The main issue I find with Yu-Gi-Oh's readability is the formatting. The text box is small, and all the text is in one big paragraph. It's actually better in Japanese, as each effect is on its own line or bullet point, but English cards just don't bother with that for some reason. Honestly, I think the card layout should be altered for a slightly larger text box, to allow for bigger font and better formatting, but that's another issue.
You can blame Takahashi Kazuki for that. Depictions of manga cards are very simple, and he needed to fill all that blank space with something. So you end up with expedient decisions like dedicating an entire line to levels, with multiple stars rather than a single number. Rush Duel has remedied these bad decisions by using a single number for levels (which opens the door for, say, Level 20), overlaying the level stat on the artwork, and placing the text "[Spell Card]" (plus icon) on the same line as monster types, saving lots of space for the artwork (which is frameless) and textbox, both of which also extend as close as possible to the card frame. These are little things that add up to contributing space to the important text. They also use a more readable gothic/sans-serif font, add line breaks, and bold type for headings. The OCG and TCG on the other hand have only been patched with expedient solutions that waste space (wasted space for levels, framed card name, framed artwork, framed textbox, too much framing!) and harm legibility (small font size with more lines, tighter spacing, horizontal scaling that unseemly deforms text). They fundamentally need a complete do-over if they want to keep up with ridiculously complex effects and interactions. Wizards of the Coast has done a great job at redesigning cards without compromising on space, for example by connecting the name frame, the art frame and the text frame and making sure the frames are as small and unintrusive as possible, something that has been done with Yu-Gi-Oh! Pendulum cards, proving that Konami could do it if they want to.
While its true that Yu-Gi-Oh cards are long i think they are allowed to be because of it's use of archetypes and the mental shortcuts that this allows. For example, all main deck monsters in the tenyi archetype (like ashuna mentioned in the video) all have the effect to special themselves from hand while you control no effect monsters, and have some effect which can be activated in the grave or hand while you control a non effect monster. So often times, the name of the card is kind of like a keyword.
Yugioh: Pro, The cards explain themselves. Con, They're written in what's essentially a completely different language to account for Game Mechanics. MTG: Pro, Cards are more legible and have more room for things like larger arts and Flavour text. Con, There's a fair bit of back knowledge and not every Key Word is in use for every format.
One big thing I like about yugiohs text vs using keywords is that it gives the card designers a lot more flexibility in what a card can do, as you can functionally make a card in Yugioh do anything you want, and players will be able to understand it at a glance due the the grammatical rules of the effect system (e.g. if vs when, semi colon denoting cost, “and if you do” vs “then” etc)
Counterpoint: do these cards actually *need* that level of flexibility? Because it seems like a side effect of the fact that, to be honest, Problem Solving Card Text reads like one of those SAT questions and Konami's dev teams are scrambling to get consistent wording. The game already has keywords like Excavate, Piercing Battle Damage, and Banish. Replacing "You can add X thingy from your deck to your hand" with "Search X thingy" takes up far, far less space. There's so many common effects like "Can't be destroyed by battle" "can't be destroyed by card effects", etc. that they could probably just be reduced down to "Indestructible (Battle, Card, Monster)" or "Can't be targeted by x effects" to "Shroud (Card, Monster)"
@BoisegangGaming yes, ygo does need that level of flexibility. It has some of the best gimmick decks of all tcgs, and for me half the fun is just seeing all the insane stuff konami comes up with sometimes. If you want an example of a card that wouldn't work with keywords, just look at musical sumo dice games.
@@BoisegangGaming this type of keywording, while still keeping the surrounding language, would be a universally well received thing, I agree. Everyone loved the introduction of the word “piercing”, and I think others can definitely be introduced, as long as the rest of the PSCT rules are still followed, and it isn’t just a single ambiguous floating word on the card like MtG. A big one I think everyone can agree needs a solution is hard once per turns, they are so wordy and take up far too much text
@@TheIain531 Yeah, not everything or every effect needs a keyword, but it would benefit formatting to have common things that operate the same way all the time be keywords. This would cut down on verbosity. Also, the card frames really need to be reworked to something like how Rush Duels has it where Costs/Requirements are seperate from effects. There's also stuff like Union/Gemini/Spirit/Toon monsters that really don't need their effect text spelled out when it's universal across them - just have that in a rule the same way most XYZ, LINK, and SYNCHRO monsters have them. YGO has the "Type-line" but it really doesn't make the most out of it, especially on non-monster cards.
@@BoisegangGaming excavate, piercing and banish arent keywords in the first place; excavate sounds like a keyword but the original japanese term simply translate to "flip/turn over' and its just tcg that decided to be fancy and call it excavate when something simpler wouldve suffice, piercing is still listed with the full sentence with the 'piercing' itself being merely descriptive of 1 aspect of the full text rather then replacing the entire text itself and banish is simply just that, an action cannot be destroyed by battle, effect or untargetable arent as common as you think and there is multiple variations of them across different cards too from excluding a player or only allowing certain cards to affect them in those ways union/gemini/spirit/toons arent as universal as you think btw, some of the more recently cards with those subtpyes have had slight alterations of those previously believe to be universal effects and overall they could simply just work without the necessary inclusion of a specific word on their type line too, its honestly just an unintended result of early design before the devs figure it out
A yugioh player here. Usually, when I read a Yugioh card, I don't really need to read all of it. Most yugioh cards have the same ~10 effects, adds, summons, negate, and so on, and they are also written the same so when I read a card I can just glance over it and understand what it does without any trouble 90% of the time
as a seasoned player, yeah, you start building your parse ability to skim over effects, but it can happen that when you skim over it you may miss important information it also is not friendly to new players on one side, MTG is not friendly because a new player has to look up the keywords that come up during a game in case they don't have reminder text, but its a learning curve that feels good on contrast YGO, new players try to read every single word on these causing massive fatigue until they learn that they don't have to read everything, then they start missing important stuff which leads to the YGO players don't read meme, like how people apparently never know what Avramax does
I've dabbled in both games over the years and this video clearly underlines the issue I have with both of them. For yugioh cards I feel like I'm reading a rule book on the cards itself but usually when you follow the description as accurately as possible it will always play out correctly. With magic the gathering it's generally very clear to me what kind of threats my opponent has on the field and what they do but in specific interactions I have to look up how exactly they play out. The worst offender for me is the keyword protection since it does several things which may make you feel like the card is impervious to anything however it only protects against targetted effects so blanket effects like boardwipes would still work. It can also be a bit confusing how it interacts with multi-colored cards if you're not used to it. But generally all of the evergreen keywords are pretty clear and help keep the boardstate easy to understand.
As a player of both I have never had to look up rulings on yugioh, virtually every situation is explained on the cards themselves. But every time I play magic we have to lookup cards interactions every now and then because the effects are so ambiguous.
@@cl1nt34stw0odYou don't have to look up rulings because you know the game. "FLIP:" and "piercing damage" are actual keywords. "Once per turn" and "You can only activate the effect of ~ once per turn" mean different things that isn't explained. "Special Summon" can't summon an Extra deck monster that wasn't properly summoned, even when the card heavily implies that it will and doesn't clarify (Starlight Road). There's no conceivable way to guess just by reading whether Evenly Matched can affect monsters with protection. A Magic player can also read most cards and tell you exactly how it works by distinguishing "When" from "As", or whether the "if" is in the middle of the sentence or the end, but we don't have to pretend like it's intuitive.
@fernandobanda5734 what Im saying is, Ive been playing YGO even before I knew how to multiply and I can infer what a card like evenly match does, and with two reads any competent YGO player can do so, my brother and his friends have been playing magic for even longer than that and they still up their phones to look up rulings every now and then. My point is people complain about the card text in Yugioh thinking MTG has godlike reading when in reality most of the MTG key words cant even apply to YGO like trample or haste or flying. The real actual improvement YGO can see is the one they have on japanese cards, separate every effect in a different paragraph.
@@cl1nt34stw0od I don't think anyone is saying Magic has intuitive reading. It's the opposite. Ruling questions will come up no matter what, so you don't gain as much as people think by not simplifying the words.
anytime someone says "yugioh card too long :(" I know it's a skill issue all cards explain themselves and you really uniornically don't need to read them more than once and even then if it's your opponents cards you just have to look for the words "quick effect" or "once per turn" and 90% of the time that's all you have to care about it's really not that hard
while most of YGO cards have pretty specific effects that can't be keyworded, there are a lot of things that can and should be keyworded, some examples are: "Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must first be Special Summoned (from your hand) by ...." "Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must be Special Summoned (from your hand) by ..." "You can only use each effect of [cardname] once per turn." "You can only activate 1 [cardname] per turn." "Your opponent cannot target this card with card effects." "Neither player can target this card with card effects." "Cannot be destroyed by card effects." "Cannot be destroyed by battle." "Unaffected by other cards' effects."
unaffected is actually a bit of an issue since there's a difference between unaffected and unaffected by activated effects so it'd be weird to keyword one and not the other but if you add a little bit of extra text to clarify differences you lose the benefit of keywords making cards more compact.
@@IC-23 i admit that there are some nebulous ones, like unaffected, because it could be unaffected by traps, unaffected by activated effects, unaffected by your opponent activated effects, and maybe the destroyed and targeting ones could also apply? but i think there could be a way to keyword them in a way that makes them more streamlined in a similiar way Protection is keyworded in MTG
I feel like the only solution is to just nix half those kinds of effects completely. But I realise that's not rly something you can do 25 years into a game's lifetime. Not w/o drastically changing the way it's played anyway.
Loved that Shakespeare bit! And agree with the points made. There’s also the practice of writing out keywords’ effects as reminder text in core sets and other beginner-focused products; as a new player, keywords don’t mean ANYTHING when you haven’t learned them yet
Magic has fallen down the same rabbit hole as Yu-Gi-Oh recently, but without the decades of experience that game has. Every new MtG set comes with its own new keyword, and every one of those keywords is rendered pointless by the need to print the reminder text right next to it. The last keyword I can think of that has been given time and repetition to land home is Surveil, and I still get it mixed up sometimes. Look at a Boast card and tell me what it does without reading the reminder text right next to it.
I mean, new keywords every set has been a thing for 20+ years. Boast is an activated ability that can only be used if this creature attacked this turn. Reminder text is useful because reading it is optional. If you know what the mechanic does, then you can skip over the reminder text for it because you know it works exactly the same every time. If you have never seen it before or are trying to understand a niche interaction, then you can read how it works. That's also why ability words like Landfall and Raid exist. They don't do anything rules wise, but if you see landfall printed on a card then you know that the next few words will be "whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control".
@seandun7083 Except if that keyword is only around for one set why bother keywording it? A lot of yugioh cards have easy to skip blocks of text because they do the same thing, every Lv1 Snake Eye Except Poplar can send it's and another card to summon a snake eye from deck. every tenyi summons itself if you control no effect monsters and can exile itself from field/GY at certain times to do a thing. every adamancipator scry's 5 and summons a rock so after you familiarize yourself with a deck you don't need to read every card unless a ruling issue comes up just like how reminder text is only looked at for rulings.
@IC-23 Reasons to give a keyword for a mechanic that will only be around for one set: It indicates that they must do the same thing which means once you have read the text on one of them, you don't need to read any of it on the others. You mentioned that a lot of times in Yu-Gi-Oh you can skip reading the text of cards with similar effects, but when there isn't a keyword to enforce consistency, there can be lots of similar looking effects that still have relevant differences. Seek the Beast, Act on Impulse, Vance's Blasting Cannons and Light up the Stage all have similar but slightly different effects that you still need to read all of even if you have seen the others already. It allows you to interact with it through cards that mention the mechanic by name such as Cosmos Charger or Enhanced Surveillance. It makes it easier for the rules to cover the cards by granting a single area where players can look up rulings on how any of the cards with that mechanic work. It encourages a consistent design for cards in the set which makes it easier to design synergies. Devoted Grafkeeper would have been much worse if half of the disturb cards were cast as spells from the graveyard and the other half were activated abilities like unearth. It makes it easy for players to understand each color combination in limited formats. A flavorful mechanic name can help make it easier to understand what a mechanic is trying to do. Some mechanics (like saddle) are hard to word without giving them a name since cards with it may refer to "a creature that saddled it" or might say "if it was saddled". It makes it easier to talk about in casual conversation. "Here's my morph deck" is a lot easier to say than "here's my deck built around creatures that you can play face down as 2/2s for 3 and then turn have up later on".
@@IC-23to future proof the ability in the possibility they do revisit that design space. That way you don't get things like Eatos and Her Sword not working because they decided to print it with "when" instead of "if". or get more cards like Beast of Talwar who is a normal Monster with a cyber harpie lady like effect of always being considered as another Archfiend monster because English translation didn't think that demon could be an archtype so didn't give him the localized "archfiend" name even after fixing Slime toad who was previously Frog the Jam.
