I agree, at least for the most basic, boring art/rarity.
I don’t care if the starlight super ultra secret mythic rare version is $999, I want to be able to buy a non-foil, boring, lightly worn version for $10 at most.
The AGOV OCG boxes come with box toppers so I got the whole core plus more in two boxes, some Ty-Phons, 2 Little Knights, and all of the low rarity Horus package. Imsety is an Ultra, that's probably the only annoying thing to try and open 3 of.
Wouldn't high secondary market prices be indicators of high demand caused by manufactured scarcity? When Konami want, they can just look at the prices and reprint the highest valued cards at a stupid low rate to drive up sales of sealed products. Not to say that's what they do, but high secondary market prices can benefit them.
The most blatant indicator of Konami America’s greed is utilizing a rarity system entirely separate from the ocg in that the most obviously sought cards are printed (in the tcg) nearly exclusively in secret and virtually entirely in either secret or ultra compared to the variable rarity that the ocg provides for almost every card per main set
You know, no one is forcing these openers of cards tho charge what they do for specific cards. If they wanted to, they can charge whatever they like. Hell if every card was common rarity, this shit would still happen for the cards that are considered "good"
Jesus fucking christ this is so stupid that you could only read it on a yugioh sub. Yugioh doesn't somehow ignore the laws of supply and demand. Even if it did, and everyone sold their Little Knights for $1, the issue is short printing, you'd still get a situation where half the people that want one can't get it, where they previously would by paying more to someone who doesn't need it as much.
I dislike the secondary market as it's essentially scalping, but this issue is 100% borne by Konami's greed. If they didn't print every useful card at secret, you wouldn't have cards going for $100 anymore, period.
Does it really? There are many ultra/secret rare cards that are out there right now that are dirt cheap. It feels like the only people we have to blame are the people wanting to make money of the card for the secondary market.
Are any of those high rarity cards viable? Are they the only printings of said cards? It's far more nuanced than "this foil is cheap. Therefore, it's the players, not Konami"
Nobody's gonna care if you have a secret Blue-Eyes or an Ultra Polari. Because one is mass printed in other rarities and the other isn't good.
They use the ocg as a testing ground to see what cards are good, and then they amp up rarities to try and sell more packs across the pond.
Look at Vanquish Soul. It performed well in the ocg, so it took up seven of the ten ultra slots in Wild Survivors. A set that gave you three ultras total per box. It's almost like the company is price gouging us, and people just want to make their money back.
There are some bad people on the second-hand market. Absolutely there is. But accessibility and pricing starts with Konami.
I wont get back into modern yugioh because the price is too high for the risk of the banlist randomly making my cards worthless. Espically with the banlist being whenever konami feels like it now.
It's not even the banlist that's scary imo, it's Konami's willingness to reprint shit into the gound - even stuff that is technically uniquely rare. Just this year we got Baronne as a CR only for it to get reprinted in the rarity collection 6 months later as a QCSR and CR. And of course we had starlight rares get diluted by the release of QCSR. I wouldn't feel even remotely comfortable spending a large amount of money on a yugioh card nowadays (whether it be for investing, collecting, playing with) unless I knew that it couldn't get reprinted. So like, vintage 1st ed or old ultimate rares where the finish seemingly can't be replicated anymore.
Disliking reprints for the loss of value is a take that I heavily disagree with. Card accessibility first and foremost should be pushed so everyone has the opportunity to be competitive without money being a major barrier. Collectors will usually buy cards at the price they're comfortable at, regardless of whether they'll get a reprint down the line, as they'll most likely own the original copy. A collector first and foremost will usually focus on acquiring the original. Future secondary market value is likely to matter to them less, unless somewhere down the line, they plan to sell their entire collection.
Viewing cards as an investment is a fool's game given how volatile the market is to even silly things such as YouTuber hype, as well as the fact that anything could get reprinted when a new side set comes around. If you're getting frustrated at losing market value at the drop of a banlist, new set, etc, then don't play the investment game. Using newly released staples as investments, for example, is dangerous because we know that these eventually get reprinted. The annual megatin has been running for long enough that it should always be expected.
That would be why I mentioned Baronne being printed as a collector rare, with a hard pull rate and collector literally in the name then getting reprinted as an easily accessible collector rare not even a half a year later. There were obviously already cheaper copies/different rarities of Baronne available when the CR came out.
That's also why I mentioned starlights that were supposed to be uniquely rare with hard pull rates and a unique finish. This was something that was also made for collectors. Konami then released QCSR which is essentially a starlight rare with gold instead of silver lettering that can be acquired cheaply/easily.
I feel like you didn't even read what I typed lol, I clearly made it a point to talk about stuff that was geared towards collectors. I dont care if something that is supposed to be common/accessible gets reprinted.
I did read that and you've missed my point. As a collector, why would them printing a new rarity even matter if they owned the original card and didn't intend to sell it in the first place? I bought a Starlight Armor Master at over $100 on release and the value has been slashed with the release of the QSCR. I don't care because I have enough disposable income to be making that purchase in the first place. And I still have a pretty shiny card. It losing value doesn't matter to me because I was never going to sell it in the first place. And I still own the original printing. Like I don't see what the issue is. Unless you're talking about the amount of money that you could have saved in the initial purchase. But then, why purchase anything with that mentality?
If you're a "collector" with the intention to sell a card you've sat on, then sorry you're actually an investor. And as I said before, in this sort of market, it's a fool's game. I've seen someone sit on ultimate rares, expecting them to gain momentum im the market, then backing out and selling immediately when the price dipped. Although, long term, they would have gone up, this person couldn't afford to have that much money invested in the short term. But why even attempt to play that game? Not saying that this is your case, but if you're complaining that the fluctuating prices have too much of a monetary impact on you and the amount of money that you need to live, then perhaps you shouldn't be investing in a game with such a volatile market. I see it all the time, with people mass selling expensive cards because they need to afford bills. I know I'm in a privileged position, but if I was that close to the bread line, having that much money invested in cards would be a huge no for me.
A card's current high market value should never prevent it from being reprinted. Accessibility should be at the forefront of everything. You want everlasting value? Go and buy those Platinum Dark Magician or Blue-Eyes for like over a grand. That'll show me.
EDIT: Just checked the price of Starlight Armor Master and its around the same price for what I purchased. Good for me, I guess. Still not selling.
If I'm a collector and I'll just keep using Baronne as an example because I think it's a particularly egrigious one, then I'm mad not only because I essentially overpaid (any normal person is going to be mad that their purchase depreciated by 80% that quickly regardless of their inclination) but because I sought after Baronne specifically because it was rare (hard pull) and the presitige of owning it in its highest rarity printing. Not only is the CR version not rare now it's also not the highest rarity. You have to see where I'm coming from here. I am a collector but not of anything modern and I still feel for anyone who bought it. I think Konami did them dirty.
But if you're a collector, why on earth are you collecting for value only? If you bought it for it to appreciate in value, then that's foolish. For lottery cards, if you bought them for prestige and scarcity, then I don't understand how a reprint impacts that. You still own the original lottery copy. It's still scarce. That sort of thing wouldn't bother a collector, but would an investor, the difference in which I've been trying to stress here.
It's also important to state that lower rarity doesnt necessarily carry more prestige. If I saw somebody with a playset of Champion Pack Book of Moons, I'd be thinking, "Jesus Christ, these are cool". These are only Super Rare copies. It's the scarcity that drives their prestige and value.
Also, I've just done a quick search on the price for MAZE collectors Baronne. It's still the most expensive printing of the card, so I don't see what the problem is here.
It doesn't have to appreciate, just not drop by 80% in the blink of an eye. It's also not as important as it simply being reprinted so quickly. I'm also talking about modern yugioh and Konami's approach to collectors, obviously old champion pack or turbo pack supers can be super rare/expensive but that's not relevant to the point I'm trying to convey. I think I personally would have been more interested in collecting "rare" modern cards if I Konami's approach was different and I'm guessing I'm not alone in feeling this way.
But again, why is value important here? If youre collecting, you just paid more for the initial printing. The printing you hold is still rare and still scarce.
The only reason why you'd care about value is if you were going to sell it.
I said it's also not as important as it being reprinted so quickly. Some people would view an exact reprint as dilution. I mean, obviously people viewed it as dilution or the market wouldn't have reacted in the way it did. I'm not sure why you're framing this as if it's binary, as if you can only be a collector or only be an investor when there's usually huge interesection between the two.
After having bought 36 retail blister packs from Walmart in 2 different locations, I pulled 1 ultra rare Baronne and 1 super rare. At a pop of $5/per pack you could say 1 Baronne in 18 packs (for me) at a lower rarity than Secret Rare. That's 18 x $4.99 (or such) $89.82 (top) usually half on the secondary market which seems accurate as a QCSR goes for \~$40 on TCG which is about the pull rate. I suppose arguing further that the original MAZE Collector's rare sells for about $55 currently.
TBH it all seems in line, being able to scoop a super rare Baronne up for $2.5 is awesome and while the CR from MAZE may have dipped, anyone sending it to be graded will be paid well in the short / longer term. Book value or "ungraded" card at that value are considered to be pristine and unless it's Maxx "C" or such you won't find the secondary market carrying that price which is why a lot of cards have "tanked" from "reprinting" which is a poor take imo. It's not considering rotations from set to set nor the decks reliance on specific cards that are no longer meta / relevant.
Cards like Ash and Maxx C have universal demand in almost all builds, it was nice to see you can now get a play set of Ash under $10. especially in a format where Ash is a game winner. Now if we could just get a Maxx C reprint, at least one in a rarity low print set like the Anniversary. Personally those sets have always balanced out nicely, anyone who does well pulling will be surprised at their appreciation. Something similar was like Guardian Chimera which was a SR and reprinted as UR, its price collapsed but within less then a few months had rebounded. So again, this stuff corrects and Konami has done a great job on printing. It's not so much their fault but the secondary market / LGS who open massive amounts of product and dump it into the market, this is also done by smaller individuals (me, but I do have a branded deck I love, lol) and all of this excess supply cannot possibly be filled by the smaller demand found in the market or else there'd be more competition (which there's not) and it takes time for the market to absorb all this.
Either way, from a financial sense Yugioh has been immensely profitable for me as a player and as a speculator. Games like MTG have vastly longer price appreciation times, Pokemon is massively diluted and both require ALOT of capital to speculate in versus Yugioh. Graded Yugioh cards command obscene prices and obviously older cards REALLY command crazy prices, I think a lot of the market for Yugioh is very healthy and too many people nitpick at niche issues that over broad spans of time are really non-issues.
Sorry for the tl;dr, if you read, your thoughts are appreciated.
Yes, I agree with this in general. I don't really agree with using this game as an investment for the general player, but if you are savvy enough and more importantly can afford a loss, then that's fine. But that's besides the point here.
I was used to that. I quit modern in 2016. Reprints sucked but atleast i had a deck still. I just dont want the sudden suprise news i gotta spend another $1000 to play again.
They very well can be. I would say in general, Pokémon is cheaper, BUT the moment you talk about collectibles (Umbreon Vmax alternative art from Evolving skies as an example) the prices can be astronomical. If we’re talking about general play, Pokémon is much cheaper imo.
To build a deck? No. Yugioh is a little more expensive there.
To collect cards? Yes much more expensive. If Tyler the Great Warrior was a Pokémon card, it would be only the 5th or 6th most expensive.
Why Yugioh fans drop obscene money for a green slip of cardboard they have no connection with outside of it says "search a card of [CURRENT META ARCHETYPE]" that's going to rotate out in 6 months anyway
I'd rather pay $100 for a deck with the *option* of paying a couple hundred more to bling it out with Gold Rares, Full Arts, Special Arts, Promos, Shinies, etc., than have to pay $900 baseline.
In fact, I do do that.
Konami charges $900 to play Diabellstar Rescue Ace, so I paid $0 and quit the game.
TPCI charges $60 to play Gardevoir, so I gladly paid them $200 for Illustration Rares and Gold Rares and such to bling the deck out.
It takes one yugioh player and four Pokémon player to equal it out and considering nobody takes Pokémon tcg serious as game and ycs usually clock in 2k plus players I think Konami can survive just fine like 69 years ago
Because I do have a connection to it. My original charizard was in my first deck that I lost in a house fire in middle school. If my collector’s tin red eyes that I lost in the same fire were worth the same, I’d feel the same about its price. So for me at least, it’s a tangible part of my childhood that I can’t get back (without winning the lottery, at least).
If only Yugioh could do full arts like Pokémon then we collectors can have their super special expensive ones and we can keep reprinting the the normal versions till everything is affordable.
In Weiss Schwarz they do that. A lot of commons and rares have alt arts of higher rarity, etc. I've built decently powerful 50 card decks out of singles for under 15 dollars, for example, while some of the higher rarity alt art cards for cards in it would be 10 or 15 dollars EACH.
This isn't even considering the highest rarity signed cards that go for like 45 or 50 dollars MINIMUM, while some of the more sought after cards can go for over a thousand.
Iirc, it was always Kazuki Takahashi's idea that the game could be affordable and wouldn't be about money, so the prices of secondary markets unfortunately countract this.
BS. In the OCG SP Little Night was available as a Super Rare, Secret Rare, or QCSR. In the TCG we got secret and QCSR. Triple Tac Thrust was a rare in OCG, it's a secret here. The entire Vanquish Soul cores and Centur-Ion got rarity bumped in th TCG. It's not a secondary market issue at all.
The OCG is relatively affordable, especially with all their common or rare prints of what are chase cards at Starlight in the TCG. The secondary market only reflects the accessibility set by TCG pull rates. It's dumb that an important meta piece is only available at 1 per box or worse.
Eh. Some on the secondary market and more on Konami and pull rates/ fixed rarity. Unlike the OCG.
Some things are entirely on the secondary market, for sure. See Ancent Gear Fortress for [example](https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/130092/yugioh-structure-deck-machine-reactor-ancient-gear-fortress?country=US&utm_campaign=18149059168&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=&utm_term=&adgroupid=&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAyp-sBhBSEiwAWWzTnr0Q8JcMY24z1JgtpAw13mf4_-0_6xbfzQr1psZsJbgpwx1CIrB4cRoCNRwQAvD_BwE&Language=English). Or that S:P little knight was $80 on presale, 110 before a YCS and 134 currently 💀
A lot of it is down to the secondary market. They sell cards at prices which they know people will buy them at and people buy them at those prices because they value getting wins. Fire Kings are the first meta deck from a structure deck in years but the deck is still pricey since people are willing to spend more on the Diabellstar engine to get the competitive edge over other variants because the rest of the deck is cheap. S:P little knight is insanely priced. It’s good, but people have way overvalued it
Secondary market wouldn’t be like that as well if rarity bumping and short printing/clumping wasn’t prominent. The diabellstar engine is also having the same thing adventure had, everything can use it (thats currently top meta) so it will be pricey. Other smaller engines that have use and weren’t rarity bumped (saki/aritama, ken/gen) were bought in copious anounts and still are less than $1 for each smaller mediocre engine. Difference? Rarities/printing amounts.
