I think one of the problems here is there is a difference between complicated and difficult. Yugioh has stigma of being complicated much more than being difficult, and if you are a new player, complicated is what you are going to get smacked with front and center. The difficult part of the game doesn't come until much later when you already are pumped with an insane amount of knowledge and rulings, to where you decisions finally have some weight and understanding. Chess is nearly the total opposite. Just about the entire game can be explained and understood in less than an hour, and past that point, most players will not need to have rulings explained to them again. Only a handful of rulings have a slight amount of complication to them (such as castling or un passant), but even those rulings are pretty easily understood. Compared to YGO, where it will be many, many hours before you understand most of the rules, functionality of the game, functionality of hundreds of thousands of individual cards, and functionality of tens of competitive archetypes before you can start making real informed decisions. Swing it back to chess again, where this is 5 different pieces that more or less behave the same away in all situations. Chess is much, much easier to pick up than YGO, and is one of the best poster children for "easy to play, difficult to master". This isn't all just to take a dump on YGO, I think YGO certainly has it's moments of difficulty, it's just blocked by complication. It's why I am always a fan of making cards less complicated, but trying to keep the difficulty in tact.
Yeah, the game should more focus on the interaction, not the solitaire part. Also, we need to redefine the "interaction" in this game. Players think the good "interactions" are when they can put disruptions in 1 turn and use them all in a single turn too. Personally, 2-3 disruptions in each turn, but with less time to set up, will be very interesting "interaction" and also more skillful. When you can put and use everything in a single turn, sometimes the opponent doesn't have cards to play under those disruptions at all, and it suddenly becomes auto-win.
As someone who picked up yugioh less than a month ago it is still incredibly fun to read new cards, identify their negates and whatnot and find ways to play around it. Even if I misplay or might not understand other cards that aren’t face up that I have to play around, breaking apart a board and trying my best to solve the puzzle is still incredibly fun even if I lose in the end. All ppl rlly need to know is how the staples work to an extent and to read read read to have fun. This is just my personal experience as a new player and I had tons of fun from learning my first (and the only deck I know rn) by playing solitaire, once I understood my routes better and what interruptions exist I’m now having fun solving the puzzles even if I’m misled and not making the best decisions with the information available im still fighting my best fight and that’s fun
This is all very true my friend, that is why i think Paul quoted Morphy and just replaced chess with yugioh, only thing is they have their differences obviously. One is difficult for a reason concerning positional play and lines while other (yugioh) is mostly on the complicated side. Think that, if all cards had PSCT, HOPT for effects and actual site for all the rules and rulings with concrete solutions other than some cards working in a weird way just because Konami said so, then we would have much healthier approach to the game itself.
I don't understand this, Yugioh can be understood how to play in a few hours, but much like chess, the skill difference between players will be massive. There are thousands of different chess strategies that players have to memorize in order to become good at chess and make informed decisions as well. It's all the same stuff. People like you just conflate learning yugioh with learning how to pilot a Tear deck to an average degree. Those aren't the same, just like learning Chess is not the same as learning how to respond to your opponent's Sicilian Defence Dragon Variation opening optimally.
As someone who used to compete in compretitive chess and swimming with a very short stint in collegiate MOBA Theres a key difference between the difficulty of Yu-Gi-Oh and the difficulty in honestly almost any other sport ive ever tried. Entry cost. Even Airsoft a very expensive hobby. Lets u borrow gear to use. Most sports try to make the entry barrier as EASY as possible for players. So they can focus on the actual work/practice you need to put in. Yu-Gi-Oh unfortunately doesn't have that. You either have the cards or you don't. And boi is it difficult to have the cards if you dont have a very generous sponsor or the money yourself
Yeah, that is a big portion of the game that I wish saw improving. Staple cards should not be expensive. And Rarity Collection really helped with that but we need more.
@chicabubr7094 yes and no Yeah, you can buy structure decks or use a loaner during an event, but playing meta requires either significant money or time investment (or lucky pulls ig).
@@chicabubr7094 UR, UR, UR, UR, UR, UR, UR, UR, UR... FFS even the random shit cards for bad archetypes that I happen to like are fucking UR's while being goddamned commons/rares/super rares IRL...
The thing is. Difficulty is most appealing when it's an "easy to learn, hard to master" type of deal. Look at chess for example. Chess is an INSANELY difficult game, but it takes mere minutes to learn how the pieces move. YuGiOh is not like that. YuGiOh is almost impossible to get into from the get-go.
@@changhyon92 difference is, soul games are hard but are fun, yugi meta is comolicated not difficult is not fun and is frustrating that my turn now is the main phase 3 of my opponent
@@elitesayanzthat’s entirely subjective. I personally find the run back of older Souls games to be incredibly annoying and I fell off all of them except Bloodborne and Elden Ring for that reason. If you’re motivated, it’s fun. If you’re not motivated, it’s a drudgery. You can say the same about a battle royales, mobas, older fighting games, etc. It’s not fun to play a game and lose/die before you even got to learn what you’re doing. BUT if there’s something in that game you value beyond winning, you’ll stick around for hundreds of losses while you learn.
@@changhyon92If you mean that they are easy to learn, hard to master then I would agree. Learning to block, dodge, attack and heal in Dark Souls isn't difficult at all. The difficulty comes from the situations players are challenged to overcome using those simple tools and the overall challenge the game makes to the player to master their usage of those tools.
It is not hard to learn yugioh on a basic level. You can teach someone the game in like 40 minutes. You are just conflating learning how to play a complex deck to a decent degree with learning yugioh. Learning how monsters, spells, and traps work in yugioh is not difficult outside of extremely edge cases, much like chess is not difficult with pieces. Learning a deck in yugioh is like learning how to counter certain opening s like the Sicilian defense where you have to start memorizing tons of different openings and strategies. It's the exact same.
