The thing that annoys me is people assume casual players dont wanna upgrade rheir decks

funniest part to me is paying over 300 dollars for a set of a card then go into a tournament to win a Nintendo switch

There was a thread on reddit this month, from an OCG player. During the discourse, that person legit asked, how kids are able to play Yu-Gi-Oh in the TCG. That blew me away, man. Apparently kids DO play this game in the OCG (I don't know which country that person is from). Meanwhile, in the TCG, whenever a kid does try to play, their parents only buy them a few packs or a structure deck because they're not gonna spend more than that, they get destroyed, and then they leave and don't come back.

I really feel like when people argue for expensive shit they stay expensive, is solely to make sure they can "protect their investment".

I can't believe triff JOKINGLY said "just win a ycs" lol

I think the reason why the OCG is cheaper is because Konami knows that they are in direct competition with multiple other card games that have $100-150 meta decks.

Another point no one brought up is, the amount of tops where players are thanking people for letting them BORROW staple to have been able to compete in the first place!

losing 100% of all matches you play is cheap.

At this point I really like the direction this is taking. Every day there is a new video about this topic and the more we can stir the pot and start chaos the better. Maybe this will finally be the time were Konami starts to acknowledge the community and something changes, who knows.

The price of meta cards are blocking players from actually being competitive. I have no business playing my deck at a regional without an S:P little knight when the same deck will do infinitely better with that card. The pay wall holds a lot of us back.

Reminds me of the similar conversation being had by the Magic the Gathering community. Across the board decks are way more expensive than they used to be, but in that case it seems most of the popular content creators actively voice how they’re pretty displeased by the price hikes

Most people have other stuff they have to pay for. If you make people decide between their daily necessities and a card game guess which do you think they’ll go for. I like Trif but sometimes he sounds like a complete knucklehead. These people who complain about prices but keep buying these overpriced cards need to stand by their words like the adults they probably think they are or shut up and consume like the good consumers they are.

OCG player here. I feel sorry for the TCG community for having outrageous prices. Competitive Yu-gi-oh! in the OCG is cheap enough that anyone with a 9-5 job can play the META. Triple Tactics Thrust is only a rare and is $4. Rarity collection staples sell like hotcakes where you can get SR ash blossom for $5.

I remember as a teen getting really excited to pick up aromages when they initially came out, really liked the deck, then a good chunk of it got inexplicably rarity bumped and my meagre allowance wasn't going to cut it. To this day I haven't built aroma, a deck I ADORE, primarily because or rarity bumping and scarcity of its necessary cards in the TCG despite being a fairly bad deck

The thing is, Konami would make just as much money, if not more if they took a lot of these cards that are artificially short-printed and just.... printed them in multiple rarities. It would allow more players to upgrade their decks with commons and rares which brings in more customers to the game while also allowing the more cash flow players to spend whatever they wanted on the highest rarities to shiny their decks to the max, because they would regardless. By isolating the game so that only those with the biggest pockets can play, is the reason why Yugioh is ironically falling behind other card games in sales. The exclusivity is pushing more and more people away.

Something in yugioh that i have noticed about the community especially over the years is that they have a "Ignorance is bliss" mindset where if THEY dont have to deal with the issue at hand then its considered as something "people should just stop whining and buy some more money and go get the cards they need to play the game at a reasonable pace with ppl who do own the cards". This feels disgusting to have to deal within the community because it proposes an "elite mindset" where the "bad" players are gated by price and the good players or "ones deserving" get to play the best cards and its gating wins and tops behind the almighty dollar. This game also just doesn't have the prize support to justify the price it cost to play competitively, simply put.

We should do the same thing that the OCG does with the rarities.

My locals is very competitive. It's difficult to even trade for cards when all 30-40 players want the 6 Thrusts that were pulled from everything.

