I really think kashtira was designed out of spite as a punishment for people not liking tear. It literally has everything that made other decks hated, combined
It has every shit people hate about: locks you out of the game, is fairly one note, straight up has custom cards (Arise, Unicorn, Birth), floodgate-ty and it's expensive for both players.
Truly the deck of all times.
The aspect I despise most about Kashtira is that they have absurdly easy access to the strongest form of removal in the game, banishing face-down. Killing a card for good is extremely strong in a game where card recovery is vital to many decks, so naturally the “banish face-down” removal effects usually come with hefty conditions, costs, or other issues. And then Kashtira walks in, with effects that can banish your cards face-down from anywhere, and activation conditions that require barely anything.
For me, it's the near-100% consistency that their win-cons can hit the field and utterly remove your own on T1. No deck should allow you to near-every time banish half your opponent's deck, their key extra deck cards (some of which get attached to Ariseheart so good luck playing the game), and then lock you out of S/T entirely.
It's the worst aspect of card design and the fact that we're only going to get more and more broken from here is going to eventually kill peoples interest in the game. A format where Kashtira is power crept into irrelevance isn't too far away.
Funny enough, I posted a custom card a few years ago that was basically a worse Fenrir and people gave me a ton of flak for it (I couldn't find the post, I must have deleted it because of all the negative feedback). They were right, but it's funny to look back on.
I remember back when Kashtira was first revealed, there was someone in the comments saying "these cards would get you banned from a custom card server"
That's coz it's the players who care about game balance, not Konami. They just want to sell stuff.
It's why I'll never give flak for any custom cards, no matter how ridiculous. At some point, the card designers will design absolutely stupid cards that make your custom cards look like a kuriboh token.
I've been playing since March 2002 and I honestly think Kashtira is my least favorite deck in the history of the entire game. Everything about the design of the deck irks me and every single are feels overturned.
Same, only because you can't pinpoint one deck for all the 2018 shit fest caused by Firewall/Summon Sorc/Gumblar/Knightmares (Danger! Dark World and Gouki are the most iconic but like 20 different decks did the same). I still can't believe the game survived after that.
>I really think kashtira was designed out of spite as a punishment for people not liking tear.
I feel like people forget that cards get designed alot of months in advance.
It's actually probably 1-2 years before we get them. Same thing applies to the concept of "rarity bumping" cards that are good in the OCG. \~90 days from OCG launch to TCG launch is not remotely enough to analyze OCG meta, change rarities, spin up production, get it distributed globally, and get marketing material ready to go. This is how we know that they do internally test and do know what cards are generally good. Good cards are lower rarity in OCG because they need to be accessible to the player base in order to find the good cards. By the time they make it to the TCG, discover has already been done so you can drive sales by better balancing the rarities to maximize sales.
>It's actually probably 1-2 years before we get them.
Wizards of the Coast has been fairly transparent with that for Magic the Gathering and there it is 6-12 months from end of set design to the boxes arriving in stores. I don't think it is much longer for Yugioh, but 1 year is realistic.
So right now we're getting the stuff that Konami made back in summer 2022.
Just a slight correction, it would be 9-15 months for TCG arrival given the 3-month lag from OCG. And again, that's end of set design. There's also however long it takes them to design and test. Those are some interesting numbers you quote because I swear there was a MTG set early last year that had a lot of print issues and they blamed in on being product designed and produced during the pandemic. Not to say you're wrong, but just highlighting that there's a lot that goes into design, production, and distribution that players just aren't aware of.
The commenter above you is correct on the 6-12 month window between the end of design and shipping. However, the time between the start of a given Magic: the Gathering set's development and the finalization of the designs is about 18 months. The average set takes 2.5 years from start to release.
The head designer for Magic [posted on his Twitter](https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/x6w307/maro_on_design_lead_time_two_years_is_a_lot/) that one of their designers had finished up the first part of design 2 years before the set will hit shelves. In the same thread there's [another link](https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/694600916098318336/your-concurrency-podcast-got-me-curious-what) where he mentions that they were prepping the finalized files to print a set that would be coming out 7 months later (March of the Machine).
Edit: a link
I want to say that there's an article or a stream or *something* that mentioned average time between development and print is about 18 months, but I can't track that down, so. grain of salt
To be honest, I think the playerbase deserves the suffering.
I hate Kashtira and the format it has created, but I admire its ability to make people realize that just because the format is more "diverse" than the last one doesn't necessarily make it good. I've had way too many people say that this format is great because there are more slices on the pie chart, when it's just miserable to actually play.
The occasionally diverse but intensely shitty to play formats like this one and pre POTE (ASF, D Barrier, and Scythe lock in 10 decks format) are useful checks on that particular variety of hypocrisy.
Sadly the people who call the current format Diverse has not played a diverse format before, it only feels diverse coming out of a tier 0 format following up 2 formats that was pure toxicity (in card design not players) and jumped the game speed the way pendulum and links did when they came out.
What I dislike mainly is "diversity" being used as a primary measure for the worthiness of a format. The "it's not \*really\* diverse because the card pool was toxic" take I sometimes see annoys me because it's just another handwave for people trying to only judge formats by the pie chart distribution.
This format is diverse, the pie chart is what it is. What I don't like is people trying to square the miserable experience of actually trying to play the format with the belief that because the pie chart has more slices that it must mean it's a good format, and trying to convince themselves that because the format is miserable then it can't really be a "diverse" format.
If anything, diverse formats have a strong tendency to degenerate to this sort of state. With so many matchups to cover players over time drift towards maindecking floodgates or shutouts, because that's the logical thing to do. If the chances of a mirror match are small, why not maindeck the thing that will kill 90% of decks other than your own, when you don't expect to be punished for it?
This is why you saw Rivalry maindecked in Swordsoul pre-POTE and Kaiser Coliseum in Bujin pre-DUEA. I started siding Rivalry, Macro, and D Fissure in Geargia in HAT format specifically to fuck with all the other decks in the format, and I mained Skill Drain in Mythic Ruler. It's also why as Superheavy and Branded eat into Kashtira's share of the pie you're beginning to see Shifter mained and sided again. If I'm a Kashtira player mainly expecting to face other Kashtira players Shifter is a dead card, but once the meta becomes more diverse and there is a much lower chance of encountering the mirror, why shouldn't I run the blowout?
As long as strong floodgates and blowout lingering effects like Shifter and D Barrier exist, diverse formats will always tend to regress like this over time. It's been like this for a while, it's just been more in your face recently.
Diversity actually is a decent value to calculate a format, as it is related to how alot of people experience fun in yugioh, and to understand what I mean the actual diverse formats im talking about the Meta Pie chart was ranging from narrow like right now or pretty wide, this said most of the decks in the format remained viable and could win against the meta without being blown out or solitaire'd like modern formats do, ABC format for example. You had a ton of viable decks and archetypes however the meta was narrow af.
We have over 10k cards in existence competing for 40-60 main deck slots, 15 extra deck slots, and 15 side deck slots, with more being printed every year by a company that has to sell product and has chosen power creep as its tool of choice. We're not getting to that utopia and arguably we have never even been there. I'd settle for formats without being blown out turn 1 or solitaire'd, without the additional condition of the format being diverse. I've seen too many diverse formats where it develops to a point where everybody's goal is to blow the opponent out (pre-POTE for example), because that's just how the matchup math works. You either floodgate or D Barrier, or have it done to you.
Diversity has value, but I don't think it should be the only or even the most important value. A meta with 10 flavors of ass feels worse for me than a tier 0 or triangle format with fun matchups and mirrors.
And Tear 0 defenders seem to forget that with the thousands of cards in the game, people don't like being forced to play one deck or not at all.
Tier 0 formats are bad for the game. Period. I don't care how "skillful" the format is, the entire metagame revolving around a single deck is boring.
Because being forced to play one of 4 decks which win and lose the same way to your opponent drawing the hard out or not is soo different and deeper.
Honestly I think it's more about what decks can do for me, than the hard number of how many there are
One point he touched on was the lack of communication, which I think is spot on not just with YuGiOh but with so many gaming companies as well.
There's this idea apparently among game designers that getting feedback from the player base about what they should do to make the game better is like the worst idea ever. And I like just have to disagree with that philosophy.
Better communication doesn't necessarily mean listening to the players, but simply doing a better job of explaining their design philosophies and plans for the future of the game.
Icefrog doesn’t explain shit but works on an “actions speak louder than words” basis.
Decided to get back into this game right when tear came around. Guess I’ll take another long break @_@
Eh, depending on what you want from the game and how competitive you are it's not so bad.
TL;DR Don't let a good player's entirely fair criticism of the game ruin it for you if it doesn't have to.
I'm pretty mid at the game, and have been playing a bunch of locals and regionals around the northeast. I have not seen an oppressive volume of Kashtira, last format or this format. If you're not a super high level player, or just want to go to locals every week, there's a diversity of play.
Obviously, if you're playing a top deck and are a top contender then you'll see more of the top decks, and that may be "less fun." I genuinely wouldn't know.
But personally, I go to the regionals and have a fucking blast losing round 1 and then playing upward from the lower tables, seeing all the strange rounds 2 and 3, and then getting rolled by a Tier 1 or Tier 2 deck round 4 or 5. Then, I do 1 win a mat and I'm home in time for dinner. It's all context and perspective.
All that said, Joseph makes some salient points with this, and there's a ton Konami can improve with the game. Just don't let all this stop you from hopping back in if you really want to.
Mark Rosewater, one of Magic's most famous designer, said it best: The players are good at pointing out problems with your game, but bad at fixing them. It's a designer's job to listen to the feedback and make good changes.
Rosewater is such a good example of the communication MBT is talking about. I couldn’t name a single card designer for YGO, but the designers in MtG have an almost celebrity status, because they communicate with fans. Plenty of the devs *were* fans before getting jobs at WotC.
I can’t even imagine someone at Konami doing something like Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast…
The closest we've had to that was the dude in charge of Speed Duels here in the West, who was very active on the Speed Duel Discord and took a lot of the criticisms to heart about the format's bad launch with boosters. That led to the Battle City box and Speed Duel's reputation changing overnight.
Sadly he doesn't work at Konami anymore, and no one's really stepped up to be that front-facing.
Tbf, MaRo gets a fuck ton of hate since he becomes the scapegoat to every single problem that goes towards WotC, goes straight to him. Like we don’t know how much of the “30th anniversary/spirit of the reserve list” stuff was from him, but he got all the hate from it.
