Is The Yugioh Meta WAY TOO D*MN Expensive Right Now ? $500 To Play Meta Decks ? 

Since it’s been requested, follow up video addressing Duel Academy’s points will be coming Monday/Tuesday

It's already hard enough to try to convince any friends to try out this game due to it being complicated and extremely fast in the modern day. The price feels like the final nail in the coffin to seal it off from me being able to convince anyone new to get into it at all.

I genuinely cannot fathom how anyone can see $100+ meta staple cards as ever being ok in any capacity ever. I havent boughten boxes in years. There is literally no point. I know 100% that im not going to get everything i need to play a deck in 1 box. Probably not even 5 boxes. Of course i want the serotonin of opening cards just as much as anyone else does but I know konami is screwing us with pull rates so there isnt any point in playing a rigged slot machine. If konami ever truly fixed things and went to a system like the ocg I would actually buy their product instead of having to just get singles of the cheaper decks i can afford.

Triple Tactics Thrust is only a rare over in the Ocg. While in Tcg it’s a 90 dollar secret rare. Rarity bumping is just straight up dumb, konami tcg can do better.

i had a whole massive thing written about how ridiculous it is that cards every deck needs (thrust and SP) are $100 instead of making archetype specific cards the money cards, but decided it's not worth it. the game's too expensive, it always has been, it's not gonna change, and it's very sad that the accessibility of generic staple cards is not reflected by their broad use. everyone needs these? let's price the fuck outta them. thrust effectively lets you play a 20-30 card side deck whereas the people who refused to spend $300 are stuck playing a 15 card side deck. that's not ok.

remember guys, we are part of the problem. Konami does not do this in the ocg just the tcg and if you keep buying their stuff with no pushback itll only get worse

The clip from the podcast about SP Little knight being a much more expensive super rare being the same as what we have here put me through the roof. 780 yen is about $5.21 USD. Konami sees what cards over preform and bumps their rarity. This doesn’t even bring in the fact that we get garbage cards at highest rarity so that people will pull D Boyz instead of a playable card. Probably why we will never get a unified format too. How would Konami know what cards to make players sell their kidney for. Why are we charged a premium to play this game outside of the ocg

This happens every few years. The game gets crazy expensive but at the same time Konmai is going "How can you complain about the prices, we just gave you all those Cheap Reprints"... it's their cop out from criticism, having Expensive staples and Cheap RePrints side by side. And they just tell you to choose other options.

The main problem is that by the time a cheaper reprint of x card or deck core becomes available either A. the card or deck core is powercrept or B. the card or deck core becomes a casualty on a banlist. It's pretty much a lose lose scenario financially unless you invest in a rogue or tier 2 deck and find alternates/next best thing type of cards to replace the expensive staples.

I remember when Gold Rare Crush Card was a whopping $360 dollars vs Japanese Starter Deck Kaiba having the reprint, selling for $10( Toywiz & Conventions would later jack it up to $45-75!) My point is, its getting even more expensive to grab competative cards. I too have ran 'cheap decks', because thats the only way to compete. Though i am proud competing at regionals, or using unorthodox strategies that grant me victories; It should be a game that focuses on your deck skills and not your pocket book!

High barrier of entry to have a decent deck = fewer new customers. Fewer new customers = less growth. If a franchise that's been around for almost 25years with many different forms of media to advertise itself and can't figure how to attract new players because of a high barrier of entry problem then it should be easy to fix.

Other games don't have this issue. Shadowverse Evolve's expensive cards you need for a deck are like $15 each for a three of, max. There are certain extreme chase cards that have a lot of hype but no real results. The game being a resource based game makes it so alternatives actually do exist. If I don't have Dark Angel Olivia as the mathematically best 5 drop I can slap in the next best 5 drop which is usually class based and has its own benefits. I chalk this up to 1. there being less demand because it's a niche game, and 2. sets being designed to be playable from top to bottom. They don't hinge all their value on the top end. The equivalent of commons and rares are sometimes the best cards in your deck.