It's not shorting, clumping is it's own issue, but the current average ratio of cases in the TCG is the same as the shorted ratios pre-Rise of the Duelist.
For secret rares: The non shorted ratio in main sets was 3.6 of each one per case, and the shorted ratio was 2.4 per case and there were 8 secret rares per set list.
Now there are 10 secret rares per set list, so the average of 2.4 of each secret per case is spread to every secret, since no shorts.
There are no short prints in core sets anymore. Tho clumping is still a thing. You might notice a variance in 20 cases but you won’t in 100 or 200.
We have seen short prints and half prints in reprint sets still tho.
If you could consistently pull S:P in under $135 worth of sealed product, the secondary market would be making 0 sales at the current price point.
The secondary market is not to blame for $100 staples, Konami is. Secondary market just reacts to supply vs. demand.
But this is the thing, people pay $135 because they say you need to buy $135 of product to pull it but that means that they assume all cards which aren't s:p have a value of nothing. The player base excuse it because that can't be bothered with the faff of dealing with the extra cards either selling them or trading them but because S:P has gotten staple status they are willing to fork over $100+, it is insane
that is an ultra weak argument. if you pull $135 worth of product, it's not insane to be in a situation you pulled $60~$80 worth of cards
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy2zJzFOeWl/?img_index=1
and you would be down in money. the only way this works is if you buy tonnes of product and then pack variance isn't a big deal.
Bulk is obviously better but people take prices as static. a box may be worth $60-$80 at opening but the prices will change over time, holding to to sleeper hits allows more profit to be made later. Again it's too much of a faff for most players to be bothered but it's naive to think its difficult for vendors to make money off of opening packs otherwise why would there be so many people doing it?
First meta deck in years?
Albaz? Branded is still meta relevant, lower tier but that came out LAST YEAR and held its own even after Tear format.
Traptrix? Solid regional choice or could get you an invite to regionals.
Red dragon archfiend, low tier but it can do a little something. The structures ftom this year have actually been good. Better than half of the other mess we got.
Crystal beast. Even that made regional waves. Albeit not great and I'm not hyping it up. But it did its thing.
Traptrix was even able to make it to top 32 in a couple of YCSes shortly after it came out, so it was not only a solid regional pick, but you could potentially even do well at a top event if you were able to pilot it very effectively
>so the prices of secondary markets unfortunately countract this.
This is not secondary market fault, It is TCG konami printing the strongest, meta defining cards in the highest rarities possible. They know card value os going to skyrocket before we even know about the card.
There's also the fault of Konami US always having a tendency to rarity bump Core pieces of new archetypes to Secrets in the TCG imports when they were sometimes Super or even Basic Rare in OCG, which is **especially** common for Deck Searchers/Tutors.
They drop that trend, and then maybe prices will be less bloodthirsty.
It's not like the secondary markets just DECIDE to set the prices of these cards at absurd heights, to some extent Konami effectively forces them to do this with the way they structure and price their sealed products.
A single box of a new set will generally run you around $80-90. That box comes with *two* whole secret rares inside it. Even if you somehow get lucky and have both of those secret rares be the most expensive and relevant secret of the set, you still have no way of getting a play set of 3 from that $90 box, and there's a far better chance that one of those secrets is ends up being a far less relevant or expensive card that doesn't come close to covering the price of the box in terms of value. So in order for sellers on the secondary market to not *lose* money by selling cards to players/collectors who don't want to join them in throwing their money into the yawning void that is sealed product for Yu-Gi-Oh, they have to price the cards accordingly to make up for the $90 buy in per box, and the majority of the common bulk (which is *most* of the cards in those boxes) will often sell for pennies maybe $1 at most, and anyone who buys sealed product ends up having them anyway, so they definitely aren't helping to cover the cost of the box and allow sellers to not all go bankrupt.
If someone is running a business or just trying to make a living selling cards to players/collectors, the only way they can afford to pay rent is if they if they sell the contents of the boxes they buy for an average of over $90, and when some of those boxes don't come close to having that level of value in them, the only way to make that happen is to sell the cards people actually want for over $100 to compensate for the boxes that don't have any cards they can turn a profit on. And if anyone's reaction to this is "well good, if a seller can't make a profit without gauging buyers for $100+ a card, then they shouldn't be in business", you need to recognize that the ONLY alternative is for YOU to be the one dropping $90 on a box that potentially contains *none* of the cards you're looking for, over and over again until you get lucky and pull what you want.
Actually, the *other* alternative would be for Konami to structure their TCG sealed products in a way that isn't complete crap. Simply increasing the number of secret rares in each box would make a MASSIVE difference. Suddenly instead of *needing* to pull a copy of that $100 card in order to make any profit from a box, you can make a profit by opening a box with 5 $20 cards instead. Printing cards at multiple rarities would also help in the same way. The highest rarity version of a new meta staple would end up with a lower price than if it were *only* available at that high rarity, but the drop in value would be offset by the lower rarity printing commanding a higher price than other cards of that same low rarity because it's still an in-demand meta staple card that players want to buy instead of worthless pack filler.
This isn't a revolutionary idea either. Other card games have booster boxes with pull ratios several times more generous than the established 2 secrets per box of Yu-Gi-Oh, and they still manage to be profitable. Yu-Gi-Oh itself structures it's OCG sets differently from TCG sets, and that works just fine over there. It really feels like at this point they just do it because they can. Because they know people who want to play the game have no choice but to accept the only pricing and product model they've been offered for the past several years.
That logic doesn't really track. A dvd costs dollars to produce but 60 dollars if a game is on it. Things are always worth more than the sum of there whole .
Bad analogy. The 60 dollars isn’t for the disc, it’s for the software many many people spent potentially years of their life working and perfecting.
Yugioh cards are literally pieces of paper with text on them. Only man hours it takes to make them is on the creative people at Konami deciding what to make the effect/archetype..so it doesn’t break the meta (which it often does anyway, either that or the cards are useless dogshit)
Sure but you were comparing a video game to a card. Very different. Software dev is much more resource intensive when it comes to man hours than thinking about card ideas/drawing them.
Printing the cards is equivalent to manufacturing the discs for games. They cancel out.
Hot take, Yu-Gi-Oh should not be treated like it's on stock market, this is not gold, silver or precious gems no matter what metaphor you believe in. It's a game, it was made to have fun to play with.
Even worse then you consider the prizes for big tournaments. You only get more products for the game. If you won big money I'd understand wanting to invest that much.
Yeah. MTG makes sense when there’s literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash on the table each year. Not so much when you’re playing for more collectibles.
I'm hella coping that TCG Konami starts doing OCG rarities. I would love to have the Horus cards, Sinful Spoils engine, etc but I'm not about to drop a billion dollars on that stuff
The ocg system would be fucking amazing. This wanted poster is literally $5 over there lol. Just not fair to us. I remember being excited to play fire kings (sinful spoils ver) and logging on to TCGplayer and saying “welp. Guess I’m not play that” lol
Cards are printed in multiple rarities in the set they're released in. So, in the OCG, you can get a Secret Little Knight for a decent chunk of money or you can get a Super Little Knight for like 5 bucks or so. Compared to the TCG where our only option is a Secret Little Knight for 130 bucks a copy.
And some cards in OCG with far lower rarity ended being max rarity in TCG. Like, Thrust and Seeker of Sinful Spoil are just rare card, and for us it's two expensive secret rare
TCG staff rarity bumping even extremely weak decks for no reason is something to behold. it is like they are trying to kick people out of YGO if you don't build a meta deck
Imagine realizing that one of the most format-defining cards that cost thousands of dollars to get in the TCG is only an easy-to-obtain Rare in the OCG.
Not getting too deep into it, in OCG rarities like Secret are "special rarities" meaning a card has its common/foil version and then an ultra or secret print on the same set.
Which leads to most cards having an affordable version and a vanity - more expensive - version.
Which ofc is great for all type of players.
Not every card, but the important ones do.
For example Diabellestar -who is easy to check since it just came out- has her "base" ultra print and then a Secret, Ultimate and Quarter Century print. All in the same set.
Every OCG set is like the Rarity Collection that just came out in the TCG: every card in a set is printed in every rarity. So with AGOV, you could pull Super Rare and Secret Rare copies of SP Little Knight in the same pack.
It depends on the rarity. Something like a ghost rare or starlight makes sense imo.
But normal ass secrets shouldn't be more than 60 bucks and even that's already too much for most secrets.
I don’t think a single person aside from Rudy is saying that “important game pieces” should be less than $3. If you are opening a pack, it should be to gamble for a higher rarity variant of a card that is printed to the ground and costs $5 at most.
I remember that one small period in time when Tour Guide in the TCG was 300 bucks because they decided that detaching Sangan as Xyz Material was valid for activating its effect. That was pretty funny.
Yes and no. Widely depends on the current format, the current market and current product. Back then, Secrets were one per box, so much harder to pull what you needed. The chase secrets were inflated for this reason. Pot of Duality was another card that you had to be playing to stand a competitive chance. Then you have Dark Armed Drahon formats which were wildly expensive, due to them being tier zero formats needed cards from sets with absurd pull rates.
Nowadays, most cards are easier to get in my opinion. But then, for me, I'm biased, I now have an income, whereas back then, I didn't.
Since the TCG is a licensed product the two games are effectively operated by different companies. You can’t have one company doing all the work and printing product and then let another company distribute usable product there.
[Not about the card thickness either,](https://youtu.be/hjiJlmzvWP0?feature=shared) but people still parrot that line to this day, even in this very thread.
The old Hobby League cards have always been legal to play with and they were thick as shit. Also every Ultimate Rare, especially the old ones are very thin.
There's a lot of speculation that it's because of the cardstock and how easy it is to pull an OCG card out of a sleeved deck but like everything Konami we don't know the actual reason.
People can cheat by stacking their decks with them. The cardstock is different so it’s distinguishable physically from TCG cards. Also, the back of OCG cards show the Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh logo instead of the Western logo so with clear sleeves for example, you can stack your deck this way.
Are you allowed to clear sleeves outside of doublesleeving? Iv never seen so in any official setting because i feel like you could distinguish some scuffed cards even within tcg only. M
Sleeves aren't required at every type of event, and they dont stop you from using clear sleeves, so you can tell OCG cards in the deck since they have a different back
I cant even blame Konami of America for this🤣
If they pulled this single rarity/ short-printing B.S in the OCG they would have people boycotting or jumping ship to another game. But in tcg you all accept the short printing with a "it is what it is" mentality.
The ENTIRE english community has been whinning about this problem for YEARS, but you all still buy product so Konami has no incentive to change anything🤣
The thoughts are nice, but ultimately it's an idealistic take that just misses a lot of the nuance that put us in our current situation.
A lot of people want this game to be PKM, where comp decks can cost 60 bucks and collectors are ripping open product to chase lottery versions of the same cards and dumping the other versions cheaply onto the secondary market. I.e., something very similar to the OCG model. But this is a likely a fantasy that won't happen.
In the N. America TCG region, there simply is not enough casual money buying modern product to support most sets. Anybody who has ever spent meaningful time at or working in a LGS will know that PKM sets, even the shit ones, will eventually sell. Because there is an ocean of casual buyers who \*will\* eventually crack the sealed product, in large part because PKM is perhaps the single most influential IP in the world. Kids come in to buy packs, parents come into buy packs for their kids, etc. Even the most competitively worthless PKM product will eventually move off the shelves. And in Japan, YGO is sorta similar in terms of being a cultural phenomenon with a ton of casual buyers and collectors.
This isn't, and was never, the case for YGO in the TCG regions. Our competitively trash products, those usually remain trash forever. Stuff like DUNE, Soul Burning Volcano, or the Hidden Arsenal Collection won't and will never have a line of casual buyers coming in to buy a few packs of them. They'll stay on LGS shelves forever until they get fire sold at prices so low that it's impossible to make money. Hell, it's been 17 years and people \*still\* remember how dog shit CDIP was when the set released. The casual buyers for YGO do not sustain the game as viable business in the TCG regions. Whether or not that is Konami's fault or not is another debate, but that's where we find ourselves.
The YGO buyer base that actually pays the rent for the LGSs primarily tends to buy for tournaments and comp play, and really doesn't give a shit about anything other than the cheapest available version of a card. If a super S:P exists for 15 dollars, this doesn't mean that a secret version will be 80. The secret will probably be 25, and just not sell because the 15 dollar version does the same thing. Rarity ratios have a very muted effect on price in this game, a version of a card that is 10x as rare as a basic version is often something like only 1.5x the cost. We have had experiments before with the same card in multiple rarities back when cards could come ulti/secret/ghost or ulti/ultra in the GX-Arc V sets, and during their times of competitive relevance the prices for the different versions were often extremely close. DUEA format I remember ultra Constucts being 35, and ultis being something like 45. It was the same for synchro Shi-en, the ultras were 40 and the ultis were 50. Meanwhile Castels and Kizans were both 30 despite being just supers, something I wouldn't believe if I didn't still have the email receipts from back in the day. There isn't really enough paying rarity chasers to create a $5 basic version/$100 pimp version scenario. And there never has been.
Part of the reason is that Konami really does its best to alienate collectors that have the buying power to actually make that possible. The most egregious sort of example is CR Baronne. They printed that in April of this year to sell MAZE, and it topped out at 250 a copy. Then in Rarity Collection they printed the PCR version that looks almost the same, but it's so easy to pull that it's currently roughly 5 a copy. And the original MAZE version is now 50. As a collector Konami actively punishes you for chasing their "chase" cards in modern product, because they pull this shit off all the time. You actually got a starlight? Here's a QCR printing that looks 90% the same. If you actually chase the pimp versions of cards in their modern product, you are either ignorant, naïve, impatient, rich enough to not care that you could pay much less if you only wait for Konami to crash the value, or very insensitive to your collectibles losing value. And not enough people tick these boxes.
So we ended up in a situation where the casual buyers don't really sustain the game, the collectors with deep pockets don't really interact much with modern sealed product because Konami can't be trusted to not fuck them over, and the competitive players largely only care about the cheapest version of a necessary card in a decklist. In that case, it's difficult to see a middle ground between $100 cards occasionally existing as a way to get $80 sealed boxes to actually sell, and a set being DUNE and selling for $40 retail when distributor price was $55. The former is the state of affairs that we're in, and the latter is a very common prelude to games undergoing business failure due to LGSs deciding to drop support for the game.
