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You are both right. Absolutely, Yu-Gi-Oh needs alternative format support to be a healthier game and make set releases more exciting. But most Yu-Gi-Oh is played casually and printing mediocre decks with unique effects has a place. Tunneling on the competitive scene too hard when it comes to design like League of Legends does has pitfalls.

The only ‘bad’ cards that I don’t think should be printed are the ones for meta archetypes. The competitive players won’t use because they’re bad and the casual won’t play them because they aren’t playing the meta archetype where they can only be used.

I did not even know Metazoo existed until the "Metazoo is dead" videos started popping up around.

Yugioh has 3 different audiences. Competitive, casual and collectors. Yugioh also has 5 different types of product. 3 types are to appeal to only 1 audience, 1 type for appealing to multiple audiences, and then the last type is just bad product that appeals to nobody. If Konami stopped making bad product that appealed to nobody, things would be better

Honestly I feel like if they’re knowingly going to print bad card, they shouldn’t make them entire sets. They should be paying attention to how people play the game and NEVER print a set without at least having all the chase cards be actually good, if not introducing actually good archetypes

Why doesn't anybody understand that pot of generosity is infernity support

I think there's definitely a space for bad cards. Like I'm happy to play something like Unchained in a more competitive scene but I'm also always happy to play Poker Knight Slifer the Sky Dragon turbo in a casual setting.

Card that are purposefully bad in a joking kind of way (like jar of generosity) are actually fun to pull. However, cards that are obvious pack filler feel bad to pull because most of the time they feel like they are wastes of cool artwork.

To be fair Jumpstart packs started as an actual good product that people liked, but then Wizards stopped making those packs and used the Jumpstart name to rebrand a different type of packs that no one enjoys or cares about. That's why Jumpstart is garbage. Original Jumpstart was a thing where people could open two packs and just play those against each other. It had actually good reprints and new cards. Current Jumpstart is just rebranded Theme Boosters, which are basically an officially endorsed bulk lot repack scam.

imo its a case where i agree that bad sets like the mako/soulburner sets should not really be made. i also don't know the numbers of how well they did outside of lgs's. i think itd be overall more healthy for less sets each year still that way each one gets more focus and its less junk being thrown out into the space that no ones gonna buy and sit in a landfill. however! bad cards are awesome and will exist regardless of what you make. i wont lie and say that it doesnt suck that tistina for example is a very dog ass archetype but i also wont deny a lot of the content around memeing on it and seeing people lose to it is funny as hell.

I don't think bad archetypes are a problem, but I think packs shouldnt include exclusively bad archetypes, just don't load up a set with support you dont expect to be game changing with the new wacky archetype you also dont expect to be played. Sets releasing weak new archetypes should be filled with reprints of staples or in demand cards for existing powerful stratagies and sets releasing powerful new archetypes or support that is likely to change the game significantly should be where reprints for jank decks or support for them should live. The main problem is a financial one, both for stores who want to move roughly the same amount of everything since they are required to buy some of every product, and for players who shouldn't feel priced out of buying a certain pack or find it sold out literally everywhere if they want to get their hands on it. Spreading out chase foils and highly desired game pieces out more evenly would result in a much better system that what we are experiencing now.

3:14 A store I regularly stop by has recently dropped Yugioh from their TCG section in favor of more Pokemon and Lorcana. Except for some packs of Duels from the Deep, which have been sitting on the counter for the last couple months and just refuse to move.

only mechanic Doodle knows about meta zoo is the save money mechanic

Ok kentucky hellhound gets an attack bonus if you play it In Kentucky. Also no one played meta zoo especially in Kentucky

if they aren't gonna make bad cards i'll just use the cards badly you know that vaalmonica spell it is either monster reborn or monster reincartion for level 4

POV: you just now found out meta zoo existed

My favorite part of a new set coming out is figuring out if I can include any of the new jank into my deck

There was a craterhoof in my Walmart Jumpstart booster 🥺

meta zoo has a mechanic where you draw cards

Theres some guys trying to get a "domain format" going, its like 4-player deckmaster format but with changed rules. Their channel is yugioh commander. Havent played it, but it seems interesting

Dragunity player for life~! (although it's mostly just D-synchro piles with a Dragunity engine as a fuel now adays)

We could easily have alternative formats and a lot of people would just come and say "haha that's not real Yugioh".

This was a very muddy analysis because there’s a big difference between reasons for printing bad cards within a set, a bad archetype within a set, and a bad set

One mechanic from meta zoo? not sure if it counts, but 1 card ask you to put a piece of tin foil onthe table without getting up

The only cards I don't like are archetype support that splits the playstyle. If you are giving a deck strategy bad support, just make it something irrelevant like an ATK buff or a watered down monster that adds another target to a searcher.