Having 500 dollars to be a barrier of entry for competitive yugioh or in the minds of the average joe wanting to return to the game in general thinking the game is 500+ just to play is saddening and is a reason why so many people do leave this game (such as myself having just play One Piece now)

Rarity collection will help but they’re always gunna be non reprinted staples for every deck that will push the tier 1 decks to 4-600 bucks. Thrust and sp for sure atm

Yeah I pretty much switched entirely to online now until I move overseas to study and play in OCG. I'd rather play against the maxx roach than submit my wallet to more torture.

I wish there was more balance between high-rarity and lower-rarity staples and archetype cards. Even when I played back in 2009-2010, there were always THOSE decks where oh, you need X amount of supers (rarer back then), Y amount of ultras and a bunch of secrets, so only people who were on the tournament grind would really get them, meanwhile we would have to "budgetize" our stuff.

Im a little bit over a month into yugioh. I have been picking up my first tcg deck(labrynth). I know that it feels expensive to many Yugioh players but I am a long time magic the gathering player and many magic meta decks for modern which is probably the most comparable format in magic to yugiohs advanced format are about twice what yugioh decks cost. So for me yugioh seems very affordable even as a student who works part time. On the other hand when i first learned about the rarity bumping from the OCG I was pretty astounded. The example I stumbled upon was Chaos angel which i opened one of in my first ever yugioh boosterbox opening. This is a $70 secret rare with no other tcg printings but has an ocg rare printing that is far cheaper around $14 for a japanese rare. as labrynth is very good at utilizing this card id really like to pick up two more of these but they alone cost more than the entire labyrnth main deck. However, the fact that the main deck is so cheap is amazing to me. in conclusion im torn between felling that yugioh is not that expensive compared to magic but rarity bumping is dumb. The ideal format for releasing cards for tcgs should be a set where you can buy one copy of every card in a set at common rarity and then a set where you can open these cards in higher rarities, this way if you want the common versions just to play they are affordable and if you want to try and collect and bling out your deck you have this option too.

I remember back in 2019 I was really getting into the game and spending $14 on a Double Evolution pill and thinking that was a lot of money. Then Animadorned went from common to $80 secret and I quit since I couldn’t play the best version of my deck. Once it finally went down to $20 after the tins I tried to get back in and then Misc went to 1 and the deck was dead.

I like when games have low rarity base forms and chase alternative treatments. Appeals well to both kinds of players. Wixoss for example, a competitive deck is around $100 minimum rarity but the same deck can be $2-$3000 max rarity.

Joshua Schmidt even says that if anything should be cheap, it's staples because they are commonly used to make decks function properly and deck cores should be more expensive, depending on their individual power level. If anyone is really horny to play with these cards, I refer you to DB, YGOPro, Master Duel, etc. Hell even proxies among friends if everyone is cool, but never let a hobby cost you so much that it puts you under creditors or making you unable to pay your financial obligations. Hobbies cost money, but they should be low key, not a tax you have to pay. Make good choices, friends.

Honestly, yeah. Even with me using a Branded Red Eyes Deck, which arguably doesn't use a lot of modern staples such as SP Little Night, it's so god damn expensive to get the specific cards you want/need. Not to mention, why would you go about spending money when you can just hop on Master Duel and get the same cards for free unless you have love for the physical card game? It's just...not really worth it. At least rn.

I feel like TOSS was a good example of having a competitive meta where there was a deck that had a lower cost barrier to entry with Salamangreat. If I recall(and you can correct me), the only really expensive card in that deck was Cynet Mining.

Konami doesn't want another pankratops. It was a common and a strong board breaker so they limit it. Fenrir was ultra and strong as or stronger than pank and was an expensive card, yet exist at 3 rn cause the rarities it exist in are harder to obtain thus keeping the card above the $10 range. Even the rarity collection strong as it is, lacks current power cards (like said in the video) to help increase your win rate.

