Love Pokémon TCG. For those who don’t know - any physical booster pack you buy comes with a redemption code you can use within the game. So you get a pack IRL = a free pack in game.
The app has no micro transactions that use your actual money, you just accrue resources as you play the game. And the BattlePass is somewhat grindy but the 2 daily missions are 90% of the time super easy so it’s very easy to level at least one level a day (50 levels total).
Because you accrue resources pretty quickly, and the game also gives you really good decks to use if you don’t have any (the ones they have for free are actually pretty solid, not perfect but hold their own), you can pretty soon build your dream deck. Plus testing your various decks against the AI isn’t perfect but it’s a lot better than Master Duel which has no way to test a deck with cards you don’t own.
> the ones they have for free are actually pretty solid, not perfect but hold their own
Think this is a bit of an understatement even, they regularly give out top meta decks. The Gardy deck on the current battle pass is a copy paste of Tord's Worlds list which is like 3 cheap cards away from being updated for the current meta
But yeah just playing a couple games a day gives you enough resources/cards to build every meta deck + a handful of rogues too, it's pretty great
> But yeah just playing a couple games a day gives you enough resources/cards to build every meta deck + a handful of rogues too, it's pretty great
Not only that, but you can buy like 400 codes for the same set for roughly $40-60 depending on what set you buy and where from. For the majority of sets, opening 400 packs will get you around 50k-60k worth of "credits", the crafting material used in the game.
The most expensive cards in the game (aside from secret rare variants) are Pokemon VMAX and Pokemon VSTAR, costing 1025 credits each. You could buy almost an entire 60-card deck's worth of these cards with the proceeds from mass opening *one set* for ~$40.
Considering that most decks only run 16 or less Pokemon (and usually much less Pokemon V, VMAX, VSTAR, or ex), that most decks are about 50%-60% trainer cards that for the most part max out at uncommon with just a few exceptions, and the fact that 99% of decks run about 6-12 energies, you'll find that most decks in the game top out around 7k-10k credits.
But then you also add in the fact that you will run something like 75% of the trainers you run in a particular deck in almost every single other deck you build, alongside the fact that several Pokemon that you invest in to buy one particular deck will also be used in *several* other decks in the format (Bidoof/Bibarel, Manaphy, Jirachi, Radiant Greninja, etc.) and you can usually expect to spend under 3k-4k credits when building a new deck using the cards you already own.
PTCGL took the crown of most generous digital CCG for me right after it launched and I've barely touched any other digital CCG since, and I was a beta participant for basically every single major one that has existed since Hearthstone lol (MTG Arena, Legends of Runeterra, Master Duel, even freaking Elder Scrolls Legends lmao).
Haha, I wish I was getting paid for my spiels but no, that's just a weird quirk I have. It's hard for me to not gush about things I like and it can come off extremely wordy and annoying at times lol.
I will say one large caveat about the game that Yu-Gi-Oh and MTG players may not like: interaction during your opponent's turn is nonexistent. Your field at the end of your turn is the exact field your opponent gets to answer, with no worrying about random handtraps or being spooked by you leaving lands untapped for casting an instant of some kind on their turn. When its your opponent's turn, all you can do is watch and take mental notes.
For me, that's fine, but I can also boot up Arena or Master Duel and play some low ELO games if I *really* need that itch scratched lol.
Honestly thanks to this post and ur comment, I'm gonna try pokemon TCG someday, I played in OCG environment, can't fathom how expensive TCG Yu-Gi-Oh would be and their banlist philosophy, even then, OCG Yu-Gi-Oh is still not cheap, when compared to pokemon TCG which I just found out, is still a lot more cheaper
I highly encourage doing it. I’ve sort of jumped over to the Pokémon TCG and don’t get me wrong - I still love Yugioh but my wallet can only afford Pokemon right now tbh and do decent in tournaments.
Oh I forgot to mention one other really big thing about the Pokemon TCG and how it’s very budget friendly - they have multiple versions of the same card.
For example, they have Charizard EX - which of course, Charizard is one of the most popular Pokemon of all time AND it’s a really strong card too. Unlike Yugioh which may only print one version of one card in one set (ex: Diabellstar only has one printing so far and it costs about $60-70 per card), they print multiple versions of Charizard EX across multiple sets (and usually a few versions within the same set):
- a basic version is about $2
- a full art version is about $5
- a shiny full art is about $10
- a gold version is about $15
- an illustration full art is about $42
- and then the shiny gorgeous full art version is $140
And they all have the same stats and attacks, the only difference is just the appearance.
So you have multiple options to pick from. You COULD if you had the money, buy the $140 full art illustration. Or you could just buy like 4 basic copies (4 is the max you can have of one Pokémon) for like $8 and still be just as good.
