Any 'Yu-Gi-Oh!' fans here?

Yu-Gi-Oh feels like it's a game that was designed by 7 year olds, then they all aged out of it, and new 7 year olds came up with cooler cards with new rules, and we're about 5 cycles deep right now. I wanted to get into Master Duel, but there doesn't seem to be a bracket for games that go longer than first turn of first player.

I loved Yu-Gi-Oh up to synchro summons. Xyz were okay, but it started to become pretty convoluted already. Then came pendulum and I was pretty out of it.
We also now got link summons, and don't know what other mechanics. But to me it's just too much of a mess to get back into it again.

As a kid I watched the first season of the show and owned some of the cards. Years later I watched some of the parody Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series and liked it a lot. It's fun seeing the show's weirdness remarked on.

I play Master Duel sometimes but I legitimately do not understand how Pendulum or Link Summons work... I just don't put those in my decks. Also if someone spends more than a minute straight on their turn summoning this and that, I just quit the game. I'm not trying to be the King of Games out here I don't care about my win %. I wish there was a way to just have silly duels like in the anime. I want to high five the sky, not play solitaire for 5 minutes and then auto-win while denying my opponent the chance to play.

I keep jumping in and out of Yu-Gi-Oh. I grew up on the game and loved it, stopped playing around the time Duel Masters ended and GX started and I got rid of all my cards. I was massively the Duel Masters anime as a kid and will still stand by it being great (The sub anyway, not the 4kids dub). I've found myself enjoying it on rewatch as an adult. the concept is dumb but the drama is incredible.

A few years later my friends were playing the game so i decided to start playingagain - this was around the time XYZ were introduced, this is when I really got into the game, I was studying decks and creating my own on Duel Network (A free online Yu-Gi-Oh game which has now shut down because of copyright). I made a Harpie deck myself, they weren't meta but I found them really fun to play. After my friends stopped playing it was quite difficult to keep playing in real life as I didn't have a meta deck or the funds to make one, but I still played on Duel Network until Pendulums became a thing and I hated the format so quit but kept my cards.

Years later I got back into the game thanks to Master Duel, I updated my Harpie Deck and built a Dragon Maids deck too in real life. Unfortunately my local only played on weekdays and I had work so couldn't play in real life so now I log in to master duel occasionally but don't play that often anymore, I still enjoy the game but don't get to play it as much as I like. Master Duel is great but real life is a lot more fun.

My opinions on the game overall is that "classic" Yu-Gi-Oh is better. I do enjoy, Syncro's, XYZ etc and I'm not hating on those formats but I think Syncro's are overly complex but XYZ is a good format. I think the modern game is a lot of fun although difficult to pick up for new players and it plays very differently from what I grew up on thanks to the invention of hand traps, the game is basically unrecognizable from the original at this point.

I do worry about the games shelf life since I think the game is too convoluted for kids to pick up which limits the new audience. The anime hasn't been good since 5D's in my opinion. The anime was always just an advertisement for the cards, but now the rule set is too complex to flow well as an anime and I think the quality has dropped.

I think when it comes to card games Yu-Gi-Oh is seen as a kids game and Magic is seen as an adult game, which isn't true but that's the general consensus I see. I don't imagine many new people picking Yu-Gi-Oh up over Magic, especially with how convoluted the Yu-Gi-Oh ruleset is now. I haven't played Magic in about 5 years but I doubt it's gotten as convoluted and complex as Yu-Gi-Oh so please correct me if I'm wrong.

If someone told me they wanted to get into Yu-Gi-Oh now, I feel I'd teach them with the original format and gradually work through the years to explain, Rituals, Fusion, Syncro's, XYZ, Pendulums and so on. The game is fun and great to play but It's very complicated and has 20 years of rules piled on top of each other which I think scares a lot of people off.

Got super into Yu-Gi-Oh! at the beginning of this year (actually just happened to go to my first locals the week Tearlaments were banned, lucky timing). I totally understand the complaints about how complicated it is, but to me that's actually it's biggest selling point in a weird way.

It's definitely rough at first, but the feeling I get when I'm able to take advantage of the specific timing of a card to catch my opponent off guard is hard to beat. Plus, I really enjoy how each archetype can feel totally unique, almost as if each one has it's own set of rules (something only possible because of the super specific rules surrounding the naming conventions of cards).

I watched the anime as a kid during the duel monsters era and even played a few games incorrectly. Fast forward about a decade and a half, and I got into duel links in order to better understand the game and I have been playing at least occasionally mostly ever since.

Personally I actually like all the fancy modern summoning mechanics. What I don't like is how every modern card is a novella of effect text.

