They've done worse. Like turning Commons into Secret Rares.

​@@SakuraAvalon"you called?" -Purrely

you mean Konami levels of evil

They are all in the seven deadly sins playlist.

Seconded

YuGiOh has a nasty habit of making their tier 0 formats pricy as hell, and that is thanks to the problem highlighted in this video, OCG being a testing table for Konami to rarity bump the cards that they know they will sell. And this is true because when Unchained became meta, the only UR you had to worry about was Yama, which was like 15 per card when it first appeared, and Unchained flopped in the OCG so they didn't had a presedent to Rariry bump the rest of the support that came in Duelist Nexus.

This is why, no matter how many times I try to get back into Yu-Gi-Oh, I'm back out of the game in no time flat. Since the Goat Control days of the mid-2000s, they have ALWAYS striven to make a Tier Zero meta, and it shows. Any time something old gets dusted off that might beat their newest hotness, they ban it, while leaving the new OP thing untouched until it goes out of print. They don't make a balanced game - they sell shitty investments for top dollar. Literally EVERY other TCG is, to some degree, better than Yu-Gi-Oh at giving players choices and a fun meta.

yugioh always had it's Tier 0 Format and the funny part: thanks to set rotation aka power creep and bannings, players will now pay 100 dollar and more for single card and then that card will either be reprinted or even get banned so a new deck can be milked :D and ygo players happily jump on this EVERY time

yeah, i don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this is the least accessible format since teledad.

@@tubegerm6732 or Dragon Rulers... or.....

Another day, another video of Kohdok shitting on the GA premium decks because he doesn't want to acknowledge that you can have different products for different players.

Yeah, not sure why he keeps picking on that specific product

Hell, he even shows regular GA starter deck in this very video. Smells like bad faith and misinformation to me.

This is strange, since this is the second video he pulled this "mistake". You can tell when he doesn't care about a game. Less to say he is manipulative and spiteful, more to say he doesn't care about correcting a record for a mistake for a game he doesn't care for.

So it's JUST like the Poke' Starter Trainer Collections but with decks instead?

THIS! as far as I can tell the Re: Collection decks are meant for dedicated fans of those characters, not new players! It's very strange that he somehow can't see that.

Kohdok has a real distaste for Grand Archive and will not hear out any correction on his assessment, it seems. :/

It's essentially a reprint set at a higher "level" over the base and with the extra stuff.

Not exactly, it will be mostly new cards - they gave her a colorless Spirit that ist all basic elements for casting slimes and additionally a Brunch of new slimes cards. But you can get a starter Deck, even for that charackter, for a lower Price. I don't know if that new Version will be netter or worse, but I would compare it less to a starter deck and more as an equivalent to the Pokémon Elite Trainer Box which gives you only cards for your choose charackter and Happens to give you enough to Play ootb. It even Comes with an extra package that completes the playset of all cards include in lower quantities in the precon and Dragon shield sleeves of the Champion etc.

And for even more bonus points, Pokemon these days has a reasonably consistent and high quality art style, with even the common versions of things like ex looking reasonably cool, so if you don't own the fancy versions, you're not missing out too much. MTG's comparable activities typically end up with a huge difference in art style and/or quality between different artworks, and in some cases the common version of a card looks hideous. They know this, and really hike the prices on their art style variations to milk all the players desperate for a taste of anything other than soulless fantasy realism.

Price is a factor that will keep people away from a game but a low price won't attract players either. It makes it easier for people to pull the trigger on giving it a try, but you still need to find a way to attract people and an exciting enough experience for people to move on to the next step.

Because Living Card Games are just kinda dull. For several reasons, but most simply, people actually like the gamble and the cost, a little bit. They don't like a ton of it, but a small amount of it creates excitement and exclusivity, it makes your cards feel like *your* cards. It's very fun to own a rare and expensive card, it's quite fun to roll the die on whether or not you get one in a random pack, and it's even a little bit fun to pay a little extra for a card on the secondary market than for other cards, makes the card feel more premium. In comparison, Living Card Games feel much more like board games from the perspective of how you purchase them and organise play for them. You pay a high upfront price for something that comes in a board game box. It typically has a very specific theme, sometimes even a licensed IP, that makes it feel like a contained experience rather than an ever-expanding and diverse universe with an archetype for everyone. They're often cooperative vs 'AI' or have some other form of non-player "environment" such as a campaign structure, and require game pieces to track these elements beyond the cards in a deck which means you may be getting out the full board game box when you play it. In most meaningful ways, LCGs tend to work like board games, but they don't work like board games in any of the areas that board games usually use to achieve solid profitability, including mechanical simplicity, broad aesthetic appeal, and "something for the parents". Incidentally, they also seem to be very American, you don't often see a Japanese LCG for some reason, and when it comes to card games, traditionally, if Japan isn't doing it, it probably won't work.