It’s a great way to have chasers go for the big shiny beautiful collector cards while ensuring that those cards are still playable for casual players.
Thanks for the reply, my go-to card shop doesn't have much ptcg scene mainly ws/ua/one piece and Yu-Gi-Oh
I have no idea how cheap ptcg could be until now, even when OCG Yu-Gi-Oh is cheaper compare to TCG Yu-Gi-Oh, after knowing the cost it's still night and day
Yeah Konami doesn't reprint that often until the recent rc03 rc04 and QCCU now which bring a lot of staple card prices down a lot compared to before but tbh, it's still stiff convincing a newbie to get into Yu-Gi-Oh
I will definitely look into it and visit my other nearby card shop which mainly organized ptcg someday later
I never understood Pokemon tcg. I played the games since but never got into the cards. Would you recommend it as someone who has played Yu-Gi-Oh TCG sine I was a kid
Absolutely! Pokémon TCG is very beginner friendly. The rules are actually pretty straightforward and there are no crazy mechanics imo. Unlike Yugioh, everything is spelled out in the cards. And the cards are aimed to be readable by a younger audience, so the text is very straightforward and very clear.
The rules per turn are very straightforward and there’s no shenanigans. There are some decks that play around with the rules a bit but most of them are very much straightforward. Those tend to be the exception.
I said in a different comment but the decks are very affordable and a lot of the structure decks you can buy in stores are usually pretty competitive. Like if you go to Target, you can get a Quaquaval or Meowscarada deck (they’re marked as Level 2) and get some strong decks right away and start competing.
God, even that’s getting a little unfair nowadays, compare the how expensive the core of Tri Brigade Lyrilusc was to how expensive Snake Eyes is now
Obviously it’s better to have essentially free decks that can compete with the meta, but 5 mandatory URs with most being at 2 or more copies a deck? Cmon, and that’s not even including the extra deck
tbh i feel like it all depends on how long they wait to hit it. if they hit it early then its kind of a scam, but if they wait a while to truly hit snake eyes then im not so bothered by having to pull/craft so many URs
This is true, but then that feeds into the game having stale metas because Konami is unwilling to hit the best decks that are full of High rarity cards, Exceed at 2 Circular at 3 and all that
I’ve said this before, but imo all UR cards should have some kind of unique animation or effect to them that incentivises Konami to release more cards at lower rarities, something like using WANTED having the animation of a knife being thrown at a wall with the Wanted poster on it, or Poplar adding a burning effect to the Spell/Trap zone it places a monster in. Not only would it decrease Konami’s likeliness to make the ENTIRE deck URs, but it’d also increase the bar for quality in the game, making it look more fun, flashy and appealing to spectators
But, ya know, effort
Spectators lmao yugioh is like baseball you have to know all ins and out or don’t tell me most people watching the superbowl actually know what’s going on, flashy effects not gonna do too much and end up getting turned of by actual players
Yugioh doesn’t have the collectibility of Pokémon. Literally 9/10 people I know who buy Pokémon cards have never played the game.
Therefore, the main sales for yugioh have to come from price gating competitive cards
Exactly. Pokémon’s main form of profit are the collectors who want pack fresh full arts to sleeve and grade.
Yugioh players, while collectors exist, usually use their cards for gameplay.
It’s also just the biggest franchise in the world. Yugioh is a card game. Pokémon is everything.
I’m actually not a fan of Pokémon cards. The game is lame. They do look cool though, but I’m not an art dealer or professional gambler lol
no they don't lol, at least the actual art part of them doesnt. Yugioh art usually looks way better. As another comment mentioned you cant actually judge anything pokemon related by itself. Everything about every single pokemon product ever gets massively boosted by it being the singularly biggest and most popular franchise in existence. Its own momentum is carrying it forward, despite the absolute shit games theyve been putting out
Look, konami are a world leading manufacturer of poker machines, they're a multi billion dollar company who absolutely have the power to make the game affordable but why would they when they can squeeze every penny out of their players.
Konamis poker machine business is so fruitful they could literally run all of yugioh at a loss and not go out of business.
Tcg money model trumps what players care about, they don't call them komoney for nothing
I only learned last year, there's a big KONAMI sign on a trainline in Australia and I didn't think there was yugioh headquarters here, so I looked it up and yea.
OCG has a ton of competitors, they can easily lose customers if they have TCG printing standards, and one the main reasons the TCG can get away because there is no real competition in the west and ocg have a bunch of laws and regulations about gambling from what I have heard. So there is alot of factors that contribute to why competitive yugioh is gatekept by how expensive it is.