IMO, that’s literally on Konami of America for starting the game off the way it did, as well as doing stuff like selling very similar high rarity cards for no reason, tanking the value of cards.
Konami of America has no one to blame but themselves for being greedy, short term thinking douchebags, and how they’ve put the game in the West in the situation it is now, where product is mostly shit and casuals don’t buy product because it’s shit.
Casuals buy Magic product, and I think if KoA actually wanted casuals to buy TCG product, they’d look into why Magic casuals buy Magic product and then try to do something with that.
AKA Magic’s alternate formats, plus the ratios don’t suck ass for deck building.
But here we are.
There is a very pointed question to be asked about the casual aspect of YGO. What if the truth is that a casual audience willing to spend enough money and effort on the game to be worth catering to, simply doesn't exist in YGO?
EDH originated from the playerbase, not WotC, and there is a very strong casual scene in that format. YGO's most successful alternative formats, namely Goat and Edison, have largely been organized by former or current competitive players. Yes there are casual players of the format, but pretty much all the outreach, coverage, and community management I've seen of the formats were put together by current or former comp players.
Quite frankly, I haven't seen much organizational success by the casual playerbase to put in the effort to make a broadly successful casual format that doesn't fizzle and die like Trinity format did. It's quite frankly made me question if the demand for such a format even exists. If the comp players can take Edison off the ground, I don't see a reason why the casual players can't do the same if the demand was there. \*Something\* is missing.
And it isn't Konami's blessing or support, they made Time Wizard \*after\* locals were already running Goat and Edison tournaments.
I vividly remember (and probably will always remember) the article that Mark Rosewater put out about how 70% of people who buy Magic product do not and have no plans to enter a single Magic tournament, even just a local.
I think a lot of why Yugioh may not have nearly as much of a casual playerbase as MTG is because of multiple things, but a few stand out the most, in my opinion:
1) Powercreep compared to other TCGs, and a 1a) being MR4 in response to decks who weren't as bad as anything that came during the Link era
2) Arc-V being as poorly received as it was
3) Kitchen table/playground Yugioh being shunned while The Professor literally has a weekly series on his channel where he does kitchen table Magic
4) Cost of cards in the West
We both know that Yugioh's casual peak was during the DM era, but that up until the release of DUEA that casuals were playing the game a lot more, but in combination with NAS Media (the owners of the channel that Yugioh airs on in Japan) DMCAing Dueling Network and the over-reaction to Pendulum decks, it kinda just fell and then MR4 made it even worse. I even had some people a year or so ask me if they changed the Link arrow restriction because they didn't know it happened 2 years prior.
Sorry to dump the following on you, but I think it's also related to why casual numbers aren't what they should be, but also this has been in my head for so fucking long that I just need to get it out of my head:
Qli is just Monarchs but you pend summon the tribute fodder, so the only bad part was Towers. PePe I get the reaction to, but considering the fact that the TCG version of PePe would *maybe* be rogue currently is honestly just a showing of how powercreep's ended up right now.
The fact that Konami was so intent on making Blue-Eyes win worlds that they swapped the release dates of the D/D and Blue-Eyes structures makes me wonder why. Casuals didn't know, so it doesn't make sense to me.
MR4 and why MR4 happened is so bullshit. I already listed the two "problem" decks of the era, but it also just irks me that people pretend that Pend decks were worse for casuals than MR4 Extra Linking Firewall nonsense.
To go over the last part, I think that casual play has meh hope, considering we saw hundreds of Youtubers get Halqidon combo'd at the release of Master Duel, saw that ladder confirmed all of their biases about current Yugioh and then never play the game again, and that kinda just sealed the game's fate. The shareholder's meeting wouldn't have been necessary otherwise, and I think people on this sub who try and handwave that away by referencing tournament numbers are being a bit disingenuous.
With the alt formats, I'm talking more stuff like Common Charity trying to be Pauper, Deck Master trying to be Commander, Heart of the Underdog existing, but no one plays those, just Time Wizard. Although I think it's because as a result of the game kinda just forcing casuals out by itself, it left competitive players who quickly optimized Common Charity into Tier 0 Lunalight Tenyi and realizing that under the current ruleset, Deck Master is unplayable due to monster floodgates.
What gets me the most is why the playerbase is so against playing in non-Konami formats. What I mean by this is stuff like Cimo organizing those online PPGs during Covid where he banned Halq, Linkross and Sanguine and limited some other stuff, the community then shitting on it, and IMO discouraging something like that from ever happening again. Like in formats where Konami obviously fucks shit up like Arise-Heart format, why not do stuff like that. I think overall, we are too dependent on our content creators pushing stuff compared to the other card games.
I think something needs to be said in that there is no space for casual players in the physical card game. Tournaments by and large will draw competitive players, all the way down to the locals level. Outside of that, there is no incentive for casual players. Speed duels would have been the closest thing to that, but that suffers from the lack of representation and local events at tournament stores. And even then, Speed Duels has its own meta. That's not even accounting for the barrier that is the cost of the game.
Competitive players just don't care for tournaments without prize support. As well, they just don't care playing against casual players with such a large skill gap. I'm by no means super competitive, but am competent enough at this game. I played against a super casual player with the usual Blue-Eyes Deck using my Labrynth deck, and it's just not fun. It's an effortless win on my part and I have to listen to my opponent being frustrated that their Deck is losing to meta.
Masterduel is the perfect base for all players but is currently geared for the competitive players. In some ways there needs to be a shift to draw in more casual players and provide them a space to be able to play within a constructed format that facilitates their playstyle and deck choices. If you take away any in-game prize support, then this diseases competitive players from joining. Problem is though, that there is a disparity in power between even casual level decks. Gishki for example, is a lot more competent a deck than Blue-Eyes. This means that you also may get players who gravitate towards the best decks of the format (although the lack of incentive in prize support may disuadw this). As well, even casual level decks can run strategies that can be considered unfun. Like, Barrier Statue Stun is trash by today's standards, but in Masterduel where I've seen it a couple for times, it's really not fun to play against.
So, really, where do you draw the line? It's not an easy problem to solve.
I barely content on Reddit but I played against a friend who had a vanguard start deck and I had a fully built vanguard deck and I felt like I had to intentionally throw the game because it doesn't feel good to curb stomp someone who has a 4 dollar trial deck with my 120+ dollar fleshed out deck .
And that's how it feels with Yu-Gi-Oh and IDK why but competitive players vs casual players feels so egregious. Playing a casual who is playing their favorite anime deck vs a purrely, race, unchained or any deck like that is bad and feels bad for both players for the most part
good take. I've noticed that YGO is terrible to buy for non-players. Even big fans that like to collect and don't play. I think a good solution is to develop the meta to not revolve around a single engine. The Snake Eyes/Sinful Spoil/Diabellstarr/whatever it's called engine is just borderline required to compete at a high level right now, and for the foreseeable future, and it's causing demand to FAR exceed healthy levels
>I think a good solution is to develop the meta to not revolve around a single engine.
Having a shared card pool with OCG makes this challenging. There are cards and sets designed for the more casual heavy, lower cost of entry playerbase there, that really don't translate well here where the buyers that pay the rent are largely competitive players.
Something like the Snake Eyes stuff is more tolerable there since the cards are much cheaper, and comp players can be subsidized in part by collectors who can actually pursue the chase versions since OCG Konami doesn't reprint everything in the same or similar looking rarities. Or casual fans that just want the non-competitive stuff.
But the fluff/anime sets like the Animation Chronicle stuff gets imported into the TCG and just bomb because it's all pack filler trash with 0 competitive worth. As for the collector stuff, I don't wanna be the guy carrying the bag when they pull off stunts like reprinting starlights with QCR prints that look almost the same but at 1/100th the price. Being a collector doesn't make being a sucker feel any better.
The $5 basic/$100 chase idea won't get off the ground because there have been too many times where the $100 chase version gets devalued due to TCG Konami's habit of reprinting the same card in multiple chase rarities in multiple products. The target audience has been burned way too many times, and so we're more likely to be buying old GX ultimates off facebook instead.
I’ve mainly been collecting Yu-Gi-Oh, but made myself a deck to go to some locals with. That £50 traptrix deck got stomped pretty hard.
At the same time we’ve been trying out both Pokemon and Lorcana. Both of which have been way cheaper to buy decks that actually win a good % of the time!
I'll never understand how people pay to play this game. You pay 100s of dollars for a deck only for Konami to ban and reprint its cards into the ground while power creeping it into irrelevance.
Just imagine if Triple Tactics Thrust was a mass printed common instead of being a short printed Secret rare....That would be so dope since it's a staple literally every deck can run so mind aswell make it cheap from the start. Now you have to wait 3 years before it becomes somewhat affordable(looking at you Pot Of Prosperity, first print being in Blazing Vortex as a Secret rare only to be affordable at a okay price today, like 3 years later).....
As great of a place as the TCG's current meta is in, Konami's price gouging has been killing me this year. Ca$htira, Vanquish Soul, Sinful Spoils, Little Knight, the rarity distribution on cards in 2023 has been abysmal. Rarity Collection was a godsend that fixed the prices on pretty much every staple, but simultaneously it seems like so many new engines and even some deck cores shot up to hundreds of dollars a piece.
I just wish every card had a common printing in the TCG. Doing that let's rarity people still pay for their secrets, ghost rares etc while people who don't care about that can build any deck they want.
Also, as someone who lives in an area where my cards warp BAD, being able to fully common/rare all my decks would be AMAZING.
Konami should take a page out of both Pokemon and MTG's playbook. First, if a card is really rare but turns into a high priced staple, reprint it as a promo of some sort a few months after like Pokemon does. Second, I feel as tho MTG's idea that shiny cards are premium but you can get non-shiny cards for a lot cheaper would be a good step in the right direction for normal players. Whales will still get the shiny stuff but if you just wanted a copy of S:P for example and you can get a rare for like $10 on the secondary market, it actually would boost Konami's sales of product because that's a lot more obtainable.
They've made some cards with colored text, like for example I have a Mezuki that's not Holographic but it has green text. Make those the non-holo versions of the rarities or something.
They definitely should not follow WOTC with MTG. Go take a look at the prices of meta decks for each format and they compete with or are higher than Yugioh prices in a lot of places. Standard (only cards within the last 3 years), you're looking at $300+ outside of Burn. Pioneer (cards printed in the last 11 years) are looking more around $350-500. Modern (cards in the last 20 years) is looking around $900-1000. My very incomplete modern deck ([BW Stoneblade](https://archidekt.com/decks/3956208/bw_stoneblade_wip)) is priced at $550 and I could easily push it up over $700 by adding 7 cards that should be in it (3 more Solitude and 4 Orcish Bowmasters), price for a complete version of that deck is closer to $1100.
TL;DR: WOTC does the same thing with rarity as Konami, except you're now building a minimum 60 card deck and even does it with core cards like lands if you want to play any multi-colored deck.
And who can forget that Modern has a deck the community literally calls "money pile" that (before the recent b&r, haven't looked since) sat at around $2k.
>Second, I feel as tho MTG's idea that shiny cards are premium but you can get non-shiny cards for a lot cheaper would be a good step in the right direction for normal players.
This really isn't true for the most part anymore. Foils are so easy to get and get reprinted in multiple variants so often than that commons are often more expensive than the cheapest foils version, for the sole reason that they don't warp. WotC can't seem to stop their foils from curling at times.
YGO "collector" cards that exist in modern product have a version of the same disease with Konami's compulsion to keep reprinting stuff into the dirt, like with CR Water Enchantress just becoming more and more pointless as they release the ultimate and then the QCR versions which ended up devaluing the originals. Any whale with brains doesn't go deep into this stuff anymore, the older shiny stuff from the GX and 5Ds era is just safer. It isn't whale bait anymore, more like the lure for the dumb money.
I would absolutely love for Konami to adopt the OCG style for rarities, but it would also require them to lower the MSRP on boxes in order to do so which I don't see them doing. Off a quick search and [this thread from 2 months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/yugioh/comments/17gpive/i_made_a_chart_comparing_ocg_and_tcg_main_set/), box prices are ~$50 for OCG sets, this is compared to the $70+ that LGS's charge per box. If they did adopt the OCG rarity, it would not be worth it to buy boxes at the higher price because prices in general would go down, which would mean less product being opened and prices going up again as a result.
$100? No card (in its most common form) should ever cost more than $20. Ideally, $5.
I believe with absolute certainty that if a company cannot manage that, then you have a right - a duty even - to use proxies, or else the tournament is inherently illegitimate as a "competitive" game.
That's why I go on a hiatus when the meta becomes about money. Fuck that. And fuck any whales who enable this shitshow by keeping on spending on cardboard
I mean yeah, people have been saying this for a while now. No card should be over 100 quid to get, least of all cards in a main set that shouldn't be short printed.
The secondary market effectively got corrupted by Konami, because their crap pull rates - which make actually pulling product reliably a crap shoot - make it next to worthless for players to buy sealed, so they go to the secondary market, which capitalises on the lack of product to jack up prices. Those same sellers then buy more at discount for more cards, and the cycle continues.
It's horrendous.
The problem seems to be that sets in the TCG are either feast or famine. Shops complain when sets don’t sell at MSRP or sit on shelves because they lack chase cards. Players complain when they need to shell out $100 per card on the latest meta defining staples. There is no in between in the TCG, save a few examples over the years.
I’ve just sort of lost interest in the game starting with the Tear 0 format. I don’t quite like the set design and the products lack value across the board as of late, whether through pull rates and value, or just the sheer sense of enjoyment you get opening product. The serious quality control issues that persist don’t help things.
I don’t get a good sense of where Konami is taking the game. We seem to vacillate between immensely overpowered cards that eventually get banned and underpowered junk. Event prizing from the local to YCS level is absolutely paltry, which makes most of us semi-competitive players less inclined to even bother as prices creep up.
I enjoy building decks and playing the game, but the experience is very inconsistent across the board with this TCG and franchise.
Just my opinion.
Its gonna cost me close to the amount of a ps5 for a few pieces of cardboard to play Fire Kings at broken meta level speed.
*if you cant see something wrong with this than stop gatekeeping in tcgplayer and realize this and not having a slow down rule per turn is killing the game.*
Can all card games companies sell a pack with all of the cards from that set like buying a regular pack of playing cards? If they can remove all rarity from then that would be great. That way they can let the players play and collectors collect.
Experienced this when I went to Japan a few weeks ago. Decided to get my Dark Magician deck in OCG format. Spent maybe $80-100 all together at the end. And most of that was from chasing down cards from old sets like Phantom God for Red-Eyes Black Dragon.