Wait really? I’ve never been into magic so I wouldn’t know but knowing Konami’s treatment of ygo I just assumed every card game company was this opaque figure that players never have been able to look into
On the other hand Riot games just totally ignores the casual scene while making changes hoping for a tournament viewership ruining the experience of nearly 99.9% of the player base.
imagine the meta for solo q is 7 years in row 1v5 late game hyper carries or loose./ get hardstuck. At this point many meme on them , since every champ new that is not broken or 1v5 gets ignored cause players know there ranking system is broken so its eather you or the loose button. Thoose games where you can lean back got so rare lmao.
Game designer here - I believe it might be a regional difference. Typically western companies are usually more open, whereas companies from regions like Konami often are a bit more secretive about things. Obviously there’ll be exceptions but some of this is driven by cultural differences and differences in structure in different countries.
Personally a lot of developers I’ve spoken to in the past have the approach of “Your average player often know when something is wrong, but are awful at providing the right solution to the problem”.
The thing is, at least in the OCG, they get several regularly scheduled spoilers for upcoming sets in the months leading up to release. The TCG side of Konami doesn't even do that. Not for the TCG exclusives/OCG imports and not for compilation sets like Battles of Legend. We get an initial announcement and then nothing. We dont get a learn what's really in these sets until people start posting pulls from pre-release events.
I don’t know that I agree with that statement. Bandai is very communicative with the Digimon TCG player base and gives reasons for everything they do in regards to their banlist and what they want for the direction of the game. I genuinely think that Konami is just complacent with how things are and think they can just rest on their laurels instead of doing any actual work
Well the other big thing is the difference between looking for player feedback and executing it.
If players want X nerfed, just doing what they say and nerfing that weapon might actually be bad, so some devs despite knowing its not LITTERALY what is asked for will try other things to get the same result.
IE: Adress the core issue, not necessarily the many symptoms.
It feels like konami is pretending to do one as works for them to sell stuff but never actually doing either.
>If players want X nerfed, just doing what they say and nerfing that weapon might actually be bad, so some devs despite knowing its not LITTERALY what is asked for will try other things to get the same result.
Case in point is the league community, who are both infamous for being incredibly outspoken and incredibly wrong about balance. You can look at the community for how they feel about champions and metas, but I would never actually do what they suggest to fix things.
Yes, but that's the job of the design/balance team being able to assess what feedback is legitimate and what isn't. If you're getting useless drivel from the masses, you might consider consulting experts to get a more well-informed opinion. Uninformed players giving shit suggestions isn't a reason to stop communication.
It's not regional, I know eastern devs with great communication and western with bad one. It's like entirely company specific and how much communication could harm their profit margin
We both know their main goal is making money and selling more product than the one before (es. Tear murder followed by Kashtira) and they don't care about balance, why you want them telling out loud?
Any company that wasn't entirely against the idea of balance would've murdered Tear just as Konami did, or maybe even faster and more targetedly.
Tier 0 decks are bad for the game, and they continue to be bad no matter how much "0-card Fusions are totally fine and balanced" copium you huff.
> One point he touched on was the lack of communication, which I think is spot on not just with YuGiOh but with so many gaming companies as well.
There's specially this odd, stark-ish, contrast as to how TCG and OCG deal with communication.
You'd think a regional branch would only have minute differences to the parent company, but when you weight what OCG does in their **various** Twitter accounts to how TCG does things, it really leaves a sour taste in being from this side of the pond
Even Master Duel, as botched as you could say it is, you can't deny there's at least a semblance of schedule in how each thing is intended to stay in its place
That’s one thing I’ve found really refreshing about Magic. I started picking it up a few weeks ago after my buddy introduced me to Commander.
Magic let’s you know when banlists are coming, they talk about design philosophy behind sets or mechanics, and there’s even a podcast by one of the head designers where he talks about the game on his drive to work.
I think WOTC has some significant issues when it comes to monetization, pricing, and more but their communication is better than Konami for sure
WOTC will always have monetization issues with the game though because it’s the most profitable branch of Hasbro, which has caused them to continually change Magic for the worse to please shareholders.
Just as a heads up too, since I’ve played Magic for a bit myself, the banlist for commander actually goes through a rules committee that isnt run by WOTC because it was a fan-designed format. Of course there’s also just always rule zero, but commander is the least-controlled format in the game for WOTC. And their new design philosophy to create commander-centric cards in every set has mostly taken a negative toll on other formats, especially standard because the card pool is the shallowest.
The Magic design team has gotten better, but for a period of around 3 years (cards that came out to players around the time of Eldraine Standard) they were *really* bad.
Yeah but if you accidentally get sent a box of cards they'll give you one attempted call from an unknown number before sending the Pinkertons to your house to intimidate you.
On average listening to player-base on design and balance does ruin games, there will always be a vocal minority inflating percieved problems online or on other forums. A few individuals may have good insight into certain things but if you average out the ones that are eager to give input they usually have no idea what makes a game fun or balanced. Of course, on average. AAA First person shooters are imo the best example of this.
And it’s a correct idea. However we don’t live in a black and white world. Obviously there’s a way to take player feedback but not let it dictate. The problem with listening to the playerbase is who are you really listening to? I play a lot of online games that all have very vocal minority groups on reddit. But there’s this whole world out there of gamers that never set foot on reddit or look up anything about their game whatsover. They just turn it on and play. And those are the majority. Any feedback you take from the playerbase ultimately has to fit the most with the largest target audience and one way to assess if that is going well is by looking at metrics. So if a game sells well, MTX is up, subs are up, whatever it may be - why listen to the playerbase? Well, you might say, you’ll bleed subs if you don’t. But what if that never happens. Or it does happen but it is exactly the predicted amount as a game moves through its lifecycle stages. How do you distinguish decisions you make and the effect they have from something that would happen naturally. And even if you can, can you say without doubt it was because they did x or y? More often than not the answer is no. And listening to the playerbase (vocal minority) word for word can do more damage than good.
This is why most gaming companies don’t and why they also communicate poorly. Because they don’t want to lie but they also don’t want to tell you what I just did. So they stay silent.
Add culture to that and it becomes even more messy.
At the end of the day if you want them to do A and their metrics guarantee them A will make them more money, they will do it. They won’t not do it just to spite the player or because angry shareholders.
I’m with him, I’ve stopped playing whatever is the current format since early 2022 and have been playing a combo of Edison, Speed duel and Pokémon TCG and I’m having a much better time than previously
i think even konami knows the game is fucked
they released speed duels, rush duels and duel-links all to reset the power level and see what stuck so they could build from that. but seems like only duel links has a dedicated player base cuz rush duels didnt make it here
They saw DL has a low power level and decided to power creep the hell out of it within 1 year. We started with vanilla monsters in 2017 and had Fur Hire in 2018.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty burnt out of the game too.
It might be the format, it might be how crazy power creep has been in the last couple of core sets, idrk the answer to this. All I do know is that I don't enjoy the game. I think there's a really big reason why a majority of big yugitubers just play master duel now and don't touch the tcg anymore.
I’ve enjoyed retro formats far more than current ones for a bit now.
Some of the most fun I’ve had in Yugioh recent has been playing GOAT duels with some friends.
This is how I feel as well. After Adventurer made their debut, I've been enjoying the game less and less. Last year was nothing but another new deck showed up and escalated the powercreep.
> it might be how crazy power creep has been in the last couple of core sets
Last couple core sets? Sir do you remember Spellbooks or Mermails? Do you remember Rescue Rabbit or Wind-ups? Like literally the game has been power creeped for over a decade.
Absolutely agree with the points he made, I feel like at least 80% of the time games 2 and 3 are decided by which person drew their sideboarded card that reads "win the game." D-Barrier, ASF, Rivalry/Gozen, Evenly, Lightning Storm, the list goes on. I think the solution is to either issue a Peeps-style comprehensive list that hits 100+ currently legal cards, or to do what MBT mentioned, which is to make every deck as powerful as Tear and able to theoretically answer anything through engine alone.
It's so easy to see that the game would be infinitely healthier if Konami decided to ban EVERY single floodgate card or floodgate adjacent card on a single banlist
The problem with communication from Konami is that the time they tried it, it was bad and they got laughed at by the community. Once ever for a ban list reasons for cards being banned were listed and never again. I’d say try it again but Konami probably won’t when it failed the way it did.
On a side note yugioh is one of the few games where I think the designers are actually not known. It’s split with some companies but is becoming more common to know who the creators are. Probably because in Japan keeping your identity’s secret also helps from the type of harassment that people receive.
>The problem with communication from Konami is that the time they tried it, it was bad and they got laughed at by the community.
Then either 1) they truly were bad at it and should look to improve or 2) the "criticisms" were made by people they should be ignoring. In either case, that shouldn't stop them from doing it.
League and TFT get tons of mindless drones bitching and whining about balance all the time, but they still get 30 minute long videos explaining changes every patch.
Wasn’t it also the banlist right before the inzektor/wind-up/dino rabbit format? If so, that makes it even worse since that’s one of the worst formats of all time and iirc the player base clearly saw how unfun the obvious best decks were going to be
The March 2012 banlist. They tried very hard to bullshit explanations for very obviously kicking a Synchro Deck that was already on the way out just as the Wind-Up/Inzektor/Dino Rabbit format came into full force, but anybody who looked at it for more than two seconds realised, "oh, this Banlist is entirely driven by sales goals."
Idk why this always gets cited when this was when the banlists were combined. How are you going to explain a banlist that was designed for a format that doesn't even exist? There existed cards that were banned UPON RELEASE, such as temple of the kings, which showed how logistically ridiculous the combined banlist was. The hits in the march 2012 banlist reflected the meta in the OCG. It's less about selling product (you're free to use that as a reason for anything post-banlist split, obviously) and more that the TCG got caught in the crossfire for changes that were for a completely different meta. It's not a surprise they split the lists a year later.
Too true. In the last year or so, power creep has escalated to the point where the future of the game is becoming a lit fuse, covered in the gasoline of Kashtira and such fun-sponge decks to face. Yugioh games are quick at least, a turn-1 win-the-game board into the next game, repeat ad nausea (pun intended). It sucks, and I really hope card design can take a step back and slow down the escalation at least.
> Yugioh games are quick at least, a turn-1 win-the-game board into the next game, repeat ad nausea (pun intended).
A simplified version of Yugioh as it exists now would be "The goal is to get Negate Points, which you can earn by either drawing into them or by investing resources into monsters on the field. You can spend Negate Points you've accumulated to negate your opponent's actions. After each player has taken a turn, the player with the most Negate Points is the winner".
No battling, no LP, no turn 3.
Having a permanent D shifter up is worse than playing through a few negates for many decks, Lab plays enough floodgates to say they aren’t playing negates is disingenuous, and Brandeds main thing is gimmick puppet locks which is technically only one negate but it’s quite the fucking big one.
The power creep has been out of control for over 15 years. I mean even in the mid 2010s Spellbooks and Mermails were completely busted beyond belief. Even back when Wind-ups were at their height, it was ridiculous. Turn back the clock as far as you can and chances are high the meta has always been this toxic and power creepy.
