Let me know about your favorite powercrept cards in the comments! Would love to see ways other card games have dealt with powercreep! Remember to like an Sub for more!
i always had a love hate relationship with yugioh's powercreep. konami always manages to pump out the most elaborate decks/archetypes that break the game in interesting ways, but everyone including konami can see that this isn't sustainable. they always try to set back the clock with new formats or games like duel links, speed duels, or rush duel but they all inevitably run into the same issues. this makes me worried about the longevity of the game, especially considering how difficult it is to onboard new players onto the game.
Powercreep in yugioh has gone so bad that decks are experiencing convergent evolution. As a former yugioh player my problem with modern yugioh is honestly that every modern deck plays the exact same way, often times even culminating in the exact same boss monsters with the only difference between rogue and top tier decks being the number of disruptions they can play through and their consistency. Gone is the contrast between say a HAT player summoning myrmeleo, search for bottomless, set 3 or 4 pass, and then his opponent tries to go off with mythic rulers on the next turn. Or a bujin player trying to play the whole game with never summoning more than once or twice vs a sylvan deck that swarms the board and makes multiple high rank XYZ. These decks were so different but saw play at the same time. Decks actually had identity back in the day, now they are all the same. 2014-2015 was peak yugioh
The recurring problem with YGO is that it tries to diversify decks with archetypes and themes for years, yet those builds centers arround the same boss monsters and counters. Why you want to play Deck A to end with Baronne and/or Apollousa, when Deck B does the same more consistently? Why you want to play Gate Guardian with all its new support and unique boss monsters, when the rest of decks out there are summoning they same big monster leading the board anyways? Lately they're trying to avoid generic summoning conditions, as they banned those two examples in some formats. Some Decks like Memento, Labrynth or Vaalmonica are good examples of unique builds that tries to stay on their own playstyle, but they can still add just a few tech options without losing their whole identity.
@@YGOstratPlayerthis is simply not true. konami this year banned all generic endboard monsters. a runick white forest players endboard is a diabell and 3-4 runick spells. a yubel endboard is phantom, varudas, rage, desirae. a lab endboard (2 lab players got top 32 at a 1800 ycs this week) is 5 set cards pass. a ritual beast endboard is a collosus, ulti-galli, and protos. no endboard is the same every deck has dif lines and point of interaction
Complexity creep in YuGiOH has reached insane levels, making the onboard game really hostile to new players since it became like a MOBA (League or Dota) where the only way to improve is knowledge and the way to earn it (because of how many cards/characters exist) is to play A LOT of games to face a lot of the decks and cards that exist but also how the mechanics of the game works in general and for those specific archetypes, and in the process you are going to get demolished over and over again, that makes the game overwhelming to learn and most people won't be able to take that many loses to just grasp the general idea of how YuGiOh plays.
Not to mention the 'rulings' and card text in Yugioh are absolutely dogshit awful. For example: If/When timing and missing activations. The difference between "select" "target" and how cards effectively target "at resolution" but because it doesn't say target it doesn't actually "target". The lack of PSCT and the need for writing entire sentences like "Cannot be targeted or destroyed by card effect, battle, traps, spells, whatever" instead of just saying "indestructible." Yugioh is a fucking mess and a pile of dogshit of a card game- and that's from someone who joined during the then "end times" of Spellbook vs Druler and played up until now. That's not even touching on powercreep and monetization I only talked about PSCT and Yugioh's lack of. Nevermind the lack of supported formats outside of advanced (standard) and Edison alone.
I’m fine with having random words mean different things as it’s an expression of skill, though I can see how that’d be an issue for someone getting into the game. There are other formats, like duel links and rush. I have no defense for the cost asides from its way better in the ocg, and to play master duel. Also power creep is fun, and I’d say that Konami has helt it pretty well.
And once you do reach the point where you understand enough to feel competitive you also realize it's simply not worth the effort since the game is anti-fun. The only people who actively enjoy the gameplay are sadists.
Yugioh actually has official, 1st party articles explaining the comprehensive psct they have and if you understand it, like 99% of "rulings" questions immediately evaporate. Keywords are fun, and good design, but if you read the psct article, you will almost never have a ruling question for the rest of your time playing the game @Flatfootsy
@@Flatfootsy Well the confusing wording were always a problem especially in the old days some cards were not even clear they target or not. Really good example is Sakuretsu Armor which come up a lot back in the days cuz it says nothing about targeting however IT DOES and you just had to know... Well there is some support for old formats they have official Time Wizard format buuuut yeah these events are rare and supported that much. GOAT is supported mostly by community (that's what i play btw) and not really by Konami.
Powercreep in Pokemon has really not been bad at all the past 2 generations. It’s just the Tag Team fuckup that really created a huge problem, and the designers have slowly been deescalating since
I feel like I missed the memo then. The power creep has come from the energy acceleration. Welder used to be considered overpowered and only somewhat "acceptable" because fire was in a weaker place. Now, attaching an extra energy would borderline be considered a bad card when you have cards digging for/attaching 3 energies at a time.
@@P4brotagonistGood point! Again, I haven't played for a while but I remember ADP decks being able to consistently get an Altered Creation tag team attack off on turn one going second mainly due to energy acceleration and moving a steel energy from Zacian V to ADP. Also I might be wrong but weren't you able to play Welder on turn one until they changed the rules regarding supporter cards?
@DarkMarkGaming94 Oh god instant PTSD from just reading "ADP." Yeah you could use them first turn but that got changed. After ADP/Zacian they really reigned in the energy acceleration. Heck it was considered insane when they printed a psychic pokemon that let you dig and attach psychic energy, but you had to go second to even use it. Now, you have like 3-4 energy a turn with damn near infinite discard recursion.
One thing I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the Yugioh section is hard once per turns. They put a very clear limiter on what you can and cannot do by making sure copies of your card can't activate their effect
It would be especially interesting because Yu-Gi-Oh has the very rare trait of reverse powercreep, where the release of new cards can increase the viability of older cards (either by design as nostalgia bait or accidentally due to some niche interaction). This is especially the case with older cards that lack once per turn limits on their effects or have some powerful effect with a cost that is now no longer detrimental.
@qweqwe5609 that is what I like about yugioh. A card like Blue Eyes White Dragon can go from basically worthless to meta relevant with the release of new support cards
There is a distinction to be made between power creep and complexity creep. Both happen in all games but some learn more towards one than the other. In Magic and Yugioh, the average card has gotten more text on them over time but in Pokémon, by just upping the numbers a lot, cards haven't truly gotten that much more complicated.
That is boring though, pokemon has sadly often repeated, specific ability or attacks and makes it so kinda boring sometimes. Like if you go throught multiple generations you often see very often similarities between pokemon or what specific types can do.
In MTG case, there was old cards with complicated and long texts of rules, but in the end it was just one effect. Nowadays, cards with lot of texts do 2 ~ 3 different things rulewise. Sometimes they are value, engine, and finisher all in one card.
Pokemon is easily the most balanced/best game out of all the TCG's. Every deck gets to play, every deck has its own playstyle, every deck does what other card games consider absurd like drawing 9-14 cards per turn, every deck has tech cards to win and outplay opponents and on top of that it's the CHEAPEST TCG out there by miles.
@@Flatfootsy .... it's not even the cheapest of the 4 games in the video, let alone of all TCGs, though? Hearthstone has tens of thousands of players who have never spent a cent. That is fundamentally not possible for a paper card game, even if you are gifted a bunch of cards, somebody paid for them, wizards tpc and konami got their piece for it. MTGA and Duel Links/Master duel also host free players. Pokemon is the odd one out in this context, tbh. It's literally the only one that you MUST pay to play. How does that work out to be cheapest in your head?
What about horizontal scaling instead? Create new mechanics and ways to win, that are not better or worst than existing one, just different? Might not be feasable, but imo it should be the goal
@12Tsurugi Horizontal scaling is probably the ideal situation, at least from a player perspective, it just is going to take a lot of very good playtesting to get that the way it should be. It's a challenge to keep a new mechanic from being so strong it ends up being vertical anyway, or not strong enough that people don't even bother with it.
@@12Tsurugi in an idealistic world it is the goal, but honestly how much you can make it absolutely horizontal all the way while keeping it fun? it is just a fact that some mechanics in all card game or even any game are far easier to break and abuse, which is what competitive players are looking and strive to achieve. even if you can maybe maintain it for a while, oversight will happen, and the spike will arrive. the slope of power going up, while noticable and maybe can be the starting point of "game gone bad", can also bring in a lot of fun as well. being with many mechanic of similar power might be fun for a while, but at the end, meta will form, and some might fall off entirely without being able to be saved, and those that enjoys mechanics that dies the easiest wont have fun anymore
It is true that Powercreep is unavoidable but it can be properly managed and somewhat mitigated. The problem with Magic recently is that there is so much product and that just makes us feel the effects of powercreep more often.
I agree. Powercreep should be something that happens slowly. If i look at some new cards i buy and they are better in every way than the cards i used to play 4 years ago than so be it. But sometimes in MTG you buy a new Commander Deck or make a Standard Deck and 2 Sets Later half of it is outdated and considered "not that good" anymore. Horrible feel.
The problem is that manabased cardgames just dont have a lot of design space as the gameplay is so linear. Only so many ways to print a 2drop, a removal spell or a draw spell yeah it can be really unique but it will still be what it is fundamentally. So you just keep playing the same formats in different coats of paint. MtG will never evolve thanks to set rotation, it will always be more of the same but slightly different.
He talked about 4 different TCGs, which is more than what the average player knows about. He doesn't need to be 100% accurate to illustrate a general point. Don't miss the forests from the trees!
2:28 Another side effect of powercreep, especially in eternal formats, is having duplicates in your deck. If you can only put 4 copies of a card in your deck, but they print a stronger version, put all 8 in the deck and now you've doubled your chance of drawing the card, although copies 5-8 are slightly weaker, sometimes that's worth it. Similar to that is a concept called critical mass, which is something devs want to avoid or someone might just make a deck with 24 lands and 36 copies of effectively the same card. (Magic in this scenario)
They have to be as good or better otherwise they wont be used competitively and getting exactly as good is Very hard. Also even if in a vacuum card power level remained the same versatility and synergy would increase creating power creep that way
That's what Shadowverse Evolve is mostly doing. The power scale crept up very slowly and when it seems like something is one or two cards away from being way too good they'll shift to something new until other classes catch up. People generally enjoy swapping over to new archetypes since they do different things instead of being the same thing but more powerful every set. Shifting over to the novelty rail has been a great strategy.
Two aspects about powercreep that weren’t mentioned: niche filling and conditional effects. They can overlap but are different. Niche filling is just the result of having more options, which means as new cards get made it’s more likely a specific hole in a strategy will be filled. Now, this isn’t guaranteed to happen, but it’s likely to happen as more and more options are made. As powercreep, the result is often that the power floor of the game is raised, rather than the ceiling. Although, naturally, sometimes a specific niche might push a strategy over its ceiling by covering a weakness. Now onto the next topic. “Restriction breeds creativity,” as Mark Rosewater often says. I think conditional effects are inherently more interesting than otherwise, and I think most players and designers agree-even if unconditional cards are stronger. This makes most card games lean into specific archetypes or subsets of cards that need to be played together for them to work well. Note that this includes otherwise drawbacks and downsides on cards. One of the consequences is that conditional cards will provide a stronger effect for the same rate, or the same effect for a cheaper rate. After all, you’re paying an extra deckbuilding, gameplay, or resource cost. Note that this isn’t powercreep-as I said, it does incur an additional cost. But as satisfying that cost becomes less of a burden, the end result is that you gain access to a better effect for free just by adhering to a specific strategy. This can be related to niche filling in that for everything you want the deck to do, there’s a card tailor-made for the specific strategy. The end result is that satisfying the extra condition is so trivial as to be free, and in the specific deck every conditional card works as a better version of the unconditional card. It’s powercreep not through individual cards, but by different options coming together to enable a stronger deck. I want to leave another comment, and I might follow up this train of thought there if I do make that one.
in marvel snap we are seeing power creep when you compare some cards to the vanilla stat line, before a 4 cost 6 power card was vanilla stats, so a card with a benefit at that cost, needed to have less stats, like enchantress and specially shan chi (a 4 cost 3 power destroy your opponents 10 power or more cards here) while huge payups like crossbones (a 4 cost 10 power) had a downside, now we are at the point where a 4 cost can have 7 power and no theoretical downside and be fine. what i find interesting is "retroactive" powercreep, where a group of cards had very little effect in the meta but a single new card can push them over the edge to the point those old cards start to look overpowered for what they do, just because they gained consistency in modern times
I really miss old Hearthstone with its minion focus. I found building a board and trading minions with the opponent to over multiple turns to be very satisfying. It wasn't absurd for a minion to stick on the board for 3 turns, and that didn't even automatically win you the game. It's what made Hearthstone unique compared to other card games and I'm sad that they went into a different direction.
i dont really understand this sentiment maybe because im a newer player? every single paladin midrange tempo deck has been about board control till you get enough mana to buff your board to start going face, elemental mage is about board, evolve shaman cares about minions, pirate demon hunter cares about minions aswell and board based combat, all of these decks that are viable routinely go against each other and going 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 is the way you win each of these matchups, is that not what you talk about?