I’m glad I chose to play swordsoul. The deck is dirt cheap and still quite playable. Will I win every match? No. Will I have fun? Yes

I learned my lesson trying to play meta too quickly. I had been a casual Yugioh player my whole life, but right around the time Shaddolls got big I decided I wanted to step my game up. Ended up pulling some good stuff out of some packs and traded a good amount of stuff to some friends, and had a fully functional pure Shaddoll deck except one piece of the puzzle, being Construct. So I paid the $60 each at the time, got 2 copies of it, and was going to go to locals that Saturday, but then on that very Thursday the ban list came out and Construct got banned. $120, gone, no refunds, friends obviously didn't want to trade back. This was also back when they would ban cards for actually being strong instead of banning cards to force players to buy the new cards so the ban really hurt on a fundamental level. All this just to say, after that I'll never play meta again, it's just too expensive and can be ripped out from under you literally overnight. It's gonna be crazy when Bonfire has 1 format of being at 3 and then becomes ROTA number 2. Calling it right now.

I really appreciate Konami releasing rarity collections. I can't wait for the second one to come out so I don't have to pay an arm and a leg for Accesscode Talker. I hope these sets continue and we can see stuff like Bonfire, Diabellestar, and S:P Little Knight become affordable. The more affordable meta staples can be, the better.

I can't draw the out against my bills no matter how I change my deck. Am I stupid?

Honestly if Konami did what pokemon did it wouldnt be this expensive. Like make a common version for the competitive cards and a "full art" version for those who wanna shell out for the expensive card. Like they arent going to make any more money anyways since they just sell the product and be done with it.

Yugioh is certainly not cheap. But the way people define "expensive hobby" is relative, and price floors for validity can be true. For example, tennis or golf are "expensive" hobbies because the bare minimum requires several hundreds of dollars for entry. Comparatively, you might think that Yugioh is cheap. You can get into competitive Yugioh with a relatively cheap deck for approximately $100-150. That being said, there's no reason for TCG to be as expensive as it is.

as a magic player the easiest way to start solving the price issues are to allow ocg copies of cards to be played in tcg formats. i own multiple foreign copies of magic cards that were significantly cheaper to purchase in Japanese, Chinese, German or Italian. i recently purchased 3 ocg thrusts to play with my friends and to me they are physically identical to my friend tcg copies.

The fact that we have gotten to a point where i literally have to pick between keeping up with a silly goosey card game versus being able to put food on my table everyday says alot.

As a budget player i approve this message , although i personally don't mind paying top dollar for cards i just don't think Yu-Gi-Oh! out of all games should be so expensive considering we have 0 cash prizing.

Honestly what baffles me the most is that most of these people wouldn't even do this at huge tournaments. As playing at even a casual level the game can cost more than most tier 2-3 meta deck in other cardgames. It's something Konami has been doing since the beginning and the sad thing is that they'll continue to as they know that they'll get away with it.

I think it's worth mentioning that Card Grading Companies and Outside investors have also helped push up the cost of YuGiOh. They buy up all the old stock and old boosters from online stores and hold onto them thinking its a financial investment that they can profit from. Also YuGiOh channels that focus on just opening old booster packs and talking about how much each card costs help to push prices higher.

The main difference between the ocg and tcg is that in the tcg, most good cards have only high rarity printings and most bad cards have only low rarity printings (so outside that 1 slot for high rarity, everything else is basicly trash), in the ocg however, most cards get multiple rarities, low rarity for those who just want to play with the cards and high rarity for those who want to colect, so in conclusion, the ocg does everything better, not only because it is cheaper but also because every slot in your packs could be good.

Hey that's my graph! Thanks for using it!

As a Floo player, some players are wild for feeling they NEED to build a new deck with cards like bonfire when you can just upgrade what you have. That’s called financial literacy imo. However, there are generic staples that come out way too expensive. I coulda bought a pair of black air forces, a black turtleneck and chain ($62 for a silver one on clearance) for a playset of thrust before the reprint came out. Brrrrrr What happened to that boy 🐧

People who say yugioh isn’t a rotating format haven’t played long enough, the ban list/power creep is our rotation

At least Cap-G gets it

When I was lucky enough to pull a Forbidden Droplet and an Accesscode Talker back when they were absurdly expensive I didn't even want to risk putting them in my deck knowing that if I lost them or they got stolen I wouldn't be able to afford replacements. No card game player should ever have that fear.

