So curious, before the likes of Heathstone...

So curious, before the likes of Heathstone, Gwent etc physical cards games like the actual Yu-gi-oh card game and Magic the Gathering the had people buying cards left and right.
Yet they were never scrutinised as much as todays digital versions.
So how did they avoid all the finger pointing of 'pay to win' and such from the masses?

DEKI SETTU

INTO ZA VRAAAAAAAAAINS

In people's mind, digital products don't have as much value/any value compared to physical ones. It's how some pirates justify themselves. Combine that to back when Yu-gi-oh was fairly simple and there were very few cards that could be considered "op" and it didn't get as much scrutiny except from hardcore fags. With newer games, even for newer players, they can easily see when someone bought better cards straight up

You're a fucking retard. Stop posting this stupid bullshit argument that's been deconstructed and thoroughly blown the fuck out countless times in the past few months.

Are you stupid or just pretending to be?

>In people's mind

No, in fucking reality.

Because you could sell cards you had no use for and buy yourself better ones instead of blowing all your money and winding up with shit luck. also people did bitch about pay2win back then, it got to the point where you either spend hundreds of dollars buying packs, or hundreds of dollars buying the cards you needed

You're delusional. Digital products have just as much value as physical one's, it's already been proven in the market and almost all commercial products that can are shifting that way

Pretty much this. With the physical cards, one could always sell the ones they don't need/want for actual money.
Can't do that with them digital cards.

>walk into card shop
>hey I want to buy 1 blues eye white dragon
>okay that will be [insert currency here]
>done

versus

>log into hearthstone
>I want this 1 specific card
>okay buy 50 of these packs hope one of them has it
>btw if you sell/trade these cards we will ban your account and you lose all your cards

Are you a walrus or a hippo?

price creep

Parents had also played with baseball cards or whatever, that were cheap and they had boxes with thousands of them.

Magic the gathering didn't get super bad until the millennial generation. Now you cant play unless you spend a thousand dollars on your deck.
Honestly, its bad game design. Just say that its a game made for adult men with lots of money and be true to your market, instead of lying and saying that its for kids.

>Pretty much this. With the physical cards, one could always sell the ones they don't need/want for actual money.
I feel like people who say this are people who don't realize only like 1% of cards hold any value what so ever and the rest are just bulk fodder.

The straightfoward answer is that nobody gave a fuck. There was no real overlap between videogames and card games so whinny mouthbreathers that only played videogames didn't really care that card players were getting ripped off.

The not so straightforward answer is that they actually were scrutinized but there were mitigating factors that just made players shrug. Yes, it's pay2win, but physical trades allowed you to bypass it to some extent if you were good at the social game as it'd literally let you improve your collection just by socializing, which also improved the value of your deck and ultimately allowed you to play catch up with the pay2win decks.

>never scrutinized

know how i know you're underage?

...

Its pretty obvious, people don't feel like they own the cards in video games the way they own real cards. They see it as them paying for "nothing," stuff that's "already in the game" so to speak.

because the cards had real value that you could trade and sell. they also are collectros items. a digital collection just isn't the same.

i dunno, do lootbox systems have rarity in the same way? not that it matters because in the end it's all digital.

only plebs buy booster packs. real niggas buy the specific cards from ebay or your local card shop. better to spend $5 on one yugioh card than to gamble $20 for a chance at a boosterback.

I've heard about duel links on Android but I wasn't really interested in playing on my phone.

Is it the same for Steam? No XYZ or Synchro BS right?

Yusaku is the best damn thing since Yusei.

The Steam version is cross platform with the phone/tablet version. So whatever you do on PC will carry over to phone.

yet you can still sell them, they will always have real value. i sold my entire collection of yugioh cards a couple years back to a kid at college for $50. can't do the same with my hearthstone cards.

There's a more than plenty of options for reselling trading cards as values and costs shift over time (mostly in Magic and still fairly minor but yes), but regardless you can buy singles of whatever card you want online or in dedicated shops and have them shipped to you via third parties instead of rifling through booster packs. More importantly though you can do whatever the fuck you want with them because you own them, including selling them for a profit. Can't do that online unless you want to sell your whole account.
Also people have bitched forever about power creep but people who buy physical objects either just drop it entirely or figure they're in too deep to stop now, that is if they bitch in the first place.
Yes, it's the same game. Which means they're going to add the other summoning methods sooner or later.

It is the same on steam, and no summoning gimmicks past GX
Speed format means 20 to 30 card decks which means ritual cards are more viable too

You can buy the singles you want.
In Magics case, cards you buy and use usually not knly retain value, but can be used in multiple game modes.

