Ah yes, time for another episode of: “How Yu-Gi-Oh! is the Black Sheep of Card Games”

Alt Title: 10 Commandments of TCGs 1: The Rare Slot is Sacred

Oh you're totally gonna make a 10 Commandments of TCG Design series now, you put that energy out into the universe.

Pretty sure that playing a duel with Yu-Gi-Oh cards on fire was the gimmick of at least one episode.

> Gacha is named after the sound an egg capsule makes when cranking it i honestly thought it was named after the fact that it makes companies go "Gacha! Now we've made you spend all your money just to get that one rare item."

It's called the "God Pack" because the first time this was done was for the Theros MTG set, where the pack could contain all 15 God cards from the set.

the lootboxes versus packs intro really made me stare at magic arena and its terrible economy

While you're right that Lootboxes are worse because you don't get to keep, re-use, trade or exchange the things that come out of it, they're still gambling mechanics designed to tempt people to part with more money than they otherwise might in the hopes of getting the things they want for a game they enjoy. The secondary market is a bandaid allowing you to make up for this by buying singles but those prices are dictated by a combination of demand and the artificial limiting factor of random chance pack opening. TCGs are fundamentally economically abusive mechanically, there's no getting away from that.

You know Kohdok, I think I just realized why I like your videos so much while watching this one. Yes your content is really good, but I really like your delivery. Your editing from shot to shot is really smooth. The actually visuals choices of showing off cards and the like really flow well. Also you don't overflow your videos with loud music, greenscreens, and stock images, making it feel like someone is talking to you rather than some power point presentation. Keep up the good work!

7:14 Funny thing is, even after that, there s still a chance that you won't have 3 of ALL commons

One thing I feel should be mentioned about gachas is that they aren't all negatives either. In most cases, they are bought with an in-game currency that you can get by playing the game as well as by buying it with real money, so many players aren't paying anything, while with physical card games that is never an option. It's a system designed to prey upon gamblers and those desperate enough to whale, but in many cases it's totally possible to play normally for free. Your first example, Fate/Grand Order, I played for over 4 years and only spent like 40 dollars total, and that only for guaranteed super rares, and despite that I had a ton of high rarity characters with over a thousand of the premium currency (so, like, 400 rolls) saved up. It was incredibly generous both with good characters and with difficulty to not need specific good characters. On the other hand there are many games that are extremely predatory, but a gacha system does not mean the game is guaranteed to be predatory.

If there's one thing I didn't expect, it's a Pekora clip being used in this video

The gate ruler English release has insane pull rates. Every box gives you at least one copy of every high rarity card (except one). It also gives you 4 upgrade rarity cards, meaning you could get two copies of the uber rare. Buying 4 boxes means you have a complete set except for 3/4 singles.

Those Pekora pulls are pretty insane tho, she IS the lucky bunny after all.

The set booster is great when you realize that buying them by the box eliminates chaff while providing pretty solid rare/ premium card output.

You cannot escape the Hololive

16:21 Now that Digimon got all the rares foiled. WE ARE SAFE!!!

I actually love the set boosters. They force the commons and uncommons to have some mechanical or flavor theme with each other, meaning that even when I only get one rare, I still feel like the majority of the pack might end up together in a deck at some point. I still buy singles for most purposes, but when I want to just drop a few bucks and jam some packs from the newest set, the set boosters are a much more enjoyable open than draft boosters, which are ideal for their one specific purpose… drafting.

The name god pack comes from a very small percentage of journey into nyx packs that had one of every god from the theros block.

That sponsor was so well executed, well done.

I argue that Booster Packs ARE Gacha and Loot Boxes. It’s just that they suck less. But they still suck

'"Now, a Booster Pack of Phantom Rage has 24 Booster Packs" Great video regardless

I think there are a few differences between typical TCG packs and lootboxes/gacha mechanics - and IMO the latter are (currently) probably more predatory than the former. Ultimately, though, I think they're more similar in spirit than not, as booster packs still push players to spend more money in hopes of pulling a chase rare or tournament staple. I feel the secondary market, in-game currency, and other features are more "additional" characteristics than intrinsic aspects of a TCG or gacha - that is, those things can be added/removed or modified with relative ease.