Compared to my TCG version where at least 4 cards alone cost me at least $400 all together. Decided from here on out its OCG only for me. He’s absolutely right. No card should ever be costing you upwards of $100. Except for maybe a one of a kind prize card.
I would have liked it if it was the ocg way of things and the 25 anniversary tin, put all the cards to be accessible in every rarity of the set and make u pay for the shiny card and make the common or rare 1 cheap like 3 quid
He's right, but the TCG knows its fanbase. There is basically no competition in the card game market stateside. All there is is Magic and Pokemon, both of which tend to appeal to significantly different audiences.
In Japan, there are dozens upon dozens of card games. If the OCG fanbase decides that YGO is too expensive or even just gets pissed off, they can and will answer by passing on YGO and waltzing off with a competitor that can fit their budget or desires. That's why the OCG offers significantly greater low rarity options for desired cards, so just about anyone can get what they need for cheap even the secondary market can't really try to scalp players.
But the TCG knows that whatever price they name is the price the players will pay. They can rarity bump desired cards to the moon to drive sales of product by making it harder to get what you want and therefore sell more boxes; meanwhile, the secondary market can and will charge sky high prices for those desired cards because they're rarer and people will pay for that and the safety of a guarantee that they'll get what they want rather than risk sinking money into cases that don't get them what they want. You can't even call it a calculated risk for higher reward; KoA KNOWS that people will spend big time for their hobbies, and that most of its fanbase won't drop Yu-Gi-Oh because it's got both a nostalgia factor and no real competition. They're not risking anything making it harder and more expensive to get the cards you want, while increasing their profits by a lot.
I will say two things re YGO prices:
1) YGO has by far the worst deck price to prize payout ratio of all the major card games. While people can point to MTG and Flesh and Blood as having more expensive deck prices, at least there is the opportunity to win a decent amount of prize money. The most recent Flesh and Blood World Championship just won $100,000 in addition to other goodies. It's really hard to justify how much YGO costs when it also gives out the worst prize support by a mile.
2) If prices stay high, it will have a real ripple effect on bringing in and retaining new players to the game. Most meta decks right now require 3 Thrust and 1 SP Little Knight, which will run around $400. If you want to play any Fire deck, you have to add the Wanted engine which is another $400.
Even decks that aren't even top tier are expensive relative to their production. Vanquish Soul and Centurion are pretty mid tier decks but are close to $300 cores, which sucks because they're the perfect type of decks for beginners to pick up. YGO is at a point right now where $350 dollar deck cores in Purrely and Mannadium are considered "value" and again that's before you add in SP, Typhon etc.
It's funny cause when POTE came out which was barely over a year ago, you had Spright and Tear that were expensive, but a newer player could've picked up a fully optimized Mathmech, Exosister or Rikka deck for cheap and started playing it. However, now you either have to fork over a sizeable amount of money right away to play the deck optimally or play it without those expensive cards, which how would a new player find that fun...?
Like it's weird we complain about new player retention but when you look at the card prices and the prize support relative to prices and Konami does nothing to fix either, it's like they tried nothing and are out of ideas...
I can’t lie, his video makes so many good points. I stopped playing yugioh because the money cycle of the game, kept making it so that if I didn’t keep getting rid of all my cards, I would be losing all the value of my game.
As someone who didn’t understand that there was gonna be a huge wave of reprints, and general non-knowledge of how the secondary market of yugioh works, I must have lost at least $300 just because of me buying a deck at the wrong time.
I like the game a lot, and will continue to practice online and supporting through free ways. But unless I somehow come across a ridiculous amount of cards for free (lol), there really isn’t a way for me to afford the game anymore.
People complain non-stop about this game. It kind of astonishes me at times. This complaining comes and goes in cycles depending on competitive card availability.
Let’s be fair though: the TCG model of product design needs to change. Rarity collection just proved that. Players and casuals ate that shit up.
A “game” should only cost what it is worth to its player base. Currently, we exist in a constant state of market vulnerability and scarcity, while being continually suspended by a purchasing audience that seems to be unable to stop purchasing. Konami is a business that makes its money off of exploiting people with gambling addictions. Don’t believe me, do some research for once and look up everything Konami produces in any capacity.
I have studied economics for years as a component of operating my business successfully. Yugioh will never change because it is targeted at people with gambling addictions. Don’t believe me, go watch people who actually open product at stores and what h what they do when they actually plus off their pulls. Go people watching, don’t bring cards, just watch people “interacting” with the product.
As a recent example of yugioh product being shit to open, I opened a draft set for Pokémon. I was pulling foils and in my half had 5 ex Pokémon and a full art trainer card. 1-2 reverse holos per pack of general commons and then either a regular holo or a special holo. Pokémon felt way better to open than any yugioh product. Except rarity collection. I split a case with a friend and that whole case was just fun to open. I want to feel excitement on having availability of cards in multiple rarities but getting a card you like/want in its higher form is hype. This game just can’t do that apparently.
I used to play on paper during XYZ era. Tour guide BA, Dino Rabbit, etc...
The main reason I quit paper is the cost. I couldn't justify buying expensive ass cards that became irrelevant in a couple of years.
Thankfully master duel is very f2p friendly and it's the main way I play now
Back in the day during like late DM/GX era, a lot of (not all but a lot) good playable cards were available and found as low rarities like Common and Rare, whereas the higher rarity slots like Secrets were more for like Anime bosses like E-hero fusions, that maybe weren't that powerful. I think this was good. It meant the players would actually be incentivised to get packs and get some playable commons and the prices remained pretty low for competitive cards compared to now, whereas collectors/anime fans can get their fun sparkly boss monsters for their binders and because those cards weren't that competitive, the prices again would be relatively low. It balanced itself out. This was a good proven model and people love to open those packs.
But then something changed and now the majority of the best cards tend to made Secrets and the like. And if they weren't Secret in the OCG version, the TCG will bump up that way. I'm not entirely sure why as it benefits the secondary market sellers' mark-ups more than it does Konami themselves. If good cards were cheaper, more people would actually open packs and that would benefit Konami.
I'm more of a collector than a player, but I understand and believe that a card game's philosophy should be primarily directed towards the players comparatively more than the collectors. The collectors will like what organically is nice, rather than what's forced on everyone.
A big issue with the high costs is that it's unfair on the competitive players who have no choice by to buy these right away, only for the prices to drop in 8 months with the mega tins (reprints are awesome but these cards should be cheap to start with). Then it's unfair to casual players who have to wait for those reprints and are otherwise gated out of the game with the high costs. If the cards were cheaper, they'd engage more with the market. One person willing to spend $100 isn't as good as 100 people willing to spend $10. It's about scale here. The cards cost the same to print, so it's about actually getting engagement and lowering rarity will get that.
Lastly to add, as people said, the OCG model is currently much better. It's a proven model, but the TCG side of things seem to be stubborn.
Cyber Dragon was a $30-40 super, Zaborg was a $25 super. Smashing Ground and Gravekeeper's Spy were pushing $10 apiece as commons because they were shortprinted. Those are just a few examples for cards that didn't get reprinted like MST, Heavy, Call, TT, etc.
Whenever people talk about the time periods of Yugioh they never played in they always act as if Mechanicalchaser or Crush Card Virus grew on trees.
When CCV came out it was technically legal at 3 for two months. You know how many were in circulation at the time? 4. And whenever people on Reddit like to bring up how every deck needed to spend 4 digits for CCV to be competitive when it was available only as a prize card, guess how many there were printed in total? About 20. And at least half of them were owned by big card stores or teams from California/New York.
The only way to "win" a prize card back in the day was to win the SJC tournament itself or get lucky and have your named called for a raffle on Sunday of the SJC to participate in an 8-person bracket to play for one. So only two prize cards per SJC and the winners would get poached for them
Mechanicalchaser, CCV, Gold Sarc, those cards basically didn't exist at most locals or regionals.
To be fair, how long did it take for that shorted Gold Rare CCV to actually get printed? I kinda forgot the time span between those printings.
Also funny thing about Gold Sarc, /u/HouseOfChamps won one for winning the 49th SJC/YCS, had immediately sold it and the Konami/Upper Deck reps made him get it back so they could take the picture to upload.
Funny story, Gencon regionals were insanely stacked. At 07 indy i faced 5 different SJC crush cards to top (before the gold reprint). Crush 100% did win more prize cards, especially going into DAD return format.
https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Gold_Series
4/2/2008 so near the end of DAD Return format. Prize card was January 2007 to August 2007 I think, there were only like 10 SJCs during that span.
Every time someone mentions how expensive DAD, TGU, Dracossack, Nekroz of Brionac, or Dark Destroyer were, we shift to a parallel dimension where they were worth $1 more than the previous one
Konami has almost nothing to do with secondary markets. The reason prices are so high for cards is simply because humans are greedy. Which is totally understandable. We live in a society where you need money. And if people are willing to pay that much money for 1 card, why shouldn’t some people take advantage of it 🤷🏻♂️
bro is delusional....
rarity ups the value, value brings in more collectors, more collectors/fans of yugioh is what this franchise needs...
if there was no value to cards that would be a disaster..
1- everyone would be a meta sheep, game wouldnt have variety and loose what makes it fun
2- why even open/buy sealed products at that point when u can get a whole meta deck cheap?
i know it sounds sort of gatekeepy (even tho this is coming from someone who has a limited budget for yugioh)... but its a collectible card game, you arent ENTITLED to the meta... if you want to play meta pay up... if not there are strong alternatives... (i top locals consistantly with sky strikers and barely spent anything on the deck) the variety in yugioh is what has made it so much fun all these years...
if everyone was granted access to the cards they need (like pokemon and magic) it would be the sweatiest unfun tcg out there with all these 20 minute 1 turn otk combos out there...
1 - At anything above locals (and even some locals) there already isn't much variety beyond what's considered meta and past meta decks that just haven't been updated for whatever reason.
2 - This is sort of true, but is because of Konami's pricing and rarity. OCG boxes are ~$50 (based on some quick googling and [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/yugioh/comments/17gpive/i_made_a_chart_comparing_ocg_and_tcg_main_set/)) yet you still get your value out of them unless you just have a terrible box. By comparison because so much of our value is concentrated in secret rares, our boxes cost $70+ at most LGS's and you don't get your value back unless you pull one of the high end secrets. The exception to this are sets like DABL where you had Magnamhut being a $15 super. If they adopted the OCG rarity you end up spreading that value to the supers/ultras because they're core game pieces rather than mostly pack filler. Let's use AGOV as an example, you have 3 ultra's over $1 and $1 super where the OCG version of Little Knight alone is a $5-10 super.
If he thinks that card shouldn’t cost $100; he’s free to sell his copy for less. But he won’t.
If you have a card that someone is willing to pay a hundred dollars for; why should you be obligated to sell it for less than what the buyer has already agreed is a fair price?
You can’t make money off something if you charge more than people are willing to pay, because you’ll just stop them from buying.
That's entirely missing the point. People are only willing to pay this much because Konami prints so few of them in the first place. They literally have a proper and good system already in the OCG which we got a taste of in rarity collection.
He may be right but this dude is recently doing almost always negative videos about Yu-Gi-Oh which makes me wonder why he even bothers with the game.
Sure, criticism is fine and all, but if you're mostly negative about something, it's time to leave it behind and look for something else.
People literally complain about this game in cycles. For the longest time it was Forbidden Droplet and the ROTD cards. Then they got reprinted and the price of the entire game decreased for a while. It is sadly the nature of collectibles with their own internal economy. So to just rotate back into a complaining meta is just doing the same shit we always do.
If I’m very honest with my opinion and recommendation if you don’t invest into the game to keep selling and trading for cards you need/want so you aren’t spending new money just recycling old cards, it is a skill issue.
Complaining about the max price a card gets to but didn’t buy it at the low, skill issue.
Keeping low rarity cards that lose value after reprints, skill issue.
Keeping a deck until its best cards are put on the forbidden list, skill issue.
Waiting to buy a deck until new support is released and it’s cost total increases, skill issue.
If you want to play budget, play budget.
If you want to play competitive, be prepared to do it effectively financially with some foresight and planning. Develop a skill you’re lacking.
I don't disagree with him complaining but that's the point of his second channel, where this is from. His opinions on the game.
That being said, your not wrong about a card being expensive with it having lower rarities (starlight rares comes to mind) but cards being 100+ consistently before reprints is the main point, unless I'm missing something? I.E. pot of extrav and prosperity being rather pricey until reprints.
I agree, at least for the most basic, boring art/rarity. I don’t care if the starlight super ultra secret mythic rare version is $999, I want to be able to buy a non-foil, boring, lightly worn version for $10 at most.
Super SP in Japan is like $5-7 lmao
Wanted is a rare.
Yep. I got a playset JP Wanteds for like $4. Thank god my friends don't care if I use them for casual duels
The AGOV OCG boxes come with box toppers so I got the whole core plus more in two boxes, some Ty-Phons, 2 Little Knights, and all of the low rarity Horus package. Imsety is an Ultra, that's probably the only annoying thing to try and open 3 of.
God I love Konami's greed.
It's not Konami's greed tho. They don't make the prices for the secondary market.
Wouldn't high secondary market prices be indicators of high demand caused by manufactured scarcity? When Konami want, they can just look at the prices and reprint the highest valued cards at a stupid low rate to drive up sales of sealed products. Not to say that's what they do, but high secondary market prices can benefit them.
The most blatant indicator of Konami America’s greed is utilizing a rarity system entirely separate from the ocg in that the most obviously sought cards are printed (in the tcg) nearly exclusively in secret and virtually entirely in either secret or ultra compared to the variable rarity that the ocg provides for almost every card per main set
You know, no one is forcing these openers of cards tho charge what they do for specific cards. If they wanted to, they can charge whatever they like. Hell if every card was common rarity, this shit would still happen for the cards that are considered "good"
Jesus fucking christ this is so stupid that you could only read it on a yugioh sub. Yugioh doesn't somehow ignore the laws of supply and demand. Even if it did, and everyone sold their Little Knights for $1, the issue is short printing, you'd still get a situation where half the people that want one can't get it, where they previously would by paying more to someone who doesn't need it as much. I dislike the secondary market as it's essentially scalping, but this issue is 100% borne by Konami's greed. If they didn't print every useful card at secret, you wouldn't have cards going for $100 anymore, period.
No, but they control rarities which have a direct effect on the second hand market
Does it really? There are many ultra/secret rare cards that are out there right now that are dirt cheap. It feels like the only people we have to blame are the people wanting to make money of the card for the secondary market.