As a filthy casual, these type of videos always confuse me, because I always grew up with yu-gi-oh by playing with friends and family. I think some of my friends and I looked at Yu-Gi-Oh the wrong way, because we tend to play with cards that sucked because we liked how some of them looked, rather than how well they played. We probably didn't know the exact ruling on a lot of cards, and we asked each other not to play certain cards we thought were unfair. We eventually grew out of it, and whenever we look at videos that complain about Yu-Gi-Oh nowadays, it makes a bit worried. Like I feel kind of dumb, but it always seemed easy to just play Yu-Gi-Oh with close friends and such, but it never occurred to me that asking a stranger that you met at a local tournament not to play certain cards, is a taller order than asking a close friend. And because Yu-Gi-Oh is so far into it's power creep, I think the only people left playing Yu-Gi-Oh outside of video games, are the people that play Tournaments and such. One of the reasons I like stuff like Master Duel, and YGOPro, wasn't just because of it being free, but because it was easier to play games again with my old friends with silly anime-like decks. But I don't know if that counts as "Playing Yu-Gi-Oh" So Maybe Yu-Gi-Oh doesn't have to be expensive to get into if you can get a friend to get into it with you.

I managed to pull 2 Baron De Fleur back when they were worth $50ish, specifically one from Synchro Storm and one from Maze of Memory. I played Speedroids, so naturally i put 1 in a deck, and I still have both of them. When I saw the value of them decrease to about $10 a month or two ago when that rarity collection dropped, i wasn't upset, i was slightly hyped because it meant that more people could have access to a card i liked using that's playable in a ton of decks. And I'm also a Casual, i rarely even get the chance to duel irl since the 1 card shop in my town doesn't support Yu-Gi-Oh (but supports MTG and Pokemon). Im at this point starting to realize a mixture of price and not being able to play irl is making me not interested in Yu-Gi-Oh anymore, at least playing it physically or digitally, still like Watching Yugi-Tubers sometimes. It's gotten to the point that ive complained enough to a friend about the pricing issue (which btw they play the Pokemon TCG and are up-to-date with it way more then I am, i currently dont have a standard format deck for that TCG) that they randomly sent me a Mandaium? Deck that costs over $1000 (I think, i dont know much about current meta decks, i stopped paying attention when Purrely and Kashtira were the main 2 alongside Rescue Ace and i think Unchained, and idk what unchained and Rescue Ace do) So yeah that sucks. Konami, please fix your game, because I'm reaching a point that price alone can mean i cant play a TCG, and that hasn't really been an issue for me with the Pokemon TCG, and i didn't build meta decks for most of my life in that game

"Dark magician-fire princess-turtle deck" hit me right in the heart of the cards i ran that when i first started going to locals. The guys have been very helpful in getting me up to speed, in a surprising healthy way. Probably cuz the shop has strick rules on any form of bullying. Still i knew i had a casual burn deck and i had a blast losing and getting to know everyone in a low stakes match

How often do you see a deck profile and they say “shout out to my friend for letting me borrow this card.” Huh, it’s almost like they couldn’t afford that card before the tournament.

This opinion is exactly what's wrong with yugioh at the moment. I haven't played in over a year because it stopped being fun because no matter the format or the year it's the same story. 1-5 decks that control everything that you have to build counters into your deck to deal with them but if you don't draw the cards to counter them then it's an auto lose. Speed duels are probably the most fun I've had playing in a long time

my favorite part about the trif tweet is that saying the whole "just win your locals and you'll get cards lol" is also just straight up gambling a lot of the time. In my case, I go to a local with 10 dollar entry and consistently top 4 them. Even when you are rewarded at least a dozen packs of a set, you can just get shafted and lose out more from paying entry fees that could have also went into funds to save and buy an expensive card. Over the years I've played, I'd say on average I've definitely either lost out or barely broken even on the cost of entry to prizing ratio from locals and this is coming from someone who is experienced at the game.... Not the new/ more casual players that these price complaints come from.

I don’t mind a card costing $100+ . The problem is when $100+ is the cheapest available price for a card. What I’m tryna say is ocg-style multiple rarity sets will most likely help

100$ for bon fire get the truck out of here 1400 for a case of Rarity collection 2 for chance pull oh hell yes. So dumb.