@@muditjain4024 Its simply nostalgia. Players say this all the time, but when blizz launched a "classic" hearthstone, it bombed so hard that it was pretty much only bots on ladder. It is a finished format too, everyone already knows what is the best, and as said in the video, it had very little variation besides your draws. Matchups are won or lost if you draw flame imp on turn one or wild growth on curve. Most of meta decks of classic hs weren't minion focused too, freezing mage, ramp druid, miracle rogue, to name a few, weren't minion focused at all.
People like to focus on tag teams discussing Pokémon, but I feel people forget those early black and white years… the $30 Pokémon catcher without a coin flip, computer search as the only useable card of its kind, $80 XBall mewtwo that completely dominated nearly all formats it was part of. As bad as ADPZ may have been, those team up to cosmic eclipse days were still dynamic and affordable, and it has only gotten better since then.
Hey man, is everything alright? You sometimes breath in a very quick succession, like you breath in after part of a sentence, say 2 - 3 words and then breath in again. This happens super often. E.g. 2:15 "This way, powercreep can feel kind of draining on players, *breath* either feeling like *breath* all of their old cards basically *breath* serve no purpose after new cards come out to replace them *breath* [...]" This is just one example, it happens a lot. If this is not a condition (and I apologize in advance if it is, I don't want this to be critique of an health issue or something), try to listen to some professional speakers and see where they make their breathing pauses. Also try to take longer breaths and not these quick ones, so you can say a lot more on a breath, because you are able to do that. This makes the (in music this is called:) phrasing a little more coherent and better to listen to, instead of having these short pauses, that are often times (not always) awkward, because of the short breaths. Again, if this is an actual condition that you're struggling with, I'm sorry. This isn't supposed to be a thing of "Skill issue, now get healthy or you can't do RUclips anymore" or something like that. I was just geniunely curious and trying to give some advice.
14:45 i used to play pokemon tcg back when all the rule changes to the first turn happened. first i cant use supporters, then suddenly they remove any turn 1 restriction at all and give the player going 1st a major advantage, then a few years later they add an attack restriction going 1st and add a coinflip to a powerful trainer card that was a major centerpiece of the format for 3 years. the amount of change with every new generation was too much as a kid to keep up with so i ended up quitting when that happened around XY release (also because the deck i just invested the little money i had as a kid in was a pretty fast and agressive deck that relied on attacking turn 1 and abusing that trainer card to easily knock out weak benched basic pokemon and grab extra prize cards thanks to an ability LOL). apparently they re-added the supporter rule another few years later on too lmao. i went to a prerelease once many years later to support our new local game store at the time (it still died a year later due to covid restrictions :skull:) and i was struggling the whole time trying to remember what the current rules of going 1st even were, because i had seen so many different iterations in the past when i still played.
It’s been no supporter no attacking turn one for a little while now, I don’t see them changing it any time soon. The restrictions encourage different decks to actively wanting second or first into specific matchups, rather than everyone wanting first. Sometimes the meta swings one way or the other depending on what’s good, but right now your choice, and ability to deal with it when you don’t have a choice, have a lot of skill and nuance built into it.
The powercreep in Yugioh is immense, but the way Yugioh works allows them to go and apply that power creep to old decks, even decks that were bad on release 12 years ago and make them suddenly an amazing deck. The current top deck in the TCG uses Yubel cards, that were previously a deck of 3 hard to summon 0/0 monsters with battle related effects (battle is typically seen as irrelevant to many players in Yugioh). Now the deck is an absolute menace, so they might have taken it a bit too far in this case, but they support old decks relatively often.
Yugioh is a fascinating game when it comes to power creep. Semi casual - rogue tier decks are fascinating decks that use a massive variety of mechanics in different ways that are on a similar level and lead to varied, in depth, back and forth games The problem is the consistent release of one or two decks that warp the entire game to be just about them. Tearlaments and Fire Format are key examples, but even things like Kashtira which never became the sole dominant deck, are so far and above even things that are printed later and have locks/restrictions which they just simply don’t that it makes the vast majority of decks in Yugioh never see play
I was fine with the fire format, as there was a lot of decks that you could play asides from snake eyes, also I liked snake eyes. Just, they’ve been around for wayy too long.
Just because nobody bothers to power rank all the rogue decks doesnt make them equal. There will always be a best deck and a lot of rogue decks are really oppressive if they ever were the best deck. Remember a key design philosophy of konami is to just give older decks some floodgate boss to make them good again.
Pokemon has kept a surprisingly good handle on it so long as you forgo multi-prize cards. Considering the game has been in circulation for something like 25 years, that's pretty damn impressive.
Dragon Ball Super Card Game is one of the best examples of how power creep affected that game with the early sets being slow and costing a lot of energy to play things to later sets basically having every card be free or 1-2 energy to get some insane effects
It would have been really interesting to see your take on Cardfight Vanguard. The powercreep has become so bad not just once, but twice to the point where the company had to soft-reboot the game on both occasions, resulting in different format splits and the game constantly becoming feature creeped each and every instance.
Vanguard powercreep is a bit out of hand - every time a new product in D format releases, the entire metagame shifts. And they release new sets so fast. At the moment, it seems to be in a good place but for a year there the competitive format was just a rotating door of “Top 3” decks. Because of the way Guard Values and Attack Points scale, they could just simply inflate the numbers to keep complexitycreep in check but for some reason they have elected not to do it.
that's just tcg my brother, the meta right now in master duel is quite fun and a lot of decks are very viable, ofc fk snake eyes and yubel are a bit ahead but not too much, and branded for example is still powerful here even with it being the weakest version of the deck out of the 3 formats
As a Pokémon player, I don't think power creep is much of a problem in the game. Numbers have inflated since the old days, but in recent years the power levels stay pretty steady.
The pokemon damage output is also scaled well with the hp values now so it really doesn't feel very crept. Also literally everything is playable to some degree even cradily go silly turbo
High numbers, but everything scales accordingly. Means the prize card system is actually good, since it has aged well. Looking at YGO's life point system on the other hand...
@@AoyagiMeiYugioh is more about how many negates and hand traps you can assemble rather than life points lol. Which isnt terrible. The resources keeping you alive are variable and have a lot of weird interactions. You do have to make choices on which tools in your toolkit to utilize
@@danielhicks1824 The LP acts as a timer on how many turns you get to draw outs or pieces to make a comeback play. Big boards are too easy to assemble these days.
Ey I want to say I really like your videos and how you talk about the context of every card game and how it's different, have you considered to expand the games that you include? I would really love to see you include Flesh and blood in all this analysis that you do Keep the good work!❤
I would have mentioned regarding Yugioh the concept of turn 0. When you go 2nd as (full powered) Tearlaments, you can functionally win the game after the first action that your opponent does on their turn when they go first, by chaining Tearlaments and millers to distrupt and floodgate your opponent before they can play the game. Other decks like Labrynth and Rescue Ace can do this too. But Tearlaments does it the best.
To me, I prefer power creep by complexity rather than power creep by scale. Or sidegrades. Basically, considering Quick Study is power crept out of the gate, we could get a sidegrade to Brainsurge where it's Quick Study but two-brid, now every color can use it.
Shadowfist is interesting because even though it's a paper game, they aren't afraid to issue errata and reprint cards with different text. So a lot of the broken "alpha" cards have been reworked with higher cost or additional restrictions to be more fair. For example, the "political favors" faction has a lot of ways to gain mana that don't involve lands. One card lets you steal an unspent mana from target player. Has decent counterplay if your opponent is playing Ascended you should try not to have unspent mana floating around. Except on the first turn of the game. It was such a feelbad moment when the ascended player stole your only mana on turn 1 before you could play anything that the card now reads "target an opponent who has completed at least one turn."
if u think powercreep in ur game is bad, think about yu gi oh, we had a deck that played full combo with negates and disruption on your opponents first turn (if he started or not). man, it was fun
@@deathboy345 idk what deck you referring to but full combo first turn boards with negates first was popularized with 2016 Tier 0 PePe so damn near a decade ago. 2017 Tier 0 Zoodiac popularized a small archetype engine stacked with handtraps to disrupt your opponent's first turn board.
@@traplover6357he’s talking about tearlaments. The main deck monsters activated an effect to fuse from GY upon hitting the GY and a way to do an effect and then mill 3. They also had a monster that could summon from hand then mill 3 on the opponent turn and 2 hand traps that milled both players for five letting them get engine going and setting up multiple interruptions before taking their first turn
Well yes, we had broken control formats over the last years and it's not a completely new issue, but Yugioh still reached a point, where playing Trap cards is only viable if they activate from hand or if you get them for free anyway. So basically 1/3 of the cards got powercrept out of existance already
@@traplover6357 can zoodiac play during the first turn of the duel if ur opponent went first (i mean core engine, not handtraps)? Tear, the most wonderful deck ever created can
Yu-Gi-Oh has a way of balancing new cards.they tend to be more complex new cards often require specific deck, which helps keep older cards useful. Additionally, new mechanics can sometimes make older cards shine in unexpected ways. they also increase the power of new cards is by giving them multiple effects, such as one on summon, an ignition effect, a passive effect on the field, and even an effect if removed.
12:16 you forgot to mention, that part of the trainers become supporters (and you can play only 1 supporter per turn), and part of them became items, which can be used multiple times.
Every time I see a picture of Sheoldred it makes me glad I stopped playing Magic nearly 20 years ago. Feels like the creativity of combining cards to win is gone and you just need 1-2 powerhouse cards now to likely win.
Yugioh right now is based on engines, little archetype packages that can mash within each other and create a deck. The issue is that in reality, there are only 3 engines and a bunch of bad decks that can't win against them. Fiendsmith, Snake-eyes and the new Yubel package.
I stopped playing hearthstone when they started to constantly print cards that are "strictly better" than others, I just hate that I understand that powercreep is inevitable, but at least in digital you could update older cards to make them on the same power level as new releases instead of just forgetting about them, that is something marvel snap is doing so far and I quite like it
This comment section is full of anti-YGO sentiment lol. Meanwhile me: we've reached the singularity, we can only sort of expand horizontally, not that much vertically/forward. I don't think the powercreep is that bad since we've reached basically a limit and it's unlikely to be pushed hard so it's kinda whatever and as someone else mentioned, there's hard once per turns already so there's at least a limit per turn. So... it's kinda fine. The only issue with is soft onces or no onces at all which is what the ultimate bad situation is: FTKs. Not to mention, since YGO doesn't have the axis of having Mana, and maybe only levels and ranks and whatever else nomenclature for the theoretical printed power level, there isn't really much stat powercreep and stats aren't exactly an issue and haven't been an issue in such a long time. I think the game has hit so many "gold standards" that are so timeless like max 2k ATK for a 4-star and an average of like... 1600, kind of like the 2/2 2-mana Bear in MTG so... yeah.
Powercreep in magic depends in part on what format you are playing. I feel a lot of players tend towards commander, standard, or draft. I play commander, which is one copy of any spell or creature unless the card gets around that with it's own rules
You forgot to mention that in Yugioh they introduced pendulums, allowing you to summon up to 5 monsters per turn for free. Then they realized that was stupid and nerfed the entire concept.
technically, yes, within the "meta-slang" or just the normal conversation vocabulary, no: "instant" and "sorceries" are named as "spell" just to shorten the "non-permanent spell"
At least in the case of Magic, you have set rotation to rotate out broken cards and return the game to the core set "status quo" as it were. Yugioh doesn't have that. Our banlist is our set rotation, which is why i'm of the opinion that Yugioh NEEDS to have periods in the game where powercreep essentially plateaus and declines for a while so that the banlist can catch up. Deck building sets are generally excellent for that kind of thing because they're not often designed to break the ceiling of the game but rather introduce new archetypes with interesting gimmicks. Not saying it can't happen (we got both Labrynth and Runick from a deck building set), but its not like the core sets where their main goal is to just make everything that came before obsolete. I just wish Konami was more aggressive with the banlist because they really don't do enough to balance this game. As it exists right now, its just a mechanism to sell product (which would be less aggravating if we had multiple supported formats like Magic).
