Another point regarding distribution/allocation: the average person might not realize that shops have to place their orders for a given set SEVERAL MONTHS in advance and speculate as to whether or not a set will produce strong sales/profits. Shops hedge their risk by purchasing greater quantities of "good" sets and lesser quantities of "bad" sets. But as Ruxin pointed out, distributors can cut your allocation if you don't consistently order or order ENOUGH, creating fomo for the shop owners. That aside, it seems that the 'Big 3' are all suffering from similar issues at the moment. Time will tell if they adjust, or continue overprinting into oblivion. Great video!
3-6mo pre-order time, by time we know if a set is good or not, it's WAY to late.@@Ruxin34 Pretty sure I already have numbers down for the next 4-5 sets.
Honestly as a TCG collector as a whole; it’s crazy to see Konami, WotC and Pokemon international all pretty much struggling with the same issue as a whole and not understanding their market that much. Absolutely enjoyed the video Ruxin!
@@hieinh no no they're really not. I go to multiple LGS' and only one sells Pokémon product that's the newest releases and hosts a locals there. Which is bad for a card game
@@hieinhPokemon isnt doing fine ,no not really. Alot of my friends that own groups or just hardcore collectors are all either quitting or taking a big break currently. Appart from the 151 pack wjth mew on it , all ladt packs has been complete garbage from what they told me. I myself openned some of those new ones and it did seem like crap.
As someone who works at a locals, its hard to watch the product sit on the shelf, only for it to be buried under the next set only a few weeks later. This is a very insightful video and very well done Ruxin!
@@DaddyKranemy locals suck but even their packs are cheaper than retail stores. But I don’t trust single packs from my locals, I’ve never made back my money on a a pack. When I buy singles from target they always hit.
@@DaddyKrane my local target doesnt have any because its a regular isle and not an up front/behind the counter isle, and they are regularly raided and often theres evidence by blatant criminals, including a pile of open wrappers one time.... also i live in a top ten big US city. I also seen a guy in dollar tree weighing yugioh packs on a scale in the corner, while multiple employees watched.
@@tehpurplepills mine don't either and it's because they buy them all but Walmart has a shit ton that I get from and they're better prices then card shops
Yeah my local store completely stopped dealing with Yu-Gi-Oh, all from selling, buying it or doing any tournaments. Calling it (no longer user-friendly) for introducing new players with it's over the top mechanics. It's sad to see it like this, when it used to be mostly about attack, defense, & flip effects with some rituals and fusions only.
Konami needed to set a special summon cap per turn like 10 years ago the game is just too damn fast, complicated, unforgiving and expensive for new players to get into so there's been a steady bleed off of players for years.
Sets should come out every 2 months, and should include new artworks for existing cards to make it more collectible, having 20 prints of the same card doesn't do no good
I'd probably say 1 - 2 sets a year, let them make their appearance for people to at least remember them. It's super overwhelming seeing all these different cards and as Ruxin said; It's impossible to keep up, even for a long-term Yu-Gi-Oh lover. Bring out multiple sets a year will render the previous sets worthless if they keep this up.
The fact that hobby stores also increase the price of the boxes over a short period of time because of the cards in the packs also blows my mind. It’s all just a huge rip
To be fair, they do that because otherwise why not just open the boxes and sell the cards online? Yugioh boxes work off 5-8 cards having value and everything else being worthless.
@@markjacobs3232 but also because of that. thats why most people just go to tcg or amazon lol. or in my case I rather just get singles or some people get structure decks lol
Best solution up the max rarity like quarter century starlights Colette’s rare and ghost per a case more people will be inclined to buy boxes who cares that the card value for max rarity will drop but the other card rarity will go up in price as a result because less bulk will be available from hunting the max rarity will be easier to collect
Pokemon's issue is increased MSRP without increasing the value of the set contents. I think TPC thought the illustration rares and higher EX pull rates would be a good enough value add to justify the increased distributor costs but its paradoxically dropped the value due to chases being overprinted without coming anywhere close to box prices.
eeh not quite the singles market in yugioh is still intact meaning in theory stores can sell singles to recoup value we also haven't had a full collapse of our formats meaning theres reasons to buy newer products
@@Ragnarok540 that was a joke ha ha. Most yugioh folks don't know but this is a copy paste of the stuff wotc has done to the game magic the gathering. So I'm saying they took notes from wotc to get short term profits. Things can't be 'gamepieces' and collectibles at the same time. These companies have to make Lil timmy happy. Look into what commander masters is doing.
Good point. I do not like that they make these whole assed systems like Vaylantz that cannot compete well. But I love the cards and the concept. Why not make a bunch of systems like Nymerlia or others a bit more competitive.
You lost me when you said reprinting cards too much - shifting the problem to the consumer to spend more is what led to this problem? No one wants to spend 100s on game pieces.
honestly the only reason theyre printing at this rate is because its the... 25th anniversary. also local shops here in my city are selling for $100 CAD or $73 USD a box so they're definitely making a profit. The fact these boxes are making a net loss in the states is beyond me.
Canada is a different market, less racing to the bottom, but this is also because wholesale in Canada is higher then the US, 73 USD/box is barely making profit, likely only a few bucks, even when sold in store. Hell 73 USD in the states is barely any profit, something like 12% margin, that doesn't pay for a single utility, let alone rent, labor, etc.
@@Amardarial And your sources are.. what exactly 😅 My local shops in my city are doing quite well actually despite the few dollars profit per box as you suggest. There's also other forms of revenue such as tournament entrance fees, accessories, and other TCG games available that's not just Yugioh. I also make sure to support them every week so they don't go out of business, as collecting trading cards is a very niche hobby so to speak.
@@BjayyCmy grandpa owns a card/hobby shop and he won't touch cards, especially yugioh because everything online is so much cheaper than what he can offer to make a profit.
Similar situation with MTG with the huge volume of product releases. They 'solve' that problem by dumping excess product on Amazon. Though I have to admit this Yugioh schedule looks even more insane!
Because TCG Player/Ebay are doing the dumps@@Ruxin34 Yugioh has been a horrible product for LGS's for over a decade, likely longer. Boxes are expected to be no more then 70-75, when they cost 55-60, and this is for good sets, bad sets are losses 100% of the time, players won't touch them, even at deep discounts. Singles Market for Yugioh is even worse, only single market worse then Yugioh is Pokemon.
This is an issue within Pokemon english as well. It's ridiculous how any LGS and purely online stores can survive with paper thin margins. I once thought of owning my own card shop, but hearing how low the margins are, it made me rethink that entirely.
yup, when a set fails hard it's BRUTAL on the stores. that's why they sell wide varieties and other stuff like board games, dice, accessories, paints, etc. even then margins aren't great and it's a rough business...
Reality is a lot of lgs make more flipping collections than they do with new releases. Big lgs quickly capitalize markets. Even then with worries that tcgs are going to reprint everything to the ground, they are now not accepting bulk.
I think most shops live and die on the snacks they sell, most people aren't buying too much products but they'll buy a drink or a candy bar as they play for hours.
Yep, Pokemon's most recent set is considered alright because it has Charizards (which is a tier 1.5-2 deck), but because it has two Japanese sets and some promos it is smaller than the previous two sets which were meta-defining. There are fewer useful cards for competitive and thus people aren't opening as many. However, Pokemon competitive is doing overall fine since the competitive cards are easily accessible and cheap so anyone from a 5-year-old to an adult can play the game for like $50.
Honestly one set a month should be enough. They should release structure decks in between those periods instead of new sets that nobody wants. Structure decks always give exact value and has good commons, and it's less work for konami to have to make up random cards just to fill packs.
Yeah agree - more structures and less boosters would be massive for the general community who can’t afford spending hundreds to get a good archetype from multiple boosters
I have mix feelings about this because I try to support my local shop but the price of some of their stuff is high when I can go on TCG and pay cheaper but they are releasing a lot of sets back to back and for the average joe it’s hard to keep up
My local shop is selling the 25th anniversary boxes for $100 a pop lol! Even IOC which is $48 on TCGplayer. There is a fine line between a local mom and pop shop struggling and them straight up robbing people 😅
That boils down to the player base demanding dirt cheap singles prices and vendors bending the knee. The EV of a box opening goes in the trash and nobody wants to open sealed anymore so vendors are just dumping sealed inventory on TCGplayer for 💩 margins or even at a loss. No reason a Quarter Century rare should be going for 20-30 bucks under any circumstances. The player base demanded this, they got it, and now they’re sitting there like the surprised pikachu face wondering why the game is failing. Let’s start by holding the line on premium pulls and charging what they’re actually worth. EV goes up, you cant get boxes for dirt cheap on TCGplayer anymore, then it’s not such an awful value proposition to buy sealed product from your local game store. Everyone wins except for the neckbeard at locals who can’t stop repeating that Quarter Century rares are garage sale Starlights
Which means they cancel carrying the game, which more and more LGS are doing. In which case you are forced to either quit as well or buy from Big Box like walmart, which guess what is close to 100$/box buying by the pack.@@AdriNox777
This is hitting my local game store hard. They've also pretty much stopped bringing in Yu-Gi-Oh! product because it's just so expensive. In South Africa, buying a booster box is a 4 figure investment. I was able to pick up a box of Monstrous Revenge for R1,800 which is ridiculous. I hope this issue is addressed else I'm done with the paper game.