I think Konami made a wise decision making structure decks competitive in recent years like Dinosmashers Fury, the Shaddoll deck and new Dark World deck. They did learn the lesson of Upper Deck to not short print cards and better chances. That said, for a piece of cardboard the game has gone through cycles and TCG Konami really should not be rarity bumping cards as it seems they didn’t learn their lesson from DAD, and now this.

Yes, already having super expensive staples is annoying. Feeling like there's a new super expensive staple every new set makes ne feel like yugioh us just not worth the money investment

Yup, thanks konami tcg for your stinky bussines model, i just hope the rarity collection (the best set i've seen in this game is a literal translation minus maxx c of an ocg product) and the bad state of side sets can change the direction of this game of something more ocg like, a combination of the ocg multiple options of getting a card and the tcg love of reprint sets could make this game not a hit at the wallet, but i dont expect a change short term

I feel like the TCG is paying a premium for meta relevant cards compared to ocg with these rarities.

I can't afford Yu-Gi-Oh 😭

I think YGO is far more expensive in the long run than it was in the days of TeleDAD/Dragon Ruler/Nekroz, you have to consider that if you bought DADs, DDraws, Allures etc, you coulda held onto them for about 2 years and still had a meta viable deck. Nowadays you just don't get that kinda longevity out of cards, every set that comes out requires you to either A. play the new theme, or B. acquire 2-3 copies of the new meta staple to keep your deck relevant.

Dude, it sucks that a shitty company like Konami is running Yugioh. People can argue as much as they want, but the truth is that there is no reason why Konami isn't releasing cards in multiple rarities in core sets. The OCG has been doing it for a long time. If someone wants the expensive good-looking card, they can spend $100 on it. If someone only cares about playing the game, they can get the rare or the super rare instead.

I wouldn't have that much of a problem with staples being that expensive, if konami did't find a way to totaly devalue them in a few months after release, eather with a reprint of the same/higher rarirty, a banlist, or powercreep.

Competitively price for a deck it is expensive. A shame that you can’t just take a deck that is really cheap and win at a competitive event outside off locals

Hell yes. I mean in Digimon some of the top meta decks are very affordable like for example Belphemon is meta deck and is I believe below 50$.

I blame the customer/players on this topic, there the ones always asking for their cards to be shiny and have high value. As a casual player i dont care if my ash blossom is common or secret as they both do the same. I get that core sets need those expensive cards to validate the purchase of that booster box otherwise no one would buy them but we need to meet in the middle and implement the ocg rarity distribution where all cards are available low rarity and make the good/chase cards low and high rarity.

Ideas: 1. A box should be $40-$50. 2. Rarity Spread- Buying 2 boxes should give you like 2-3 casual decks and most of what you need for a competitive deck, plus 1 or 2 chase cards. 3. Include a bunch of new awesome rarities for meta players. If they did this, casuals and budget players would buy sealed product like crazy

Game is far too expensive right now lol

I switched to warhammer age of sigmar the table top game because yugioh was just to expensive and buying product is pointless when the pulls are worthless most of the time and it’s hard to get play sets of cards needed for decks from a booster box I still watch yugioh content follow the meta and buy cheap singles from time to time but I gave up on chasing the meta or even trying to participate in events at least with warhammer I know exactly what I’m getting when I purchase products and they maintain their value somewhat

short printing and rarity bumb is fucked up for sure legit just pure greed. if we had a good chance of getting want we want in the boxes konami would actually sell way more packs and boxes... most tcg player wont even try to pull cards from pack and straight away goes for the singles online. i really dont know what they are thinking

I really wish I could send you some pictures of my OCG cards to give you a more complete reference. Normally there are 8 ultras and 10 supers in an OCG set. It’s a bit different this year due to the 25th Anniversary. Ultras can also be pulled as ultimates, secrets, and starlights (QC rares this year). Supers can be pulled as secrets and starlights (QC rares this year). There are options for players to upgrade their sets without having to wait for a reprint set. And, as was previously mentioned, some other key cards are rares. Rares are in most packs only replaced by secrets and supers. Strangely they can be found in packs with ultras and ultimates. This is for core sets. Side sets have a different set up.