Duel Masters has heavily supported Fire Bird archetype in previous set and make it to the top of meta, defeating Magic Kakumeijin archetype especially after some of its core cards like Perfect Fire had become limited
Unmatched is an interesting card game, for a lot of reasons, but I'd say especially with its relationship to power creep. Unlike TCGs, where you make your own deck, Unmatched is a card game with set-in-stone character decks. King Arthur's 30 card deck is ALWAYS the same, all the time--the same goes for Alice with her deck, Bruce Lee with his deck, and so on. As a result, it's less that individual cards matter, and more that decks do--like multiplayer video games and their character options. This makes a really weird thing with power creep, in that, rather than specific cards being phased out from being too weak, entire characters are. You can't just bring in Beastform to replace Excalibur--those are each tied to their respective deck. There is a competitive scene for this game, but it's VERY small, all things considered--most players are casual, and most people are buying decks because they are of characters they know or since they look fun--not really because they're particularly strong. So, power creep becomes less of a "this NEEDS to be done to sell more sets" type thing, and more like "the creators are experimenting with systems" type of thing. Now, I'm personally a bit biased, and think that power creep is actually entirely unnecessary in this game--at least, on a broader scale. Sure, the very first sets had some weird weak things that make sense for patching out, but once those were done, the power level of the game felt very defined, with only a few outliers as being particularly strong. The game could have just kept releasing new decks that stayed in that level of power, and pretty much everything could have been fine, either by banning the top contenders, making formats which made them less powerful, or even just dealing with it and adapting around them. Instead, Restoration Games continued to increase the power level, sometimes in incredibly bizarre ways (like printing cards that are objectively better than other cards, without actually accounting for that in the power budget). Many people hold the opinion that the company does not actually play the game, because they make a lot of strange choices that make no sense to anyone who DOES actually play. This is a problem that's mostly been relevant from the many, many Marvel sets--but at the very least, it seems like everything is calming down, as the power levels of a lot of the newest sets are actually returning more to the "general baseline", so to speak. Hopefully, the upcoming Witcher and TMNT sets will be good fits for the game!
i want to push back on the idea that powercreep is required. weve been playing goat format for 20 years. how long have we played poker games for? also you dont need to increase a games power level to keep it changing, you absolutely could also change game rules to change the game. bans and unbans also change the game. also people absolutely will buy new cards for a game they like without those cards being powercrept. instead powercreep is needed for more powercreep. its not actually needed for a card game to be played, but it is needed for powercreep to happen, for the designers to be payed to make more powercreep. its a self feeding cycle that is falsely given more importance than it deserves while still possessing all the negative problems described in the video.
And how often have you bought new packs to get cards for goat? For a game to keep support from it's makers it continuusly needs to make money, poker or chess don't count because everyone can produce their own poker set while it is illegal for you to print your own new yugioh set. But that said keeping people buying cards can also be done by splitting the game into a more casual eternal format that has all the cards and holding all your high payout tournaments in a format that has rotation, forcing players who want to compete at the highest level to buy new cards no matter if they are stronger or even weaker.
Sounds like YGO should get the Pokemon treatment where the base game rules are upheaved and changed to help the game be more in line with the fantasy of battling monsters that you use also as resources, being played out back-and-forth over many turns with escalating power, as opposed to an extremely fine-tuned solitaire, combo-decks, negates and FTKs... Amusing how YGO hasn't really had statline power creep, tho. Blue-Eyes White Dragon stats are still a benchmark for generic and archetype ace monsters, while your usual 4-star archetype card will have La Djinn stats lol.
Yu-Gi-Oh is a strange case when it comes to power creep. The power level of what decks can do hasn't changed, rather the level of consistency at which these decks can execute these plays, and more importantly their RESILIENCE to disruptions that seek to counter these plays has. Yu-Gi-Oh functionally started off as a "broken" game design-wise because it more or less was built off of a manga, which only loosely had rules about how the game was played and cards were more often made as a part of the story. Because of this, before any kind of real thought was put into a limitation on the number of copies of certain cards used in a deck and how a card worked in conjunction with other cards available, Yu-Gi-Oh was unintentionally doing everything players have said it's been doing since the beginning. We had FTKs (Exodia FTK) burn (Magical Scientist), crazy combo fest OTK you the next turn (Reasoning Gate OTK, Cyber-Stein OTK, Airblade Turbo), and overbearing good stuff piles that plays the best cards (Chaos Yata, Destiny Raida) from basically the first 4 to 6 years of the game all thanks to players finding out creative incidental synergies and Konami having never had a real plan on how to balance card power in the first place. Konami wasn't planning these decks or playstyles out... until they did.
I think you ought to explain the powercreep in Yugioh a little more. I think it is understated just how bad the powercreep in Yugioh is. Every new summoning mechanic is better than the last, being way more consistent and easier to pull off. The older summoning mechanics see play recently only because they eliminated the summoning requirements with card effects. Like fusion monsters are now pretty much just link monsters. It has gotten so bad that there is now no conceivable way of making a better archetype without just straight up banning problem decks every few months.
It goes even further in that the majority of new Yugioh archetypes that are released are flat out unplayable or worse than the 1 or 2 top decks that are broken, and this is a consistent thing. There’s loads of genuinely good decks in rogue tiers, but they’ll never be meta simply because the gap between them and the top deck is so large (usually because the rogue deck has any type of restriction while the top decks don’t)
I understand where you are coming from. In theory links are much better than xyzs since it is much more generic. However I don’t really think it is true since most of the time the amount a deck special summons depends on the archetype they play. Links are good, but only when you can spam enough material on the field to utilize the monsters to their fullest. Older summoning mechanics such as fusions and synchros are just as easy to pull off if in the correct archetype. Adding new summoning mechanics imo is just a way to make the game have more variety and playstyles. Also they banned most of the overpowered generic links anyways
It really sounds like you don't know yugioh. The first good fusion deck was gladiator beast. It's whole thing was not using a fusion spell and just contact fusing (essentially just link summoning but is actually the precursor to synchros.) Fusion summoning the way it was originally designed was always going to suck. The next time a fusion archetype was top tier was when shaddol fusion just fused from the deck. A mechanic designed around going -2 either needs to be broken or it will just be bad. Synchro summoning was the only time the new summoning mechanic was better than the old one immediately. Konami realized that mistake and made XYZ, pendulum, and links take multiple sets to build up strength. Yugioh has been banning cards from the start to slow down power creep. It's the rotation of the game. Yugioh would be dead if they didn't.
@@AlphaSquadZero fusion summoning just was bad card design like ritual monsters. People are just attached to it more because it was bigger in the anime.
I refuse your first assumption (around 1:03) : every deck has its fields of competence and lacks in some other aspects; to print new cards you either create new strategies, power up some old strategies that have been left back in order to let them keeping up, or fill the lacks in those previous decks to have a way to compete. It's totally hard to do, but you don't need to cram 4-5 different cards all together in a Swiss-Knife One-Man-Army Deus-Ex-Machina card. In Magic I've seen a staggering increasing amount of cards that are enablers of strategies, payoffs, and engines WHILE having another different role in it (like being able to get involved into combat). Back in the day you needed **a whole deck** to do so. This is not "keeping up", this is a __blatant attempt to make people salivate over a steamy newly cooked meal and to quiet the crybabies screaming "This card has a downside / restriction! I WANT MORE!"__
It's very interesting how every single game, except seemingly hearthstone, has started off with weak creatures that power creep into strong creatures, with the reverse happening to spells. The examples were given in yugioh, mtg and pokemon. I wonder why those games all had this happen? Is it just harder to evaluate spells before game launch?
Power creep is required; power leaps are not, and we've been seeing power leaps in these games, especially YGO over the past few years. MTG standard is also seeing a problem with this, so much so to the point where it almost feels like YGO cause of all the mono-red and Azorius nonsense.
I don't think games require power creep. How many people play chess or backgammon? No updates for thousands of years. I do think games should sell new cards to stay fresh for sure. But I think rotation and formats help slow down power creep. I also think power-creep is easy if you can't find a gimmick for a card or set just make it better that will sell packs. I just dislike games where the rares are cleary just better. It makes the constructed format how ever spend more wins and who ever pulled better wins in limited. Designers need to playtest and not vomit rush products. People will go back and play fun formats if you current game is bad.
Nadu was by design its a legendary creature that only needs one cost creatures 0 equit or 1 equip equipment and lands and some big win cards that are high cmc
Speed and power aren’t an issue in yugioh so long as the power level is fairly comparable for a decent number of decks and both players can make meaningful interesting decisions before the other shuts them out of the game. If hearthstone were to suddenly play like yugioh that would be a problem but yugioh shifted focus of how play works to be about things like intricate card interactions, a high density of interaction points, and a relatively unique form of resource management. Yugioh also foregoes many traditional card game focus points like tempo, early game, etc
@@jamismiscreant7514 speed is definitely an issue. you don't get X turns to draw hand traps and outs to stop your opponent before they finish you off. if you don't open with or top deck any for turn you're mostly screwed.
Yugioh powercreep was EVERYWHERE. It was rare to have a 4 star monster with > 1800 atk. It was a big deal when Mechanical Chaser came out with atk of 1850. Then Gemini Elf’s at 1900. Now I hear there are 2000 and 2100 atk normal monsters no drawbacks Hand traps completely put regular traps out of the game. Every monster has an Omni negate and remove from the field It’s insane
I feel like Pokémon has done more of an inflation model v power creep. Outside of EXs and their variants the gameplay still feels similar to 20 years ago v any other game. Yugioh is the one that’s unrecognizable from the game’s roots. Speed and power have been embraced at the expense of fun interactive gameplay.
Yugioh definitely still has interactive gameplay it is just that the form that takes looks very different. It honestly has more actual mind gameyness to it than most card games tbh.
@@jamismiscreant7514 I do play current. I have VV currently in paper/IRL and do decently well with it. Have also played with Tenpai and Yubel a bit. There’s interaction in current, but the game is fundamentally centered around stopping your opponent from playing entirely. You have to. Decks are too powerful and if your opponent gets to play they will shred you apart. The interaction isn’t centered on a fun gameplay loop in my view . It’s about pummeling your opponent into the ground with cards like Shifter, Flamberge into an unbreakable set up, Sanctifiring into a puppet lock, or just getting to the battle phase with Tenpai. When I play Goat and Edison it’s night and day and it’s clear those much earlier eras are within the parameters of the game’s design. Archetypes and engines were designed around each other along with limited power traps, not floodgates and Omni negates that stop the opponent entirely.
With Yugioh it's partially a problem because of how exponential the power creep has ramped up in the last 3 years. I call it Yugioh 2 because it's completely different now than it was in say 2020. Sure every new Summoning mechanic has shifted the game and something like Mechanical Chaser which was amazing many years ago is beaten out in usefulness by even a mediocre Normal Summon Archetypal Searcher released a decade ago, but through all of them(barring Master Rule 4 violating the Geneva Conventions because of Pendulum Monsters) Yugioh has stayed at least fairly the same overall. With Yugioh 2, it seems that every couple sets are printing Decks that are 1 card combos and have oppressive elements to funnel out literally everything printed before 2022, as well as generic cards and engines that throw away the identity of playing "A 'Blank' Deck" when it's 3-8 engines thrown together to sit on generic Extra Deck Monsters and a couple Archetypal Main Deck Monsters you can play because they're generic enough or are part of the Archetype of one of your engines. It's basically reverted to Goodstuff.Deck but instead of a generic toolbox of Main Deck Monsters to interact with the opponent like in older formats it's "Fire King Yubel Snake-Eyes Fiendsmith Albaz Diabellstar Horus" where the concept that Archetypes were created to prevent has been thrown away and it's entirely unrewarding to try to play if you haven't drawn the out.
Powercreep is handled the best in Pokemon. The pokemon just get bigger numbers and nothing much else change aside from some mechanics like ace specs and v-stars.
