Greetings, Yu-Gi-Oh players! It's been a very long time since I've updated this site, but I resumed playing competitively a few months ago and spent that time learning about the current state of the game in order to get back into the swing of things. Obviously, a lot of things have changed in the time that I've been gone, and I thought that giving my thoughts on some of these changes would be a perfect way to get back into regular posting here on the blog. I'm glad to be back, and I hope you all enjoy reading the new (and old!) posts on the site.
Click through for the full article after the jump!
The newest forbidden and limited list, which went into effect on September 1st, 2013, brought with it a lot of surprises and changes to the competitive world of Yu-Gi-Oh in the TCG.
I think the biggest surprise for most of us is the new duration of ban lists. Konami decided to move to a 3 list year, as opposed to the 2 lists we had every year previously. A lot of players, including myself, were very apprehensive about the change. Many valid concerns were raised, particularly what was going to happen to the value of cards since the formats would be changing more frequently.
I personally am not concerned with making money from this game, and I think that for the overall health of the competitive circuit it was a brilliant idea on Konami's part to implement a third format change every year, solely because prices on current popular cards will drop, and because cards that are yet to be released will likely never reach the astronomical amounts we've seen in formats past ($120 Pot of Duality, $100-ish Spellbook of Judgment, $120 Draccosack, etc. There are many other examples.).
I think it's detrimental to any game that aims to have a healthy, varied meta to allow the value of cards to skyrocket like that. After Tachyon released last format and Dragon Rulers and Prophecy proceeded to dominate the meta, it effectively turned the competitive scene into a game of money. If one didn't have the money to buy one of the two top decks, they simply didn't win. This isn't a new premise in Yu-Gi-Oh, but it's something that's long overdue for a change.
Card games and their mechanics are designed on the premise of skill, not the amount of money one has in their wallet, and that's the direction I think Konami is trying to take this game. Of course, there are always going to be the ridiculously overpowered and overpriced tier 1 decks; Konami will never fully do away with their cash cows, but they've taken steps to at least allow other decks the room to compete. That's important, because it leads to more variety in the decks being played at any given time, and as a result forces players to increase their skill level overall by learning how all of the other decks operate. This chain of events ultimately prevents players from just blindly steam-rolling everything else with an overpowered $800 deck that they bought on eBay because it's so powerful.
This isn't really a new direction for Konami, though. It's evident that they've been trying to make the game cheaper and more accessible for quite some time now. In more recent times, Konami reprints the powerful, highly sought-after cards very quickly and makes them easy for everyone to get via tins and special collections: Pot of Duality, Solemn Warning, Rescue Rabbit, Leviair, Zenmaines, etc. have all seen fast reprints, some of them multiple times. This balances the game out tremendously, because powerful cards are no longer solely the domain of players with a bottomless wallet. If powerful staple cards like Pot of Duality and Solemn Warning are in the hands of nearly every player, then it puts everyone on roughly the same footing, at least in terms of the available card pool. The skills one has and what one is able to accomplish with those cards will vary wildly by the player, but at least everyone has the same opportunity to use the best cards in the game in their decks.
But that's not the only way this ban list change benefits the game. I know that I've played through a few torturous formats where one or two decks were completely unstoppable, to the point that it discouraged me from playing. The format that immediately jumps to my mind is the 3-Launcher Infernity, Rescue Cat X-Sabers and Frog OTK format. It was absolutely awful, as I'm sure most players who experienced it would agree, and quite a few of my friends stopped playing the game because of it.
As a game creator and designer, I think Konami had to have realized at some point that this model of maintaining the game is not sustainable in terms of profits. If there are decks in the meta that are actively discouraging people from playing the game, or causing them to quit altogether, then that translates to less people buying cards and participating in Konami events; in other words, lost profit for Konami. Besides being unhealthy for Konami's bottom line, the two or three deck format is just toxic for the health of the competitive game.
The last few months of the March 2013 format illustrates this perfectly. Dragon Rulers and Prophecy were nearly unstoppable decks, and typically lost to no other decks except for each other (or to Evilswarm every now and then). So, we had a two-deck format, and a lot of people just stopped playing, or significantly decreased their activity because they were so frustrated with these decks. Still, because of our love for this game, we kept playing, and were forced to suffer through months and months of Dragons and Spellcasters. How boring and tedious!
Not anymore. With the format changing every four months, it's unlikely that we will ever see this happen again. It's not impossible, of course, but even if it does happen, the amount of time we will have to wait to see overpowered decks get tamed is much shorter. In my opinion, that is a wonderfully healthy change for the game that should have been made a long time ago. Many people were/are upset about the format change frequency, but I think it's pretty much perfect. 3-month formats would be too short and wouldn't allow adequate time for a meta to solidify, while 6-month formats are simply too long and leave the meta to stagnate.
I am also thrilled about the fact that the TCG list now differs from the OCG list. I was always puzzled by the fact that the two lists were by and large the exact same thing. The two markets have traditionally had pretty different metas, and the changes every March and September to the OCG list frequently focused only on the OCG market and failed to address the issues the meta was experiencing in the TCG. That seems to have been taken care of in a meaningful, positive way, as well. This change alone may well prove to be the best thing competitive Yu-Gi-Oh has seen in years.
The changes made to our list are kind of hit-and-miss, however. I am very glad to see Monster Reborn banned again, as well as Spellbook of Judgment and Super Rejuvenation. These cards are all unbelievably overpowered and unhealthy for the game, so I'm happy to see them go. Other limits and semi-limits I felt weren't enough. For instance, Mermails. Hitting Deep Sea Diva and Atlantean Dragoons was a good start, but it wasn't nearly enough to bring the deck down to the unbroken level. I think the OCG's limits of Abyssteus and Abysssphere were much smarter and more effective. There are other changes I don't necessarily agree with, but that's not the point of this post, so I won't go into that.
I suppose only time will tell if all of these changes turn out to be good or bad. Though the initial reaction was overwhelmingly negative, I think that now that we're a couple of weeks into the new format, players' opinions are starting to change and I think that, in time, players are going to grow to really like all of these changes, and start to wonder why we ever did things differently before. I can't wait to see what happens!
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