The thing about YGO's paragraph style text, is just a few cards can actually be keyworded. There's a lot of conditional stuff that differs just a bit from card to card that keywording is a nightamre. People from the YGO comunity have tried to make fan "transltions" into keywords, but becomes futile. It's like if in MTG you had creatures that gain fliying and conditional alterative casting cost. if your hand is empty, you still need to say "if you have no cards in hand, this creature has Flying. If you don't control a land, you can cast this card without payng it's mana cost". That's a lot of text for a Magic card if you want it to do the stuff a monster does in Yugioh. But they get extra complex sometimes even if in practice the effect on the dard is very simple. I do prefer both TCGs style for it's own, I like my Magic cards explained simple, at most Atraxa Grand Unifier levels of complexity. But for Yugioh, I want to be able to have cards that work like a gear in a transmision module, so I can hop between lines of play and put in check from 2 different angles a boss monster in the opoonent's field.
This isn't a problem really. Magic's already had this happen every time a keyword is introduced: • They find the best implementation for the keyword and that's the one they use moving forward. • Old cards don't get errata'd to the keyword if it isn't the same and it doesn't matter. In fact, the fact that they don't use the keyword calls attention and makes it easier to notice the difference. • If a certain variation is interesting, then they just print a new card without the keyword. Standardizing the effect helps a lot to understand it, and it's not inconceivable to restrict your card design to that one version of the effect. But even if you don't want to, the introduction of the keyword doesn't limit the rest of your designs at all.
@@fernandobanda5734 An example of a YGO-like effect in MTG that can't be keyworded even with all Keywords MTG has at it's dispossal: Animate Dead (and Necromancy or Dance of the Dead by extension). The effects is super simple, but needs a complete explanation for it to work. Keywording in YGO would work like set specific Keywords but instead of sets, would be for Archetype, and that's worst.
@@JorgeSanchez-zk6zw I understand. But why is that a problem? On one hand, Animate Dead still exists, and on the other, it's really a plus that nothing like Animate Dead exists anymore. Old overly-complicated designs can stay in the past. Animate Dead isn't even a good thing to keyword anyway. On the Yu-Gi-Oh side, things that would be useful to keyword and standardize: hard once per turn, Special Summon effects/conditions/permissions, some common forms of protection. Yes, a lot of the cards deviate from the norm, so what? You make those be written out, still benefit from the majority that follows the keyword, and you're more inclined to not design outside the norm when necessary, which reinforces the keyword and players understanding it. If you're even more extreme, you could also errata old cards that worked very similarly but not quite just to standardize more. It's not like Yu-Gi-Oh! is afraid of functional errata.
@@fernandobanda5734 Both games were designed in a different way, YGO cards were not made to be used with keywords so trying to introduce a lot of them would not work, also trying to limit new cards design in a 25+ years old game is not a good move. Even in MTG i would argue that any keyword outside of the top 10 most common ones are BAD, the common ones are good because a lot of cards feel like a reprint of another card with different stats/cost, wich is also different from how YGO cards are made (Lots of conditions, archetypes etc). The main problem with YGO text design is the lack of numbes separating effects in the TCG, you could definitely introduce keywords such as soft once per turn and hard once per turn, but not much else.
Also an advantage of Magic’s simpler to understand text is, even if you misunderstood the rules you can usually still have some kitchen table fun playing it. As a kid, my first deck is the Ninja of the nights precon. We thought Ninjutsu was “when this creature deals combat damage, you may pay the ninjutsu cost of a ninja you have in hand and swap it in, dealing damage again”. It’s not well balanced when played like this, but you can still play the game. Meanwhile Yugioh can feel terrifying to even sit down and try.
Little funny note: Your gold dragon doesn't have enough information on it. The complete text would say: "Adult Gold Dragon cannot be blocked except by creatures with this ability, or creatures with the ability to block creatures with this ability. When this creature deals combat or effect damage to a creature, player, Planeswalker or Battle, you gain life equal to the damage dealt this way. This creature can attack and tap or untap to pay for the activation cost of activated abilities even if it has not been continuously controlled by a player since the beginning of that player's most recent turn." Even that wouldn't cover everything that keywords let us accomplish, such as effects that deal damage to all flying creatures!
Maybe not as important, but something I enjoy abt magic is that when it 'hides' it's complexity, it makes u feel all the more gratified when u figure out certain interactions (like the madness exile thing). The game still works and is fun on a superficial level, but by masking its complexity, it makes for a much more engaging learning curve.
Plus when new mechanics are introduced, they have how the mechanics work in parentheses on simple cost cards, as well as have reminder text removed on alt art versions of the same card. It teaches players how the mechanic works, then rewards said players/gives them confidence when they get the alt art.
As an extention of the "quick and easy to parse" aspect of keywording is it also provides a easy signal when you actively choose *not* to keyword an ability that behaves similarly, that the effect isn't intended to work the way you may have immediately expected from the keyworded version. To use a chicken-before-egg example, in MTG, Lifelink is fairly straight forward - when the thing does damage, the controller gains that much life, and Lifelink doesn't stack with itself (it is on or off) And the aura, Lifelink, gives the enchanted creature lifelink (the keyword). But then there's Armadillo Cloak, which very specifically spells out its effect - "Whenever enchanted creature deals damage, you gain that much life" - because it clues the player in that although it serves a similar function to lifelink, it doesn't behave the same way. In this case, because it stacks, and it also benefits you even if you enchant an *opponents* creature.
Lifelink is also a weird one because they went back and forth several times on whether or not to keyword it along with how to word it. Loxodon Warhammer was originally printed in Mirrodin granting the ability "whenever this creature deals damage you gain that much life". In tenth edition it was updated to grant lifelink with the reminder text "when it deals damage, you gain that much life". In Planechase and so future paper printings it had lifelink without reminder text. (Duels of the Planeswalkers did have a version with the current reminder text for lifelink). Effects that often work slightly differently depending on the card are definitely ones that are hard to keyword though. One effect that has been printed a lot over the past few years is "exile n cards from the top of your library. You may play them until...". Some say"play", some say "cast" meaning you can't play lands. Some say "until end of turn" some say "until your next end step" some say "until the end of your next turn" and all of those mean slightly different things.
reading the card actually works better in yugioh than it does in magic imo. it's just the yugioh cards are way harder to read. magic cards are formatted in a way where you can read them easier, but also worded in a way that makes them harder to understand without prior knowledge or a guidebook.
The main issue I see with yugioh card readability would be the lack of formatting. If effects were placed on new lines it would do a lot to allow cards to be read at a glance.
exactly. this is something ive noticed with all the 'player from different card game evaluates cards from game they dont play', that me as a person that only really got into ygo is that most cards from other card games with less text thanks to keywords and such only LOOK easier to grasp
Small correction to your Adult Gold Dragon. Lifelink's ability is technically "Damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much life." The big difference is noncombat damage also counts for lifelink. It's why Firesong and Sunspeaker works as a card. Just another fiddly keyword edge case you have to look up.
There's a few things this video misses in the way of Yugioh. 1) A big reason as to why keywords probably would be difficult to implement in Yugioh is because Konami is very fluid about the rules of its game and often builds many cards that'll just completely circumvent or ignore certain restrictions in the games rules. An easy example of this is the concept of "sending cards", which is basically just a generic form of removal that bypasses any other sorts of protections aside from cards that aren't affected by card effects (and those cards can also be circumvented by forcing your opponent to do an action, such as with Destructive Daruma Karma Cannon [which that card is its own can of worms]). Much like EDH, Yugioh would also have a million different keywords you would have to memorize because there's no set rotation in this game. But beyond that, most text on a Yugioh card is basically just costs and restrictions. When you know what text to look for during a match, reading a card becomes simple. You can generally just ignore 75% of what your opponent's card says when you're looking for an effect. Its just a skill issue. Most of the text on a Yugioh card is important to the player using it as opposed to the opponent since it keeps them from spamming multiple copies during a turn. Otherwise, every deck would have the capacity to become an FTK deck. Like, Yugioh is a game where if a card has less text, it may be more powerful because its spammable. 2) Yugioh cards do more than what they say on the card because they're combo pieces, so their text doesn't do a good job of intuiting to the opponent what their deck is meant to do. Special summon combos are just a staple of all types of decks in this game, they aren't only inherent to actual combo decks. The reason for this is because Yugioh archetypes are designed to play like MOBA champions or fighting game characters. The game is incredibly swingy more often than not, and you generally have to look for certain extenders in the middle of their combos to intuit the sort of shenanigans that your opponent may be on if they're playing anything toxic. This just means that Yugioh is a game where you have to memorize a lot of different match-ups each format so that you can understand during a match when a deck is deviating from a standard list, which is generally just something you'll learn as you expand your card knowledge. And in a competitive setting, a pro player is going to be very careful not to reveal their entire strategy from the onset. The only saving grace usually is that there's generally only 6-18 archetypes that are considered "meta-relevant" at a time in the competitive space aside from tier 0 formats. Figuring out what those archetypes are though can sometimes be difficult, and in those situations, certain archetypes can just come in and completely blindside everyone (such as the Labrynth deck that took second place at YCS Indy). Whenever a new set releases, Yugioh players are expected to re-evaluate the whole competitive landscape and determine what archetypes they're likely to run into at a YCS or a regional or whatever. And locals are a whole other story since people are going to bring what they like to play, which means you gotta get used to what the people there are running (whether its meta-relevant or not). Magic decks are (generally) not designed like this because Magic is a game designed to be played throughout multiple turns. You have beaters, you have blowout cards, you have some draw/mill/self-mill/whatever engines that help to speed up your game plan, and you have cards like sol ring or what have you that allow you to get into those cards sooner over the course of a game. And typically, your deck has an overall end board they're trying to reach towards the late game. So you have a lot of time to figure out what a Magic deck is trying to do and determine what cards in your deck could be used to stop them. By comparison, Modern Yugioh especially is basically a game of king of the hill. You're just constantly trying to deny your opponent the board, because failing to do so usually means that taking back the board becomes that much harder. If you're facing a deck like Centur-Ion in a competitive setting for example and you're going second, you either stop them from reaching Calamity or you don't get to play the game. And nothing about the archetype tells you that's what they're trying to do because Calamity has nothing to do with the Centur-Ion archetype, its part of the Resonator archetype and the deck is just able to extend into it using a generic synchro monster called Crimson Dragon. 3) Even if Yugioh card text were more brief, it wouldn't really tell you what a deck does at a glance because very few Yugioh archetypes are alike. If you sit down to play a game of magic and your opponent is playing some green mana deck, you can generally intuit that they're most likely playing some sort of ramp deck or what have you. If they're playing black blue, i'm basically facing your average Yugioh deck. If its white, i can expect stuff like massive life gain shenanigans. And if its mono red, then they're bad at the game. By comparison, attributes in Yugioh (the seven elements that can be on a monster card) don't really intuit shit about what a deck does. You can have a deck with monsters of all sorts of different elements, and it could play similarly to a deck made up of all dark monsters for example. But even if we were to look at a single card like Branded Fusion for example, that could lead into, like, 8 different outcomes which each have their own set of combo lines. Maybe i'm trying to end on Red-Eyes Dark Dragoon? Maybe i'm trying to end on Millennium-Eyes Restrict? Maybe i'm trying to summon a Gimmick Puppet onto your field and lock you out of your next turn (please god, just ban Sanctifire Dragon :painpeko:), or maybe i'm running some other supplemental package in my deck (like Chimeras) and i'm trying to extend into those extra deck monsters. Yugioh is basically a game where card knowledge is a literal skill issue. Its why perfect knowledge is just incredibly OP in the hands of a good player (especially in the context of the modern game where going first is just so fucking oppressive), which is why many cards in this game that do grant you that knowledge either have heavy restrictions (meaning they're usually unviable), are designed to be retaliation cards (like Triple Tactics Talent), or end up getting banned if they aren't reasonably balanced. Like, i still love Yugioh despite all of that (the surprise factor is even part of why i do), but a new player has to understand that this is what the game entails. It can involve a lot of homework, but when you're able to grasp everything that's going on, Yugioh really is like no other game I've played.
If there is anything that yugioh could do with, it's some small signals for extremely common properties of some effects, for example, if there was a specific symbol representing soft/hard once per turn effects that would probably save a lot of text bloat. If ygo were to add keywords, i think they would be new words for basic game mechanics, such as how discard is used. example: If this card is sent to the GY to activate a WATER monster's effect: Add 1 Sea Serpent monster from your Deck to your hand, except "Atlantean Dragoons". would become -> If this card is sent to the GY to activate a WATER monster's effect: *search* 1 Sea Serpent monster, except "Atlantean Dragoons". When this card is destroyed by battle and sent to the Graveyard: You can Special Summon 1 Level 4 or lower non-Tuner "Gusto" monster from your Deck. would become -> When this card is destroyed by battle and sent to the Graveyard: You can *Recruit* 1 Level 4 or lower non-Tuner "Gusto" monster. (maybe rally? i'm not sure.) When this card is Normal Summoned: You can send 1 Zombie monster from your Deck to the GY. Would become -> When this card is Normal Summoned: You can *Bury* 1 Zombie monster. i'm think special summon from hand would also be a good keyword, but i'm not sure on what to call it.