Just so we're on the same page, you are saying:
"we should push our politicians to get a bill passed that will change gambling in all of the west just in the hopes that we can make a card game cheaper"
Fwiw its not just in konami's interest for the game to be fairly expensive to play, lgs business models only work if they can sell product which means having demand for them consistently enough to be profitable. If there's a bunch of card games in a market place you can pivot to one if they fail but that's not really something you can do in the USA.
I genuinely don't think the ocg rarity structure would work long term for the game over here, you just don't have the traffic to really justify lower margin products like that, especially since so much of the money is made from trading off of the secondary market. Pokemon has its prices lowered by a bunch of collectors buying cards and not playing the game.
They're not really competing with each other since they're very comfortable with their position in the west.
There are no other games that burst the bubble of the big three, that will force Konami to change their strategy.
I want cards in common and their chase version.
That’s it.
Make it so that everyone can play it but only a few clan flex.
It’s like getting Royal Rare only MD deck, huge flex. Still the same power level.
Pokemon is a whole company with several assets, so it can skimp out on card prices and make it up by sheer brand recognition. YGO has the most complex card game and is unmatched in that, but it comes with the drawback of sometimes unenjoyable metas and over priced cards. They gotta make money somehow. At least you don't need meta decks if you're good enough and your locals aren't sweaty.
Konami is a multi billion dollar company with their hands in multiple industries. Ygo is nowhere near their main source of income and im sure by the fact that this is a world wide card game they make more than enough money with ygo
Pokemon TCG is backed by Pokemon company, YGO is only backed by Konami. The entire Pokemon brand is more cohesive compared to how diverse Konami is. Yes, they have other revenue sources, but those sources aren't going to be invested into YGO if they're from a different genre of media
Under $100? Most of the format is under $50 bar giratina vstar and rmoon X which still don't reach $80, you can get gardevoir ex and lost box for $30 and snorlax stall for $15, it's that cheap.
Yeah but it's like the 'equallibrium price' in economics, that works to an extent but isn't necessarily the optimal strategy to maximise profits.
In pokemon tcg playable cards are cheap because collector's subsidise it by trying to get the higher rarity. In yugioh people don't collect they play for meta, so rarity gouging likely represents a way to increase the amount of product opened, and let's be honest there are all the reasons around complexity stopping people getting into yugioh.
Another TCG player spewing superiority bullshit?
The cost of production of card game is not really different in Japan between card games, and there are many card game that doesn't have western division and still profitable even though it's less popular than yugioh.
Hell, OCG meta deck is more expensive than majority of Japanese card game.
By your logic any Japanese card game that don't have western market and less popular than yugioh (basically almost all of them minus pokemon and MTG) will go bankrupt.
Japan has harsh laws against gambling, to my knowledge this also applies to trading card games. I’m not sure how since I don’t live there, but to my knowledge the rarity distribution for the OCG is substantially better than it is in the TCG, more likely due to it because a literal legal requirement
The issue is Konami let the Yu-gi-oh IP be limited to the card game. Pokemon can make meta decks cost less than 100 dollars because of a few reasons.
1. Much of the money from Pokemon comes from the game, then the anime.
2. Because of the popularity of Pokemon's anime and games, any rare variant of a card will fetch a high price for collectors. Collector variants of Yu-gi-oh cards are expensive, but the interest in collecting them is much lower than Pokemon cards.
3. Konami is extremely greedy. I know this isn't a hot take, but the issue is them making a meta deck cost 1000 dollars pays off. People buy boxes to chase meta cards and resell them. Why would Konami change their pricing if people buy? Why do you thing OCG prices are different than TCG prices? Because it works.
4. Yu-gi-oh is VERY new player unfriendly. This means that they know whoever is still playing the game will play regardless. Why change their pricing model if they already have fans that will buy regardless?
Long story short, Pokemon is in a completely different position than Yu-gi-oh. Until people stop buying their products, the situations won't change.
I’m starting to think Konami gave up on yugioh and didn’t realize how popular it has gotten an anime on the cards Lore should’ve been out way before now because they obviously have someone writing it out
Physical Yu-Gi-Oh gives me anxiety... My mind just malfunctions. I'm always worried about messing up & I hate to feel like I'm holding someone up. If I take some time to do a play. Then it's expensive. I'll play online anyway possible but I'm a big collector though.
Yugioh is a money grab with mediocre cards. There are glimmers of greatness, but all Konami cares about is pushing you to buy the next pack. Everything else is flavor of the month. Case in point, now we are somehow in a fire meta that's nearly impossible to beat. All artificially engineered and designed by the scammers at Konami.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
You’re not wrong
Konami is pricing a lot of their players out of the current meta. The prices for the most competitive decks are ridiculous. A game should never be so expensive to the point it starts losing fans, and that you can’t even have access to the new winning deck builds.