Advertising Yugioh's difficulty is like advertising the gym as a place you can be in pain and smelly in a room with strangers. It's a core part of the experience, but not the reason why yo're doing it. One thing that could help, however, is introduce the idea of combos from the start. Learning about link climbing is more relevant than tribute summoning , for example. If Yugioh is the game where you can do a bunch of stuff in one turn, show new players ow to do a bunch of stuff in one turn.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think it would work. The thing about chess is that; it's a game of equals. Both side starts the same pieces and can do the same thing on their turn. Yugioh (and other card game) isn't like that. Decks aren't made as equals. You can play a low tier deck perfectly, and still lost to someone who did made a mistake but play a higher tier deck. Due to this; the appeal of "be the best by mastering the difficulty of the game" would quickly be overshadowed with the fine print "except if you don't have the right card and your opponent does". And in a game that (in this scenario) want to push for more competitive settings, that's not really appealing.
@@cheesycheese7100 yes, as mentioned. Trading card games will always have 2 sides that are not equals. Even if both play the exact same deck, due to shuffling, they would have different hands that aren't exactly equal.
Also, don't forget the impact of first turn. Chess is a game where white has a lead BUT is not so massive it invalidates what black can do. YGO is an asymmetrical game in practice BUT it's clear it was not built to be one, instead one where combos were built over multiple turns, having to pass sometimes.
I think the difference between chess and YuGiOh is that chess is incredibly accessible, 5 year olds can play the game and understand all the rules, but you can devote your life to doing nothing but playing chess and will never be in the top 100. YuGiOh has the opposite problem, where the barrier for entry is rediculously vast from the point of view to a new player, but you can easily rise to the top withen a year or two (like Pak)
having the best cards isn't indicative to skill; if anything it says the opposite. I play a mid tier deck, only with spell counter cards (Endymion mostly) and I won against rescue ace, you may not think that's a big deal, but it is if you understand the tiers. Recue ace is played against snake eye and snake eye's currently is top five. When you play high tier decks; is it skill or is it the cards?
The problem with this strategy is we can easily end up like modern Rainbow Six Siege. Where the mass audience has left in droves and only the core player base remains after the hyper fixation on making R6 Siege into a very competitive game. While the game is still doing relatively well. Their undeniably losing more and more of their audience every year. That's something yugioh in my opinion can no longer afford to do for the western audience. It might work in Japan since they have a good buffer of players if it goes wrong. But even the slightest bad shake up in the TCG space can prove fatal for their sales as the community currently stands
I think this is kinda already the issue that yugioh has now, and yeah it very well might lead to the death of both of these games in short order if they dont work themselves out
@@SeveNStarSeveN That was an OCG tournament in Japan. And regardless, tournament attendance(especially OCG) are not a good indicator for the health of the game. Most games can reach capacity on events. Many yugioh tournaments have people unable to play because the venue cannot accommodate them. It does not change the fact that pure numbers wise YuGiOh has much less players and sells far less player than the other from the OG big 3 and even far less than other games like Flesh and Blood.
@@SeveNStarSeveN I specifically mentioned that the OCG where this biggest tournament ever happened is flourishing. The Western market however is definitely not and therefore cannot afford a major high risk gamble without a backup plan. In case you didnt know, just less then two months ago. The NA YCS banned the event from having an audience at all. We assume its to save on costs. Thats not exactly a thriving TCG market signal is it? On top of that, while the OCG card shops are thriving off Yu-Gi-Oh sales. In my zone alone. 2 major stores officially stopped selling Yu-Gi-Oh products this January and February. I hear its not uncommon either in other areas
@@JonNuclear Yugioh is the second best selling card game in Japan and outsells the 3rd best card game (Duel Masters) by almost 2x. By all measurable standards, sales, tournament turnout, the game is doing better than ever. Konami was literally suprised at how well Master Duel was retaining players compared to other live service games.
I know there's a couple of comments saying what I'm about to say but yeah, YGO isn't hard, it's tedious. Chess isn't hard because each pawn has a 100-word description about what they do, nor a series of chained steps to make them work efficiently, nor effects to disrupt what the opponent can do... but it's fine; that tediousness is what many players like about the game and that's cool. I do think it's a cool game, but not hard. IMHO, the only card game that feels like chess, where a single action matters and could win or lose you the game, is SWU.
every card game uses descriptions. Also this idea that you don't have to read to learn chess is hilarious. Do you think that most people aren't learning the 10000 different openings and strategies people employ . The vast majority of players do not get this through osmosis, they read.
@@SeveNStarSeveN of course every card game uses descriptions, and some of them have twice or three times the depth and complexity of YGO with a single mechanic or line of text, rather than a whole paragraph describing specific steps, board zones, card types, summonings, and other quirky stuff. Again, tediousness is not difficulty. I'm a YGO player and a chess player since I was in elementary school. I actually started playing YGO thinking it was like chess in a card game. But in chess, you can read a single book about openings or strategies or even spacial strategy and that's it. Some players learn as many openings and ending strategies as they can so they know how to react to everything, while others learn how to read the board and think ahead as much as they can, all of this with a single book backing it up. Both players know what they're dealing with and they see the outcome of their decisions either in the same turn or, sometimes, it's a slippery slope that needs a deep analysis. In YGO, chance plays a HUGE role. That's one thing. Then, even if you play the same single deck for the rest of your life to perfection, you learn that there are other decks you'll never beat. You realize that there are decks where even if the opponent messes up the main combo, sometimes they still end up in a way better position. And sometimes, you play against a card you've never seen and don't you dare asking "what does it do?" cause the opponent only knows what the card does in their specific deck and they've never actually read the whole card. I could go on like this cause I like YGO and chess, but I just don't find YGO difficult at all, the word is tedious. And again, I find that tediousness fascinating.