One advantage of keywords is that it encourages designers to have consistency with their effects. Its possible that some path of exile dev had a good idea for some effect that cares about something happening in the past 3 seconds, but because its similar to "recently" it would as be reworked to use 4 seconds for consistency. A problem that yugioh has that prevents the introduction of keywords is there are a tonne of cards with very similar but slightly different effects.
I wouldn't exactly say that's a bad thing, it gives more space for card design, though sometimes it could be annoying, like how there's like 10 different types of towers in the game.
@@asafesseidonsapphire similar things working slightly differently is bad design. It increases mental load and reduces a user's confidence in using the product. This is as true for lamps as it is for trading cards.
@@daveclarke1990 Similar things working differently in a strategy game where players will be bringing different things to the table that will then interact with each other and are incentivized to try to find interactions in their favor... is around half the fun in yugioh.
Love the video. I honestly find the differences between card games interesting and i like how the video is an objective overview that doesnt let preference get in the way of analysis.
MTG has less text but you need to understand the vague gibberish like vigilance and scry. YGO is more verbose, squished up and kinda hard to read FROM A DISTANCE but that's because it's trying to explain it's gimmicks as clearly as possible.
Reminder text is a great way to get the benefits of both worlds. If you understand the keyword then you can skip reading the reminder text since the keyword works the same every time, but if you haven't seen it before or need some clarification, then you still have the rules spelled out for you. That's also the case with ability words like Landfall and Raid. They don't have rules meaning, but if a card has a Landfall ability, then you know it will start by saying "whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, ..."
@@phorchybug3286 reminder text is italicized text in parenthesis on cards in beginner focused sets or for set specific mechanics to explain what they do. For example, the text of Opt is "Scry 1. (Look at the top card of your library. You may put that card on the bottom.) Draw a card." If you are familiar with the mechanic or are describing it to someone experienced in the game, you can easily skip the reminder text but still know exactly what the effect does, but if you haven't seen Scry before then you can still just read it.
Dark World is so confusing because TCG categorizes each effect with a period instead of numbering. This is what Snoww would look like using OCG format: ①: If this card is discarded to the GY by card effect: add 1 "Dark World" card from your Deck to your hand. If it was discarded from your hand to your GY by an opponent's card effect: you can also target 1 monster in your opponent's GY; Special Summon that target in Defense Position. People only talk about surface level issues that OCG doesn’t have (Hard one per turn being the 1st sentence, Numbering, “this card’s name” instead of [long ass name] to name a few), even though there’s so many things wrong with TCG wording beyond that. TCG uses like 6 different phrases for "Untargetable + Indestructible by opponent's card effect" despite OCG, from what I looked up, uses 1.
@@acasualgameryt6978 Yeah absolutely. If the TCG even used the system Rush Duels does for card effect (pretty much the OCG way) then readability would increase so much.
@@MrXhukari dark worlds have exceptionally confusing card text because most of them were made over 10 years ago at a point when Konami weren't really sure how to write cards yet but it's not so hard when you understand that all of them have an effect when discarded by you and one when discarded by your opponents effect.
@@martsawup i can easily imagine them to be worded differently with bullet points for if it was discarded by the owner or the opposing player if they came out in modern days instead
Something worth noting with Magic's use of keywords, the set specific keywords will have reminder text with them on all the normal versions of the commons and uncommons and will carry reminder text on normal versions of higher rarity cards if there is enough room. This is by design as the commons and uncommons are the most likely to be encountered over something like a rare or mythic and these are used to teach players about the keywords. This allows Magic to be both verbose and clear with their effects while offering cleaner looking versions through the special versions, whether those be retro frame, extended art, guest sheets, etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But your custom Adult Gold Dragon wouldn't be able to block another Adult Gold Dragon because it doesn't have "Flying" written on it.
So, with many of the examples you gave for keywords that are rarely used, I agree that without reminder text they can become convoluted and confusing. However, ability words like Landfall and Threshold actually DON'T fall into that category. Read the Landfall cards you brought up. Both Omnath and Obuun read: "Landfall - Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, [effect]" So, those ability words actually specify what they do without reducing it to ONLY a keyword, whereas Trample just says Trample (except in Core Sets where they add reminder text to evergreen keywords), and so the player has to understand that means "When assigning combat damage, this creature may assign excess damage to defending player (or permanent being attacked)"
I think you left out the most important one, which is that it restricts game design space. Because Magic likes to keep things to keywords, there's a lot of effects that are literally identical to each other. A 2-mana 2/3 with "Can't be blocked by creatures without flying or reach" might be an exciting card to a Magic player, but a Yugioh player would call it a terrible card design, it's such a boring card. Hence why bringing more keywords to Yugioh... just isn't really possible. Other than HOPT, there's simply not enough repeated effects. It sounds like there should be, but if you make a list of 18 'evergreen abilities' like in Yugioh, you'll end up with a list of keywords... that are likely only going to appear once per deck, total.
Magic doesn't keep things to keywords, it does not make every effect into a keyword, in fact most of magic effects is written without keywords. Keywords are only there for common, repeated effects. "Evergreen" keywords means they will come up in every single magic set, they are by far the most used. And new sets usually introduces or brings back a previous keyword, but that by no means reflect that every card in that set is a collection of those keywords. Everything on yugioh cards wouldn't be keywords if keywords were introduced, only things that were commonly called back to and repeated. Also, a 2 mana 2/3 "flying" creature in magic is not really going to excite people, but if it was a 2/1 flying where when it enters the battlefield you could pay X mana to gain control of an artifact with mana value X or less, now we're talking. The only keyword in that text, is flying.
one insteresting thing is that yugiho player have made generally agreed upon keyword, same for hexproof in magic if i recon correctly You could technically do the inverse you did with adult gold dragon for a yugiho card using those keyword, acronym (NSu, SSu) remove redundant limitations or reminder text
In Yu-Gi-Oh, there are few keywords (like target, negate, if, when), but people needed so much time to assimilate them I can understand they stopped doing that. Before someone tells me that if and when are not keywords: "If this card is sent to the graveyard..." "When this card is sent to the graveyard..." have different Yu-Gi-Oh meaning.
I'd say it's just the difference with information density difference across different languages. Thing is, most east asian language (japanese, korean, and chinese) has high information density so long winded word feels much less winding in it
It tries to solve a linear equation using the variables below a is the declared number from 1 to 6 x is the level of the effect monster you chose y is the number of cards your opponent control c is the number of cards in your graveyard If ax+y=c then you can shuffle cards opponent control If ax+y=/=c then you take damage Good thing we don't have quadratic equation cannon
as someone that play both in their mobile version, duel link and arena, and learned to play recent enough to remember how was, 7 years maximum to yugioh and 2 to magic, yugioh is far easier to learn to play, if not for the arena showing me the meanning of the key words would have been a nightmare learn that, after you learn magic became easier to understand
I would like to point out that at least commons and uncommons have italicized reminder text to tell you what a set keyword does so if you open a pack you understand the gist of what a mechanic does at least. Incubate is a good example of this in a recent set Edit: actually I checked and all the rares (including the commander cards) have the explanation text: the only one that doesn’t is the mythic Elesh Norn which one won’t really stumble into randomly often
Do think smaller Key Words can be added to Yu-Gi-Oh. Like "(Quick Effect)", and "banish". And even smaller wording choices like "This card is unaffected by the effects of Trap Cards" to "Unaffected by Trap Effects".
Here's what I find important. Magic has a comprehensive rules document that can answer any problem you have with weird interactions. YGO does not. Magic has formats that limit the number of things you need to know about, YGO doesn't really have that to the same degree.
This, I can't believe the TCG cards ruling are basically you go to this website for all the OCG card ruling and use google translation. Not to mention the "applying ruling of other cards with the same exact phrases for effects so it should have similar ruling" approach works way harder in TCG because something like "Untargetable + Indestructable by opponent's card effect" has at least 6 different way to word in TCG while only 1 in OCG.
I think YuGiOh has an issue with text that's similar to being overwhelmed by too many keywords. Stuff like cost, effect, banish, destruction by battle or by card effect, what is activate-able in damage step, if vs when, nothing crazy complicated if you already know, but ask an actually new player, and they'll be confused at the question or give a completely wrong answer. "My card is unaffected how come Called By negated it!" -> reads card -> card says "unaffected by activated effects", meanwhile Called By is lingering
One other secondary benefit to using full text: It lets you make cards that have very distinct and nuanced effects because you can easily have them branch out by making slight changes to card text. To use a random set of cards as an example: Mystic Tomato, Silver Gadget, Shark Cruiser and Fire Hand all have effects that trigger if they're destroyed but if they were all given a single keyword of "FLOATING" it would change all of their effects since their conditions are all different. Another benefit against keywords is more subtle and not really mechanical but more in how some effects being given a keyword might limit the creative space of game designers when making new cards. Magic having a "flying" keyword means if they ever want to make a card that would attack directly it needs to have some aesthetic connection to flying. In Yu-Gi-Oh the comparable effect of being a direct attacker has cards like Toon monsters, submarines, ninjas/spies, snipers, cavalry, tiny monsters, and also flying things. There's a lot more variety flavor-wise in what is "able" to direct attack and it still makes sense on the card art. But this is more a flaw of picking your actual keywords poorly where you don't really consider long-term impact they might have on variety.
Its not that descriptive effects are banned in MtG, but more like, some standard/generic effects are normalized with some tags, while it can have more specific ones. The issue in YGO, imo, is the lack of a resource system, everything must be special summoned to be fast and viable, but then, it needs to have some kind of restriction/condition to be played and the only place to put it, is on each card individually since each card/effect is its own thing. I'm not saying its a pronlem tho, its a consequence and this is how they addressed. I love how sometimes it feels like a law dispute with how effects are worded, card effect, protection and how it interacts with the board or other cards.
I mean, not really? MTG has a fair number of alternative options to "flying" available for "we only want specific cards to be able to block this" that they can pull from. Keyworded abilities, even. There's Shadow, Protection, Fear, Intimidate, Menace, Horsemanship, and Skulk. (Also Landwalk for "is unblockable in certain contexts") If you want cards that are only blockable by certain things, you've got keywords for days, and a pretty wide variety of aesthetics to pull from.
@@Zetact_ Of those, only protection and menace are still used in the standard-legal sets. Most are relics of the past when the developers hadn't quite figured out the best ways to handle keywords. Aside from flying and menace (and to a much, much, lower extent, protection), any other hard-to-block effect these days is spelled out (not accounting for sets like Modern Horizons, which are aimed at more enfranchised players) I think part of the issue is that magic's most popular format is commander, which while advertised as a more casual, social, experience, also allows pretty much every card from the game's entire history, and with it, every single keyword.
Here's some food for thought: I am sure that Yugioh intended to use keywords for some mechanics. Mainly for all secondary card types that can be seen in the typeline. Toon, Spirit, Ritual and Unions all share a gameplay mechanic amongst themselves, that could be left out of the actual card text. For whatever reason though, they still specify their gimmick. Famously Toon monsters suffer greatly from this, as limitations on text length meant that some Toon had some aspects of the Toon gimmick truncated, which is confusing to keep track of. Also, as a reminder that should always be mentioned in this discussion: Yugioh has only one format and no rotation and I think the more elaborate explanations help when trying to play cards with each other that have decades between them
its more like the devs arent sure how to implement certain effects early on rather then intended for them to be keywords like toons all required toon world to be active but that card literally does do anything and they couldve instead just made it so the bulk of the toon monster's playstyle and effefts were to be printed on toon world instead, spirits is more of an experimental mechanic to balanced overpowered effects, rituals couldve been an extra deck summoning mechanic but needed to differ from fusions and unions is redundant when there now exist cards and archetypes that works with equipping monsters without the limitations of unions the whole concept of monster abilities is sorta pointless when they can function exactly the same without the necessity of the ability term on their type line
I remember the good old days of yugioh where getting 3 monsters in a turn was ridiculous. Now trying to play it, people will have a full board turn 1 with a card that basically says you can't do anything: I win next turn.
The reason why Yugioh does not have keywords is because the vast majority of the cards have unique effects and a lot of effects, restrictions and conditions of activation/summon that differs just a bit from card to card so if keywords were added to yugioh the result would be thousands of keywords and I think that would scare any player more than long texts
You could just pick a few, standardize those, and leave the rest. This is what Magic does and has done and it causes no problems after people learn the relevant keyword in like two days
I disagree that Flying or Trample can be intuitively understood. So when you think of trampling you think of something massive bulldozing something small or maybe clearing an area... So obviously Trample means that you can attack a land right? or anything with a stat total low enough or mana cost low enough instantly dies right? No... Somehow a giant elephant stepping on a squirrel means some wizard somewhere just gets a massive nosebleed for some reason. Flying to be understood properly needs you to know an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT KEYWORD. hearthstone uses keywords, but at least they have the decency/ability to tell you what those keywords do if you hover over the card.
