability of decks in yugioh, but there's also no rotation and the way yugioh is designed as a card game just leaves individual decks to rot as the game progresses unless they are somehow miraculously brought back to life by legacy support. Decks in other card games aren't left to rot, they're either just rotated out or a specific deck is more based around certain concepts rather than an actual set cards that you have to inject super steroids into every couple for years for it to start running like usain bolt for like 9 months and then just fade back into the lower tiers. Like mono red aggro will always have a place in mtg because it's a concept rather than a set couple of cards that absolutely must be played for that deck to be called what it is called. Pokemon, on the other hand, will just take charizard ex out back and shoot it after the next rotation. I think yugioh is the very very late stage of having a card game be an eternal format. One piece is an eternal format, but it's way too young of a game for the gap between low tier petdeck and tournament meta threat to be so insanely wide. Yugioh feels like a fighting game that keeps getting stronger dlc characters, but then only ever buffs some old characters every once in a while, and most of the time the old characters don't get buffed enough for them to compete so the roster is like 95% unplayable bottom tiers, 3% playable mid to high tiers, and 2% top tiers.
I don't really play yugioh much anymore but you're channel offers high level strategy and play which is fun to watch
yugioh is also really difficult to " keep up with" because if you are playing against a deck for the first time, its almost impossible to predict how the archetype cards interact with each other and what to look for, this can be a taxing endeavor for a lot of people, imagine a returning player trying to play against snake eyes for example, there is 0 chance they would know where to interact with the opponent to have the most impact.