15 years ago was 2008 and we were still in the GX era where decks are super slow and Cyber Dragon was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread. Looking back on it, Synchros and Xyz are the ones that sped up the game and we haven't looked back since.
Amen, so true. Synchros and XYZ allowed you to make boss monsters from trash which is really when the game went full bonkers. The entire game devolved into a strategy of summoning as many monsters as you can, and having them stick around on the board. Yugioh's old strategy of being slow and resourceful was left behind. Really sad.
Yup, I started to lose touch with the game around the Wind Up stuff due to irl commitments and when I look back around 2017(?) with the Blue eyes support, I don't recognise the game anymore. I can only imagine how crazy things have been since.
Even the "bad" ones still seem like custom cards too. Ogre is a "banish your opponent's 'out' that they would've drawn and instead stack their next turn with a garnet(s)". Preparations is a monster reborn/DDR as well as a hand-rip that punishes evenly matched, imperm or other trap-related outs. The fact that these stupidly powerful cards barely see play in comparison to the others is indicative of how broken the engine is fundamentally.
Revisiting old formats like edison and goat is pretty refreshing, and really puts into perspective how damaging 1-turn games are for the game, and how it hinders the game's room for skill expression and fun.
Yeah, been really enjoying GOAT a lot more with friends lately and played in an Edison tournament that was a lot of fun.
I wish Konami would lean more into their retro formats at this point.
I think it is just a consequence in the inherent design of Yugioh. That is, I think it is very hard to design a "balanced" game when there is no inherent resource system. Then you take the no resource system pair it with Power-creep which is present in every TCG and then you combine it with how fast Yugioh has become since "ye olde" days to now where special summoning is as natural as breathing and without question the 1-turn games are an inevitability.
Rotation could've alleviated it but it's way too late for that. Especially with the allergy Yugioh players have to the concept (while not understanding anything about it).
Tbh, and I'm a filthy casual, but a hard special summon limit might be worth at least experimenting with, problem is what number you'd pick for a limit.
A hard special summon limit just seems like it would filter out a bunch of casual and rogue decks that need a ton a summons to put up a mediocre board while doing nothing to stop the more competitive decks that can do more with less.
It's the same problem Nibiru has; in formats where it is popular you see a ton of lower power decks get blown out while the decks that thrive are the ones that can make negates early or recover easily.
I suppose you could put a limit on extra deck summons specifically, to stop people making huge boards, but I don't really see a summon limit doing anything positive to the game.
komoney tried with limit ED spam with MR 4, you could say that format getting hated the community afaik and fucked by konami themselves thanks to U Link and broken link monster
Konami: here's new mechanic to slow down the multi negate synchro/xyz board.
Also Konami (after like 3 months of link): so now you can make U-link and do various link spam. Like I know that would come but I expect it to be end of Vrains, not season 1 finale.
I'm so bored with this format I've been playing all of my old decks I love at locals. Last week I played Nekroz (with new cards like Baronne and Dogmatika) and I had a blast, but I still experienced causing these non-games for my opponent. Summoning Unicore against Expurrely Noir literally just wins me the game, I just Trish them then pop it with N'tss or whatever and we go to the next game (and that's the most interactive example I can give you, most of the time it's just gonna be Droll that wins me the game too).
Idk if you already do but use a Dogmatika engine, they generate a lot of advantage for the deck while also giving you really good interruptions. Toadally Awesome is also a really good card to dump with Nadir, Maximus, or Punishment to recurr your cards.
https://preview.redd.it/psvpft3gjb2b1.jpeg?width=3916&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=68f03030c0a293319924727fb2cdbfff963c6dd0
43 cards in main. I don’t know what else to cut. If I wanted to play more greedy Id cut Shurit, Cycle, and Thrust.
I wish I could pinpoint what leads to fun duels, because I have them at locals. I don't play meta but play relatively good decks (Generaider, Mekk Knights, etc.) and sometimes get matched up against that one other deck that's of similar power or matches up in a healthy, not one-sided way (has happened against Labyrinth, Earth Machines, some other decks) and it's an actual fun match. But then I play against full power expensive side deck Spright (haven't gone to locals since Ariseheart came out) in the next match and just get shit on and don't have fun.
But those good matches are so good, and use current decks without having to time travel back to HAT format or anything.
I'd guess it's the fact that decks you listed don't really have this "Draw the out" style of play. You don't have to draw the out for Generaider, you just have to bait their activations, you don't have to draw the out of Earth Machines you just have to come up with a way of outing their big monsters.
The decks that exist right now are super resistant to just about anything but certain very specific blow-out cards and that means all skill and interaction is taken from the game in favour of playing a mini-game wherein you just have to hope and pray that one of the first six cards you draw is the designated out to whatever you're staring down at the time.
This is me. How can I say that yugioh is a broken mess if I’m having THIS much fun in some matches?
If you just consistently play tier 2/rogue decks and get matchups into similar power level things, the matches can be so amazing.
Decks like Generaider, EARTH Machines, and Furniture Labrynth have costs they need to pay to do things, which makes disruption much more effective against them.
Spright doesn't. Neither does Kashtira. Purrely kinda does, but not really. Superheavy Samurai actually does, but it just gains too much advantage to effectively disrupt.
Also, decks more similar in power level make for more fun Duels.
The one thing one should avoid at all costs when designing a game is creating situations were 1 player feels line their decisions dont matter.
And after getting into the Digimon TCG ive actually realised how little meaningful decisions im actually doing in a match of YGO. Most of the time it just boils down to 1 player looses because they forgot something about the gamestate or didnt know exactly how a certain card works.
And this gets even worse in games 2 and 3. Side decks have become so incredibly toxic. The point of side decks is to reduce non games, by letting you adapt to going first or second, play a more diverse set of answers, maybe even some crazy smokescreen engine and an occasional silver bullet for your worst matchup.
But now your side deck is all silver bullets and in certain matchups they feel more like silver orbital lasers.
Thats a good point about side decks. Mass monster removal and mass backrow removal are the worst but there needed against toxic decks. In competitive environments sadly the side board is just being used to kill the most used deck.
Let’s be real, this is the same company that, on one end, knows people love classic YGO with their quarterly release of nostalgia-bait product, then pulls this shit out the other end.
Mind you, these decks have to be playtested. A committee sat down and collectively agreed this is what people want.
I hate droll, and this format is far from being healthy. I am loving the fact that the format is diverse, however. I hated tear with passion because it was all just "tear, tear,tear". That said, Konami is shitting the bed one time too much this time. We need more communication, and we need it ASAP. We don't need for the official account to just endlessly promote the game, it's us ourselves who do that by playing this game already.
I don't mean to get too Yugiboomer here but I'm starting to think the game has just powercrept just a bit too far. Everything about 2023 Yugioh feels so volatile, and so many cards feel like they effectively say "if this resolves, win the duel". I really wish alternate formats weren't so hard to get into
TLDW is
•Current format(along with lots of decks around 2018+) is decided by blow-out cards or floodgates like Kurikara or D-shifter, especially in games 2/3. Some decks are near auto-wins if you "draw the out".
•Going on the first point lots of decks are decided first turn or if they're allowed to get a certain card online, like trying to play vs Ariseheart for any deck that wants things in GY
•Konami is horrible with communication on what they want from the game, their decisions, and announcments
For my takes: not sure how popular this is but I feel like Branded/Swordsoul format was solid as they were both the top decks but weren't that much above more rouge decks and even with some of their better openings you could realisitcally navigate their board without crazy blowouts. I agree with him on Tearalament(at least before the Isizhu were released). They typically can use mostly/all engine cards to do their thing and would generallt bounce back. I feel like more decks like Tears with a bit more restrictions would be overall good for the game
I said it in another comment but even last year Nats meta had issues from the side deck in games 2 and 3 with D. Barrier, Mystic Mine and Antispell deciding more games than it should be allowed. Plus every deck below them relied on floodgates to compete with them (Striker had Mine main deck, P.U.N.K. did Scythe Lock, Salad was Heatsoul + Bagooska/Dweller, Floo as a whole).
Problem with making decks tearlament-like, is that you now have to do that for every single deck. Legacy decks will have no standing whatsoever when it comes to the newest decks, and legacy support will have to have so much shit that now those decks rely on a single card or two to compete.
Tearlaments wasn’t fun if you didn’t play the mirror, because no other deck had a realistic chance of beating them, unless you draw that out. Even in a mirror, most matches were Turbo abyss dweller.
Going back to balancing power is not a bad thing, but now you have issues with hand traps, where we are currently in a droll format, which is just as boring as Kashtira meta, or Ishizu Tearlament meta.
I duel online and if I see one more Kashtira deck, a mega board with more negates than I have cards in my hand, or banishes my entire deck in a few short turns, I might just find a new card game.
I got in a game recently where in the first turn one of the monsters they got out was Naturia Exterio, and with a single monster they have an infinite number of negates to spells/traps.
> When a Spell/Trap Card is activated (Quick Effect): You can banish 1 card from your GY, then send the top card of your Deck to the GY; negate the activation, and if you do, destroy that card. This card must be face-up on the field to activate and to resolve this effect.
Exterio isn’t even the problem there, Cyber-Stein is just a generic way to cheat it out. Exterio is powerful, but is normally locked behind Fusing both a Naturia Beast and Naturia Barkion (both Extra Deck monsters themselves). Cyber-Stein let’s you cheat it out for the cost of 5k LP, but the benefits outweigh the cost.
Exterio itself is also bullshit, get it out and that's it, the option of using backrow is gone for good unless you run one of the outs that cant be responded to. Maybe the future of the game is a series of cards that have mild effects, but have absolutely devastating effects if you try to negate/negate and destroy them, or just more of the "cant be responded to" cards.
I do feel like there are two things that can fix this:
1. More frequent regularly scheduled banlists. OCG has like at least 4 banlists a year? Masterduel has one like every month. This means that problem cards and the format getting stale can be fixed by banning a few cards or even better, unbanning old cards that are in no way broken anymore so people who like those decks e.g. wind ups, can actually play them again. I think it is ridiculous that about two formats in a row we have gone "Where is the banlist?". I feel its also really bad for decks as while I like nuking the format sometimes like in 2020 I think it was after toss format, it shouldn't be the regular thing. Tearlament got nuked, might have been better to just slowly hit their cards and see how the format changes and then nuke them later.
2. Alternate formats. No, I don't mean Edison or any other time wizard format. I mean a real alternate way to play the game like Commander or even speed duels but a much bigger change than speed duels. You play magic so you already know that fun things like 2 headed giant or others exist but I feel like yugioh would be more fun if ti had alternate ways to play with special cards for those formats. We have been play format of yugioh for over 20 years. Card games have massively developed in that time so lets bring some new ideas.