Not a card game, but wanted to note that Warhammer 40k had keywords like "Feel no Pain" in earlier (objectively better) editions, but in recent editions they have abolished them and started to print the entire rule on the unit card. So that's one example of the same game switching the approach.
I really feel like YGO needs better formatting for the card. Additionally, having Special Summon restrictions (i.e. "can't be normal summoned or set, can only be special summoned by X" feels like it could just have "SPECIAL" the same way some monsters have "FLIP" and then lists the Special Summon conditions the same way XYZ and LINK monsters do. Reinventing the card frames to something like how Rush Duel looks would also solve this as it frees up more space for art and text at the same time. The biggest issue I have as someone who doesn't play YGO is that when card text is read out, my eyes start to glaze over. There's also inane rules like "When" vs "If" (i.e. missing timing) and a whole bunch of stuff regarding just pure jank. Also, the text size is the same regardless of how much empty space is left, which is really, really annoying considering how small they can be. There's too many words, too many clauses, and too many sub-clauses.
yugioh has a lot of early installment weirdness to it before the devs figure a lot of things out with FLIP being 1 of them since there does exist monsters with flip effects without the FLIP subtype and their effects do not count as flip effects either while effect prefaced with FLIP on a monster card with the FLIP subtype does count as a flip effect all FLIP does these days is be redundant when it isnt necessary at all since by itself it doesnt actually do anything which is why its more or less been abandoned trying to create a "SPECIAL" subtype carries the same baggage too in that it doesnt actually do anything, will bring with it its own new aspect that can easily be mistaken for something else and the listed method is still required anyway these also exist cards that differ in cannot be normal or set but can be special summoned in more ways then just the listed method so its not like thats the only variation of the line that exist, additionally im not sire if you know this but xyz and links dont actually fit into that aforementioned summoning restriction since you can actually summon them outside of their listed method
Here's a thing too - I can't read the text on a yugioh card. Like, my eyes are physically unable to make out the lettering. I knew my eyes were weak, but it's the first time I've ever been unable to read something and feel "excluded" as a result. Whoever the hell decided on the layout of those cards was not thinking ahead.
Ah yes, poison trample. Serious thought: yugioh cards are very different from each other, so an effect can be triggered by being sent to gy, being destroyed or leaving the field and maybe only by an opponent’s card effect. If deathrattle existed in yugioh a lot of its cards would look so much more similar and it would be a shame. Raye being able so activate from gy after spolying shizuku or prankids battle butler triggering even on a kaiju for the first time will always be some of my favorite yugioh moments. The only keywords i could see implemented would be soft hard opt, but even that would be difficult since a card can have different effects with different limitations. To sum up yugioh is complex and that’s why I love it. Also engage
another thing is that hard and soft opt is actually fundamentally different from one another, they're worded similarly and tehy achieved similar results but differ in how they actually work in that one puts a restriction on the card and the other places it on the player instead so because of this actually changing control of the card would still enable its new controller to use its effect an additional time even if its effect is a hard opt that has already been used this very turn and then there is something like baronne de fleur whose effect is both a hard and soft opt combined...
Idk I've had to look up the rules playing yugioh lately than magic and even then we had to guess and vote on the rules so there isn't clarity with more text
Ah, my favorite kind of keywords, sizes / distances. I still laugh every time someone says there is a "small castle" as that in my mind means that the castle is 2.5 x 2.5 feet Also, WOTC, if it is not evergreen, put the reminder text there, always. Especially if it is something like making a map token, because I don't know what a map token does, and they are uncommon enough that you or a new player does not encounter them every day. Also, please stop making more and more tokens, I already need to bring Food, Blood, Clue's, treasures, maps, soldiers, constructs, servo's and gold. I like to play an artifact token deck, however I doubt even half of those tokens can't be standardized. The soldiers, constructs and servo's all are identical, save for their creature type for instance.
The ones that really get to me are the tokens that are designed to be altered, like the ring token. When I put my tokens away, I don't want to find a little side-spot to put the two halves of my damn ring!
Since magic has mana as a recourse and common effects, its easyer to categories. But with Yugioh you need restrictions for the game not to be ftk fest. Becuase the effect takes up little of the card space and majority of the card text is the restrictions. Like tutor 1 tenyi card to the field from deck is that same as special summon 1 tenyi card from deck. Since there is the restrictions in general of mana cost in Majik a lot of these broken things aren't like you can just do it. Thought id bring up this point. There are key works like negate maybe yugioh could do something like have the key word up top and restrictions under it like this could solve the problem. Search (evil eye card only, if on summon, once per turn(card name)) Negate (once per turn, on monsters effect quick effect)
Using "Once per turn:" and "Special Summon: [condition]" properly would help A LOT, if Yu-Gi-Oh! wasn't so fearful of changing anything. I don't understand how you design cards with the same text for 10 years and don't take the initiative to do something about itm
Tbh, archetypes in yugioh confused me for a while. In magic, the actual name of a card is irrelevant except for a few cases where you're looking for an exact match of the entire name. (I,e; legendaries or Rat Colony) In yugioh, the name is actually important! So many archetypes basically use the name like mtg uses the type line. And then there's weird cases like Frog The Jam where even though it's called a frog it's not *really* a frog(I think because it was named before the frog archetype existed or something?) so every frog related card specifically spells out EXCEPT FROG THE JAM. (Except I think they errataed them all at some point so now it does count?)
frog the jam isnt a frog because the original name in japanese is actually "slime toad", it does not have the 'frog' word in its name so does not belong in the frog archetype which is why frog support has to exclude it since it was never a frog card at all but because its tcg name made a mistake and localized it to include the word 'frog' in it some unaware players may believe it is a frog card when it isnt so frog support has to have that restriction otherwise the card may be used in a way its unable to be used konami did went and later errata the name of frog the jam into slime toad in tcg giving it its supposed name back so that frogs can stop having to exclude but at this point the damage is done already and frog the jam became a meme
Ive only ever played yugioh, and never have i ever touched a magic card. However the "keyword mechanic" does not require the one word not being accompanied by any other words. If i understand corectly, the trample keyword is similar to the piercing keyword found in yugioh. The only difference is that instead of saying "piercing" in yugioh, it just says "When this card attacks a defense position monster, inflict piercing battle damage". Yes, it does SOUND more convoluted, however even a new player can tunnel vision into the word "piercing" alone. And although it is more tiring for a new player to read an entire paragraph, once you read it you are 100% sure how that card works, without need to read specific interactions ( most of the time). So even though it is more tiring, imo paragraphs are actually more welcoming to new players, as long as they know the basic terminology of "attack, defense, normal summon, special summon, gv, banish zone". Might just be the fact that i havent played magic tho, idk....
If you play Magic once or twice, you are going to run into keywords that you have to then learn. If by you play like five or six times, then you already internalized them. It's so easy to use them that most cards games follow that.
Magic does often use reminder text (italicized text explaining how an ability works) to explain new keywords or in sets targeted at beginners. It is generally used much more often on lower rarity cards since those will be encountered more often if you are a new player or are opening the latest set with it's new mechanics. This lets them save some room on higher rarity cards for more complex mechanics since those will be used more often by experienced players who know how the ability works.
i believe the full text is always listed to eliminate any alternate interpretation of the effect like if it just says the card inflict piercing then somebody will eventually interpret it in ways it was never intended to be interpreted either on purpose or accidentally while in comparison to if the text specifically mentioned the card itself is the 1 atking into a defense mode monster then battle dmg itself is still inflict to the opponent then there is very little to nothing to speculate about
Yugioh would benfit a ton from keywording its most common effects. It would benefit, even more, from word spacing and a consistent structure for its card text.
@@acasualgameryt6978 Structure as in formatting. Where all effects of certain qualities always appear on a card in a consistent order, and formatted in a way that makes sense on a glance instead of having to parse one block of text. The Japanese version of yugioh already has some of this down.
@@axelostlund2348 oh, definitely, the things yugioh OCG does better that are common knowledge are numbering, separates conditions and effects (like Promethean Princess's restriction is an effect) better, and has HOPT clause on top. However, I don't see people talk about is how TCG sometimes words the same effect differently for some reasons. "Untargetable + Indestructable by OPP's effect" has like 6 difference wording in TCG even though OCG only has 1. BTW, I only knew about this while researching for more suggestions for the keyword version (regular version) of Master Duel's Readable Card Effects mod
@@acasualgameryt6978 Quite, and that is part of what makes a lot of things so confusing. I have seen some videos of people inspired by the ocg and magic's formatting translating yugioh tcg cards into that structure, and seeing the result of those were the first time in year I looked at a yugioh card and though: "Oh wow I understand what this does right away." For reference I used to be, very, into yugioh, so I have dealt with its formatting and could even recite all effects of cards in my deck from memory, but I definitely feel it could use a thorough clean up.
This is why I quit playing both card games . The video games are more consistent with rulings and are more likely to discourage infinity combos by forcing players to physically re-tap every single time.
As someone who has played like 40 games of magic. Trample is not in anyway self-explanatory. Deathtouch is but I originally thought trample was going to be some weird form of deathtouch + first strike.
3:36 my issue with your Adult Gold Dragon with the keyword definition is, the lines of text each start a new paragraph for each effect. To emulate the yugioh effect/design on a M:TG card, you should have each sentence end, then immediately start the next effect, rather than each one getting its own line to start at.
@@acasualgameryt6978 It all depends on the phrases you want to summarize. "When this card enters the battlefield" can be "Fielding" "Des-trigger" could be "whenever this card is destroyed and sent to the graveyard". "Des-battle" could be "Whenever this card is destroyed by battle and send to the graveyard" "Des-effect"... "Search your deck, add it to your hand" could be scope "X-click" whenever a X card is activated. So we have a "Fielding: scope a Dark Magician card. Des-trigger: reborn a Dark Magician normal monster."
@@MansMan42069 You can't, because Endymion doesn't work with the common mechanics of yu-gi-oh! but the rather uncommon "Spell Counter" mechanic. Nevertheless, YGO card effects usually revolve around moving cards from one place to another. Searching, recovering, bouncing, destroying, negating, special summoning.
@@TheDragonfriday I also hope they will use bullet points like in ocg. I dont know about keyword tho, I dont play magic. They should probably keyword things like restrictions, condition and cost tho. Most of the text is like "you can only use this effect once per turn" or " you can special summon if you have no monster".
My issue with magic is the same as games like Elden ring. If I need to have a wiki page open in order to properly play your product then I am not having fun. Yugioh is hard to learn initially, but to this day I can still pick it up and play, no matter what new cards get added/ what I have forgotten. Magic on the other hand is pure memorization. You need to memorize 50+ keywords in order to properly play the game. The true issue with yugioh is that the majority of people are really bad at grammar. Schools nowadays value memorization and regurgitation rather than understanding. I think the best analogy for magic vs yugioh is this. Yugioh is for people who like doing algebra. Magic is for people who enjoy memorizing the multiplication table so they can finish the 100 multiplication quiz in under 5 minutes so they get to participate in the pizza party for the clasa
The main issue I find with Yu-Gi-Oh's readability is the formatting. The text box is small, and all the text is in one big paragraph. It's actually better in Japanese, as each effect is on its own line or bullet point, but English cards just don't bother with that for some reason.
Honestly, I think the card layout should be altered for a slightly larger text box, to allow for bigger font and better formatting, but that's another issue.
You can blame Takahashi Kazuki for that. Depictions of manga cards are very simple, and he needed to fill all that blank space with something. So you end up with expedient decisions like dedicating an entire line to levels, with multiple stars rather than a single number. Rush Duel has remedied these bad decisions by using a single number for levels (which opens the door for, say, Level 20), overlaying the level stat on the artwork, and placing the text "[Spell Card]" (plus icon) on the same line as monster types, saving lots of space for the artwork (which is frameless) and textbox, both of which also extend as close as possible to the card frame. These are little things that add up to contributing space to the important text. They also use a more readable gothic/sans-serif font, add line breaks, and bold type for headings. The OCG and TCG on the other hand have only been patched with expedient solutions that waste space (wasted space for levels, framed card name, framed artwork, framed textbox, too much framing!) and harm legibility (small font size with more lines, tighter spacing, horizontal scaling that unseemly deforms text). They fundamentally need a complete do-over if they want to keep up with ridiculously complex effects and interactions. Wizards of the Coast has done a great job at redesigning cards without compromising on space, for example by connecting the name frame, the art frame and the text frame and making sure the frames are as small and unintrusive as possible, something that has been done with Yu-Gi-Oh! Pendulum cards, proving that Konami could do it if they want to.
While its true that Yu-Gi-Oh cards are long i think they are allowed to be because of it's use of archetypes and the mental shortcuts that this allows. For example, all main deck monsters in the tenyi archetype (like ashuna mentioned in the video) all have the effect to special themselves from hand while you control no effect monsters, and have some effect which can be activated in the grave or hand while you control a non effect monster. So often times, the name of the card is kind of like a keyword.