As someone who played in my childhood, the 25th anniversary release hit my nostalgia button hard. Spent hundreds on them for my new collection. Now that I've done that I started looking into more modern cards and trying to learn how to play....and it's beyond over bearing. I can't tell what the new release is, what a good buy would be, if cards even stay relevant after a few months or not. And honestly, it has me overwhelmed and stuck in place as a collector of OGs strictly ATM. I didn't realize the amount they were printing and it just makes those OGs worth it even more in my eyes.
It's funny because people who play meta, whether they started recently or have been playing for a while, do not realize that the amount of time and dedication to memorize this stuff is atrocious. It's not much different than how keywords work in MTG, except instead of a million little fiddly keywords It's several sentences of rather exact dialogue that has rules inconsistencies through the ass. "Cannot be targeted", yet it can be removed by "Choose one of your opponents monsters" which, while targeting in all sense of the word, works because it isn't LISTED as targeting in the effect. I play meta, but I entirely understand the plight of the players trying to return for nostalgia sake. I like slow duels, I like fast duels, but not everyone wants to play like me. A game is supposed to be enjoyable, and if it directly pushes part of its original playerbase, who'd been there since the beginning, out of its roster then it's doing it wrong.
This is the same issue that Magic players have been complaining about for a while. Set releases are coming out so often that the hype cycles that used to come every few months when a new set got released is now every few weeks. There are so many sets and products that come out that most players can't keep up with it. But basically everything you've talked about here has been an issue for MTG as well. I think the top end of corporate are seeing numbers go up and are correlating more set releases with more money and this is the result.
To put emphasis on how bad it is with Magic, if we ignore an entire product line (the Secret Lairs) we still have only 2 months this whole year so far without a new product. We barely have time to open packs of one set before spoilers for the next set start.
@@DualSwordBesken yup, previews for a set start right after the release of a set. commander masters released and wilds of eldraine was getting spoilers right after... completely SLAUGHTERED commander masters because the reprint fairytale cards in eldraine are insane ON TOP of having brand new awesome cards and fun revisted themes and archetypes in eldraine... so commander masters precons went from being $100 to $60 in like a week... that's unreal deflation which has happened A LOT in magic in the last 3ish years.
@@WangerZ3291 I remember watching a Pleasant Kenobi video where he basically said MTG was in perpetual hype that we never got the chance to really process anything because we were supposed to be good about the new set over and over again.
In my opinion, Konami should decrease there releasments of new YU-GI-Oh sets to come out of the crisis. If local markets dont buy Konamis' products, they will maybe go bankrupt with YUGIOH.
@@Habeev07 It's a new pack per month average, one core every three, one deck build every three, and one reprint/non-standard every three, plus the annual tin, holiday product, and special product
I think having a lot of 25th anniversary cards in the set, lowers the price of the cards, which is good for players. I think Konami should print chase cards in multiple rarities in general.
They do that in the OCG and surprise surprise, things sell a lot better there and product is viewed better there. It's mind-boggling why the TCG doesn't adopt this since it's just way smarter from a business standpoint.
I think honestly it's because it's their 25th anniversary and they want to go all out. They will either slow down in year 26 or run themselves into the ground.
@@four-en-tee lol I mean... wotc are making insane cash despite everybodys complaints. eldraine will probably sell INSANE amounts of product with how many great things are in the set plus the nutso reprints in the one slot in every booster. I hate what they're doing but they keep making crazy profit so, are they really imploding? maybe long term they'll just kill their game but we've been saying that for years and it hasn't happened yet.
@thatepicwizardguy Bruh. They literally sold MTGO. Forget MTG going under. The entire company is in the part of Monopoly when they're about to lose and selling all their shit.
Yes, I 100% agree with this and it makes me happy I'm not the only one who thinks this. As a small budget collector I really enjoy collecting these sets, but the fatigue from all these new releases has been turning me away for a long time now and that's comming from an average person with an average salary. I used to buy 2 boxes on release, then I started to only buy one and now I'm thinking about just buying the singles straight from the internet, which is exactly what Ruxin said in the video - it's going to hurt my local store I purchase from. Buying just the singles is also not the same as opening booster packs... It feels like a christmas present that you give to yourself. Sure, it's the thing you want, but, you know... You already know exactly what you're getting and it feels different. I gave up on collecting Starlights, Collector Rares, 25th anniv. etc a long time ago, that's just not affordable for someone like me. It's just a hobby and life is obviously the main priority and constantly having to question myself "Should I buy this? Is this even worth it? Can I even afford to buy this? Is there even any point in getting this?" is making me just want to stop collecting all together. That's not great, because it's my hobby, something I love to put my time and money into. I'm not saying they should make the cards less rare, but the amount of them over the past couple of months has been insane. Just please slow down a little, let us mortals have a chance at this, too.
It isn't, and they won't change unless the money stops flowing. I have not spend any cent in yugioh for almost a year and a half, it gets easier the longer you go and helps you realize how stupid you were for following their game. For me Konami can change or die but im not coming back if things keep going this way.
This video is actually super important. If Konami can’t sustain Yu-Gi-Oh!, we will eventually lose the game we love. Hopefully something is done. I’ve always thought that Yu-Gi-Oh! Releasing a new set basically every month, was a losing strategy. Not just from a business standpoint, but the game can’t even keep up with how frequently these sets are coming out.
Yugioh can sink for all I care. The secondary market has completely killed off the approachability of the game unless you've got stupid levels of disposable income
Basically this. The only reason i've enjoyed the rate of product is because the meta we're in sucks balls right now and i'm hoping some new archetype will drop that'll shake things up, even if i'm personally not going to pick that archetype up myself.
@@fencingfireferret1188 This is a problem with the way Konami structures their sets, not the rate of product releases. Even if sets were structured like the OCG and contained lower rarity prints of meta cards along side the collector rarities, we'd still be having this issue probably (although we'd probably be a lot more incentivized to trade cards and therefore spend less money).
@@fencingfireferret1188the game died when pendulums made the scene. I still love yugioh,but I stopped playing since. I still do enjoy time from time collecting 😊
The issue is not that there are to many products, it is that there are to many stores selling online. Everyone quits their job and opens up a stupid store just to go bankrupt after a year and become homeless.
It’s like Syndrome says in The Incredibles, “If everyone is super, then no one is.” I have so many old, worthless holos like Fire Princess that I still treasure because at least holos from the original sets felt special, regardless of whether they were any good or not. Printing a holo in every pack really took away their luster. There was at least some collecting excitement when Starlights were introduced in RIRA. It was basically all we had at the time except OTS ultis, so pulling/owning one felt spectacular. But now there are starlights, 25th anniversary starlights, ghosts, ultis, collector rares. And sometimes dozens per set. It’s too many. The only thing that makes pulling a card feel special these days is if it’s expensive. And it’s only expensive if it’s meta relevant. Wish Konami would do more to try to make collecting about more than just money.
It’s mostly the TCG that has this problem. OCG sets have better rarity spreads and make all decks accessible to all players, so you won’t have to drop $900 on a new deck because 15 of the main cards have all been short printed and set to 2 per case. Konami runs the TCG like a business, not a CG, and thts what’s so frustrating
I really agree with this. I’m mostly a collector now, but it’s so hard to know what cards are coming out, what the prices are, and I’m on a limited budget. I can’t just buy box after box for each set
LGS here, i can confirm that the quoted whole sale price is pretty much spot on, you can pretty much gestimate the wholesale price of any yugioh product by taking konami msrp x 0.55. And we feel like the problem with the low online pricing is that there are somehow an endless horde of stores selling for under wholesale on tcgplayer. We speculate this arise from the fact that all the set came out this year had been very weak when compare with grcr, pote, dabl, and mama. In additon to the greed that people order way too much yugioh. Konami never had an allocation thing, it had always been print to order, if you want 1000 pallets they will send you 1000 pallets
my LCS told me after battles of chaos they're not going to carry it anymore. I think they bought 2 booster boxes to sell packs and that was it. didn't realize the economics of it. thanks for the breakdown Rux
Totally agree that’s there’s been too much product released recently. They’re saturating the market and the average buyer doesn’t have enough money to buy a new set every 2 weeks
Very awesome to see this being discussed in a big three game. The speed of releases ramping up has been something I've noticed all across the TCG industry and gotten tired of when its just new releases every 4-6 weeks as in many Bushiroad and Bandai games. It was going to catch up to these companies eventually, and I hope they'll all take a step back and return to the sweet spot of a 3 month release pace.
I think it might just be better to go full digital. Like, Duel Links has been earning money for Konami for years due to the way it is monetized. A new event every month that encourages players to buy gems has proven to be extremely reliable. The problem with Master Duel is that it was made to get people interested in the paper card game with a pretty generous monetization model and making it really easy to get whatever cards you want. But, that just tends to result in people going "This isn't fun..I guess the paper card game isn't fun," and not buying actual cards.
The real issue with YU GI Oh is the community. Not a single store in my city will host events……between theft, vandalism, drug use, noise complaints, and altercations it just isn’t worth the headache.