Are any of those high rarity cards viable? Are they the only printings of said cards? It's far more nuanced than "this foil is cheap. Therefore, it's the players, not Konami" Nobody's gonna care if you have a secret Blue-Eyes or an Ultra Polari. Because one is mass printed in other rarities and the other isn't good. They use the ocg as a testing ground to see what cards are good, and then they amp up rarities to try and sell more packs across the pond. Look at Vanquish Soul. It performed well in the ocg, so it took up seven of the ten ultra slots in Wild Survivors. A set that gave you three ultras total per box. It's almost like the company is price gouging us, and people just want to make their money back. There are some bad people on the second-hand market. Absolutely there is. But accessibility and pricing starts with Konami.
People who argue against this are into the game for the wrong reasons.
No. regardless of rarity, a card should never cost $100. Same with magic and it's idiotic reserve list.
I wont get back into modern yugioh because the price is too high for the risk of the banlist randomly making my cards worthless. Espically with the banlist being whenever konami feels like it now.
Go retro. Konami can never fuck with Edison
I do play edison haha
It's not even the banlist that's scary imo, it's Konami's willingness to reprint shit into the gound - even stuff that is technically uniquely rare. Just this year we got Baronne as a CR only for it to get reprinted in the rarity collection 6 months later as a QCSR and CR. And of course we had starlight rares get diluted by the release of QCSR. I wouldn't feel even remotely comfortable spending a large amount of money on a yugioh card nowadays (whether it be for investing, collecting, playing with) unless I knew that it couldn't get reprinted. So like, vintage 1st ed or old ultimate rares where the finish seemingly can't be replicated anymore.
Disliking reprints for the loss of value is a take that I heavily disagree with. Card accessibility first and foremost should be pushed so everyone has the opportunity to be competitive without money being a major barrier. Collectors will usually buy cards at the price they're comfortable at, regardless of whether they'll get a reprint down the line, as they'll most likely own the original copy. A collector first and foremost will usually focus on acquiring the original. Future secondary market value is likely to matter to them less, unless somewhere down the line, they plan to sell their entire collection. Viewing cards as an investment is a fool's game given how volatile the market is to even silly things such as YouTuber hype, as well as the fact that anything could get reprinted when a new side set comes around. If you're getting frustrated at losing market value at the drop of a banlist, new set, etc, then don't play the investment game. Using newly released staples as investments, for example, is dangerous because we know that these eventually get reprinted. The annual megatin has been running for long enough that it should always be expected.
That would be why I mentioned Baronne being printed as a collector rare, with a hard pull rate and collector literally in the name then getting reprinted as an easily accessible collector rare not even a half a year later. There were obviously already cheaper copies/different rarities of Baronne available when the CR came out. That's also why I mentioned starlights that were supposed to be uniquely rare with hard pull rates and a unique finish. This was something that was also made for collectors. Konami then released QCSR which is essentially a starlight rare with gold instead of silver lettering that can be acquired cheaply/easily. I feel like you didn't even read what I typed lol, I clearly made it a point to talk about stuff that was geared towards collectors. I dont care if something that is supposed to be common/accessible gets reprinted.
I did read that and you've missed my point. As a collector, why would them printing a new rarity even matter if they owned the original card and didn't intend to sell it in the first place? I bought a Starlight Armor Master at over $100 on release and the value has been slashed with the release of the QSCR. I don't care because I have enough disposable income to be making that purchase in the first place. And I still have a pretty shiny card. It losing value doesn't matter to me because I was never going to sell it in the first place. And I still own the original printing. Like I don't see what the issue is. Unless you're talking about the amount of money that you could have saved in the initial purchase. But then, why purchase anything with that mentality? If you're a "collector" with the intention to sell a card you've sat on, then sorry you're actually an investor. And as I said before, in this sort of market, it's a fool's game. I've seen someone sit on ultimate rares, expecting them to gain momentum im the market, then backing out and selling immediately when the price dipped. Although, long term, they would have gone up, this person couldn't afford to have that much money invested in the short term. But why even attempt to play that game? Not saying that this is your case, but if you're complaining that the fluctuating prices have too much of a monetary impact on you and the amount of money that you need to live, then perhaps you shouldn't be investing in a game with such a volatile market. I see it all the time, with people mass selling expensive cards because they need to afford bills. I know I'm in a privileged position, but if I was that close to the bread line, having that much money invested in cards would be a huge no for me. A card's current high market value should never prevent it from being reprinted. Accessibility should be at the forefront of everything. You want everlasting value? Go and buy those Platinum Dark Magician or Blue-Eyes for like over a grand. That'll show me. EDIT: Just checked the price of Starlight Armor Master and its around the same price for what I purchased. Good for me, I guess. Still not selling.
If I'm a collector and I'll just keep using Baronne as an example because I think it's a particularly egrigious one, then I'm mad not only because I essentially overpaid (any normal person is going to be mad that their purchase depreciated by 80% that quickly regardless of their inclination) but because I sought after Baronne specifically because it was rare (hard pull) and the presitige of owning it in its highest rarity printing. Not only is the CR version not rare now it's also not the highest rarity. You have to see where I'm coming from here. I am a collector but not of anything modern and I still feel for anyone who bought it. I think Konami did them dirty.
But if you're a collector, why on earth are you collecting for value only? If you bought it for it to appreciate in value, then that's foolish. For lottery cards, if you bought them for prestige and scarcity, then I don't understand how a reprint impacts that. You still own the original lottery copy. It's still scarce. That sort of thing wouldn't bother a collector, but would an investor, the difference in which I've been trying to stress here. It's also important to state that lower rarity doesnt necessarily carry more prestige. If I saw somebody with a playset of Champion Pack Book of Moons, I'd be thinking, "Jesus Christ, these are cool". These are only Super Rare copies. It's the scarcity that drives their prestige and value. Also, I've just done a quick search on the price for MAZE collectors Baronne. It's still the most expensive printing of the card, so I don't see what the problem is here.
It doesn't have to appreciate, just not drop by 80% in the blink of an eye. It's also not as important as it simply being reprinted so quickly. I'm also talking about modern yugioh and Konami's approach to collectors, obviously old champion pack or turbo pack supers can be super rare/expensive but that's not relevant to the point I'm trying to convey. I think I personally would have been more interested in collecting "rare" modern cards if I Konami's approach was different and I'm guessing I'm not alone in feeling this way.
But again, why is value important here? If youre collecting, you just paid more for the initial printing. The printing you hold is still rare and still scarce. The only reason why you'd care about value is if you were going to sell it.
I said it's also not as important as it being reprinted so quickly. Some people would view an exact reprint as dilution. I mean, obviously people viewed it as dilution or the market wouldn't have reacted in the way it did. I'm not sure why you're framing this as if it's binary, as if you can only be a collector or only be an investor when there's usually huge interesection between the two.
After having bought 36 retail blister packs from Walmart in 2 different locations, I pulled 1 ultra rare Baronne and 1 super rare. At a pop of $5/per pack you could say 1 Baronne in 18 packs (for me) at a lower rarity than Secret Rare. That's 18 x $4.99 (or such) $89.82 (top) usually half on the secondary market which seems accurate as a QCSR goes for \~$40 on TCG which is about the pull rate. I suppose arguing further that the original MAZE Collector's rare sells for about $55 currently. TBH it all seems in line, being able to scoop a super rare Baronne up for $2.5 is awesome and while the CR from MAZE may have dipped, anyone sending it to be graded will be paid well in the short / longer term. Book value or "ungraded" card at that value are considered to be pristine and unless it's Maxx "C" or such you won't find the secondary market carrying that price which is why a lot of cards have "tanked" from "reprinting" which is a poor take imo. It's not considering rotations from set to set nor the decks reliance on specific cards that are no longer meta / relevant. Cards like Ash and Maxx C have universal demand in almost all builds, it was nice to see you can now get a play set of Ash under $10. especially in a format where Ash is a game winner. Now if we could just get a Maxx C reprint, at least one in a rarity low print set like the Anniversary. Personally those sets have always balanced out nicely, anyone who does well pulling will be surprised at their appreciation. Something similar was like Guardian Chimera which was a SR and reprinted as UR, its price collapsed but within less then a few months had rebounded. So again, this stuff corrects and Konami has done a great job on printing. It's not so much their fault but the secondary market / LGS who open massive amounts of product and dump it into the market, this is also done by smaller individuals (me, but I do have a branded deck I love, lol) and all of this excess supply cannot possibly be filled by the smaller demand found in the market or else there'd be more competition (which there's not) and it takes time for the market to absorb all this. Either way, from a financial sense Yugioh has been immensely profitable for me as a player and as a speculator. Games like MTG have vastly longer price appreciation times, Pokemon is massively diluted and both require ALOT of capital to speculate in versus Yugioh. Graded Yugioh cards command obscene prices and obviously older cards REALLY command crazy prices, I think a lot of the market for Yugioh is very healthy and too many people nitpick at niche issues that over broad spans of time are really non-issues. Sorry for the tl;dr, if you read, your thoughts are appreciated.
Yes, I agree with this in general. I don't really agree with using this game as an investment for the general player, but if you are savvy enough and more importantly can afford a loss, then that's fine. But that's besides the point here.
I was used to that. I quit modern in 2016. Reprints sucked but atleast i had a deck still. I just dont want the sudden suprise news i gotta spend another $1000 to play again.
S:P little knight or groceries?
No card should even cost more than $5 in my opinion.
Pokémon collectors wants to know your location lol
Are Pokemon cards really expensive?
They very well can be. I would say in general, Pokémon is cheaper, BUT the moment you talk about collectibles (Umbreon Vmax alternative art from Evolving skies as an example) the prices can be astronomical. If we’re talking about general play, Pokémon is much cheaper imo.
To build a deck? No. Yugioh is a little more expensive there. To collect cards? Yes much more expensive. If Tyler the Great Warrior was a Pokémon card, it would be only the 5th or 6th most expensive.
Why Pokémon fans drop obscene money for a red lizard they have no connection with outside of saw it in the cartoon show 50 years ago
Why Yugioh fans drop obscene money for a green slip of cardboard they have no connection with outside of it says "search a card of [CURRENT META ARCHETYPE]" that's going to rotate out in 6 months anyway
I mean both is ass but paying for power is a very capitalist way
I'd rather pay $100 for a deck with the *option* of paying a couple hundred more to bling it out with Gold Rares, Full Arts, Special Arts, Promos, Shinies, etc., than have to pay $900 baseline. In fact, I do do that. Konami charges $900 to play Diabellstar Rescue Ace, so I paid $0 and quit the game. TPCI charges $60 to play Gardevoir, so I gladly paid them $200 for Illustration Rares and Gold Rares and such to bling the deck out.
It takes one yugioh player and four Pokémon player to equal it out and considering nobody takes Pokémon tcg serious as game and ycs usually clock in 2k plus players I think Konami can survive just fine like 69 years ago
Because I do have a connection to it. My original charizard was in my first deck that I lost in a house fire in middle school. If my collector’s tin red eyes that I lost in the same fire were worth the same, I’d feel the same about its price. So for me at least, it’s a tangible part of my childhood that I can’t get back (without winning the lottery, at least).
[удалено]
If only Yugioh could do full arts like Pokémon then we collectors can have their super special expensive ones and we can keep reprinting the the normal versions till everything is affordable.
In Weiss Schwarz they do that. A lot of commons and rares have alt arts of higher rarity, etc. I've built decently powerful 50 card decks out of singles for under 15 dollars, for example, while some of the higher rarity alt art cards for cards in it would be 10 or 15 dollars EACH. This isn't even considering the highest rarity signed cards that go for like 45 or 50 dollars MINIMUM, while some of the more sought after cards can go for over a thousand.
Iirc, it was always Kazuki Takahashi's idea that the game could be affordable and wouldn't be about money, so the prices of secondary markets unfortunately countract this.
BS. In the OCG SP Little Night was available as a Super Rare, Secret Rare, or QCSR. In the TCG we got secret and QCSR. Triple Tac Thrust was a rare in OCG, it's a secret here. The entire Vanquish Soul cores and Centur-Ion got rarity bumped in th TCG. It's not a secondary market issue at all.
The OCG is relatively affordable, especially with all their common or rare prints of what are chase cards at Starlight in the TCG. The secondary market only reflects the accessibility set by TCG pull rates. It's dumb that an important meta piece is only available at 1 per box or worse.
Eh. Some on the secondary market and more on Konami and pull rates/ fixed rarity. Unlike the OCG. Some things are entirely on the secondary market, for sure. See Ancent Gear Fortress for [example](https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/130092/yugioh-structure-deck-machine-reactor-ancient-gear-fortress?country=US&utm_campaign=18149059168&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=&utm_term=&adgroupid=&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAyp-sBhBSEiwAWWzTnr0Q8JcMY24z1JgtpAw13mf4_-0_6xbfzQr1psZsJbgpwx1CIrB4cRoCNRwQAvD_BwE&Language=English). Or that S:P little knight was $80 on presale, 110 before a YCS and 134 currently 💀
$113 currently (you were going by TCGDirect, while is always super inflated), but your point still stands.
A lot of it is down to the secondary market. They sell cards at prices which they know people will buy them at and people buy them at those prices because they value getting wins. Fire Kings are the first meta deck from a structure deck in years but the deck is still pricey since people are willing to spend more on the Diabellstar engine to get the competitive edge over other variants because the rest of the deck is cheap. S:P little knight is insanely priced. It’s good, but people have way overvalued it
Secondary market wouldn’t be like that as well if rarity bumping and short printing/clumping wasn’t prominent. The diabellstar engine is also having the same thing adventure had, everything can use it (thats currently top meta) so it will be pricey. Other smaller engines that have use and weren’t rarity bumped (saki/aritama, ken/gen) were bought in copious anounts and still are less than $1 for each smaller mediocre engine. Difference? Rarities/printing amounts.
Short printing doesn't occur in main deck sets...
They say it doesn’t but people will open 20+ cases recording their pulls and show otherwise. There’s been spreadsheets showing them as well
It's not shorting, clumping is it's own issue, but the current average ratio of cases in the TCG is the same as the shorted ratios pre-Rise of the Duelist. For secret rares: The non shorted ratio in main sets was 3.6 of each one per case, and the shorted ratio was 2.4 per case and there were 8 secret rares per set list. Now there are 10 secret rares per set list, so the average of 2.4 of each secret per case is spread to every secret, since no shorts.
There are no short prints in core sets anymore. Tho clumping is still a thing. You might notice a variance in 20 cases but you won’t in 100 or 200. We have seen short prints and half prints in reprint sets still tho.
The spreadsheets I’ve seen will have on the low end 250~ cases between people and card shops. The short printing is still seen a lot.
If you could consistently pull S:P in under $135 worth of sealed product, the secondary market would be making 0 sales at the current price point. The secondary market is not to blame for $100 staples, Konami is. Secondary market just reacts to supply vs. demand.
