Yugioh is such a fucked up autistic game. The rules are impossible, there's been decades of extreme power creep...

Yugioh is such a fucked up autistic game. The rules are impossible, there's been decades of extreme power creep, and the rules text on many cards is longer than Infinite Jest.

Yet there is something magical about the game. Games are often determined in a flash, like a knife fight. But there's also ridiculous combos that let us summon huge super powerful dragons and robots with gratuitous and epic weeb art. There is no set rotation. That means you can always find a secret tech to catch your opponent off guard. And Konami will often release a handful of cards to help out an old deck archetype like they have done recently with Crystal Beasts and Destiny Heroes.

So maybe MTG is more well designed with its focus groups and huge hierarchies of researchers and developers. Maybe Yugioh is fundamentally flawed. But Yugioh has a soul and style that will never be matched. And that's why we keep coming back.

Personally, I find the whole pages-of-rules on cards and the lack of rotation are pretty much death for accessibility. If you want to learn the game, then you have to wrap your head around a staggering amount of cards with very niche effects and synergies, not helped by the general predisposition to the Old Vanguard school of cards which only work in a very narrow niche. Archetypes help to remedy this, but even then there's a staggering amount of support and staple cards to consider in a limited deck space, not to mention the Extra Deck's myriad contents.

I think it does come from me not having played since original Gladiator Beasts were meta, but right now I don't even know how to begin to play the game and frankly it feels like to produce a constructed-ready deck you need to do weeks of reading and testing to grasp the function of the game.

That said: I do agree that Yu-Gi-Oh has a certain charm to it. Text in 1.5 point, arbitrary thousands and knife-fight gameplay aside, I remember having tremendous fun tagging in and tagging out a Gaoidiaz into a Hoplomus.

Dunno, I miss it back when the Extra Deck was just the Fusion Deck.

>But Yugioh has a soul and style that will never be matched
Season Zero is the actual Yugioh though. The Yugioh that everyone knows was literally made as a cashgrab from day one. An extremely effective cash grab, but a cash grab none the less. In my opinion the game does not have a soul, because they do things like release intentionally broken cards to help a set sell. Pic not related but what comes to mind most is something like Soul Charge.

Always was for me. Back in the good old days if you didn't have to use Polymerization to get a fusion monster then it was special.

That's why I enjoyed GBeasts. The deck was all about rapidly changing and exploding your lineup and your Fusion Deck was just another part of your deck which you could use for tag team blowouts.

Never understood this guy, though. Card advantage, yes, but that was what Secutor was for, right?

I don't play YGO, so I might be missing something, but how does that card generate card advantage? It looks to me like you're trading it for a draw -- that sounds like card filtering, not advantage.

Gladiator Beasts revolve around swapping eachother out after making an attack or being attacked, where you "tag out" for another one in your deck by shuffling the one that fought back in in exchange for a new one. This usually triggers an effect of the card, like removal or, as in this card, draw.

I was always confused about Torax because he can't tag out again unlike any other GBeast and has a lackluster statline. The only thing I can really see a use for is with Secutor, a weak lizard who lets you summon two more GBeasts from your deck if it survives combat. Then it's a straight +1.

But yes. It does seem to be pretty awful and I'm unsure exactly why it exists.

>Yet there is something magical about the game.

It's the tiny adorable card size and shiny holographics.

It exists because its pack filler

I see. Thanks for the explanation.

But even if you special summon Torax through Secutor, Torax isn't providing you card advantage, is it? Secutor is.

Secutor gets you +2 CA. Torax just replaces itself, so you still have the same number of cards in total, right? If Torax didn't put itself into your deck, then it'd be +1.

Super Rare, though. I dunno. I was wondering if there was some super-secret tech my teenage mind could not process when I first played it.

I miss the days when the gimmicks was between overall types like dragons, insects ect. None of this exacting gimmicks that need you to basically replace your whole deck

So that's confirmation on it being useless then. You're quite right about the card advantage maths. Mystery well and truly solved, I suppose.

I do like the knife-fight aspect of the game and its willingness to do pretty much anything cardwise (We had goofy dinosaurs in the same universe and sets as genocide cults who resurrected ancient demons, after all).

I hate the players, the cost, the arcane fucking rulings, the way the Chain works, "misses the timing,"and basically everything else about it.

So playing it on a simulator is the best option, basically.

I understand most of the things you hate, but why Chains?

As a past and present YGO player that got back in after a 10 year hiatus, there is a charm to it. I also play MTG, but something about YGO just feels right to me. Sure, power creep is a real thing but you also have so many rogue decks that can and have beaten the meta that it is worthwhile. I prefer magician decks to most others and have made some great power plays recently against the modern Blue Eyes decks by use of Buster Blader. By supplimenting the old cards that did very well with new aspects of the game like Pendulums to speed up summons, and XYZS to help plan for situational encounters, the game hasn't really devolved but become more complex. To learn it, start by playing a classic circa 2003 or 2004 deck build without the ban list and work from there. If you know fundamentals, the new structure is a cakewalk to learn.

i used to play for a bit after a hiatus until i found out all the cards i had were either obsolete, useless or banned

also when power creep lead to 1 turn win decks becoming popular in my area i dropped it and never looked back.

i probably would only get back into it if they did a video game like duel network where every card is available but also have AI opponents as an option

There's Ygopro. Also, 1 turn win decks? OTK decks aren't meta right now. The current top decks can OTK if you let them, but so can most other decks.

I guess I've been spoiled by Magic, but the fact that you can't do anything to a chain mid-resolution annoys me.

I got back into it because some of my students play it where I teach. When I played the Joey deck box was just out, so the game was in its early stages to say the least. Having picked it back up is what got me into MtG and I enjoy them for different reasons.

Yugioh is exactly like a knife fight. I turn one managed to get a blue eyes ultimate dragon out, protect it, and one hit kill my opponent on turn two. That is the shit that makes me hard for this game. Multiple huge plays that turn a 8000 life game into a stab party.

Not him but I hate chains because it was a retarded card you had to main 3 of in every deck and it was also only available in super rare from an OOP set or something like that instead of common/rare so the price skyrocketed. Even the reprinted common or whatever was worth like $5.

I assume you're talking about Lavalval Chain. It's banned.

thanks for the blog

Fiendish Chain.

Ah. Makes more sense.

>Yet there is something magical about the game.
There really is.

I honestly think I really like archetypes as a casual that only plays online because they mean I can take a break from the game for a few months and wait for the next set to come out and suddenly have something brand new to play and keep my interest while I consider its viability and just general strategies and card synergies that could be involved in it.

It's a special kind of enjoyment that I don't really get nearly as much out of other card games and it makes YGO something I can definitely keep getting sucked back into.

Now if only the archetypes I found interesting each time weren't usually shit.

Thanks for the youtube comment

>Soul Charge
Dragons of Legend didn't really need it though, considering it had Kuribandit and Mathematician,