Yes you can, people sell accounts all the time on ebay.

Then those accounts get banned. Works the same way as Blizzard banning people who account trade for Overwatch and WoW. They detect you're logging in from a far away unknown IP address and they lock your account.

You're obviously set in your belief, and there is nothing I can say to convince you.

Classic isnt worth playing, but there isnt much you can do after having your deck rotated out of standard other than play highlander forever, which sucks.

Hearthstone did it better by having basic cards always remain in either game mode. But the rotations are still bullshit.
I havent spent any money in hearthstone other than the initial 50 bucks i put in the game for the first expansion pack, and I've done fine. If you play frequently enough you can craft anything you need, but ONLY for one class.
So I'd like to say that if you play a few games a week consistently, you only need 50 dollars to stick as one class.
Its not 50 for every class though, since if you play multiple classes you're disenchanting less cards, so you get fucked hard

thought of a follow up as well specifically for hearthstone - you can't trade hearthstone cards either. if i want to give my yugioh cards to a friend who actually plays or give them a card they want in exchange for a card i want i can do that. with hearthstone, if a friend and i both unpack legendaries we don't want but the other wants, we're stuck with those cards. also, when i gave up hearthstone, i couldn't give my cards to my friends who still played. the same applies to any loot box systems with no trading.

The point is that you don't own digital cards and selling off your account always poses a risk of getting banned or getting chargebacked from the buyer. You don't have to worry about this with physical trading cards.

true, but what if i want to trade/sell some of my cards but not all of them? i could sell off my entire yugioh collection but keep my main deck. can't do the same for hearthstone.

because yugioh is an actually good game, unlike hearthstone and gwent and magic. That is if you gitgud

YGO is literally the worst tcg ever. I'd sooner play hearthstone and sooner sooner play pokemon.

yu-gi-oh is literally the best TCG of all time. The complete lack of a resource system beyond "I have these cards available to me right now" is what makes it so exciting.
that is, if you didn't stumble into HAT or Spyral hell.

Valves upcoming trading card game will let you trade cards via the steam market and steam trading system.

>I'm brain dead and want to be allowed to do anything I want at all points in the game so long as I hold the card.
Nah. Sounds way too unga bunga for me.

Post your favourite cards.

when was the last time you played yugioh?

entry level is best level

the queen is coming back soon.

Easy. Shoutout to Inferno Tempest as well.

YGO is complete shit though, you aren't even allowed to mulligan and people defend that because then decks can become too consistent since unstoppable OTKs are all over the fucking place. Not to mention they don't do rotations, so to get people to continue buying product they just keep power creeping and banning cards.

I don't think anyone pretends MTG is for kids

>tfw a disgusting neckbeard on /trash/ ruined DMG for me

because digital card games can take away your cards and your ability to play at any time for basically no reason

Wizards isn't going to break down your door and take away your decks, and even if you get banned from playing in official tournaments, there's nothing stopping you from continuing to play with friends, in unsanctioned events, or even selling your cards.

how so? weird porn?

I don't quite understand people playing physical Yugioh competitively to be honest. I remember buying Structure Decks and a booster or tin box once in a while for super casual duels with friends but spending more than $20 one every few months just seemed crazy to me. That's why I always prefered playing the GBA and later PSP games. You could make whatever deck you wanted and were only held back by your skill of the game and not money. It's crazy to me how this is supposed to be a card game for adolescents and a competetive deck costs $300+. And that's just one deck. How much money do you need to spend if you want to build several decks? An expensive card can get reprinted and you lose almost all your money. If you are a teenager who has $300 to spend won't you get more fun from spending it on a game console, upgrading your PC or some other technology rather than cardboard? And if you are an adult who can easily spend $300 will you be playing Yugioh?

Well memed

Because the secondary market existed and still exists. If I buy a pack of magic cards and my "rare" is some shit like pic related then I've only got myself to blame since I could have just bought the cards I actually wanted online.

Also note said secondary market is, you know, secondary. Wizards isn't the one asking you to pay thousands of dollars for a Black Lotus, some nigga on ebay is.

I always really dug the original art for this and I can't wrap my head around why it was replaced with ugly blobs of shit with a face protruding from the side besides either a bias against Foglio art or someone at HR getting a lot of angry phone calls about titties.

>you aren't even allowed to mulligan
That is not a bad thing, consistency in deckbuilding is the core idea of yugioh as a card game. You want to build a deck that always makes plays. Consistently drawing what you need to win two out of three games is why a Tier 0 deck is a Tier 0 deck.