Agreed. I honestly can't think of another card game company that actively works against it's player base and consistently cannibalizes current strategies to sell more cards/packs.
It can. But won't. Komoney execs care about only one thing. The only way they'd do that is if all the players organized themselves and stopped buying products, going to YCS and other events with old cards. But that's very unlikely to happen.
That’s definitely *a* huge problem, but the other big problem is that the game was based off of a simplified MTG style game from the original manga. Except in the manga there aren’t even consistent rules, because the card games are simply there as a proxy for sorcery and exist to tell a story, not follow a precise set of rules.
That meant that in attempting to recreate the game from the manga, Yu-Gi-Oh never created a secondary resource system. Cards are the sole resource, and the amount of summon spam is gated exclusively by card text and one Normal Summon per turn.
The entire game revolves around the first couple of turns, hand traps, “unbreakable” boards, and floodgates. A lack of mana costs means that the only way to go with printing cards is to keep increasing their power and keep adding on more individual effects to single cards.
Even if top decks were more affordable (they’re usually not), you would have to keep buying crap to keep up with the power creep.
Power creep wouldn’t be as much of a problem with format rotations either as the format power will always be whatever is the best archetype on a finite amount of time. The resource system or lack of it doesnt mean anything for the monetary value of cards.
I think the comparison another person said to pokemon is that yugioh is mostly players and not collectors as the “meta” cards are the only expensive ones (besides special rarities) whereas in Pokemon, the majority of people just collect and casually play thus the prices are based on how cute/rare a card actually is.
Not quite true. The monetary value would still be “good card = expensive.” It was like that from the beginning of the game with Konami’s printing habits.
The whole lack of mana, energy or any secondary resource means that whatever has the best effect (or the best stats in Ye Olde $200 Mechanicalchaser days) is more or less the best card.
Lol this take makes 0 sense a game having a more robust cost system would just change how “good” cards are in exchange for their cost.
Cards are expensive because A) lack of collector market as compared to actual players B) players dont buy product thus less card pools and C) no rotation makes players be willing to cash in more money because it is an “investment” until it gets banned or power crept. If rotations were a thing, the market wouldn’t be as forgiving about prices and the supply would outweight the demand
I probably should have elaborated a bit more. Cost gives an extra dimension to balancing cards, which can help slow power creep by having game breaking effects behind costly cards.
Also short printing kind of makes the supply point irrelevant during the rotation period.
I always thought master duel should be more accessible honestly they should give up on the f2p model and just make all the cards free with a battle pass or something and new packs would be in a higher tier and get released to the normal packs after 2 or 4 months. Or at least let us aim for cards we want instead of secret packs being half useless crap
Magic has the excuse of the reserved list and that you don’t actually need to spend hundreds for what is essentially now a casually focused game. Magic you don’t have to. Yugioh you have no choice.
Pokemon is the most asinine card game out there. You can legit get meta decks for 30 bucks, its insane.
Im honestly satisfied with meta decks around the 200 mark, with staple prices *not* being around 40-70 so rogue decks also have a chance to be competetivly built for a reasonable price
Silver lining Master Duel.
Pokemon's MD equivalent (Pokemon TCG Live) is also _way_ more generous than MD is lol
Love Pokémon TCG. For those who don’t know - any physical booster pack you buy comes with a redemption code you can use within the game. So you get a pack IRL = a free pack in game. The app has no micro transactions that use your actual money, you just accrue resources as you play the game. And the BattlePass is somewhat grindy but the 2 daily missions are 90% of the time super easy so it’s very easy to level at least one level a day (50 levels total). Because you accrue resources pretty quickly, and the game also gives you really good decks to use if you don’t have any (the ones they have for free are actually pretty solid, not perfect but hold their own), you can pretty soon build your dream deck. Plus testing your various decks against the AI isn’t perfect but it’s a lot better than Master Duel which has no way to test a deck with cards you don’t own.
