PLEASE do like a round table discussion with other content creators from other card games, would be incredibly interesting to listen to!

As a magic player I could confirm, nobody plays Standard, the most popular competitive format is Modern, which costs around 1000$ on avarage per deck, but it isn't rotating like standard. But there is Limited, which consist draft or sealed, and unlike in Yu-Gi-Oh, its a competitive format, where you only need to purchase the sleeves and the entry.

The fact this video set the vanguard Twitter on fire because of how defensive people got was downright hilarious lmao. And I actually like vanguard (no physical tcg where I live though 😢)

The fact that some people say 360 dollars is "not that bad" basicly proves how out of touch tcg players are with how much money for hobbies the average person has. If you have 360 Dollars for every format (4 months) , thats almost twice as much as i spend on videogames per YEAR. And those games give much much more hours of fun even if i went to every single locals per week.

23:30 this is why I suggest that if people make videos about averages and means, they should also put a standard deviation in their results, because mean/average alone isn't enough to accurately interrpret the data as the distance between the data points also matter.

I have no disposable income right now so when I see a video like this it gets me excited to try out some of the cheaper card games. I currently have been playing yugioh and only really buying structure decks myself and thankfully I have a buddy who sends me his bulk from new sets that he doesn't want. That's where I've been getting a lot of my competitive cards from and I would never have been able to get them if it were not for his kind charity. Yugioh is expensive as balls if you're a new player and want to compete at a higher level. Because of this video I might try and see what one piece or digimon is like since those 55 dollar decks are exactly in the price range that I would like to get once I actually land a job and such.

I remember when you could get into Yugioh for 100-200USD for an archetype engine… it was just that you’d also pay absurd prices for staples. In 2020-2021, we had $150 Prosperity, $150 Droplet, $30 Imperm, $30 Ash Blossom, $40 Evenly Matched, $100 Lightning Storm, $100 Triple Tactics, $100 Zeus, $150 Accesscode… over $1500 just for staples. Now it seems we’ve swung to a more balanced state, where you’ll pay 200-400ish for an archetype and another 200-400ish for staples.

Recently took a break from yugioh and trying Battle Spirits and since the game is new it’s constantly developing the info in the video doesn’t really accurately reflect the game. One of the decks that’s been topping, white agro, is roughly $20-25. There are decks that don’t need to play ice shield which cuts massive costs from any deck you are trying to build. Outside of the boss monsters which are the highest rarity (not mentioning alt arts) 90%-95% of the card pool is below a dollar (with a lot being .10c)

The issue with the dragon ball total is that the price is 70-90% SCR. The lists taken ran different ones clearly but anything of the same color usually can run the same one.

Weiss Schwars has the particularoty that if you want to foil your deck, it gets ridiculously expensive, we are talking multiple card that are around a 500USD on the low to 2000 USD, i have these guy that goes to my locals with a max rarity Hololive deck and those can be like 30K depending on the build.

As someone who plays digimon and Pokémon, it blows my mind the cost of meta relevant decks in YuGiOh and Magic, I would love to get into them but it’s just such a steep cost

I'd love to see a video like this that goes over prize support for each game at competitive event levels of play.

While there are some flaws with the analysis, this was a pretty god look at how expensive current TCGs are. Some other things to look at would be how often you need to replace sets and how reprints change prices.

10:00 "People are complaining a lot about yugioh's cost but it's really not that bad" Say this to south american players where a meta deck costs 3 to 5 times more the minimum wage

The cost of tcgs is so crazy high in general compared to like, fighting games. You buy the game & you're good, maybe you gotta buy dlc later on but it's not 100+ per character

The average calculated here is useful for people that think that competing means you need to have all options (which is probably true only for some of these games). In Vanguard you usually need only a couple at any given format. In Pokemon I like to have all of them (it being the cheapest game definitely helps)

Keep in mind for digimon that that $55 is for a full on top meta-relevant deck. If you're just looking to get into the game and build smart, as little as $20-$30 can get you a deck that can shred through locals if you play it well. God I love that game.

