Review: Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters

So as a preface, I have played Yu-Gi-Oh since 2002 or so whenever the show came out on KidsWB on Saturday mornings. It's been a long time and I have always kept up with it which is why I'm starting with a review of the card game I ran a blog for a year or so on. What to expect below: Personal Anecdotes, SHORT overview of the premise of the game, a list of Pros and Cons associated with all facets of the card game I have experience with. Without much further ado you'll want to click the Read More so as to not take up a whole page.

Short Overview of Duel Monsters as a whole

This game is a competitive card game with the number one goal being to win the game over your opponent. You do this by dealing 8000 damage, achieving any number of alternate win conditions or your opponent being unable to draw a card. 

You build a deck of at least 40 cards but no more than 60 and a separate deck of 15 Extra Deck monsters and in high level events a side deck of 15 cards is also needed which you can exchange cards with between rounds in a match. 

The game like most Japanese card games is centered around playing your best monsters as quickly as possible and winning with them. No joke you can win on turn 2 with most decks in a healthy format and turn 1 in an unhealthy format. 

The biggest thing to me is that your goal when playing aside from winning is to get out your preferred board state but when you do if you don't win that turn your opponent making their board will generally trump yours unless you weaken yours in order to stop them from trumping it easily leading to back and forth game play like the anime.

The game can be very frustrating but the good feelings decimate the bad by virtue of how cool your plays can be with no timing restrictions on most of them. Gonna move on now to some personal stories and especially some insights I have gained into the game over time.

Story Time!!

So we will start with the most important story of when I first realized how much SRS BIDNESS goes on with the players. I used to go to a comic shop in a seedy part of town and I believe the second time I went it was right after the new Starter Decks came out (which are preconstructed decks for new players). My brother and I had different decks mine was a modified starter his was some weird Insect Barrier deck of some sort (Hint: we were children). These grown men saw me playing (Everyone there was a grown man all of them Black (The area was predominately Black)) They asked to look at my deck and essentially took out everything I added and then dueled my brother who lost hard to a shell of a starter deck. 

Later stories are bit more silly such as the time when at a regional at nine years old I almost got jumped by a grown man for beating his girlfriend and causing her to cry to him somehow.

Then there was the story I heard of a man getting hit by a crowbar for his backpack of expensive cards. Yep he let them beat him until help came instead of lose a thousand bucks of cardboard. BTW Yu-Gi-Oh Regionals and Championship Series tournaments now have armed police and security due to jumpings in bathrooms and parking lots over cards worth adequate money of course (Grand Larceny).

There are more stories of my own but I don't think they'll be much more insightful than funny. 

Pros and Cons of the Worlds Most Popular Card Game

Pros

• Fast games and lots of downtime during tournaments.
• Small Deck size and many searchers and lots of draw power leading to consistent decks.
• Widespread tournament scene and huge playerbase.
• Quarterly set releases supplemented with tons of secondary product introducing huge shifts in the top decks.
• Can compete at a high level with a Tier 2 or 3 deck (Basically anything that actually feels like a functional deck) with the appropriate skill levels
• Frequent reprints leading to huge supply of chase cards within a year or so of their release generally.
• Frequent Forbidden and Restricted list updates 3 to 4 times a year keeping the game fresh.
• Game thrives in urban environments.
• The game has a lot of interaction at a high level or a low level.
• There are 3rd party technically not quite legal but sorta gray area simulators allowing for deck testing and playing online.
• There are also 1st party fully legal videogames for similar but less updated.
• Very constructive game play, your goal is to achieve your strategy to win not necessarily stop your opponent from winning. 
• There are many powerful tools to help you beat your opponents big plays.

Cons

• Games are sometimes too fast and one-sided.
• Due to the sheer amount of released new product over a year its hard to invest into anything but staple cards.
• Bad investment due to Forbidden and Restricted List frequent updates leading to upheavals in prices of cards unless you are good at predictions.
• Also bad investment due to extremely lax reprint policy any popular cards WILL be reprinted very shortly after Worlds generally.
• There is very little you can do to stop your opponent on the first turn from going off with a big play the caveat is that you can and have to trump it the next turn or you lose most of the time.
• There is less freedom in deckbuilding due to the overwhelming presence of Archetypes leading to easy to build decks with less personal flare but there are far more than enough archetypes to feel unique at your local store generally.
• Old Archetypes take a very long time to get new support often forcing you to start a new deck in order to keep up in power level as the game goes on
• No rotation meaning at any moment a card from 20 years ago could be God Tier for no reason with little supply.
• Generally the top decks boil down to 1 or 2 overpowered or popular decks the caveat is that those decks can just lose to a rogue strategy and have no recourse to beat it due to how tuned the lists become.

So after all that information On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being this game should never be played to 10 being this game is the best of the best and no other card game should exist before it.

Yu-Gi-Oh scores a square 7 the game is fun, quick, easy to learn, and enjoyable at all levels but suffers from too much stuff to read syndrome along with too much change before things can actually settle out into a full fledged meta. The rating is so high despite the negatives because the game is still one of the most enjoyable card games I've ever played. 

If you have any insights into YGO leave a comment below, also if you have any ideas for how I can do these kinds of reviews better please leave comments about those as well I love to hear from readers. Yes I will do set reviews and deck techs and such related to every card game that I review so leave comments about card games you'd like to me try out and I'll see how it goes (doubtful that i'll be able to attend any tournaments for them FYI)