Spot on Ruxin, 2 years ago I wanted to find something that me and my son could enjoy together. Yu-Gi-Oh gave me a great sense of nostalgia but as we went to tournaments and got completely wrecked. I had to start a store to try and keep up with the meta. What I missed the most was the nostalgia of opening packs. I remember Having to save up all week just so I could buy that one or two packs at the local hobby shop. Times have changed. The only way you can hope to pull some of the best cards is by buying cases. There is nothing like pulling the card that you wanted to get out of the set. It seems no matter what set we get, the printing is too much. I really hope that they lower the amount of cases print for the rarity collection. It seems to be the only set this year that should be able to profit from buying a case. However, if the market becomes saturated with all these easier pulls than we're at the beginning of the end.
Hey you featured my comment! 🤩. Agree fully with everything you said. Also, as a player, it really isn’t worth opening up boxes anymore. The retail prices on boxes (from local stores) are absurd when you compare them to the price of cards you actually want out of each set. In most cases I can just buy singles of what I want out of the set for a third of the cost it would be to buy a booster box. If the boxes were cheaper I would actually buy but if things stay the way they are the only set I’ll open is the tins. Perhaps they should lower MSRP to a more reasonable pricepoint for stores and player alike. Of course that will cut into their bottom line though
This was an interesting analysis, really showing off the accountant background here. Pokemon sets too also are cheaper in the SV era then they were for S&S and this is after MSRP increased at the start of the new gen so margins are even worse. A lot of places I'm seeing selling booster boxes for what has to be pretty close to cost.
Konami does make quite a bit of cards. But the overall problem isn’t with that. The problem is that it is always cheaper to buy something online rather than in store. Working retail can show you that. I used to work for a phone company and the phone cases we sold customers would buy them online for cheaper and the store would have to either severely discount items or return them.
I knew the recent sets weren't holding any value but didn't realize it was THAT bad, this combined with the already known new-player problem is hurting the game a lot but WOTC and PTCG are having the same issues with product fatigue and disinterest in a lot of stuff. A wider product variety would probably help, more structure decks, maybe even a legitimately playable deck out of the box with a rubber playmat and sleeves and deckbox for like 30$ or something would be a cool product for new players. The tins always do well but man, seeing a new set every 2 weeks to keep up with is definitely not sustainable
The interplay between set content, reprinting, the secondary market and the meta is one of the biggest issues. Some sets like Soulburning Volcano had multiple issues (i) no big chase cards (which going back to Rage of Ra the Ghost Rares in the LDS packs haven't been sought heavily); (ii) a bunch of reprints of archetypes that fairly accessible and not sought heavily (we have a structure deck for Salamangreat already); and (iii) a focus on archetypes that are not competitive in the meta. Chase cards are easy to solve in theory, but then they reprint them to death (Baronne comes to mind as the one that is going to get the treatment this year), taking them from high value cards that are good both for the collection and the meta, thus maintaining levels of demand for the product. If they reprint in a form that is too accessible, the secondary market is flooded with supply and no need for the set. Archetype issues are not as easy to solve in the era of the Ishizu/Tear/Spright/Kashtira/Runick dominance, but people aren't going to get excited for commons of cards that get stomped by other archetypes. Need to make cards that are at least somewhat competitive for people to want them. Straight reprints of old cards aren't going to work, maybe erratas, but the excitement is just not there.
I have a small store as my part time job here in Mexico and this release schedule + quality of the product is killing me. If I weren't a software engineer, I would not be able to keep up with my store, I'm losing money every set thinking I can recover with the next one but it is almost impossible at this point. Let's how the tin goes.
I know people will hate this opinion, but Yugioh would greatly benefit from not only printing less shitty sets, but having different formats like MTG (used to have because they're fucking up by printing too many sets as well).
I don't care much about buying cards anymore. Deck building is just stale in modern Yu-Gi-Oh. I can understand staples like hand traps and board breakers but the fact I have to buy engines from better decks to make my decks even be able to compete,a crutch basically for any non promoted decks, I am at such a disadvantage i shouldn't bother playing outside casuals. Fenrirs and kash package in everything. Runnick in everything. You can't run a fusion/ light or dark deck without branded apparently.therions,etc. Spright in everything. You finish regular combo? Add on this one card starter to make sure you're board isn't being broken, or let your opponent expend every resource they have and then surprise the last card in hand is a spright blue or jet or starter or a Fenrir or a branded fusion. You're playing traptrix but your end board has shangri ira and an ariseheart? Oh cool the illusionist monsters this'll be really interes- branded fusion. Gate guardians? You rock man this is c- oh branded fusion. Wym I'm running dinomorphia wrong by not playing labrynth in it? I'm playing dinos wrong for not having Fenrir? Oh I need to run runnick for it's extra interruption,draw power,free bodies and ability to push through boards/hand traps yeah that's..that's nice ig. But what if, hear me out,I don't want to run runnick in my volcanics or my inzektors or my rescue ace or literally anything
Honestly…a lot of folks may talk shit about master duel but since Konami is making the app into something seriously competitive for players. It’s honestly A LOT! Cheaper. I’d rather grind it out and get all the staple cards I need. Paying 50-100 dollars for a staple card is highway robbery.
The best things stores can do is just band together and order less products, essentially go on some kind of "strike" against Konami. Decreased availability would also mean the cards aren't widely available and potentially make them slightly more profitable in short term. The players would pay the extra cost if less cards are available, but it would be worth it if the store can sustain itself and still keep yugioh on the shelf
Note that I don't mean skip sets. More so order less so that everyone starts feeling the pressure of scarcity. There's just too much on the market right now imo
Won't happen, to many deep discount "stores", they literally could care less if the game died, they just want to move the most product as fast as possible, if that means 1% margins so be it.
Thanks for the math and calcs. It is frustrating too because you have to bank on usually 3-6 months before on orders, so while ocg has some sets in advance, their meta doesn't develop until after the cut off date to pre order. - 4 core sets at 3 months - 3 structures per year at 4 months - Deck build packs (wild survivors, tactical masters) should have a larger influence for the reprint season. While I enjoy these packs a lot, I think if we can increase it with 40 reprints (100 card set) of general cards we can avoid brothers of legends being sadly mid printing a lot of fluff
Great video Ruxin, nice analysis putting the costs into perspective. As a consumer I can’t even keep up with all the new sets, and I’m a pretty serious collector. The average Joe looking to buy a box here or there is surely inundated with all the new releases coming out so quickly. I wish they would only do a new set every month or two
So, I think another piece of this issue for local stores (which I believe you touched on a little), is that a lot of stores stop carrying Yu-Gi-Oh! because no one comes in to buy it. So, besides the speed of product, the market in a lot of places is low. I have been to game stores across my state and surrounding states, and in some of them, they said we don't carry Yu-Gi-Oh! or have a very limited supply of Yu-Gi-Oh! because there is no customers.
Something similar happened back in the late 2000s when children, such as myself back then, were flooding game stores to play Yugioh, while most of the game stores only had Magic: The Gathering or Warhammer. The main difference then was most of those stores either didn't sell much to begin with or never sold Yugioh at all. And all the people who ran these stores didn't want there mediocre and boring games to be surpassed by something truly amazing. Yugioh has managed to maintain it's players through out the years and I still believe they are doing the best especially staying some what up to date on the dumpster fire that is MTG. Where I live and grew up there weren't game stores closer than an hour drive, so for me nothing really changed except I've gotten older.
LGS store owner here! Beckett is correct. Average cost for Legendary Duelist for an LGS was between $42-$45 while main sets are between $55-$60, depending on your order size. Not sustainable is an understatement in 2023. We used to crack a pretty good amount of cases for singles (between 40-70 on release) per set but in the end you have 4-5 bad sets and only 1-2 good sets with the result being you are underwater 60% of the time. We have the math and for an LGS to mass crack any main set for singles and sell on tcgplayer, which cost $55-$60 per booster) they’d have to have a cost between $42-$45 ($10 below actual cost) to just BREAKEVEN. Singles suck and selling sealed also sucks so it’s a pick your poison scenario we have on our hands in 2023.
Yeah I've noticed that Konami has been releasing sets too frequently and figured that would end up being a problem. One thing you probably forgot to mention is that most people won't buy a new release if an upcoming one looks better like the one centurion will be coming out of. I like how they're releasing so many new archetypes and reprints but at the same time it's hurting the game and sales. Another thing is reprinting cards too soon also hurts sales. The price of the card that had been reprinted will drop making purchasing singles more favorable than buying a bunch of boxes for the price of 3 of those cards with a chance of getting 0-2 of the chase cards. So why buy a bunch of boxes trying to get 3 cards that you may not get 3 of when you can just buy the singles for the same price or less. They definitely need to stop printing so many cards although I'm not against them consistently making new support for older archetypes. I think they should just release a new set every 2-3 months with only 1-2 new archetypes instead of 3. The rest of the set can be reprints (especially the ones that haven't EVER had a reprint) and support for other existing archetypes and generic support.
The sad part is that even the DISTRIBUTORS are losing money on yugioh. I'm a seller as well and both of my distributors that i have accounts with currently have almost EVERY recent set on overstock currently (literally every set set since hidden arsenal 1, aside from LOB 25th). Core sets are $60/box and legendary duelists are $56. They're sending out bulk discounts multiple times per week to desperately get people to buy their stock that doesn't profit. And even these bulk discounts are BARELY profit. If even the distributors who are getting product directly from Konami can't profit, how can anybody else? Yugioh selling nowadays is literally just the stock market. You buy a set, hold onto it and hope that it goes up. And if it doesn't.... well, you just keep holding till it does. Sometimes 1 year+ later...