I started playing on paper a few months back, and when figuring out a deck to play most of the time I'd look at a decklist and there would be 1 or 2 cards in it that simply price me out of it. Rarity collection having Baronne and Prosperity helps with that to an extent but there's still Thrust and Little Knight. Sure there are substitutes you can use but a new player isn't really going to know that and just move onto to something else.

Doesn’t help that digging though common boxes at stores is a nightmare and playing for shipping in TCG player sucks but if a meta card gets printed as a common for budget players is awesome. Also people are forgetting Yugioh famous are infamous for being like sorry I only play first editions only. Once more age of overload keep printing maybe prices will drop its only been put for a couple weeks. But if Konami wants to help the player base have players be able to buy the boxes or singles straight from them. Vendors are already marking up the 25th rarity box.

This is why I will never play competitively and I always stick to rouge decks. Hell I used to go for cards I just have than buy expensive cards. How is it that the OCG has all these cards, each one having different rarities from Rare to Ultimate yet here, that card has one rarity and is super hard to get.

everything is too expensive. yugioh cards car parts pc parts houses food 😭😭 maaan 😊

It’s crazy how expensive the game is. I remember when ash blossom came out and it was $40-$50 and then it got reprinted as a super and it was still $20-$30. I can’t remember which one when ash came out in a structure deck and you could get 3 copies for $30 it was so late in that cards life cycle you could’ve gotten it 100 times over by then. It’s crazy how they are manipulating the market for these cards just to make people that love the game have to go out a lot of money just to play. I haven’t played in years and that’s because I depend on pulls to get a deck because that’s the only way I can afford it, but I never get there so I never get to play

I’m an OG like yourself been playing since 02 and started to play competitive with Blackings in 08 and was finally able to top a few regionals in 2012-13 with 4-axis fire fist and F.A.T. (My all time favorite deck). I stopped playing the physical game after my daughter was born about 5 years ago. With 2 kids now, the power creep is just too expensive. Like you, I maxed out the rarities of decks that I love but, I’ll stick with just playing tournaments on master duel for now.

A massive boycott and protests can fix this issue and make tcg the same as ocg but sadly the meta sheep do nothing cause they justify spending that cash while being upset when no one can afford the game

I would like to see Konami set a goal for no staple cards being above $20/per on the secondary market. Hopefully with something like rarity collection we see reprints of serious staples every year. They know what they're doing and it's actually killing the game. No other game with any serious competitive scene forces these prices on the secondary market for staple cards. If they want more people playing the game instead of collecting, they're going to have to make it to where average Joes can play the physical game and not be blown out turn one.

One thing I think Konami should do at regionals is have an anti-meta sort of division. A neighboring town has tournaments locally where meta decks and cards aren’t allowed and it seems highly popular. The entry fee is the same, prizes aren’t nearly as great as the main event, but it does allow for more interaction and gameplay

I think one of the saddest aspects of the game is that eventually everything gets power creeped. So if you do bite the bullet and purchase some of the more expensive cards you only get to use them for a certain amount of time before they end up in a box collecting dust. Or the cards are too good and get banned so guess what, they still end up in box collecting dust. I remember I wanted to play Swordsoul so bad, but by the time I was able to get all the cards (thanks to reprints) the deck is basically a shell of its former self and nowhere near as powerful as it was. Look at Kash that deck is barely 2 years old and has been hit on every banlist since it came out.

Its sad to see that people are NOW talking about this games "Cost of Entry" because of a Waifu "Tax" extra deck staple. And people wonder why this game has a new player problem to begin with.

Thing is you have to spend a lot of money to play one of the best decks one of the top metas to really have a chance to compete and then even if you don't want to play a meta deck and you want to play something you actually like instead of scrubbing a deck list to get wins you have to then buy expensive Staples to put in a rogue non-medically be able to even have a chance those Staples are required equalizers.