Yugioh:
Pro, The cards explain themselves.
Con, They're written in what's essentially a completely different language to account for Game Mechanics.
MTG:
Pro, Cards are more legible and have more room for things like larger arts and Flavour text.
Con, There's a fair bit of back knowledge and not every Key Word is in use for every format.
I mean, Yugioh cards explain themselves except when they don't
One big thing I like about yugiohs text vs using keywords is that it gives the card designers a lot more flexibility in what a card can do, as you can functionally make a card in Yugioh do anything you want, and players will be able to understand it at a glance due the the grammatical rules of the effect system (e.g. if vs when, semi colon denoting cost, “and if you do” vs “then” etc)
Counterpoint: do these cards actually *need* that level of flexibility? Because it seems like a side effect of the fact that, to be honest, Problem Solving Card Text reads like one of those SAT questions and Konami's dev teams are scrambling to get consistent wording.
The game already has keywords like Excavate, Piercing Battle Damage, and Banish. Replacing "You can add X thingy from your deck to your hand" with "Search X thingy" takes up far, far less space. There's so many common effects like "Can't be destroyed by battle" "can't be destroyed by card effects", etc. that they could probably just be reduced down to "Indestructible (Battle, Card, Monster)" or "Can't be targeted by x effects" to "Shroud (Card, Monster)"
@BoisegangGaming yes, ygo does need that level of flexibility. It has some of the best gimmick decks of all tcgs, and for me half the fun is just seeing all the insane stuff konami comes up with sometimes. If you want an example of a card that wouldn't work with keywords, just look at musical sumo dice games.
@@BoisegangGaming this type of keywording, while still keeping the surrounding language, would be a universally well received thing, I agree. Everyone loved the introduction of the word “piercing”, and I think others can definitely be introduced, as long as the rest of the PSCT rules are still followed, and it isn’t just a single ambiguous floating word on the card like MtG.
A big one I think everyone can agree needs a solution is hard once per turns, they are so wordy and take up far too much text
@@TheIain531 Yeah, not everything or every effect needs a keyword, but it would benefit formatting to have common things that operate the same way all the time be keywords. This would cut down on verbosity.
Also, the card frames really need to be reworked to something like how Rush Duels has it where Costs/Requirements are seperate from effects.
There's also stuff like Union/Gemini/Spirit/Toon monsters that really don't need their effect text spelled out when it's universal across them - just have that in a rule the same way most XYZ, LINK, and SYNCHRO monsters have them. YGO has the "Type-line" but it really doesn't make the most out of it, especially on non-monster cards.
@@BoisegangGaming excavate, piercing and banish arent keywords in the first place; excavate sounds like a keyword but the original japanese term simply translate to "flip/turn over' and its just tcg that decided to be fancy and call it excavate when something simpler wouldve suffice, piercing is still listed with the full sentence with the 'piercing' itself being merely descriptive of 1 aspect of the full text rather then replacing the entire text itself and banish is simply just that, an action
cannot be destroyed by battle, effect or untargetable arent as common as you think and there is multiple variations of them across different cards too from excluding a player or only allowing certain cards to affect them in those ways
union/gemini/spirit/toons arent as universal as you think btw, some of the more recently cards with those subtpyes have had slight alterations of those previously believe to be universal effects and overall they could simply just work without the necessary inclusion of a specific word on their type line too, its honestly just an unintended result of early design before the devs figure it out
A yugioh player here. Usually, when I read a Yugioh card, I don't really need to read all of it. Most yugioh cards have the same ~10 effects, adds, summons, negate, and so on, and they are also written the same so when I read a card I can just glance over it and understand what it does without any trouble 90% of the time
as a seasoned player, yeah, you start building your parse ability to skim over effects, but it can happen that when you skim over it you may miss important information
it also is not friendly to new players
on one side, MTG is not friendly because a new player has to look up the keywords that come up during a game in case they don't have reminder text, but its a learning curve that feels good
on contrast YGO, new players try to read every single word on these causing massive fatigue until they learn that they don't have to read everything, then they start missing important stuff which leads to the YGO players don't read meme, like how people apparently never know what Avramax does
I've dabbled in both games over the years and this video clearly underlines the issue I have with both of them.
For yugioh cards I feel like I'm reading a rule book on the cards itself but usually when you follow the description as accurately as possible it will always play out correctly.
With magic the gathering it's generally very clear to me what kind of threats my opponent has on the field and what they do but in specific interactions I have to look up how exactly they play out.
The worst offender for me is the keyword protection since it does several things which may make you feel like the card is impervious to anything however it only protects against targetted effects so blanket effects like boardwipes would still work. It can also be a bit confusing how it interacts with multi-colored cards if you're not used to it.
But generally all of the evergreen keywords are pretty clear and help keep the boardstate easy to understand.
As a player of both I have never had to look up rulings on yugioh, virtually every situation is explained on the cards themselves. But every time I play magic we have to lookup cards interactions every now and then because the effects are so ambiguous.
@@cl1nt34stw0odYou don't have to look up rulings because you know the game.
"FLIP:" and "piercing damage" are actual keywords.
"Once per turn" and "You can only activate the effect of ~ once per turn" mean different things that isn't explained.
"Special Summon" can't summon an Extra deck monster that wasn't properly summoned, even when the card heavily implies that it will and doesn't clarify (Starlight Road).
There's no conceivable way to guess just by reading whether Evenly Matched can affect monsters with protection.
A Magic player can also read most cards and tell you exactly how it works by distinguishing "When" from "As", or whether the "if" is in the middle of the sentence or the end, but we don't have to pretend like it's intuitive.
@fernandobanda5734 what Im saying is, Ive been playing YGO even before I knew how to multiply and I can infer what a card like evenly match does, and with two reads any competent YGO player can do so, my brother and his friends have been playing magic for even longer than that and they still up their phones to look up rulings every now and then.
My point is people complain about the card text in Yugioh thinking MTG has godlike reading when in reality most of the MTG key words cant even apply to YGO like trample or haste or flying. The real actual improvement YGO can see is the one they have on japanese cards, separate every effect in a different paragraph.
@@cl1nt34stw0od I don't think anyone is saying Magic has intuitive reading. It's the opposite. Ruling questions will come up no matter what, so you don't gain as much as people think by not simplifying the words.
anytime someone says "yugioh card too long :(" I know it's a skill issue
all cards explain themselves and you really uniornically don't need to read them more than once and even then if it's your opponents cards you just have to look for the words "quick effect" or "once per turn" and 90% of the time that's all you have to care about
it's really not that hard
while most of YGO cards have pretty specific effects that can't be keyworded, there are a lot of things that can and should be keyworded, some examples are:
"Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must first be Special Summoned (from your hand) by ...."
"Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must be Special Summoned (from your hand) by ..."
"You can only use each effect of [cardname] once per turn."
"You can only activate 1 [cardname] per turn."
"Your opponent cannot target this card with card effects."
"Neither player can target this card with card effects."
"Cannot be destroyed by card effects."
"Cannot be destroyed by battle."
"Unaffected by other cards' effects."
unaffected is actually a bit of an issue since there's a difference between unaffected and unaffected by activated effects so it'd be weird to keyword one and not the other but if you add a little bit of extra text to clarify differences you lose the benefit of keywords making cards more compact.
@@IC-23 i admit that there are some nebulous ones, like unaffected, because it could be unaffected by traps, unaffected by activated effects, unaffected by your opponent activated effects, and maybe the destroyed and targeting ones could also apply?
but i think there could be a way to keyword them in a way that makes them more streamlined in a similiar way Protection is keyworded in MTG
I feel like the only solution is to just nix half those kinds of effects completely. But I realise that's not rly something you can do 25 years into a game's lifetime. Not w/o drastically changing the way it's played anyway.
Loved that Shakespeare bit!
And agree with the points made. There’s also the practice of writing out keywords’ effects as reminder text in core sets and other beginner-focused products; as a new player, keywords don’t mean ANYTHING when you haven’t learned them yet
Magic has fallen down the same rabbit hole as Yu-Gi-Oh recently, but without the decades of experience that game has. Every new MtG set comes with its own new keyword, and every one of those keywords is rendered pointless by the need to print the reminder text right next to it. The last keyword I can think of that has been given time and repetition to land home is Surveil, and I still get it mixed up sometimes. Look at a Boast card and tell me what it does without reading the reminder text right next to it.
I mean, new keywords every set has been a thing for 20+ years.
Boast is an activated ability that can only be used if this creature attacked this turn.
Reminder text is useful because reading it is optional. If you know what the mechanic does, then you can skip over the reminder text for it because you know it works exactly the same every time. If you have never seen it before or are trying to understand a niche interaction, then you can read how it works.
That's also why ability words like Landfall and Raid exist. They don't do anything rules wise, but if you see landfall printed on a card then you know that the next few words will be "whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control".
@seandun7083 Except if that keyword is only around for one set why bother keywording it?
A lot of yugioh cards have easy to skip blocks of text because they do the same thing, every Lv1 Snake Eye Except Poplar can send it's and another card to summon a snake eye from deck.
every tenyi summons itself if you control no effect monsters and can exile itself from field/GY at certain times to do a thing.
every adamancipator scry's 5 and summons a rock so after you familiarize yourself with a deck you don't need to read every card unless a ruling issue comes up just like how reminder text is only looked at for rulings.
@IC-23 Reasons to give a keyword for a mechanic that will only be around for one set:
It indicates that they must do the same thing which means once you have read the text on one of them, you don't need to read any of it on the others. You mentioned that a lot of times in Yu-Gi-Oh you can skip reading the text of cards with similar effects, but when there isn't a keyword to enforce consistency, there can be lots of similar looking effects that still have relevant differences. Seek the Beast, Act on Impulse, Vance's Blasting Cannons and Light up the Stage all have similar but slightly different effects that you still need to read all of even if you have seen the others already.
It allows you to interact with it through cards that mention the mechanic by name such as Cosmos Charger or Enhanced Surveillance.
It makes it easier for the rules to cover the cards by granting a single area where players can look up rulings on how any of the cards with that mechanic work.
It encourages a consistent design for cards in the set which makes it easier to design synergies. Devoted Grafkeeper would have been much worse if half of the disturb cards were cast as spells from the graveyard and the other half were activated abilities like unearth.
It makes it easy for players to understand each color combination in limited formats.
A flavorful mechanic name can help make it easier to understand what a mechanic is trying to do.
Some mechanics (like saddle) are hard to word without giving them a name since cards with it may refer to "a creature that saddled it" or might say "if it was saddled".
It makes it easier to talk about in casual conversation. "Here's my morph deck" is a lot easier to say than "here's my deck built around creatures that you can play face down as 2/2s for 3 and then turn have up later on".
@@IC-23to future proof the ability in the possibility they do revisit that design space. That way you don't get things like Eatos and Her Sword not working because they decided to print it with "when" instead of "if". or get more cards like Beast of Talwar who is a normal Monster with a cyber harpie lady like effect of always being considered as another Archfiend monster because English translation didn't think that demon could be an archtype so didn't give him the localized "archfiend" name even after fixing Slime toad who was previously Frog the Jam.
The thing about YGO's paragraph style text, is just a few cards can actually be keyworded. There's a lot of conditional stuff that differs just a bit from card to card that keywording is a nightamre. People from the YGO comunity have tried to make fan "transltions" into keywords, but becomes futile.
It's like if in MTG you had creatures that gain fliying and conditional alterative casting cost. if your hand is empty, you still need to say "if you have no cards in hand, this creature has Flying. If you don't control a land, you can cast this card without payng it's mana cost". That's a lot of text for a Magic card if you want it to do the stuff a monster does in Yugioh. But they get extra complex sometimes even if in practice the effect on the dard is very simple.
I do prefer both TCGs style for it's own, I like my Magic cards explained simple, at most Atraxa Grand Unifier levels of complexity. But for Yugioh, I want to be able to have cards that work like a gear in a transmision module, so I can hop between lines of play and put in check from 2 different angles a boss monster in the opoonent's field.
This isn't a problem really. Magic's already had this happen every time a keyword is introduced:
• They find the best implementation for the keyword and that's the one they use moving forward.
• Old cards don't get errata'd to the keyword if it isn't the same and it doesn't matter. In fact, the fact that they don't use the keyword calls attention and makes it easier to notice the difference.
• If a certain variation is interesting, then they just print a new card without the keyword.
Standardizing the effect helps a lot to understand it, and it's not inconceivable to restrict your card design to that one version of the effect. But even if you don't want to, the introduction of the keyword doesn't limit the rest of your designs at all.
@@fernandobanda5734 An example of a YGO-like effect in MTG that can't be keyworded even with all Keywords MTG has at it's dispossal: Animate Dead (and Necromancy or Dance of the Dead by extension). The effects is super simple, but needs a complete explanation for it to work. Keywording in YGO would work like set specific Keywords but instead of sets, would be for Archetype, and that's worst.