This might be your most ingenious and thought-provoking video to date. And that means a lot, considering the usual quality of your videos.

This was so incredibly helpful and fascinating to me, as are all the videos of yours I've been binging the past few days, so thank you! Looking forward to sharing my game with you sometime later this year!

These videos are INCREDIBLE. Hope you make more TCG analysis vids.

Great discussion, my friend and I love just cracking packs, I've been doing so for the last 18 years. I have always found it interesting how different games organize their packs or how different sets within the same game organize them.

One of the most instructive video of the series, and the level was high!

Words cannot express how much I love the first 30 seconds of this video

I love this type of content. Keep up the good work, mate!

You know, most of these videos get me excited to make my own TCG, which I don't really have the capacity to do. Which is disappointing, but fun. This video is dangerous, because it got me excited to open booster packs, which I CAN do. ...even though my TCG of choice is Yu-Gi-Oh, this video's Goofus to Digimon's Gallant.

Loot boxes are more predatory but they're still basically the same.

Really great video, I already know all this stuff and but it was still interesting to hear you talk about it.

Good to have you back with a new commentary!

This helped me out tremendously, you have no idea. Thank you.

Great videos. These will greatly help with the TCG I'm working on.

The quality of this vid is honest amazing. Keep it up XD

Yoo, Arid Mesa pull lol

Are you reading my mind Kohdok? I was just thinking about my booster packs when your video was shown to me by KZfaq. ;) Love it! A lot of good information here.

Kohdok, I'm a huge fan, and I'd like it if you reviewed Keyforge, the primary gimmick of which is that, simultaneously, the decks are mostly random, and the game has no boosters

just got this in my recommended, opening animation is god tier

3:00 I understand the distinction you're making and why to a player that matters but like you did just describe a loot box that has more stakes in it which in the eyes of the law doesn't make it better but worse.

This has great application for thinking about setting up cube drafts as well imo!

Now I need this, this is going to be saved in a list

I think another reason Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG packs have 9 cards is that the earliest TCG sets were slightly larger, because each was a combination of two OCG sets. Legend of Blue Eyes has 126 cards. 5% of 126 = 6.3, which rounds to 7 + 1 = 8, which is much closer to the stated ideal number (Metal Raiders has 143 cards, which comes out to 9). Of course, at this time the OCG sets were *smaller*, with only ~60 cards, so it was the OCG getting some pack chaff (OCG packs have 5 cards, but 5%+1 of 60 is 4). And once the TCG caught up, they also had 60 card sets. Konami seems to have gradually figured out during GX that 60 cards wasn't enough, and the sets gradually trend upward to 100, at which point an OCG pack is exactly 5% of the set. All this is to say that 9 cards made sense for LOB and Metal Raiders exactly, and nothing after that. Even if having half the cards of Pokemon or a third of Magic wasn't an issue (and I'm sure it would have been a huge issue), telling your customers they're going to be getting half the value for their buck is simply unfeasible, even if the bang is statistically better, and it improves the resale value. That said, in very early Yu-Gi-Oh!, since any card can go in any deck, having a glut of commons was probably genuinely helpful for casual players.

New idea for Errata Text: Building Better First Sets The first set of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) had 295 cards. It showed players endless possibilities. It allowed them to construct all sorts of decks. The first set of the Yu-Gi-Oh! (YGO) only had 126 cards. It more or less only allowed players to build beatdown decks. It more or less did not show players endless possibilities. It instead made it easier for players to learn YGO, making it easier for them to get started with YGO, making it easier for them to buy YGO. The next sets of YGO later introduced new mechanics and new possibilities. YGO eventually showed players endless possibilities when they noticed that it had a lot of sets.

Thank you once again for your amazing content.

13:03 Hey, what happened here? It looks like some text is layered on top of itself in this section.