My hero is they guy that won the WCS in Brazil with only common and super cards in his trap and spell deck (mystic mine burn), he crushed all the meta trash and then they start complaining 😂

14:29 I agree. If also they need to make a core set Is that support these meta cards. So they'll be easy for people to pick up. Cause keep in mind konami is still trying to get people to play this game. But here's The Thing. How are we supposed to do that If the cards are too damn expensive Not to mention hard to pull And I mean, if you want to get him in rarities like you said. Also, by the court sets that way, they could keep selling the product. Like it's ridiculous that we had to wait for this twenty fifth anniversary just to buy some of these cards. Especially when yao Is ban list lyrically changes up so much of the game as it goes on

Just make cards more accessible. Stop locking the top competitive level of the game behind price. This game is only expensive because the best cards are Secret Rare and/or Ultra Rare. Look at Vanquish Soul. If Konami would stop locking great cards in ONLY the ScR and UR slots, the entry price of the game would come way down. LIKEWISE, if they were to give reprints of good cards in lower rarities in the Mega Packs, the cost of entry wouldn't be as high for new players. Pot of Prosperity was reprinted in tins, in the ScR slot when it was ALREADY a ScR, and kept entry to good cards high. Same for other cards like Forbidden Droplet, Lightning Storm, Triple Tactics Talent...Imperm is probably the only exception, EVENTUALLY. What could the reason for this be, if not for profit? This is how Konami wants the game to be. Because to them, the game doesn't have any other purpose than to make money. It's evident in how they present their regional events; production in all accounts is lower and more shallow than other events. The most direct example I can see is Pokemon VGC/TCG/PGO. Yes, this game is expensive. Why we still play is beyond me...but I'll be going to my locals with S:P in my deck.

Konami is only interested in milking their customers. This will never change.

I genuinly think that Konami could make more money if they dropped this anti-consumer policies they've been running with for so long. I'm kinda impressed how this system has been working thus far, because by all common sense it should not, and it began to show symptoms this year when multiple stores stopped distributing yugioh card because they lost money, and then konami response was to rarity bump every single good card in this AGOV set so the product sells like crazy. The solutions are so clear and everyone knows about them, they just simply don't want to.

This is no surprise. Competitive yugioh has always been expensive. Remember Kozmo’s in their prime? Secret rare dark destoryers where $100 a pop and you needed to play 3 of them and 3 kozmo farm girl which were $60 - $70 and again you needed 3 of them and the rest of the other cards, handtraps and expensive side deck to go with it. This was 8 years ago. This is going to always be a thing in yugioh. Top tier decks are always going to be crazy expensive until another reprint tin comes out rinse and repeat.

Would love to have you on our podcast to talk about similar topics such as this. Do you have any contact info I could reach out to?

3:11 The fact that you're spending a thousand dollars on cards. And you still might lose as kind of a wild if you stop and think about it. You should be destroying the Meta

$500 dollars just to compete with the rest of the meta, you can pay your debts and play the game that you love. Konami needs to address this in the tcg because not everyone can afford the game it shouldn't cost rent just to play and win because this is getting out of hand

Every since i had played yu-gi-oh i had never been able to play a proper deck because of how damn expensive it can get, i had been able to get full bases but because the staples are so high in price i either have to sell that deck to afford the staples but then am stuck with a cheap deck that goes between rogué or tier 2, so yes they should fix the prices, cards should not cost more than 20$ at most or deck should be between a range of 100 to 200$, the only reason they could go higher is because of a collect rarity, but the card should be available at a common or rare, so that way having a 500$ deck is a option not a must.

I haven't bought cards in a few years. Just too damn expensive for no real reason.

I dont understand why the ocg is cheaper than the tcg where as everyone can get it in the ocg but not for the tcg.Maybe cause they know the tcg players will buy it no matter what

If I had to put it down on paper each deck I possess cost at least around $200 to 300 and it would take me around 5 months to a year to complete one.