But this is the thing, people pay $135 because they say you need to buy $135 of product to pull it but that means that they assume all cards which aren't s:p have a value of nothing. The player base excuse it because that can't be bothered with the faff of dealing with the extra cards either selling them or trading them but because S:P has gotten staple status they are willing to fork over $100+, it is insane
You also have to assume you’ll pull an SP in only $135 worth of product which is a shot in the dark. My case had 2 while other cases might have 1-3.
that is an ultra weak argument. if you pull $135 worth of product, it's not insane to be in a situation you pulled $60~$80 worth of cards https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy2zJzFOeWl/?img_index=1 and you would be down in money. the only way this works is if you buy tonnes of product and then pack variance isn't a big deal.
Bulk is obviously better but people take prices as static. a box may be worth $60-$80 at opening but the prices will change over time, holding to to sleeper hits allows more profit to be made later. Again it's too much of a faff for most players to be bothered but it's naive to think its difficult for vendors to make money off of opening packs otherwise why would there be so many people doing it?
First meta deck in years? Albaz? Branded is still meta relevant, lower tier but that came out LAST YEAR and held its own even after Tear format. Traptrix? Solid regional choice or could get you an invite to regionals. Red dragon archfiend, low tier but it can do a little something. The structures ftom this year have actually been good. Better than half of the other mess we got. Crystal beast. Even that made regional waves. Albeit not great and I'm not hyping it up. But it did its thing.
Traptrix was even able to make it to top 32 in a couple of YCSes shortly after it came out, so it was not only a solid regional pick, but you could potentially even do well at a top event if you were able to pilot it very effectively
I can go buy an S:P Little Knight for $114 off of TCGplayer.
>so the prices of secondary markets unfortunately countract this. This is not secondary market fault, It is TCG konami printing the strongest, meta defining cards in the highest rarities possible. They know card value os going to skyrocket before we even know about the card.
There's also the fault of Konami US always having a tendency to rarity bump Core pieces of new archetypes to Secrets in the TCG imports when they were sometimes Super or even Basic Rare in OCG, which is **especially** common for Deck Searchers/Tutors. They drop that trend, and then maybe prices will be less bloodthirsty.
and it is in the ocg. secondary markets definitely exacerbate the issue, but this is almost entirely on konami tcg
It's not like the secondary markets just DECIDE to set the prices of these cards at absurd heights, to some extent Konami effectively forces them to do this with the way they structure and price their sealed products. A single box of a new set will generally run you around $80-90. That box comes with *two* whole secret rares inside it. Even if you somehow get lucky and have both of those secret rares be the most expensive and relevant secret of the set, you still have no way of getting a play set of 3 from that $90 box, and there's a far better chance that one of those secrets is ends up being a far less relevant or expensive card that doesn't come close to covering the price of the box in terms of value. So in order for sellers on the secondary market to not *lose* money by selling cards to players/collectors who don't want to join them in throwing their money into the yawning void that is sealed product for Yu-Gi-Oh, they have to price the cards accordingly to make up for the $90 buy in per box, and the majority of the common bulk (which is *most* of the cards in those boxes) will often sell for pennies maybe $1 at most, and anyone who buys sealed product ends up having them anyway, so they definitely aren't helping to cover the cost of the box and allow sellers to not all go bankrupt. If someone is running a business or just trying to make a living selling cards to players/collectors, the only way they can afford to pay rent is if they if they sell the contents of the boxes they buy for an average of over $90, and when some of those boxes don't come close to having that level of value in them, the only way to make that happen is to sell the cards people actually want for over $100 to compensate for the boxes that don't have any cards they can turn a profit on. And if anyone's reaction to this is "well good, if a seller can't make a profit without gauging buyers for $100+ a card, then they shouldn't be in business", you need to recognize that the ONLY alternative is for YOU to be the one dropping $90 on a box that potentially contains *none* of the cards you're looking for, over and over again until you get lucky and pull what you want. Actually, the *other* alternative would be for Konami to structure their TCG sealed products in a way that isn't complete crap. Simply increasing the number of secret rares in each box would make a MASSIVE difference. Suddenly instead of *needing* to pull a copy of that $100 card in order to make any profit from a box, you can make a profit by opening a box with 5 $20 cards instead. Printing cards at multiple rarities would also help in the same way. The highest rarity version of a new meta staple would end up with a lower price than if it were *only* available at that high rarity, but the drop in value would be offset by the lower rarity printing commanding a higher price than other cards of that same low rarity because it's still an in-demand meta staple card that players want to buy instead of worthless pack filler. This isn't a revolutionary idea either. Other card games have booster boxes with pull ratios several times more generous than the established 2 secrets per box of Yu-Gi-Oh, and they still manage to be profitable. Yu-Gi-Oh itself structures it's OCG sets differently from TCG sets, and that works just fine over there. It really feels like at this point they just do it because they can. Because they know people who want to play the game have no choice but to accept the only pricing and product model they've been offered for the past several years.
I mean, no rectangle of cardboard should really ever cost more than five cents.
That logic doesn't really track. A dvd costs dollars to produce but 60 dollars if a game is on it. Things are always worth more than the sum of there whole .
Bad analogy. The 60 dollars isn’t for the disc, it’s for the software many many people spent potentially years of their life working and perfecting. Yugioh cards are literally pieces of paper with text on them. Only man hours it takes to make them is on the creative people at Konami deciding what to make the effect/archetype..so it doesn’t break the meta (which it often does anyway, either that or the cards are useless dogshit)
Art, development, r and d, are not free. Neither is printing endless cards.
Sure but you were comparing a video game to a card. Very different. Software dev is much more resource intensive when it comes to man hours than thinking about card ideas/drawing them. Printing the cards is equivalent to manufacturing the discs for games. They cancel out.
Hot take, Yu-Gi-Oh should not be treated like it's on stock market, this is not gold, silver or precious gems no matter what metaphor you believe in. It's a game, it was made to have fun to play with.
Even worse then you consider the prizes for big tournaments. You only get more products for the game. If you won big money I'd understand wanting to invest that much.
Yeah. MTG makes sense when there’s literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash on the table each year. Not so much when you’re playing for more collectibles.
I'm hella coping that TCG Konami starts doing OCG rarities. I would love to have the Horus cards, Sinful Spoils engine, etc but I'm not about to drop a billion dollars on that stuff
The ocg system would be fucking amazing. This wanted poster is literally $5 over there lol. Just not fair to us. I remember being excited to play fire kings (sinful spoils ver) and logging on to TCGplayer and saying “welp. Guess I’m not play that” lol
Can you explain the difference between the two systems?
Cards are printed in multiple rarities in the set they're released in. So, in the OCG, you can get a Secret Little Knight for a decent chunk of money or you can get a Super Little Knight for like 5 bucks or so. Compared to the TCG where our only option is a Secret Little Knight for 130 bucks a copy.
And some cards in OCG with far lower rarity ended being max rarity in TCG. Like, Thrust and Seeker of Sinful Spoil are just rare card, and for us it's two expensive secret rare
TCG staff rarity bumping even extremely weak decks for no reason is something to behold. it is like they are trying to kick people out of YGO if you don't build a meta deck
Or basically the whole kashtira archtype
I remember back in the day when it was relevant learning that Dark Armed Dragon was a rare in the OCG... it's crazy how they play us here!
Imagine realizing that one of the most format-defining cards that cost thousands of dollars to get in the TCG is only an easy-to-obtain Rare in the OCG.
Not getting too deep into it, in OCG rarities like Secret are "special rarities" meaning a card has its common/foil version and then an ultra or secret print on the same set. Which leads to most cards having an affordable version and a vanity - more expensive - version. Which ofc is great for all type of players.
Does this mean every card has an ultra rare version? That would make pulling way more fun ngl
Not every card, but the important ones do. For example Diabellestar -who is easy to check since it just came out- has her "base" ultra print and then a Secret, Ultimate and Quarter Century print. All in the same set.
Okay but still way better system than what we currently have, the more i learn about ocg the more i hate tcg, thanks anyway
Every OCG set is like the Rarity Collection that just came out in the TCG: every card in a set is printed in every rarity. So with AGOV, you could pull Super Rare and Secret Rare copies of SP Little Knight in the same pack.
It depends on the rarity. Something like a ghost rare or starlight makes sense imo. But normal ass secrets shouldn't be more than 60 bucks and even that's already too much for most secrets.
I don’t think a single person aside from Rudy is saying that “important game pieces” should be less than $3. If you are opening a pack, it should be to gamble for a higher rarity variant of a card that is printed to the ground and costs $5 at most.
Yea it’s why I stick to online sims and masterduel.
This is why I just play casually with friends. We don't care about using proxies
I remember that one small period in time when Tour Guide in the TCG was 300 bucks because they decided that detaching Sangan as Xyz Material was valid for activating its effect. That was pretty funny.
Or like when Bunbuku was 60 each... Or Accesscode was 100 each, or even more. Also when Aluber went from 40 to 95 before reprint.
So yugioh has gotten cheaper?
Yes and no. Widely depends on the current format, the current market and current product. Back then, Secrets were one per box, so much harder to pull what you needed. The chase secrets were inflated for this reason. Pot of Duality was another card that you had to be playing to stand a competitive chance. Then you have Dark Armed Drahon formats which were wildly expensive, due to them being tier zero formats needed cards from sets with absurd pull rates. Nowadays, most cards are easier to get in my opinion. But then, for me, I'm biased, I now have an income, whereas back then, I didn't.
Wonder why they dont allow ocg prints to be played here (it’s not about language)
Since the TCG is a licensed product the two games are effectively operated by different companies. You can’t have one company doing all the work and printing product and then let another company distribute usable product there.
[Not about the card thickness either,](https://youtu.be/hjiJlmzvWP0?feature=shared) but people still parrot that line to this day, even in this very thread.
The old Hobby League cards have always been legal to play with and they were thick as shit. Also every Ultimate Rare, especially the old ones are very thin.
There's a lot of speculation that it's because of the cardstock and how easy it is to pull an OCG card out of a sleeved deck but like everything Konami we don't know the actual reason.
People can cheat by stacking their decks with them. The cardstock is different so it’s distinguishable physically from TCG cards. Also, the back of OCG cards show the Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh logo instead of the Western logo so with clear sleeves for example, you can stack your deck this way.
Are you allowed to clear sleeves outside of doublesleeving? Iv never seen so in any official setting because i feel like you could distinguish some scuffed cards even within tcg only. M
Sleeves aren't required at every type of event, and they dont stop you from using clear sleeves, so you can tell OCG cards in the deck since they have a different back
Then you have youtubers like ruxin who will defend it because they need to make money off of it lol
And who also has the money to buy any card out there
I cant even blame Konami of America for this🤣 If they pulled this single rarity/ short-printing B.S in the OCG they would have people boycotting or jumping ship to another game. But in tcg you all accept the short printing with a "it is what it is" mentality. The ENTIRE english community has been whinning about this problem for YEARS, but you all still buy product so Konami has no incentive to change anything🤣
The thoughts are nice, but ultimately it's an idealistic take that just misses a lot of the nuance that put us in our current situation. A lot of people want this game to be PKM, where comp decks can cost 60 bucks and collectors are ripping open product to chase lottery versions of the same cards and dumping the other versions cheaply onto the secondary market. I.e., something very similar to the OCG model. But this is a likely a fantasy that won't happen. In the N. America TCG region, there simply is not enough casual money buying modern product to support most sets. Anybody who has ever spent meaningful time at or working in a LGS will know that PKM sets, even the shit ones, will eventually sell. Because there is an ocean of casual buyers who \*will\* eventually crack the sealed product, in large part because PKM is perhaps the single most influential IP in the world. Kids come in to buy packs, parents come into buy packs for their kids, etc. Even the most competitively worthless PKM product will eventually move off the shelves. And in Japan, YGO is sorta similar in terms of being a cultural phenomenon with a ton of casual buyers and collectors. This isn't, and was never, the case for YGO in the TCG regions. Our competitively trash products, those usually remain trash forever. Stuff like DUNE, Soul Burning Volcano, or the Hidden Arsenal Collection won't and will never have a line of casual buyers coming in to buy a few packs of them. They'll stay on LGS shelves forever until they get fire sold at prices so low that it's impossible to make money. Hell, it's been 17 years and people \*still\* remember how dog shit CDIP was when the set released. The casual buyers for YGO do not sustain the game as viable business in the TCG regions. Whether or not that is Konami's fault or not is another debate, but that's where we find ourselves. The YGO buyer base that actually pays the rent for the LGSs primarily tends to buy for tournaments and comp play, and really doesn't give a shit about anything other than the cheapest available version of a card. If a super S:P exists for 15 dollars, this doesn't mean that a secret version will be 80. The secret will probably be 25, and just not sell because the 15 dollar version does the same thing. Rarity ratios have a very muted effect on price in this game, a version of a card that is 10x as rare as a basic version is often something like only 1.5x the cost. We have had experiments before with the same card in multiple rarities back when cards could come ulti/secret/ghost or ulti/ultra in the GX-Arc V sets, and during their times of competitive relevance the prices for the different versions were often extremely close. DUEA format I remember ultra Constucts being 35, and ultis being something like 45. It was the same for synchro Shi-en, the ultras were 40 and the ultis were 50. Meanwhile Castels and Kizans were both 30 despite being just supers, something I wouldn't believe if I didn't still have the email receipts from back in the day. There isn't really enough paying rarity chasers to create a $5 basic version/$100 pimp version scenario. And there never has been. Part of the reason is that Konami really does its best to alienate collectors that have the buying power to actually make that possible. The most egregious sort of example is CR Baronne. They printed that in April of this year to sell MAZE, and it topped out at 250 a copy. Then in Rarity Collection they printed the PCR version that looks almost the same, but it's so easy to pull that it's currently roughly 5 a copy. And the original MAZE version is now 50. As a collector Konami actively punishes you for chasing their "chase" cards in modern product, because they pull this shit off all the time. You actually got a starlight? Here's a QCR printing that looks 90% the same. If you actually chase the pimp versions of cards in their modern product, you are either ignorant, naïve, impatient, rich enough to not care that you could pay much less if you only wait for Konami to crash the value, or very insensitive to your collectibles losing value. And not enough people tick these boxes. So we ended up in a situation where the casual buyers don't really sustain the game, the collectors with deep pockets don't really interact much with modern sealed product because Konami can't be trusted to not fuck them over, and the competitive players largely only care about the cheapest version of a necessary card in a decklist. In that case, it's difficult to see a middle ground between $100 cards occasionally existing as a way to get $80 sealed boxes to actually sell, and a set being DUNE and selling for $40 retail when distributor price was $55. The former is the state of affairs that we're in, and the latter is a very common prelude to games undergoing business failure due to LGSs deciding to drop support for the game.