I would argue that there's more of a focus on speed and consistency since we haven't really seen much of an hp increase in a while, and the big pokemon take a few turns to set up
I think you left something out in your list of problems power creep can cause, it can fundamentally change the game. I think this is why Powercreep in Hearthstone has been so bad for the game and Blizzard already considers it a dying product after just 10 years. Early Hearthstone was all about trading creatures and spells in advantageous ways to maximize value. Losing one extra creature to a board wipe spell was devastating and every individual health point mattered. A key way you see this is that every direct damage combo and a very specific number it could reach and you were safe if you stayed above that. It only took Hearthstone 8 years or so to become a very different game.
Bc yugioh doesn't have set rotations, the game is constantly growing in power because if the new cards aren't relevant or better than what's already good, no one will buy it.
Hey man, really like your videos, they are fun and really interesting. May I give you a small pint of constructive critizism tho? I think you need to slow down with your speed at which you speak at. It feels like its a rush for you and one can bearly keep up sometimes and one can hear you breathing in really heavy sometimes. I feel like your video ideas are great and you explain everything nicely but personally i think if you improve your speaking skill in your videos a little bit it can push these videos to the next level. I hope this finds you well. Thx for the great videos.
I see a bunch of yugioh players in this comment section talking about yugioh's power creep problem and I, as a yugioh player myself, would like to add on. In regards to yugioh's power creep problem the issue is more on the overall complexity of the game from rules that's not well explained in the handbook given to duelists when they buy a Structure Deck, this creates the issue of constant misunderstandings from a casual perspective, but the game's so complex anyway that it's rare to find new yugioh players actually playing the game. Another issue which has somewhat been resolved? Is the issue of a new summoning mechanic being introduced every few years or so. We haven't gotten a new summoning mechanic in the last 6ish years and I doubt we're getting another, Konami has acknowledged the complexity if the game and the harsh learning curve that yugioh has and they've made products around this such as the 2 player starter set which has done absolutely nothing to help players get into the game as it's too battle phase focused and not at all focused on even touching on the actual confusing rulings it has. Finally, the issue of Tier 0 formats; we get A LOT of these in yugioh it's been a rough journey these last couple of years, even now, but these formats are how the game functionally works at this point, Tier 0 formats are never a good thing for the general community only the top players seem to enjoy it as they are willing to spend thousands to play the next best deck and make their name be known but for the rest of the community it feels bad to lose to a deck that out paces your 2 year old deck that won't get any support for a really long time. There probably is more to say here but I'm procrastinating some work I need to do so I think I'll stop here.
@@danielhicks1824 not really, auto sims don’t explain stuff like timing rules on card texts or what kind of steps there are in the battle phase or even complex stuff like card advantage. What I’m saying is not necessarily for people who want to play to just hop on a sim and mindlessly click buttons then wonder “why game bug?” When they cannot perform an action but instead I’m trying to explain it is the complexities that makes Yugioh hard to get into and on top of that there’s no good entry points because the game itself is expensive and every new card has like 3 effects on one text box.
@@draconicmeta846 i think you WILL learn the interactions eventually because if you make an effort to get better in the context of a sim you do in fact have to know how your cards will interwct with other cards. It's just absurd to throw someone into real games without those guard rails in place. The info dump needed is silly
invidualy maybe ,but you could only summon reliably once but activate spells until you hand is empty and no body for a board wipe seems a lot better than a body with 1 pop
the mono white background is a bit of an issue, I had to crank down my brightness all the way to keep my eyes from hurting, and at this low light level the cards are totally unreadable. Darker background please! Doesn't need to be black, any shade of gray or really anything not pure white would be a blessing. Great vid otherwise.
I don’t think power creep requires that the new cards are like some old cards except better, just that decks with newer cards reliably beat decks with older cards.
Powercreep is not required. You just need to have alternate equally viable options. But to do that the game designers would have to have foresight on how players will use the new pieces, fine tuning to match the ever expanding number of match-ups, some narrative reason or fun aspect to draw in new players, and a spark of creativity to come up with this new alternative in the first place. All of which is extremely unlikely, and thus rather than try this and fail sometimes, game designers prefer to just use brute force methods like creating new card patterns with the dial turned up so high they can't fail, or creating strictly better versions of old card patterns alongside other cards to ensure something is 'hype', a.k.a. powercreep. TLDR: powercreep is when game designers don't know where the balance of their game is, or don't care, and just make strictly better stuff so it sells.
@@camfunme I agree but people seem to disagree with us. Only TCG players seem to have this attitude towards powercreep and I think its a form of Stockholm syndrome we have because no card game has ever tried to fix it. Could you imagine if other game genres forced you to use the new characters or items and just forget about the old stuff? I imagine people wouldn't be happy. People will buy new cards in order to try new things and enjoy different strats. No need to force us to buy new sets just for profits.
@@mrevilducky because they don't try to. Every game is unbalanced but card games intentionally power creep for profits. If a tcg existed out there where the developers actually tried to make it balanced im sure they be doing much better than today's tcgs
more viable options does equal power creep ,having more copies of a card also equals power creep, making new cards does equal powercreep ,even if every new card you make is weaker it reaches a point where there is enough combinations of cards to stomp whatever this theorythical power level you want to keep
@@some2043 there's a difference between what your describing and cards that are the exact same but the new one is just better because of higher stats, lower cost, same stats but much better effect.
Hi SodaTCG, I am getting more and more interested into the game theory (not the Nash etc one, the theory behind games themselves) and its relation to economical health. Can you suggest any textbook or other kind of sources to learn about this topic? Thank you very much for your content!
In YGO I have the experience the best format to learn the game is funnily enough the Ishizu Tear format as it relies on your ability to quickly determine the best outcome for you specifically while allowing you to disrupt your opponent. The best way to learn deck building is the history of older formats like Edison or Goat as you learn to evaluate cards. Then the best format in YGO is sadly always the one 1 month in the future from now if they didn’t released the next broken set.
5:35 I think part of the powercreep problem, at least with YuGiOh, is that what we’re capable of in the game these days has VASTLY exceeded what was originally intended for when it was made back in the late 1990’s, and that it’s never fully been adjusted to accommodate. I have some ideas on how to rectify that WITHOUT directly nerfing anything we’re able to do in the game currently: ⚪️Increase the starting LP from 8000 to 20,000 (a 2.5X LP increase to help slow down the game a smidge). ⚪️A suite of opt-in “boons” you could start the duel with 1-3 of, that act akin to the lifelines you’d see on some game shows. These boons, if they were cards themselves, would generally have effects that would be on the weaker side of things, and are meant to be a compliment to any given deck or slight soft counter to your opponent’s instead of anything you’d wrap your entire deck around. Boons would be defensive/utility based by default, aimed to keep you in the game longer rather than helping you win outright. In a match setting, during the first duel, both players would pick their 3 boons, then during the second duel, only the loser of the first match can change all 3 of theirs while the winner of the prior duel can only swap out 1 boon, and then if the match reaches the third duel, both players can redo all their boons. Some examples would include: ⚫️Boon of Resilience: You begin the duel with 5000 more LP. Once per duel (Quick Effect), you can halve any single amount of battle or effect damage your opponent inflicts upon you. ⚫️Boon of Regeneration: During the End Phase of each player’s turn, you gain 1000 LP. Once per turn (Quick Effect), you can tribute 1 monster from your hand or field; Gain LP equal to that tributes total Original ATK/DEF. ⚫️Boon of Normality: During your Main Phase, you can Normal Summon 1 Normal or Gemini Monster in addition to your Normal Summon/Set. Each turn, 1 Level 5 or higher Normal or Gemini monster you Normal Summon can be Summoned without Tributing, but if you do, that summoned monster cannot be tributed or used as material during the turn it was summoned this way. ⚫️Boon of Abundance: If you began the duel with 60 cards in your main deck: At the beginning of the duel, before the first turn begins, you can shuffle your entire starting hand into your deck; Draw an equal number of cards. Once per turn, you can shuffle 1 card from your Hand, Field, GY or Banishment into your deck. Once per duel, you can draw 2 cards for your Normal Draw instead of 1. ⚫️Boon of Resourcefulness: If any number of cards from your Hand or Deck would be Sent to the GY or Banished by an opponent’s card(s) or Effect(s); You can negate the effects of and Banish up to an equal number of cards from your Extra Deck facedown instead. Once per duel, if there are no cards in your main deck, and any number of cards were moved out of your main deck by an opponent’s card(s) or effect(s) this duel; You can shuffle 20 random cards from your Hand, Field, GY and/or Banishment into your deck. ⚫️Boon of Liberation: During the beginning of the duel, Target 1 of your Zones (Monster, Spell/Trap, or Field); That targeted zone is unaffected by the effects of Opponent’s cards for the rest of the duel. Once per duel, during either player’s turn, you can declare 1 Card Type (Monster/Spell/Trap); For the rest of the turn, Cards in the Targeted Zone are unaffected by the effects of other cards of that declared card type, EXCEPT if they are of that declared card type themselves. ⚫️Boon of Mischief: During your Main Phase, you can Normal Set 1 Normal or Flip monster in addition to your Normal Summon/Set. Once per Turn (Quick Effect), You can Shuffle all Facedown cards on your field (in your Monster OR Spell/Trap Zones.) ⚫️Boon of Dominion: During the beginning of the duel, Place 1 Field Spell you own in your Field Zone. Its effects are negated until it leaves your field. Once per turn, if a Field Spell you control would be removed from the field by an opponent’s card or effect; You can discard your entire hand instead (Min. 1 cards). ⚫️And so on and so forth…
this video doesn't make me think powercreep is a necessary evil, this video makes me think that card games are just bad the point of why powercreep should be good is because so players would be more engaged with new things, but why a game need to always change? for a new player everything is already new, and if a player is tired of the same format that should be ok, they will try other games or do other hobbies, and if the game was really good they would return after some years maybe the typical f2p competitive online game also has some form of powercreep, but it feels way more genuinely good instead of "buy new things!!" and isn't there an exception about this rule? i talk about historical Yu Gi Oh formats (Goat and Edison) where by definition, they can never change and the meta will be always the same, but people play it anyways
Yugioh doesn't have power creep, it has power sprint
You could say it’s… “Rushing Recklessly”
@@RJV-s3lNot bad, but i think it is in a "space" of "chaos"
Well at least the power creep has slowed down. Hard to power creep a consistent turn one win
@@antarath517until tearlament dropped and full comboed you on your turn when you go first
i always had a love hate relationship with yugioh's powercreep. konami always manages to pump out the most elaborate
decks/archetypes that break the game in interesting ways, but everyone including konami can see that this isn't sustainable. they always try to set back the clock with new formats or games like duel links, speed duels, or rush duel but they all inevitably run into the same issues. this makes me worried about the longevity of the game, especially considering how difficult it is to onboard new players onto the game.
Powercreep in yugioh has gone so bad that decks are experiencing convergent evolution.
As a former yugioh player my problem with modern yugioh is honestly that every modern deck plays the exact same way, often times even culminating in the exact same boss monsters with the only difference between rogue and top tier decks being the number of disruptions they can play through and their consistency. Gone is the contrast between say a HAT player summoning myrmeleo, search for bottomless, set 3 or 4 pass, and then his opponent tries to go off with mythic rulers on the next turn. Or a bujin player trying to play the whole game with never summoning more than once or twice vs a sylvan deck that swarms the board and makes multiple high rank XYZ. These decks were so different but saw play at the same time. Decks actually had identity back in the day, now they are all the same. 2014-2015 was peak yugioh
The recurring problem with YGO is that it tries to diversify decks with archetypes and themes for years, yet those builds centers arround the same boss monsters and counters. Why you want to play Deck A to end with Baronne and/or Apollousa, when Deck B does the same more consistently? Why you want to play Gate Guardian with all its new support and unique boss monsters, when the rest of decks out there are summoning they same big monster leading the board anyways?
Lately they're trying to avoid generic summoning conditions, as they banned those two examples in some formats. Some Decks like Memento, Labrynth or Vaalmonica are good examples of unique builds that tries to stay on their own playstyle, but they can still add just a few tech options without losing their whole identity.
Now its been dificult to keep the old ones
@@YGOstratPlayerthis is simply not true. konami this year banned all generic endboard monsters. a runick white forest players endboard is a diabell and 3-4 runick spells. a yubel endboard is phantom, varudas, rage, desirae. a lab endboard (2 lab players got top 32 at a 1800 ycs this week) is 5 set cards pass. a ritual beast endboard is a collosus, ulti-galli, and protos. no endboard is the same every deck has dif lines and point of interaction
@@neroneroren6788baronne and appo are banned for a reason in the tcg to avoid generic endboards
Complexity creep in YuGiOH has reached insane levels, making the onboard game really hostile to new players since it became like a MOBA (League or Dota) where the only way to improve is knowledge and the way to earn it (because of how many cards/characters exist) is to play A LOT of games to face a lot of the decks and cards that exist but also how the mechanics of the game works in general and for those specific archetypes, and in the process you are going to get demolished over and over again, that makes the game overwhelming to learn and most people won't be able to take that many loses to just grasp the general idea of how YuGiOh plays.