I can only handle the modern game in Master Duel. The older game was approachable IRL but the modem game is only playable to me on automatic simulators. Either way I agree that the complexity in interactions and the skill expression is amazing, it really shines in Master Duel, but I still want alternative formats.
new format: each player sets up their field with no interaction, just what you can muster with the 5 cards. Then the game actually begins where both adds 1 card, coin flip on who's turn priority, when it's your response can activate effect OR attack with one monster which each attack is called battle phase for that monster OR set a card which can be activated on next response. Trap cards fixed. When turn priority can't make a play then turn ends.
Yeah, I believe this type of change should be experimented with. Turn one and two are just the two players setting up their boards with turn three being where the true fun begins. Does it solve all the issues that plague Yugioh, no, but it's a start, and it wouldn't involve any major changes to the cards on Konami's part.
A format where, and I’m just spit balling here, lots of quick effects and links are used to generate advantage? Like say I:P into S:P and Appo. And then the graveyard interactions also start to matter more. Cards like Flamberge and Promethean Princess would be super important in maintaining pace. Lots of floaters, lots of hand traps your opponent can’t account for but assume are still there, and cards like Ty Phon would be the only way to finish off boards. I wish we had a format like that.
@@MagnusvonYoshi just ban Exodia smh. It's a poorly designed card anyways. (This is obviously a joke. Just ban Royal Magical Library instead and Exodia is fine)
I don't think its hard, rather tedious and more memory based than intuitive strategy. You can make a lot of mistakes with combo decks and still end up in the same position or similar position. The whole point of combo decks is to take away your opponents input anyways, you can't do that in chess. First time i used an draw combo deck i messed up bunch of times but still worked out.
"take opponent input away" how? Are you playing against stun ? And no combo decks can't win if you mistake because you have a opponent that is a real human being on the other side
Good luck playing Infernoble through handtraps bro. It's probably more difficult than piloting a control deck optimally and I prefer playing control decks.
@@chicabubr7094 Sorry but you're wrong, i played tearlements for the first time and succesfully milled my opponent. I didn't do at all what was optimal and still won turn 1. Exodia decks are the same way, its just a bunch of similar effects ( means to an end ) and some times it over shoots some times it under shoots.
Doubling down on what makes the game unapproachable already sounds like a great way to kill it for good. When you have to create your own rules to make this fun, the main format of the game is broken. "This is a fucking game, that you used to play as a fucking kid, because it was fun" -Roy Kent.
I don't know man. It sounds like a great way to market to new players. There is a great appeal for games with high difficulty--look at Dark Souls, or fighting games, or a game like chess. Yu-Gi-Oh has a lot of healthy difficulty, and that is rewarding to play.
@tastyfalcon1788 the diffrence is all those examples have a low skill floor but a high ceiling. Aka like Magic. But yugioh does not have a approachable floor at all.
@@Ratchetfan321 soulsborne maybe, but youre utterly delusional if you think a single fighting game on the market has a "low skill floor". Yugioh is literally identical to fighting games where you will be absolutely demolished if you dont understand your opponents character probably even more deeply than your own, and how that specific matchup is supposed to be played, with a grueling sequence of having to actually perform in real time against a real person trying to enforce mindgames and baits/ different tactics on you
"Create your own rules to make it fun." That sounds like what a casual player/fan of the old anime would say and that is exactly the point that Paul is making here. The game is marketed by nostalgia but the outsiders who have that nostalgia are often not interested/motivated enough to try and learn the actual game. But if the marketing was like: "DARK SOULS PREPARE TO DIE EDITION" it could attract the type of player who enjoys the grind of learning something difficult.
@@Ratchetfan321 Fighting games do not have an approachable floor, wtf are you on. You get absolutely steamrolled for your first like 200 hours of gameplay. Also the game is more popular than ever, so cope. Like we literally beat the record for largest TCG tournament a week ago in the guinness world records.
what i love about yugioh is that you can find some dumb card and be like "oh, i can make a deck out of this". what i believe its missing is the back and forth, its kinda just draw the out or lose in most cases.
Playing Yugioh today is like playing in duelist kingdom. Your opponent just says their card does some broken thing and you’re like “yeah seems good”. Meanwhile pot of greed is broken lol
I love the tone of this video. It invites conversation. Here are my two cents. There's a key difference between modern Yu-Gi-Oh and chess. Chess may be as difficult to master as modern Yu-Gi-Oh, but modern Yu-Gi-Oh is much more difficult to enter. A good number of people have played and enjoyed a beginners' game of chess, but very few to try modern Yu-Gi-Oh have understood, let alone enjoyed the game because the barrier to entry is so goddamned high. That's a mark of poor game design. A well-balanced game has fun in store for players of all skill levels. Also, chess isn't marketed as a difficult game. It's known widely as a game for pawns, knights, kings, and queens alike. That's why we've played it for over a thousand years.
Yu-Gi-Oh having an elo rating would be kind of dope. That way players can have fun dueling others with near the same rating and experience. Love the shirt!
