why i quit competitive yugioh - part 1

“the metagame and konami’s business practices”

i used to convince myself that the main reason i quit yugioh four years ago because of how badly the game was balanced. i’ve long since realized that it wasn’t the main reason, but the way konami handles their game is laughable, quite hilarious, actually. with all of the shit they pulled and continue to pull, i’m surprised yugioh is still going.

~balance~

for one, i don’t think konami knows what “balance” even means. it means that new ideas and archetypes should be able to compete with older ones without centralizing or dominating the decks people play. clearly, konami doesn’t understand this, because its balance philosophy is “print more and more broken cards that outclass the old ones”. this happens every set. about every four months or so? from what i recall. sometimes they’ll breathe new life into older archetypes, only to make them just as broken and make them eclipse everything else. every set, there was always some new archetype, some new support, some new fad that got everyone’s attention. x-sabers, blackwings, infernity, six sams, plants, TGs, dark worlds, wind-ups, dino rabbit, mermail, fire fist, noble knights, dragon rulers, prophecy, evilswarm, bujin, HAT, and finally, before i quit, shadoll. that’s just the digest version of the four years i played. all of those decks went from “the new hotness” to “completely unplayable” just due to new cards replacing them. who knows what kind of shit runs around now, but i’ll bet most of those decks are completely worthless now.

~rarity hiking~

a standard pack of yugioh cards costs $3.99. in that pack, you get 9 cards, one card in the middle will always a rare, and the card right next to it could be something better. the rest are, usually, worth less than actual garbage. nowadays, pack odds have supposedly changed, maybe they’re better now, or something, but i doubt they’re still anywhere near fair. in yugioh, japan always gets the cards first; they’re usually an entire set ahead at any given point. this means that konami of america gets to see firsthand how the new cards affect the metagame, and will literally increase the rarity of some cards solely to sell more packs. pot of duality, a card released in late 2010, merely a super rare (1 in 6 at the time) in japan, was made into a secret rare (1 in 23, a rarity that didn’t even exist in japan originally) in the US. solemn warning, released in the same set, was a common in japan, and an ultra rare (1 in 12 at the time) over in the states. rescue rabbit, released in late 2011, was a rare (1 in every pack) in japan, and a secret rare over here. all of these cards (and many, many more) were extremely meta-defining and important, and were purposefully made harder to get over here because money. konami couldn’t just make money, they needed all the money. and don’t even get me started on fucking short prints, which were there only to make certain commons (that konami knew would be good) harder to find.

~TCG exclusives and kevin tewart, PR disaster~

yugioh is a game broken into two distinct halves, the TCG (trading card game) in the west, and the OCG (official card game) in the east. the two halves have never gotten along, and the OCG always gets the cards first. someone at konami of america had the brilliant idea of introducing TCG exclusive cards in the new sets so there would be something more to look forward to, something to differentiate the TCG more from the OCG. problem is, TCG exclusives are so polarized in their rarities and power levels. sometimes they’re complete trash, other times they’re the best cards in the game. because konami of america gets to control this, they also have power over what rarities these cards are, and, you guessed it, most of them are secret rares. from tour guide of the underworld and reborn tengu to the noble knight, burning abyss, and SPYRAL archetypes, TCG exclusives got way out of hand really fast, and show no signs of stopping, according to people i know who still play.

not sure if he’s still working at konami of america or not, but a man named kevin tewart was the community director back when i played. he was…pretty shitty, and would blatantly misinterpret the rules in order to sell more packs. when Xyz monsters first hit the states, we’d already known due to konami’s official announcements from japan that the “xyz materials” on a monster didn’t count as “on the field” and were their own separate entity. mr. tewart, the wise sage that he was, decided to completely disregard this rule, making xyz materials count as “on the field” in the TCG, simply to sell more ‘tour guides of the underworld’. i can’t think of any other possible reason, because “faulty translation” is unacceptable considering people editing the fucking wiki do a better job at it.

~the banlist~

i’m convinced that yugioh can never be fixed at this point without some kind of major overhaul. they tried with link summons, i think, but that didn’t stop the core problem of the overwhelming amount of cards in the game. yugioh operates off a forbidden/limited list that changes every six months. normally you can have up to 3 of a card in your deck, but konami will limit cards to 2 or 1, or simply ban them from tournament play. seems nice, right? but, remember what i said earlier, about releasing more and more bullshit just to sell packs? well, konami also has a bad track record with its banlist, making very questionable decisions, but also kicking its playerbase in the teeth when it limits and bans the broken cards it just made. sometimes it takes up to six months, but other times, konami will just “emergency ban” a card that’s too broken. a card that they made, knowing full well it would be broken. suddenly, without warning, cards you spent a lot of money getting or traded a lot of cards for become useless. the most recent example of this (iirc) is a few cards from the performapal archetype, which were hit with emergency banlist action not even two months after the set they came out in was sold in stores. 

~the upkeep of being competitive~

so, to recap, konami prints bullshit cards to sell more packs, jacks up the rarities of those cards to artificially inflate the amount of cards people buy, then can ban them without warning, making people lose tons of money. seems good, right? in order to be competitive at the game, you need to constantly have the best deck (i.e. whatever broken deck konami decides to rarity hike this time), and the cornerstone cards of those decks will be incredibly hard to find. these decks are so strong that they can win by themselves. these “autopilot” decks, like dragon rulers, fire fist, blackwings, you name it, were universally shunned by the community, but were still played because they won. we’ll get into what that means later.

now, i know that you can win with “tier 2″ decks. it’s happened many times. there have been upsets, dark worlds won a YCS once, yadda yadda. however, one thing to note is that these decks, while infinitely cheaper to make, usually still require some amount of “competitive” cards that konami has decided to gatekeep away from people. in the dark worlds deck that won the YCS, it used a fair number of older cards, skill drain and dragged down to name a few, that were hard to find and still somewhat expensive. it essentially requires a pre-existing collection, which is why it’s so hard for new people to get into the game. these decks are also a lot harder to play and require more practice, more stress, and more time to perfect and pilot correctly. and i applaud those people. there’s nothing wrong with that. however, getting these cards without rolling the dice on card packs….oh boy. that’s for part 2.