Not to mention the 'rulings' and card text in Yugioh are absolutely dogshit awful. For example: If/When timing and missing activations. The difference between "select" "target" and how cards effectively target "at resolution" but because it doesn't say target it doesn't actually "target". The lack of PSCT and the need for writing entire sentences like "Cannot be targeted or destroyed by card effect, battle, traps, spells, whatever" instead of just saying "indestructible."
Yugioh is a fucking mess and a pile of dogshit of a card game- and that's from someone who joined during the then "end times" of Spellbook vs Druler and played up until now. That's not even touching on powercreep and monetization I only talked about PSCT and Yugioh's lack of. Nevermind the lack of supported formats outside of advanced (standard) and Edison alone.
I’m fine with having random words mean different things as it’s an expression of skill, though I can see how that’d be an issue for someone getting into the game. There are other formats, like duel links and rush. I have no defense for the cost asides from its way better in the ocg, and to play master duel. Also power creep is fun, and I’d say that Konami has helt it pretty well.
And once you do reach the point where you understand enough to feel competitive you also realize it's simply not worth the effort since the game is anti-fun. The only people who actively enjoy the gameplay are sadists.
Yugioh actually has official, 1st party articles explaining the comprehensive psct they have and if you understand it, like 99% of "rulings" questions immediately evaporate. Keywords are fun, and good design, but if you read the psct article, you will almost never have a ruling question for the rest of your time playing the game @Flatfootsy
@@Flatfootsy Well the confusing wording were always a problem especially in the old days some cards were not even clear they target or not. Really good example is Sakuretsu Armor which come up a lot back in the days cuz it says nothing about targeting however IT DOES and you just had to know...
Well there is some support for old formats they have official Time Wizard format buuuut yeah these events are rare and supported that much. GOAT is supported mostly by community (that's what i play btw) and not really by Konami.
"Speed and power must be kept in check" meanwhile Yu-Gi-Oh cranking it up laughing maniacally
Powercreep in Pokemon has really not been bad at all the past 2 generations. It’s just the Tag Team fuckup that really created a huge problem, and the designers have slowly been deescalating since
3 prize Pokemon were a big mistake imo. Late sun/moon into swsh format is where my interest slowly started to fade.
@@DarkMarkGaming94 Agreed. I stopped playing for a good 4-5 years and only came back last year. The meta is really good right now
I feel like I missed the memo then. The power creep has come from the energy acceleration. Welder used to be considered overpowered and only somewhat "acceptable" because fire was in a weaker place. Now, attaching an extra energy would borderline be considered a bad card when you have cards digging for/attaching 3 energies at a time.
@@P4brotagonistGood point! Again, I haven't played for a while but I remember ADP decks being able to consistently get an Altered Creation tag team attack off on turn one going second mainly due to energy acceleration and moving a steel energy from Zacian V to ADP.
Also I might be wrong but weren't you able to play Welder on turn one until they changed the rules regarding supporter cards?
@DarkMarkGaming94 Oh god instant PTSD from just reading "ADP." Yeah you could use them first turn but that got changed. After ADP/Zacian they really reigned in the energy acceleration. Heck it was considered insane when they printed a psychic pokemon that let you dig and attach psychic energy, but you had to go second to even use it. Now, you have like 3-4 energy a turn with damn near infinite discard recursion.
One thing I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the Yugioh section is hard once per turns. They put a very clear limiter on what you can and cannot do by making sure copies of your card can't activate their effect
It would be especially interesting because Yu-Gi-Oh has the very rare trait of reverse powercreep, where the release of new cards can increase the viability of older cards (either by design as nostalgia bait or accidentally due to some niche interaction). This is especially the case with older cards that lack once per turn limits on their effects or have some powerful effect with a cost that is now no longer detrimental.
@qweqwe5609 that is what I like about yugioh. A card like Blue Eyes White Dragon can go from basically worthless to meta relevant with the release of new support cards
@@qweqwe5609it's why set rotation is dumb.
They dont make a difference, the result is the same, combo of on your first turn and negate all the opponent’s turn
HOPT is yugioh's "mana system"
There is a distinction to be made between power creep and complexity creep. Both happen in all games but some learn more towards one than the other.
In Magic and Yugioh, the average card has gotten more text on them over time but in Pokémon, by just upping the numbers a lot, cards haven't truly gotten that much more complicated.
That is boring though, pokemon has sadly often repeated, specific ability or attacks and makes it so kinda boring sometimes.
Like if you go throught multiple generations you often see very often similarities between pokemon or what specific types can do.
In MTG case, there was old cards with complicated and long texts of rules, but in the end it was just one effect. Nowadays, cards with lot of texts do 2 ~ 3 different things rulewise. Sometimes they are value, engine, and finisher all in one card.
Pokemon is easily the most balanced/best game out of all the TCG's. Every deck gets to play, every deck has its own playstyle, every deck does what other card games consider absurd like drawing 9-14 cards per turn, every deck has tech cards to win and outplay opponents and on top of that it's the CHEAPEST TCG out there by miles.
Pokemon should introduce hand traps. Imagine how much that could open up the game.
@@Flatfootsy .... it's not even the cheapest of the 4 games in the video, let alone of all TCGs, though? Hearthstone has tens of thousands of players who have never spent a cent. That is fundamentally not possible for a paper card game, even if you are gifted a bunch of cards, somebody paid for them, wizards tpc and konami got their piece for it. MTGA and Duel Links/Master duel also host free players. Pokemon is the odd one out in this context, tbh. It's literally the only one that you MUST pay to play. How does that work out to be cheapest in your head?
Powercreep is an unavoidable reality of any game that has regular updates, especially if they're collectable in some fashion.
Dominion would like to have a word. Jokes aside, it is not collectable and I see that as the bigger factor
What about horizontal scaling instead? Create new mechanics and ways to win, that are not better or worst than existing one, just different?
Might not be feasable, but imo it should be the goal
@12Tsurugi Horizontal scaling is probably the ideal situation, at least from a player perspective, it just is going to take a lot of very good playtesting to get that the way it should be. It's a challenge to keep a new mechanic from being so strong it ends up being vertical anyway, or not strong enough that people don't even bother with it.
@@12Tsurugi in an idealistic world it is the goal, but honestly how much you can make it absolutely horizontal all the way while keeping it fun? it is just a fact that some mechanics in all card game or even any game are far easier to break and abuse, which is what competitive players are looking and strive to achieve. even if you can maybe maintain it for a while, oversight will happen, and the spike will arrive. the slope of power going up, while noticable and maybe can be the starting point of "game gone bad", can also bring in a lot of fun as well. being with many mechanic of similar power might be fun for a while, but at the end, meta will form, and some might fall off entirely without being able to be saved, and those that enjoys mechanics that dies the easiest wont have fun anymore
It is true that Powercreep is unavoidable but it can be properly managed and somewhat mitigated. The problem with Magic recently is that there is so much product and that just makes us feel the effects of powercreep more often.
I agree. Powercreep should be something that happens slowly. If i look at some new cards i buy and they are better in every way than the cards i used to play 4 years ago than so be it. But sometimes in MTG you buy a new Commander Deck or make a Standard Deck and 2 Sets Later half of it is outdated and considered "not that good" anymore. Horrible feel.
But also very clearly the specific cards that are power creept are very obviously designed to be broken and force you to buy them
The problem is that manabased cardgames just dont have a lot of design space as the gameplay is so linear. Only so many ways to print a 2drop, a removal spell or a draw spell yeah it can be really unique but it will still be what it is fundamentally.
So you just keep playing the same formats in different coats of paint.
MtG will never evolve thanks to set rotation, it will always be more of the same but slightly different.
The examples he gives for powercreep are pretty wild. I don't think that many people would think of Solutide as a powercrept version of Path to Exile.
Especially considering swords to ploweshers exists
He talked about 4 different TCGs, which is more than what the average player knows about. He doesn't need to be 100% accurate to illustrate a general point. Don't miss the forests from the trees!
@@drago939393I guess he was accurate about the other two since with Magic and Hearthstone the examples didn't make much sense at all.
Lmao "over hall"
It's overhaul 😂
2:28 Another side effect of powercreep, especially in eternal formats, is having duplicates in your deck. If you can only put 4 copies of a card in your deck, but they print a stronger version, put all 8 in the deck and now you've doubled your chance of drawing the card, although copies 5-8 are slightly weaker, sometimes that's worth it. Similar to that is a concept called critical mass, which is something devs want to avoid or someone might just make a deck with 24 lands and 36 copies of effectively the same card. (Magic in this scenario)
Yugioh old school: set 1 monster and 1 face down card
New Yugioh: with this 1 card i can literally play solitaire
Future Yugioh: with this 1 card I can wreck entire families
Future YGO will involve winning games before you play that
You don't need to make new cards more powerful than older cards to keep players interested. You just need to make them different.
They have to be as good or better otherwise they wont be used competitively and getting exactly as good is Very hard. Also even if in a vacuum card power level remained the same versatility and synergy would increase creating power creep that way
That's what Shadowverse Evolve is mostly doing. The power scale crept up very slowly and when it seems like something is one or two cards away from being way too good they'll shift to something new until other classes catch up. People generally enjoy swapping over to new archetypes since they do different things instead of being the same thing but more powerful every set. Shifting over to the novelty rail has been a great strategy.
@@jamismiscreant7514 they will be used competitively if the older cards get rotated out.
Two aspects about powercreep that weren’t mentioned: niche filling and conditional effects. They can overlap but are different.
Niche filling is just the result of having more options, which means as new cards get made it’s more likely a specific hole in a strategy will be filled. Now, this isn’t guaranteed to happen, but it’s likely to happen as more and more options are made. As powercreep, the result is often that the power floor of the game is raised, rather than the ceiling. Although, naturally, sometimes a specific niche might push a strategy over its ceiling by covering a weakness. Now onto the next topic.
“Restriction breeds creativity,” as Mark Rosewater often says. I think conditional effects are inherently more interesting than otherwise, and I think most players and designers agree-even if unconditional cards are stronger. This makes most card games lean into specific archetypes or subsets of cards that need to be played together for them to work well. Note that this includes otherwise drawbacks and downsides on cards.
One of the consequences is that conditional cards will provide a stronger effect for the same rate, or the same effect for a cheaper rate. After all, you’re paying an extra deckbuilding, gameplay, or resource cost. Note that this isn’t powercreep-as I said, it does incur an additional cost.
But as satisfying that cost becomes less of a burden, the end result is that you gain access to a better effect for free just by adhering to a specific strategy. This can be related to niche filling in that for everything you want the deck to do, there’s a card tailor-made for the specific strategy. The end result is that satisfying the extra condition is so trivial as to be free, and in the specific deck every conditional card works as a better version of the unconditional card. It’s powercreep not through individual cards, but by different options coming together to enable a stronger deck.
I want to leave another comment, and I might follow up this train of thought there if I do make that one.
in marvel snap we are seeing power creep when you compare some cards to the vanilla stat line, before a 4 cost 6 power card was vanilla stats, so a card with a benefit at that cost, needed to have less stats, like enchantress and specially shan chi (a 4 cost 3 power destroy your opponents 10 power or more cards here) while huge payups like crossbones (a 4 cost 10 power) had a downside, now we are at the point where a 4 cost can have 7 power and no theoretical downside and be fine.
what i find interesting is "retroactive" powercreep, where a group of cards had very little effect in the meta but a single new card can push them over the edge to the point those old cards start to look overpowered for what they do, just because they gained consistency in modern times
Can't wait to see Yugioh lmao
It's all out anime brawl, ora ora vs muda Muda style
I really miss old Hearthstone with its minion focus. I found building a board and trading minions with the opponent to over multiple turns to be very satisfying. It wasn't absurd for a minion to stick on the board for 3 turns, and that didn't even automatically win you the game. It's what made Hearthstone unique compared to other card games and I'm sad that they went into a different direction.