Got back into the game when a couple friends informed me one of my favourite archetypes (dark world) was getting a structure deck. Playing with them was great. Then they eventually brought me into their playgroup where the rest didn't have any price hangups or desire to play any sort of casual. Been completely locked out of 80% of the games I play, and barely do a single thing in about 15%. Even before the current things, the stuff to run to have any sort of chance was going to cost 300+ dollars. Now it's even more. It's insane

People keep forgetting just how crippling YGO's lack of fiscal prize support is. No money in the prize support means there's MUCH fewer players, which means demand for chase cards on the secondary market is much lower. As such, you get much fewer vendors actually buying up boxes of stock. The difference here is that the Vendors' impact of the supply is EXPONENTIALLY greater than the lower demand, because BOTH the lack of prize support and the lower demand drive them away. Edit: For comparing YuGiOh TCG to OCG, *that* disparity is because Konami of Japan doesn't rarity-bump the cards that most people want to play for the sake of driving sales. For just one example, Invasion Vengeance - OCG Treatoad on release was just a Rare, whilst in the same TCG set, Toadally Awesome was a fucking Secret. And this doesn't even touch on the fact that the OCG allows you to play TCG prints, while the TCG doesn't allow you to play OCG prints - so it's working with an objectively LARGER secondary market.

Yooo! He's on to something with that duston fire princess dark magician deck We cook now

Paying crazy amount for yugioh cards is a bad financial decision. They reprint everything into the ground. You cannot make any money in Yu-Gi-Oh playing events because price support is like nothing. Try playing One Piece you got promo cards that have the value of entry or even more and when you win you win big. Also calling somebody a pro player does not exist in yugioh. Its a fun game to play but not to make money in.

I hate so much the argument of "Every hobby is expensive at high level so Yu gi oh must be" Every other hobby are expensive does NOT mean a card game would be, especialy when meta staples or combo pieces are also usefull to mid to bad decks that would cost 20 or less

imo the biggest factor is that most people aren't ready to invest time into preparing, testing and deckbuilding. last year we saw rather cheap decklists like salamangreat (pre-LD10), floo, marincess or virtual world get YCS tops. you can do well at the highest level without spending a ton. you just have to play very well, make good meta calls and of course get lucky. the huge cardpool allows that. nobody "forces" you to play one deck. especially in formats as wide as this current one

It depends... If you have your staples, Dark Ruler, Ash, Droll, Super Poly, Evenly, Imperm, Nibiru, etc. Then the game is very cheap. You can roll up with absolute trash and win constantly. If you win, you get money to buy better stuff. If you don't have those staples, the game is extremely expensive. Those staple cards are what win games, and they rotate frequently, so you will have to buy them as they become relevant. Becomes very taxing. You have to be on those when they get released. But no, you do not need SP, Thrust, Sinful package to win. I won Tear format with Ghoti. I won Kash format with Gate Guardian and Gold Pride. Now, I'm looking for a good deck in this format, but I'm keeping that a secret.

So here's the thing, as someone who worked at a shop and has played yugioh and MTG competitively. If you're talking about prices of cards there is one major advantage ygo has over something MTG: Konami does not have the conecpty of a "reserved list" or a list of cards they will never reprint, even in functional similarity. yes, yu-gi-oh staples are expensive as fuck on release and for a few weeks after because of simple supply and demand. Some card prices stay insanely high because of scarcity, especially when there are little to no reprints. but Konami can and does reprint cards pretty aggressively so while you may not be able to play thos big staples immediately if you're on a tight budget (or unless you get super lucky) the prices do inevitably come down. The other issue as far as cost is concerned is if you're playing in any game where there is a competitive environment, metagame homogeneity is a thing. The most optimal performing decks are going to share a lot of cards because that is what competition demands of them. At which point if you play the game you need to identify why you play. If you're trying to a top tier competitor, it's gonna cost you time and money. You can try and play a rogue deck or sneak wins from bigger decks by studying and leveraging the weaknesses in their strategies against them, which will potentially cost you less money but more time. The level of financial investment is entirely determined by your motivation for playing and, generally the type of decks you're drawn to play.