Flesh and Blood is an excellent game but the equipment and power staples are a massive gatekeeper. They took the Yugioh approach of expensive chase cards that are always available to you like the extra deck defining the hero and those cards are almost always expensive if they're high rarity and best in slot. You can play alternatives for pennies but good luck winning against anyone who is heavily invested. The extra block points, resources, and sometimes mechanics make the expensive equipment pretty close to pay to win. Their power staples are also a bit too much like Yugioh's but without the quick reprints due to the Magic finance side of the playerbase grabbing LSS by the balls. Art of War is priced a lot like Prosperity is now but Command and Conquer is like Droplet before the reprint and it came out three years ago. Fyendal's Spring Tunic and Arcanite Skullcap are often BiS equipment and together they cost about as much as the rest of the deck unless you're playing full playsets of Art and Command. And god forbid your deck's functionality hinges on a Fabled. You're ponying up for a playable starlight. The gameplay is excellent but the prices are too high. It's the perfect friend group game but if one player decides to get sweaty the whole thing kind of falls apart.

Vanguard is expensive for current meta at multiple decks played. Not gonna lie due to how sets release cards plus demand on singles, meta deck maintenance is high plus most staples on standard for nations come from limited release promos which is also a factor. Though interchanging set releases in standard does introduce a new playable deck and those non meta are way cheaper to build especially on release day. Chronojet on the other hand for me with the new banlist can be reasonably cheaper than what was stated.

Can a single vanguard player actually explain whats wrong with the video? Otherwise I'm assuming the video is right.

Wish we had a TCG vs OCG deck price video

Having played both YGO and Digimon, for the same price as ishizu tear pre-banlist, I built 4 digimon decks, 3 of them meta relevant. Just my two cents on ygo pricing vs digimon

Once you buy the staples making a new deck is cheaper but it's true that the initial inversion for yugioh is high.

Modern is magics premier format which is $1000+ legacy is way way more expensive since playable cards in the format are contractually not allowed to be reprinted. One good saving grace is that the decks typically don’t go out of playability for a very long time (years) although they have been printing power creep as of late

i would be really interesred in a monthly average cost for each game. How much do i have to spend regularly if i want to stay in the loop, after i established myself in the current format?

There is no way you can say the price of playing yugioh isn't bad. Whether or not it's worth it is a completely different discussion, but konami knows what they are doing. It could be much different and better.

One thing to consider is that, because Magic has draft, the rarity of the cards is actually a balancing lever for gameplay. Cards are common, uncommon, rare or mythic based on complexity and to an extent power, as a means of shaping the limited environment. Yes MtG has chase rares, but they need to be at rare to avoid warping limited play. Rarity hikes without limited play exist only as a means of hiking prices.

I genuinely play like 5 different TCGs, kinda tempted to get into more and make a new channel called TCG everything to be able to talk about all of them as opposed to having a main one.

Vanguard is very much alive in fact it's the TCG I play the most now. I don't even play Yu-Gi-Oh anymore partly because of cost but also because none the meta decks interest me and my pet decks aren't in a great spot rn. Vanguard offers more for me at a better price range as well but I will note that I play Premium format not standard because premium allows you to play with all the "summoning mechanics" not just the one they're trying to promote. And this is coming from someone who plays Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, and Vanguard.

I think in terms of staples, yugioh has definitely improved since I started playing, with ash being $70, imperm being 50 on release etc. However when new staples like droplets come out and are ~100 per copy, it feels very bad, especially not knowing when a reprint will come and how much that will drop the price by. It would be nice if there were cheaper versions more quickly available and people would still splash on max rarity versions

The commentary on yugiohs price not being THAT bad is more comparable (compared to magic specifically) because the lifespan of decks are so much shorter. I mean, how expensive was Ishizu/tear, compared to how long it got to exist before getting nuked?

Flesh and Blood looks insane in comparison, but it’s not trying to compete with fucking Standard, but rather Modern, and then it is $1000+ MINIMUM. For Legacy shit just goes into the 2k~8k territory very easily. Vintage is not a real format tho.

It would be really insightful, if (like you suggested) you actually do somehow managed to get players from other card games together in order to discuss various TCG topics (like the ones from the "magical hats" discussions). I'm thinking of maybe "the Professor" from MtG and the Hearthstone player, who tried out other TCGs including Yu-Gi-Oh a while ago.

Funny thing is standard mtg is actually more expensive than this as mono red and mono black are not tournament decks, theyre budget lists, the most recent tournament deck are atraxa piles and they cost way more than rdw.