My opinion is that Konami is just disconnected with what collectors want. The new cards look terrible compared to what we got with 5D’s and prior. Not the artwork themselves but layout and look of the new cards is just not the same. I feel like yugioh will need a big reset if it’s to stay relevant in years to come
They have to bring back the anime for one, reduce the MSRP to vendors so they can stay in business, make these collector rares exclusive not common. Lastly get rid of those ugly ultra starlights and go back to the originals 😂
I agree. Battles of Legend, Legendary Duelists, the tins, 2** game changing structure decks (like traptrix, albaz strike), thats 5 releases right there. Then 3 core sets for the competitive "seasons", and 2 collector sets. That's 12 releases, one per month. Also that's not mentioning speed duel and holiday products like Magnificent Mavens, special editions, whatever "gold" comes out that year, Legendary Collection *?*, etc. One thing that's worth mentioning, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE to become a OTS store that can order cases from Konami (months in advance btw). A specific chair/table amount, signage, a building ZONED for retail, and once you get that final stamp of approval you're paying bills for months before your first set of cases come in. Side note, I've noticed pokemon releasing more than usual the past couple years as well.
You know it’s serious when Ruxin has the glasses on 😂 in seriousness, they could have put a good reprint in this set and maybe a ghost rare of Blaster the Dragon Ruler since it would fit well with a fire archetype… idk, but yeah the fire duelist pack kinda sucks and I just wasn’t interested in it, not even the ghost rare.
It doesn't help that as you mentioned, there's no good reprint, or high rarity chase card. Ghost Blaster would go hard. But yea, it also doesn't help that the set is all salad support, battlin boxer support, and volcanic support. Nothing else. Unless you play these decks, this set is a massive waste of your time and money.
The issue with Yugioh is that as it constantly changes how the game is played, it scares off old players as well as becomes far more intimidating for new players. Add in that it's not even much of a card game anymore where "games" tend to not last more than a single turn, and it can quickly cause many players to no longer be interested in it. Pokemon and Magic have a strong playerbase due to how it is a game but also can appeal to a much larger audience while many of their cards don't lose value and relevancy through new sets and rotations.
One thing you didn't talk about is that product is sold within the first week, and is often sold at a higher value. The problem you are talking about are for stores that over-order and cant move all their product in that week. I do agree with less booster product releases, but would like more accessories releases. Think the yugioh accessories market could be improved to be a win for the local stores.
We got the same issue in France : Local shops and retail store doesn't sell Yu-Gi-Oh products anymore. The reason behind that ? if your a professional you're paying about 65€ for a Soulburning Volcano Set, after taxes you're barely making 5€ per Set but, in the meantime, online resellers are selling the same set for 45€ (that's the price you get your set from a professional retailer before taxes). Online shops are just killing local business, 10 years ago we got like 10 shops selling Yu-Gi-Oh products in our city, Nowadays we got only one left..
As someone who is just returning to the game after 20 years of not collecting, i agree that there seems to be too many products. I'm still trying to enjoy Deulist Nexus! The set is really cool IMO and there are still a handfull of cards I'm trying to find. Meanwhile, the new Legendary Duelists set doesn't really do anything for me.
Honestly, a lot of my buddies that played even just 2 years ago competitively almost all just stopped. The cards coming out just aren’t good enough so you either pull the banger yourself or cough up a stupid amount for a set. It’s just getting to a point where to pursue a competitive deck is costly, there’s too much fluff, and local shops are cutting back on tournaments.
Couldn’t agree more. I have been a single box collector for each set that releases for the last 3 years and this is the first year I’m struggling to keep up with releases based on finances due to too many boxes dropping so fast. I understand it’s the 25th anniversary but maybe a month or two in between to let everyone catch up.
This is a great video. Honestly, I never minded Konami printing so many sets, I actually love seeing it. But if they're gonna print so many sets they gotta bring down the cost per set. They seriously need to cut the distribution price in half. I've seen so much less Yugioh in card game shops and big box stores for years at this point. I can only assume they're losing market share and if they're not distributing at a rate their sellers can make money off of then they just aren't doing a sustainable business model. Would love to see them cut distribution sales price in half to create a guaranteed margin even for their sets that sell like shit. Set a recommended market price that's basically what all the box sets start at these days, maybe even cut it a bit to try to get more people interested in card games to consider Yugioh as a more affordable option than it currently is, but keep it up enough that even if the market price drops by 1/3 the stores will still be able to make a profit. Konami should be able to do that pretty easily. I'm sure they're enjoying their current margins, but that will not last if no stores are willing to carry their products. Konami really needs a good slap in the face to see what they're doing to destroy this brand and get their business plan on a sustainable track. Could be fairly easily doable and have every set released this year be profitable for the stores that sell them. This is an active choice by them to do this
Yeah I just started collecting again after a 20 year hiatus and I completely agree with you. Its just overwhelming the amount of sets and they churn out in the space of 3 months. Honestly its becoming a downer trying to collect them all. Its the same in the pokemon tcg space as soon as one set releases another is announced for the following month.
As someone who plays comp yugioh, just dont try to collect everything. Ive seen so many people jump in with the same plan and quit after 3 months. The game is not made for that
Pokemon in the west releases new sets every three months on average. Between the core (non-reprint) sets of Silver Tempest and Scarlet Violet Base set this year, there was a gap of almost 5 months.
Months ago I finally found a local card shop, went in ready to buy some packs, but they only had Magic and Pokemon. I didn’t have the heart to ask why they didn’t sell Yugioh.
Kinda crazy that both ygo and mtg are having product fatigue at the same time. Really makes you wonder wtf the big wigs are thinking in these companies..
Just feels like a 'grab as much money from this IP as we can' and then just let it burn to the ground. Somehow like both companies are 'bored' with the whole thing and wouldn't care if it crashed and burned tomorrow.
We can confirm that distributor prices are indeed much higher than people think. As an example, on average, core sets go for about $48-$61 per box (depends on set & distributor). TCGPlayer charges, on average, 10% on total cost (so if you charge for shipping they, collect a percentage of that). After that, shipping is usually around $7-$15 for the shipping label, $1 for the box and, depending on who's packing it, about $2-$3 of employee or owner time to pack and ship it. Total cost to sell is usually around 30%. Therefore, if we look at that $48-$61 cost figure, and then the average sale price on TCGPlayer (which is about $55-$89 for core sets and $25-$45 for side sets) the amount of money made is around $38.50-$62.30. Then, we have other costs involved - storage costs, employee pay, any interest on any loans/credit cards/MCAs that may or may not have been taken out to buy said product, rent, payroll taxes, income taxes, internet/phone bills, etc. I hope this helps bring more clarity as to what we as vendors have to deal with regarding this issue.
It's less of an issue of too much product, and more of a problem with literally every set being incredibly short printed or rarity upshifted for what's essentially the same effect. Buying packs and or boxes is a horrible decision right now. It's not worth it for the players and it's not worth it for the hobby stores. We're getting fisted too hard by konami. The reprint tins bring hope, but idk man. I'm losing faith.
Heck, even as a content creator trying to keep up with the sets is hard because we have to buy singles and cases for videos is hard. I honestly have gotten to the ponit it's really hard to keep up and I just do what I can. Konami needs to slow down and quit making crappy sets like soulburning volcano that has absolutely NO value to resell or open. This is a serious problem and I'm glad you made a video about it.
A case from the distributor is about $700 for 12 Boxes. So about $58 per box at cost. This is for Core sets. Side sets is about about the same. Legendary Sets is about $550 per case. That's about $45 a box. The OTS stuff is free from Konami to support Local Tournaments. But those are supposed to cost $5 (Entry price of locals).
I miss the old days of only main sets being the only product that releases every 3 months with a side set or starter/structure once in a blue moon. Now every card game essentially always has side sets releasing right after main sets, it's annoying.
I have become a bit of a larger collector recently (I guess only compared to the average person - 1 box per new set) and it has been a bit rough to keep up with all these new releases. It is nice to have more cards to open so frequently, and thankfully I can afford to keep getting the boxes I want, but I can definitely see how too much of a good thing can be a bad thing here even just for the players, before even considering the more concrete financial impact on stores. I still like the game and opening packs and collecting cards, but it would be nice if this was something they looked into and addressed. Even if they just spread out the existing releases over the course of a year without changing their overall product line, it would probably make a difference and give people some time to enjoy each one as they see fit instead of eternally being in the waiting room for the one they care about most
My locals was essentially threatened to be cut off completely if they didn't order at least a few cases of every set, even if they knew the sets would underperform for them.
Ruxin I think it’s great that you’re looking into this. The crazy thing is that stores are actually losing more than this. On eBay those fee percentages are taken from the amount the buyer pays (which includes tax). So the 13.25% is taken from an even larger sum (unless you accounted for this and I missed it!). Only a couple states don’t have sales tax so the majority of sealed product ordered will have that additional hit to profits
His math was a bit off, as someone with a LGS that sells on ebay and has maxed out discounts on ebay fees, at wholesale on good sets, profit is like 2-4$/box, most sets it's ~10$/box loss. This is after fees//shipping.
The crazy thing about Konami releasing so much product right now is that it is the dead period after worlds and kashtira is still the best deck in the TCG gate keeping the majority of other decks like volcanics that have gotten a new wave of support and need the grave to function properly. They frustrate stores and their player base by being incompetent and lackadaisical when it comes to bringing out ban lists after major tournaments to help engage the community.