The best hope is that store fronts wheen back on buying predatory sets while pushing for productive sets to motivate TCG Konami to shift their direction in set production. TCG Konami won't care if the playerbase doesn't buy as much product so long as stores maintain their regular purchase of sets. It will take time because there are many whales who're too devoted to buying meta, blind to the unnecessary expense TCG Yu-Gi-Oh is in the competitive scene.

8:25 I thought I fell in the twilight zone

I think Vendor is the key to "attacking" Konami TCG. With the current condition, because Vendors buy a lot of stock for reselling. From Konami's perspective, this is like "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". If vendors stop buying the packs, we all know YGO players won't want to buy boxes or packs because it is not worth it. This will have a huge impact on Konami TCG. You all need to collaborate with Vendors to take down Konami TCG's current system. If the boycott is only from the players, I don't think this will work. . OCG looks cheaper because currency in Asia is mostly weaker than in Western countries. In my country, good modern deck price is around 10%-25% of the monthly minimum wage (some places have lower min. wage). I don't know the ratio in foreign country. But I know EU and US have stronger currencies than most Asian countries. Also, Westerners usually have a higher cost to make something. . Asia has a big population. OCG system works because there is a large population of players that can support this system. So, when it is imported to TCG. Do you have enough people to support this system? This is just a wild opinion because this needs detail data for Konami itself.

If Konami really wants to help the players out bring back rares into sets so that way every pack has a rare and a super and the desired cards have ultra rare printings in sets and the secrets can be any ultra in the set as a blinged out version. Collectors can go after secret rare versions of cards while the competitive players will see way more of the ultra rares being relevant and more commonly seen. Accessibility needs to be priority #1 for any tcg and yugioh has only gotten worse over time when it comes to this

The secondary market definitely sets the price. People r willing to shell out over $100 on a bonfire so it becomes valued at that amount since people will pay that much to get it. Classic supply and demand. The biggest issue regarding the secondary market is its landscape could be totally different like in the ocg or Pokémon where they have multiple rarities of staples. Rarity collection is definitely a step in the right direction and they r printing a sequel. Hopefully cuz Konami learned that they need to make generic staples more accessible cuz at the end of the day it gets more people to play the game which helps keep the game alive. I like this cuz I love Yugioh. The only real money that u should spend on a deck is for the core itself. I’ve been playing long enough that I’ve held all my staples even after they lost value so I only have to get a deck core and add them in. Not everyone is like this tho especially if they just started playing. They wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pick those staples up in the past. And depending on the price of the deck core u can just get structures cheaply to form a competent deck core and upgrade with staples that should be affordable. Also I agree that locals is a competitive event. Not the most competitive but still a competition. Even a non competitive locals is still a tournament where u r tracking wins and losses. There r standings and some amount of prizing, usually small, but it’s a small competition compared to ycs and nats. Keyword there tho is it’s a competition, a tournament. Lastly I’ll leave u with this. Mtg KZfaqr pleasantkenobi has similar opinions regarding magic which also has become very expensive which is crazier considering most people who play magic aren’t competitive but casual commander players but that doesn’t mean they don’t want strong cards to put in their decks. He says the same things about multiple rarities. Reprint expensive cards with an affordable rarity for people to acquire the game pieces they need to play the game and then print special full art, fancy foils, etc for people who can and want max rarity or for collectors who want a cool version of a card as a collector piece. This gets more people playing which overall enhances the health of the game. Wotc has done this to some degree with sets from the last four years having multiple rarities of cards but it still hasn’t been enough. It does help with new cards tho. A brand new card like bonfire wouldn’t make sense to reprint so soon so instead they could’ve just printed multiple versions. Like the lower rare versions would still cost something as it would still only be available in the newest set but maybe $5-10 at most per copy. And it’s not like this would impact sales. People would still buy the set to pull bonfire. Stores would buy it to sell singles and they would easily offload any bonfires of any rarity cuz players of all incomes would want the card. Ygo players especially love max rarity so even people who couldn’t afford the more expensive version would probably still buy it but doing it this way gives anyone a realistic opportunity to acquire the game pieces to play. They do need to keep the ev of boxes somewhat high, at least high enough for stores to buy boxes for singles and expect to recoup the costs of the boxes by selling said singles. We need this so we have places to play at and buy cards from. At the end of the day tho it is simple economics. The players control demand which will always be high cuz ygo players r so deranged they will pay anything for a card but Konami controls supply and they can print more versions of a card so that the supply of the card can meet the demand for it thus the secondary market can set a price that is reasonable to the average consumer especially in the midst of a cost of living crisis