Damn i loved Vanguard but never really had a chance to play it as it never picked up in my locals.

My ULTI blue was only 30 and the secret was like 20, spright dirt cheap

Also looking at the actual National topping lists, ygo is more expensive than portrait here. Kash decks going for $700+ and shit…

Iv played vanguard before the 2 reboots And it was relativly cheap to play when it was clans Royal paladin Shadow paladin Kagero Oricle think tank Nova grappler And if you bought a case you got double playsets of every double r and triple r in the set and you got practically every common and rare and nothing was short printed Apart from cards that didnt get a re-print Goddess of the half moon tsyukiomi Cards would average around £25-£50 per copy for rr and rrr Depending on how competitively viable the deck was or if it was a fan favourite But in yugioh which is the game i have played the longest The higher rarity cards are just short printed and you have to pay outrageous prices to pick them up Kashtira- the main core in its lowest rarity You have to buy a case to try and gaurentee just to get a playset

They should have taken the average without staples then + the samples without duplicates

Wait, I thought Battle Spirits is a very old card game. I remember watching its anime when I was a kid.

I wish people would stop using the word “invest” when they really just mean “purchase”

theres a difference between "have every deck and staple" and "own a deck thats ycs-topping worthy", for the latter, you can pick up for mathmech for less than 150 euro

FaB is expensive because of Legendary Rares. Basically the equivalent of cards only being available in Starlight Rare. Like imagine how expensive Yugioh would be if cards like Apollousa were only available in Starlight. That's basically FaB.

Glad people are at least talking about vanguard

I really only know ygo, but wouldn’t the games with tier zero decks in the format mess up the prices here. I highly doubt that each of these formats have 4 decks that are competitively viable.

Discord Link? :)

The video idea is nice but overall the approach and "result" seems flawed to me, for example looking at the top 5 decks can have huge fluctuation and only looking at 5 means that outliers have huge impact on any average;

Man, pokemon looks so attractive from a budget perspective. But there’s no tournaments around me.

i'm surprised that mtg and yugioh are on par but i guess mtg is only standard not modern or dear god we don't even talk about legacy where you would put around 3000 on the table if you build optimally. but i guess it'S a good comparison when most of the money you spent goes into the mana base that you only do once for the rest of time

Except for magic i played like every of those games ygo,cfv,dbs,optcg,pokemon

Yeah Vanguard is pretty damn bad, the company behind it (Bushiroad) is imo from what I've seen much worse than Konami. Like if you thought that konami doesn't give a damn about their playerbase you haven't seen bushiroad. Btw can we talk about how many people outside of our community always act like Yugioh is so bad because it has cards with long effect texts. Meanwhile Vanguard and Weiss Schwartz walk around with Bible Chapters as their card texts while using Keywords.

MTG by a mile is the most expensive game to maintain with standard format listed. Everything rotates typically demolishing prices because cards arnt good in other formats most of the time. Forcing you to continuously buy product to make new strats after fresh rotation. The only exceptions are pioneer, modern, legacy but have decks with low entry’s but also decks that cost 5k. With the only upside of meta decks for pioneer, modern, legacy will usually hang around a while and hold value.

At least for me. Mtg cards are a lot easier to get. Getting yugioh cards from Australia is a nightmare. It is really hard to find the cards for budget decks.

this guy sounds like deditated wam guy

Yeah MTG is wrong. I would argue that if you wanted to compete at the highest levels (which this video does) MTG grinders would need a Modern, Pioneer, and Standard deck (likely just Pioneer and Modern since I don't see too many stores still running Standard qualifiers).

Now play any of those in Latin america... T T those sweet prices

Di-Gi-mon!?? Really!??

I think yugioh is expensive. If you want to play competitive it's always about 1k a year. Each set has some pretty good and expensive cards. You have to buy multiple tins or displays. I had 13 2023 tins and pulled a single nib and one ash. That's it for the staples.

I think the creator should have run an "average/most expensive deck/least expensive deck" shot of the different games instead of totaling them together. I think that would have created a more nuanced look at each game than what was provided, IMO.

TCGs are still more expensive than ECGs, even compared to Pokémon.