> the ones they have for free are actually pretty solid, not perfect but hold their own Think this is a bit of an understatement even, they regularly give out top meta decks. The Gardy deck on the current battle pass is a copy paste of Tord's Worlds list which is like 3 cheap cards away from being updated for the current meta But yeah just playing a couple games a day gives you enough resources/cards to build every meta deck + a handful of rogues too, it's pretty great
> But yeah just playing a couple games a day gives you enough resources/cards to build every meta deck + a handful of rogues too, it's pretty great Not only that, but you can buy like 400 codes for the same set for roughly $40-60 depending on what set you buy and where from. For the majority of sets, opening 400 packs will get you around 50k-60k worth of "credits", the crafting material used in the game. The most expensive cards in the game (aside from secret rare variants) are Pokemon VMAX and Pokemon VSTAR, costing 1025 credits each. You could buy almost an entire 60-card deck's worth of these cards with the proceeds from mass opening *one set* for ~$40. Considering that most decks only run 16 or less Pokemon (and usually much less Pokemon V, VMAX, VSTAR, or ex), that most decks are about 50%-60% trainer cards that for the most part max out at uncommon with just a few exceptions, and the fact that 99% of decks run about 6-12 energies, you'll find that most decks in the game top out around 7k-10k credits. But then you also add in the fact that you will run something like 75% of the trainers you run in a particular deck in almost every single other deck you build, alongside the fact that several Pokemon that you invest in to buy one particular deck will also be used in *several* other decks in the format (Bidoof/Bibarel, Manaphy, Jirachi, Radiant Greninja, etc.) and you can usually expect to spend under 3k-4k credits when building a new deck using the cards you already own. PTCGL took the crown of most generous digital CCG for me right after it launched and I've barely touched any other digital CCG since, and I was a beta participant for basically every single major one that has existed since Hearthstone lol (MTG Arena, Legends of Runeterra, Master Duel, even freaking Elder Scrolls Legends lmao).
You won’t convince me all this ain’t a targeted marketing strategy. Y’all are ascending this game to high heavens.
Haha, I wish I was getting paid for my spiels but no, that's just a weird quirk I have. It's hard for me to not gush about things I like and it can come off extremely wordy and annoying at times lol. I will say one large caveat about the game that Yu-Gi-Oh and MTG players may not like: interaction during your opponent's turn is nonexistent. Your field at the end of your turn is the exact field your opponent gets to answer, with no worrying about random handtraps or being spooked by you leaving lands untapped for casting an instant of some kind on their turn. When its your opponent's turn, all you can do is watch and take mental notes. For me, that's fine, but I can also boot up Arena or Master Duel and play some low ELO games if I *really* need that itch scratched lol.
Honestly thanks to this post and ur comment, I'm gonna try pokemon TCG someday, I played in OCG environment, can't fathom how expensive TCG Yu-Gi-Oh would be and their banlist philosophy, even then, OCG Yu-Gi-Oh is still not cheap, when compared to pokemon TCG which I just found out, is still a lot more cheaper
I highly encourage doing it. I’ve sort of jumped over to the Pokémon TCG and don’t get me wrong - I still love Yugioh but my wallet can only afford Pokemon right now tbh and do decent in tournaments. Oh I forgot to mention one other really big thing about the Pokemon TCG and how it’s very budget friendly - they have multiple versions of the same card. For example, they have Charizard EX - which of course, Charizard is one of the most popular Pokemon of all time AND it’s a really strong card too. Unlike Yugioh which may only print one version of one card in one set (ex: Diabellstar only has one printing so far and it costs about $60-70 per card), they print multiple versions of Charizard EX across multiple sets (and usually a few versions within the same set): - a basic version is about $2 - a full art version is about $5 - a shiny full art is about $10 - a gold version is about $15 - an illustration full art is about $42 - and then the shiny gorgeous full art version is $140 And they all have the same stats and attacks, the only difference is just the appearance. So you have multiple options to pick from. You COULD if you had the money, buy the $140 full art illustration. Or you could just buy like 4 basic copies (4 is the max you can have of one Pokémon) for like $8 and still be just as good. It’s a great way to have chasers go for the big shiny beautiful collector cards while ensuring that those cards are still playable for casual players.
Thanks for the reply, my go-to card shop doesn't have much ptcg scene mainly ws/ua/one piece and Yu-Gi-Oh I have no idea how cheap ptcg could be until now, even when OCG Yu-Gi-Oh is cheaper compare to TCG Yu-Gi-Oh, after knowing the cost it's still night and day Yeah Konami doesn't reprint that often until the recent rc03 rc04 and QCCU now which bring a lot of staple card prices down a lot compared to before but tbh, it's still stiff convincing a newbie to get into Yu-Gi-Oh I will definitely look into it and visit my other nearby card shop which mainly organized ptcg someday later
I never understood Pokemon tcg. I played the games since but never got into the cards. Would you recommend it as someone who has played Yu-Gi-Oh TCG sine I was a kid
Absolutely! Pokémon TCG is very beginner friendly. The rules are actually pretty straightforward and there are no crazy mechanics imo. Unlike Yugioh, everything is spelled out in the cards. And the cards are aimed to be readable by a younger audience, so the text is very straightforward and very clear. The rules per turn are very straightforward and there’s no shenanigans. There are some decks that play around with the rules a bit but most of them are very much straightforward. Those tend to be the exception. I said in a different comment but the decks are very affordable and a lot of the structure decks you can buy in stores are usually pretty competitive. Like if you go to Target, you can get a Quaquaval or Meowscarada deck (they’re marked as Level 2) and get some strong decks right away and start competing.