Meanwhile Yugioh's goat format be like
i dont really understand this sentiment maybe because im a newer player?
every single paladin midrange tempo deck has been about board control till you get enough mana to buff your board to start going face, elemental mage is about board, evolve shaman cares about minions, pirate demon hunter cares about minions aswell and board based combat, all of these decks that are viable routinely go against each other and going 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 is the way you win each of these matchups, is that not what you talk about?
@@muditjain4024 Its simply nostalgia. Players say this all the time, but when blizz launched a "classic" hearthstone, it bombed so hard that it was pretty much only bots on ladder. It is a finished format too, everyone already knows what is the best, and as said in the video, it had very little variation besides your draws. Matchups are won or lost if you draw flame imp on turn one or wild growth on curve.
Most of meta decks of classic hs weren't minion focused too, freezing mage, ramp druid, miracle rogue, to name a few, weren't minion focused at all.
People like to focus on tag teams discussing Pokémon, but I feel people forget those early black and white years… the $30 Pokémon catcher without a coin flip, computer search as the only useable card of its kind, $80 XBall mewtwo that completely dominated nearly all formats it was part of. As bad as ADPZ may have been, those team up to cosmic eclipse days were still dynamic and affordable, and it has only gotten better since then.
Hearthstone power creep makes me the most depressed. Compared to what it used to be 6 years ago, it's so alienating to play the game.
You are steadily becoming my favorite TCG-tuber. Keep up the good work and informative videos.
Drinking game idea: whenever “random” is mentioned when talking about hearthstone.
The idea sounds fun but i rather stay alive :D
Hey man, is everything alright? You sometimes breath in a very quick succession, like you breath in after part of a sentence, say 2 - 3 words and then breath in again. This happens super often. E.g. 2:15 "This way, powercreep can feel kind of draining on players, *breath* either feeling like *breath* all of their old cards basically *breath* serve no purpose after new cards come out to replace them *breath* [...]" This is just one example, it happens a lot.
If this is not a condition (and I apologize in advance if it is, I don't want this to be critique of an health issue or something), try to listen to some professional speakers and see where they make their breathing pauses. Also try to take longer breaths and not these quick ones, so you can say a lot more on a breath, because you are able to do that. This makes the (in music this is called:) phrasing a little more coherent and better to listen to, instead of having these short pauses, that are often times (not always) awkward, because of the short breaths. Again, if this is an actual condition that you're struggling with, I'm sorry. This isn't supposed to be a thing of "Skill issue, now get healthy or you can't do RUclips anymore" or something like that. I was just geniunely curious and trying to give some advice.
14:45 i used to play pokemon tcg back when all the rule changes to the first turn happened. first i cant use supporters, then suddenly they remove any turn 1 restriction at all and give the player going 1st a major advantage, then a few years later they add an attack restriction going 1st and add a coinflip to a powerful trainer card that was a major centerpiece of the format for 3 years. the amount of change with every new generation was too much as a kid to keep up with so i ended up quitting when that happened around XY release (also because the deck i just invested the little money i had as a kid in was a pretty fast and agressive deck that relied on attacking turn 1 and abusing that trainer card to easily knock out weak benched basic pokemon and grab extra prize cards thanks to an ability LOL). apparently they re-added the supporter rule another few years later on too lmao.
i went to a prerelease once many years later to support our new local game store at the time (it still died a year later due to covid restrictions :skull:) and i was struggling the whole time trying to remember what the current rules of going 1st even were, because i had seen so many different iterations in the past when i still played.
It’s been no supporter no attacking turn one for a little while now, I don’t see them changing it any time soon. The restrictions encourage different decks to actively wanting second or first into specific matchups, rather than everyone wanting first. Sometimes the meta swings one way or the other depending on what’s good, but right now your choice, and ability to deal with it when you don’t have a choice, have a lot of skill and nuance built into it.
The powercreep in Yugioh is immense, but the way Yugioh works allows them to go and apply that power creep to old decks, even decks that were bad on release 12 years ago and make them suddenly an amazing deck. The current top deck in the TCG uses Yubel cards, that were previously a deck of 3 hard to summon 0/0 monsters with battle related effects (battle is typically seen as irrelevant to many players in Yugioh). Now the deck is an absolute menace, so they might have taken it a bit too far in this case, but they support old decks relatively often.
Yugioh is a fascinating game when it comes to power creep.
Semi casual - rogue tier decks are fascinating decks that use a massive variety of mechanics in different ways that are on a similar level and lead to varied, in depth, back and forth games
The problem is the consistent release of one or two decks that warp the entire game to be just about them.
Tearlaments and Fire Format are key examples, but even things like Kashtira which never became the sole dominant deck, are so far and above even things that are printed later and have locks/restrictions which they just simply don’t that it makes the vast majority of decks in Yugioh never see play
I was fine with the fire format, as there was a lot of decks that you could play asides from snake eyes, also I liked snake eyes. Just, they’ve been around for wayy too long.
Just because nobody bothers to power rank all the rogue decks doesnt make them equal. There will always be a best deck and a lot of rogue decks are really oppressive if they ever were the best deck. Remember a key design philosophy of konami is to just give older decks some floodgate boss to make them good again.
Pokemon has kept a surprisingly good handle on it so long as you forgo multi-prize cards. Considering the game has been in circulation for something like 25 years, that's pretty damn impressive.
Dragon Ball Super Card Game is one of the best examples of how power creep affected that game with the early sets being slow and costing a lot of energy to play things to later sets basically having every card be free or 1-2 energy to get some insane effects
It would have been really interesting to see your take on Cardfight Vanguard. The powercreep has become so bad not just once, but twice to the point where the company had to soft-reboot the game on both occasions, resulting in different format splits and the game constantly becoming feature creeped each and every instance.
Vanguard powercreep is a bit out of hand - every time a new product in D format releases, the entire metagame shifts. And they release new sets so fast.
At the moment, it seems to be in a good place but for a year there the competitive format was just a rotating door of “Top 3” decks.
Because of the way Guard Values and Attack Points scale, they could just simply inflate the numbers to keep complexitycreep in check but for some reason they have elected not to do it.
Yu-Gi-OH's only problem is Konami and their unending greed.
Just in the tcg…
that's just tcg my brother, the meta right now in master duel is quite fun and a lot of decks are very viable, ofc fk snake eyes and yubel are a bit ahead but not too much, and branded for example is still powerful here even with it being the weakest version of the deck out of the 3 formats
As a Pokémon player, I don't think power creep is much of a problem in the game. Numbers have inflated since the old days, but in recent years the power levels stay pretty steady.
Yeah tag teams were really just the main mistake that led numbers to be as high as they are now but they are relatively steady now
The pokemon damage output is also scaled well with the hp values now so it really doesn't feel very crept. Also literally everything is playable to some degree even cradily go silly turbo
High numbers, but everything scales accordingly. Means the prize card system is actually good, since it has aged well. Looking at YGO's life point system on the other hand...
@@AoyagiMeiYugioh is more about how many negates and hand traps you can assemble rather than life points lol. Which isnt terrible. The resources keeping you alive are variable and have a lot of weird interactions. You do have to make choices on which tools in your toolkit to utilize
@@danielhicks1824 The LP acts as a timer on how many turns you get to draw outs or pieces to make a comeback play. Big boards are too easy to assemble these days.
Ey I want to say I really like your videos and how you talk about the context of every card game and how it's different, have you considered to expand the games that you include? I would really love to see you include Flesh and blood in all this analysis that you do
Keep the good work!❤
I would have mentioned regarding Yugioh the concept of turn 0. When you go 2nd as (full powered) Tearlaments, you can functionally win the game after the first action that your opponent does on their turn when they go first, by chaining Tearlaments and millers to distrupt and floodgate your opponent before they can play the game. Other decks like Labrynth and Rescue Ace can do this too. But Tearlaments does it the best.
To me, I prefer power creep by complexity rather than power creep by scale. Or sidegrades.
Basically, considering Quick Study is power crept out of the gate, we could get a sidegrade to Brainsurge where it's Quick Study but two-brid, now every color can use it.
Shadowfist is interesting because even though it's a paper game, they aren't afraid to issue errata and reprint cards with different text. So a lot of the broken "alpha" cards have been reworked with higher cost or additional restrictions to be more fair. For example, the "political favors" faction has a lot of ways to gain mana that don't involve lands. One card lets you steal an unspent mana from target player. Has decent counterplay if your opponent is playing Ascended you should try not to have unspent mana floating around. Except on the first turn of the game. It was such a feelbad moment when the ascended player stole your only mana on turn 1 before you could play anything that the card now reads "target an opponent who has completed at least one turn."
if u think powercreep in ur game is bad, think about yu gi oh, we had a deck that played full combo with negates and disruption on your opponents first turn (if he started or not). man, it was fun
There's more...
A deck (and cards) that destroys said board and potentially leave you dead in 1 turn.
@@deathboy345 idk what deck you referring to but full combo first turn boards with negates first was popularized with 2016 Tier 0 PePe so damn near a decade ago. 2017 Tier 0 Zoodiac popularized a small archetype engine stacked with handtraps to disrupt your opponent's first turn board.
@@traplover6357he’s talking about tearlaments. The main deck monsters activated an effect to fuse from GY upon hitting the GY and a way to do an effect and then mill 3. They also had a monster that could summon from hand then mill 3 on the opponent turn and 2 hand traps that milled both players for five letting them get engine going and setting up multiple interruptions before taking their first turn
Well yes, we had broken control formats over the last years and it's not a completely new issue, but Yugioh still reached a point, where playing Trap cards is only viable if they activate from hand or if you get them for free anyway.
So basically 1/3 of the cards got powercrept out of existance already
@@traplover6357 can zoodiac play during the first turn of the duel if ur opponent went first (i mean core engine, not handtraps)? Tear, the most wonderful deck ever created can
Yu-Gi-Oh has a way of balancing new cards.they tend to be more complex new cards often require specific deck, which helps keep older cards useful. Additionally, new mechanics can sometimes make older cards shine in unexpected ways.
they also increase the power of new cards is by giving them multiple effects, such as one on summon, an ignition effect, a passive effect on the field, and even an effect if removed.
12:16 you forgot to mention, that part of the trainers become supporters (and you can play only 1 supporter per turn), and part of them became items, which can be used multiple times.
I appreciate you making these videos. I really enjoy them! Thank you 🥰
Every time I see a picture of Sheoldred it makes me glad I stopped playing Magic nearly 20 years ago. Feels like the creativity of combining cards to win is gone and you just need 1-2 powerhouse cards now to likely win.
I know it's not as old, but I'd love to see Legends of Runeterra analyzed alongside Hearthstone, too!
Yugioh right now is based on engines, little archetype packages that can mash within each other and create a deck.
The issue is that in reality, there are only 3 engines and a bunch of bad decks that can't win against them. Fiendsmith, Snake-eyes and the new Yubel package.
I stopped playing hearthstone when they started to constantly print cards that are "strictly better" than others, I just hate that
I understand that powercreep is inevitable, but at least in digital you could update older cards to make them on the same power level as new releases instead of just forgetting about them, that is something marvel snap is doing so far and I quite like it
This comment section is full of anti-YGO sentiment lol. Meanwhile me: we've reached the singularity, we can only sort of expand horizontally, not that much vertically/forward. I don't think the powercreep is that bad since we've reached basically a limit and it's unlikely to be pushed hard so it's kinda whatever and as someone else mentioned, there's hard once per turns already so there's at least a limit per turn. So... it's kinda fine. The only issue with is soft onces or no onces at all which is what the ultimate bad situation is: FTKs. Not to mention, since YGO doesn't have the axis of having Mana, and maybe only levels and ranks and whatever else nomenclature for the theoretical printed power level, there isn't really much stat powercreep and stats aren't exactly an issue and haven't been an issue in such a long time. I think the game has hit so many "gold standards" that are so timeless like max 2k ATK for a 4-star and an average of like... 1600, kind of like the 2/2 2-mana Bear in MTG so... yeah.
Powercreep in magic depends in part on what format you are playing. I feel a lot of players tend towards commander, standard, or draft. I play commander, which is one copy of any spell or creature unless the card gets around that with it's own rules
You forgot to mention that in Yugioh they introduced pendulums, allowing you to summon up to 5 monsters per turn for free.
Then they realized that was stupid and nerfed the entire concept.
Not for free. I get what you mean but setting up 2 scales is technically the cost.
Creatures are spells!
technically, yes, within the "meta-slang" or just the normal conversation vocabulary, no: "instant" and "sorceries" are named as "spell" just to shorten the "non-permanent spell"
At least in the case of Magic, you have set rotation to rotate out broken cards and return the game to the core set "status quo" as it were.