Look at legends of runeterra for a revecent card game with this isue.

Pokemon also releases cards in multiple prints within the same set. Common, reverse, full art, full art rainbow/art/whatever else. Yugioh has the issue of cards only being a single rarity within the same set outside of starlights (and now quarter century). If you need a Diabellstar, have fun spending $90+ on a playset (which is cheaper than it was on release). Whereas pokemon's most recent set has 4 different printings of Iron Crown ex. The lowest right now is $6, then $10, $16, and then $75. Having four different printings of a card in the same set makes it so budget players can have the card, while people who collect or want to bling out their deck have options.

Its not purely a money making thing on konami's part. The tcg rarity system for konami seems to be designed to keep secondary market prices high, which they cash in on with reprint products, but there could also be legitimate reasons for wanting secondary market prices to be on the higher end for a game. Its a pretty complicated business model because not only does it have to balance the interest of consumers and its own corporate mandates, but there's also local game stores which have to make a profit from the game somehow as well. Which without a strong culture of collecting like pokemom or drafting like MtG there are strong incentives to have cards have high resale values. I've seen plenty of bad boxes finally sell because there's a single card in the set list that's creeped up in price and would be worth more than the box that it is in. At the very least it feels like they aren't directly benefiting from the secondary market like a company like hasbro is trying to.

@@stardustspark5682 OK this response would be correct however the OCG itself literally does what you are describing and even they decided to make bonfire expensive without a cheaper printing

Star Wars Unlimited just hit the market, and all the most important cards are common and uncommon. The arguably best leader in the game right now isn't even a rare - no, it's Boba Fett, a common. Very easy to get. And the most powerful card in the entire game - Overwhelming Barrage - is a 25-cent uncommon that comes in the starter set. THAT is how you hook people into a TCG!

Magic has always had a problem with putting the most important utilities of all - dual lands - in high rarity slots.

That's a fantastic idea for how to handle boosters.

​@Sanguivore I think they were still kind of expensive like 10 dollars but it was nice that you and a buddy could each buy a booster than play each other. You can probably use anything as a token as long you both agree what there purpose is. I think like for the first set you just need something for damage and in the game you collect amber it was like 10 amber is 1 key and first person to make 3 keys win the game.

@@zerokura Is that the game that was made by Mark Rosewater after he left WotC? It sounds really familiar.

@@Sanguivore ya I think he work on it than like a different company work on it so you like have to buy the new set online I think. It's a fun card game I like.

@@zerokura I’ll have to look more into it! Thank you! ☺️

Signs are pointing towards that going down in the UK apparently after the public outcry over cancelled products in that region + stuff like the Bonfire situation, to the point where YGOEU even had to bring it up in a public post.

Pokemon knows exactly who its audience is: Parents - people who are pretty good at gauging material product cost and quality, but who have no understanding of digital product quality. Parents won't buy physical goods that are obviously overpriced or low quality, so pokemon merch is still pretty consumer-friendly and the pokemon card game can never charge more for a piece of paper than about a pound. Parents will buy any video game, however, as long as it's in line with other video game prices, and have no way of knowing that SV is unfinished.

Have you played gen 4 or 5? Pokeball customisation was already a thing, it was cool, they cut it. Just like they cut pretty much every other cool idea their predecessors had.

@@yurisei6732 Actually yeah I haven't played those but I'm saying more than just stickers and will after effects although asking that from today's Pokémon team is a bit of a challenge I've just seen there Eldridge horror of coding for the last three games and let's just say I've already looked into the eyes of cathulu and it made more sense! Although adding a color patch skin that mods have probably done like 40 times shouldn't be too hard to ask then again scarlet and Violet does have an Eldridge demon summoning the moment you look at the code

Nevermind. Looks like this isn't about handicap accessibility.

Entirely depends on your archetype of choice. That's the double edged sword with yugioh. Yes, it's wonderfully diverse in a way that no other card game is, but if the archetype you find yourself drawn to happens to be the rarity bumped archetype in a deck build pack (Weathery, Sky Striker, Dragonmaid etc), you may need to buy multiple playsets of £10 or £20 cards. Konami always make sure to grift the casual players a little bit too, they always like to at minimum give an archetype one £10 playset, so they put Witchcraft Creation at secret.