I personally think YGO in and of itself is not difficult, however playing, especially against combo decks, feels like you have little to no agency as a player, if your opening hand did not contain any handtraps. Of course YGO is like any other card game still a game of random chance, but it is still frustrating to essentially watch someone play solitaire for 10 minutes, before attacking for lethal next turn. When comparing it to other TCGs, like mtg for example, combo strategies are way less consistent in mtg due to having way fewer cards that let you search out your combo pieces, when compared to YGO. Furthermore combos in mtg take a lot more effort to protect, due to them rarely being playable in a single turn and each piece of the combo having to be added one turn at a time, thus requireing protection from removal by your opponent and of course preventing your opponent from killing you before you can assemble your combo. So i think what turns people off of YGO ist less the difficulty and more the likelyhood to be just completely overwhelmed, while being unable to do anything while your opponent pops off. And imo the main ptoblem is the incredible level of consistency that decks can have due to almost all cards in meta decks either allowing you to search, special summon or being able to negate. And I feel like the community, as far as I have seen, really only cares about assembling decks like that. Little emphasis is put on unique ways to play, outside of occasional joke decks and the odd exodia deck here and there. But mostly it seems to all be about assembling a board with as many negates as possible, while being able to play around as many handtraps as possible, which not only fuels the eternal loop of powercreep, but also makes pretty much all high power level decks feel exactly the same. On the other hand the high level of consistency makes YGO so fun to begin with imo. I do not constantly have to deal with being mana flooded or manascrewed like in mtg and the likelyhood for your deck to completely brick is way lower. Also I feel like YGO really manages to give you that anime feeling, where every draw could give you that one card you'd need to win. So i feel like the consistency of YGO is both its biggest pro and biggest con, which is less an issue with the game's general difficulty snd more an issue with the card design.
At around min 6, you say that "it's actually easy to just sit down and play YuGiOh". But I don't think it is. The thing about something like chess for instance is that no matter what the skill difference is between two players, the weaker player can still, no matter how hard they lose, understand the moves that the other player is making. They may not understant the tactics or motivation behind them, but they can still go "ah so he moved his bishop here.. looks like he got me, well played". Same for something like CSGO or Valorant, like you mentioned. Even the weakest players understand it's good to shoot the heads of the opponents. That's what makes these games "easy to play", even though the skill ceiling is incredibly high. But YuGiOh is not like this. In yugioh if I'm a weak player playing against a top player on a combo deck, I'll have 0 clue wtf is going on. I'll just go "I set a monster and 2 cards face down, pass turn", then watch my opponent talk continously for 15 minutes just saying random words, then the game is over. THAT'S why this approach won't work for YuGiOh. People love difficult games, but they need to have a difficulty curve, not a giant brick wall.
Disagree with your point against Yu-Gi-Oh! If you have a weaker deck and are confused against a meta deck then that’s your responsibility to either chime in if you need to see what a card does or simply learn the rules.
I certainly understand where you're coming from. Only got back into the game recently because of MD, and it's very overwhelming reading massive textbooks of cards with multiple effects. But I feel like with any game, taking note of cards you see often played or allowing yourself to learn more and more with every failure is something that keeps bringing me back. Watching players replays in MD helps alot too.
@@DarkestVoid "chime in if you need to see what a card does" ok but you will need to do that about 20 times in 1 turn :)).. and each time you need to read, parse and understand about 100 words. It's not realistic. And that is assuming you've already learned all the basic rules and mechanics, which is already a massive upfront investment. Again, with something like chess, once you've learned the basic rules and mechanics you can understand every move that is happening on the board. With YuGiOh, once you've learned all the basic rules and mechanics, you still have to break the flow of the game 20 times in 1 turn (which, by the way, psycologically is not easy because at some point you start to feel bad about it) and read 2000 words every single game to understand what is happening. I cannot begin to describe how insane that is from the perspective of a new player. The initial point i was arguing against is that "it's easy to just sit down and play YuGiOh". If all of that sounds "easy" to you, then we must simply have different definitions for that word.
Difficult? Biggest issue is you either win or lose on turn 1-2 by memorizing a pattern. It is not approachable and a huge turn off for a new player looking from the outside in especially when every card is an essay. The majority of people think yu-gi-oh is supposed to be a back and forth duel, strategy vs strategy, thinking on the fly and adapting. Not a single player game where 1 gets to play.
As someone who loves going second, I wish we had Puzzle Duels in Master Duel. Including being able to make your own puzzles and share it with other players. It was one of the most interesting things in the old DS games for me.
I agree with you Paul. As a YGO boomer, that took a decade hiatus this was kind of an unspoken motivation. 2 years ago I got back into it by buying Albaz Strike, that was a wild ride to learn and I built upon it that deck and learned the combos (adding different more modern packages with it; invoked, Shaddoll, and then finally Despia w/Bystial). Growing and learning has been a joy and good escape the past few years. If Konami could release either meta-relavent decks or better training wheels decks (2 player set was horrible and Pokemon did it better). I think one of the bigger issues which you alluded to is the cost disparity between TCG and OCG and the best cards being very much gate-kept by the almighty dollar. On a side note, I enjoy these discussion/thought videos, it's refreshing as a non-competitive player to hear a competitive yugi-tuber be down to earth and see that there are issues but not lose the love of the game. Pass, turn! Keep it up man!
good like using memorization to play through any 10,000 combination of handtraps or interaction that could change how your combo plays out. Seriously try playing something like Infernoble through 2 pieces of interruption. You have to figure out wtf to do and on the fly.
@@SeveNStarSeveN and knowing what to do requires memorising effects and alternate combo lines. you don't just cook plays on the spot, that part should have been back in the deck building step
@@AoyagiMei Sorry but you are talking out of your butt, yes people practice some interruptions. But there are so many different ways to be interrupted optimally, not even unoptimally, so people can't practice even 99% of the ways you will actually be interrupted in games. After the basic ash and imperm stuff, people just have to wing it. Especially with extremely complex decks like Infernoble. You are more just looking for checkpoints to get to like Angelica and a way to target her.