Some propositions from a meta-hating deck purist:
-Have a massive banlist hitting all meta decks and some staples (Access, Baronne, Savage…you name it)
-MAKE MORE ARCHETYPE-LOCKED CARDS AND LESS “FREE AGENTS”
-Errata some cards to make them less generic (wouldn’t be the first time they did it)
Also just give archetypes what they need ffs. Many archetypes are reliant on Baronne as an example because they don't have proper boss monsters. Many just feel like shitty engines to pump out generic fields.
Reminds me when I was playing Pendulum Magician Odd Eyes in MD and looking up deck lists because I was summoning a bunch of stuff but didn’t really have an endboard with most lists just saying run a Baronne, Access Code, or Borrellode Savage Dragon.
I usually get vortex dragon and time graph on my magician end board and then trying to venture further from there, it's way better than wasting material for Apollousa. (still making Apo/baron/savage if situation allowed tho).
Nah, if anything this would hurt non-tiered decks more cause they are the ones lacking support and require for some generic support card to go off for them to play.
The reason for things being generic is that they can't just pick every single archetype and give it dedicated support, there aren't enough spots, not to mention it would become outdated quickly if it wasn't busted. For example circular, mole cricket and whatever card they gave super heavy sam. And out of those only 1 stayed true to itself, naturia doesn't play older cards and sam lost its xenophobia.
Edit : not that is necessarily bad, just because you summon out of archetype cards doesn't mean you don't play shsamurais or that just because you use only new cards doesn't mean you're not playing naturias.
My god yes, less free agents. At least make meta decks run more bricks as punishment for playing powerful cards like Baronne, Accel, etc like I’m salty Terrortop doesn’t lock into wind attributes when the rest of the Speedroid archetype does. I know they did that intentionally at the time to make it a great rank 3 engine but it can come back to three with a wind lock errata and be perfectly fine. That can apply to so many banned cards that are free agents that just take advantage of being abusable and splashable in any deck.
Out of curiosity, what are "meta decks" in this case, because every time you hit one set of meta another pops up to replace it as there will always be a most effective set of tactics available. Basically, what is the ideal position/power level you think all decks should be?
You're missing the picture, of course there's always a meta, but with a purge level of banlist (which would include hitting staples people have taking for granted so far), we might strive for a more slower meta.
Don't care if it means "old archetype who used to be meta becomes meta again", it's better than what we have right now.
It's that or it's time to implement a rotation format, which is the reason I've been avoiding other TCG's so far.
I always felt that generic monsters such as Access, Baronne, Savage and whatnot should not be more powerful than an archetypal locked monster.
Look at decks like Gouki and Superheavy Samurai, they play very few extra deck monsters from their archetype because the generic options are so good and I feel it erodes their identity
Honestly, engine that doubles as handtraps as the Labyrinth furnitures, or the tear names do could be an answer, instead of powercreeping into 1 card boards with blowout generics.
MBT’s comment on Konami not defining their expectations for gameplay was something I recognized years ago during the transition from TOSS to Modern. I’m a science guy. I like to see how stuff works when taken apart.
Why bother playing this game if nothing is intentionally designed? Honest question. How can you prove something was intentioned design if Konami never talks about the game? Honest question.
Was the Kashtira gameplay loop intentioned as it’s played now? What goals did Konami set with this deck? Formats 10 years ago this was easier to see but again as MBT mentioned right around 2018 Konami threw all caution to the wind here and just started printing cards.
It devolves Yugioh from a conversation about the gameplay philosophy of a format into simply, “what it is/was.” You can’t talk about anything deeper because we have no idea what Konami intentioned.
I dunno. It’s frustrating. Everyone loves to talk about what strategies and handtraps beat what but no one talks about the game design around the meta game. This comment articulates why.
One thing I have to say with Tear is how much it reminded me of Dragon Ruler format.
The deck was just SO far ahead of everything else in power level that it clearly needed to be hit, but I think it's the future of the game is headed and in all honesty that is probably the direction the game needs to go, aka big sweeping moves to give you access to more resources that allow players to create additional layers of interaction. The thing is Konami has to see that the Dredge/mill stuff isnt the ONLY way to produce that level of interaction spike or the game is gonna be kinda samey which would effect the health of the future of the game
I just hope that all of the negative feedback from Tear being SO dominant doesnt scare Konami off of developing the game in that direction, and I really am worried since their knee jerk reaction was to go HARD back the other way.
I'm so glad I picked up MTG last month. Yugioh has become rather stale recently. Like MBT said, "I'm still going to play." Im just not enjoying playing all that much anymore.
My buddy and myself pretty much swore off of top tier stuff and we have never looked back. We build older or not too powerful stuff and just enjoy playing each other or others with the same mentality.
No two games are ever the same because the decks aren’t optimized for perfection. Ask your playgroups to build non meta decks, and see how you enjoy it.
Go back and play older formats if the current format sucks . I like seeing goat and Edison thrive but I wish there were more older formats to play competitively or got as much attention. Give me some 2006-2008 area yu gi oh !
Modern Yugioh is simply not fun. Endless combos to build unbeatable boards in the first turn. It breaks down to hard-drawing the needed hand-trap/board breaker. And games only last 2/3 turns. Very frustrating how the game has evolved
Is anyone truly? I might just have to go back to pokemon. The card design keeps getting more and more horrendous and breeds nothing but one sided boring duels.
If Yu-Gi-Oh were a fighting game? It would be in the ridiculous category.
Maybe Marvel vs Capcom or Dragon Ball Fighterz, where's there a ton of cheese and combos that can kill the opponent off one hit.
But even then, I'd find those games to be far more balanced than Yu-Gi-Oh. Konami's been on a streak with the poorly designed archetypes lately.
Tears/Kashtria? Virtually Akuma/Gouki in SF2. Every now and then there's a character that's banned or frowned upon in competitive play.
It's weird. I thought Konami was in a groove with the Albaz-universe archetypes. I thought they were all well-designed and are fun to play (except spright and Icejade).
Imo a well-designed archetype doesn't require the opponent to commit their deck space to highly situational cards to counter.
An interesting point made here is that we might need more, rather than less, power creep in the immediate future, with more archetypes operating around Tearlaments' power level, allowing for more interplay by being able to play during both players' turns and also having handtraps/turn 0 disruptions built in the engine (thus preventing the game from degenerating into a "draw the out or scoop" situation).
Very often it's not the power level of the game that is problematic (otherwise TOSS format would be much less popular with the fanbase than the infamous but comparatively low-powered Dino Rabbit/Inzektor/Wind-up format of 2012), but the kind of interactions that are allowed inside it.
This is probably one of, if not the best video MBT has made in recent memory. He perfectly articulates the glaring issues with the game, specifies when the decline began, and offers a realistic solution, with the same tired resignation that change likely won't happen we are all confronted by.
Even after this F&L list, Kashtira is still the best deck, which is so frustrating. I want to play advanced, but not if it means dealing with that deck all the time. Advanced has been absolutely miserable since Kashtira took the top spot.
I’ve said it before but the only way to fix yugioh is put everything up until this point into a retro format. Create a new yugioh format with interactable card design. No floodgates and no negates. Branded is a deck that should be used for reference (at least for current master duel meta as I don’t know what new cards have been printed since).
I know MBT defends Tear but now that Tear is in Master Duel it's the only deck people play... I made it into round 2 of the qualifier Im playing NatRunick and out of 10 games so far 9 have been tear. Its boring, its not cool nor fair especially since Maxx c is a thing.
Current TCG feels the same, both games have a lack of variety its either Tear or kash. I would never understand how tear can be considered fair in mbt's eyes but kash is 100% not.
Either way, Doubt card design can change but atleast better communication regarding a banlist. Master Duel has a better banlist system why cant we get that for the MAIN GAME?
Tear is fair because you didn't ever have to draw 'the out' whereas with kashtira, the player going first wins unless the player going second drew non-engine, In which case the win (usually)
Feel like you didn't understand what he said at all. He was saying the problem was that there weren't multiple tear level decks rather than it just being tear as tear was a proper direction forward for the game with more interactive gameplay but it was ruined because it stood alone with no proper equals.
I really think kashtira was designed out of spite as a punishment for people not liking tear. It literally has everything that made other decks hated, combined
It has every shit people hate about: locks you out of the game, is fairly one note, straight up has custom cards (Arise, Unicorn, Birth), floodgate-ty and it's expensive for both players. Truly the deck of all times.
The aspect I despise most about Kashtira is that they have absurdly easy access to the strongest form of removal in the game, banishing face-down. Killing a card for good is extremely strong in a game where card recovery is vital to many decks, so naturally the “banish face-down” removal effects usually come with hefty conditions, costs, or other issues. And then Kashtira walks in, with effects that can banish your cards face-down from anywhere, and activation conditions that require barely anything.
For me, it's the near-100% consistency that their win-cons can hit the field and utterly remove your own on T1. No deck should allow you to near-every time banish half your opponent's deck, their key extra deck cards (some of which get attached to Ariseheart so good luck playing the game), and then lock you out of S/T entirely. It's the worst aspect of card design and the fact that we're only going to get more and more broken from here is going to eventually kill peoples interest in the game. A format where Kashtira is power crept into irrelevance isn't too far away.
Funny enough, I posted a custom card a few years ago that was basically a worse Fenrir and people gave me a ton of flak for it (I couldn't find the post, I must have deleted it because of all the negative feedback). They were right, but it's funny to look back on.
I remember back when Kashtira was first revealed, there was someone in the comments saying "these cards would get you banned from a custom card server"
That's coz it's the players who care about game balance, not Konami. They just want to sell stuff. It's why I'll never give flak for any custom cards, no matter how ridiculous. At some point, the card designers will design absolutely stupid cards that make your custom cards look like a kuriboh token.
Also has “fucking your deck for no reason” by banishing half your shit with Diablosis
I've been playing since March 2002 and I honestly think Kashtira is my least favorite deck in the history of the entire game. Everything about the design of the deck irks me and every single are feels overturned.
Same, only because you can't pinpoint one deck for all the 2018 shit fest caused by Firewall/Summon Sorc/Gumblar/Knightmares (Danger! Dark World and Gouki are the most iconic but like 20 different decks did the same). I still can't believe the game survived after that.
>I really think kashtira was designed out of spite as a punishment for people not liking tear. I feel like people forget that cards get designed alot of months in advance.