It cost so much I had to start charging myself for pleasure

Dont confuse "EXPENSIVE cards okay if GOOD" with "GOOD cards should always be EXPENSIVE" those are two completly different statments that should never ever be mixed up becuase it causes people to get angry at two VERY different questions. Everyone wants cheap good cards but everyone should understand if good cards are expensive (There is a limit before it gets stupid and ridiculuos though)

Cap, I think me & you have a similar opinion on the matter however 1 thing I will say is if YuGiOh prizing justified playing $500-$1000 decks, there would be less complaints. Although I agree the TCG rarity bumps and all that, I personally wouldn’t care that much if I top 4’d a regional & got more than a playmat & deckbox…

Honestly Yu-Gi-Oh steuggles with the line between casual and competitive even at locals it can be pretty miserable if you want to play something fun

Budget versions of decks like scareclaw, dinomorphia, floo, resonator, fire kings and traptrix can be made under $40 and win both locals and regionals (which you consider to be a competitive level).

It's heartbreaking that yugioh content creators who make a living off this game are the most untrustworthy voices in the community- and they're the most dominant

I like how these people think no one plays meta at locals or regionals. I literally only play meta decks at locals and regionals. Maybe a rogue deck every now and then.

Randall, thanks for keeping at this topic. Its super important. Could you maybe do a discussion about English Edition for Asia? Nobody else is talking about it.

Vanguard is cheaper if bushiroad got as much hype as magic and Yu-Gi-Oh we might see a large migration

The only way this is going to be fixed is for people to stop buying these overpriced cards, if sales slow down significantly vendors will have to start selling them cheaper or else end up keeping them

Love you for this video and speaking up I dropped the game because of this it's been a problem for years I play essentially every other card game because I just love playing cards I grew up on yugioh but it's just too expensive to play competitively and even if there is no rotation power creep happen so quickly it's insane

I recently bought 3 Structure Decks of the Crimson King and been practicing/modifying. With that deck, it does amazing things. The only decks I have built myself are HEROs and Eldlich/Zombie World and at the locals I go to (3rd time currently), My Zombies couldn’t keep up with the meta. My HEROs, a little bit better. I got my locals today and I wanna see how far I get in with that deck. Majority of the people using are Fire Kings.

In fairness, there has to be a balance in this discussion between the low end and super expensive. You can absolutely build a fun, effective deck without 100 cards. A friend and I have multiple decks like that which are very fun to play. Players don’t need Bonfire. It is a card for a small type usable in a currently strong archtype. It is not a ubiquitous staple necessary for a fighting chance.

Well said. I haven't been able to play in person for a while because it's too expensive. Not sure how anyone can actually justify these cards costing so much. I'd love to play in person again because for me it's a much more fun experience than just playing master duel, but I really can't imagine having to spend hundreds of dollars to play a deck again. I mean I'd love to play the new infernoid and sky striker stuff when it eventually comes out and I have the old cores of those decks, but I guarantee they'll be high rarity and/or any other support cards I need that I don't have will be. So ridiculous

The issue here lies not just in meta cards being absurdly expensive, but the lack of budget options that can serve as replacements. For example, in spite of Magic the Gathering's Commander format having staples that are several hundred dollars (Gaea's Cradle, Mana Crypt, Dual Lands, etc.) there are replacement cards that are mere dollars or even cents that are only marginally worse (Circle of Dreams Druid, Sol Ring, and Painlands respectively).

