Hi, my name is Gabe, and I love games! Draw 5 Move 5 hosts discussions that draw connections between the mechanics behind our favorite games. From Dungeons & Dragons to Yu-Gi-Oh, Monopoly to Overwatch, and ancient times to modern day, we can learn a lot by dissecting the common threads in our most popular pastimes.
Current video schedule is at least once a month on Monday mornings!
The BIG reason keywords are great is things like Deathrattle; where you can tap/click on the keywords and a pop-up will explain it for you if you forget after taking a break from a game or new keywords are intruced to the game. Having access to keyword tools like this are important to physical card games. One tool could be where you have common cards only existing to explain keywords. Having a mobile app to help deck build and explain keywords like Hearthstone or Legends of Runterra or just shipping a book marker with starter decks with keywords and rules printed on. All these examples have flaws but these are some solutions. If you don't have the new cards or know new keywords have been introduced to a physical card game you may not know they exist. If you don't want a mobile app taking space on your phone you also will not know they exist. If you sit down at a table you would have to rely on your opponent to pass on the information to you, and the more keywords you have alongside the more convoluted they get leaves the more cause for error or complicated it is for player to player interpretations and problems because so. I think shipping with basic keywords and sticking to it is the best answer. Don't over do it, stay consistent and don't make keywords convoluted and have keywords do all the speaking for the game.
@13:20 I haven't finished watching the video so pardon my immediate reaction; I'm also working while listening so my attention is in and out at times; but I'd like to also have a piece of dialogue on this point that, with card games in mind, having lore does also expand in some ways in deck building. That is that some principals and meta advantages are thrown out the window for the sake of lore just for fun. I remember in yu gi oh trying to make a Cat deck work with cards like rescue cat, Lockat-funny play on the word: locket, a cat with a locket for a collar, and other cat monsters alongside an extra deck based around beast type monsters where all the cats were obviously beasts and help recruit themselves from the deck. Themes, lore, background story within itself can help inspire players to do intriguing and interesting dumb fun stuff and craft unique strategies! Another example is Legends of Runterra, an entire card game based on lore. Crafting decks themed on combining regions of the world to build army like decks with themes of that region based on the lore. It can inspire off meta decks entirely for fun that even go rogue at some points. One such deck is Pirate Monkeys that utilized phantom like haunted gun powder manifested monkeys that would ignite themselves at the end of the round to deal damage to the enemy. Trying to build around it for fun the deck actually went from meme to tier 1!
(I'm aware this is an older video) As a Magic player, I've never thought that YGO was ruined. I've always thought it was a complicated mess. There doesn't seem to be any logic or central theory tying it all together. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but as an outsider looking in, it just looks chaotic.
I dont think the extra deck itself is as much of problem as the fact that people were so terrified of rng and consistency issues that almost all powercreep pretty much revolves around cards that nullify all probability and just let you search out or play whatever you want. Nowadays your entire deck and probably also graveyard may as well be in your hand, and the extra deck issues are just a cherry on top of the rest. Since theres very little randomness, naturally that discourages variation, and now everyone is stuck playing solitaire with all the same cards.
no 2 games play the same except in yugioh where almost every game can be decided by a comparing of the hands because every card does everything and has to win the game by itself
I’m really curious as to what your thoughts on Yugioh’s game design - or lack thereof - are given your commentary in the intro of the video. My own issues with the game, power creep aside, have to do with accelerating game mechanics, lack of power ceiling, the frequent and plentiful Omni negate (although the game seems to be moving away from this on bodies after recent ban lists in 2024), the bottle-necking of the meta game, and the widespread erasure of the Trap Card mechanic short of about ~ 20 generic cards.
Imo Link & Pendulum are the worst offenders. If there is an extra deck, the deck needs to be built so it can even use it. Link basically is a seperate hand, a toolbox. Every deck can use it, even if it wouldn't usually use an extra deck. And that's unhealthy. Its the same reason Companions have been an issue in MTG, or why Eminence is a hated mechanic.
Mechanics like "If your opponent controls a [...] and you don't" can help with this. There are Yu-Gi-Oh decks that want to go second because of effects like these too.
I think a lot of effects could be in subtypes, but they actively tried that, then stopped with a few exceptions. Spirit, Union, Gemini, Tuner, Fusion, Link, Syncro, XYZ, Pendulum and Ritual are the ones I speak of. Each of these have their set rules tied to them. With exception of cards with different colors, Tuner is the only one they use without printing the meaning on the card. Very early on, they could have done this and made these part of the rule system, but actively didn't. The other thing is spell/trap types, which they did very well. If they took this idea for other cards like trap monsters, this could have simplified a lot. I think Rush duels are their way of rebooting the cardgame, and hopefully they use some of these tips when they do.