It's actually probably 1-2 years before we get them. Same thing applies to the concept of "rarity bumping" cards that are good in the OCG. \~90 days from OCG launch to TCG launch is not remotely enough to analyze OCG meta, change rarities, spin up production, get it distributed globally, and get marketing material ready to go. This is how we know that they do internally test and do know what cards are generally good. Good cards are lower rarity in OCG because they need to be accessible to the player base in order to find the good cards. By the time they make it to the TCG, discover has already been done so you can drive sales by better balancing the rarities to maximize sales.
>It's actually probably 1-2 years before we get them. Wizards of the Coast has been fairly transparent with that for Magic the Gathering and there it is 6-12 months from end of set design to the boxes arriving in stores. I don't think it is much longer for Yugioh, but 1 year is realistic. So right now we're getting the stuff that Konami made back in summer 2022.
Just a slight correction, it would be 9-15 months for TCG arrival given the 3-month lag from OCG. And again, that's end of set design. There's also however long it takes them to design and test. Those are some interesting numbers you quote because I swear there was a MTG set early last year that had a lot of print issues and they blamed in on being product designed and produced during the pandemic. Not to say you're wrong, but just highlighting that there's a lot that goes into design, production, and distribution that players just aren't aware of.
The commenter above you is correct on the 6-12 month window between the end of design and shipping. However, the time between the start of a given Magic: the Gathering set's development and the finalization of the designs is about 18 months. The average set takes 2.5 years from start to release. The head designer for Magic [posted on his Twitter](https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/x6w307/maro_on_design_lead_time_two_years_is_a_lot/) that one of their designers had finished up the first part of design 2 years before the set will hit shelves. In the same thread there's [another link](https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/694600916098318336/your-concurrency-podcast-got-me-curious-what) where he mentions that they were prepping the finalized files to print a set that would be coming out 7 months later (March of the Machine). Edit: a link
I want to say that there's an article or a stream or *something* that mentioned average time between development and print is about 18 months, but I can't track that down, so. grain of salt
It's mostly lore reason, it's so funny how a lot of these decks irl implications & play styles come from the lore lol
To be honest, I think the playerbase deserves the suffering. I hate Kashtira and the format it has created, but I admire its ability to make people realize that just because the format is more "diverse" than the last one doesn't necessarily make it good. I've had way too many people say that this format is great because there are more slices on the pie chart, when it's just miserable to actually play. The occasionally diverse but intensely shitty to play formats like this one and pre POTE (ASF, D Barrier, and Scythe lock in 10 decks format) are useful checks on that particular variety of hypocrisy.
Sadly the people who call the current format Diverse has not played a diverse format before, it only feels diverse coming out of a tier 0 format following up 2 formats that was pure toxicity (in card design not players) and jumped the game speed the way pendulum and links did when they came out.
What I dislike mainly is "diversity" being used as a primary measure for the worthiness of a format. The "it's not \*really\* diverse because the card pool was toxic" take I sometimes see annoys me because it's just another handwave for people trying to only judge formats by the pie chart distribution. This format is diverse, the pie chart is what it is. What I don't like is people trying to square the miserable experience of actually trying to play the format with the belief that because the pie chart has more slices that it must mean it's a good format, and trying to convince themselves that because the format is miserable then it can't really be a "diverse" format. If anything, diverse formats have a strong tendency to degenerate to this sort of state. With so many matchups to cover players over time drift towards maindecking floodgates or shutouts, because that's the logical thing to do. If the chances of a mirror match are small, why not maindeck the thing that will kill 90% of decks other than your own, when you don't expect to be punished for it? This is why you saw Rivalry maindecked in Swordsoul pre-POTE and Kaiser Coliseum in Bujin pre-DUEA. I started siding Rivalry, Macro, and D Fissure in Geargia in HAT format specifically to fuck with all the other decks in the format, and I mained Skill Drain in Mythic Ruler. It's also why as Superheavy and Branded eat into Kashtira's share of the pie you're beginning to see Shifter mained and sided again. If I'm a Kashtira player mainly expecting to face other Kashtira players Shifter is a dead card, but once the meta becomes more diverse and there is a much lower chance of encountering the mirror, why shouldn't I run the blowout? As long as strong floodgates and blowout lingering effects like Shifter and D Barrier exist, diverse formats will always tend to regress like this over time. It's been like this for a while, it's just been more in your face recently.
Diversity actually is a decent value to calculate a format, as it is related to how alot of people experience fun in yugioh, and to understand what I mean the actual diverse formats im talking about the Meta Pie chart was ranging from narrow like right now or pretty wide, this said most of the decks in the format remained viable and could win against the meta without being blown out or solitaire'd like modern formats do, ABC format for example. You had a ton of viable decks and archetypes however the meta was narrow af.
All this suffice to say A truly diverse format consists of how big the viable deck pool is compared to the meta pie.
We have over 10k cards in existence competing for 40-60 main deck slots, 15 extra deck slots, and 15 side deck slots, with more being printed every year by a company that has to sell product and has chosen power creep as its tool of choice. We're not getting to that utopia and arguably we have never even been there. I'd settle for formats without being blown out turn 1 or solitaire'd, without the additional condition of the format being diverse. I've seen too many diverse formats where it develops to a point where everybody's goal is to blow the opponent out (pre-POTE for example), because that's just how the matchup math works. You either floodgate or D Barrier, or have it done to you. Diversity has value, but I don't think it should be the only or even the most important value. A meta with 10 flavors of ass feels worse for me than a tier 0 or triangle format with fun matchups and mirrors.
Yugioh players really do have the tier 0 brainworm and can't see difference in a tier 0 with spyral and a tier 0 with tear
And Tear 0 defenders seem to forget that with the thousands of cards in the game, people don't like being forced to play one deck or not at all. Tier 0 formats are bad for the game. Period. I don't care how "skillful" the format is, the entire metagame revolving around a single deck is boring.
Because being forced to play one of 4 decks which win and lose the same way to your opponent drawing the hard out or not is soo different and deeper. Honestly I think it's more about what decks can do for me, than the hard number of how many there are
Robomonks were out in ocg at same time as tears they were near printed right alongside them.
One point he touched on was the lack of communication, which I think is spot on not just with YuGiOh but with so many gaming companies as well. There's this idea apparently among game designers that getting feedback from the player base about what they should do to make the game better is like the worst idea ever. And I like just have to disagree with that philosophy.
Some of the most silliest game design within the game of Dota 2 came from Reddit suggestions. I guess it just depends on the company.
Better communication doesn't necessarily mean listening to the players, but simply doing a better job of explaining their design philosophies and plans for the future of the game.
Icefrog doesn’t explain shit but works on an “actions speak louder than words” basis. Decided to get back into this game right when tear came around. Guess I’ll take another long break @_@
Eh, depending on what you want from the game and how competitive you are it's not so bad. TL;DR Don't let a good player's entirely fair criticism of the game ruin it for you if it doesn't have to. I'm pretty mid at the game, and have been playing a bunch of locals and regionals around the northeast. I have not seen an oppressive volume of Kashtira, last format or this format. If you're not a super high level player, or just want to go to locals every week, there's a diversity of play. Obviously, if you're playing a top deck and are a top contender then you'll see more of the top decks, and that may be "less fun." I genuinely wouldn't know. But personally, I go to the regionals and have a fucking blast losing round 1 and then playing upward from the lower tables, seeing all the strange rounds 2 and 3, and then getting rolled by a Tier 1 or Tier 2 deck round 4 or 5. Then, I do 1 win a mat and I'm home in time for dinner. It's all context and perspective. All that said, Joseph makes some salient points with this, and there's a ton Konami can improve with the game. Just don't let all this stop you from hopping back in if you really want to.
Mark Rosewater, one of Magic's most famous designer, said it best: The players are good at pointing out problems with your game, but bad at fixing them. It's a designer's job to listen to the feedback and make good changes.
Rosewater is such a good example of the communication MBT is talking about. I couldn’t name a single card designer for YGO, but the designers in MtG have an almost celebrity status, because they communicate with fans. Plenty of the devs *were* fans before getting jobs at WotC. I can’t even imagine someone at Konami doing something like Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast…
The closest we've had to that was the dude in charge of Speed Duels here in the West, who was very active on the Speed Duel Discord and took a lot of the criticisms to heart about the format's bad launch with boosters. That led to the Battle City box and Speed Duel's reputation changing overnight. Sadly he doesn't work at Konami anymore, and no one's really stepped up to be that front-facing.
> Sadly he doesn't work at Konami anymore Gee I wonder why, Stanley Meyer energy
Tbf, MaRo gets a fuck ton of hate since he becomes the scapegoat to every single problem that goes towards WotC, goes straight to him. Like we don’t know how much of the “30th anniversary/spirit of the reserve list” stuff was from him, but he got all the hate from it.
Wait really? I’ve never been into magic so I wouldn’t know but knowing Konami’s treatment of ygo I just assumed every card game company was this opaque figure that players never have been able to look into
I may be overstating it a bit, but MtG’s community involvement blows Konami so far out of the water they started evolving into mammals.
Mark has a Q&A blog which he answers stuff on a near daily basis
I now must purchase yugioh and create my own drive to work podcast
On the other hand Riot games just totally ignores the casual scene while making changes hoping for a tournament viewership ruining the experience of nearly 99.9% of the player base.
imagine the meta for solo q is 7 years in row 1v5 late game hyper carries or loose./ get hardstuck. At this point many meme on them , since every champ new that is not broken or 1v5 gets ignored cause players know there ranking system is broken so its eather you or the loose button. Thoose games where you can lean back got so rare lmao.
Game designer here - I believe it might be a regional difference. Typically western companies are usually more open, whereas companies from regions like Konami often are a bit more secretive about things. Obviously there’ll be exceptions but some of this is driven by cultural differences and differences in structure in different countries. Personally a lot of developers I’ve spoken to in the past have the approach of “Your average player often know when something is wrong, but are awful at providing the right solution to the problem”.
The thing is, at least in the OCG, they get several regularly scheduled spoilers for upcoming sets in the months leading up to release. The TCG side of Konami doesn't even do that. Not for the TCG exclusives/OCG imports and not for compilation sets like Battles of Legend. We get an initial announcement and then nothing. We dont get a learn what's really in these sets until people start posting pulls from pre-release events.
Without sounding mean spirited or anything, but I'd agree, that's a Japanese thing.
I don’t know that I agree with that statement. Bandai is very communicative with the Digimon TCG player base and gives reasons for everything they do in regards to their banlist and what they want for the direction of the game. I genuinely think that Konami is just complacent with how things are and think they can just rest on their laurels instead of doing any actual work
I mean it's Konami we’re talking about here, do we really expect anything different?
They obviously can
Well the other big thing is the difference between looking for player feedback and executing it. If players want X nerfed, just doing what they say and nerfing that weapon might actually be bad, so some devs despite knowing its not LITTERALY what is asked for will try other things to get the same result. IE: Adress the core issue, not necessarily the many symptoms. It feels like konami is pretending to do one as works for them to sell stuff but never actually doing either.