I went to a local shop that stopped selling cards and stopped hosting yugioh games, I asked why and the answer shocked me. He told me that the yugioh players that would go there were toxic. They'd trade kids but do unfair trades, be loud and disrespectful. This may have just been local issue but has anyone else heard of this kind of thing happening in your area?
I completely agree with this analysis. I love this game and I have invested a lot of time and money into it over the past couple of years and as a player it's starting to dawn on me that maybe it's time to slow down a bit. Recently I lost a lot of money with a large investment I did in finishing a full Branded Deck, only for the contents of the new tins to be leaked and all my $50+ cards going down by a large portion of their price (like Cartesia and Bystial Lubellion). I really hope Konami can start realizing their mistake and hopefully start improving, even if just a little bit.
But the cards shouldn't be $50, let them be in a price range of $5-15, outside of chase variants in SL/QCSR/UTR, reprints like the tins *are not the issue*
I’ve thought this since I came back to YGO in early 2021. Like every month there’s 2 releases weather it be sets, starter decks, ots, etc. it’s impossible to keep up with collecting modern & vintage
Yeaaaah... we can just sweep this video under the rug, too, right? Every year since 2015 there are videos like this and absolutely nothing has changed. You don't need to see the numbers to know this, you just gotta use your eyes
not really an issue considering the power creep the game went through from the beginning. best to end the game while we're ahead and never circulate better cards that we would have to waste resources acquiring. i remember the days when effect monsters and beatsticks were rare enough that the game was mostly balanced and the game didnt have gimmicks like pendulum or xyz.
Tons of good points in this video! One other thing that didn't come up is how people have changed how they buy TCG products. Everything in this video was priced in Boxes or Cases. Both of those, up until relatively recently, were considered wholesale quantity to most players. For most of the game's history, players were buying packs not boxes or cases. When a store breaks down a box and sells it at $4-5 a pack, the profit margins are entirely different. But as players have gotten older and more experienced, they have more disposable income and want to take advantage of the same bulk discounts retailers were getting historically. Just one other dimension to this conversation to consider.
Very well said. Definitely agree with several of the other comments that these release schedules are a little too tough to keep up with for most major current TCG, CCG, etc. Not sure what other viewers might think but I'd find it interesting to hear a complementary video about the state of the game as a whole. I feel like there is a stronger correlation between playability and collectability of a card or set in Yu-Gi-Oh compared to other games. I don't seem to hear. Value seems to be from it being either a meta staple, high rarity(which is being diluted), or a nostalgic card.
yeah from the perspective of a new player who got back into after years, i would never buy product from a local store when online prices on TCG are 30% cheaper. Surprised physical stores are even selling ygo product
I've noticed that the Booster Box Sets that Konami has been releasing lately were beyond terrible... I've bought multiple entire Booster Box sets and never ever getting the cards I've wanted. If I'm lucky, just one copy... I've stopped buying Booster Box sets and started to only buy the Deck Box sets and Structure Decks now. It just ain't worth it anymore. Especially in a recession. Less Booster Box sets. More Deck Box sets and Structure Decks. Edited: 9:30 - You're spot on man. I've noticed that Konami was dishing out these Booster Box sets like crazy. I just can't keep up. Part of the reason why I'm just gonna buy the Deck Box sets and the Structure Decks now.
It’s really strange how things work? Here in Japan, some core sets sell out at local stores in a matter of days and order quantity for preorders is limited depending on projected popularity of the set. Core sets are 30 packs, 5 cards per pack, and cost is roughly 176 yen per pack ($1.20). Side sets are 15 packs (deck builders/ legendary duelist, etc…). Structure decks and usually 1 holiday set in December and lately 1 rarity Collection in February. There are basically the reprint sets. Konami in the US does put out too many sets, but also too much in volume for a higher price. OCG core sets are only 80 cards/ 125 cards for a master set. Side sets are 45 cards with a few rarity bumps on certain cards. The OCG has its share of bad sets, but quantities released to toy stores is limited compared to local OTS stores. Wish I had all the shipping and store costs for you. Yugioh is by fare the cheapest card game in the OCG even with the price bump on rarity collection and holiday box sets. They produce lots of sets but in lower volume and for a lower price. Even though I can get a good deal through Tier Zero, OCG is more affordable for me in the long run and my TCG is moving more towards buying singles. Not to mention stores like Walmart, Target and other local stores that have other sources of sales that allow them to sell TCG products at a loss that really doesn’t help local stores that depend on cards and related product sales as the main source of revenue. Sorry to see Yugioh go like that. It will be found online for inflated prices, especially on streaming platforms. Good luck!
TCG distro price is chasing whales, and the set design of includes, reprints, and rarities reflects this since they only print the most meta stuff from the OCG sets as high rarity and leave the rest as set filler. There's a further issue of drafting not being possible because of the format and set design including fragments of support for lots of different archetypes, which means that people buying the cards are only in it for a few specific cards rather than a wider selection of the cards in the set, further making it less likely for people to buy packs unless they have money to burn. Rarity collection will be where we can tell how much they are thinking about the long-term health of card prices.
Pretty sure the goal for these companies would be to go completely online/digital. They probably wont care too much if the physical cards quit selling in locals.
25th Anniversary boosters here in NZ are $120 USD. Not a fan of the meta and recently back into collecting, the rate of new cards and products is overwhelming. Not sure how they keep it up. Maybe it is just nostalgia but the 2002-4 era seemed to have more breathing room for strategies and products...which is why something like IOC is so well known
It's not the amount of sets printed, it's the quality and price point. Consumers don't want the product because the product is terrible. Why should someone play $60+ for 2 random secret rares or 3 ultra rares? People aren't stupid and there's so much quality competition on the market right now. Konami needs to change their structure if they want to maintain sales and growth. OCG boxes are around 30-40 and have no secret rare locked cards. It's why the OCG is so much cheaper and more successful.
I worked for an LGS and handled all the ordering, the yugioh problem has been a huge issue mostly due to distributors locking you to what you ordered for the previous set. On top of that you get no guarantee when a set is an absolute banger and they have to allocate you down even if you went ham on a bad set to "guarantee" a larger amount of the next good set. Distributors even go so far as to lock OTHER TCG product to you ordering bad yugioh product. When they rolled out having excess of some of the original Modern Masters sets for MTG they forced us into cases of the infamous yugioh advent calendar. Great video and info!
What ruined the game for me was that they kept changing the rules and making things too difficult. In the old days, you just had to sacrifice some lesser monsters to summon stronger ones and fuse monsters with one magic card, but now, there are all these stupid conditions to summon and fuse. The game was just fine as it was and very easy to learn, but now it has SOOOOOO many rules that learning to play is even worse than learning math in school. Nothing will ever make me stop loving the series, but they need to reign themselves in
It's not the too many prints killing it, it's the secondary market full of people buying tens of cases ripping them open for their highest rarity cards and re selling them at ridiculous prices. If konami kept printing at the same rate as years before, all the sets would be gone in a day or 2 because scalpers, collectors and "content creators" would have had already bought 99% of it preorder, not to mention the ones that abuse nepotism and get sets Pre-release just because they know or are friends with a store owner. Secondary Market killed the "trading" aspect of the game.
I get that sets are too expensive and I agree this is a problem. However these prices just seem super off, if a store is buying cases at these prices and not marking it up enough when selling the box as a whole that’s their problem. These boxes are often sold as individual packs that make way more money that way, it just feels like all these prices are super under cutting what stores are actually charging (UK POV)
I hate how fast yugioh releases products. I say, for the year, there should be 4 core sets, 2 structure decks, and the tins if they still want to do that.
These things happen when people allow scalpers to actually succeed by buying their products. I owned a store in 2010, i got my products for $30 selling at $40-$50, but because people started to buy from scalpers i stead of actual retail price, the money hungry companies said ok lets raise the price because there are low IQ people out there that will pay anything for cardboard. This problem will only be fixed when people stop buying from scalpers, let the sit on their overpriced merchandise and wait until they have to put their prices down to retail or below. If you buy above retail, you are part of the problem.