Yuguioh was a pretty normal game until 2015-2018 and recently that they just idk what happens they just started to print crazy cards that don't have once per turn effects or that combo the hole engine in 1 play i mean back in the day you have cards like stratos that search a card for no cost making a plus 1 and if you had ways to loop it you could get more that 1 card but that never happened lol but suddenly since DR/spellboocks they started to print cards that do the whole combo in 1 turn with no cost like zoodiacs and now a days since they realeased token they just said fuck it let's see where this shit can get beacause modern cards don't even have restrictions anymore lol is such a crazy thing
Yu Gi Oh is using keywords, wherever they can, but due to how nuanced every single effect can be, the cases in which that can be done are very limited. Sometimes keywords even lead to even longer cardtext. Like (Quick Effect) now instead of "During either players turn" seems shorter, except when you actually AREN'T supposed to activate it during either players turn. Then you get "During your opponent's turn (Quick Effect)", which is actually longer. See Flamberge for example. It is not actually easy to point at multiple cards having the exact same effect without at least as many other monsters having a very similar but not exactly same effect, each having a tiny different spin on it. You wouldn't actually gain much from keywording something like this, because the text you save on some of the cards actually ends up on another card, which needs explained that it actually doesn't work exactly as the keyword says, all for the cost of having a keyword that doesn't explain itself and people need to know. The problem with YGO cards isn't actually the text or keywords. They're mostly very clear if you're familiar with their syntax like ; : , "if" "when" "and if you do" "then". The bigger issue is the formatting of the cardtext. If each effect would simply be split up into it's own section, it would be so much less cluttered and easy to understand. Example: Add 1 "Diabellstar" monster from your Deck or GY to your hand. During your Main Phase: You can banish this card from your GY, then target 1 of your "Sinful Spoils" Spells/Traps that is banished or in your GY, except "WANTED: Seeker of Sinful Spoils"; place it on the bottom of the Deck, then draw 1 card. You can only use each effect of "WANTED: Seeker of Sinful Spoils" once per turn. This sucks to read. Add 1 "Diabellstar" monster from your Deck or GY to your hand. During your Main Phase: You can banish this card from your GY, then target 1 of your "Sinful Spoils" Spells/Traps that is banished or in your GY, except "WANTED: Seeker of Sinful Spoils"; place it on the bottom of the Deck, then draw 1 card. You can only use each effect of "WANTED: Seeker of Sinful Spoils" once per turn. Easy to read. Immediately clear. If only cards wouldn't be so tiny. Thank god Master Duel exists.
I applaud you for not mentioning "once per turn" at all in this, as it's BY FAR the most common phrase printed on Yugioh cards. The OCG has a method of formatting cards to convey the frequency of ability usage that the TCG didn't adopt. Konami could drastically reduce card text if they would just define "You can only use this ability of <insert card name> once per turn." using a keyword, abbreviation, or symbol. Given how many abilities are once per turn, I'd argue that it might be better to change the rules to state that an ability is once per turn by default and can be used more if specified.
I wasted a lot of my childhood playing yugioh before moving on to MTG and man mtg is the clearly superior game. Seeing what yugioh has turned into nowadays is depressing.
Really appreciate this video. It made me think about how I'd incorporate an extra deck mechanic into my own game while avoiding these kinds of issues into the card game I'm working on right now. I can't say that I'm absolutely going to add the idea I came up with while considering the pitfalls listed in your video, but if you end up playing my game one day and there's an extra deck you can tell people that your analysis of the concept made me think about how I'd do it. I plan to kickstart my game one day, so it's not impossible, but I realize the odds aren't super great that that will even happen given the way the market is established. Just wanted to say. Also cool that this video is 100% still relevant 3 years later. Great job on it, and I'm subscribing now! 😆
The chilean TCG Mitos y Leyendas works exactly like the bakugan game. Your castle (deck) is also your health, and each time you receive damage, you discard cards. You lose if you run out of cards, of course.
You there? It's been awhile since we last met, on an Inscryption stream. My TCG is doing great, and wish to show you how far It has arrived, wish to discuss it with you, it's been years, but wish we could cross paths again, and see the journey that is my game has been through, the lore is rich and in depth, I think you'll like it, ARG card game, Inscryption made it possible, I'll walk extra miles with mine, or even run, the meta narrative would be fun to discuss, hope you're doing good soldier.
Cuz YGO everything is archetype… the concept of keyword is to duplicate the same effects across cards. YGO do not design card that works individually, they design the entire archetype, and each card is just a small part of an archetype. And since each archetype has different ways of running, no duplicate effects are used across different archetypes. They can technically have keyword among one archetype, but that isn’t going to be better. For example, all shadoll cards can refer when X, do something. Where X is just when a card is sent to graveyard. But this isn’t gonna help that much
I mean I would like to see more keywords in yugioh. Also just please turn all when efects to if. It makes no sense in this powercrept state of the game. It just makes confusion for new players and makes older decks even worse. It wouldn't make any impact on the game only saves time and turns off frustration caused by missreading when or if.