@@JorgeSanchez-zk6zw I understand. But why is that a problem? On one hand, Animate Dead still exists, and on the other, it's really a plus that nothing like Animate Dead exists anymore. Old overly-complicated designs can stay in the past. Animate Dead isn't even a good thing to keyword anyway.
On the Yu-Gi-Oh side, things that would be useful to keyword and standardize: hard once per turn, Special Summon effects/conditions/permissions, some common forms of protection. Yes, a lot of the cards deviate from the norm, so what? You make those be written out, still benefit from the majority that follows the keyword, and you're more inclined to not design outside the norm when necessary, which reinforces the keyword and players understanding it.
If you're even more extreme, you could also errata old cards that worked very similarly but not quite just to standardize more. It's not like Yu-Gi-Oh! is afraid of functional errata.
@@fernandobanda5734 Both games were designed in a different way, YGO cards were not made to be used with keywords so trying to introduce a lot of them would not work, also trying to limit new cards design in a 25+ years old game is not a good move.
Even in MTG i would argue that any keyword outside of the top 10 most common ones are BAD, the common ones are good because a lot of cards feel like a reprint of another card with different stats/cost, wich is also different from how YGO cards are made (Lots of conditions, archetypes etc).
The main problem with YGO text design is the lack of numbes separating effects in the TCG, you could definitely introduce keywords such as soft once per turn and hard once per turn, but not much else.
@@Pudimmelado I agree. You introduce keywords to shorthand things that are going to be common in your game, not cram something that doesn't belong.
Also an advantage of Magic’s simpler to understand text is, even if you misunderstood the rules you can usually still have some kitchen table fun playing it.
As a kid, my first deck is the Ninja of the nights precon. We thought Ninjutsu was “when this creature deals combat damage, you may pay the ninjutsu cost of a ninja you have in hand and swap it in, dealing damage again”.
It’s not well balanced when played like this, but you can still play the game.
Meanwhile Yugioh can feel terrifying to even sit down and try.
Little funny note: Your gold dragon doesn't have enough information on it. The complete text would say:
"Adult Gold Dragon cannot be blocked except by creatures with this ability, or creatures with the ability to block creatures with this ability. When this creature deals combat or effect damage to a creature, player, Planeswalker or Battle, you gain life equal to the damage dealt this way. This creature can attack and tap or untap to pay for the activation cost of activated abilities even if it has not been continuously controlled by a player since the beginning of that player's most recent turn."
Even that wouldn't cover everything that keywords let us accomplish, such as effects that deal damage to all flying creatures!
Maybe not as important, but something I enjoy abt magic is that when it 'hides' it's complexity, it makes u feel all the more gratified when u figure out certain interactions (like the madness exile thing). The game still works and is fun on a superficial level, but by masking its complexity, it makes for a much more engaging learning curve.
Plus when new mechanics are introduced, they have how the mechanics work in parentheses on simple cost cards, as well as have reminder text removed on alt art versions of the same card. It teaches players how the mechanic works, then rewards said players/gives them confidence when they get the alt art.
I feel like you might just have some kind of mtg stockholm syndrome
As an extention of the "quick and easy to parse" aspect of keywording is it also provides a easy signal when you actively choose *not* to keyword an ability that behaves similarly, that the effect isn't intended to work the way you may have immediately expected from the keyworded version.
To use a chicken-before-egg example, in MTG, Lifelink is fairly straight forward - when the thing does damage, the controller gains that much life, and Lifelink doesn't stack with itself (it is on or off)
And the aura, Lifelink, gives the enchanted creature lifelink (the keyword).
But then there's Armadillo Cloak, which very specifically spells out its effect - "Whenever enchanted creature deals damage, you gain that much life" - because it clues the player in that although it serves a similar function to lifelink, it doesn't behave the same way.
In this case, because it stacks, and it also benefits you even if you enchant an *opponents* creature.
Lifelink is also a weird one because they went back and forth several times on whether or not to keyword it along with how to word it.
Loxodon Warhammer was originally printed in Mirrodin granting the ability "whenever this creature deals damage you gain that much life".
In tenth edition it was updated to grant lifelink with the reminder text "when it deals damage, you gain that much life".
In Planechase and so future paper printings it had lifelink without reminder text. (Duels of the Planeswalkers did have a version with the current reminder text for lifelink).
Effects that often work slightly differently depending on the card are definitely ones that are hard to keyword though. One effect that has been printed a lot over the past few years is "exile n cards from the top of your library. You may play them until...". Some say"play", some say "cast" meaning you can't play lands. Some say "until end of turn" some say "until your next end step" some say "until the end of your next turn" and all of those mean slightly different things.
reading the card actually works better in yugioh than it does in magic imo. it's just the yugioh cards are way harder to read. magic cards are formatted in a way where you can read them easier, but also worded in a way that makes them harder to understand without prior knowledge or a guidebook.
The main issue I see with yugioh card readability would be the lack of formatting. If effects were placed on new lines it would do a lot to allow cards to be read at a glance.
exactly. this is something ive noticed with all the 'player from different card game evaluates cards from game they dont play', that me as a person that only really got into ygo is that most cards from other card games with less text thanks to keywords and such only LOOK easier to grasp
Small correction to your Adult Gold Dragon. Lifelink's ability is technically "Damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much life."
The big difference is noncombat damage also counts for lifelink. It's why Firesong and Sunspeaker works as a card.
Just another fiddly keyword edge case you have to look up.
There's a few things this video misses in the way of Yugioh.
1) A big reason as to why keywords probably would be difficult to implement in Yugioh is because Konami is very fluid about the rules of its game and often builds many cards that'll just completely circumvent or ignore certain restrictions in the games rules. An easy example of this is the concept of "sending cards", which is basically just a generic form of removal that bypasses any other sorts of protections aside from cards that aren't affected by card effects (and those cards can also be circumvented by forcing your opponent to do an action, such as with Destructive Daruma Karma Cannon [which that card is its own can of worms]). Much like EDH, Yugioh would also have a million different keywords you would have to memorize because there's no set rotation in this game.
But beyond that, most text on a Yugioh card is basically just costs and restrictions. When you know what text to look for during a match, reading a card becomes simple. You can generally just ignore 75% of what your opponent's card says when you're looking for an effect. Its just a skill issue. Most of the text on a Yugioh card is important to the player using it as opposed to the opponent since it keeps them from spamming multiple copies during a turn. Otherwise, every deck would have the capacity to become an FTK deck.
Like, Yugioh is a game where if a card has less text, it may be more powerful because its spammable.
2) Yugioh cards do more than what they say on the card because they're combo pieces, so their text doesn't do a good job of intuiting to the opponent what their deck is meant to do. Special summon combos are just a staple of all types of decks in this game, they aren't only inherent to actual combo decks. The reason for this is because Yugioh archetypes are designed to play like MOBA champions or fighting game characters. The game is incredibly swingy more often than not, and you generally have to look for certain extenders in the middle of their combos to intuit the sort of shenanigans that your opponent may be on if they're playing anything toxic. This just means that Yugioh is a game where you have to memorize a lot of different match-ups each format so that you can understand during a match when a deck is deviating from a standard list, which is generally just something you'll learn as you expand your card knowledge. And in a competitive setting, a pro player is going to be very careful not to reveal their entire strategy from the onset.
The only saving grace usually is that there's generally only 6-18 archetypes that are considered "meta-relevant" at a time in the competitive space aside from tier 0 formats. Figuring out what those archetypes are though can sometimes be difficult, and in those situations, certain archetypes can just come in and completely blindside everyone (such as the Labrynth deck that took second place at YCS Indy). Whenever a new set releases, Yugioh players are expected to re-evaluate the whole competitive landscape and determine what archetypes they're likely to run into at a YCS or a regional or whatever. And locals are a whole other story since people are going to bring what they like to play, which means you gotta get used to what the people there are running (whether its meta-relevant or not).
Magic decks are (generally) not designed like this because Magic is a game designed to be played throughout multiple turns. You have beaters, you have blowout cards, you have some draw/mill/self-mill/whatever engines that help to speed up your game plan, and you have cards like sol ring or what have you that allow you to get into those cards sooner over the course of a game. And typically, your deck has an overall end board they're trying to reach towards the late game. So you have a lot of time to figure out what a Magic deck is trying to do and determine what cards in your deck could be used to stop them.
By comparison, Modern Yugioh especially is basically a game of king of the hill. You're just constantly trying to deny your opponent the board, because failing to do so usually means that taking back the board becomes that much harder. If you're facing a deck like Centur-Ion in a competitive setting for example and you're going second, you either stop them from reaching Calamity or you don't get to play the game. And nothing about the archetype tells you that's what they're trying to do because Calamity has nothing to do with the Centur-Ion archetype, its part of the Resonator archetype and the deck is just able to extend into it using a generic synchro monster called Crimson Dragon.
3) Even if Yugioh card text were more brief, it wouldn't really tell you what a deck does at a glance because very few Yugioh archetypes are alike. If you sit down to play a game of magic and your opponent is playing some green mana deck, you can generally intuit that they're most likely playing some sort of ramp deck or what have you. If they're playing black blue, i'm basically facing your average Yugioh deck. If its white, i can expect stuff like massive life gain shenanigans. And if its mono red, then they're bad at the game.
By comparison, attributes in Yugioh (the seven elements that can be on a monster card) don't really intuit shit about what a deck does. You can have a deck with monsters of all sorts of different elements, and it could play similarly to a deck made up of all dark monsters for example. But even if we were to look at a single card like Branded Fusion for example, that could lead into, like, 8 different outcomes which each have their own set of combo lines. Maybe i'm trying to end on Red-Eyes Dark Dragoon? Maybe i'm trying to end on Millennium-Eyes Restrict? Maybe i'm trying to summon a Gimmick Puppet onto your field and lock you out of your next turn (please god, just ban Sanctifire Dragon :painpeko:), or maybe i'm running some other supplemental package in my deck (like Chimeras) and i'm trying to extend into those extra deck monsters.
Yugioh is basically a game where card knowledge is a literal skill issue. Its why perfect knowledge is just incredibly OP in the hands of a good player (especially in the context of the modern game where going first is just so fucking oppressive), which is why many cards in this game that do grant you that knowledge either have heavy restrictions (meaning they're usually unviable), are designed to be retaliation cards (like Triple Tactics Talent), or end up getting banned if they aren't reasonably balanced.
Like, i still love Yugioh despite all of that (the surprise factor is even part of why i do), but a new player has to understand that this is what the game entails. It can involve a lot of homework, but when you're able to grasp everything that's going on, Yugioh really is like no other game I've played.
If there is anything that yugioh could do with, it's some small signals for extremely common properties of some effects, for example, if there was a specific symbol representing soft/hard once per turn effects that would probably save a lot of text bloat.
If ygo were to add keywords, i think they would be new words for basic game mechanics, such as how discard is used.
example:
If this card is sent to the GY to activate a WATER monster's effect: Add 1 Sea Serpent monster from your Deck to your hand, except "Atlantean Dragoons". would become ->
If this card is sent to the GY to activate a WATER monster's effect: *search* 1 Sea Serpent monster, except "Atlantean Dragoons".
When this card is destroyed by battle and sent to the Graveyard: You can Special Summon 1 Level 4 or lower non-Tuner "Gusto" monster from your Deck. would become ->
When this card is destroyed by battle and sent to the Graveyard: You can *Recruit* 1 Level 4 or lower non-Tuner "Gusto" monster. (maybe rally? i'm not sure.)
When this card is Normal Summoned: You can send 1 Zombie monster from your Deck to the GY. Would become ->
When this card is Normal Summoned: You can *Bury* 1 Zombie monster.
i'm think special summon from hand would also be a good keyword, but i'm not sure on what to call it.
Awesome video, I never thought of effect text in things outside of card games as keywords. I guess i'll be looking at stuff like that differently now.
One advantage of keywords is that it encourages designers to have consistency with their effects. Its possible that some path of exile dev had a good idea for some effect that cares about something happening in the past 3 seconds, but because its similar to "recently" it would as be reworked to use 4 seconds for consistency.
A problem that yugioh has that prevents the introduction of keywords is there are a tonne of cards with very similar but slightly different effects.
I wouldn't exactly say that's a bad thing, it gives more space for card design, though sometimes it could be annoying, like how there's like 10 different types of towers in the game.
@@asafesseidonsapphire similar things working slightly differently is bad design. It increases mental load and reduces a user's confidence in using the product. This is as true for lamps as it is for trading cards.
@@daveclarke1990 I mean imagine if Majespecters were towers in the level of Apoqliphort Towers, It doesn't make sense.
@@daveclarke1990 Similar things working differently in a strategy game where players will be bringing different things to the table that will then interact with each other and are incentivized to try to find interactions in their favor... is around half the fun in yugioh.
@@qedsoku849exactly!