@@SeveNStarSeveN Your example of getting to checkpoints is exactly what I mean by alternate combo lines. They're not "full combos" but they get to something that might help you through a turn or set up for next turn. This is something people will either memorise or learn through experience. Maybe tribute summon Nibiru isn't a combo, but it's still a line of play. For new players, they don't have the knowledge or experience. Hence, they get told they have to memorise what to do when X happens when learning to play their deck if they even get that far. This is a genuine hurdle new players go through. When they get negated and just pass, they get criticised for not knowing a certain play they could have done.
I completely agree while the downside of it is the introduction of new players the difficulty just offers so much satisfaction once you have overcome the challenge that seemed impossible before
LoL doesn't advertise how hard the timings are or how in depth runes go, they advertise the big fight scene with all the players executing perfectly and then put you into a simple game as a basic champion and tell you that if you put in the work you can do that cool stuff too And thats how you have to thing about it because the issue is that none of these other games are actually advertising themselves as difficult, or more accurately to yugioh, complex when it comes to their basics. They advertise themselves as things that have a lot of potential and a high skill sealing. Yugioh's issue is the skill floor. You can learn to play chess totally fine and have fun in about 5 minutes, you can learn to play and beat other competent players in starcraft or league in a short amount of time as well. And then if you WANT to, you can continue to ascend higher and higher and realistically always go up in skill level learning more and more and doing more and more things you couldnt at the start. Very few games actually advertise having a barrier to entry, think dark souls as the obvious one, but even these are designed in a way to allow players who arent even that good at games to learn and explore and understand and eventually beat them. And the only version of this that exists in pvp games is stuff like mil sims that have a very high level required to even be able to function in the game and these have a very small but dedicated hardcore audience, which yugioh already kinda mirrors. What I do think Konami should advertise more is the idea that as you learn more of the game it opens up to be something with a huge amount of skill expression and all these interesting game systems that youll be able to use as you learn more. Even if not always exactly true, it at least is an enticing proposition and what I see people using when trying to convert other tcg players to yugioh all the time. Dont say "its good cause its hard" say "its good because as you get better you can do more cool things you cant at the start"
The idea of Yu-Gi-Oh leaning more into the competitive side is really interesting. Imagine if they always did this, Instead of people saying “Look it’s Yugi, I remember watching that show when I was a kid!” they might say something like “Wow it’s that really complicated game, maybe I should see if I’m good at it.”
I really enjoy how well you and Team APS presents YGO. Have you considered doing videos that are like "migration guides" from other card games? Making YGO more approachable for other ccg players is something that really seems to be missing in YGO content
Alright time to bring out the Complexity vs Depth concept here. For those unfamiliar, this is a pretty standard game design concept where a game's difficulty to learn should exponentially increase the amount of deep strategies that arise from players playing it. Chess is a great example of a game with only a few rules, but takes years of studying to master. It needs to be said that Yugioh is a highly complex game with low depth relative to its complexity. The likelihood for you to be able to play at all in yugioh is generally out of your control. Bricks happen frequently, the coin flip and opening hand generally determine your ability to play, etc. The moments you described are fun, lockpicking to break boards, and playing through interruption... But the moments where 1. You have an ability to attempt to break the opponents board beyond their opening combo. Or 2. Have an ability to play through their combination of handtraps. Happen very infrequently in yugioh. We're talking probably around 30% of games, and i honestly think thats a generous assessment. i mean, cool, my opponent opened full combo game 1 after winning the die roll, and game 3 drew their blowout floodgate. Marketing itself the way you have described could work, but the problem is yugioh doesnt appeal the same way as these other examples youve described. In chess, starcraft, fighting games (which ill throw in here), you have full control over your ability to progress and get better. Also generally these games have low complexity (with the exception of starcraft, which is a very difficult to learn game in a genre that has lost much popularity due to its high complexity), and high depth, where each players' ability to progress is entirely within their own control. In fact in all of these games, with the sole exception of chess, your fate is almost entirely in your control. And even in chess, which has a similar problem to yugioh with the first player problem, it has contingencys built into its ranking structure to account for the only bit of randomness it has.
why does chess have armageddon auction while Yu-Gi-Oh! has only a predetermined armageddon in letting the 1st player not draw instead of an armageddon auction like whomever bids the lowest cards for starting hand gets to be 1st? Or whomever bids the lowest life points to start gets to be 1st?
I unironically talk about this with the people i play with all the time when we talk about other card games we have played. Yu-Gi-Oh is fast and complicated, nithing is more satisfying to me than having a 3-4 turn Yu-Gi-Oh as Yu-Gi-Oh game that is crazy back and forward, ending with one player out playing the other with well timed bait and execution.
I used to be upset when a game would only be on turn 3 or 4 by the time it ends, but I've realized recently that what really matters is what's happening in those turns. A heavy back and forth happening in each turn means the players deeply understand the decks they're playing, and the creativity bred from that is so satisfying. Just yesterday, I had an incredible match with a Blackwing player who was making moves that blew my mind with how well and quickly he planned them out. We had chipped each other down to 700 LP each, he was using Monster Reborn to take one of my monsters to search for a card in HIS deck, I recovered from near defeat with a new card I had never tried until then - it was nuts. This game's complicated nature is exactly what makes it so great - there's no way that experience wouldn't appeal to potential new players.
Exactly! We have a lot of different TCGs at our locals and some of the ygo players decided to try the other TCGs. They all excel at these other games simply by the sheer knowledge and skill they built up through yugioh. To the point that the other players started to complain that the ygo players were too good/meta. Not other TCG has given me this level of creative freedom with deckbuilding while also providing this level of complexity and feeling of satisfaction when I pull a win from the depths of defeat.