>unstoppable OTKs are all over the fucking place
Yugioh at its core is a game about exactly that.
Either you build a board that your opponent can't break and kill them the next turn or you break your opponent's board and kill them. The game is all about setting up strong boards and dismantling them.

>Not to mention they don't do rotations
I think rotations are honestly a worse way of doing things, since it makes the game more stagnant.

>they just keep power creeping and banning cards
Sorry, but I think Komani is just incompetent like that. They really don't understand their playerbase. Tell me what pops into your mind when you look at this card. What is this about?

Ashes are like really, really good, if you don't have a playset you basically can't play right now. Also, usually you only own 3 of staples like that.
And if the money spent bothers you you can always go play on devpro.

In TCG games you cannot keep buying "better" cards indefinitly. You eventually own a set of 'good cards' and that makes you on par with everyone else that owns the 'good cards'.

So Armageddon is good MtG card. But you can't buy Armegeddon 2 which costs less mana or has a better affect. If you combine it with the good elf cards you can make a decent deck called elf-geddon where you use Armegeddon to nuke all lands, so no one can play any cards cuz no one has mana....except your running elves and elves can make their own mana.

Also TCG games the more expensive cards are not nessiarially the best. Sometimes a common or uncommon card is better than a rare. Rarer carrds tend to be more niche or complicated rather than more powerful: but there are cards that just fucking suck.

In a P2W game you can keep fucking buying power indefinitly. And more power=more $

...

I never played Yu-Gi-Oh competitevly but I always had the feeling that 90% of the cards were simply worse versions of other cards. Like why would I ever use a 4 star monster with less than 1900 attack points if the weaker ones don't have an effect? Why would I play a 2300 attack monster with the same amount of stars as a 2500 attack monster?

I am really glad that the vanilla beatdown and the "goodstuff.dek" eras have ended, even if nostalgiashitters disagree

>Speed format means 20 to 30 card decks which means ritual cards are more viable too
This is funny because rituals aren't weak in the main game.

My only experience with Yu-Gi-Oh recently is duel links but I would still use a 4 star monster with less than 1900 attack because different monsters have different types that scale with spell cards and also my character skill.

That's how the "old yugioh" everyone says was so much better is. BTW traps/spells are just like that too. 99% of traps/spells are some situaional shit. No one runs that crap. They run the stuff that is generic and works every time. (ie you dont run the stuff that fucks with monster position, that only works if a certain situation is true, you run the stuff that just says 'destroy a card' or 'raise attack', or 'take card from the graveyard and get it back')

"new yugioh" made the whole game about archtypes. An archtype is a family of 10-30 cards that all say 'does something awesome when interacting with another card from the archtype'. So that's how variety happens....although at a competative level there is AT MAX 5 good archtypes on any day of the week, often there is only 1....and the difference between a bad archtype and good is HUGE.

Back in the day the "Neo-cloth" archtype had basically a 100% win rate against literally every other archtype for example

>Black card
>Levels on left
>loli
>"XYZ"
>"2 Level 4 "Madolche" monsters

What the fuck am I looking at, exactly?

modern Yu-gi-oh

Isn't the Pokemon TCG more popular than YGO nowadays? I see pokemons cards being sold everywhere, while MTG and Yugi are only sold o the more nerdy places.

Yugioh really doesn't revovle around types...it did WAY back in the earleist days. But eventually it reached the point where it was better to just get the best monsters from every type than to stick to one...it also didn't help that the best attack boosting cards in the game worked on all types.

type-based gameplay was stupidly shallow though. "Oh this 1900 beater uses the axe of fire to get +500 attack because he's a fire warrior" "but this 1900 beater uses the sword of ice to get +500 attack because he's a water warrior"

>This is funny because rituals aren't weak in the main game.
literally every ritual deck except necloth sucks
even if I love gishki hieratic and gustkraken is best girl

You think that's confusing. Wait till you have to learn the combos. You need to know how to synergize that card with every other monster in the maldche family and learn all the loops and tricks to go+ than how to exploit their archtype specific spells....and if you want to actually BEAT a moldche player you must also knwo this so you can fuck them.

Every archtype is like this.

New Yugioh is infinitly more complex and it scares dumb players that could barely handle a game where monsters had 2 stats (and only one mattered...) and almost no abilities.

Tiaramisu is not a loli, Madolches have super deformed art.

>Gishki Hieratic
>_m
Fuckin philistine, Zielgigas turbo or bust

Madolche an archetype focussed on swarming the field, that consists of cute, sweets themed monsters.
They recently got a new support card and they're a genuine threat in link format. They are also very cute!