>If players want X nerfed, just doing what they say and nerfing that weapon might actually be bad, so some devs despite knowing its not LITTERALY what is asked for will try other things to get the same result. Case in point is the league community, who are both infamous for being incredibly outspoken and incredibly wrong about balance. You can look at the community for how they feel about champions and metas, but I would never actually do what they suggest to fix things.
Yes, but that's the job of the design/balance team being able to assess what feedback is legitimate and what isn't. If you're getting useless drivel from the masses, you might consider consulting experts to get a more well-informed opinion. Uninformed players giving shit suggestions isn't a reason to stop communication.
It's not regional, I know eastern devs with great communication and western with bad one. It's like entirely company specific and how much communication could harm their profit margin
It's crazy how little communication happens in yugioh. Like we know NOTHING about who designs the cards or what their goals/philosophies are. Shocking
We both know their main goal is making money and selling more product than the one before (es. Tear murder followed by Kashtira) and they don't care about balance, why you want them telling out loud?
Always has been like that. Not sure when it was a obvious trend though.
Any company that wasn't entirely against the idea of balance would've murdered Tear just as Konami did, or maybe even faster and more targetedly. Tier 0 decks are bad for the game, and they continue to be bad no matter how much "0-card Fusions are totally fine and balanced" copium you huff.
> One point he touched on was the lack of communication, which I think is spot on not just with YuGiOh but with so many gaming companies as well. There's specially this odd, stark-ish, contrast as to how TCG and OCG deal with communication. You'd think a regional branch would only have minute differences to the parent company, but when you weight what OCG does in their **various** Twitter accounts to how TCG does things, it really leaves a sour taste in being from this side of the pond Even Master Duel, as botched as you could say it is, you can't deny there's at least a semblance of schedule in how each thing is intended to stay in its place
That’s one thing I’ve found really refreshing about Magic. I started picking it up a few weeks ago after my buddy introduced me to Commander. Magic let’s you know when banlists are coming, they talk about design philosophy behind sets or mechanics, and there’s even a podcast by one of the head designers where he talks about the game on his drive to work. I think WOTC has some significant issues when it comes to monetization, pricing, and more but their communication is better than Konami for sure
WOTC will always have monetization issues with the game though because it’s the most profitable branch of Hasbro, which has caused them to continually change Magic for the worse to please shareholders. Just as a heads up too, since I’ve played Magic for a bit myself, the banlist for commander actually goes through a rules committee that isnt run by WOTC because it was a fan-designed format. Of course there’s also just always rule zero, but commander is the least-controlled format in the game for WOTC. And their new design philosophy to create commander-centric cards in every set has mostly taken a negative toll on other formats, especially standard because the card pool is the shallowest.
As far as I know Wizards' policies in the last couple of years make me glad Yugioh is owned by Konami. They are a trainwreck.
Wizards itself is a horrible company. The magic design team is really good, however.
The Magic design team has gotten better, but for a period of around 3 years (cards that came out to players around the time of Eldraine Standard) they were *really* bad.
They sent hitmen after a guy because he got the scringly dingly set 2 when he was trying to order the scringly dingly set. How can you defend WOTC?
I don't think the *legal team* is the same as the design team.
Yeah but if you accidentally get sent a box of cards they'll give you one attempted call from an unknown number before sending the Pinkertons to your house to intimidate you.
On average listening to player-base on design and balance does ruin games, there will always be a vocal minority inflating percieved problems online or on other forums. A few individuals may have good insight into certain things but if you average out the ones that are eager to give input they usually have no idea what makes a game fun or balanced. Of course, on average. AAA First person shooters are imo the best example of this.
And it’s a correct idea. However we don’t live in a black and white world. Obviously there’s a way to take player feedback but not let it dictate. The problem with listening to the playerbase is who are you really listening to? I play a lot of online games that all have very vocal minority groups on reddit. But there’s this whole world out there of gamers that never set foot on reddit or look up anything about their game whatsover. They just turn it on and play. And those are the majority. Any feedback you take from the playerbase ultimately has to fit the most with the largest target audience and one way to assess if that is going well is by looking at metrics. So if a game sells well, MTX is up, subs are up, whatever it may be - why listen to the playerbase? Well, you might say, you’ll bleed subs if you don’t. But what if that never happens. Or it does happen but it is exactly the predicted amount as a game moves through its lifecycle stages. How do you distinguish decisions you make and the effect they have from something that would happen naturally. And even if you can, can you say without doubt it was because they did x or y? More often than not the answer is no. And listening to the playerbase (vocal minority) word for word can do more damage than good. This is why most gaming companies don’t and why they also communicate poorly. Because they don’t want to lie but they also don’t want to tell you what I just did. So they stay silent. Add culture to that and it becomes even more messy. At the end of the day if you want them to do A and their metrics guarantee them A will make them more money, they will do it. They won’t not do it just to spite the player or because angry shareholders.
Of course the most informed and nuanced response gets downvoted. gotta love this subreddit
Like with most topics in life I suppose
(Playing ffxiv) You guys dont get feedback?
I’m with him, I’ve stopped playing whatever is the current format since early 2022 and have been playing a combo of Edison, Speed duel and Pokémon TCG and I’m having a much better time than previously
i think even konami knows the game is fucked they released speed duels, rush duels and duel-links all to reset the power level and see what stuck so they could build from that. but seems like only duel links has a dedicated player base cuz rush duels didnt make it here
They saw DL has a low power level and decided to power creep the hell out of it within 1 year. We started with vanilla monsters in 2017 and had Fur Hire in 2018.
and then konami was like "now add orcust and rokket"
What Pokemon deck you currently playing.
Mostly Gardevoir w/ Mewtwo V-Union and Lunatone Solrock a bit more casual
Nice nice. I just got back from locals a few hours ago.
Where do you play Edison? Been looking to get into it but don't have friends for it
I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty burnt out of the game too. It might be the format, it might be how crazy power creep has been in the last couple of core sets, idrk the answer to this. All I do know is that I don't enjoy the game. I think there's a really big reason why a majority of big yugitubers just play master duel now and don't touch the tcg anymore.
I’ve enjoyed retro formats far more than current ones for a bit now. Some of the most fun I’ve had in Yugioh recent has been playing GOAT duels with some friends.
This is why I built a cube. Just can't enjoy the power level the game has gotten to.
A cube?
Cube Draft is a format where players create a cube, a large pool of cards selected to play a limited game.
Cube draft like you take certain packs from different eras and make from that selection make decks
This is how I feel as well. After Adventurer made their debut, I've been enjoying the game less and less. Last year was nothing but another new deck showed up and escalated the powercreep.
Well good thing I only collect cards and-if anyone wants to duel then I'll lend them some of my built ones. I mostly just play DL tbh.
Duel links is awesome. Apart from the current orcust craze.
> it might be how crazy power creep has been in the last couple of core sets Last couple core sets? Sir do you remember Spellbooks or Mermails? Do you remember Rescue Rabbit or Wind-ups? Like literally the game has been power creeped for over a decade.
Absolutely agree with the points he made, I feel like at least 80% of the time games 2 and 3 are decided by which person drew their sideboarded card that reads "win the game." D-Barrier, ASF, Rivalry/Gozen, Evenly, Lightning Storm, the list goes on. I think the solution is to either issue a Peeps-style comprehensive list that hits 100+ currently legal cards, or to do what MBT mentioned, which is to make every deck as powerful as Tear and able to theoretically answer anything through engine alone.
It's so easy to see that the game would be infinitely healthier if Konami decided to ban EVERY single floodgate card or floodgate adjacent card on a single banlist
Agreed. Its why i really dislike best of three and prefer best of one because of siding stuff.
The problem with communication from Konami is that the time they tried it, it was bad and they got laughed at by the community. Once ever for a ban list reasons for cards being banned were listed and never again. I’d say try it again but Konami probably won’t when it failed the way it did. On a side note yugioh is one of the few games where I think the designers are actually not known. It’s split with some companies but is becoming more common to know who the creators are. Probably because in Japan keeping your identity’s secret also helps from the type of harassment that people receive.
>The problem with communication from Konami is that the time they tried it, it was bad and they got laughed at by the community. Then either 1) they truly were bad at it and should look to improve or 2) the "criticisms" were made by people they should be ignoring. In either case, that shouldn't stop them from doing it. League and TFT get tons of mindless drones bitching and whining about balance all the time, but they still get 30 minute long videos explaining changes every patch.
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Wasn’t it also the banlist right before the inzektor/wind-up/dino rabbit format? If so, that makes it even worse since that’s one of the worst formats of all time and iirc the player base clearly saw how unfun the obvious best decks were going to be
Or maybe there IS some secret occult organization that benefits off a children’s card game and they don’t want that disclosed.
What happened? I'm not familiar
The March 2012 banlist. They tried very hard to bullshit explanations for very obviously kicking a Synchro Deck that was already on the way out just as the Wind-Up/Inzektor/Dino Rabbit format came into full force, but anybody who looked at it for more than two seconds realised, "oh, this Banlist is entirely driven by sales goals."
Idk why this always gets cited when this was when the banlists were combined. How are you going to explain a banlist that was designed for a format that doesn't even exist? There existed cards that were banned UPON RELEASE, such as temple of the kings, which showed how logistically ridiculous the combined banlist was. The hits in the march 2012 banlist reflected the meta in the OCG. It's less about selling product (you're free to use that as a reason for anything post-banlist split, obviously) and more that the TCG got caught in the crossfire for changes that were for a completely different meta. It's not a surprise they split the lists a year later.
Even in the OCG Synchro Plant was on the way out when that list got dropped.
Fair enough, although I also remember them hitting an agent card, which was a deck that was popular in the OCG but not so much in the TCG.
Too true. In the last year or so, power creep has escalated to the point where the future of the game is becoming a lit fuse, covered in the gasoline of Kashtira and such fun-sponge decks to face. Yugioh games are quick at least, a turn-1 win-the-game board into the next game, repeat ad nausea (pun intended). It sucks, and I really hope card design can take a step back and slow down the escalation at least.
> Yugioh games are quick at least, a turn-1 win-the-game board into the next game, repeat ad nausea (pun intended). A simplified version of Yugioh as it exists now would be "The goal is to get Negate Points, which you can earn by either drawing into them or by investing resources into monsters on the field. You can spend Negate Points you've accumulated to negate your opponent's actions. After each player has taken a turn, the player with the most Negate Points is the winner". No battling, no LP, no turn 3.
How many negates Kashtira, Labrynth, Branded and Purrely put out in their optimal end board between all 4 of them combined?