I always think back to Pot of Duality and Solemn Warning, both cards that were very important for a majority of decks at the time, both being printed in the same set, Duelist Revolution. In japan, SW was a rare, and PoD was a Super Rare. In America? Ultra and Secret. They both went up 2 tiers of rarity, and were very expensive until their reprints as tin promos a year later.

New generation of players, have to be caught all over again. Remember, the target demographic for pokemon today is too young to commonly have played SM, a 2016 release on a console already past its prime, they're mostly new age pokemon fans who started with SwSh or Pokemon Go and the huge marketing boosts these games received, with little existing connection to the TCG before then.

@@yurisei6732 I understand that new players have to be marketed towards but $10 for one standard art ex and a pile of largely unusable bulk seems quite unappealing when $20-30 could get you one of the nicer preconstructed decks or even your own consistent playable deck I honestly think the $10 pokemon starters should come with either more ultra rares or a sealed booster to be more in line with the price of the gane as a whole

Konami's behavior is pretty stable honestly. That's all priced in for the player base, you just kinda accept card depreciation and having to build 3 to 4 decks a year. I doubt konami could really get away with anything though.

@@shawnjavery - card rarity bumps (regulary) players accept that - (way back) locking legal cards as tournament prices (crush card virus)

MTG players are just as blind as yugioh players lmao, LOTR is their most profitable set ever, which was released a long time after it became popular knowledge that WOTC sucks and is greedy - hell, universes beyond was itself a colossal controversy, still probably the second worst rep thing WOTC has ever done after Magic 30.

@@yurisei6732 well with LOTR i (kinda hope) that some buyers were new players coming into MTG and didn't really see the Hasbro/Wizard controversy. I think it's the same with the Warhammer Sets. I bet several buyers were Warhammer fans which maybe wanted to play a warhammer card game after the LCG game was killed by FFG

@@Zanji1234 Doesn't matter, money is money. If that is the case, I'd argue it's even worse, because it just incentivises WOTC even harder to sell to people who aren't MTG players.

You learning more about MTG Commander and gradually realising that you probably don't want to compete in events anyway because competitive EDH, while interesting, is an entirely different format that doesn't play at all like casual EDH.

I T D E P E N D S . . .

Gee thanks

Master Duel is far more accessible, it's very free to play friendly compared to most gacha games. Yes, there's a lot of URs, but you get enough stuff where you can get anything you want with some patience. Also the Bonfire case right now is definitely an exception, it's usually not this bad

@@monocrown3911 I know you can usually make a deck with 10 or 12 URs per deck assuming you already crafted the staples, but still that means you have to pull up to 36 UR from Packages, and taking into account that you usually get 1-2 every 10 packs, that means you either put your wallet or you grind to all hell to get the remaining URs, the ammount of grinding you have to do to make a simple functional deck is like non acceptable, specially when there is way more f2p friendly cardgames like Shadowverse.

The rarity of Master Duels cards is the least of Yugioh’s problems. Hell for someone getting into master duel it means absolutely nothing, they easily get enough funds to cover whatever deck they want.

Yeah he's kind of glossed over stuff like accessibility for physically-disabled people (including his like for skill challenges) and somewhat mentioned about colorblindness, but I don't necessarily think it's malicious intent on his part?

As a colorblind person, that's actually a good point. That's also a barrier to entry for some of us.

That's a more challenging problem, because not everyone is colourblind and limiting the colour combinations you can use can impact non-colourblind players' interest in cards. Especially considering there are a number of different kinds of colourblindness, and if you want to make sure all of them get the full experience, you're basically just doing everything in black and white.

Incidentally, game console pricing is already kind of absurd. Even when selling at a loss, a basic digital-only PS4 sets you back about £400. If you then buy 10 games to play on it, you've effectively still paid £40 extra for each of them, on top of whatever markup is being put on those games to act as the extra profit margin that makes selling the console at a loss worthwhile - could be another £10 or £20. Of course, consoles have to cost this much because the hardware inside them and the workers who assemble them cost this much and there's only so much loss you can accept - and evidently, it works well enough. Card games though have negligible production costs and arbitrary profit margins based on artificial scarcity, so where Sony might expect the average customer to spend about what they spent on their console again on their games (so like, £400 upfront and £400 in games), a card game publisher expects the average customer to spend vastly more in future products than on their intro sets (£10 intro, maybe £500 lifetime purchases), so there's really very little need for the intro pack to be inaccessible... and yet they often are anyway.