At around 10:30 u mentioned a podcast after jeff jones talked being linked in the description. However i dont see any of that

I played anti meta deck p much my entire active ygo "carreer" not bc i wanted to, with the except of infernity hero that deck was tight af, but bc it was all i could afford as a kid and while i can definitely afford to play a top tier deck now as an adult, i rather use that money for bills or those who rely on me

And Jeff has a point, nobody said hobbies are supposed to be cheap. However $100 plus for 1 card is madness.

Honestly people who are defending the absurd cost of this game are either 1) resellers 2) collectors 3) competitives who want to cash out their deck after events OCG model is the way to go.

People always point to Flesh and Blood as the most expensive game but something to point out to that arguement is that the pricy cards for FAB are generic staples that can be played in every deck and a lot of those cards are equipment pieces you only need 1 of and the game has an evergreen format. Yugioh has been expensive for a while and your meta staples that are 100 plus dollars can just be banned and now they are practically worthless.

YES! YES! ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES YES! It's one of the biggest reasons I want Konami to lose the rights for Yugioh and have it be given to a company that will treat the IP well (Update. Now I have an answer that I've mentioned elsewhere. Bandai Namco. Yes. I know they did the original Yugioh card game. But its been two and half decades. I think it's time to give them a second chance.

3:36 I started at the very start of the d m era. And I still play Do I used to hit my best friend's Grandma. Clean up her house for 20 bucks. The funny thing is that twenty bucks Could help me buy cards. Good luck with that shit now

Yugioh gets less expensive the more cards you already have.

Yugioh is the most accessible it’s ever been. Mega Tins routinely slash card prices in half. Bitching about a card being too expensive when it hasn’t even been out long enough to be reprinted is the dumbest take out there. I’m old enough to remember how extortionately expensive older formats were. Tour Guide was in excess of $100 and ran at 3 copies and the accompanying Zenmaines was also in excess of $100 and you’d play at least 1 copy. Dino Rabbit was also a pricey deck with a 3 of secret rare in Rescue Rabbit plus Lagia and Dolka. Teledad format was likely the most expensive format of all time with CCV being de facto required to be competitive. Mermail was also a pricier deck during fire/water format with it being high rarity. Or the extra deck of Ruler format costing $600+ on its own. Jump forward a little bit more and you get into Kozmo format with Dark Destroyer being up to $150 apiece and cards like Tin Can, Farm Girl, and Straw Man also being on the pricey side thanks to the deck being almost entirely high rarity. Or we could go to Zoodiac format where Barrage was a mandatory 3 of in every deck and was nearly $100 plus the cost of playing your secret rare Drident at at least 2 copies. The deck has historically never been this accessible for new players. Yes insanely broken cards like Thrust command a high price point on release. No that doesn’t make the game unaffordable because these cards will eventually get reprinted. The only card recently that’s avoided having its price tanked after the mega tins is Prosperity, which has now been reprinted in the rarity collection and will absolutely plummet in price. TTT used to be $80 and now it’s down to $10. Same goes for other high impact staples like Evenly, Imperm, Lightning Storm, Droplet, Ash, etc. They all had periods of being expensive and then were reprinted and now sit at a fraction of what they used to cost. A new player not being able to afford SP Little Night or Thrust doesn’t make the game unaffordable when deck cores are at a historic low point in terms of price and staples are at an all time low in terms of price. The idea that the game is becoming worse and worse from a price standpoint is just blatantly wrong. Even comparing tier 0 formats, Ishizu Tear format was substantially more affordable than Teledad, Nekroz, and Zoo format and the extra deck alone of a Ruler Deck cost almost as much as an entire Ishizu Tear deck. The last prohibitively expensive format that we’ve had recently was Adamancipator Eldlich format, and there wasn’t even paper play at that point so there wasn’t any incentive to buy the cards.

