The Struggling Rise of XYZ! 

If you noticed a few jump cuts, that's because I had to remove the commercial interludes due to copyright claims.

This was the era that began my disillusion with the game. The start of the XYZ era was so Synchro-hostile. So many cool cards came with the "Cannot be used as a Synchro Material" stipulation, that I was getting nothing new for my deck for a while.

God, the memories. This was the last era where my team was still "together" and we'd go to locals semi regularly. It wouldn't be until late 2012 that we'd pretty much drift apart. That was also the period I constructed my magnum opus, "B Movie". What was originally a pure Alien build turned into a hodgepodge of engines to constantly keep my opponent on their toes. By far, my favorite deck I ever made back when the game was still a big part of my life.

Ngl I feel like the XYZ material mechanic is the most successful example of the game trying to force a Mana resource. Counters were a fine idea, but too many cards were based around just generating them for their specific monsters, and aside from Breaker, very few monsters with counters even had enough consistency or a strong enough effect to be competitively viable. Discarding for cost can be abused depending on the deck, and probably shouldn’t even be seen as a mana resource considering how many cards want to go to the grave first, tributing one of your own monsters is a trade-off that can really set a player back, and paying LP usually doesn’t matter, unless you’re up against a burn strategy, so most players are fine paying as much as they possibly can in order to set up their win condition quickly. At least here, there’s a clear limit to the monster using the effect a set number of times, but they can still function as a monster afterwards.

seems like yesterday playing around this time. one of my favorite era's of the game, looking forward to the next installment. i was a chaos dragon player, loved that deck and the future fusion combo loading up the grave and looping light pulsar and darkness metal. good times!

We need a D-Boyz archetype baby

Definitely part of the long stretch where I stopped paying attention lol. I love going back and catching up on everything with these videos, though.

I played the original XYZ-Machines just so to give you an idea about my willingness to struggle.

Xyz finally started to take off during this time, but Synchro definitely wasn't going quietly. Konami had to take them out back and put them down so they could sell the new cards

Time flies

I remeber getting recked by dark worlds in playground yugioh

Devils Gate was my first SD

And it fell flat on its Arse!

I start to stop playing Yu-Gi-Oh because of xyz. This is the begining of the end of Yu-Gi-Oh

What's your favorite card from this period?

Pure Evols was a rolercoaster to pilot!