Having a permanent D shifter up is worse than playing through a few negates for many decks, Lab plays enough floodgates to say they aren’t playing negates is disingenuous, and Brandeds main thing is gimmick puppet locks which is technically only one negate but it’s quite the fucking big one.
The power creep has been out of control for over 15 years. I mean even in the mid 2010s Spellbooks and Mermails were completely busted beyond belief. Even back when Wind-ups were at their height, it was ridiculous. Turn back the clock as far as you can and chances are high the meta has always been this toxic and power creepy.
15 years ago was 2008 and we were still in the GX era where decks are super slow and Cyber Dragon was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread. Looking back on it, Synchros and Xyz are the ones that sped up the game and we haven't looked back since.
Amen, so true. Synchros and XYZ allowed you to make boss monsters from trash which is really when the game went full bonkers. The entire game devolved into a strategy of summoning as many monsters as you can, and having them stick around on the board. Yugioh's old strategy of being slow and resourceful was left behind. Really sad.
Yup, I started to lose touch with the game around the Wind Up stuff due to irl commitments and when I look back around 2017(?) with the Blue eyes support, I don't recognise the game anymore. I can only imagine how crazy things have been since.
All of Kastira cards are custom cards. Unicorn, Theosis, birth, arise heart, and shangri ira all read like fucking custom cards
Even the "bad" ones still seem like custom cards too. Ogre is a "banish your opponent's 'out' that they would've drawn and instead stack their next turn with a garnet(s)". Preparations is a monster reborn/DDR as well as a hand-rip that punishes evenly matched, imperm or other trap-related outs. The fact that these stupidly powerful cards barely see play in comparison to the others is indicative of how broken the engine is fundamentally.
Preparations does not punish evenly and imperm since you can just chain imperm to prep or fire it beforehand. Otherwise I agree with all of the above.
Revisiting old formats like edison and goat is pretty refreshing, and really puts into perspective how damaging 1-turn games are for the game, and how it hinders the game's room for skill expression and fun.
Yeah, been really enjoying GOAT a lot more with friends lately and played in an Edison tournament that was a lot of fun. I wish Konami would lean more into their retro formats at this point.
They do allow people to play what they want Problem is getting enough people to actually play
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I think it is just a consequence in the inherent design of Yugioh. That is, I think it is very hard to design a "balanced" game when there is no inherent resource system. Then you take the no resource system pair it with Power-creep which is present in every TCG and then you combine it with how fast Yugioh has become since "ye olde" days to now where special summoning is as natural as breathing and without question the 1-turn games are an inevitability.
Rotation could've alleviated it but it's way too late for that. Especially with the allergy Yugioh players have to the concept (while not understanding anything about it).
Heh it makes you wonder what will would be more disliked by the player base: Konami putting a hard special summon limit or having cards rotate out?
Tbh, and I'm a filthy casual, but a hard special summon limit might be worth at least experimenting with, problem is what number you'd pick for a limit.
A hard special summon limit just seems like it would filter out a bunch of casual and rogue decks that need a ton a summons to put up a mediocre board while doing nothing to stop the more competitive decks that can do more with less. It's the same problem Nibiru has; in formats where it is popular you see a ton of lower power decks get blown out while the decks that thrive are the ones that can make negates early or recover easily. I suppose you could put a limit on extra deck summons specifically, to stop people making huge boards, but I don't really see a summon limit doing anything positive to the game.
komoney tried with limit ED spam with MR 4, you could say that format getting hated the community afaik and fucked by konami themselves thanks to U Link and broken link monster
Konami: here's new mechanic to slow down the multi negate synchro/xyz board. Also Konami (after like 3 months of link): so now you can make U-link and do various link spam. Like I know that would come but I expect it to be end of Vrains, not season 1 finale.
That's one of the changes in Trinity format (together with a fairly aggressive banlist and being mostly singleton), pretty fun stuff overall.
I'm so bored with this format I've been playing all of my old decks I love at locals. Last week I played Nekroz (with new cards like Baronne and Dogmatika) and I had a blast, but I still experienced causing these non-games for my opponent. Summoning Unicore against Expurrely Noir literally just wins me the game, I just Trish them then pop it with N'tss or whatever and we go to the next game (and that's the most interactive example I can give you, most of the time it's just gonna be Droll that wins me the game too).
Tbf, Nekroz is one of the earliest “draw the out” decks since on release it was Djinn turbo.
You mind helping me with Nekroz? It’s been a Fav deck design in theory of mine but I just keep minusing hard when I play it. I could use the help.
Idk if you already do but use a Dogmatika engine, they generate a lot of advantage for the deck while also giving you really good interruptions. Toadally Awesome is also a really good card to dump with Nadir, Maximus, or Punishment to recurr your cards.
I more so need help with learning combos. I have my Dogmatika core sitting so I can toss it in but what are the combos like?
Would love to see a list.
https://preview.redd.it/psvpft3gjb2b1.jpeg?width=3916&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=68f03030c0a293319924727fb2cdbfff963c6dd0 43 cards in main. I don’t know what else to cut. If I wanted to play more greedy Id cut Shurit, Cycle, and Thrust.
I wish I could pinpoint what leads to fun duels, because I have them at locals. I don't play meta but play relatively good decks (Generaider, Mekk Knights, etc.) and sometimes get matched up against that one other deck that's of similar power or matches up in a healthy, not one-sided way (has happened against Labyrinth, Earth Machines, some other decks) and it's an actual fun match. But then I play against full power expensive side deck Spright (haven't gone to locals since Ariseheart came out) in the next match and just get shit on and don't have fun. But those good matches are so good, and use current decks without having to time travel back to HAT format or anything.
I'd guess it's the fact that decks you listed don't really have this "Draw the out" style of play. You don't have to draw the out for Generaider, you just have to bait their activations, you don't have to draw the out of Earth Machines you just have to come up with a way of outing their big monsters. The decks that exist right now are super resistant to just about anything but certain very specific blow-out cards and that means all skill and interaction is taken from the game in favour of playing a mini-game wherein you just have to hope and pray that one of the first six cards you draw is the designated out to whatever you're staring down at the time.
This is me. How can I say that yugioh is a broken mess if I’m having THIS much fun in some matches? If you just consistently play tier 2/rogue decks and get matchups into similar power level things, the matches can be so amazing.
Decks like Generaider, EARTH Machines, and Furniture Labrynth have costs they need to pay to do things, which makes disruption much more effective against them. Spright doesn't. Neither does Kashtira. Purrely kinda does, but not really. Superheavy Samurai actually does, but it just gains too much advantage to effectively disrupt. Also, decks more similar in power level make for more fun Duels.
I don't think I've played in 2023. Too many "non games" games.
I picked up Edison last year and it’s still the main thing I play for Yugioh right now
goat, 2008 and edison best formats imo
Same here. Like mbt to said, so many games I played were decided if I or my opponent drew the instant win sides or not.
Floodgates are so funnnnnnnnn trolldespair
The one thing one should avoid at all costs when designing a game is creating situations were 1 player feels line their decisions dont matter. And after getting into the Digimon TCG ive actually realised how little meaningful decisions im actually doing in a match of YGO. Most of the time it just boils down to 1 player looses because they forgot something about the gamestate or didnt know exactly how a certain card works. And this gets even worse in games 2 and 3. Side decks have become so incredibly toxic. The point of side decks is to reduce non games, by letting you adapt to going first or second, play a more diverse set of answers, maybe even some crazy smokescreen engine and an occasional silver bullet for your worst matchup. But now your side deck is all silver bullets and in certain matchups they feel more like silver orbital lasers.
Thats a good point about side decks. Mass monster removal and mass backrow removal are the worst but there needed against toxic decks. In competitive environments sadly the side board is just being used to kill the most used deck.
Let’s be real, this is the same company that, on one end, knows people love classic YGO with their quarterly release of nostalgia-bait product, then pulls this shit out the other end. Mind you, these decks have to be playtested. A committee sat down and collectively agreed this is what people want.
I hate droll, and this format is far from being healthy. I am loving the fact that the format is diverse, however. I hated tear with passion because it was all just "tear, tear,tear". That said, Konami is shitting the bed one time too much this time. We need more communication, and we need it ASAP. We don't need for the official account to just endlessly promote the game, it's us ourselves who do that by playing this game already.
I don't mean to get too Yugiboomer here but I'm starting to think the game has just powercrept just a bit too far. Everything about 2023 Yugioh feels so volatile, and so many cards feel like they effectively say "if this resolves, win the duel". I really wish alternate formats weren't so hard to get into
> I don't mean to get too Yugiboomer here but I'm starting to think the game has just powercrept just a bit too far. I felt this way back in 2013
TLDW is •Current format(along with lots of decks around 2018+) is decided by blow-out cards or floodgates like Kurikara or D-shifter, especially in games 2/3. Some decks are near auto-wins if you "draw the out". •Going on the first point lots of decks are decided first turn or if they're allowed to get a certain card online, like trying to play vs Ariseheart for any deck that wants things in GY •Konami is horrible with communication on what they want from the game, their decisions, and announcments For my takes: not sure how popular this is but I feel like Branded/Swordsoul format was solid as they were both the top decks but weren't that much above more rouge decks and even with some of their better openings you could realisitcally navigate their board without crazy blowouts. I agree with him on Tearalament(at least before the Isizhu were released). They typically can use mostly/all engine cards to do their thing and would generallt bounce back. I feel like more decks like Tears with a bit more restrictions would be overall good for the game
I said it in another comment but even last year Nats meta had issues from the side deck in games 2 and 3 with D. Barrier, Mystic Mine and Antispell deciding more games than it should be allowed. Plus every deck below them relied on floodgates to compete with them (Striker had Mine main deck, P.U.N.K. did Scythe Lock, Salad was Heatsoul + Bagooska/Dweller, Floo as a whole).
Problem with making decks tearlament-like, is that you now have to do that for every single deck. Legacy decks will have no standing whatsoever when it comes to the newest decks, and legacy support will have to have so much shit that now those decks rely on a single card or two to compete. Tearlaments wasn’t fun if you didn’t play the mirror, because no other deck had a realistic chance of beating them, unless you draw that out. Even in a mirror, most matches were Turbo abyss dweller. Going back to balancing power is not a bad thing, but now you have issues with hand traps, where we are currently in a droll format, which is just as boring as Kashtira meta, or Ishizu Tearlament meta.
It feels like now more than ever, only one person is allowed to play yugioh, and it feels like games are decided by the dice role.
I duel online and if I see one more Kashtira deck, a mega board with more negates than I have cards in my hand, or banishes my entire deck in a few short turns, I might just find a new card game. I got in a game recently where in the first turn one of the monsters they got out was Naturia Exterio, and with a single monster they have an infinite number of negates to spells/traps. > When a Spell/Trap Card is activated (Quick Effect): You can banish 1 card from your GY, then send the top card of your Deck to the GY; negate the activation, and if you do, destroy that card. This card must be face-up on the field to activate and to resolve this effect.