Tiaramisu is an old lady, try Sistart or Anjelly if you want a loli.

Pokemon is still super mainstream with kids/pokemon fans in general. That's why most of the product are goofy giant boxes with other goodies.

Alright so it seems like they still have the problem of variety. Maybe that is the cost for having no real resource system. To be honest I just never liked the artwork on most cards which is why I was a Magic kid, always felt like it was superior gameplay wise too, but who knows.

b-but muh hand loop

Haha, I'm posting it AGAIN!

There really never was a true beatdown era. People forget, because they're jaded by nostalgia and they were probably children at the time playing with their friends who were also children, but meta has always strayed away from beatdown decks in yugioh. The earliest true meta to take shape was fucking BLS, and it stuck around for quite some time.

That being said, yeah, there are a lot of cards that are more or less inferior versions of others and never got the treatment some other cards did. A lot of the more popular ones get retrained into better cards, or have archetypes built around them, which is always cool. But a ton of the early game vanilla monsters continue to be trash. Those barely exist anymore, though. They're relics from the beginning of the game and most of them are cards that were made for the manga. Pretty much everything these days is an effect monster. Even then, it's true that keeping around the lower stat lower levels monsters does serve a purpose for spells or as monster effect targets. Or otherwise. But for the most part they're just trash, yeah.

Spin to win baby

The art was absolute dogshit until the last few years, that much is indisputable. That said "variety" waxes and wanes.

Nah, not really.
There's plenty of cards that are technically archetype cards, but go work with basically any deck. For instance, these three cards are key cards in their own archetype and the reason they are even playable at all, but people started playing all three of them together, because it's such a strong combo

Well you are right, I do recall some cooler designs that I saw when I stopped playing.
That card looks sick btw.

I'd like to see you spin and win when you start the game with two cards.

>Maybe that is the cost for having no real resource system.

That's pretty much what it comes down to. Yugioh decks can function at full power by turn 2, being able to play any card in their hand. Decks that try to build up to something over time (for example trying to tribtue something) just get beat down before they can accomplish anything.

Also lack of resource matters even more with the control cards. MtG can support cards that let you look at your oppoenents hand discard cards, or counter their spells, or completly nuke the field. In yugioh such cards are either so good literally every deck ran them (before they get banned) or come with draw backs so severe they never get ran.

>To be honest I just never liked the artwork on most cards which is why I was a Magic kid, always felt like it was superior gameplay wise too

It is. There's just more variety in magic as I explained. Also more depth to the combat phase. In Yugioh whoever has the biggest monster on the field wins the combat phase, while in magic several smaller monsters can unite to take a big one or you can swarm the field with more forces than the lone giant monster can block.

Yugioh is fun as a casual card game because it's so lightning fast. With no resource and a combat system that puts all the favor in the attacker's position the games end in 3-5 turns. Complex hand loops also look cool. It's amusing seeing someone go through 10 cards on their first turn and flood the field. It's like type 1 MtG. Every deck attempts ot lock the oppoenent down or win in one attack phase and they have just enough resources to do it if you don't disrupt them. If you don't whipe their board clean by your turn they will simply end the game.

yugioh is for nerds that show their asscrack

That's a bit rare to happen though. Usually there's 1-3 good synchros/xyz in each rank/level...about 10-20 staple spells/traps/hand traps...and MAYBE 10 or so normal monsters that are good.

99% of the cardpool is fucking worthless even in casual games.


Also the fact that yugioh has only one fucking playmode hurts. MtG has a bunch of play modes which means a card that might suck in type 2 is good in modern, or legacy, or EDH, or pentagram.

>whoever has the biggest monster on the field wins the combat phase

No, wrong. Most of modern Yugioh is played with monsters who's attacks don't really matter. The trick now is to lock down your opponent if you go first and make sure turn 2 is a literal death sentence for them. The new Firewall loop is especially scummy. Even older yugioh involved traps and effect monsters and shit that made sure your opponent was never 100% guaranteed a win with a bigger monster.

>That's a bit rare to happen though
Considering half the popular archetypes these days are played like these cards as engines to facilitate combo plays, I don't think it's rare at all.

>Also the fact that yugioh has only one fucking playmode hurts. MtG has a bunch of play modes which means a card that might suck in type 2 is good in modern, or legacy, or EDH, or pentagram.
that wouldn't work for yugioh

You have no idea.
You never played during one of the three recent tribute hell formats, you never played against a decent control deck, I'm sure even a barrier statues + floodgates deck would make you cry.