Nice voice work at the start there haha👌🏿

That whole "card packs are not lootboxes" rant was the biggest amount of copium ever xD There is a reason that in every single TCG, experienced players will tell you to buy singles and never touch official product. Because official product is obviously designed to ripp you off

I've been trying to make a card game based in the world I am making a book on, and watching these videos gives me at the same time inspiration and disheartens me. There's so much that needs to be done and frankly as someone working and having to do it on my own its incredibly hard. Hopefully one day I can actually send you it to review. Anyways, one idea I mulled about with selling cards was just to sell the archetypes of the set together in packs where you get playsets of all the stuff in that archetype. You buy theoretically four packs you have all the cards in the set. Tbh, I don't really care about people having to spend a ton of money on my game opening packs. I just would want them to have the cards. Pack opening is fun though sooo... Idk :/

Coming back to this banger. 8:25 got me good. Recently retired from YGO, because I despise the way the game is now and wanted to focus on Digimon. Sold my stuff for very very cheap, even the expensive things. A whole common/rare/super rare box was still there after I sold everything else, around 600 cards. Had trouble to find someone to buy the box for 50 reais (that's 10 USD at most). Imagine selling hundreds of cards for basically the price you pay for a pack... And they weren't even all garbo, there were some useful stuff there, not the whole box was good but it's still amazing that I basically sold years of cards collected for less than 2 cents each.

wow that ad in the beginning after what happened a week or two before this comment hit me like a truck

I remember in the original Innistrad set of MTG, I once got a "bomb" pack. It had a mythic rare in the rare slot, a mythic rare in the foil slot, and a mythic rare in the flip card slot (Innistrad was the first set to do the double sided cards and they all had a bonus slot akin to the foil slot).

Couldn't help but notice the Pokemon Snap music ya used. Good choice.

15:11 Hitting us with that Pokemon Snap music lol Professor Oak is going to rate your booster packs "Wonderful!"

This was quite enlightening.

In WWE Raw Deal the "God Pack" was named "Hot Pack" and contained all the foil only that were character specific that normally would fall in to the Mythic Rarity.

Fun fact - There were LITERAL god packs in MTG's Theros block, where all the cards in a pack were replaced with the 15 mythic rare Gods.

But did you try the chili recipe?

Star Wars Unlimited seems to have taken these lessons to heart. 1st set is 252 cards so using your formula you get a pack size of 14. SWU packs have 16 slots but 1 slot is always a leader and 1 a location. This is really good for limited formats. Also, they have foil slot and a rare slot. Your uncommon slots have a chance of being a higher rarity. Finally, the rarest cards in the game are showcase leaders and they only affect the leader slot so you could still get a legendary in the same pack!

Booster packs are still gambling man, there's no way around it

I like how video from fgo (2:32) has the banner from this week's event and everything summoned is new so there's a high chance that the account was created just for this video. Also getting kaleidscope on first roll is great luck.

I know of "rush packs" as god packs because my exposure to them were the journey into nyx god packs where each card in the pack were the 15 different gods of theros.

The fact of the matter is booster packs have similarities with loot boxes even if they aren't the same, even the way that there's a secondary market exists albeit to a lesser extent with lootbox games where a lot of gacha games have the whales(the equivalent of people who buy booster cases) where when they leave a game they might sell their account to someone else to use(which is against terms of service but is done anyways.) In fact, while loot boxes are more predatory and try to be more limiting about the secondary market there are some elements in which they are less abusive than trading card games in that there have been laws passed that requires them to have publicly available the exact percentage of the chance you are to get any given unit/character/item for any box that can use the premium currency. This means that unlike side sets in YuGiOh there can be no true short printing. There's a reason why Cimoo is right about buying singles and that video game youtubers are right when saying that micro-transactions are bad and that it's best to buy games that just have stand alone content where unlike gacha or trading card games there is a clear upper limit for how much money you have to spend. Ring Fit Adventure or Pokemon Sword and Shield, not Fate Grand Order or YuGiOh Duel Links.

Great series! I’d love if you could make a video about Spellfire.

thanks, it's all so mysterious to me

What's a good ratio for the composition rarities within a set, rather than within a pack or box? Like... is there a magic formula for how much of a set should be rare vs common?