Bonfire is ultra, not super, and its a shortprint ultra from a terrible, low print run set, that no one was buying except people who wanted bonfire. That's why it's £100 - there are relatively few copies in circulation.

@@yurisei6732 i see Set havent been playing Yugi in a looong while, i miss those nuances

Card games in general are just money sinks. Tons of hobbies are though. You're really not going to beat the price point of video games in terms of money spent to entertainment achieved. Its mostly just a source of social interaction for people.

Also, printing Called by the Grave in the first place, after these handtraps already existed, which I remember at time of first printing was also "I'm not paying that" price and necessary for competitive play.

@@yurisei6732 Actually it was quite the contrary: Called by the Grave was one of the firt major cases of a meta card being made *easier* to obtain thatn ever before: it debuted as a Super Rare Promo card that came in Booster Pack Bundles and was later released in a main set as a Common. Prices at the time were between $2-$8 due to that. ....Which in hindsight makes it's current Limited status even worse.

The real shame is that Yugioh is still a great and reasonably priced game once you scrape off the top layer or two of pushed competitive crap. Casual gameplay is surprisingly well balanced, I daresay even self balancing in some ways thanks to casual decks increasingly gaining access to recursion, recovery and consistency, and so many games have that delightful back and forth where you have no idea who's going to win. I still have a solid 40-60% winrate with some ten year old archetypes because powercreep in archetypes not pushed to be competitive isn't very fast. No one sees that side of Yugioh though, because the stuff going on at competitive levels is blinding, especially to people who only play online and at events.

Not really. Please finish the video.

I would prefer to say that money is just simply the wrong tool for gatekeeping a hobby. After all it's not like the kind of people you would like to gatekeep will happen to always have little money to spend and the rest will have all the disposable income they could want. The starter products should still very much gatekeep, by giving an affordable and accurate look into the kind of gameplay and mechanics the game will have. That way everyone interested in that gameplay can join right in, and everyone else can do themselves and the existing players a favor by not getting into it.

I'm curious why you feel gatekeeping is generally good, and what exactly you consider to be gatekeeping when you say that. My guess is you feel it's important for collectible cards to have a certain level of value that remains stable so your collection isn't at risk of being devalued when cards are reprinted in cheaper forms?

@@yurisei6732 Naw, tourists just ruin hobbies.

@@TheMorbidHobo How?

@@yurisei6732 There's a great image that sums it up but it's pretty hard to find. Basically tourists create cyclical declines in hobbies: Tourists join Tourists complain about parts of the game Game makers in an attempt to increase their audience cater to those complaints; new content (or community post talking about the complaints) Tourists leave; fans complain about the changes Game makers respond negatively to fan complaints (optional) Fans leave New content (that still has the previous changes if not moreso) Some fans that left return (And repeat) When you let people that don't care about a hobby into the hobby, they often seek to change the hobby to cater to their non-fan views, and the game often does change for them which pushes existing fans that liked the game as it was, out-- and tourists, being what they are, often leave the hobby out of either disinterest or a feeling of accomplishment in having changed it.

Trash is pretty harsh, it's a decent card that saw a little success when it came out. It's just not meta. Odd choice for a "good card" in the video but whatever

What did I lie about? The fact that it's the only way to get the deck inside, or the fact that it's $50? Because I show the sales sheet proving both. It is a bad product, something only a few people would want, sold in cases of EIGHT that a store is going to have a hard time selling because nobody wants more than one unless they are insane and want to spend $50 multiple times for a chance to pull a CSR. It is an awful, wasteful, exploitative product and I will continue to call it that, because a spade is a spade.

@@KohdokEven if a store doesn't sell their entire stock of this product over the counter (assuming they purchase more than a case or two) they can always sell it online. I don't have a store near me so I'd gladly purchase one of those decks (that are clearly not starter decks which is also the issue that the original comment pointed at) and be happy with it. I started watching your videos years ago because they're generally well researched and thorough but this extreme bias against this single game seems irrational.

@@Dimitar_Tsanev Now now, there's never been a card gamer on Earth who hasn't had that one game they irrationally hate. For me, it's Keyforge. What's yours?