I haven't played the game in 15 years, but modern Yu-Gi-Oh! DEFINITELY feels like a tcg where every move is the first move or response at the beginning of a Chess match. This analogy is spot on! 🙌🏿
A difference between something being hard because it’s a challenge, and cheap and cheesy. Most of yu gi oh difficulty is the latter. There is a balancing issue, most of the fun is from back and forth actually being able to play your turn and use the strength of your archetype. Most of the time you’re done by turn 3 or 4.
Idk, I wouldnt Say YGO's difficulty líes in building unbreakable boards, unless You find the correct combo on your own instead of following a spreadsheet.
This is kind of how I like to explain Yugioh to people I think would like it. I tell them that I could teach them how to "play" Yugioh in about an hour or two. But they could become "great" at Yugioh with years of play. It's a matter of how dedicated they are.
Now, this is probably one of the best videos you've done in a while. Paul. This is a great objective. Well, thought out video I really appreciate it. Not as much complaining I like, sorry, not sorry. But keep up the good work.
Honestly my issue with Yu-Gi-Oh today isnt that its hard, ive made fun decks on legacy of the duelist. My issue with the game is my accessibility with the game at large. TCGs biggest issue is how card's worths can differ and much of that has to do with the formats played. Ive played Magic and Pokémon TCGs in the past and ive found Pokémon highly affordable on a budget. Ive made some of my more successful decks without breaking the bank. One of the last tournaments i played in Pokémon much of the main combo pieces were in a starter deck. In MTG i played both standard and commander and had fun. Both of those formats were great without getting expensive. Yu-Gi-Oh had a different experience for me. I saw myself doing well at first, i also could stay competitive during 5ds era. But eventually I fell I couldn't keep up with competitive decks anymore and I think about I couldn't afford to get many of the staples i needed. I wasn't losing my edge as a strategist but rather lost my accessibility to key cards to keep up with high octane gameplay.
I think Yugioh has the potential to be a tremendously popular competitive experience, but also a tremendously popular casual experience. Konami just needs to grab that and run with it. Pulling off your combo after stopping someone else's is tremendous fun, especially when you find new lines.
The main issue is the learning curve. I believe speed duel was a good "meet me half way". I've gotten many casual storecomers into yugioh with Speed Duel, and it was up to them whether they wanted to remain in speed or try out master format. We had a healthy mix of both, that would have never happened without speed. Good thing Konami sees the value of speed duel and is totally not worrying consumers with any recent news.
I love this concept, I tell people that there’s a vocabulary to learn. If you could get a lock onto the vocabulary then the card text doesn’t seem so long or complicated
I go back and forth. Sometimes I think yugioh is this high skilled game about choosing the correct line and making the best counter moves. Other times I think the only thing which matters is drawing the out.
I think there are decks that require skill but there are also decks so powerful that even a child which never played the game can beat a pro by just doing what is written on a sheet like Pegasus did with Bandit Keith
Maybe if they were still making yugioh video games and advertised said video game as such that could work, but for the card game itself? Absolutely not. Like you said the game is already unapproachable for most people due to the absurdity of the omnipresent meta. Doubling down on the difficulty is just going to give people even more reason to stay away. And we're well past the point where Konami would even consider making one for something other than rush duels because with duel links and master duel, they straight up don't need to anymore.
I remember when MtG started releasing pro player cards in packs to try and get more people interested. Now if these cards had more than just stats and how much money they made with a small blurb kinda about them maybe more people would have cared? What I wanted as a casual player was things like, what combos were they using? What were some key cards they had? What kind of deck did they have? Heck what is in their opinion the best three cards in their deck would have been nice! For yu-gi-oh having the players stats and some basic deck/combo information would be amazing I mean it’s what I look for when I’m thinking about trying a new deck out. It would help new players learn cards and how they go together and what to look for to counter as well. Or it could just have the same blah effect it had on MtG.
How would any of this help when Konami fundamentally prevents players from easily obtaining the cards they need to be even remotely competitive? They don't care about the TCG and are complacent with short-printing key cards, steering players toward the secondary market.
The fact that it is incredibly overcomplicated is what has kept me and buddies from ever playing it. Surely we aren't the only ones. If I want complicated and rewarding, I'll play Android Netrunner.
With OCG English available where I live it's honestly pretty appealing for me to start playing again. Havent bought a meta devck in ovr 5 years. The only issues i have are learning the game and getting better seems very difficult and I wouldn't even know where to start.
Yu-Gi-Oh! is difficult because it is unbalanced. This is like a race with a Bicycle and the other player is using a Motorcycle, you can consider this race as difficult, right? Chess is difficult because everything is open and both players start with the same condition. And even with a simple movement, the possible interaction in Chess is too many to handle. Action games like Valorant and MOBA are difficult, but there are some things that make good and bad player different, like the reflexes and how quick their thinking. Valorant or MOBA is difficult when your opponent can respond 0.001s faster than you. . This is my perspective as a person who likes Chess and played in regional Chess tournaments when I was in school. Also, I played MOBA for years before Master Duel was released. And no one taught me YGO directly. My experience with this game, before MD, was playing GX GBA and 5D's PSP. . This is not good when you promise a "challenging" game. But the people found it just because the cards were unbalanced. The turn 1 player can have consistent access to finish their combo. But for the 2nd turn, the only "saviors" are the unsearchable cards. You can see how unfair the condition is. Yes, we know the combo can be interrupted, even in turn 1, if the other player draws the handtrap. But what if they do not? I watch a lot of tournaments and there are a lot of times a player doesn't draw hand traps or the hand traps aren't enough to weaken the opponent's board, or worse, even if they drop the hand trap in the best part, their opponent can punish them back by using TTT, Kash Unicorn, or something like that. We shouldn't call a game "fair" if the balancer or the things that equalize the game are something random. . I still think YGO is better if we try to be more like chess. With less combo, it will be easier and less intimidating to learn for new players. This is also more fun as a multiplayer (in case you forget, this game is played by 2 players) card game. Then, focus more on the interactions itself.