Yugioh doesn't have that. Our banlist is our set rotation, which is why i'm of the opinion that Yugioh NEEDS to have periods in the game where powercreep essentially plateaus and declines for a while so that the banlist can catch up. Deck building sets are generally excellent for that kind of thing because they're not often designed to break the ceiling of the game but rather introduce new archetypes with interesting gimmicks. Not saying it can't happen (we got both Labrynth and Runick from a deck building set), but its not like the core sets where their main goal is to just make everything that came before obsolete.
I just wish Konami was more aggressive with the banlist because they really don't do enough to balance this game. As it exists right now, its just a mechanism to sell product (which would be less aggravating if we had multiple supported formats like Magic).
Duel Masters has heavily supported Fire Bird archetype in previous set and make it to the top of meta, defeating Magic Kakumeijin archetype especially after some of its core cards like Perfect Fire had become limited
Really digging your channel, keep up the good work!
here's a video idea:
card games that have cards with effects that people don't use but use the card in a different way.
during the rule change section when you mention yugioh I'm surprised you didn't expand and mention MR3->MR4->MR5
Unmatched is an interesting card game, for a lot of reasons, but I'd say especially with its relationship to power creep.
Unlike TCGs, where you make your own deck, Unmatched is a card game with set-in-stone character decks. King Arthur's 30 card deck is ALWAYS the same, all the time--the same goes for Alice with her deck, Bruce Lee with his deck, and so on. As a result, it's less that individual cards matter, and more that decks do--like multiplayer video games and their character options.
This makes a really weird thing with power creep, in that, rather than specific cards being phased out from being too weak, entire characters are. You can't just bring in Beastform to replace Excalibur--those are each tied to their respective deck.
There is a competitive scene for this game, but it's VERY small, all things considered--most players are casual, and most people are buying decks because they are of characters they know or since they look fun--not really because they're particularly strong. So, power creep becomes less of a "this NEEDS to be done to sell more sets" type thing, and more like "the creators are experimenting with systems" type of thing.
Now, I'm personally a bit biased, and think that power creep is actually entirely unnecessary in this game--at least, on a broader scale. Sure, the very first sets had some weird weak things that make sense for patching out, but once those were done, the power level of the game felt very defined, with only a few outliers as being particularly strong. The game could have just kept releasing new decks that stayed in that level of power, and pretty much everything could have been fine, either by banning the top contenders, making formats which made them less powerful, or even just dealing with it and adapting around them.
Instead, Restoration Games continued to increase the power level, sometimes in incredibly bizarre ways (like printing cards that are objectively better than other cards, without actually accounting for that in the power budget). Many people hold the opinion that the company does not actually play the game, because they make a lot of strange choices that make no sense to anyone who DOES actually play.
This is a problem that's mostly been relevant from the many, many Marvel sets--but at the very least, it seems like everything is calming down, as the power levels of a lot of the newest sets are actually returning more to the "general baseline", so to speak. Hopefully, the upcoming Witcher and TMNT sets will be good fits for the game!
i want to push back on the idea that powercreep is required. weve been playing goat format for 20 years. how long have we played poker games for? also you dont need to increase a games power level to keep it changing, you absolutely could also change game rules to change the game. bans and unbans also change the game. also people absolutely will buy new cards for a game they like without those cards being powercrept. instead powercreep is needed for more powercreep. its not actually needed for a card game to be played, but it is needed for powercreep to happen, for the designers to be payed to make more powercreep. its a self feeding cycle that is falsely given more importance than it deserves while still possessing all the negative problems described in the video.
And how often have you bought new packs to get cards for goat?
For a game to keep support from it's makers it continuusly needs to make money, poker or chess don't count because everyone can produce their own poker set while it is illegal for you to print your own new yugioh set.
But that said keeping people buying cards can also be done by splitting the game into a more casual eternal format that has all the cards and holding all your high payout tournaments in a format that has rotation, forcing players who want to compete at the highest level to buy new cards no matter if they are stronger or even weaker.
Sounds like YGO should get the Pokemon treatment where the base game rules are upheaved and changed to help the game be more in line with the fantasy of battling monsters that you use also as resources, being played out back-and-forth over many turns with escalating power, as opposed to an extremely fine-tuned solitaire, combo-decks, negates and FTKs...
Amusing how YGO hasn't really had statline power creep, tho. Blue-Eyes White Dragon stats are still a benchmark for generic and archetype ace monsters, while your usual 4-star archetype card will have La Djinn stats lol.
Yugioh power creep is going from sticks and stones to all out nuclear warfare
Powercreep is basically the inflation of games.
Yu-Gi-Oh is a strange case when it comes to power creep. The power level of what decks can do hasn't changed, rather the level of consistency at which these decks can execute these plays, and more importantly their RESILIENCE to disruptions that seek to counter these plays has.
Yu-Gi-Oh functionally started off as a "broken" game design-wise because it more or less was built off of a manga, which only loosely had rules about how the game was played and cards were more often made as a part of the story. Because of this, before any kind of real thought was put into a limitation on the number of copies of certain cards used in a deck and how a card worked in conjunction with other cards available, Yu-Gi-Oh was unintentionally doing everything players have said it's been doing since the beginning.
We had FTKs (Exodia FTK) burn (Magical Scientist), crazy combo fest OTK you the next turn (Reasoning Gate OTK, Cyber-Stein OTK, Airblade Turbo), and overbearing good stuff piles that plays the best cards (Chaos Yata, Destiny Raida) from basically the first 4 to 6 years of the game all thanks to players finding out creative incidental synergies and Konami having never had a real plan on how to balance card power in the first place.
Konami wasn't planning these decks or playstyles out... until they did.
Can you make a video on what newer games (such as one piece, Dragonball, loricana, etc) are doing different to differentiate themselves
I think you ought to explain the powercreep in Yugioh a little more. I think it is understated just how bad the powercreep in Yugioh is. Every new summoning mechanic is better than the last, being way more consistent and easier to pull off. The older summoning mechanics see play recently only because they eliminated the summoning requirements with card effects. Like fusion monsters are now pretty much just link monsters. It has gotten so bad that there is now no conceivable way of making a better archetype without just straight up banning problem decks every few months.
It goes even further in that the majority of new Yugioh archetypes that are released are flat out unplayable or worse than the 1 or 2 top decks that are broken, and this is a consistent thing. There’s loads of genuinely good decks in rogue tiers, but they’ll never be meta simply because the gap between them and the top deck is so large (usually because the rogue deck has any type of restriction while the top decks don’t)
I understand where you are coming from. In theory links are much better than xyzs since it is much more generic. However I don’t really think it is true since most of the time the amount a deck special summons depends on the archetype they play. Links are good, but only when you can spam enough material on the field to utilize the monsters to their fullest. Older summoning mechanics such as fusions and synchros are just as easy to pull off if in the correct archetype. Adding new summoning mechanics imo is just a way to make the game have more variety and playstyles. Also they banned most of the overpowered generic links anyways
It really sounds like you don't know yugioh.
The first good fusion deck was gladiator beast. It's whole thing was not using a fusion spell and just contact fusing (essentially just link summoning but is actually the precursor to synchros.) Fusion summoning the way it was originally designed was always going to suck. The next time a fusion archetype was top tier was when shaddol fusion just fused from the deck. A mechanic designed around going -2 either needs to be broken or it will just be bad.
Synchro summoning was the only time the new summoning mechanic was better than the old one immediately. Konami realized that mistake and made XYZ, pendulum, and links take multiple sets to build up strength.
Yugioh has been banning cards from the start to slow down power creep. It's the rotation of the game. Yugioh would be dead if they didn't.
You're right, gladiator beasts really did turn fusion summoning into link summoning with the likes of gyzarus. What was Konami thinking, smh.
@@AlphaSquadZero fusion summoning just was bad card design like ritual monsters. People are just attached to it more because it was bigger in the anime.
I refuse your first assumption (around 1:03) : every deck has its fields of competence and lacks in some other aspects; to print new cards you either create new strategies, power up some old strategies that have been left back in order to let them keeping up, or fill the lacks in those previous decks to have a way to compete.
It's totally hard to do, but you don't need to cram 4-5 different cards all together in a Swiss-Knife One-Man-Army Deus-Ex-Machina card.
In Magic I've seen a staggering increasing amount of cards that are enablers of strategies, payoffs, and engines WHILE having another different role in it (like being able to get involved into combat). Back in the day you needed **a whole deck** to do so.
This is not "keeping up", this is a __blatant attempt to make people salivate over a steamy newly cooked meal and to quiet the crybabies screaming "This card has a downside / restriction! I WANT MORE!"__
It's very interesting how every single game, except seemingly hearthstone, has started off with weak creatures that power creep into strong creatures, with the reverse happening to spells. The examples were given in yugioh, mtg and pokemon. I wonder why those games all had this happen? Is it just harder to evaluate spells before game launch?
Yeah, ygo and it's not even close
Power creep is required; power leaps are not, and we've been seeing power leaps in these games, especially YGO over the past few years. MTG standard is also seeing a problem with this, so much so to the point where it almost feels like YGO cause of all the mono-red and Azorius nonsense.
I don't think games require power creep. How many people play chess or backgammon? No updates for thousands of years.
I do think games should sell new cards to stay fresh for sure. But I think rotation and formats help slow down power creep.
I also think power-creep is easy if you can't find a gimmick for a card or set just make it better that will sell packs. I just dislike games where the rares are cleary just better. It makes the constructed format how ever spend more wins and who ever pulled better wins in limited. Designers need to playtest and not vomit rush products.
People will go back and play fun formats if you current game is bad.
Nadu was by design its a legendary creature that only needs one cost creatures 0 equit or 1 equip equipment and lands and some big win cards that are high cmc
Imagine if he talked about Digimon tcg, it has blatant powercreep and it only is 3 years old.
Special summoning in yugioh is so bad that special summoning 20 cards is easily normal 😂
"rules over hall" oops, that's a typo, it should be "rules overhaul"
If only yugioh would learn to keep the speed and power in check... The start of MR4 with the introduction of links was very refreshing.
Speed and power aren’t an issue in yugioh so long as the power level is fairly comparable for a decent number of decks and both players can make meaningful interesting decisions before the other shuts them out of the game. If hearthstone were to suddenly play like yugioh that would be a problem but yugioh shifted focus of how play works to be about things like intricate card interactions, a high density of interaction points, and a relatively unique form of resource management. Yugioh also foregoes many traditional card game focus points like tempo, early game, etc
@@jamismiscreant7514 speed is definitely an issue. you don't get X turns to draw hand traps and outs to stop your opponent before they finish you off. if you don't open with or top deck any for turn you're mostly screwed.
Peak power creep in yugioh is pre-errata chaos emperor dragon. IYKYK
Yugioh powercreep was EVERYWHERE. It was rare to have a 4 star monster with > 1800 atk. It was a big deal when Mechanical Chaser came out with atk of 1850.
Then Gemini Elf’s at 1900.
Now I hear there are 2000 and 2100 atk normal monsters no drawbacks
Hand traps completely put regular traps out of the game.
Every monster has an Omni negate and remove from the field
It’s insane
^ Wait until this guy hears about special summoning
@@Gleiren its like showing grandpa pankratops to mr fenrir
“Rules over hall” hehehe
alternative title : how good power creep is in every card game
generaly pretty good but none make it as fun as ygo
I feel like Pokémon has done more of an inflation model v power creep. Outside of EXs and their variants the gameplay still feels similar to 20 years ago v any other game.
Yugioh is the one that’s unrecognizable from the game’s roots. Speed and power have been embraced at the expense of fun interactive gameplay.
Yugioh has fun (sometimes) and very interactive gameplay though is absolutely is a fundamentally different game than it was before
Yugioh definitely still has interactive gameplay it is just that the form that takes looks very different. It honestly has more actual mind gameyness to it than most card games tbh.
@@jamismiscreant7514 I do play current. I have VV currently in paper/IRL and do decently well with it. Have also played with Tenpai and Yubel a bit. There’s interaction in current, but the game is fundamentally centered around stopping your opponent from playing entirely. You have to. Decks are too powerful and if your opponent gets to play they will shred you apart. The interaction isn’t centered on a fun gameplay loop in my view . It’s about pummeling your opponent into the ground with cards like Shifter, Flamberge into an unbreakable set up, Sanctifiring into a puppet lock, or just getting to the battle phase with Tenpai.