I think gacha mechanics and most TCG boosters rely on pretty much the same things. In most gacha games, the lowest rarity units can offer multiple copies and can help make the unit stronger. Having low rarity units can be the foundation in many gacha games. The same can be said about C/U/R rarity cards because as a collector of TCGs, at some point, the box with commons/uncommons and even rares becomes meaningles cardboard and you're just searching for higher rarity like Super/Awesome/Fabled just get that shot of dopamine. That's pretty much also the same with gacha mechanics - a 5-star or max rarity character is also the most sought after collectible. Now, how the gacha mechanics are implemented is a different story. See, if a gacha game has a "pity" reward, meaning, after certain amount of summons/pulls you don't get the rarest unit, you are guaranteed after x-amount of failed attempts to finally get it. I look at this "pity" rate as the same thing as purchasing a booster box - you are guaranteed some rare stuff, like certain amount of Majestic cards in FAB booster box. BUT wait - what if you do not purchase a booster box case, then you might miss out on some extremely rare card that shows up 1 in every 4 boxes but the 2 boxes you've ordered came from 2 different cases or someone else purchased them earlier and already got the extremely rare card. Point is - both gacha and TCG boosters rely on baiting collectors like myself and it always depends on the eye of the beholder what value you're getting out of C/U/R cards or 3-star/4-star units in a gacha game. The best way to fight against these addicting vices is by purchasing singles to avoid gambling on booster boxes and building up enough resources to summon on the "pity" rate in one go in a gacha game. P.S. Yes, I fully know some gacha games do not have pity rates (like Fate/Grand Order, although I heard they've introduced some kind of bingo pity rate in JP) and that's why my comparison was made against some really annoying rarities in TCGs where you can only get a card 1 out of 4 booster boxes or something.

Does the term "God pack" have any origin in the packs from MTG's journey into Nyx that contain only beyond rares with the god creature type?

Good to see FoW getting some praise for God Packs It's a hype time to open one

My rule for packs is simple don't get them expecting to get a specific card if there's a card you want and you happen to get it from a pack that's great but at the end of the day if you want a specific card buy singles I buy packs when I just want more cards and cus opening packs is so satisfying and a great way to cheer me up (digital ones don't do it for me)

great vid!

Its called a god pack because magic had a pack back in Journey into Nyx that had all 15 gods in it.

Digimon is a rad game for many reasons, but in particular the way they handle rarity and packs is excellent. First of all, plenty of cards in the game are available with at least 2 different art styles. You can find the regular version of the card in the wild pretty easily, but you can occasionally find an extremely rare alternate art version of a ton of cards. A full booster box contains 1 (or 2) alt arts only! Even better, they routinely reprint old cards in new art styles in their tournament packs. Some of these tournament cards are absurdly rare, so even if the original card is dirt cheap, the tournament version can go for a lot on the secondary market. This sort of thing is great for consumers, because if you're a casual or have a limited budget, that means you can probably find the cards you're after for a reasonable price if you stick to the regular version, while the sky's the limit for a big spender seeking to bling out their collection with max rarity playsets. All of this is concerning the same cards, with the same exact in-game utility. It doesn't matter what version of the card you use, it is functionally the same. This is just for cosmetic purposes. Compare that to a game like MTG where the "cheapest" (or only) version of staple competitive cards go for so much that its shameful. Sure, there will always be some exceptions, but when you compare Digimon to other games, it really is more friendly to the consumer on the whole. Best of all, they do go back and reprint old cards that become harder to collect in random places like structure decks or as box toppers.

Love the shirt!

Wow, The Spoils! I didn't know they existed outside the back of Dragon Shields boxes.

I had no idea god packs were a thing Im shocked that Yugioh hasnt even tried this before, it would be awesome

I'm gonna have to say gacha are a lot like booster packs and physical gacha machines. So booster packs you do usually get some physical object you own and can sell, if MtG is discontinued you can still play with what you have just can't buy more, virtual cards and characters go down with the servers. But I don't care what anyone says, 90% of commons are drink coasters once you have a full set or are just unusable, you'd barely be able to sell them for pennies unless proxy cards take off and someone needs any disposable physical card as a backing. Most people don't care a whole lot about trading their collection assuming there's a rubberband system to guarantee you get something decent or a ticket to get exactly what you wanted. There are lots of bad gacha and lootbox mechanics like weighted statistics of getting useful items or the game requiring high level rare stuff in order to progress but those same mechanics can apply to cards in some way, except instead of manipulating the odds of getting a virtual card you just print less rares in general. I'm not trying to sell lootboxes over physical card packs just saying collectible card games have always had these mechanics under the table, most are just smart enough not to use them recklessly unlike EA's bs or some other games.