The OCG Structures manga kind of does what I think you're getting at here. It's not exactly "edgy", but it does a helluva job being complicated. My head spins just trying to follow the play-by-play on the wiki.
Your using difficulty wrong. What your really mean is complexity. Yugioh is just overly complex which makes it difficult to learn not necessarily play. Its memory based not actually stratigic. It can't possibly be if its a 1-3 turn game. Yugioh is quite literally not chess becuase of this. Magic is actually far more comparable to chess due to the amounts of strategies and play by play changes.
yeah it's really the coolest thing that the game is complex. it feels so good that i took the challenge to come back after almost 20 years and still managed to learn how it works and get better every day
Best example of this is Chess. But for Yugioh, I think a really big step would be making more casual formats or just 1 that’s regulated. They market Kaiba and Yugi, but we can’t even play their anime decks.
I think the main reason someone wouldn't talk about the difficulty of getting good at something like chess or Counterstrike or Starcraft is that those are kind of an even playing field and much more about skill than luck. Then you compare it to something like mahjong or Poker (which I dunno anything about) that's more about luck but also skill but-at least for Texas Hold 'em-you all see the same thing and have to read your opponents and play the odds while all having the same general information and playing field-unlike this game, where you spend money and you have more options to start in a better position. And you already mentioned the last thing I was gonna say. Since I started playing Yakuza 8 and I've played a little of shogi: imagine two people playing shogi (which is kind of like Japanese chess), but one person pays to have all their pieces promoted from the start and the other person can't afford as much. That actually sounds kinda cool for some kind of Akagi-like manga arc, but this is the kind of thing I'm thinking of when comparing Yugioh to the playing field of other difficult games. I guess DLC characters in like a fighting game is kinda like it, but the cost of them is so much more affordable and, at least in Street Fighter, I'm pretty sure they just come in updated releases of the game.
Interesting idea. I think, Konami is simply afraid, that if they actually advertised Yu-Gi-Oh as being hard, they might lose even more potential players. If that is what would actually happen, I don't know.
Great take! I agree! Especially is boys growing into men. Yugioh teaches everything you need to be successful. No lie. If you apply deck building and tournament logic to your daily life be amazed. Start treating everyone and everything the way you feel about yugioh and hobbies. Going to the card shop is life changing for a lot of us. My best friends and brothers all came from this game. We are all still friends 25 years later and some have kids now who play. Its epic af
This is actually as genius as it is simple because it changes the attitude and expectations you approach this game with. It is no longer treated as a childrens game, whose purpose it is to generate as much money as possible, but a serious sport targeted for adults who are actually enjoying challenging themselves. But you would have to completely cut Yugioh off from its roots in a way.
I've been wanting this from the game for a while. Konami will never be able to simplify the game when thye insist on power creeping every three months, so they may as well lean into it. Introduce a new summoning mechanic every year. Remove zones from the board, allowing us to control as many cards as we want. Give us multiplayer formats. Heck, go back to the days when there were no deck size restrictions. We're already crazy. Let's admit that we are.
A game being difficult is good... But there is a difference between it being difficult because you are competing against an opponent in a back and forth and it being difficult in having to follow a set of specific 100 steps playing solitaire with a couple of reactions from the opponent sporadically....
3rd: 3:04 Actually yes! Engines are solving chess. Why aren't there engines for Yu-Gi-Oh! anymore? Like let the engine calculate the best moves based on knowledge of every (relevant) card in history. Chess engines are to top players as cars are to Usain Bolt. Why are yugioh engines more like household cats or dogs or something?
I have to say I agree to an extent. The complexity is fun while out-of-game thinking through scenarios and theory-crafting, but the actual part where you have to play and resolve it all is horrible. Master Duel feels a lot more chess-like to me and rekindled my joy for the game exactly for this reason. It automates a lot of the complex chores of properly resolving chains and effects, so it leaves all the brainpower for the fun part. The top-down overview with easy access to card text is also amazing. Really feels like this is how yugioh SHOULD feel, but due to the limitations of IRL play it will never get there. Old yugioh had a lot less complexity to it on a card-to-card basis, so back then it had a similar feeling, as you had more brainpower for macro decisions. Yugioh became "micro heavy", master duel does the micro managing for you. Really makes me think, if I was smarter or higher IQ, had a better working memory, would I enjoy paper play just as much? (I already do, but not to the same extent.)
My big push would be for a higher end knowledge to be more accessible. Only really playing master duel, I would want solo modes that have scenarios setup to break boards with certain cards or decks. The better you get at learning what a high end card does when the computer expects you to have a good response would give people the help they need not to fear cards or high level play. Demystify the concept of a high level player by letting people see what all the cards can do and how to counter in a controlled environment.
I see a lot of comments talk about how it's more complicated than difficult. I get where they are coming from. But maybe just switching some words around and the concept you're pitching still works. Maybe saying it has a lot of depth, a lot to master. I think people see this "anime card game" and think it's going to be generally very easy but being honest is gonna work best because honestly, a person tries one game, gets confused and lost, assuming something easy, and they're put off. So even if there is less initial interest, there will be longer term users. Not sure I can agree with people saying it's all tedious and purely long turns. I do feel like there could be things to reign in how long a first turn can be but hand traps and cards that play around established boards exist for a reason. It's not hard to understand how a card works from reading it once as well. I'm sure there are some fringe examples but that's the thing, all card games have at least a few cards that are not easy to grasp.
