The thing that really pisses me off about Farfa’s guitar analogy is that the basic fundamental cards for modern ygo is a much larger financial sink. A cheap but good enough guitar won’t gate you from learning the basics.
Yeah. Farfa’s analogy was braindead. It doesn’t matter if I’m learning violin on a Yamaha that cost $300 Or a priceless Stradivarius the challenge of improving my technique will be the same. The player who can’t afford to put S:P and Diabellestar in their deck is trying to learn violin with a broken instrument.
The analogy also doesn't make sense. You're not COMPETING on guitar. If you show up to the race track and just do solo laps for fun, it doesn't matter if you bring a Civic or a GT-R. But if you're RACING against other drivers, okay now the Civic matters.
Yugioh IS NOT the most popular its ever been. You feel that way because you are in the streaming/vtuber echo chamber and see many of your friends and colleagues playing it currently. But at one point globally Yugioh was the biggest TCG in the world bigger than Magic and Pokémon. Now many places that used to support Yugioh both in terms of selling products and hosting events won't even touch it due to a lack of interest. I love Yugioh but the fact is the game is at an all time low and I'm afraid for its future.
It was bound to happen. Let alone the power creep, you can't play competitively without the expensive must haves in Yu-Gi-Oh. Very rarely, can you compete with META with a cheap budget deck. What Yu-Gi-Oh needs at this point is a resource system of some form, imo. If Yu-Gi-Oh becomes any more quicker, you might as well flip a coin.
Yugioh players consider $60 to be a reasonable price for oen card? I have entire decks in other tcgs that full power cost less than $60 and can keep up with current meta.
most pokemon competitive decks are around 45 dollars because pokemon tcg doesn't hide game pieces after chase rarities everything is available in rare or less they just have more rare versions for collectors. and that website for magic shows how much for all copies in the deck ragavan isn't 180 dollars its 45 still way to high but its not that bad (yet) with the fighting game analogy that was used by rednu I would say yugioh is the kusoge of tcgs. is it unfun? no of course not its super fun.
Yes it bother3d me when he said “reprints” . Pokémon doesn’t make its players wait a year before printing important game pieces in an accesible form They print in the same god damn set. 23:14
What a lot of people saying it's cheap, don't get that is that it is a constant sinkhole. At some point, you get your cheap core, but you really wanna make it better. And the reality is, you don't have all the time in the world to optimize it. Meta shifts, cards get played and used more, staples change, etc. Your deck will constantly need to change in some way, or you're gonna crave wanting to play other decks. Those costs add up and they add up very fast, especially because a lot of decks are drastically different in how they're built.
Many of the cards of those pokemon decks are out of rotation currently and not part of the Standard. You can replace them with other options though and they mostly work with current meta.
I haven't played paper yugioh in 10 years now, cause it started to get to a point where the game was getting ridiculous expensive. Plus you got tones of sims out where you can play in online combative formats. I also didn't care about not playing in person because all honestly the community was also becoming even more toxic, and I didn't see the point in spending money to play the game I love.
Are evolved pokemon ever used in the TCG? Like I don't think so which kind of kills the coolest thing about pokemon, like they should balance it so it was viable imo but that's coming from a magic player that has no experience in pokemon except the gameboy color game.
This is a hot take but I think Yugioh is alot easier to learn then people say I an 14 now but learnt yugioh in 2020 when i was 10 purely through youtube my only prio experience was using my dads old cards from DM era so I think if a 10 year old can do it an adult can
I barely play modern and only have 1 modern pet deck in HERO. I only update it when the cards get reprints because i dont play enough to justify it. There was no way in hell i was spending $100 on Adusted Gold, Faris, and Malicious Bane when they were new. They will always get support though so it works out as a way to save a ton of money on this hobby
Yugioh is essentially just a really expensive hobby. It requires a time sink of hundreds of hours just to master the fundimentals and if you want to play the real thing, be prepared to drop up to a thousand dollars per competitively viable deck
Farfa's take is a total L take. It's not a matter of needing the best cards in order to compete; it's sometimes that you need the best cards to even TRY. Let's go down how easy these games are to even get into. Let's assume you head to your local game store and want to get into all three major TCGs; YuGiOh, MtG, and Pokemon. You find three pro players who're down to teach you to play, but there's a catch; you need to purchase two decks, one for each of you, that're beginner friendly. You'll own both decks after, but you need to provide the decks since their own decks are too strong for you as is. Let's assume the store is fully stocked and uses prices similar to Amazon, rounded up to the nearest $5 increment. MtG's best start seems to be the 2023 Starter Kit, which consists of two 60 card decks. Looking over the reviews, both consist of very well balanced decks that're good for beginners and somewhat powerful with minimal investment. Most cards come in 1-2 copies, but some come with 3-4, so a second copy of this product, while it could be helpful, is unnecessary. This product comes in at just under $20 per copy, so for around $40, you could get two copies to make the decks more consistent and powerful with additional copies of the better cards within these decks. But that's only if you want to learn the more basic format; if you want to learn Commander, those decks are much more expensive; around $30-50 depending on the deck. However, those decks are also meant to be much more powerful and competitive right out of the box; so they're more complex to learn, but compensate by being pretty decent. Pokemon would come in second, as the 2023 Worlds decks seem to be relatively simple and easy to learn, if having a bit more of a learning curve than the MtG decks. Depending on the