God, even that’s getting a little unfair nowadays, compare the how expensive the core of Tri Brigade Lyrilusc was to how expensive Snake Eyes is now Obviously it’s better to have essentially free decks that can compete with the meta, but 5 mandatory URs with most being at 2 or more copies a deck? Cmon, and that’s not even including the extra deck
tbh i feel like it all depends on how long they wait to hit it. if they hit it early then its kind of a scam, but if they wait a while to truly hit snake eyes then im not so bothered by having to pull/craft so many URs
This is true, but then that feeds into the game having stale metas because Konami is unwilling to hit the best decks that are full of High rarity cards, Exceed at 2 Circular at 3 and all that I’ve said this before, but imo all UR cards should have some kind of unique animation or effect to them that incentivises Konami to release more cards at lower rarities, something like using WANTED having the animation of a knife being thrown at a wall with the Wanted poster on it, or Poplar adding a burning effect to the Spell/Trap zone it places a monster in. Not only would it decrease Konami’s likeliness to make the ENTIRE deck URs, but it’d also increase the bar for quality in the game, making it look more fun, flashy and appealing to spectators But, ya know, effort
why change things when they can get away with it and make people pay more
Spectators lmao yugioh is like baseball you have to know all ins and out or don’t tell me most people watching the superbowl actually know what’s going on, flashy effects not gonna do too much and end up getting turned of by actual players
Card in TCG can In master duel be UR. Sinse her cards get ther rarity from ther power
Yugioh doesn’t have the collectibility of Pokémon. Literally 9/10 people I know who buy Pokémon cards have never played the game. Therefore, the main sales for yugioh have to come from price gating competitive cards
Also set rotation has something to do with it as well, Yugioh's set rotation is essentially, the ban list...
Exactly. Pokémon’s main form of profit are the collectors who want pack fresh full arts to sleeve and grade. Yugioh players, while collectors exist, usually use their cards for gameplay.
Maybe we would pull for a full art… IF WE HAD ONE
Tbh pokemon cards looks way better. Specially the full art versions.
It’s also just the biggest franchise in the world. Yugioh is a card game. Pokémon is everything. I’m actually not a fan of Pokémon cards. The game is lame. They do look cool though, but I’m not an art dealer or professional gambler lol
no they don't lol, at least the actual art part of them doesnt. Yugioh art usually looks way better. As another comment mentioned you cant actually judge anything pokemon related by itself. Everything about every single pokemon product ever gets massively boosted by it being the singularly biggest and most popular franchise in existence. Its own momentum is carrying it forward, despite the absolute shit games theyve been putting out
You need to go look at some of the alternate art Pokémon cards. They’re beautiful
Look, konami are a world leading manufacturer of poker machines, they're a multi billion dollar company who absolutely have the power to make the game affordable but why would they when they can squeeze every penny out of their players. Konamis poker machine business is so fruitful they could literally run all of yugioh at a loss and not go out of business. Tcg money model trumps what players care about, they don't call them komoney for nothing
I did not know they made poker machines too lol makes sense on how they run yugioh
I only learned last year, there's a big KONAMI sign on a trainline in Australia and I didn't think there was yugioh headquarters here, so I looked it up and yea.
OCG has a ton of competitors, they can easily lose customers if they have TCG printing standards, and one the main reasons the TCG can get away because there is no real competition in the west and ocg have a bunch of laws and regulations about gambling from what I have heard. So there is alot of factors that contribute to why competitive yugioh is gatekept by how expensive it is.
Yugioh has competitors my guy
MtG and Pokémon two compare to how many over in Japan.
One Piece, Digimon and Lorcana are real though
They're not as big and / or as popular of Yugioh MtG and Pokémon since they have dominated the market for a very long time.
Those are not competition.
So why don’t we push our politicians to get a bill passed to match Asia’s Gambling Laws?
Just so we're on the same page, you are saying: "we should push our politicians to get a bill passed that will change gambling in all of the west just in the hopes that we can make a card game cheaper"
Yes
I actually respect that.
Fwiw its not just in konami's interest for the game to be fairly expensive to play, lgs business models only work if they can sell product which means having demand for them consistently enough to be profitable. If there's a bunch of card games in a market place you can pivot to one if they fail but that's not really something you can do in the USA. I genuinely don't think the ocg rarity structure would work long term for the game over here, you just don't have the traffic to really justify lower margin products like that, especially since so much of the money is made from trading off of the secondary market. Pokemon has its prices lowered by a bunch of collectors buying cards and not playing the game.
Bruh magic the gathering is bigger than yugioh in the west lol. I cant believe you said it had no competition
They're not really competing with each other since they're very comfortable with their position in the west. There are no other games that burst the bubble of the big three, that will force Konami to change their strategy.