I don't think YuGiOh is especially complex. If you play other TCGs, they're roughly as complex at the highest level of play. MtG at its highest level of complexity is significantly more complex than YuGiOh. Hell, the fact that the combat phase is defender's choice in MtG makes its board states infinitely more complex. YuGiOh is a lot more tedious and convoluted than other TCGs. There's a much larger knowledge barrier, a lot more up front complexity because of how long the first turns are, and the cards and effects are designed in such a way you can't meaningfully play against novel cards or situations and instead need to be aware of the massive card library beforehand. There's a ton of rulings that aren't merely complicated, they're outright counterintuitive, like target versus nontarget (but still player choice) effects, activating a card versus activating an effect, negating an effect versus negating an activation, if versus when, costs versus effects versus conditions, etc. When I play MtG, HS or LoR, the complexity comes from the fact I have to optimize my gameplay based on an open information boardstate that might have endless units/triggers/combat permutations, but *how* the cards work is something that's easy to understand. Versus Yugioh where *how* the cards work is itself a big stupid confusing hurdle. I would rather have board state complexity over ruling complexity. In other games I can figure out the optimal play based on the information on the board. In YuGiOh you much more often just have to *know* things. You can give someone who's never played HS in their *life* a patron warrior lethal puzzle and just by reading the cards they can try and solve it. Meanwhile you simply have to *know* for instance where the choke point you ash Branded is ahead of time by knowing everything the archetype generally does already. I don't know, I don't think YuGiOh is especially complicated in a good way. I think it's got a lot of design problems people mistake for depth when other games in the genre can have just as much decision making and gameplay depth *without* all of this massive ruling and mechanic confusion.
Having come back into YGO recently, (thinking it would be less heavy meta intensive than MTG or OP, boy was I wrong...) I don't find the game difficult. It's complicated due to the high word counts on cards, but aside from that, the game isn't difficult nor all that complicated. I only find it difficult when taking my jank Ice Barrier Penguins into the rank ladder to play the same Labrynth/Snake-Eyes/Kashtira decks over and over.. but that's an intentional choice I make because I don't like playing Meta. I could play the same thing as everyone else, but then its a "Who is a better pilot/better luck?" As opposed to a challenge I set for myself.
Agree since ones priority by starting to play a new cardgame isn't beeing the best but having fun which modern ygo isn't for the most part.
28 дней назад
Yu-gi-oh is not as simple as Chess, chess is an approachable game, modern Yu-Gi-Oh just isn't. I've a knowledge of Yugioh that's good up to Edison, everything after Edison is really hard.
I like the complexity, but not strictly meta. There's so many cards that just say "I'm not effected by anything haha screw you"! I hate that. It's fake difficulty. There's not actually strategy.
yugioh is like chess, when you get good the early game is all solved combos you have to read about. the fun part is the late game. except there is no lategame and the match ends on turn 3.
I disagree. I main hero decks and its the same gameplay on master duel over and over. You say its like chess buy theres no variety to make it like chess.
3:12 fhats what im saying i e been using needle wall etc to wittle down my opents lf points aka jaden on yugioh gx 😅 mixed with pyro monsters etc love continous spell traps
I'm not sure whether or not that would be a good marketing strategy exactly, but it would at least be more honest than the current form of slapping yugi and kaiba on everything and going holy heck look at that dark magician! Also, asking "can you break this board?" just makes me imagine those stupid mobile game ads with the puzzles being done wrong, but instead as a yugioh game state with a bunch of board breakers and a starter
I am not so sure if marketing the difficulty of the game would be all that beneficial, but maybe it could work. I don't think that the game is THAT hard to get into, but there is no really good onboarding system. We don't have a corporate and/or community run forum where people can go to get a well formated summary on how the game works. The best we have right now are the official rulebook, and some niche rulings on websites, however we are lacking something more central. Think of a kind of online "Duel Academy", where players can go to find all kinds of knowledge on the game. 1.) A robust and thorough rulebook 2.) Decks/Archetypes sorted (roughly) by difficulty (Easy, Intermediate, Hard) and deck type (Combo, Aggro, Control, Midrange) 3.) Forums for each deck that at least contain a basic summary on how it works, how to build and how to play. Also can contain links to various social media servers/RU-vid channels that contain more specialized knowledge. 4.) Do similar if not the same thing for alternative formats/versions of the game (Goat, Edison, RUSH)
Also I wish I saw more videos of Yugitubers explaining why they enjoy this game. There is to much emphasis around the games negatives and not enough around it’s positives. Yu-Gi-Oh may be the outlier amongst its peers in how it plays but it clearly must have been doing something’s right, since it’s been around for 25 years.
I don't actually think Yu-Gi-Oh is difficult, it's more just overwhelming for new players with all the effects going on. The turns aren't really any different from MTG, and the effects are pretty self-explanatory once you read them. The problem is getting people to actually read the cards. There will often be 2 or 3 effects on a single card, all crammed into a single paragraph in the textbox. The TCG doesn't even follow the Japanese formatting where each effect has a bullet point or new line. Then there's the text size, which has always been fairly small. Honestly, I think the textbox should be a bit larger to help with that. The only other real "difficult" parts are planning or deck building. Most of the time if you build around an archetype, you just have to not forget effect triggers and the cards basically play themselves. Some allow for more choices mid-game, but with the popular style of "play your deck on turn 1" the main choices are what order you play cards and when you try to use handtraps.
I think the issue is that yugioh has marketed towards children since its inception. Konami would have to almost change their whole business model to cater to adults. Which is unlikely because children generate more revenue.