The prices seem incredibly inflated for one piece

I will say I hate the “not that bad” argument. $50 is still a lot for a card regardless. And sometimes even $20 is too much.

Vanguard is pretty dead competitively, especially in Europe. But it's still very much alive and kicking in jp, so they also keep the en cards running for some reason. It's a pretty fun game (fab took a lot of inspiration from it clearly), but I only play it with one other friend from time to time and we're pretty much the only players in my country, lmao.

yugioh became better with time, when I started playing 1.5 years ago, ash was 30 bucks, now it's 3. an invoked list I looked at was like 800 bucks because it ran a playset of droplets and prosperities which were like 100 bucks each at that time

Pokemon pricing is accurate, I built all meta decks for less

I like Standard and built my first deck just to find out none of my like 5 lgs’s run any standard tourneys. Farfa and Coder were actually kinda right about being frustrated over trying to get an answer of what the premier tournament format is. The various formats don’t feel like they test different skills to make for a greater than sum evaluation of a player. It just feels like the community is divided and there’s no one game I can just sit down and play with another magic player. Yugioh might not be perfect but at least there’s an implicit understanding what game you’re sitting down to

What version of Branded is only $310?

No hate but im just not understanding why he talks while the video is playing. Like just pause it a bunch of times if you have to 😂

As someone that is trying to build a deck from scratch this is suuuuuuuper cap. Decks are like 800 bucks for yugioh there’s no way he’s including the extra deck and side deck

does anyone actually play flesh and blood?

It's bad, I'm missing a lot of cards cause of prices, 3x fenrir, chaos angel, sp little, there's too much money, I can't afford all of these, so I'm just stopped buying cards and enjoy my rogue decks :(

Vanguard was a bad experience for me personally. So many people try to you or make bad deals. Got majorally ripped off in the beginning. Soured my enjoyment

vanguard use to be cheap until they add extra deck which not generic like yugioh

So the Magic prices are... Weird right now. Currently, the best way to play Standard is Arena, and WOTC isn't holding tournaments irl, which is crippling the demand for the physical cards. I genuinely think that pre-pandemic, these prices would have been significantly lower. It's just weird right now

"I played Hearthstone back in the day" damn, talking about HS as if it effectively died hurts

Flesh and Blood seems to me to be targeted at disenfranchised Magic players who are nostalgic for how Magic was from 1992 to 2005. It would be like if another company made a card game that thematically captured how Yugioh played during the DM era and it siphoned off disenfranchised Yugioh players. But since the people who are attracted to Flesh and Blood are older with a lot more disposable income, I can see their higher purchasing power playing a role in the high prices of Flesh and Blood. To undersand why, imagine if Yugioh cost that much. It would likely price out a huge percentage of the player base so there is a lower natural cap on the costs at which the Yugioh market can remain stable.

Tbf I play magic a lot, and standard is nowhere to be seen. It should have picked modern, where decks are 1K

Dragon ball numbers are inflated by probably 5-10x cuz it looks like he’s using high rarity prices

“It’s really not that bad” TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR CARDBOARD Edit: Yoooo guess I’ll never play F&B

The person who made the video didn’t really take outlier decks into account. Like that $1,300 Flesh and Blood deck really skews the results for the top 5

yeah i think that the only point of contention i have with this is the chosen formats, i understand why the author chose to compartmentalize the top 5 decks in each game for the chosen format, but to say that a rotation based format like standard from MTG is equivalent to an eternal format like advanced in Yugioh is extremely disingenuous. Makes the video look like wizards propaganda almost xdd. Don't even get me started on Legacy for MTG. Modern would probably be the most equivalent to Yugioh's format, and staple playsets of some side deck cards and even mainstay lands are almost as much as entire tertiary decks in Yugioh. you feel bad buying a Baronne? imagine how people feel shelling out for a playset of Wooded Foothills or some shit. they arent even generic enough to use in every deck either? i see people whining about Yugioh pricing perma without any context, and maybe thats just the magic doomer in me but when I see 3 dollar ash blossom/12 dollar imperm at a 3 of versus force of will at 48 bucks as a 4 of, I could not care less if Konami has shit westernized business practices and rarity distributions. im gonna play gold pride punk and be ASS

So many cards in this video are overpriced. You’re telling me “Absolute Ice Shield” is $30 a pop when only 5 people play that game??