The only honestly, as someone that plays the game pretty often, the only keyword I would want added would be ‘indestructible’ for cards that can’t be destroyed by battle or card effects. Keywords do have a downside to legibility on cards, since the keyword has to be self referential to be immediately understood by new players if you don’t want them to have to open Google every new keyword that shows up. Having the effect spelled out directly on the card does make the effect text bloated, but I prefer that to having to go on Google when I’m reading a magic card that has a keyword I’ve never seen. One benefit of keywords in magic though is that I was looking through cards on TCG player and found one that says “when you commit a crime” instantly bought it, really funny stuff
You simply can't avoid power creep. You either continue to iterate and improve upon old designs, to retain attention, or you plateau in design and you bore your players away to the other games that aren't afraid to power creep. Magic didn't survive by laterally designing Serra Angel and Shivan Dragon for thirty years.
The fact that Rush Duels exists shows that Konami *could* use keyed text since RD cards are literally formatted as: [Requirement] "what you need to do to play the card" and [Effect] "what happens after the requirement is met." This shows Konami sees the TCG as nothing more than a little cash crop to stuff their wallets with.
Yugioh player that defends it quite regularly and I have a lot of fun playing it Yugioh is fast in terms of “turns played” but that 2 turn game was 40 minutes long lol Imagine like tearlaments all gas vs snake eyes all gas, that game can go for a bit and both sides playing around hand traps
Another way to shorten the text is to abbreviate some of the stuff like how Graveyard > GY Main Phase - MP and MP1/MP2 Battle Phase - BP And it's not like that unusual for them to do because a lot of the older yugioh game have done that
Hello, fellow Gabe In my opinion, the only way to truly avoid power creep is to make the game digital. Physical cards can't be altered once you have them (future releases can, but not your copy specificly). In a digital card game, you could take every Celtic Guardian and make them Obnoxious Celtic Guardians
Well turn wise i would say a resource system slows the game down, look at Yu-Gi-Oh, sure there are slow decks, but if i have understood things correctly most games are over on player 1's turn 2, that's way faster than fx. hearthstone (my most played game) where winning on turn 5 is insanely fast, rn one of the best decks have games lasting 12.5 turns on average, and we are in a very fast meta with one deck winning turn 6 on average
Before keywords I want better readability on the text box, for instance in the ocg they use numbers in a circle to differentiate between effect, why tcg doesn't do that? in the tcg I have to read all the card just to find the second effect, like come on... MTG nailed it with by having a line break between effect, like for example I don't need to read all of _Questing Beast_ text box to get onto its second or whatever effect, meanwhile I'm practically forced to read all the novel that is pen Endymion just to get to second effect🙄 that is soo annoying...
By far the most powerful thing in card games is consistency. You could have a card that can be played for free that says 'Win the game. This effect cannot be prevented' but the only thing that matters is how often you can draw that card. So to always have access to a card or effect from the beginning of the game is always going to be insanely strong, and must be very niche or ABSURDLY minor to counteract how absurdly strong consistency is. And to emphasize this: Hearthstone has two cards called Baku, The Mooneater and Genn Greymane who for the steep cost of building your deck with only cards with only odd or only even costs, would upgrade your hero power or reduce the cost of using your hero power. Usually resulting in a button you could use every turn that says something like 'Deal 1 damage for 1 mana' or 'Deal 2 damage for 2'. Very minor effects! For the incredibly cost of only disallowing HALF the possible cards. They were so terrifyingly meta warping that they had to be taken out of the standard format prematurely.
8:59 now suddenly we need a word for adding from GY, Banishment, or Face-up Extra Deck to hand. I never liked this idea of trying to reduce Adding from deck specifically to keyword, as it forces you to add a bunch of other keywords you'd then need to remember when you can just have for them all. Id rather "Add to hand" is changed to "Retrieve" and leave the specifics alone. "Retrieve X from your Deck", "Retrieve X your Deck or GY", and so on. 9:05 Bury should sending a card in general, not just from Deck. "Bury this card from your hand", "Bury all other cards from the field", and so on. Making it specifically replacing sending from deck is far too limiting. I feel like people want to fit too much into one keyword. There's middle ground between the needlessly long text we have, and the needlessly short text I see suggested.
I think the original concern about power creep discussed by Richard Garfield was that making new cards would add more synergy or combos, even if they weren't technically more powerful in isolation. Rotation might be the main solution for that. Sticking to one set at a time or a limited number of sets could also be solutions. The discussion here is really about blatant power creep. Another issue with incomparables is it's likely to keep making the game more complex and text heavy.