When I play Goat and Edison it’s night and day and it’s clear those much earlier eras are within the parameters of the game’s design. Archetypes and engines were designed around each other along with limited power traps, not floodgates and Omni negates that stop the opponent entirely.
Pls do a video on how easy it is to spot a fake card in every card game
all card games have power creep.
but yugiohs power creep is like a formula 1 race against the snails that are all other card games
Yugioh was so fun back in the days.
With Yugioh it's partially a problem because of how exponential the power creep has ramped up in the last 3 years. I call it Yugioh 2 because it's completely different now than it was in say 2020.
Sure every new Summoning mechanic has shifted the game and something like Mechanical Chaser which was amazing many years ago is beaten out in usefulness by even a mediocre Normal Summon Archetypal Searcher released a decade ago, but through all of them(barring Master Rule 4 violating the Geneva Conventions because of Pendulum Monsters) Yugioh has stayed at least fairly the same overall.
With Yugioh 2, it seems that every couple sets are printing Decks that are 1 card combos and have oppressive elements to funnel out literally everything printed before 2022, as well as generic cards and engines that throw away the identity of playing "A 'Blank' Deck" when it's 3-8 engines thrown together to sit on generic Extra Deck Monsters and a couple Archetypal Main Deck Monsters you can play because they're generic enough or are part of the Archetype of one of your engines.
It's basically reverted to Goodstuff.Deck but instead of a generic toolbox of Main Deck Monsters to interact with the opponent like in older formats it's "Fire King Yubel Snake-Eyes Fiendsmith Albaz Diabellstar Horus" where the concept that Archetypes were created to prevent has been thrown away and it's entirely unrewarding to try to play if you haven't drawn the out.
Powercreep is handled the best in Pokemon. The pokemon just get bigger numbers and nothing much else change aside from some mechanics like ace specs and v-stars.
I would argue that there's more of a focus on speed and consistency since we haven't really seen much of an hp increase in a while, and the big pokemon take a few turns to set up
I think you left something out in your list of problems power creep can cause, it can fundamentally change the game. I think this is why Powercreep in Hearthstone has been so bad for the game and Blizzard already considers it a dying product after just 10 years.
Early Hearthstone was all about trading creatures and spells in advantageous ways to maximize value. Losing one extra creature to a board wipe spell was devastating and every individual health point mattered. A key way you see this is that every direct damage combo and a very specific number it could reach and you were safe if you stayed above that.
It only took Hearthstone 8 years or so to become a very different game.
Bc yugioh doesn't have set rotations, the game is constantly growing in power because if the new cards aren't relevant or better than what's already good, no one will buy it.
Hey man, really like your videos, they are fun and really interesting.
May I give you a small pint of constructive critizism tho?
I think you need to slow down with your speed at which you speak at.
It feels like its a rush for you and one can bearly keep up sometimes and one can hear you breathing in really heavy sometimes.
I feel like your video ideas are great and you explain everything nicely but personally i think if you improve your speaking skill in your videos a little bit it can push these videos to the next level.
I hope this finds you well. Thx for the great videos.
I see a bunch of yugioh players in this comment section talking about yugioh's power creep problem and I, as a yugioh player myself, would like to add on. In regards to yugioh's power creep problem the issue is more on the overall complexity of the game from rules that's not well explained in the handbook given to duelists when they buy a Structure Deck, this creates the issue of constant misunderstandings from a casual perspective, but the game's so complex anyway that it's rare to find new yugioh players actually playing the game. Another issue which has somewhat been resolved? Is the issue of a new summoning mechanic being introduced every few years or so. We haven't gotten a new summoning mechanic in the last 6ish years and I doubt we're getting another, Konami has acknowledged the complexity if the game and the harsh learning curve that yugioh has and they've made products around this such as the 2 player starter set which has done absolutely nothing to help players get into the game as it's too battle phase focused and not at all focused on even touching on the actual confusing rulings it has. Finally, the issue of Tier 0 formats; we get A LOT of these in yugioh it's been a rough journey these last couple of years, even now, but these formats are how the game functionally works at this point, Tier 0 formats are never a good thing for the general community only the top players seem to enjoy it as they are willing to spend thousands to play the next best deck and make their name be known but for the rest of the community it feels bad to lose to a deck that out paces your 2 year old deck that won't get any support for a really long time. There probably is more to say here but I'm procrastinating some work I need to do so I think I'll stop here.
Just play master duel or duel links until you learn by experience. Thats the practical way to approach the game.
@@danielhicks1824 not really, auto sims don’t explain stuff like timing rules on card texts or what kind of steps there are in the battle phase or even complex stuff like card advantage. What I’m saying is not necessarily for people who want to play to just hop on a sim and mindlessly click buttons then wonder “why game bug?” When they cannot perform an action but instead I’m trying to explain it is the complexities that makes Yugioh hard to get into and on top of that there’s no good entry points because the game itself is expensive and every new card has like 3 effects on one text box.
@@draconicmeta846 i think you WILL learn the interactions eventually because if you make an effort to get better in the context of a sim you do in fact have to know how your cards will interwct with other cards. It's just absurd to throw someone into real games without those guard rails in place. The info dump needed is silly
Pokemon powercreep doesn’t really matter because the only format that people play is on a rotation basis.
I don't know early Yu-Gi-Oh monsters were more broken than spells.
invidualy maybe ,but you could only summon reliably once but activate spells until you hand is empty and no body for a board wipe seems a lot better than a body with 1 pop
I'm wondering what's the powercreep in Duel Master be like
Peak is back
the mono white background is a bit of an issue, I had to crank down my brightness all the way to keep my eyes from hurting, and at this low light level the cards are totally unreadable. Darker background please! Doesn't need to be black, any shade of gray or really anything not pure white would be a blessing. Great vid otherwise.
15:00 Just a small thing but it is "overhaul" not "over hall"
I don’t think power creep requires that the new cards are like some old cards except better, just that decks with newer cards reliably beat decks with older cards.
Powercreep is not required. You just need to have alternate equally viable options. But to do that the game designers would have to have foresight on how players will use the new pieces, fine tuning to match the ever expanding number of match-ups, some narrative reason or fun aspect to draw in new players, and a spark of creativity to come up with this new alternative in the first place. All of which is extremely unlikely, and thus rather than try this and fail sometimes, game designers prefer to just use brute force methods like creating new card patterns with the dial turned up so high they can't fail, or creating strictly better versions of old card patterns alongside other cards to ensure something is 'hype', a.k.a. powercreep.
TLDR: powercreep is when game designers don't know where the balance of their game is, or don't care, and just make strictly better stuff so it sells.
@@camfunme I agree but people seem to disagree with us. Only TCG players seem to have this attitude towards powercreep and I think its a form of Stockholm syndrome we have because no card game has ever tried to fix it. Could you imagine if other game genres forced you to use the new characters or items and just forget about the old stuff? I imagine people wouldn't be happy.
People will buy new cards in order to try new things and enjoy different strats. No need to force us to buy new sets just for profits.
Powercreep is necessary. Powercreep is inevitable. There is no balanced Trading Card Game. And there never will be.
@@mrevilducky because they don't try to. Every game is unbalanced but card games intentionally power creep for profits. If a tcg existed out there where the developers actually tried to make it balanced im sure they be doing much better than today's tcgs
more viable options does equal power creep ,having more copies of a card also equals power creep, making new cards does equal powercreep ,even if every new card you make is weaker it reaches a point where there is enough combinations of cards to stomp whatever this theorythical power level you want to keep
@@some2043 there's a difference between what your describing and cards that are the exact same but the new one is just better because of higher stats, lower cost, same stats but much better effect.
Hi SodaTCG, I am getting more and more interested into the game theory (not the Nash etc one, the theory behind games themselves) and its relation to economical health. Can you suggest any textbook or other kind of sources to learn about this topic? Thank you very much for your content!
Why do people who discuss powercreep in magic never compare new spells to spells from alpha.
In YGO I have the experience the best format to learn the game is funnily enough the Ishizu Tear format as it relies on your ability to quickly determine the best outcome for you specifically while allowing you to disrupt your opponent.
The best way to learn deck building is the history of older formats like Edison or Goat as you learn to evaluate cards.
Then the best format in YGO is sadly always the one 1 month in the future from now if they didn’t released the next broken set.
pikarom my beloved
Pokemon just had a HP issue
5:35 I think part of the powercreep problem, at least with YuGiOh, is that what we’re capable of in the game these days has VASTLY exceeded what was originally intended for when it was made back in the late 1990’s, and that it’s never fully been adjusted to accommodate.
I have some ideas on how to rectify that WITHOUT directly nerfing anything we’re able to do in the game currently:
⚪️Increase the starting LP from 8000 to 20,000 (a 2.5X LP increase to help slow down the game a smidge).
⚪️A suite of opt-in “boons” you could start the duel with 1-3 of, that act akin to the lifelines you’d see on some game shows. These boons, if they were cards themselves, would generally have effects that would be on the weaker side of things, and are meant to be a compliment to any given deck or slight soft counter to your opponent’s instead of anything you’d wrap your entire deck around. Boons would be defensive/utility based by default, aimed to keep you in the game longer rather than helping you win outright. In a match setting, during the first duel, both players would pick their 3 boons, then during the second duel, only the loser of the first match can change all 3 of theirs while the winner of the prior duel can only swap out 1 boon, and then if the match reaches the third duel, both players can redo all their boons. Some examples would include:
⚫️Boon of Resilience: You begin the duel with 5000 more LP. Once per duel (Quick Effect), you can halve any single amount of battle or effect damage your opponent inflicts upon you.
⚫️Boon of Regeneration: During the End Phase of each player’s turn, you gain 1000 LP. Once per turn (Quick Effect), you can tribute 1 monster from your hand or field; Gain LP equal to that tributes total Original ATK/DEF.
⚫️Boon of Normality: During your Main Phase, you can Normal Summon 1 Normal or Gemini Monster in addition to your Normal Summon/Set. Each turn, 1 Level 5 or higher Normal or Gemini monster you Normal Summon can be Summoned without Tributing, but if you do, that summoned monster cannot be tributed or used as material during the turn it was summoned this way.
⚫️Boon of Abundance: If you began the duel with 60 cards in your main deck: At the beginning of the duel, before the first turn begins, you can shuffle your entire starting hand into your deck; Draw an equal number of cards. Once per turn, you can shuffle 1 card from your Hand, Field, GY or Banishment into your deck. Once per duel, you can draw 2 cards for your Normal Draw instead of 1.
⚫️Boon of Resourcefulness: If any number of cards from your Hand or Deck would be Sent to the GY or Banished by an opponent’s card(s) or Effect(s); You can negate the effects of and Banish up to an equal number of cards from your Extra Deck facedown instead. Once per duel, if there are no cards in your main deck, and any number of cards were moved out of your main deck by an opponent’s card(s) or effect(s) this duel; You can shuffle 20 random cards from your Hand, Field, GY and/or Banishment into your deck.
⚫️Boon of Liberation: During the beginning of the duel, Target 1 of your Zones (Monster, Spell/Trap, or Field); That targeted zone is unaffected by the effects of Opponent’s cards for the rest of the duel. Once per duel, during either player’s turn, you can declare 1 Card Type (Monster/Spell/Trap); For the rest of the turn, Cards in the Targeted Zone are unaffected by the effects of other cards of that declared card type, EXCEPT if they are of that declared card type themselves.
⚫️Boon of Mischief: During your Main Phase, you can Normal Set 1 Normal or Flip monster in addition to your Normal Summon/Set. Once per Turn (Quick Effect), You can Shuffle all Facedown cards on your field (in your Monster OR Spell/Trap Zones.)
⚫️Boon of Dominion: During the beginning of the duel, Place 1 Field Spell you own in your Field Zone. Its effects are negated until it leaves your field. Once per turn, if a Field Spell you control would be removed from the field by an opponent’s card or effect; You can discard your entire hand instead (Min. 1 cards).
⚫️And so on and so forth…
this video doesn't make me think powercreep is a necessary evil, this video makes me think that card games are just bad
the point of why powercreep should be good is because so players would be more engaged with new things, but why a game need to always change? for a new player everything is already new, and if a player is tired of the same format that should be ok, they will try other games or do other hobbies, and if the game was really good they would return after some years
maybe the typical f2p competitive online game also has some form of powercreep, but it feels way more genuinely good instead of "buy new things!!"
and isn't there an exception about this rule? i talk about historical Yu Gi Oh formats (Goat and Edison) where by definition, they can never change and the meta will be always the same, but people play it anyways
Video 3 of asking for the power of searching in each card game