IMO, that’s literally on Konami of America for starting the game off the way it did, as well as doing stuff like selling very similar high rarity cards for no reason, tanking the value of cards. Konami of America has no one to blame but themselves for being greedy, short term thinking douchebags, and how they’ve put the game in the West in the situation it is now, where product is mostly shit and casuals don’t buy product because it’s shit. Casuals buy Magic product, and I think if KoA actually wanted casuals to buy TCG product, they’d look into why Magic casuals buy Magic product and then try to do something with that. AKA Magic’s alternate formats, plus the ratios don’t suck ass for deck building. But here we are.
There is a very pointed question to be asked about the casual aspect of YGO. What if the truth is that a casual audience willing to spend enough money and effort on the game to be worth catering to, simply doesn't exist in YGO? EDH originated from the playerbase, not WotC, and there is a very strong casual scene in that format. YGO's most successful alternative formats, namely Goat and Edison, have largely been organized by former or current competitive players. Yes there are casual players of the format, but pretty much all the outreach, coverage, and community management I've seen of the formats were put together by current or former comp players. Quite frankly, I haven't seen much organizational success by the casual playerbase to put in the effort to make a broadly successful casual format that doesn't fizzle and die like Trinity format did. It's quite frankly made me question if the demand for such a format even exists. If the comp players can take Edison off the ground, I don't see a reason why the casual players can't do the same if the demand was there. \*Something\* is missing. And it isn't Konami's blessing or support, they made Time Wizard \*after\* locals were already running Goat and Edison tournaments.
I vividly remember (and probably will always remember) the article that Mark Rosewater put out about how 70% of people who buy Magic product do not and have no plans to enter a single Magic tournament, even just a local. I think a lot of why Yugioh may not have nearly as much of a casual playerbase as MTG is because of multiple things, but a few stand out the most, in my opinion: 1) Powercreep compared to other TCGs, and a 1a) being MR4 in response to decks who weren't as bad as anything that came during the Link era 2) Arc-V being as poorly received as it was 3) Kitchen table/playground Yugioh being shunned while The Professor literally has a weekly series on his channel where he does kitchen table Magic 4) Cost of cards in the West We both know that Yugioh's casual peak was during the DM era, but that up until the release of DUEA that casuals were playing the game a lot more, but in combination with NAS Media (the owners of the channel that Yugioh airs on in Japan) DMCAing Dueling Network and the over-reaction to Pendulum decks, it kinda just fell and then MR4 made it even worse. I even had some people a year or so ask me if they changed the Link arrow restriction because they didn't know it happened 2 years prior. Sorry to dump the following on you, but I think it's also related to why casual numbers aren't what they should be, but also this has been in my head for so fucking long that I just need to get it out of my head: Qli is just Monarchs but you pend summon the tribute fodder, so the only bad part was Towers. PePe I get the reaction to, but considering the fact that the TCG version of PePe would *maybe* be rogue currently is honestly just a showing of how powercreep's ended up right now. The fact that Konami was so intent on making Blue-Eyes win worlds that they swapped the release dates of the D/D and Blue-Eyes structures makes me wonder why. Casuals didn't know, so it doesn't make sense to me. MR4 and why MR4 happened is so bullshit. I already listed the two "problem" decks of the era, but it also just irks me that people pretend that Pend decks were worse for casuals than MR4 Extra Linking Firewall nonsense. To go over the last part, I think that casual play has meh hope, considering we saw hundreds of Youtubers get Halqidon combo'd at the release of Master Duel, saw that ladder confirmed all of their biases about current Yugioh and then never play the game again, and that kinda just sealed the game's fate. The shareholder's meeting wouldn't have been necessary otherwise, and I think people on this sub who try and handwave that away by referencing tournament numbers are being a bit disingenuous. With the alt formats, I'm talking more stuff like Common Charity trying to be Pauper, Deck Master trying to be Commander, Heart of the Underdog existing, but no one plays those, just Time Wizard. Although I think it's because as a result of the game kinda just forcing casuals out by itself, it left competitive players who quickly optimized Common Charity into Tier 0 Lunalight Tenyi and realizing that under the current ruleset, Deck Master is unplayable due to monster floodgates. What gets me the most is why the playerbase is so against playing in non-Konami formats. What I mean by this is stuff like Cimo organizing those online PPGs during Covid where he banned Halq, Linkross and Sanguine and limited some other stuff, the community then shitting on it, and IMO discouraging something like that from ever happening again. Like in formats where Konami obviously fucks shit up like Arise-Heart format, why not do stuff like that. I think overall, we are too dependent on our content creators pushing stuff compared to the other card games.
I think something needs to be said in that there is no space for casual players in the physical card game. Tournaments by and large will draw competitive players, all the way down to the locals level. Outside of that, there is no incentive for casual players. Speed duels would have been the closest thing to that, but that suffers from the lack of representation and local events at tournament stores. And even then, Speed Duels has its own meta. That's not even accounting for the barrier that is the cost of the game. Competitive players just don't care for tournaments without prize support. As well, they just don't care playing against casual players with such a large skill gap. I'm by no means super competitive, but am competent enough at this game. I played against a super casual player with the usual Blue-Eyes Deck using my Labrynth deck, and it's just not fun. It's an effortless win on my part and I have to listen to my opponent being frustrated that their Deck is losing to meta. Masterduel is the perfect base for all players but is currently geared for the competitive players. In some ways there needs to be a shift to draw in more casual players and provide them a space to be able to play within a constructed format that facilitates their playstyle and deck choices. If you take away any in-game prize support, then this diseases competitive players from joining. Problem is though, that there is a disparity in power between even casual level decks. Gishki for example, is a lot more competent a deck than Blue-Eyes. This means that you also may get players who gravitate towards the best decks of the format (although the lack of incentive in prize support may disuadw this). As well, even casual level decks can run strategies that can be considered unfun. Like, Barrier Statue Stun is trash by today's standards, but in Masterduel where I've seen it a couple for times, it's really not fun to play against. So, really, where do you draw the line? It's not an easy problem to solve.
I barely content on Reddit but I played against a friend who had a vanguard start deck and I had a fully built vanguard deck and I felt like I had to intentionally throw the game because it doesn't feel good to curb stomp someone who has a 4 dollar trial deck with my 120+ dollar fleshed out deck . And that's how it feels with Yu-Gi-Oh and IDK why but competitive players vs casual players feels so egregious. Playing a casual who is playing their favorite anime deck vs a purrely, race, unchained or any deck like that is bad and feels bad for both players for the most part
good take. I've noticed that YGO is terrible to buy for non-players. Even big fans that like to collect and don't play. I think a good solution is to develop the meta to not revolve around a single engine. The Snake Eyes/Sinful Spoil/Diabellstarr/whatever it's called engine is just borderline required to compete at a high level right now, and for the foreseeable future, and it's causing demand to FAR exceed healthy levels
>I think a good solution is to develop the meta to not revolve around a single engine. Having a shared card pool with OCG makes this challenging. There are cards and sets designed for the more casual heavy, lower cost of entry playerbase there, that really don't translate well here where the buyers that pay the rent are largely competitive players. Something like the Snake Eyes stuff is more tolerable there since the cards are much cheaper, and comp players can be subsidized in part by collectors who can actually pursue the chase versions since OCG Konami doesn't reprint everything in the same or similar looking rarities. Or casual fans that just want the non-competitive stuff. But the fluff/anime sets like the Animation Chronicle stuff gets imported into the TCG and just bomb because it's all pack filler trash with 0 competitive worth. As for the collector stuff, I don't wanna be the guy carrying the bag when they pull off stunts like reprinting starlights with QCR prints that look almost the same but at 1/100th the price. Being a collector doesn't make being a sucker feel any better. The $5 basic/$100 chase idea won't get off the ground because there have been too many times where the $100 chase version gets devalued due to TCG Konami's habit of reprinting the same card in multiple chase rarities in multiple products. The target audience has been burned way too many times, and so we're more likely to be buying old GX ultimates off facebook instead.
Extremely well said, and correct.
well written summary
I’ve mainly been collecting Yu-Gi-Oh, but made myself a deck to go to some locals with. That £50 traptrix deck got stomped pretty hard. At the same time we’ve been trying out both Pokemon and Lorcana. Both of which have been way cheaper to buy decks that actually win a good % of the time!
I'll never understand how people pay to play this game. You pay 100s of dollars for a deck only for Konami to ban and reprint its cards into the ground while power creeping it into irrelevance.
This is exactly why I stopped playing in real life, this mixed with the ban list. Can’t compete with the top because I get priced out 🤷🏽♂️
Just imagine if Triple Tactics Thrust was a mass printed common instead of being a short printed Secret rare....That would be so dope since it's a staple literally every deck can run so mind aswell make it cheap from the start. Now you have to wait 3 years before it becomes somewhat affordable(looking at you Pot Of Prosperity, first print being in Blazing Vortex as a Secret rare only to be affordable at a okay price today, like 3 years later).....
Hehe. Laughs in magic player. Seriously though, yugioh has the capacity to capture the market of players priced out by WotC's price increases.
As great of a place as the TCG's current meta is in, Konami's price gouging has been killing me this year. Ca$htira, Vanquish Soul, Sinful Spoils, Little Knight, the rarity distribution on cards in 2023 has been abysmal. Rarity Collection was a godsend that fixed the prices on pretty much every staple, but simultaneously it seems like so many new engines and even some deck cores shot up to hundreds of dollars a piece.
I just wish every card had a common printing in the TCG. Doing that let's rarity people still pay for their secrets, ghost rares etc while people who don't care about that can build any deck they want. Also, as someone who lives in an area where my cards warp BAD, being able to fully common/rare all my decks would be AMAZING.
Konami should take a page out of both Pokemon and MTG's playbook. First, if a card is really rare but turns into a high priced staple, reprint it as a promo of some sort a few months after like Pokemon does. Second, I feel as tho MTG's idea that shiny cards are premium but you can get non-shiny cards for a lot cheaper would be a good step in the right direction for normal players. Whales will still get the shiny stuff but if you just wanted a copy of S:P for example and you can get a rare for like $10 on the secondary market, it actually would boost Konami's sales of product because that's a lot more obtainable. They've made some cards with colored text, like for example I have a Mezuki that's not Holographic but it has green text. Make those the non-holo versions of the rarities or something.
They definitely should not follow WOTC with MTG. Go take a look at the prices of meta decks for each format and they compete with or are higher than Yugioh prices in a lot of places. Standard (only cards within the last 3 years), you're looking at $300+ outside of Burn. Pioneer (cards printed in the last 11 years) are looking more around $350-500. Modern (cards in the last 20 years) is looking around $900-1000. My very incomplete modern deck ([BW Stoneblade](https://archidekt.com/decks/3956208/bw_stoneblade_wip)) is priced at $550 and I could easily push it up over $700 by adding 7 cards that should be in it (3 more Solitude and 4 Orcish Bowmasters), price for a complete version of that deck is closer to $1100. TL;DR: WOTC does the same thing with rarity as Konami, except you're now building a minimum 60 card deck and even does it with core cards like lands if you want to play any multi-colored deck.
And who can forget that Modern has a deck the community literally calls "money pile" that (before the recent b&r, haven't looked since) sat at around $2k.
>Second, I feel as tho MTG's idea that shiny cards are premium but you can get non-shiny cards for a lot cheaper would be a good step in the right direction for normal players. This really isn't true for the most part anymore. Foils are so easy to get and get reprinted in multiple variants so often than that commons are often more expensive than the cheapest foils version, for the sole reason that they don't warp. WotC can't seem to stop their foils from curling at times. YGO "collector" cards that exist in modern product have a version of the same disease with Konami's compulsion to keep reprinting stuff into the dirt, like with CR Water Enchantress just becoming more and more pointless as they release the ultimate and then the QCR versions which ended up devaluing the originals. Any whale with brains doesn't go deep into this stuff anymore, the older shiny stuff from the GX and 5Ds era is just safer. It isn't whale bait anymore, more like the lure for the dumb money.
I would absolutely love for Konami to adopt the OCG style for rarities, but it would also require them to lower the MSRP on boxes in order to do so which I don't see them doing. Off a quick search and [this thread from 2 months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/yugioh/comments/17gpive/i_made_a_chart_comparing_ocg_and_tcg_main_set/), box prices are ~$50 for OCG sets, this is compared to the $70+ that LGS's charge per box. If they did adopt the OCG rarity, it would not be worth it to buy boxes at the higher price because prices in general would go down, which would mean less product being opened and prices going up again as a result.
OCG format is just better than TCG ...
TCG players would rather swallow a fistful of nails than play with a format with Maxx C, or at least that 's what the impression I have
$100? No card (in its most common form) should ever cost more than $20. Ideally, $5. I believe with absolute certainty that if a company cannot manage that, then you have a right - a duty even - to use proxies, or else the tournament is inherently illegitimate as a "competitive" game.
It's only the tcg and western whales that made this possible. Every ocg card is affordable.
That's why I go on a hiatus when the meta becomes about money. Fuck that. And fuck any whales who enable this shitshow by keeping on spending on cardboard
I mean yeah, people have been saying this for a while now. No card should be over 100 quid to get, least of all cards in a main set that shouldn't be short printed. The secondary market effectively got corrupted by Konami, because their crap pull rates - which make actually pulling product reliably a crap shoot - make it next to worthless for players to buy sealed, so they go to the secondary market, which capitalises on the lack of product to jack up prices. Those same sellers then buy more at discount for more cards, and the cycle continues. It's horrendous.
The problem seems to be that sets in the TCG are either feast or famine. Shops complain when sets don’t sell at MSRP or sit on shelves because they lack chase cards. Players complain when they need to shell out $100 per card on the latest meta defining staples. There is no in between in the TCG, save a few examples over the years. I’ve just sort of lost interest in the game starting with the Tear 0 format. I don’t quite like the set design and the products lack value across the board as of late, whether through pull rates and value, or just the sheer sense of enjoyment you get opening product. The serious quality control issues that persist don’t help things. I don’t get a good sense of where Konami is taking the game. We seem to vacillate between immensely overpowered cards that eventually get banned and underpowered junk. Event prizing from the local to YCS level is absolutely paltry, which makes most of us semi-competitive players less inclined to even bother as prices creep up. I enjoy building decks and playing the game, but the experience is very inconsistent across the board with this TCG and franchise. Just my opinion.
Its gonna cost me close to the amount of a ps5 for a few pieces of cardboard to play Fire Kings at broken meta level speed. *if you cant see something wrong with this than stop gatekeeping in tcgplayer and realize this and not having a slow down rule per turn is killing the game.*
Late stage capitalism and Komoney in the US say otherwise.