Also with magic set boosters, you have THE LIST. A chance at pulling a reprint from a select list of cards printed throughout magic’s history. And, starting with midnight hunt, some commander only cards

I appreciate the Dragon Quest music in the background. I have found another KZfaqr of culture.

The Godzilla cards in Ikoria were the only time I was ever interested in MtG. I searched all around my area for months but never found any, so I ended up buying them one by one on Amazon and eBay. Only after finishing the set did I finally find a single Ikoria collectors pack on a store shelf. I bought it for no other reason than I had searched so hard for them before and was finally looking at one.

I've seen The Meta Zoo cards at Target next to the other trading cards, they look cute like Pokemon kind of

1. Papa Hasbro doesn't want there to be a secondary market 2. Pokemon sets have 5 card booster packs in Portugal, Spain and Italy to sell packs in weaker economies. 3. Pokemon might have sets of 180 cards, but 20-40 of those cards are in the Super Rare rarity which only are included 2 per case. So that golden ratio is skewed, a lot. 4. Pokemon suffers from same pack junk as YGO. Commons and uncommons are worthless (€0.02 for playset) because meta decks run on Rares and higher rarity with the super easy to obtain uncommons (usually 2-3 copies per starter deck like Ultra Ball).

I was surprised you went with Digimon's 1.0 box as the example, when 1.5 is even better and is closer to their standard for rarity breakdown going forward, that being 10-12 Super Rares per set instead of the whopping 20 in 1.0. With five boxes of 1.5 you would have almost 40 SRs (depending on alternate arts), which is potentially enough to have a playset of all of them, while being at: • 840 Commons out of 64 types, avg 13 copies each • 360 Uncommons out of 40 types, avg 9 copies each • 195 Rares out of 35 types, avg ~5.5 copies each. It's nice to still get some excitement out of those Rare and even Uncommon slots even after the second box! The lower rarities are accessible enough for players who don't want to buy too much sealed, but not so abundant they quickly become box chaff. (There is also the funny way that some of the regular Rare cards, such as BT3 Veemon, are actually valued higher than some of the Super Rares, making even a 'miss' pack into a potential good pull that you won't want to just skip over when you see there's no foil in the pack.)

I have a lot to say on your defense of boosters over loot boxes, but the thing that weirds me out the most is the...hatred of duplicate pities. Games like Dragalia Lost and Another Eden gives you alternate currency cause they aren't designed to make using duplicates an effective process of advancing through the game and they don't feel great to have for the casual player. There isn't much use out of having more than one copy of a unit outside of weirdo meme team setups, so its more reasonable to just give you an additional currency that is more effective in gettomg through the game's content. There's also the fact that in PvP-focused games, an entire team setup of the same uber-powerfu; unit can be nightmarish to face and a massive dealbreaker for most people. You can argue that those game's PvP content should have more blockades for such, but it can make the single-player content even more of a "courtesy". These are RPGs first, gambling sims second, after all. There's also just how...predatory the notion of needing multiple copies of the same unit for maximum effectiveness is by design. TCGs can somewhat get away with that notion, as the randomness of a deck is an inherent mechanic of the game itself. And even then, people having to drop $20-60 bucks on multiple big boxes to not only get the best of the best but also enough to actually play them even casually in a reasonable manner (not a lot of kids have the time for best 2 outta 3 games nowadays, unfortunately...) can feel at least disheartening for most people trying to break into the competitive scene. If you only need the one copy, it is hard to feel gipped or walled off away from the game's content because you were unlucky with you were unlucky with your draws. Most duplicate pity currencies essentially sidesteps the problems of such by equating the power of getting that unit with the power of being able to improve, refine, and make your favorites more powerful. Don't think of it as the game devs robbing you of power and ideas, so much as it is spreading out and distributing that power into your entire collection. It's not to say it is a perfect system, hell, my favorite gacha, Fire Emblem Heroes, RUNS with the idea of utilizing duplicate copies of a unit for all its worth, but there is some desogm benefits to avoiding the dupes problem entirely..