It won’t be great for Konami’s bottom line, but limiting releases to a certain level would probably help. I think we can all agree that Battles of Legend Armageddon was one of the best modern sets of all time, and it’s price surged because it was a limited run. Scarcity sells, and it makes the chase card values explode. Less is more sometimes
Some other problems from a player's point of view : 1)Even in locals people won't know or understand the opponents deck with all these cards and will usually get bored to read the wall of text. So only one at a time will understand what is happening, while attempting to pull his combo. 2)The 'good' decks are extremely expensive for something you will probably play 4 times /month (casual player following the meta). So you buy the good deck and boom after two months you have nothing. On the other hand you play a tier 2/3/4/5/6 deck and lose a loooottt. Then you get disappointed for wasting time and probably not having fun. 3)There is almost no reason for someone new to start the game. Only nostalgia brings back some people, who after a while see that the game is not even close to what it was. (Throwback) Sincerely there was a time when the most broken card, which was playable in almost all decks could be purchased at maximum rarity for 15-20 euros (ghost stardust for example) or low rarity for 1 euro. 4)There is no variety in meta top decks. Today they only make a super broken deck (tearlaments for example, with spright and flo following) and then they put it down in two months. So you either lose to that and get disappointed because you do not even have a turn to play, or you buy it (pay an extreme amount of money for the support package - people paid ~200 euros for the isizu cards) and you cannot play it after two months because it gets banned. How many times can someone lose to the tier 0 or buy the tier 0 ? (Throwback) Back in the days you would pay an absurd amount of money (for example lightsworn deck - a.k.a the old tearlaments) in order to have everything in super high rarity (ghost - secret - ultimate, all in one set all in one deck!) and you could play the deck for at least one year. Meanwhile that did not mean it was tier 0. It could be defeated by almost anything (macro monarchs, zombies you name it). 5)In the past the game pace was just right. You could follow your opponents moves, you had a lot of time to pull the trigger on the choke points and think about both players moves and what was happening. 6)Anyone could win - even kids with three structures (for example machina mayhem) could win. The cards had simply texts which were understandable by everyone. Usually only boss monsters (for example colossal fighter - less than a euro card) had a lot of text but as everyone played them everyone knew what they did. 7)The backrow was valued as much as monsters and you would think before you commited. Decks would consist most of the times of the same amount of orange cards and purple+green cards. The handtraps now are only a bad way to slow the pace. 8) The game was starting to lose its appeal around the time XYZs came out (samurais and infernity were the first to only be played for 6 months). The cards begun to become absurd (for example the solemn judgement for infernity or the giant rat for x-sabers)in terms of price/time played and effects. 9) The community is not friendly. No one will sit and help you understand as themselves cannot understand. 10) The number of participation in tournaments have dropped astonishingly. To not be tricked the time of the tournament is roughly the same as each player will go for a 20 minute turn to establish a board only to follow a forfeit or a bitter loss in one turn. 11) The shop owners are making everything they can to survive that means less prizes and an absurd amount of tournaments in one week. 12) Although different players tend to like different rare cards for the collection, almost every single rare card has an insane prize. You cannot be satisfied even from a collector point of view. 13) This cow is milked of its blood. The original creator - Takahashi - died in the sea and most likely the game, we once enjoyed, died with him. To conclude the game is extremely expensive, not fun and not challenging. Moreover it is boring and exhausting with all these new cards, the short banlists, the imbalanced meta and the constant imbalanced changes. As a result the player base is becoming smaller and smaller with fresh people dropping it . I am not saying that it was perfect back in the days but it could give you some casual fun for a long period without draining your wallet / pocket money. If you read that wall of text thank you but I really do hope that you did not !
Agree with this, got back into TCGs around 2020 like a lot of people, but the pace of releases has pushed me away again. From a casual fan standpoint its just way too much, too expensive to grab a handful of packs. Also, do other locals actually drop prices for bad sets or is that eShops only? Everyone by me still sells like legends mako for $75ish/box in store and I always chuckle when I see it.
Another point regarding distribution/allocation: the average person might not realize that shops have to place their orders for a given set SEVERAL MONTHS in advance and speculate as to whether or not a set will produce strong sales/profits.
Shops hedge their risk by purchasing greater quantities of "good" sets and lesser quantities of "bad" sets.
But as Ruxin pointed out, distributors can cut your allocation if you don't consistently order or order ENOUGH, creating fomo for the shop owners.
That aside, it seems that the 'Big 3' are all suffering from similar issues at the moment. Time will tell if they adjust, or continue overprinting into oblivion.
Great video!
Good point. They have to put in their orders relatively blind, and hope Konami produces a great product!
3-6mo pre-order time, by time we know if a set is good or not, it's WAY to late.@@Ruxin34 Pretty sure I already have numbers down for the next 4-5 sets.
Pokemon is doing just fine
This isn’t happening with Pokemon
@@level3xfactoryeah, the printers are just stealing all the hits from the sets, so no collector can actually pull anything good right?
Honestly as a TCG collector as a whole; it’s crazy to see Konami, WotC and Pokemon international all pretty much struggling with the same issue as a whole and not understanding their market that much. Absolutely enjoyed the video Ruxin!
Pokemon is doing fine. You can't compare them to Yugioh
I think Pokemon has a problem that no one is playing their card game as much
yes many people collect pokemon cards but not that many play the card game in comparisoin
@@Lucario1121
@@hieinh no no they're really not.
I go to multiple LGS' and only one sells Pokémon product that's the newest releases and hosts a locals there.
Which is bad for a card game
@@hieinhPokemon isnt doing fine ,no not really.
Alot of my friends that own groups or just hardcore collectors are all either quitting or taking a big break currently. Appart from the 151 pack wjth mew on it , all ladt packs has been complete garbage from what they told me. I myself openned some of those new ones and it did seem like crap.
As someone who works at a locals, its hard to watch the product sit on the shelf, only for it to be buried under the next set only a few weeks later. This is a very insightful video and very well done Ruxin!
Y'all sell the packs for 5 when Walmart does them cheaper maybe price match lol
Yeah most of my locals don’t even carry Yugioh anymore. I’ve got 2 stores I can go too, and 1 barely carries.
@@DaddyKranemy locals suck but even their packs are cheaper than retail stores. But I don’t trust single packs from my locals, I’ve never made back my money on a a pack. When I buy singles from target they always hit.
@@DaddyKrane my local target doesnt have any because its a regular isle and not an up front/behind the counter isle, and they are regularly raided and often theres evidence by blatant criminals, including a pile of open wrappers one time.... also i live in a top ten big US city. I also seen a guy in dollar tree weighing yugioh packs on a scale in the corner, while multiple employees watched.
@@tehpurplepills mine don't either and it's because they buy them all but Walmart has a shit ton that I get from and they're better prices then card shops
Yeah my local store completely stopped dealing with Yu-Gi-Oh, all from selling, buying it or doing any tournaments. Calling it (no longer user-friendly) for introducing new players with it's over the top mechanics. It's sad to see it like this, when it used to be mostly about attack, defense, & flip effects with some rituals and fusions only.
Konami needed to set a special summon cap per turn like 10 years ago the game is just too damn fast, complicated, unforgiving and expensive for new players to get into so there's been a steady bleed off of players for years.
Sets should come out every 2 months, and should include new artworks for existing cards to make it more collectible, having 20 prints of the same card doesn't do no good
Komani should change! Same art , only different is code, that not good enough for collectors.
No that's metazoos problem and it's impossible to collect anything in full
ONE SET every 3/4 months. 4 sets a year and a couple bonus/premium things. TOO MUCH PRODUCT!!!
Every 2 months? Lmao no way. Should be 2-3 sets AT MOST
I'd probably say 1 - 2 sets a year, let them make their appearance for people to at least remember them. It's super overwhelming seeing all these different cards and as Ruxin said; It's impossible to keep up, even for a long-term Yu-Gi-Oh lover.
Bring out multiple sets a year will render the previous sets worthless if they keep this up.
The fact that hobby stores also increase the price of the boxes over a short period of time because of the cards in the packs also blows my mind. It’s all just a huge rip
To be fair, they do that because otherwise why not just open the boxes and sell the cards online? Yugioh boxes work off 5-8 cards having value and everything else being worthless.
@@markjacobs3232 but also because of that. thats why most people just go to tcg or amazon lol. or in my case I rather just get singles or some people get structure decks lol
Pokemon is literally having this issue as well. Too many sets, too quickly.
Too many bad sets*
Best solution up the max rarity like quarter century starlights Colette’s rare and ghost per a case more people will be inclined to buy boxes who cares that the card value for max rarity will drop but the other card rarity will go up in price as a result because less bulk will be available from hunting the max rarity will be easier to collect
Agreed Pokemon is doing this too but yugioh has way more sets releasing and way less collectible/playable ones
Pokemon's issue is increased MSRP without increasing the value of the set contents. I think TPC thought the illustration rares and higher EX pull rates would be a good enough value add to justify the increased distributor costs but its paradoxically dropped the value due to chases being overprinted without coming anywhere close to box prices.
Pokemon doesn't have a problem. Maybe LGS prices but retail stores sell out
Man when Ruxin says that YGO has a problem, then we have a problem
eeh not quite the singles market in yugioh is still intact meaning in theory stores can sell singles to recoup value we also haven't had a full collapse of our formats meaning theres reasons to buy newer products
konami take notes
They already did from wizards of the coast
@@neb542they a pretty much flooding the market, so it doesn't look like they are learning.
@@Ragnarok540 that was a joke ha ha. Most yugioh folks don't know but this is a copy paste of the stuff wotc has done to the game magic the gathering. So I'm saying they took notes from wotc to get short term profits. Things can't be 'gamepieces' and collectibles at the same time. These companies have to make Lil timmy happy. Look into what commander masters is doing.
They make way too much money on Master Duel to care lol
They won’t
It’s funny they print so much but it’s all fluff and they never reprint the stuff that players actually want. A very interesting discussion for sure.
Good point. I do not like that they make these whole assed systems like Vaylantz that cannot compete well. But I love the cards and the concept. Why not make a bunch of systems like Nymerlia or others a bit more competitive.
ONE SET every 3/4 months. TOO MUCH PRODUCT!!!
I’m think the November set may fix that. That mini set is mostly staples.
Wrong wrong wrong magnificent maven reprints completely destroyed collectors dreams 100 $ cards now 5$$$$$
@@Habeev07not that either too much of that product.. They need it limited to sell out! Then not reprint!