Boardwipes are usually not played by the faster decks, simply because you don't have the space in a combo deck. The only cards that are "so good no matter what run 3 in main and side" are Ghost Ash and Ghost Ogre.

The battle phase literally doesn't matter, any decent deck will clear the field before it gets that far. If you really think attacking monsters is a thing in modern yugioh, you are delusional.

Well good job putting my thoughts in order, that was pretty much what I always felt like playing Yu-Gi-Oh.
For me MtG was superior because I can decide to take damage instead of losing my board. Makes longer winded plans more viable.

Are you fucking with me? Rank 4 toolbox, mother fucker. For awhile, XYZ monsters were fucking plagued by being WAY THE FUCK TOO GOOD. So good and accessible even that Rank 4 XYZ monsters were turned into literally just utility cards that were barely run in their own archetypes.

Damn, did overwatch start letting you trade your items and sell them to other people?

I remember casually playing "make rank 4.dek" in the good old days, shit was too fun, because you could out basically anything in the game

Hand traps are awful and also a godsend. I hate them but also see how completely useful they are and it hurts me. Fuck Ash Blossom for giving some people the ability to not die on their first turn, I guess? But also, the meta should never have gotten to this point.

Ash Blossom is the most degenerate card in all of yugioh right now, but I doubt you'll find a player who will deny that this card is necessary.

When MtG was first designed they had a totally different concept of what people's collections would be like. These rare extremely powerful cards like Ancestral and Lotus weren't seen as a problem because along with probably not understanding just how powerful they really were, no one was ever expected to go out and collect 4 of them. They really thought it was going to be like the world of the Yugioh cartoon where a rare card really is RARE, as in a ton of people might never even see ONE. They had some real misconceptions going in and had a rocky first few sets as a consequence. If the core game wasn't so solid it probably would've died right there.

>there were very few cards that could be considered "op"
There have been OP cards since the beginning.

Dude. I MAINED rank 4 toolbox back in the day and than when that got bad I switched to Sateliar to ride out the rank 4 EVEN MORe.

Yes there was always a small fucking pile of good generic cards. 99% of the time I reached for castel, 101, or exeition knight, or rebelion dragon when I did generic rank 4...off the top of my head the only other generic rank 4 was cowboy....so that's 5 good rank 4's at the fucking PEAK of their power. Like I said it's usually 1-3 in each category.

And frankly even that makes yugioh sound like it had more variety than it did (for instance the good generics for rank 1-3 might as well have not existed given how rare those were played)

>I want this 1 specific card
>okay buy 50 of these packs hope one of them has it
You forgot that you can use dust you get from extra cards, or disenchanting cards in general, to craft whatever cards you're missing.

You were better off saying Duel Links instead of Hearthstone though. Now that game has a retarded system.

there's a ridiculous number of situational generic rank 4s. the entire point of a TOOLBOX is that you can address literally anything thrown at you. Rank 4 is exactly that. With 15 extra deck cards and the ability to consistently make rank 4 you could out anything in the game of yugioh for a long time.

For people who are actually interested in talking about this or seeing how the game plays now as opposed to way the fuck back in the day, but are afraid to leave Sup Forums and check out other venues, we actually have a permanent yugioh general thread on /vg/ for talking about shit and playing the games against each other.
Lets see if I fuck this link up, because it's been years since I've had to do this.

Did that work? Did I get it?

What happens if you use Shield and Sword on that thing?

We can forgive MtG's ignorance because they were literally the first TCG game. Konami's shitty printing of stuff like Pot of Greed can only be seen as a way to get money. They KNEW perfectly well how the card pool in a tcg game operates.

Pot of Greed is literally just Yugioh's versions of Ancestrial Recall. They knew it would be a staple in every deck and one of the best cards in and the game. They made it to get you to buy packs. Yugioh's mechanics seemed DESIGNED to give a huge advantage to the guy that gave more money.

If your opponent throws out a monster with higher attack than any card in your deck and you don't have one of the 2-5 monster killing cards that existed you might as well forfeit the game immidiently. The game didn't become respectable until they designed it so that EVERY deck had access to monster killing.

See Duel Links for an example of the money grubbing. Making a fucking card pool with no or very few monster killing cards so that the guy that buys the monster with higher attack will just get free wins

...

Invalid target. Every single card that mentions or has the word "defense" in the text is basically not applicable to Links. So Book of Moon isn't a legal target, cards that swap A/D, ect.

When I buy a booster pack, I have physical card that I can trade, sell or shove up my ass, make whatever I want with without having a dev control them from his greased up chips crumbed computer.

Kids and manchildren are two unique, but similar things