Gasp! You mentioned the Spoils. I bought a couple booster boxes and basic box of awesome as they were cheap on Ebay. I'm hoping for a video on it from you someday. Although my guess is that you don't like it considering how raunchy and hard to pick up it is.

The more staples you print at ultra-mega-super-rare, the more like a lootbox your booster pack becomes.

To be fair, the set booster was meant for people who just bought packs to open and see if they pull anything cool. They made the two separate packs so casual buyers didn't get left out because the draft players bought up all the booster packs..

Buddyfight actually did a 1/box rush pack (secret pack) for the last 3 years of their run

We have to admit that anyone who would buy something without knowing what they're buying has little self-respect and is probably acting according to their addiction, rather than reason. And, of course, if you don't have much respect yourself, you certainly can't expect any from someone pitted against you in competition (which is the core nature of all business interactions). There--I just explained how TCG's work.

Have you ever played any of FFG's Living Card Game series like Arkham Horror, Android Netrunner or Marvel Champions? I think they would have been interesting to mention in this video as they do away with the entire concept of boosters to begin with. As they aren't TCGs, do they fall outside the perview of your channel? I would still really like a video on them regardless.

Lootboxes are an improved version of booster pack: they are designed to force you to buy more and more of them, but they run on the same concept, to buy random stuff that you may not need. Both system are enjoyable in they way, personally i hate both bevause i was NEVER lucky with opening stuff (and, generally, you can buy the card you need at the same price of 5 booster packs, so...)

My experience has been that collector's boxes produce more mythics while set boxes give you more rares. I'm sold on set boosters. The common/uncommon slots being themed ends up being relevant for deck building. The chance at more rares is important for my cube where rares are more likely to make the cut. Also I enjoy the art card and chance at a list card even though most of them aren't great. I guess it's just a funner pack opening and that's why I buy packs.

So, yesterday I've gotten my very first elite trainer box for Pokemon. No joke, I've gotten back to back holo rare V cards. While not good, I was happy I've gotten them.

In Yu-Gi-Oh's Duel Links version, they take some things a step further. In Duel Links, they offer two forms of boxes. Main boxes, and Mini boxes. Main boxes consist of 180 packs using three cards per pack, while Mini boxes consist of 100 cards with three cards per pack. However, the innovation comes with a unique guarantee, one that can only be afforded due to it's online status. It guarantees that if you go through the entire box, you are getting at least one copy of each ultra and super rare card. In Main boxes, if you were to go through an entire main box, you would get one copy of 8 different ultra rares, while also getting two copies of the 15 different super rares in the box (I think it might actually be 12). Mini boxes on the other hand, only contain 3 different ultra rares and 8 super rares, with only one copy of each. However, what I find so fantastic about this system is that if you want to build a deck, you don't have to go through multiple boxes to a get a copy of one ultra rare, one box is guaranteed to suffice. This also means that you have a definitive endpoint to how far you have to go through the box to get what you want. Furthermore, there several boxes that a new player can use to build a competent deck using only 2-3 go throughs of a single box, with mini boxes being the most popular due to their affordability. I really wish that more online games implemented a feature like this, because it far friendlier to the player than even other TCG boxes.

My getaway from this: Yugi Oh! Booster Set are awful, go buy singles.

Like most things tcg related god packs come from magic original theros had the potential of pulling an all gods pack. Allegedly. I also love set boosters they got a mini stories, potential of going bigger on amount of rares and art cards of varying rarity

Ok, pack design idea, assuming a 9 card pack and resource cards: 1 Rare 2 Uncommons, one of which cannot be an uncommon resource card in order to avoid doubling special resource cards at the expense of non-resource uncommons 1 Common _or_ Uncommon 1 Common _or_ "Beyond Rare" 2 Common 1 Resource card slot for resource cards of _any_ rarity 1 Foil slot of any rarity, or premium alt-art or full-art card

THE RARE SLOT IS SACRED!!!!