If you think about it, yugioh has some keywords too, albeit fairly few, for example, piercing battle damage, or the way archetypes interact
Love the video. I honestly find the differences between card games interesting and i like how the video is an objective overview that doesnt let preference get in the way of analysis.
MTG has less text but you need to understand the vague gibberish like vigilance and scry.
YGO is more verbose, squished up and kinda hard to read FROM A DISTANCE but that's because it's trying to explain it's gimmicks as clearly as possible.
Reminder text is a great way to get the benefits of both worlds. If you understand the keyword then you can skip reading the reminder text since the keyword works the same every time, but if you haven't seen it before or need some clarification, then you still have the rules spelled out for you.
That's also the case with ability words like Landfall and Raid. They don't have rules meaning, but if a card has a Landfall ability, then you know it will start by saying "whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, ..."
@@seandun7083the hell?
@@phorchybug3286 reminder text is italicized text in parenthesis on cards in beginner focused sets or for set specific mechanics to explain what they do. For example, the text of Opt is
"Scry 1. (Look at the top card of your library. You may put that card on the bottom.)
Draw a card."
If you are familiar with the mechanic or are describing it to someone experienced in the game, you can easily skip the reminder text but still know exactly what the effect does, but if you haven't seen Scry before then you can still just read it.
So many Dark World cards in YuGiOh are confusing, but even outside of that, I much rather the keyword system than a paragraph on each card.
Dark World is so confusing because TCG categorizes each effect with a period instead of numbering. This is what Snoww would look like using OCG format:
①: If this card is discarded to the GY by card effect: add 1 "Dark World" card from your Deck to your hand. If it was discarded from your hand to your GY by an opponent's card effect: you can also target 1 monster in your opponent's GY; Special Summon that target in Defense Position.
People only talk about surface level issues that OCG doesn’t have (Hard one per turn being the 1st sentence, Numbering, “this card’s name” instead of [long ass name] to name a few), even though there’s so many things wrong with TCG wording beyond that. TCG uses like 6 different phrases for "Untargetable + Indestructible by opponent's card effect" despite OCG, from what I looked up, uses 1.
@@acasualgameryt6978 Yeah absolutely. If the TCG even used the system Rush Duels does for card effect (pretty much the OCG way) then readability would increase so much.
@@MrXhukari dark worlds have exceptionally confusing card text because most of them were made over 10 years ago at a point when Konami weren't really sure how to write cards yet but it's not so hard when you understand that all of them have an effect when discarded by you and one when discarded by your opponents effect.
@@martsawup i can easily imagine them to be worded differently with bullet points for if it was discarded by the owner or the opposing player if they came out in modern days instead
Something worth noting with Magic's use of keywords, the set specific keywords will have reminder text with them on all the normal versions of the commons and uncommons and will carry reminder text on normal versions of higher rarity cards if there is enough room. This is by design as the commons and uncommons are the most likely to be encountered over something like a rare or mythic and these are used to teach players about the keywords. This allows Magic to be both verbose and clear with their effects while offering cleaner looking versions through the special versions, whether those be retro frame, extended art, guest sheets, etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But your custom Adult Gold Dragon wouldn't be able to block another Adult Gold Dragon because it doesn't have "Flying" written on it.
So, with many of the examples you gave for keywords that are rarely used, I agree that without reminder text they can become convoluted and confusing. However, ability words like Landfall and Threshold actually DON'T fall into that category. Read the Landfall cards you brought up. Both Omnath and Obuun read: "Landfall - Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, [effect]" So, those ability words actually specify what they do without reducing it to ONLY a keyword, whereas Trample just says Trample (except in Core Sets where they add reminder text to evergreen keywords), and so the player has to understand that means "When assigning combat damage, this creature may assign excess damage to defending player (or permanent being attacked)"
I think you left out the most important one, which is that it restricts game design space. Because Magic likes to keep things to keywords, there's a lot of effects that are literally identical to each other. A 2-mana 2/3 with "Can't be blocked by creatures without flying or reach" might be an exciting card to a Magic player, but a Yugioh player would call it a terrible card design, it's such a boring card.
Hence why bringing more keywords to Yugioh... just isn't really possible. Other than HOPT, there's simply not enough repeated effects. It sounds like there should be, but if you make a list of 18 'evergreen abilities' like in Yugioh, you'll end up with a list of keywords... that are likely only going to appear once per deck, total.
Magic doesn't keep things to keywords, it does not make every effect into a keyword, in fact most of magic effects is written without keywords.
Keywords are only there for common, repeated effects. "Evergreen" keywords means they will come up in every single magic set, they are by far the most used. And new sets usually introduces or brings back a previous keyword, but that by no means reflect that every card in that set is a collection of those keywords.
Everything on yugioh cards wouldn't be keywords if keywords were introduced, only things that were commonly called back to and repeated.
Also, a 2 mana 2/3 "flying" creature in magic is not really going to excite people, but if it was a 2/1 flying where when it enters the battlefield you could pay X mana to gain control of an artifact with mana value X or less, now we're talking.
The only keyword in that text, is flying.
one insteresting thing is that yugiho player have made generally agreed upon keyword, same for hexproof in magic if i recon correctly
You could technically do the inverse you did with adult gold dragon for a yugiho card using those keyword, acronym (NSu, SSu) remove redundant limitations or reminder text
In Yu-Gi-Oh, there are few keywords (like target, negate, if, when), but people needed so much time to assimilate them I can understand they stopped doing that.
Before someone tells me that if and when are not keywords:
"If this card is sent to the graveyard..."
"When this card is sent to the graveyard..."
have different Yu-Gi-Oh meaning.
"Hail, good citizen! I used to be an adventurer like you but I took an arrow to the knee."
I'd say it's just the difference with information density difference across different languages. Thing is, most east asian language (japanese, korean, and chinese) has high information density so long winded word feels much less winding in it
Alright, yugioh question.
What does linear equation cannon do?
It tries to solve a linear equation using the variables below
a is the declared number from 1 to 6
x is the level of the effect monster you chose
y is the number of cards your opponent control
c is the number of cards in your graveyard
If ax+y=c then you can shuffle cards opponent control
If ax+y=/=c then you take damage
Good thing we don't have quadratic equation cannon
I've thinking of card texts as mini contracts.
as someone that play both in their mobile version, duel link and arena, and learned to play recent enough to remember how was, 7 years maximum to yugioh and 2 to magic, yugioh is far easier to learn to play, if not for the arena showing me the meanning of the key words would have been a nightmare learn that, after you learn magic became easier to understand
I would like to point out that at least commons and uncommons have italicized reminder text to tell you what a set keyword does so if you open a pack you understand the gist of what a mechanic does at least. Incubate is a good example of this in a recent set
Edit: actually I checked and all the rares (including the commander cards) have the explanation text: the only one that doesn’t is the mythic Elesh Norn which one won’t really stumble into randomly often
Do think smaller Key Words can be added to Yu-Gi-Oh. Like "(Quick Effect)", and "banish". And even smaller wording choices like "This card is unaffected by the effects of Trap Cards" to "Unaffected by Trap Effects".
Here's what I find important. Magic has a comprehensive rules document that can answer any problem you have with weird interactions. YGO does not. Magic has formats that limit the number of things you need to know about, YGO doesn't really have that to the same degree.
This, I can't believe the TCG cards ruling are basically you go to this website for all the OCG card ruling and use google translation. Not to mention the "applying ruling of other cards with the same exact phrases for effects so it should have similar ruling" approach works way harder in TCG because something like "Untargetable + Indestructable by opponent's card effect" has at least 6 different way to word in TCG while only 1 in OCG.
I think YuGiOh has an issue with text that's similar to being overwhelmed by too many keywords. Stuff like cost, effect, banish, destruction by battle or by card effect, what is activate-able in damage step, if vs when, nothing crazy complicated if you already know, but ask an actually new player, and they'll be confused at the question or give a completely wrong answer.
"My card is unaffected how come Called By negated it!" -> reads card -> card says "unaffected by activated effects", meanwhile Called By is lingering
Well, one notable benefit to YGO's text, is it will prepare you to become a lawyer.
One other secondary benefit to using full text: It lets you make cards that have very distinct and nuanced effects because you can easily have them branch out by making slight changes to card text. To use a random set of cards as an example: Mystic Tomato, Silver Gadget, Shark Cruiser and Fire Hand all have effects that trigger if they're destroyed but if they were all given a single keyword of "FLOATING" it would change all of their effects since their conditions are all different.
Another benefit against keywords is more subtle and not really mechanical but more in how some effects being given a keyword might limit the creative space of game designers when making new cards. Magic having a "flying" keyword means if they ever want to make a card that would attack directly it needs to have some aesthetic connection to flying. In Yu-Gi-Oh the comparable effect of being a direct attacker has cards like Toon monsters, submarines, ninjas/spies, snipers, cavalry, tiny monsters, and also flying things. There's a lot more variety flavor-wise in what is "able" to direct attack and it still makes sense on the card art. But this is more a flaw of picking your actual keywords poorly where you don't really consider long-term impact they might have on variety.
*looks at Shadow keyword*
I hate that my favorite little monsters in Magic are just trash, except the one little brother who kills Graveyard decks.
Its not that descriptive effects are banned in MtG, but more like, some standard/generic effects are normalized with some tags, while it can have more specific ones.
The issue in YGO, imo, is the lack of a resource system, everything must be special summoned to be fast and viable, but then, it needs to have some kind of restriction/condition to be played and the only place to put it, is on each card individually since each card/effect is its own thing. I'm not saying its a pronlem tho, its a consequence and this is how they addressed. I love how sometimes it feels like a law dispute with how effects are worded, card effect, protection and how it interacts with the board or other cards.
I mean, not really? MTG has a fair number of alternative options to "flying" available for "we only want specific cards to be able to block this" that they can pull from. Keyworded abilities, even.
There's Shadow, Protection, Fear, Intimidate, Menace, Horsemanship, and Skulk. (Also Landwalk for "is unblockable in certain contexts")
If you want cards that are only blockable by certain things, you've got keywords for days, and a pretty wide variety of aesthetics to pull from.
@@EnderPryde See that introduces the issue of having a billion keywords that all functionally do basically the same thing?
@@Zetact_ Of those, only protection and menace are still used in the standard-legal sets. Most are relics of the past when the developers hadn't quite figured out the best ways to handle keywords.
Aside from flying and menace (and to a much, much, lower extent, protection), any other hard-to-block effect these days is spelled out (not accounting for sets like Modern Horizons, which are aimed at more enfranchised players)
I think part of the issue is that magic's most popular format is commander, which while advertised as a more casual, social, experience, also allows pretty much every card from the game's entire history, and with it, every single keyword.
Here's some food for thought: I am sure that Yugioh intended to use keywords for some mechanics. Mainly for all secondary card types that can be seen in the typeline. Toon, Spirit, Ritual and Unions all share a gameplay mechanic amongst themselves, that could be left out of the actual card text. For whatever reason though, they still specify their gimmick.
Famously Toon monsters suffer greatly from this, as limitations on text length meant that some Toon had some aspects of the Toon gimmick truncated, which is confusing to keep track of.
Also, as a reminder that should always be mentioned in this discussion: Yugioh has only one format and no rotation and I think the more elaborate explanations help when trying to play cards with each other that have decades between them
its more like the devs arent sure how to implement certain effects early on rather then intended for them to be keywords like toons all required toon world to be active but that card literally does do anything and they couldve instead just made it so the bulk of the toon monster's playstyle and effefts were to be printed on toon world instead, spirits is more of an experimental mechanic to balanced overpowered effects, rituals couldve been an extra deck summoning mechanic but needed to differ from fusions and unions is redundant when there now exist cards and archetypes that works with equipping monsters without the limitations of unions
the whole concept of monster abilities is sorta pointless when they can function exactly the same without the necessity of the ability term on their type line
I remember the good old days of yugioh where getting 3 monsters in a turn was ridiculous. Now trying to play it, people will have a full board turn 1 with a card that basically says you can't do anything: I win next turn.
Could you talk about Duel Masters
The reason why Yugioh does not have keywords is because the vast majority of the cards have unique effects and a lot of effects, restrictions and conditions of activation/summon that differs just a bit from card to card so if keywords were added to yugioh the result would be thousands of keywords and I think that would scare any player more than long texts
You could just pick a few, standardize those, and leave the rest.
This is what Magic does and has done and it causes no problems after people learn the relevant keyword in like two days
I disagree that Flying or Trample can be intuitively understood. So when you think of trampling you think of something massive bulldozing something small or maybe clearing an area... So obviously Trample means that you can attack a land right? or anything with a stat total low enough or mana cost low enough instantly dies right? No... Somehow a giant elephant stepping on a squirrel means some wizard somewhere just gets a massive nosebleed for some reason. Flying to be understood properly needs you to know an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT KEYWORD. hearthstone uses keywords, but at least they have the decency/ability to tell you what those keywords do if you hover over the card.