The economic cost of locking meta builds behind collector rarity cards has been a disaster for the Yugioh meta. If you wanna boil down why more people dont play paper Yugioh, this is why.

No, but when you're bored of the old cards and want to play with the new stuff it's painful and disheartening. I want to play Snake Eye, but Diabelstar is like 200$ engine so I can't.

Right now you can buy a Meta Deck in Pokemon for $60-$100 for the entire Deck. in Yugioh that $100 might be just 1 card in your deck. When comparing them it just shows how greedy Konami is. NorthAmerican Konami is even greedier by making a $10 card $100 in northAmerica.

I can buy multiple fully complete games for such prices! Pieces of cardboard a NEVER worth that much! NEVER!!! The TCG sales model will NEVER get another cent from me! Someday I want to see a legion of plays to storm a official tourney with decks full of Proxies, to the point where Konami either only has like 60 players in a YCS, or just accepts all the proxy players.

I think it's an important point to make that Konami don't control the secondary market and that's where the majority of the $200+, dollar cards come from. I'm new to the tcg scene and when it's scaled down, we pay something like 0.50c per card when bought in a single booster pack.

I would disagree with the comment "You do not need hobbies to live life". Sure, you can wake up every morning, go sit in traffic and go to work, come home and do chores, eat dinner, go to bed, rinse and repeat, but what kind of life is that? Everyone deals with so much bullshit nowadays, especially with the price of groceries, gas, disease, war, etc. it is unfathomable to not have hobbies that take you out of the bullshit of everyday life. Mental health is at an all time low, hobbies should be there to make you feel better, not worse, about your life. Konami ALWAYS favors the OCG over the TCG, that's just their standard. They have ALWAYS given the OCG better products, easier ways of getting cards, better exclusives, etc. Konami could do A LOT more to make their complicated as fuck card game actually fun for people that live in the west. Just IMO. This comes from a player who has been playing this game since it first came out (Seto Kaiba starter deck/Legend of Blue-Eyes booster pack). If you want to bling out your deck with the highest rarity, sure, pay a higher price. But to get the best cards in the game, it shouldn't cost upwards of $100+.

In MTG, a single card could cost you what an entire meta Yugioh deck would, we are just spoiled. And I'm not even talking about collectors stuff, I mean genuine staples for Modern or Legacy decks.

I quit this game in 2016 and it's the SAME GAME now. But compared to Magic the Gathering, $500 for a meta deck isn't the worse thing. But you do have to constantly be spending $300+ every year to buy a playset of the new broken card. But hey, Ash Blossom was the $100 staple back then and it's still used so maybe just maybe that investment could be worth it. Anyway, I played Raccoons back then because yea, I was too broke to be buy Zoodiac for $1000 LITERALLY.

Another really good example on this case was the Top 8 Exosister list. Yes, they ran S:P Little Knight, but you could have played without it. With Prosperity getting reprinted that deck falls into this category as well 8:28

ever since I came back in 2016 the meta has been too expensive. This isn't a surprise

I have a kid now i hope the prices come down so i can take him to locals

This is why i never believe konami when they say the game is growing and we have more players than ever when i live in a major capital city and our locals are considering shutting down yugioh since noone except the hardcores want to play it anymore. Its not a game anymore its a money laundering pyramid scheme. I came back after a few years off cuz links actually did finally ruin the game with infinite otks and ftks, i come back to things bring infinitely worse which unbreakable boards with half a dozen negates and interruptions. And then to add insult to injury everything costs an arm and a leg. Also that podcast is wrong you are guaranteed rares in every pack in the OCG they just have this thing called parallels whoch give shony versions of commons which can take the spot of the rare since its a higher rarity

I got the same order as others do but on ebay for 530 for the black witch x3 1 original snake - eye x1, S:P little night x2 , wanted x3 one black zeus.

My policy has always been: if I'm not competing in regional or bigger tournaments, I can wait for the reprint.

I will say this much I can buy a top teir competitive warhammer 40k army (aeldari) for cheaper than one of the current meta decks for yugioh.