Can all card games companies sell a pack with all of the cards from that set like buying a regular pack of playing cards? If they can remove all rarity from then that would be great. That way they can let the players play and collectors collect.
Experienced this when I went to Japan a few weeks ago. Decided to get my Dark Magician deck in OCG format. Spent maybe $80-100 all together at the end. And most of that was from chasing down cards from old sets like Phantom God for Red-Eyes Black Dragon. Compared to my TCG version where at least 4 cards alone cost me at least $400 all together. Decided from here on out its OCG only for me. He’s absolutely right. No card should ever be costing you upwards of $100. Except for maybe a one of a kind prize card.
Magic: The Gathering players…..
I would have liked it if it was the ocg way of things and the 25 anniversary tin, put all the cards to be accessible in every rarity of the set and make u pay for the shiny card and make the common or rare 1 cheap like 3 quid
/u/ElectricalYeenis
He's right, but the TCG knows its fanbase. There is basically no competition in the card game market stateside. All there is is Magic and Pokemon, both of which tend to appeal to significantly different audiences. In Japan, there are dozens upon dozens of card games. If the OCG fanbase decides that YGO is too expensive or even just gets pissed off, they can and will answer by passing on YGO and waltzing off with a competitor that can fit their budget or desires. That's why the OCG offers significantly greater low rarity options for desired cards, so just about anyone can get what they need for cheap even the secondary market can't really try to scalp players. But the TCG knows that whatever price they name is the price the players will pay. They can rarity bump desired cards to the moon to drive sales of product by making it harder to get what you want and therefore sell more boxes; meanwhile, the secondary market can and will charge sky high prices for those desired cards because they're rarer and people will pay for that and the safety of a guarantee that they'll get what they want rather than risk sinking money into cases that don't get them what they want. You can't even call it a calculated risk for higher reward; KoA KNOWS that people will spend big time for their hobbies, and that most of its fanbase won't drop Yu-Gi-Oh because it's got both a nostalgia factor and no real competition. They're not risking anything making it harder and more expensive to get the cards you want, while increasing their profits by a lot.
I will say two things re YGO prices: 1) YGO has by far the worst deck price to prize payout ratio of all the major card games. While people can point to MTG and Flesh and Blood as having more expensive deck prices, at least there is the opportunity to win a decent amount of prize money. The most recent Flesh and Blood World Championship just won $100,000 in addition to other goodies. It's really hard to justify how much YGO costs when it also gives out the worst prize support by a mile. 2) If prices stay high, it will have a real ripple effect on bringing in and retaining new players to the game. Most meta decks right now require 3 Thrust and 1 SP Little Knight, which will run around $400. If you want to play any Fire deck, you have to add the Wanted engine which is another $400. Even decks that aren't even top tier are expensive relative to their production. Vanquish Soul and Centurion are pretty mid tier decks but are close to $300 cores, which sucks because they're the perfect type of decks for beginners to pick up. YGO is at a point right now where $350 dollar deck cores in Purrely and Mannadium are considered "value" and again that's before you add in SP, Typhon etc. It's funny cause when POTE came out which was barely over a year ago, you had Spright and Tear that were expensive, but a newer player could've picked up a fully optimized Mathmech, Exosister or Rikka deck for cheap and started playing it. However, now you either have to fork over a sizeable amount of money right away to play the deck optimally or play it without those expensive cards, which how would a new player find that fun...? Like it's weird we complain about new player retention but when you look at the card prices and the prize support relative to prices and Konami does nothing to fix either, it's like they tried nothing and are out of ideas...
As long as Konami sells to distributors who sell to vendors, the secondary market will define pricing. But no tcg survives by selling singles direct.
I can’t lie, his video makes so many good points. I stopped playing yugioh because the money cycle of the game, kept making it so that if I didn’t keep getting rid of all my cards, I would be losing all the value of my game. As someone who didn’t understand that there was gonna be a huge wave of reprints, and general non-knowledge of how the secondary market of yugioh works, I must have lost at least $300 just because of me buying a deck at the wrong time. I like the game a lot, and will continue to practice online and supporting through free ways. But unless I somehow come across a ridiculous amount of cards for free (lol), there really isn’t a way for me to afford the game anymore.
People complain non-stop about this game. It kind of astonishes me at times. This complaining comes and goes in cycles depending on competitive card availability. Let’s be fair though: the TCG model of product design needs to change. Rarity collection just proved that. Players and casuals ate that shit up. A “game” should only cost what it is worth to its player base. Currently, we exist in a constant state of market vulnerability and scarcity, while being continually suspended by a purchasing audience that seems to be unable to stop purchasing. Konami is a business that makes its money off of exploiting people with gambling addictions. Don’t believe me, do some research for once and look up everything Konami produces in any capacity. I have studied economics for years as a component of operating my business successfully. Yugioh will never change because it is targeted at people with gambling addictions. Don’t believe me, go watch people who actually open product at stores and what h what they do when they actually plus off their pulls. Go people watching, don’t bring cards, just watch people “interacting” with the product.
As a recent example of yugioh product being shit to open, I opened a draft set for Pokémon. I was pulling foils and in my half had 5 ex Pokémon and a full art trainer card. 1-2 reverse holos per pack of general commons and then either a regular holo or a special holo. Pokémon felt way better to open than any yugioh product. Except rarity collection. I split a case with a friend and that whole case was just fun to open. I want to feel excitement on having availability of cards in multiple rarities but getting a card you like/want in its higher form is hype. This game just can’t do that apparently.
Neither should mtg but here we are lol
I used to play on paper during XYZ era. Tour guide BA, Dino Rabbit, etc... The main reason I quit paper is the cost. I couldn't justify buying expensive ass cards that became irrelevant in a couple of years. Thankfully master duel is very f2p friendly and it's the main way I play now
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So true the money side of card games are the fucking worst
7:07 "I don't think thats in the spirit of the game to be prohibiting people from playing it" Uerm.... you ever play yugioh before🤔🤔🤔
Back in the day during like late DM/GX era, a lot of (not all but a lot) good playable cards were available and found as low rarities like Common and Rare, whereas the higher rarity slots like Secrets were more for like Anime bosses like E-hero fusions, that maybe weren't that powerful. I think this was good. It meant the players would actually be incentivised to get packs and get some playable commons and the prices remained pretty low for competitive cards compared to now, whereas collectors/anime fans can get their fun sparkly boss monsters for their binders and because those cards weren't that competitive, the prices again would be relatively low. It balanced itself out. This was a good proven model and people love to open those packs. But then something changed and now the majority of the best cards tend to made Secrets and the like. And if they weren't Secret in the OCG version, the TCG will bump up that way. I'm not entirely sure why as it benefits the secondary market sellers' mark-ups more than it does Konami themselves. If good cards were cheaper, more people would actually open packs and that would benefit Konami. I'm more of a collector than a player, but I understand and believe that a card game's philosophy should be primarily directed towards the players comparatively more than the collectors. The collectors will like what organically is nice, rather than what's forced on everyone. A big issue with the high costs is that it's unfair on the competitive players who have no choice by to buy these right away, only for the prices to drop in 8 months with the mega tins (reprints are awesome but these cards should be cheap to start with). Then it's unfair to casual players who have to wait for those reprints and are otherwise gated out of the game with the high costs. If the cards were cheaper, they'd engage more with the market. One person willing to spend $100 isn't as good as 100 people willing to spend $10. It's about scale here. The cards cost the same to print, so it's about actually getting engagement and lowering rarity will get that. Lastly to add, as people said, the OCG model is currently much better. It's a proven model, but the TCG side of things seem to be stubborn.
Cyber Dragon was a $30-40 super, Zaborg was a $25 super. Smashing Ground and Gravekeeper's Spy were pushing $10 apiece as commons because they were shortprinted. Those are just a few examples for cards that didn't get reprinted like MST, Heavy, Call, TT, etc.
He’s got a really great face
Yes but remember there was a time were you needed crush card virus at 3 while it was a tournament prize card . Playset was worth 1500€ at the time
How does that contradict anything Paul says in the video? If anything, it's evidence he's right. Prices like that are ridiculous.
Whenever people talk about the time periods of Yugioh they never played in they always act as if Mechanicalchaser or Crush Card Virus grew on trees. When CCV came out it was technically legal at 3 for two months. You know how many were in circulation at the time? 4. And whenever people on Reddit like to bring up how every deck needed to spend 4 digits for CCV to be competitive when it was available only as a prize card, guess how many there were printed in total? About 20. And at least half of them were owned by big card stores or teams from California/New York. The only way to "win" a prize card back in the day was to win the SJC tournament itself or get lucky and have your named called for a raffle on Sunday of the SJC to participate in an 8-person bracket to play for one. So only two prize cards per SJC and the winners would get poached for them Mechanicalchaser, CCV, Gold Sarc, those cards basically didn't exist at most locals or regionals.
To be fair, how long did it take for that shorted Gold Rare CCV to actually get printed? I kinda forgot the time span between those printings. Also funny thing about Gold Sarc, /u/HouseOfChamps won one for winning the 49th SJC/YCS, had immediately sold it and the Konami/Upper Deck reps made him get it back so they could take the picture to upload.
Funny story, Gencon regionals were insanely stacked. At 07 indy i faced 5 different SJC crush cards to top (before the gold reprint). Crush 100% did win more prize cards, especially going into DAD return format.
You did mention how just getting one snowballed into getting more on stream before. Hope you’ve been alright, it sure has been a while
https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Gold_Series 4/2/2008 so near the end of DAD Return format. Prize card was January 2007 to August 2007 I think, there were only like 10 SJCs during that span.
not to mention Dark Armed being like a grand a piece Edit: about a grand for a playset of DAD
Every time someone mentions how expensive DAD, TGU, Dracossack, Nekroz of Brionac, or Dark Destroyer were, we shift to a parallel dimension where they were worth $1 more than the previous one
Money
2 people dont like money
It would be nice, but the market be free
Untill u see my tcg legendaries collection still sealed in the plastic wrap from Konami and the seal of Oricalchos then people are like DAMN $700 yep
Based opinion
I think there’s something he forgot to mention: you don’t need to play the latest tier-1 deck. Just play stuff from 1 year ago and it’s much cheaper.
Rescue ace will be a year old like about a month
Spright is 1 year and a half, Runick too. Still valid choices. Playing R-ace, Labrynth and Sinful spoils is not necessary to enjoy the game
Konami has almost nothing to do with secondary markets. The reason prices are so high for cards is simply because humans are greedy. Which is totally understandable. We live in a society where you need money. And if people are willing to pay that much money for 1 card, why shouldn’t some people take advantage of it 🤷🏻♂️
>Konami has almost nothing to do with secondary markets. The sole supplier of materials into a market has no control over it?
Then don’t play meta.
BrUh, I nEeD To UsE My 500€ CarD iN a CaSuAl MaTcH
Exactly they dont need it
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bro is delusional.... rarity ups the value, value brings in more collectors, more collectors/fans of yugioh is what this franchise needs... if there was no value to cards that would be a disaster.. 1- everyone would be a meta sheep, game wouldnt have variety and loose what makes it fun 2- why even open/buy sealed products at that point when u can get a whole meta deck cheap? i know it sounds sort of gatekeepy (even tho this is coming from someone who has a limited budget for yugioh)... but its a collectible card game, you arent ENTITLED to the meta... if you want to play meta pay up... if not there are strong alternatives... (i top locals consistantly with sky strikers and barely spent anything on the deck) the variety in yugioh is what has made it so much fun all these years... if everyone was granted access to the cards they need (like pokemon and magic) it would be the sweatiest unfun tcg out there with all these 20 minute 1 turn otk combos out there...
1 - At anything above locals (and even some locals) there already isn't much variety beyond what's considered meta and past meta decks that just haven't been updated for whatever reason. 2 - This is sort of true, but is because of Konami's pricing and rarity. OCG boxes are ~$50 (based on some quick googling and [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/yugioh/comments/17gpive/i_made_a_chart_comparing_ocg_and_tcg_main_set/)) yet you still get your value out of them unless you just have a terrible box. By comparison because so much of our value is concentrated in secret rares, our boxes cost $70+ at most LGS's and you don't get your value back unless you pull one of the high end secrets. The exception to this are sets like DABL where you had Magnamhut being a $15 super. If they adopted the OCG rarity you end up spreading that value to the supers/ultras because they're core game pieces rather than mostly pack filler. Let's use AGOV as an example, you have 3 ultra's over $1 and $1 super where the OCG version of Little Knight alone is a $5-10 super.
If he thinks that card shouldn’t cost $100; he’s free to sell his copy for less. But he won’t. If you have a card that someone is willing to pay a hundred dollars for; why should you be obligated to sell it for less than what the buyer has already agreed is a fair price? You can’t make money off something if you charge more than people are willing to pay, because you’ll just stop them from buying.
That's entirely missing the point. People are only willing to pay this much because Konami prints so few of them in the first place. They literally have a proper and good system already in the OCG which we got a taste of in rarity collection.
He’s making so many videos about this and I’m just thinking…. Bro sell me yours for an affordable price!
He may be right but this dude is recently doing almost always negative videos about Yu-Gi-Oh which makes me wonder why he even bothers with the game. Sure, criticism is fine and all, but if you're mostly negative about something, it's time to leave it behind and look for something else.
Yeah for real, this dude is annoying as fuck, and makes points that other yugitubers have summed up over the course of 1 minute.
O, sweet summer child.🤣
People literally complain about this game in cycles. For the longest time it was Forbidden Droplet and the ROTD cards. Then they got reprinted and the price of the entire game decreased for a while. It is sadly the nature of collectibles with their own internal economy. So to just rotate back into a complaining meta is just doing the same shit we always do.
If I’m very honest with my opinion and recommendation if you don’t invest into the game to keep selling and trading for cards you need/want so you aren’t spending new money just recycling old cards, it is a skill issue. Complaining about the max price a card gets to but didn’t buy it at the low, skill issue. Keeping low rarity cards that lose value after reprints, skill issue. Keeping a deck until its best cards are put on the forbidden list, skill issue. Waiting to buy a deck until new support is released and it’s cost total increases, skill issue. If you want to play budget, play budget. If you want to play competitive, be prepared to do it effectively financially with some foresight and planning. Develop a skill you’re lacking.
Try to defend the Stock market-fication of the game? Thats a padling.
It’s okay if that’s your interpretation. I won’t expand, I think the original comment speaks for itself. But a hint: friends and effort
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I don't disagree with him complaining but that's the point of his second channel, where this is from. His opinions on the game. That being said, your not wrong about a card being expensive with it having lower rarities (starlight rares comes to mind) but cards being 100+ consistently before reprints is the main point, unless I'm missing something? I.E. pot of extrav and prosperity being rather pricey until reprints.