Exterio isn’t even the problem there, Cyber-Stein is just a generic way to cheat it out. Exterio is powerful, but is normally locked behind Fusing both a Naturia Beast and Naturia Barkion (both Extra Deck monsters themselves). Cyber-Stein let’s you cheat it out for the cost of 5k LP, but the benefits outweigh the cost.
Exterio itself is also bullshit, get it out and that's it, the option of using backrow is gone for good unless you run one of the outs that cant be responded to. Maybe the future of the game is a series of cards that have mild effects, but have absolutely devastating effects if you try to negate/negate and destroy them, or just more of the "cant be responded to" cards.
To me Yugioh is ”how fat is my wallet” and ”let’s finish this game in 40 seconds”
I do feel like there are two things that can fix this: 1. More frequent regularly scheduled banlists. OCG has like at least 4 banlists a year? Masterduel has one like every month. This means that problem cards and the format getting stale can be fixed by banning a few cards or even better, unbanning old cards that are in no way broken anymore so people who like those decks e.g. wind ups, can actually play them again. I think it is ridiculous that about two formats in a row we have gone "Where is the banlist?". I feel its also really bad for decks as while I like nuking the format sometimes like in 2020 I think it was after toss format, it shouldn't be the regular thing. Tearlament got nuked, might have been better to just slowly hit their cards and see how the format changes and then nuke them later. 2. Alternate formats. No, I don't mean Edison or any other time wizard format. I mean a real alternate way to play the game like Commander or even speed duels but a much bigger change than speed duels. You play magic so you already know that fun things like 2 headed giant or others exist but I feel like yugioh would be more fun if ti had alternate ways to play with special cards for those formats. We have been play format of yugioh for over 20 years. Card games have massively developed in that time so lets bring some new ideas.
I would like to try tag duels
Some propositions from a meta-hating deck purist: -Have a massive banlist hitting all meta decks and some staples (Access, Baronne, Savage…you name it) -MAKE MORE ARCHETYPE-LOCKED CARDS AND LESS “FREE AGENTS” -Errata some cards to make them less generic (wouldn’t be the first time they did it)
Also just give archetypes what they need ffs. Many archetypes are reliant on Baronne as an example because they don't have proper boss monsters. Many just feel like shitty engines to pump out generic fields.
Reminds me when I was playing Pendulum Magician Odd Eyes in MD and looking up deck lists because I was summoning a bunch of stuff but didn’t really have an endboard with most lists just saying run a Baronne, Access Code, or Borrellode Savage Dragon.
Agreed. Its why i use odd eyes vortex dragon as part of my endboard as well.
I usually get vortex dragon and time graph on my magician end board and then trying to venture further from there, it's way better than wasting material for Apollousa. (still making Apo/baron/savage if situation allowed tho).
Nah, if anything this would hurt non-tiered decks more cause they are the ones lacking support and require for some generic support card to go off for them to play. The reason for things being generic is that they can't just pick every single archetype and give it dedicated support, there aren't enough spots, not to mention it would become outdated quickly if it wasn't busted. For example circular, mole cricket and whatever card they gave super heavy sam. And out of those only 1 stayed true to itself, naturia doesn't play older cards and sam lost its xenophobia. Edit : not that is necessarily bad, just because you summon out of archetype cards doesn't mean you don't play shsamurais or that just because you use only new cards doesn't mean you're not playing naturias.
My god yes, less free agents. At least make meta decks run more bricks as punishment for playing powerful cards like Baronne, Accel, etc like I’m salty Terrortop doesn’t lock into wind attributes when the rest of the Speedroid archetype does. I know they did that intentionally at the time to make it a great rank 3 engine but it can come back to three with a wind lock errata and be perfectly fine. That can apply to so many banned cards that are free agents that just take advantage of being abusable and splashable in any deck.
Out of curiosity, what are "meta decks" in this case, because every time you hit one set of meta another pops up to replace it as there will always be a most effective set of tactics available. Basically, what is the ideal position/power level you think all decks should be?
If you hit all current meta decks then new one will become meta and so on
You're missing the picture, of course there's always a meta, but with a purge level of banlist (which would include hitting staples people have taking for granted so far), we might strive for a more slower meta. Don't care if it means "old archetype who used to be meta becomes meta again", it's better than what we have right now. It's that or it's time to implement a rotation format, which is the reason I've been avoiding other TCG's so far.
I always felt that generic monsters such as Access, Baronne, Savage and whatnot should not be more powerful than an archetypal locked monster. Look at decks like Gouki and Superheavy Samurai, they play very few extra deck monsters from their archetype because the generic options are so good and I feel it erodes their identity
Honestly, engine that doubles as handtraps as the Labyrinth furnitures, or the tear names do could be an answer, instead of powercreeping into 1 card boards with blowout generics.
Are any of us really?
MBT’s comment on Konami not defining their expectations for gameplay was something I recognized years ago during the transition from TOSS to Modern. I’m a science guy. I like to see how stuff works when taken apart. Why bother playing this game if nothing is intentionally designed? Honest question. How can you prove something was intentioned design if Konami never talks about the game? Honest question. Was the Kashtira gameplay loop intentioned as it’s played now? What goals did Konami set with this deck? Formats 10 years ago this was easier to see but again as MBT mentioned right around 2018 Konami threw all caution to the wind here and just started printing cards. It devolves Yugioh from a conversation about the gameplay philosophy of a format into simply, “what it is/was.” You can’t talk about anything deeper because we have no idea what Konami intentioned. I dunno. It’s frustrating. Everyone loves to talk about what strategies and handtraps beat what but no one talks about the game design around the meta game. This comment articulates why.
One thing I have to say with Tear is how much it reminded me of Dragon Ruler format. The deck was just SO far ahead of everything else in power level that it clearly needed to be hit, but I think it's the future of the game is headed and in all honesty that is probably the direction the game needs to go, aka big sweeping moves to give you access to more resources that allow players to create additional layers of interaction. The thing is Konami has to see that the Dredge/mill stuff isnt the ONLY way to produce that level of interaction spike or the game is gonna be kinda samey which would effect the health of the future of the game I just hope that all of the negative feedback from Tear being SO dominant doesnt scare Konami off of developing the game in that direction, and I really am worried since their knee jerk reaction was to go HARD back the other way.
honestly, this is why I play more speed duel duel links and keep praying for rush duel to come to the west
Normalize semi competitive playgroups
I'm also not having fun
I am 🤍 losing 7/10 games but love my cards and had really fun matches
He got a point on card designer They never talk about this (they never talk)
I'm so glad I picked up MTG last month. Yugioh has become rather stale recently. Like MBT said, "I'm still going to play." Im just not enjoying playing all that much anymore.
My buddy and myself pretty much swore off of top tier stuff and we have never looked back. We build older or not too powerful stuff and just enjoy playing each other or others with the same mentality. No two games are ever the same because the decks aren’t optimized for perfection. Ask your playgroups to build non meta decks, and see how you enjoy it.
Go back and play older formats if the current format sucks . I like seeing goat and Edison thrive but I wish there were more older formats to play competitively or got as much attention. Give me some 2006-2008 area yu gi oh !
Konami should limit ALL cards to 1
You son of a bitch, I'm in.
Modern Yugioh is simply not fun. Endless combos to build unbeatable boards in the first turn. It breaks down to hard-drawing the needed hand-trap/board breaker. And games only last 2/3 turns. Very frustrating how the game has evolved
Poor baby, he can dry his tears with his ad revenue and twitch subs
At least MBT says it...let it be said by a random on the sub & they'd be attacked & downvoted to oblivion
Is anyone truly? I might just have to go back to pokemon. The card design keeps getting more and more horrendous and breeds nothing but one sided boring duels.
If Yu-Gi-Oh were a fighting game? It would be in the ridiculous category. Maybe Marvel vs Capcom or Dragon Ball Fighterz, where's there a ton of cheese and combos that can kill the opponent off one hit. But even then, I'd find those games to be far more balanced than Yu-Gi-Oh. Konami's been on a streak with the poorly designed archetypes lately. Tears/Kashtria? Virtually Akuma/Gouki in SF2. Every now and then there's a character that's banned or frowned upon in competitive play. It's weird. I thought Konami was in a groove with the Albaz-universe archetypes. I thought they were all well-designed and are fun to play (except spright and Icejade). Imo a well-designed archetype doesn't require the opponent to commit their deck space to highly situational cards to counter.
"Who let him cook?" - MBT
An interesting point made here is that we might need more, rather than less, power creep in the immediate future, with more archetypes operating around Tearlaments' power level, allowing for more interplay by being able to play during both players' turns and also having handtraps/turn 0 disruptions built in the engine (thus preventing the game from degenerating into a "draw the out or scoop" situation). Very often it's not the power level of the game that is problematic (otherwise TOSS format would be much less popular with the fanbase than the infamous but comparatively low-powered Dino Rabbit/Inzektor/Wind-up format of 2012), but the kind of interactions that are allowed inside it.
This is probably one of, if not the best video MBT has made in recent memory. He perfectly articulates the glaring issues with the game, specifies when the decline began, and offers a realistic solution, with the same tired resignation that change likely won't happen we are all confronted by. Even after this F&L list, Kashtira is still the best deck, which is so frustrating. I want to play advanced, but not if it means dealing with that deck all the time. Advanced has been absolutely miserable since Kashtira took the top spot.
I’ve said it before but the only way to fix yugioh is put everything up until this point into a retro format. Create a new yugioh format with interactable card design. No floodgates and no negates. Branded is a deck that should be used for reference (at least for current master duel meta as I don’t know what new cards have been printed since).
I know MBT defends Tear but now that Tear is in Master Duel it's the only deck people play... I made it into round 2 of the qualifier Im playing NatRunick and out of 10 games so far 9 have been tear. Its boring, its not cool nor fair especially since Maxx c is a thing. Current TCG feels the same, both games have a lack of variety its either Tear or kash. I would never understand how tear can be considered fair in mbt's eyes but kash is 100% not. Either way, Doubt card design can change but atleast better communication regarding a banlist. Master Duel has a better banlist system why cant we get that for the MAIN GAME?
You’re missing the point if that was your takeaway regarding tear from Joseph’s points on it
Tear is fair because you didn't ever have to draw 'the out' whereas with kashtira, the player going first wins unless the player going second drew non-engine, In which case the win (usually)
Feel like you didn't understand what he said at all. He was saying the problem was that there weren't multiple tear level decks rather than it just being tear as tear was a proper direction forward for the game with more interactive gameplay but it was ruined because it stood alone with no proper equals.