Coming from a person who is coming back, its incredibly hard to really back because how most of the new staple stuff is really expensive or i have to wait for reprints to even barely upgrade my old ass deck to somewhat playable levels and man... im regretting coming back

My question is in a what-if scenario that the TCG follows the OCG's method in having multiple rarities of cards that will change deck building and the meta, will it sustain Konami in the long run? I see the OCG thriving in their method, but more information is needed from the players there.

3x structure deck for life!Battles of legend is usually worth getting for support besides the tins. Money will always be spent….!

The reason competitive yugioh is expensive is partially vendors. They set the presale price. Not Konami. They want to ensure that yugioh is profitable for them so once they get the ratio of cards they know 4 bonfires per case 4 transaction rollbacks, etc okay what can we value these chase cards at to turn a profit while we have all these hard to get rid of bulk cards just sitting in the back. As the chase cards sell out and they open up more cases the price goes up, because their costs are also going up. Konami is also to blame by not releasing highly sought after cards in lower AND higher rarities (not this 1 per 2 cases starlight rare crap). That said the tins, and if they continue to do rarity collections help players get more cards in their hands if they have patience, but by then the cards are not meta anymore... so it's a double edged sword. That said even if they release lower rarity cards, they can still short print them making them hard to get 🤣🤣.

I stopped playing yugioh all together about 3 years ago. No buying cards, no dueling book or master duel. I do honestly keep up with the game via KZfaq but beyond that I can’t find myself to support the game in any other way. I have no proof but it’s my personal opinion that Konami TCG has their hands in the second hand market and actually encourages the price gouging that is done on sites like TCGPlayer. Also, the days of Yugioh being an interactive card game with your opponent has been dead for a while. If you go 1st and combo off with your $1,000+ dollar deck, you win. If you somehow manage to go second and draw 2-3 of your $100+ hand traps or combo stoppers, in all honesty you’ll probably still lose. All in all, life is expensive, especially in this day and age, and to spend ridiculous amounts of money on a piece of cardboard that will only be relevant for a year until the ban hammer comes down is just crazy

after a quick look into yugioh top decks vs magic( were I come from) for stander it is sad to say that yugioh is more expensive than stander magic. Yugioh's problem's are numerous and would need to worked on over years or they need to hit the reset button like Cardfight Vanguard did.

Its good to be grounded with all of this. Even when i got some of the best cards at the time (JD, Mirror Force, Injection Fairy Lily to name a few) i worked with cards i had. This game is expensive and for the most part Konami is at fault.

It's really hard to consider anyone casual when the latest form of the digital format is fueled by competition. And that's where most people care to play if they're not going to locals. Yes, we have outliers looking for groups on reddit to casually play paper yugioh, and the surprisingly substantial amount of people defending the 2 player starter set. But the latter really seems to treat yugioh as the same childhood game we grew up with, where boosters and starter decks were our cheapest ways to get cards because we didn't all have access or the will to go to the card shop and just get the small list of cards that would destroy our friends in a heartbeat.

When Pokemon gets mentioned, really to play competitive it's dirt cheap. Like compared to other TCGs, it is dirt dirt *DIRT* cheap. You can literally buy 2 of the same league battle deck, splice the thing, and you got a real competitive deck. The $150+ idk what they're buying, but that's over the top of necessity. Like 2 theme decks I mentioned you're good, everything you need. And that's the problem with the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG. Like can you play it for cheap? Sure. But competitive cheap? Nope. And that's something to really change. And that's where the issues really are. We're not dumb, we see how the OCG is treated compared to the TCG, and the TCG needs that same treatment.

I remember hearing that Kazuki Takahashi explicitly didn't want cash prizes for the winners of YCS for fear they'd turn out like Kaiba: a spoiled rich kid who rubs his wealth in peoples' faces. Well, it appears his fears were well-founded.

8:48 "Just win a YCS" Says the guy that has never won a YCS even with meta decks and staples, what a clown.