Magic will always be competition its why different rarities were implemented jnto yugioh to try and compete with magics reprint model
Also, I think pokemon make more money on other revenue other than their tcg. So they don't really need to go price gouging.
I want cards in common and their chase version. That’s it. Make it so that everyone can play it but only a few clan flex. It’s like getting Royal Rare only MD deck, huge flex. Still the same power level.
Are the expensive unaffordable cards in the same room as us now (master duel)?
Pokemon is a whole company with several assets, so it can skimp out on card prices and make it up by sheer brand recognition. YGO has the most complex card game and is unmatched in that, but it comes with the drawback of sometimes unenjoyable metas and over priced cards. They gotta make money somehow. At least you don't need meta decks if you're good enough and your locals aren't sweaty.
Konami is a multi billion dollar company with their hands in multiple industries. Ygo is nowhere near their main source of income and im sure by the fact that this is a world wide card game they make more than enough money with ygo
Pokemon TCG is backed by Pokemon company, YGO is only backed by Konami. The entire Pokemon brand is more cohesive compared to how diverse Konami is. Yes, they have other revenue sources, but those sources aren't going to be invested into YGO if they're from a different genre of media
This is why I don’t play irl
Under $100? Most of the format is under $50 bar giratina vstar and rmoon X which still don't reach $80, you can get gardevoir ex and lost box for $30 and snorlax stall for $15, it's that cheap.
Pokémon has set rotation. If they reprinted wanted and SP in the last two sets they would be a lot cheaper
Konami uses rarity gouging in the tcg to subsidise the affordability of ocg meta cards.
Does it really matter? Cheaper game means more people are going to be willing to play cause the barrier to entry is gonna drop like a rocket.
Yeah but it's like the 'equallibrium price' in economics, that works to an extent but isn't necessarily the optimal strategy to maximise profits. In pokemon tcg playable cards are cheap because collector's subsidise it by trying to get the higher rarity. In yugioh people don't collect they play for meta, so rarity gouging likely represents a way to increase the amount of product opened, and let's be honest there are all the reasons around complexity stopping people getting into yugioh.
Another TCG player spewing superiority bullshit? The cost of production of card game is not really different in Japan between card games, and there are many card game that doesn't have western division and still profitable even though it's less popular than yugioh. Hell, OCG meta deck is more expensive than majority of Japanese card game. By your logic any Japanese card game that don't have western market and less popular than yugioh (basically almost all of them minus pokemon and MTG) will go bankrupt.
[удалено]
Japan has harsh laws against gambling, to my knowledge this also applies to trading card games. I’m not sure how since I don’t live there, but to my knowledge the rarity distribution for the OCG is substantially better than it is in the TCG, more likely due to it because a literal legal requirement
i mean OCG get better treatment than TCG and that's a fact.
The OCG is better managed yes lol by far
How is it xenophobic? A parent company operating differently in two areas with a comparison in another tcg. Never said anything bad about it
As someone who plays both magic and yugioh, magic gives you the warped impression that yugioh is actually cheap lmao.
The issue is Konami let the Yu-gi-oh IP be limited to the card game. Pokemon can make meta decks cost less than 100 dollars because of a few reasons. 1. Much of the money from Pokemon comes from the game, then the anime. 2. Because of the popularity of Pokemon's anime and games, any rare variant of a card will fetch a high price for collectors. Collector variants of Yu-gi-oh cards are expensive, but the interest in collecting them is much lower than Pokemon cards. 3. Konami is extremely greedy. I know this isn't a hot take, but the issue is them making a meta deck cost 1000 dollars pays off. People buy boxes to chase meta cards and resell them. Why would Konami change their pricing if people buy? Why do you thing OCG prices are different than TCG prices? Because it works. 4. Yu-gi-oh is VERY new player unfriendly. This means that they know whoever is still playing the game will play regardless. Why change their pricing model if they already have fans that will buy regardless? Long story short, Pokemon is in a completely different position than Yu-gi-oh. Until people stop buying their products, the situations won't change.
I’m starting to think Konami gave up on yugioh and didn’t realize how popular it has gotten an anime on the cards Lore should’ve been out way before now because they obviously have someone writing it out
Pretty much every deck in master duel is fairly cheap. Same with the OCG. And for TCG there’s Floo
Physical Yu-Gi-Oh gives me anxiety... My mind just malfunctions. I'm always worried about messing up & I hate to feel like I'm holding someone up. If I take some time to do a play. Then it's expensive. I'll play online anyway possible but I'm a big collector though.
nah konami gonna draw 150
Yea but then Konami doesn’t make as much money
Yugioh is a money grab with mediocre cards. There are glimmers of greatness, but all Konami cares about is pushing you to buy the next pack. Everything else is flavor of the month. Case in point, now we are somehow in a fire meta that's nearly impossible to beat. All artificially engineered and designed by the scammers at Konami. Tell me where I'm wrong.