Spoiler: a lot

Flesh and Blood enjoyer here. I will say that looking at the numbers alone can be a bit of a misrepresentation of FAB’s competitive pricing. The bulk of the cost comes from generic, one-of Equipment that can be moved between decks without hassle. Not to mention that the ban list in FAB functions very differently. Sometimes specific cards may be hit to sort of fine tune a format, but the “true” bans come from the Living Legend system, where a character and their weapon will only be banned depending on how dominant they are in a series of tournaments. This means that while expensive cards like Fyendal’s Spring Tunic or Crown of Providence exist in a lot of decks, they remain playable in pretty much every deck in the format and there is usually little risk in them getting hit in the future. So if you’re interested in FAB competitively, I hope the pricing in the video doesn’t do too much to push you away from the game!

Looking at the overdone busy ass art for some of these card games I'm glad Yugioh is stuck in its late 90's earthen slate aesthetic with text and art completely separate from each other. Jesus.

The price of new cards that powerLEAP the last set over and over again is why I’m slowly getting into old formats like goat. A full kashtira deck today costs $800+ and I bought 4 goat decks for less than $200 total

The playset rule for the total was so weird. Why not just take the max number used for any of the decks, so e.g. if a card is played at 2/1/0/0/0 across the decks it would be 2

The guy in the video (not Josh) can't say the letter "R". What is with this speech impediment that makes people sound like toddlers?

Damn fresh and blood is like ygo. Back in game was so so expensive. Dad, tele dead, dino rabbit, GB, LS, dragon ruler too maybe. Each of thsoe decks in old ers in its prime could cost u over $1000 eac with some cards being over $100-300 a piece like dad, jd, duality, tour guide, and notoriously expensive ccv. Good thing konami makes ygo better overtume, now YGO is way more cheaper game than it used to be back then. And back then, price of goods and inflation is not same as atm, lot products was so cheap in my place SEA, playing meta YGO decks basicslly only the richest can do.

I think mashing together the top 5 decks way more useful then I thought it was at first when you shift your perspective. If you want to play a card game at the competitive level you can expect the meta to shift about 5 times a year, maybe even more depending on how much product drops in a year plus how many ban lists, rotations, etc they do. I think this isn't a perfect way to look at it but I don't think this is bad either. There isn't really a way to find the prices for decks of games you don't play in the past for a lot of these games or to know when the format shifted. The average competitive player is probably playing about 5 decks a year competitively unless your a dedicated pet decker like a Hero Player who can pretty much play the same cards with whatever 5 new cards come out for the deck each year.

In yugioh about $500 to $1000 every 2 months should keep you meta relevant

You technically compete in tcg with 3 traptrix structure + 3 prsperty(45) + 3 imperm(11) + 3 exceed(5) + redoer + random xyz monsters which will be like lower than 250

Wow, this guy who made the video was way off on Dragon Ball. Not even close

Also, this guy is a Vanguard player and he made this video mainly to complain about the prices of Vanguard, so there's likely biases in there.

Vanguard is pretty much the 4th place card game in the world. It's actually not the most popular TCG in Japan though, neither is Yugioh. Pokemon competitive decks are cheap cuz nobody really cares about the competitive scene. Pokemon is mostly a collecting game and relies heavily on nostalgia and the MASSIVE brand name of Pokemon.

DRAGON BALL SUPER CARD GAME BEST CARD GAME

Yugioh is not cheap when the cards just get realised. At YCS Lyon I had to spent 550€ (=$) for the Kashtira support Powerful cards like Ash, trust, tactics are exepensive until they get reprinted. Ash is cheap now (almost 5-10€) but when it came out it was 70€ So if you want to compete at yugioh it very expensive if you want to have the just realised cards and have an edge on a tournament

This just feels pointless to look at because the guy didn't properly set his comparison points. Counting 3 baronnes but only 3 ashs is just wrong. Comparing MtG standard to Yugioh and Pokemon is also very odd. Commander isn't competitive so you can play whatever without there being a "top deck" but at least pick Modern which is like the other format people play.

The vanguard pricing is pure bullshit on this one.

I just came across this video and now know TCG players are, in fact, deranged lol playing cards are price inflated beyond parody.