With the release of the rarity collection I'm honestly scared, cuz before "Cash"tira, deck cores used to be somewhat affordable, but rn with the release of the stapple in every rarity, Konami has the excuse to short print and sky rocket the rarity therefore the price of the deck cores for future releases, rn the sinful spoils pack is $240 just for... 6/7 cards? don't even mention if you feel like mixing it with rescue ace that's is other $200 to that, and I didn't add up yet the Little knigth, but now since we have "Cheap stapples" from the rarity Konami could easily print Centurion as a $400 base core just to say a vague example

Rhis is why i play structure decks and i pre ordered 4 boxes of the 25th anniversary box. Also rescue ace hydrant was very cheap when it first came out. Thats their fault they didnt pick them up then. Also sp little knight was 85 on release. Ppl didnt want to pick them up and now they went up...thats on you for not picking them up then...also this is why master duel has so many players. I rather play that and wait for those cards to come to md.

8:11 This is one of the reasons why I don't play the meta

As everything in life gets more expensive, yugioh is no different. Honestly I’d be shocked if yugioh, or any other TCG for that matter, doesn’t get more expensive as time goes on.

Card players take "good" cards for granted. Top gear in sports can cost 1000s. Furthermore, players admonish mid cards and shudder at power creep.

Yea, Yugioh is already hard to learn because it’s not a magic derivative so there’s so “other card game” you can use to teach people. We don’t need these rarity bumps making it harder to enter. Like let people have a low cost option to enter as they learn, and once people love a deck, they will probably start to max out shiny cardboard to some capacity

I don't play meta decks when they are relevant because I don't want to get caught by surprise when a banlist drops. I also pick up decks only if they are cheap and will be receiving more support to boost their value and make them easy to move later. Cheaper decks I play now include: Drytrons, Labrynths, Ishizu Vernusylph Traptrix, Mikanko, Umi Control, Bystials Lair of Darkness. Learn to play within your means. You don't need luxury cards to win, they just make winning easier. Make meta calls, play antimeta, play the game to pull ultis at your local OTS and improve your deck. Every aspect of life is this: luxuries tend to be expensive. Oppression makes for unprecedented innovation. High tier competitive players complaining that they got scrubbed out by jank is my theme music. The underdog finally catching a "W" and I am all for it. The poor player innovated the game and scrubbed out the players slated to win for an unprecedented upset. That is the game I want to play! You mindlessly bought your deck, I learned to make my deck beat yours.

To add insult to injury I’ve gotten my entire Rescue Ace core for 30 bucks A single hydrant nearly cost me double what I’ve paid for the whole core

I've played this game since it's early days in 2003. And I had the same perspective. Part of the biggest issue with the game right now is the price. People complain about entry knowledge but thats not even the biggest issue to most people. I don't think Jeff Jones take on the matter is really not down to earth. There's a ton different things that Konami could do to fix this, as well as yugioh literally has multiple anime. The notion that Pokemon does better because it's Pokemon doesn't hold water when you look at what happened with it back when WotC had it. There's tons of issues with defending the price gauging. To the point now where it's not just broke people complaining about it.

The tcg needs to start printing unlimited versions of their core sets again . Trying to keep the price point high so players feel like their cards have value is keeping new players from wanting to play . They also need to calm down on reprinting older cards because that's killing the secondary market making the game not worth collecting to begin with . They need to cut back on the holos as well as now it's common to see several secret rares under 10$ making the purchase of a booster box undesirable . To gain new players they need to simplify the text ,make structure / starter decks decent but around 10$ that'll include an extra deck and make an ANIME series worth watching so the youth can be pulled in and interested . Without a modern anime the youth just see it as an old card game and gravitate towards Pokémon which has toys, an anime, video games etc .

I make this argument every every new format. Do you want a great set with exciting new cards and a diverse format, or would you prefer Tier zero formats with failed set releases one after another.

Pokémon player here. I have built three meta decks in the last few months for around $100.