I think MBT would probably agree that weaker archetypes have a niche among more casual players that want to play bad decks with their friends, but based on the fact his video centered around the actual statistics of cards moving on store shelves I think his rebuttal to that would be that those players do not buy as many packs. There's an old statistics adage I've heard for games, though it's not really precisely accurate most of the time it still is surprisingly decent at describing trends, that the most dedicated 20% of a customer base makes up 80% of the sales, or something along those lines. This means that, real-ekonomik as it were, for the health and sustainability of a product like Yu-Gi-Oh cards, there has to be something in the product that the dedicated top 20% is willing to buy the product for. The sets HAVE to be good, or at least have enough "good-enough" cards to move off shelves, it doesn't have to be 100% good card density, Timmy and Johnny can have a little support each set for an archetype or two that simply will not be remotely competitively viable, but it's the chase cards and competitive staples that are going to drive the majority of sales. If there simply isn't anything competitively viable being printed then the only packs moving are probably going to be very dedicated collectors or very casual gifts from parents to their kids, and there simply aren't enough of the former, and the latter aren't buying enough cardboard to be the target audience. Little Timmy is probably perfectly happy with 2 structure decks and like a pack a month, if that, to play once every couple weeks with their parent or older sibling. And that's assuming they are even buying cardboard now that digital options exist since they probably aren't going to tournaments or game nights where they would need sleeved physical cards.

there is a difference between bad archtypes and bad cards valmonica and the face cards knights are what someone would consider *bad archtypes* but not every local is made up of 30 snake eye players so they have a place to be played and a fanbase bad cards, for example, some filler pack cards, are what their name suggests "pack filler" but even then, some of them do find home in meta decks weeks to years later so it's not like konmai designs some cards with ill intentions. then again they made a direct attacking 300atk monster in 2024 so what do i know

Bad cards should definitely exist, i love jank in every game, but sets should be majority decent/good cards so no pack is worthless... Esp considering how many cards yugioh already has

No kitty! This is my pot pie!

One truly thing i wnjoy with yugioh not having ser rotation when dog shit cards become good and actually playable

It really depends on what makes or defines a card to be "bad".

I think it's important to remember that he wasn't saying these cards are bad because he thinks they need to be meta-defining to be worth including... the Yugioh community has done that themselves. The packs for bad sets aren't selling because the cards in them are too weak to compete with other product they've released, so why would someone spend $90 (or more, sometimes) on a box of cards that are just strictly worse than the most recent core set? Everyone encourages buying singles anyway, so when even the people that love to open packs are being deterred because there isn't even something to chase for, the blame lies solely with the company that created it. The Mako set in particular is a great example of this, people who love WATER decks (like myself!) can have fun opening it, but there is literally nothing in the set that caters to any competitive player, so the card value is nil. No value in the cards means that these boxes just rot on the shelves of your LGS. Synchro Storm would have had a similar issue, but hey, Baronne was in there! We can justify opening boxes for her! That keeps stores interested in Yugioh, which keeps the game accessible to people who play other things at your store. And let's not start on the new "2-Player Starter" thing they released, that horse is long buried.

Gamba gamba gamba

Something that struck me watching this. MTG gets away with reprinting a lot of staple cards because they give it new art and fluff texts. Seeing a fav card in a new context can be a lot of fun. Shame that Konami are way to keen on reusing art and only have the card-space to print fluff text on vanilla monsters.

Arena:

I think that your conclusion that MBT is analyzing the situation from a competitive standpoint is incorrect. It seemed fairly clear to me that a lot of the complaints were financial. The question seemed to me to be asking why print sets with "bad cards" if they do not sell very well. Even his conclusions were mostly framed around the economics of the bad packs, and how they affect Konami and the stores selling Yu-Gi-Oh product.

first

1 min 80 views fell off.

Unironicly I don’t understand why you make yugioh vids at all

Pack filler exists primarily to ensure that you have to buy more packs to get what you want. If a set was like 80% playable to amazing cards by print count, then they wouldn't have to sell as much product for everyone to get what they want. Yes, there is a niche for jank cards and bad archetypes, but I guarantee you that a lot of people whose pet decks are bad would love to have their own Circular. The card quality for these releases could go up and it would not alienate those players. No, the point of the bad cards is to make it so that Konami can charge the price they do for a pack and have it not be just 2 playable cards in there. People want to feel like they are getting more bang for their buck, more cards per pack, even though most of them know that most of the cards in there are just filler. It's a psychological trick deigned to move more product and it's a huge waste of paper and plastic. They really should stop, but they won't. As for sets that are just bad... well, Konami frequently overestimates how much the yugiboomers and anime fans will shill out for sets that are mostly just bad support for bad decks that were seen a lot in the DM/GX eras. Or just for product in general... remember when they had that limited edition metal card or whatever, and it sold a lot, but then when they made another one, people lost interest because it didn't feel like it was that special anymore? I'm sure some of what MBT said is true-namely, that some sets are intentionally lower quality because they don't want to keep dropping new format-warping sets, and that some pack filler is there just for story beats-but these products exist primarily because Komoney isn't that bright, but they are excessively, myopically greedy, plain and simple.