As someone who both helps teach newbies and hangs with a few vendors, can confirm even the newbies will ask for something easy to learn yet still somewhat viable to fight the other guys with. We ain't talking going straight into 100$ each for a few cards, but they do try to throw some money to improve their decks. 5:45 lmao hung out at the locals scenes enough. I know exactly what deck this friend is referring to. "F. The police coming straight from the underground!" is what someone told me once XD

As a person who's been involved in almost all bandai games. Depending on the color, you could build most competitive tier 1 decks for about 400 at max, or 150-200. The only reason they would be expensive is because each game has 5-6 colors. So if you want to switch, it'll probably cost you a bit more to jump to a new color.

"other card games are cheaper because they have set rotation" Magic the Gathering: *laughs in $100 Sheoldred, a 4 of in every black deck*

Trif not having won a YCS is hilarious to me, why would you say those things in that position 😂

What's frustrating as hell is being a casual player, who enjoys an archetype for its gimmick, only to find that one random card in the archetype is $45 because it's part of some stupid competitive combo that has little enough to do with the actual archetype as a whole.

It's so sad, because I really love Yu-Gi-Oh! but I just cant afford anything that is even close to a meta deck. I play the Pokémon TCG since Scarlett & Violet started. I have been able to afford five different decks since then by spending about 30€ a month. Three of them are top meta decks. I absolutely could've done this for even less money, but I spent a little extra for some Illustration Rares I liked. The difference is so insane...

It's sad to witness some of these content creators speak from a high pedestal of opportunity, looking down at their own viewers & and the majority of the player base as a whole. I'd say they are, by in large, oblivious & privileged. First of all, not everyone is sponsored by big name card shops that cover their travel expenses & decks to compete at large events because they are considered part of a "team." Also, not many make thousands from covering the game across social media. Furthermore, the majority of the player base is certainly NOT sponsored by the company that distributes the game itself. Even sponsorship should not be enough to explain such delusion. "Farfa" & "Team APS" have actually made articulate points across the board, highlighting the fact that card prices are getting out of hand, making the comparisons to other TCGs & our OCG with different rarity options upon set releases to alleviate that impact on the players. It's a shame that sponsorship & an "out of touch" perspective has seemingly clouded the judgment of a large scale of "Yu-Gi-Oh!" online personalities. Commemorating Ulti-Cannahawk no longer on the F & L list. 🐦⚡️

Bare minimum should be that we should make Konami do OCG rarities but in the TCG. I want scrubs to misplay, not be gatekept by money.

Like I'm just a kid and I can't get more than 1 to 2 hundred dollars together at a time, even though I want to play competitively I just can't, it almost feels cheaper to learn Japanese, buy the cards and just play there

I have no idea about Yugioh and this video popped up. the line "Don't use the floor as a barometer" should be a life advice.

As an ocg player i kinda wanna bling out my deck sometimes too😂😂

... wasn't there a video last week about a top player that quit because of the cost? Cap... I don't mean to be rude, but if you're going to call out someone for misspelling hobby, you should make sure your video's title doesn't also have errors. I feel like the second guy was being sarcastic? Basically saying "to get the good cards, just win without them."

The moment I saw the prices of SP Little Night, a staple ED, that high I knew something was starting to get wrong. Specially after Mathmech Circular ban, which wasn't doing absolutely nothing after the first hit.

The One Piece TCG is only a year old, set rotation isn't even a question yet for that game. The Digimon TCG is fairly young too, hard to say if it will eventually introduce set rotation.

kononey being komoney as usual

I remember when Maximum Crisis came out here in the TCG I was at a regional and by the time I left there were trash cans FILLED with empty MACR boxes and packs. Then I heard about how badly Ash Blossom got shorted (Draconic Diagram too I think), people weren't even pulling your *guaranteed* 2 secrets, and when people were pissed and demanded an explanation from Konami, all they basically said was "we don't guarantee ratios in our boxes." So yeah this game is expensive on purpose, Konami isn't even trying to hide it at this point.

I live in Japan. Bonfire is a rare here and ¥3000 that's about US$20.

Yugioh is dying. Local card shops in my city that used to host Yugioh events for over a Decade have stopped and moved onto games like Digimon or One Piece because theres no interest in Yugioh. As a community we are at our lowest point and should be doing everything we can encourage new players but instead we have elitist scumbags actively trying to gatekeep the game by saying $100 a card is somehow reasonable.