Not a card game, but wanted to note that Warhammer 40k had keywords like "Feel no Pain" in earlier (objectively better) editions, but in recent editions they have abolished them and started to print the entire rule on the unit card. So that's one example of the same game switching the approach.
I really feel like YGO needs better formatting for the card. Additionally, having Special Summon restrictions (i.e. "can't be normal summoned or set, can only be special summoned by X" feels like it could just have "SPECIAL" the same way some monsters have "FLIP" and then lists the Special Summon conditions the same way XYZ and LINK monsters do. Reinventing the card frames to something like how Rush Duel looks would also solve this as it frees up more space for art and text at the same time.
The biggest issue I have as someone who doesn't play YGO is that when card text is read out, my eyes start to glaze over. There's also inane rules like "When" vs "If" (i.e. missing timing) and a whole bunch of stuff regarding just pure jank. Also, the text size is the same regardless of how much empty space is left, which is really, really annoying considering how small they can be. There's too many words, too many clauses, and too many sub-clauses.
yugioh has a lot of early installment weirdness to it before the devs figure a lot of things out with FLIP being 1 of them since there does exist monsters with flip effects without the FLIP subtype and their effects do not count as flip effects either while effect prefaced with FLIP on a monster card with the FLIP subtype does count as a flip effect
all FLIP does these days is be redundant when it isnt necessary at all since by itself it doesnt actually do anything which is why its more or less been abandoned
trying to create a "SPECIAL" subtype carries the same baggage too in that it doesnt actually do anything, will bring with it its own new aspect that can easily be mistaken for something else and the listed method is still required anyway
these also exist cards that differ in cannot be normal or set but can be special summoned in more ways then just the listed method so its not like thats the only variation of the line that exist, additionally im not sire if you know this but xyz and links dont actually fit into that aforementioned summoning restriction since you can actually summon them outside of their listed method
@@YukiFubuki. Special subtype exist... only in ocg
Here's a thing too - I can't read the text on a yugioh card. Like, my eyes are physically unable to make out the lettering. I knew my eyes were weak, but it's the first time I've ever been unable to read something and feel "excluded" as a result. Whoever the hell decided on the layout of those cards was not thinking ahead.
Neither Magic nor Yugioh cards are very clear.
I can't see through either of them when I hold them up to my face.
Ah yes, poison trample. Serious thought: yugioh cards are very different from each other, so an effect can be triggered by being sent to gy, being destroyed or leaving the field and maybe only by an opponent’s card effect. If deathrattle existed in yugioh a lot of its cards would look so much more similar and it would be a shame. Raye being able so activate from gy after spolying shizuku or prankids battle butler triggering even on a kaiju for the first time will always be some of my favorite yugioh moments. The only keywords i could see implemented would be soft hard opt, but even that would be difficult since a card can have different effects with different limitations. To sum up yugioh is complex and that’s why I love it.
Also engage
another thing is that hard and soft opt is actually fundamentally different from one another, they're worded similarly and tehy achieved similar results but differ in how they actually work in that one puts a restriction on the card and the other places it on the player instead so because of this actually changing control of the card would still enable its new controller to use its effect an additional time even if its effect is a hard opt that has already been used this very turn and then there is something like baronne de fleur whose effect is both a hard and soft opt combined...
Idk I've had to look up the rules playing yugioh lately than magic and even then we had to guess and vote on the rules so there isn't clarity with more text
Ah, my favorite kind of keywords, sizes / distances.
I still laugh every time someone says there is a "small castle" as that in my mind means that the castle is 2.5 x 2.5 feet
Also, WOTC, if it is not evergreen, put the reminder text there, always. Especially if it is something like making a map token, because I don't know what a map token does, and they are uncommon enough that you or a new player does not encounter them every day.
Also, please stop making more and more tokens, I already need to bring Food, Blood, Clue's, treasures, maps, soldiers, constructs, servo's and gold. I like to play an artifact token deck, however I doubt even half of those tokens can't be standardized. The soldiers, constructs and servo's all are identical, save for their creature type for instance.
The ones that really get to me are the tokens that are designed to be altered, like the ring token. When I put my tokens away, I don't want to find a little side-spot to put the two halves of my damn ring!
Since magic has mana as a recourse and common effects, its easyer to categories. But with Yugioh you need restrictions for the game not to be ftk fest. Becuase the effect takes up little of the card space and majority of the card text is the restrictions. Like tutor 1 tenyi card to the field from deck is that same as special summon 1 tenyi card from deck. Since there is the restrictions in general of mana cost in Majik a lot of these broken things aren't like you can just do it.
Thought id bring up this point.
There are key works like negate maybe yugioh could do something like have the key word up top and restrictions under it like this could solve the problem.
Search
(evil eye card only, if on summon, once per turn(card name))
Negate
(once per turn, on monsters effect quick effect)
Sometimes yugioh players just read search and are like cool. Ignore everything else because we just assume the restrictions.
Using "Once per turn:" and "Special Summon: [condition]" properly would help A LOT, if Yu-Gi-Oh! wasn't so fearful of changing anything. I don't understand how you design cards with the same text for 10 years and don't take the initiative to do something about itm
Tbh, archetypes in yugioh confused me for a while.
In magic, the actual name of a card is irrelevant except for a few cases where you're looking for an exact match of the entire name. (I,e; legendaries or Rat Colony)
In yugioh, the name is actually important! So many archetypes basically use the name like mtg uses the type line. And then there's weird cases like Frog The Jam where even though it's called a frog it's not *really* a frog(I think because it was named before the frog archetype existed or something?) so every frog related card specifically spells out EXCEPT FROG THE JAM. (Except I think they errataed them all at some point so now it does count?)
frog the jam isnt a frog because the original name in japanese is actually "slime toad", it does not have the 'frog' word in its name so does not belong in the frog archetype which is why frog support has to exclude it since it was never a frog card at all but because its tcg name made a mistake and localized it to include the word 'frog' in it some unaware players may believe it is a frog card when it isnt so frog support has to have that restriction otherwise the card may be used in a way its unable to be used
konami did went and later errata the name of frog the jam into slime toad in tcg giving it its supposed name back so that frogs can stop having to exclude but at this point the damage is done already and frog the jam became a meme
Ive only ever played yugioh, and never have i ever touched a magic card. However the "keyword mechanic" does not require the one word not being accompanied by any other words. If i understand corectly, the trample keyword is similar to the piercing keyword found in yugioh. The only difference is that instead of saying "piercing" in yugioh, it just says "When this card attacks a defense position monster, inflict piercing battle damage". Yes, it does SOUND more convoluted, however even a new player can tunnel vision into the word "piercing" alone. And although it is more tiring for a new player to read an entire paragraph, once you read it you are 100% sure how that card works, without need to read specific interactions ( most of the time). So even though it is more tiring, imo paragraphs are actually more welcoming to new players, as long as they know the basic terminology of "attack, defense, normal summon, special summon, gv, banish zone". Might just be the fact that i havent played magic tho, idk....
If you play Magic once or twice, you are going to run into keywords that you have to then learn. If by you play like five or six times, then you already internalized them. It's so easy to use them that most cards games follow that.
Magic does often use reminder text (italicized text explaining how an ability works) to explain new keywords or in sets targeted at beginners.
It is generally used much more often on lower rarity cards since those will be encountered more often if you are a new player or are opening the latest set with it's new mechanics. This lets them save some room on higher rarity cards for more complex mechanics since those will be used more often by experienced players who know how the ability works.
i believe the full text is always listed to eliminate any alternate interpretation of the effect like if it just says the card inflict piercing then somebody will eventually interpret it in ways it was never intended to be interpreted either on purpose or accidentally while in comparison to if the text specifically mentioned the card itself is the 1 atking into a defense mode monster then battle dmg itself is still inflict to the opponent then there is very little to nothing to speculate about
Yugioh would benfit a ton from keywording its most common effects.
It would benefit, even more, from word spacing and a consistent structure for its card text.
What do you mean by consistent structure? Post PSCT cards separate condition, card, effect using colon and semicolon.
@@acasualgameryt6978 Structure as in formatting. Where all effects of certain qualities always appear on a card in a consistent order, and formatted in a way that makes sense on a glance instead of having to parse one block of text.
The Japanese version of yugioh already has some of this down.
@@axelostlund2348 oh, definitely, the things yugioh OCG does better that are common knowledge are numbering, separates conditions and effects (like Promethean Princess's restriction is an effect) better, and has HOPT clause on top. However, I don't see people talk about is how TCG sometimes words the same effect differently for some reasons. "Untargetable + Indestructable by OPP's effect" has like 6 difference wording in TCG even though OCG only has 1.
BTW, I only knew about this while researching for more suggestions for the keyword version (regular version) of Master Duel's Readable Card Effects mod
@@acasualgameryt6978 Quite, and that is part of what makes a lot of things so confusing. I have seen some videos of people inspired by the ocg and magic's formatting translating yugioh tcg cards into that structure, and seeing the result of those were the first time in year I looked at a yugioh card and though: "Oh wow I understand what this does right away."
For reference I used to be, very, into yugioh, so I have dealt with its formatting and could even recite all effects of cards in my deck from memory, but I definitely feel it could use a thorough clean up.
This is why I quit playing both card games . The video games are more consistent with rulings and are more likely to discourage infinity combos by forcing players to physically re-tap every single time.
The problem is that Magic is becoming YugiOh because of needing to create new keywords every set.
Video starts at 02:00
i Would love you trying out Tiny Tina`s Wonderlands
As someone who has played like 40 games of magic. Trample is not in anyway self-explanatory. Deathtouch is but I originally thought trample was going to be some weird form of deathtouch + first strike.
Most keywords aren't going to be self-explanatory. You do have to learn them.
Totally love your video and vibe!! You are speaking out of my heart ♥️
I mean Rush Duel is kinda Yugioh with Keywords.
3:36 my issue with your Adult Gold Dragon with the keyword definition is, the lines of text each start a new paragraph for each effect.
To emulate the yugioh effect/design on a M:TG card, you should have each sentence end, then immediately start the next effect, rather than each one getting its own line to start at.
And the only break is a semi colon
@jmurray1110 the "yugioh Adult Gold Dragon" has a period for each sentence, so that much it correct.
great video
If you have keywords then kids wouldn’t understand early. Mtg is to complicated.
Hence why they use reminder text for beginner products and set specific mechanics.
Neither is as good as dungeon dice monsters
I'm sure Yugioh could be summarized in very few keywords., way less than what MTG uses
Ok? Tell us how. People who created Readable Card Effects mod on Master Duel would definitely want some suggestions.
@@acasualgameryt6978 It all depends on the phrases you want to summarize. "When this card enters the battlefield" can be "Fielding"
"Des-trigger" could be "whenever this card is destroyed and sent to the graveyard".
"Des-battle" could be "Whenever this card is destroyed by battle and send to the graveyard"
"Des-effect"...
"Search your deck, add it to your hand" could be scope
"X-click" whenever a X card is activated.
So we have a
"Fielding: scope a Dark Magician card.
Des-trigger: reborn a Dark Magician normal monster."
@@AndrusPr8 Thanks
Try that with *Endymion, The Mighty Master Of Magic*
Good luck.
@@MansMan42069 You can't, because Endymion doesn't work with the common mechanics of yu-gi-oh! but the rather uncommon "Spell Counter" mechanic.
Nevertheless, YGO card effects usually revolve around moving cards from one place to another. Searching, recovering, bouncing, destroying, negating, special summoning.
I'd rather read the cards, the clarity is more important imo. The value of a proper sentence cant be underestimated lol
No amount of text can make yu gi oh easier to understand.
Still key words would be quality of life also I want them add punctuation point help list out effects like they did in japan....
@@TheDragonfriday I also hope they will use bullet points like in ocg. I dont know about keyword tho, I dont play magic. They should probably keyword things like restrictions, condition and cost tho. Most of the text is like "you can only use this effect once per turn" or " you can special summon if you have no monster".
AMATURISH NOOB
My issue with magic is the same as games like Elden ring.
If I need to have a wiki page open in order to properly play your product then I am not having fun.
Yugioh is hard to learn initially, but to this day I can still pick it up and play, no matter what new cards get added/ what I have forgotten.
Magic on the other hand is pure memorization. You need to memorize 50+ keywords in order to properly play the game.
The true issue with yugioh is that the majority of people are really bad at grammar. Schools nowadays value memorization and regurgitation rather than understanding.
I think the best analogy for magic vs yugioh is this.
Yugioh is for people who like doing algebra.
Magic is for people who enjoy memorizing the multiplication table so they can finish the 100 multiplication quiz in under 5 minutes so they get to participate in the pizza party for the clasa
Fernando Banda being the resident MTG bootlicker
Apparently yugioh puts white in front of red ig
Ah, shit. I should have caught that, lol.
If I were in charge of Yu-Gi-Oh, I'd make it a hard rule that if a card effect can't be explained in 50 words, it doesn't get printed.