@@yurisei6732 Hahaha you might be right. Honestly, I don't hate any game, I'm just not interested in some of them. For example I find zero appeal in grid-based card games like Sorcery but I don't actively hate them. Also, I think the market is a pretty solid indicator of what's a good idea in terms of pricing and distribution. If enough people think a product is overpriced for what it offers, it just wouldn't sell well. On the other hand, if enough people buy a product, it's obviously doing something right. WARNING. RANT AND FEELINGS-BASED OPINIONS BELOW: That said, the closest thing to actively hating on a game to me is commander in MtG. I love Magic but I think commander's initial popularity has been exploited by content creators and marketing, and inflated artificially to the point where it's become all that is talked about. New players are left with the impression that casual Magic IS commander. This is why Wizards heavily focused on that format in recent years. So much so that it feels parasitic towards all other casual forms of the game and is defacto all casuall Magic IS these days. I used to simply not care about or engage with it, but with time I felt left out of the game as a strictly 60 card, strictly one-on-one and strictly casual player. People nowadays either want to play commander or play competitively and I don't want to do either. I just want to build a deck, not restricted by formats and ban lists (only adhering to the '60 card minimum size and up to 4 copies of each card' formula), and play casual, one-on-one games. I have nothing against the idea of building a 100 card singleton deck and playing multiplayer, I just don't like being forced into any of those things(I'm actually ok with playing multiplayer once in a while but the 100 card singleton thing I find stupid and unnecessarily restrictive). Commander was created because of the freedom Magic inherently offered players in terms of ways to play it, but it feels like now, with more and more cards, and entire sets being printed specifically for commander (and all the precons being only commander decks), it's become this thing that you need to actively avoid. If you open a booster box there's a significant portion of the cards that you just can't use unless you want to play commander. It's even worse if you're looking for 'bombs' and a lot of the rares or mythics happen to be strictly commander cards when you don't want to play commander. In short, I was ok with commander while it was just another way of playing casual Magic but now that it's artificially promoted to 'the only way to play casual Magic' i feel like it's actively contradicting the very concept of variety that allowed it to exist in the first place.

@@Dimitar_Tsanev I think the reason commander has become so dominant is that it has successfully formalised casual play. It's not that people only play commander - according to WOTC, the most popular format is still "anything goes kitchen table constructed" - however, commander is the only casual format you're going to find hosted at a game store. It's the only casual format you can play if you don't have friends who play MTG. That makes it the bridge between casual players and players who buy cards. Incidentally, the D&D side of WOTC's main target market is players who don't have friends, too, the online theorycrafters who buy products to build characters but don't play that much.

We're in a tier 0 format where THE only viable deck, Snake Eyes, requires Bonfire. What are you talking about?

I sometimes would like to have the the skill at, and capacity for, self delusion required to even tangentially follow Yu-Gi-Oh without getting blackpilled on it. I would mention power creep, but if pokemon or MTG have power creep than Yu-Gi-Oh has a damn power FTL warp drive. They have staples that every deck plays which cost about the soul of your next child, and hope you have many children to sell because those staples are gonna be outdated in no time and will be worth pennies by then. Did you like an old card and want to bully an ai with it or play against your friends with an older banlist, not on our watch since we made sure to change what the card does and only included the new version in our simulator. While a lot of retro formats either are or historically were one deck formats, the decks were at least just a cobbled together mix of whatever standalone good cards worked best together - not a bunch of cards Konami specifically named so they work only with each other so you can play the exact deck they planned out. Yeah sure right when everyone was already basically exclusively playing light and dark monsters Konami made chaos emperor dragon and the chaos BLS, but those still slotted in as a new addition to the same old deck wheras if they had released them now - wait they did, and it is an entire archetype of BLSs that name each other and only work as a package instead of as standalone cards. I mean they are the only game with an extra deck mechanic that requires you to put both decks in the same sleeves.

@@younasdar5572 Actually Yugioh doesn't really have much powercreep these days... because it already hit the power ceiling years ago, there's essentially nowhere for them to creep further except making more effects that activate from hand during opponent's first turn. And FYI, Yugioh's most meta things are actually the things where Konami *hasn't* hardcoded them to work with other cards of certain names. The big design problem at the moment is pushed engines and bosses being overly generic, with no limitations on which archetypes they can be used with, eg every deck including Snake Eyes or Adventurer because they don't say stuff like "also you can only summon Wind monsters this turn", and no deck including other comparably powerful engines because they do have such clauses.

@@yurisei6732 As I said I do only tangentially hear about Yu-Gi-Oh, but if the special thing about the best cards/engines is that they are generic then that is an exception to the rule, right? Sure in MTG most of the best cards are as broken as they are because they don't cost mana, as a general statement about current MTG card design I would still say that cards are balanced (however badly) around costing some amount of mana - because that is the rule. And if you manage to hit an endpoint to power creep then good for you, it doesn't make the power level it is at any less ridiculous or more appealing to players of anything else if they don't manage to reverse course to at least a decade ago.