You lost me when you said reprinting cards too much - shifting the problem to the consumer to spend more is what led to this problem? No one wants to spend 100s on game pieces.
honestly the only reason theyre printing at this rate is because its the... 25th anniversary. also local shops here in my city are selling for $100 CAD or $73 USD a box so they're definitely making a profit. The fact these boxes are making a net loss in the states is beyond me.
Probably that shop doesn't get enough customers for Yugioh
Canada is a different market, less racing to the bottom, but this is also because wholesale in Canada is higher then the US, 73 USD/box is barely making profit, likely only a few bucks, even when sold in store. Hell 73 USD in the states is barely any profit, something like 12% margin, that doesn't pay for a single utility, let alone rent, labor, etc.
@@Amardarial
And your sources are.. what exactly 😅
My local shops in my city are doing quite well actually despite the few dollars profit per box as you suggest. There's also other forms of revenue such as tournament entrance fees, accessories, and other TCG games available that's not just Yugioh. I also make sure to support them every week so they don't go out of business, as collecting trading cards is a very niche hobby so to speak.
@@Amardarial Canada definitely has way few competitors. Most are just located in the gta and kind of control the market there
@@BjayyCmy grandpa owns a card/hobby shop and he won't touch cards, especially yugioh because everything online is so much cheaper than what he can offer to make a profit.
Similar situation with MTG with the huge volume of product releases. They 'solve' that problem by dumping excess product on Amazon. Though I have to admit this Yugioh schedule looks even more insane!
Thankfully we haven’t had to deal with Amazon dumps😅
Because TCG Player/Ebay are doing the dumps@@Ruxin34 Yugioh has been a horrible product for LGS's for over a decade, likely longer. Boxes are expected to be no more then 70-75, when they cost 55-60, and this is for good sets, bad sets are losses 100% of the time, players won't touch them, even at deep discounts. Singles Market for Yugioh is even worse, only single market worse then Yugioh is Pokemon.
ONE SET every 3/4 months. TOO MUCH PRODUCT!!!
@@Ruxin34they did however screw the pooch on Mtg's 30 anniversary HARD
@@Ruxin34 we also had a near total collapse of our singles market thou rc25th might be our commander masters
This is an issue within Pokemon english as well. It's ridiculous how any LGS and purely online stores can survive with paper thin margins. I once thought of owning my own card shop, but hearing how low the margins are, it made me rethink that entirely.
yup, when a set fails hard it's BRUTAL on the stores. that's why they sell wide varieties and other stuff like board games, dice, accessories, paints, etc. even then margins aren't great and it's a rough business...
They don't survive, stores that close just get replaced so fast no one notices the stores as they close.
Reality is a lot of lgs make more flipping collections than they do with new releases. Big lgs quickly capitalize markets. Even then with worries that tcgs are going to reprint everything to the ground, they are now not accepting bulk.
I think most shops live and die on the snacks they sell, most people aren't buying too much products but they'll buy a drink or a candy bar as they play for hours.
Yep, Pokemon's most recent set is considered alright because it has Charizards (which is a tier 1.5-2 deck), but because it has two Japanese sets and some promos it is smaller than the previous two sets which were meta-defining. There are fewer useful cards for competitive and thus people aren't opening as many. However, Pokemon competitive is doing overall fine since the competitive cards are easily accessible and cheap so anyone from a 5-year-old to an adult can play the game for like $50.
Honestly one set a month should be enough. They should release structure decks in between those periods instead of new sets that nobody wants. Structure decks always give exact value and has good commons, and it's less work for konami to have to make up random cards just to fill packs.
also it gives the players all sets of possible staples and reprints they need without making a huge risk market move
Yeah agree - more structures and less boosters would be massive for the general community who can’t afford spending hundreds to get a good archetype from multiple boosters
It's such a stark contrast to magic. We get 2 or so structurtes a year while they get like 4 commander precons every set release
One set a month is already a lot.
Too much. 1 set every 2 months
It feels like a new set comes out every month. It's hard to keep up
I have mix feelings about this because I try to support my local shop but the price of some of their stuff is high when I can go on TCG and pay cheaper but they are releasing a lot of sets back to back and for the average joe it’s hard to keep up
My local shop is selling the 25th anniversary boxes for $100 a pop lol! Even IOC which is $48 on TCGplayer. There is a fine line between a local mom and pop shop struggling and them straight up robbing people 😅
That boils down to the player base demanding dirt cheap singles prices and vendors bending the knee. The EV of a box opening goes in the trash and nobody wants to open sealed anymore so vendors are just dumping sealed inventory on TCGplayer for 💩 margins or even at a loss. No reason a Quarter Century rare should be going for 20-30 bucks under any circumstances. The player base demanded this, they got it, and now they’re sitting there like the surprised pikachu face wondering why the game is failing. Let’s start by holding the line on premium pulls and charging what they’re actually worth. EV goes up, you cant get boxes for dirt cheap on TCGplayer anymore, then it’s not such an awful value proposition to buy sealed product from your local game store. Everyone wins except for the neckbeard at locals who can’t stop repeating that Quarter Century rares are garage sale Starlights
Huge agree with this. I know they're trying to stay afloat, but they will not move product at $100 a booster.
They ain't robbing people because they won't sell product below their cost. Even 100$/box is only 5$ over MSRP@@thezarn2058
Which means they cancel carrying the game, which more and more LGS are doing. In which case you are forced to either quit as well or buy from Big Box like walmart, which guess what is close to 100$/box buying by the pack.@@AdriNox777
This is hitting my local game store hard. They've also pretty much stopped bringing in Yu-Gi-Oh! product because it's just so expensive. In South Africa, buying a booster box is a 4 figure investment. I was able to pick up a box of Monstrous Revenge for R1,800 which is ridiculous. I hope this issue is addressed else I'm done with the paper game.
As someone who played in my childhood, the 25th anniversary release hit my nostalgia button hard. Spent hundreds on them for my new collection. Now that I've done that I started looking into more modern cards and trying to learn how to play....and it's beyond over bearing. I can't tell what the new release is, what a good buy would be, if cards even stay relevant after a few months or not. And honestly, it has me overwhelmed and stuck in place as a collector of OGs strictly ATM. I didn't realize the amount they were printing and it just makes those OGs worth it even more in my eyes.
Also hoping for another giveaway soon! Have a new collection I need to add to 😂
It's funny because people who play meta, whether they started recently or have been playing for a while, do not realize that the amount of time and dedication to memorize this stuff is atrocious. It's not much different than how keywords work in MTG, except instead of a million little fiddly keywords It's several sentences of rather exact dialogue that has rules inconsistencies through the ass. "Cannot be targeted", yet it can be removed by "Choose one of your opponents monsters" which, while targeting in all sense of the word, works because it isn't LISTED as targeting in the effect.
I play meta, but I entirely understand the plight of the players trying to return for nostalgia sake. I like slow duels, I like fast duels, but not everyone wants to play like me. A game is supposed to be enjoyable, and if it directly pushes part of its original playerbase, who'd been there since the beginning, out of its roster then it's doing it wrong.
This is the same issue that Magic players have been complaining about for a while. Set releases are coming out so often that the hype cycles that used to come every few months when a new set got released is now every few weeks. There are so many sets and products that come out that most players can't keep up with it. But basically everything you've talked about here has been an issue for MTG as well. I think the top end of corporate are seeing numbers go up and are correlating more set releases with more money and this is the result.
I was looking for this comment. WotC has pushed so many products I became desensitized
To put emphasis on how bad it is with Magic, if we ignore an entire product line (the Secret Lairs) we still have only 2 months this whole year so far without a new product. We barely have time to open packs of one set before spoilers for the next set start.
imo all tcgs just go whale fishing and thats it-
@@DualSwordBesken yup, previews for a set start right after the release of a set. commander masters released and wilds of eldraine was getting spoilers right after... completely SLAUGHTERED commander masters because the reprint fairytale cards in eldraine are insane ON TOP of having brand new awesome cards and fun revisted themes and archetypes in eldraine... so commander masters precons went from being $100 to $60 in like a week... that's unreal deflation which has happened A LOT in magic in the last 3ish years.
@@WangerZ3291 I remember watching a Pleasant Kenobi video where he basically said MTG was in perpetual hype that we never got the chance to really process anything because we were supposed to be good about the new set over and over again.
In my opinion, Konami should decrease there releasments of new YU-GI-Oh sets to come out of the crisis. If local markets dont buy Konamis' products, they will maybe go bankrupt with YUGIOH.
ONE SET every 3/4 months. TOO MUCH PRODUCT!!!
@@Habeev07 It's a new pack per month average, one core every three, one deck build every three, and one reprint/non-standard every three, plus the annual tin, holiday product, and special product
I think having a lot of 25th anniversary cards in the set, lowers the price of the cards, which is good for players. I think Konami should print chase cards in multiple rarities in general.
They do that in the OCG and surprise surprise, things sell a lot better there and product is viewed better there. It's mind-boggling why the TCG doesn't adopt this since it's just way smarter from a business standpoint.
I think honestly it's because it's their 25th anniversary and they want to go all out. They will either slow down in year 26 or run themselves into the ground.
Yeah, they want to outdo Wizards's implosion
@@four-en-tee lol I mean... wotc are making insane cash despite everybodys complaints. eldraine will probably sell INSANE amounts of product with how many great things are in the set plus the nutso reprints in the one slot in every booster. I hate what they're doing but they keep making crazy profit so, are they really imploding? maybe long term they'll just kill their game but we've been saying that for years and it hasn't happened yet.