I’m not really into the card game itself (too complicated for me - yes, a children’s card game LOL) but I love the original series a lot. I think it actually has a lot interesting to say about how troubled teens and adults might use games as a way to reclaim the childhoods they never had and how that can actually be pretty cool - Katsuya, Atem, and Kaiba all follow this trend pretty closely. Seto Kaiba is probably my favourite character in all of fiction.

This topic is more about the card game but I hope talking about the anime/manga is still. Relevant enough to at least idly chat about it in here lol

I play Master Duel on and off, mostly off after the first few months

I absolutely loved it when I was a kid, but the chaos of it was just so goddamn much as it evolved. It feels like every couple of years the design gets more insane, the card effects get longer, and the balance gets more lopsided.

I've been spending the past couple of months working on an online card game inspired by the early years of the game, purely for the selfish reason of wanting something I can ask people to play that isn't saddled with years of "it's too complicated" baggage when asking people to play a game with rules from 2005 because modern is impenetrable.

I have a very strong love-hate relationship with Yu-Gi-Oh. I love how there is no mana/energy and how your creatures/monsters are actually largely your main resource.
I also like having a limited field and the cards that interact with specific card placements on the "board", kind of making both those things a resource.
I love how all over the place archetypes and artwork can be, theoretically allowing people to very much play something they enjoy: Do you want to fight dragons with frogs? Here you go! Do you want to use anime girls against gigantic robots? Of course! You really enjoy norse mythology or kaiju? Say no more!

In practise however you can't just make any deck work, meta and ban lists can greatly impact how good your deck is, sometimes overnight. And trying to keep up with this is extremely expensive, but if (like me) you have few (or even no) friends who enjoy the game, you almost have to if you want to participate in local tournaments.

I stopped maintaining my deck ~2018 when a new release + banlist both added a strong direct counter as well as blocked a large part of my toolbox, realistically forcing me to buy a completely brand new deck if I wanted to be able to compete even slightly. I have barely played since, as my old deck is still way too strong for my one friend who also enjoys the game but more casually (so we tend to play other formats), while simultaneously being unable to get even a single win in locals or game nights at my local cardgame store.

Personally I feel like Yu-Gi-Oh is almost uniquely bad when it comes to this kind of balancing, so when mechanically and conceptually it is by far my favourite cardgame, in reality I stopped playing quite a while ago at this point. Which really is a shame because I just don't like games like Pokémon or Magic that have a mana/energy system, and enjoy the visual wackyness of Yu-Gi-Oh archetypes. I enjoy the faster paced, more consistent cardgames, where I feel like I outplayed my opponent instead of winning because my opponent got unlucky and only drew energy/mana cards after turn one and nothing else. Luck is obviously still a factor in Yu-Gi-Oh but a lot less in my personal experience.

But fuck pendulum.

I really enjoy the goat format but don't live somewhere where anything other than regular Yu-Gi-Oh is popular though, so I ended up selling my goat decks.

I sorta got back in recently for the first time since 2003 and I have no idea what's what tbh. I do miss the old Yugioh, when games took more than 2 turns.

Got into it for awhile. Rode it until links. Jumped ship there as it just encouraged some of the deck building I already didn't like (just everyone having specific extra deck staples and routing through that)

Personally, I think of it as the MvC2 to MTG's street fighter (sorta). Looooots of wacky options that aren't always balanced (dear god was there some awful balance), but can still be fun to play vs randoms because if you know what you're doing you can get away with ok games of off meta stuff (again depending).

I liked some of the pushed archetypes like burning abyss, but I really loved taking weirder stuff and doing ok with it. Rock Stun, Aliens, Noble Knights, and whatever else i've forgotten. I think my favorite this absolute pile of 60 that I think was called skittles? Just a bunch of rank one hand trap nonsense like battle fader and XYZ's/synchros that would draw out the game.

My favorite videos for it were from Lithium (https://www.youtube.com/@Lithium2300/videos), who does these cross banlist cup tournaments where it takes the best of the best from the different meta's and pits them against each other. It's a nice little timekiller and was pretty neat to watch and see how the absurdity of different era's matches up, and not always the way you'd think.

I remember watching it as a kid and while I absolutely loved the anime, it was extremely.. creepy? I guess it was just my first time getting in touch with the thought of this chaotic spiritual world, but I definitely had a few nightmares from it :D Maybe I should do a rewatch — is it any good or is it just good memories because I was a kid?

As for the cards — I live in a poorer European country, so I think I have never even seen an official card in my life, but we had huge collections of fake ones. They all had slightly different-colored backs, shitty quality (they had not much value so they got handed down I guess) and the funniest — there were many ultra-shitty Chinese translations like “This card fear death. Every turn opponent lose 100”.

Also, many of the cards were in English which we didn’t speak, so we just made up rules — which we didn’t even know for the whole game properly to begin with. So it was mostly “who has Exodia or Blue-Eyes White Dragon game”.