deck, you're looking at around $15-20 per deck, but each deck consists of as many copies of their cards as you need. Putting these decks, I used Psychic Elegance and Lost Box Kyogre for this example, you're also looking at around $40 for two well built and balanced decks. This might be even better than MtG, in fact, since these decks would actually stand a chance in regular play at the game store while the MtG deck would only do okay, unless you're learning Commander. YuGiOh is the odd man out. Looking over the numerous structure decks available, they average around $10-20 per deck, but that's where the good news ends. Looking over them all, it seems like Traptrix is the one most recommended for newbies due to it's power, at the cost of complexity. The problem coming into YuGiOh is this deck, while good, isn't actually complete and, by what I can tell, you'd need three copies of this deck to thin the bad cards out of it, get multiple copies of the good cards, to make a more consistent deck. Assuming you buy Traptrix and Hero Strike (Similar price, so they SHOULD be similar in power, right?), that's $20 per deck, three copies each. That's $120 just to get started, nearly triple the price of MtG and Pokemon. But at least you'll have a decent deck... right? Wrong. Where the MtG and Pokemon decks will do decently at your local game store, assuming nobody is wandering around with a meta deck, YuGiOh will get utterly stomped. Traptrix, while the most recommended structure deck, seems to be missing a lot of key cards for it's own archetype and while it has some decent staples, like Ash Blossom, Raigeki, and Harpie's Feather Duster, that means your most powerful cards don't actually give you a win condition. Sure, you'll win a couple matches, but against a well made, balanced archetype deck? Nope. You will get utterly crushed with one of these structure decks, even if you buy multiple of them to make them more consistent. They're simply missing too many key cards to win consistently against random players, even in casual play. And the most frustrating part will be that you'll also lose a lot through no fault of your own; anytime your opponent goes first and sets up a board with multiple negates, you'll lose regardless of your deck's power simply because you went second. This is why I see Traptrix is so recommended; it at least has Ash Blossom to give you SOME defense against simply losing by default just for going second. Just looking at a base level, yes, YuGiOh is far too expensive; even the ground floor is more expensive than the other products. Even the recent 2 Player Starter Set for YuGiOh is extremely low rated despite tons of purchases; almost like it's completely unfit for actually teaching someone how to play the game and is nothing more than a waste of money. MtG and Pokemon simply have a much lower barrier to entry and are considerably cheaper to get in on the ground floor. More concerning is that a lot of archetypes are simply unavailable for people to jump in with. About the only archetype I know anything about is Silent Magician and that's only through word of mouth. And I was dismayed to see there is actually NO option for a beginner friendly Silent Magician deck; hell, there was no option AT ALL outside of buying a deck from someone else. I was even dismayed to see that there was only one option for Spellcasters, which was a favorite of mine back before I stopped playing YuGiOh completely after Elemental Heroes basically destroyed the meta. And said option uses pendulum summons which, as I understand things, is one of the single most complex mechanics in the entire game. Yeah... probably not a good thing to try to re-learn the game with. Again, this is all as far as I can tell. It seems like while archetypes are a great way to play YuGiOh, the game seems to make it really difficult to even get into play like that with the sheer limitations on what archetypes can be bought, officially, by Konami. And while buying custom built decks is always an option, deck prices will fluctuate wildly based on what archetype, availability of the cards, and the like; making it a very difficult data point to even consider. I could probably ask for two quotes for a Silent Magician deck and one person might ask me for $40 since they have all the cards on hand and aren't using them while another could ask me $400 since they have to hunt them all down for me.
Farfa's analogy may not have been the best, but he's right about YGO being affordable in various ways, even for newer players. Yes, you don't need Thrust in order to win consistently at your locals. In fact, there are plently of rogue decks that you can find success at your locals with and are actually cheap, such as Plunder, Umi Control, and even Swordsoul. Top decks will always be expensive, but I highly doubt that even most new players would be interested in playing at a YCS or something similar. The issue is being able to play paper comfortably, which is very difficult for many people, not just new players. Simply put, countless people have locals that are full of sweaty players. YGO is a competitive game, obviously. YGO also has a very large number of players who love to compete. These players are also unwilling to help new players gain a better understanding of the game. For example, if a new player from MD approaches one of the aformentioned players with, say, Blue-Eyes, and requests a match from them, then one of two moments will happen. Either the more experienced player will tell the new player to play a better deck or ignore them entirely. Both of these moments are inherently discouraging for most people. There's also the rare third moment where the experienced player very quickly obliterates the new player for the sake of stroking their ego. These moments essentially form the typical experience for new players and even casual players playing paper. They create a situation where those types of players feel that they must play at least one of the top decks, such as Kash, in order to enjoy playing paper. YGO can be expensive, but the community is an inherently bigger problem.
I don't agree too much with the last sentences. I think that if you play in a medium to highly competitive local, you'll always find skilled players with very competitive decks. That's natural, because YGO is a competitive game, and winning even at a small local is very rewarding. Both mentally and physically, as you can win real rewards. But those same skilled players will eventually bring their pet decks, from time to time.