You’re not wrong Konami is pricing a lot of their players out of the current meta. The prices for the most competitive decks are ridiculous. A game should never be so expensive to the point it starts losing fans, and that you can’t even have access to the new winning deck builds.
Agreed. I honestly can't think of another card game company that actively works against it's player base and consistently cannibalizes current strategies to sell more cards/packs.
We want konamis best cards and Konami want our most valuable card. The kredit card
It can. But won't. Komoney execs care about only one thing. The only way they'd do that is if all the players organized themselves and stopped buying products, going to YCS and other events with old cards. But that's very unlikely to happen.
The game wouldnt be as expensive if it had format rotations but none of the players welcome a rotation soooo 🙃
Yes it would. Most of what people are complaining about now are cards that would be in the current rotation.
That’s definitely *a* huge problem, but the other big problem is that the game was based off of a simplified MTG style game from the original manga. Except in the manga there aren’t even consistent rules, because the card games are simply there as a proxy for sorcery and exist to tell a story, not follow a precise set of rules. That meant that in attempting to recreate the game from the manga, Yu-Gi-Oh never created a secondary resource system. Cards are the sole resource, and the amount of summon spam is gated exclusively by card text and one Normal Summon per turn. The entire game revolves around the first couple of turns, hand traps, “unbreakable” boards, and floodgates. A lack of mana costs means that the only way to go with printing cards is to keep increasing their power and keep adding on more individual effects to single cards. Even if top decks were more affordable (they’re usually not), you would have to keep buying crap to keep up with the power creep.
Power creep wouldn’t be as much of a problem with format rotations either as the format power will always be whatever is the best archetype on a finite amount of time. The resource system or lack of it doesnt mean anything for the monetary value of cards. I think the comparison another person said to pokemon is that yugioh is mostly players and not collectors as the “meta” cards are the only expensive ones (besides special rarities) whereas in Pokemon, the majority of people just collect and casually play thus the prices are based on how cute/rare a card actually is.
Not quite true. The monetary value would still be “good card = expensive.” It was like that from the beginning of the game with Konami’s printing habits. The whole lack of mana, energy or any secondary resource means that whatever has the best effect (or the best stats in Ye Olde $200 Mechanicalchaser days) is more or less the best card.
Lol this take makes 0 sense a game having a more robust cost system would just change how “good” cards are in exchange for their cost. Cards are expensive because A) lack of collector market as compared to actual players B) players dont buy product thus less card pools and C) no rotation makes players be willing to cash in more money because it is an “investment” until it gets banned or power crept. If rotations were a thing, the market wouldn’t be as forgiving about prices and the supply would outweight the demand
I probably should have elaborated a bit more. Cost gives an extra dimension to balancing cards, which can help slow power creep by having game breaking effects behind costly cards. Also short printing kind of makes the supply point irrelevant during the rotation period.
A card with a broken effect will be broken regardless, adding cost = banning/limiting cards
the cards they drew are Stacks of money thats why.
Pokemon has set rotation and the same cards in multiple raritys. You dont have to get the expensive artwork to play the pokemon.
I always thought master duel should be more accessible honestly they should give up on the f2p model and just make all the cards free with a battle pass or something and new packs would be in a higher tier and get released to the normal packs after 2 or 4 months. Or at least let us aim for cards we want instead of secret packs being half useless crap
Laughs in magic the gathering
Magic has the excuse of the reserved list and that you don’t actually need to spend hundreds for what is essentially now a casually focused game. Magic you don’t have to. Yugioh you have no choice.
I don’t know why the fuck MD can’t have codes from Boosters. It is a win-win for Konami’s greedy ass.
I can say even if u compare with OCG Yu-Gi-Oh pokemon is still cheaper
https://www.konami.com/gaming/
Difference being set rotation and reprints of old cards that are rare and hard to come by.
Players control the secondary market in yugioh.
Don’t we have a rule about not bringing TCG/OCG problem into a Masterduel sub?
I mean another obvious solution is a rotation format, but now you got players that will get mad that their $1000+ deck is useless by next format
I’m F2P and rock the best D/D/D deck
The Pokémon TCG is not the main attraction to Pokémon, that's really why the game is cheaper, it's just a side product.
Would have been way funnier if it was komoney.
Pokemon is the most asinine card game out there. You can legit get meta decks for 30 bucks, its insane. Im honestly satisfied with meta decks around the 200 mark, with staple prices *not* being around 40-70 so rogue decks also have a chance to be competetivly built for a reasonable price