@thatepicwizardguy Bruh. They literally sold MTGO. Forget MTG going under. The entire company is in the part of Monopoly when they're about to lose and selling all their shit.
Yes, I 100% agree with this and it makes me happy I'm not the only one who thinks this. As a small budget collector I really enjoy collecting these sets, but the fatigue from all these new releases has been turning me away for a long time now and that's comming from an average person with an average salary. I used to buy 2 boxes on release, then I started to only buy one and now I'm thinking about just buying the singles straight from the internet, which is exactly what Ruxin said in the video - it's going to hurt my local store I purchase from. Buying just the singles is also not the same as opening booster packs... It feels like a christmas present that you give to yourself. Sure, it's the thing you want, but, you know... You already know exactly what you're getting and it feels different.
I gave up on collecting Starlights, Collector Rares, 25th anniv. etc a long time ago, that's just not affordable for someone like me. It's just a hobby and life is obviously the main priority and constantly having to question myself "Should I buy this? Is this even worth it? Can I even afford to buy this? Is there even any point in getting this?" is making me just want to stop collecting all together. That's not great, because it's my hobby, something I love to put my time and money into. I'm not saying they should make the cards less rare, but the amount of them over the past couple of months has been insane. Just please slow down a little, let us mortals have a chance at this, too.
It isn't, and they won't change unless the money stops flowing. I have not spend any cent in yugioh for almost a year and a half, it gets easier the longer you go and helps you realize how stupid you were for following their game. For me Konami can change or die but im not coming back if things keep going this way.
This video is actually super important. If Konami can’t sustain Yu-Gi-Oh!, we will eventually lose the game we love. Hopefully something is done. I’ve always thought that Yu-Gi-Oh! Releasing a new set basically every month, was a losing strategy. Not just from a business standpoint, but the game can’t even keep up with how frequently these sets are coming out.
Yugioh can sink for all I care. The secondary market has completely killed off the approachability of the game unless you've got stupid levels of disposable income
It all about Digital Yugioh now
Basically this. The only reason i've enjoyed the rate of product is because the meta we're in sucks balls right now and i'm hoping some new archetype will drop that'll shake things up, even if i'm personally not going to pick that archetype up myself.
@@fencingfireferret1188 This is a problem with the way Konami structures their sets, not the rate of product releases.
Even if sets were structured like the OCG and contained lower rarity prints of meta cards along side the collector rarities, we'd still be having this issue probably (although we'd probably be a lot more incentivized to trade cards and therefore spend less money).
@@fencingfireferret1188the game died when pendulums made the scene. I still love yugioh,but I stopped playing since. I still do enjoy time from time collecting 😊
The issue is not that there are to many products, it is that there are to many stores selling online. Everyone quits their job and opens up a stupid store just to go bankrupt after a year and become homeless.
It’s like Syndrome says in The Incredibles, “If everyone is super, then no one is.”
I have so many old, worthless holos like Fire Princess that I still treasure because at least holos from the original sets felt special, regardless of whether they were any good or not. Printing a holo in every pack really took away their luster.
There was at least some collecting excitement when Starlights were introduced in RIRA. It was basically all we had at the time except OTS ultis, so pulling/owning one felt spectacular. But now there are starlights, 25th anniversary starlights, ghosts, ultis, collector rares. And sometimes dozens per set. It’s too many.
The only thing that makes pulling a card feel special these days is if it’s expensive. And it’s only expensive if it’s meta relevant. Wish Konami would do more to try to make collecting about more than just money.
Fire princess had a gimmick in life point gain decks.
It’s mostly the TCG that has this problem. OCG sets have better rarity spreads and make all decks accessible to all players, so you won’t have to drop $900 on a new deck because 15 of the main cards have all been short printed and set to 2 per case.
Konami runs the TCG like a business, not a CG, and thts what’s so frustrating
I really agree with this. I’m mostly a collector now, but it’s so hard to know what cards are coming out, what the prices are, and I’m on a limited budget. I can’t just buy box after box for each set
LGS here, i can confirm that the quoted whole sale price is pretty much spot on, you can pretty much gestimate the wholesale price of any yugioh product by taking konami msrp x 0.55. And we feel like the problem with the low online pricing is that there are somehow an endless horde of stores selling for under wholesale on tcgplayer. We speculate this arise from the fact that all the set came out this year had been very weak when compare with grcr, pote, dabl, and mama. In additon to the greed that people order way too much yugioh. Konami never had an allocation thing, it had always been print to order, if you want 1000 pallets they will send you 1000 pallets
my LCS told me after battles of chaos they're not going to carry it anymore. I think they bought 2 booster boxes to sell packs and that was it. didn't realize the economics of it. thanks for the breakdown Rux
Totally agree that’s there’s been too much product released recently. They’re saturating the market and the average buyer doesn’t have enough money to buy a new set every 2 weeks
Very awesome to see this being discussed in a big three game. The speed of releases ramping up has been something I've noticed all across the TCG industry and gotten tired of when its just new releases every 4-6 weeks as in many Bushiroad and Bandai games. It was going to catch up to these companies eventually, and I hope they'll all take a step back and return to the sweet spot of a 3 month release pace.
I think it might just be better to go full digital.
Like, Duel Links has been earning money for Konami for years due to the way it is monetized. A new event every month that encourages players to buy gems has proven to be extremely reliable.
The problem with Master Duel is that it was made to get people interested in the paper card game with a pretty generous monetization model and making it really easy to get whatever cards you want. But, that just tends to result in people going "This isn't fun..I guess the paper card game isn't fun," and not buying actual cards.
The real issue with YU GI Oh is the community. Not a single store in my city will host events……between theft, vandalism, drug use, noise complaints, and altercations it just isn’t worth the headache.
Spot on Ruxin, 2 years ago I wanted to find something that me and my son could enjoy together. Yu-Gi-Oh gave me a great sense of nostalgia but as we went to tournaments and got completely wrecked. I had to start a store to try and keep up with the meta. What I missed the most was the nostalgia of opening packs. I remember Having to save up all week just so I could buy that one or two packs at the local hobby shop. Times have changed. The only way you can hope to pull some of the best cards is by buying cases. There is nothing like pulling the card that you wanted to get out of the set. It seems no matter what set we get, the printing is too much. I really hope that they lower the amount of cases print for the rarity collection. It seems to be the only set this year that should be able to profit from buying a case. However, if the market becomes saturated with all these easier pulls than we're at the beginning of the end.
Hey you featured my comment! 🤩. Agree fully with everything you said. Also, as a player, it really isn’t worth opening up boxes anymore. The retail prices on boxes (from local stores) are absurd when you compare them to the price of cards you actually want out of each set. In most cases I can just buy singles of what I want out of the set for a third of the cost it would be to buy a booster box. If the boxes were cheaper I would actually buy but if things stay the way they are the only set I’ll open is the tins. Perhaps they should lower MSRP to a more reasonable pricepoint for stores and player alike. Of course that will cut into their bottom line though
This was an interesting analysis, really showing off the accountant background here. Pokemon sets too also are cheaper in the SV era then they were for S&S and this is after MSRP increased at the start of the new gen so margins are even worse. A lot of places I'm seeing selling booster boxes for what has to be pretty close to cost.
from 5 percent to 2 lol
Pokemon right now is at cost or barely above for good sets like Flames.
@@Amardarial yep every lgs are running clearances on pokemon. absolutely losing money for stores
Yea, 1st two sets of new block were poor sellers combined with the fall of prices since 2020 boom, has left Pokemon weak atm. @@clarksmith8830
Konami does make quite a bit of cards. But the overall problem isn’t with that. The problem is that it is always cheaper to buy something online rather than in store. Working retail can show you that. I used to work for a phone company and the phone cases we sold customers would buy them online for cheaper and the store would have to either severely discount items or return them.
I knew the recent sets weren't holding any value but didn't realize it was THAT bad, this combined with the already known new-player problem is hurting the game a lot but WOTC and PTCG are having the same issues with product fatigue and disinterest in a lot of stuff. A wider product variety would probably help, more structure decks, maybe even a legitimately playable deck out of the box with a rubber playmat and sleeves and deckbox for like 30$ or something would be a cool product for new players. The tins always do well but man, seeing a new set every 2 weeks to keep up with is definitely not sustainable
The interplay between set content, reprinting, the secondary market and the meta is one of the biggest issues. Some sets like Soulburning Volcano had multiple issues (i) no big chase cards (which going back to Rage of Ra the Ghost Rares in the LDS packs haven't been sought heavily); (ii) a bunch of reprints of archetypes that fairly accessible and not sought heavily (we have a structure deck for Salamangreat already); and (iii) a focus on archetypes that are not competitive in the meta.
Chase cards are easy to solve in theory, but then they reprint them to death (Baronne comes to mind as the one that is going to get the treatment this year), taking them from high value cards that are good both for the collection and the meta, thus maintaining levels of demand for the product. If they reprint in a form that is too accessible, the secondary market is flooded with supply and no need for the set. Archetype issues are not as easy to solve in the era of the Ishizu/Tear/Spright/Kashtira/Runick dominance, but people aren't going to get excited for commons of cards that get stomped by other archetypes. Need to make cards that are at least somewhat competitive for people to want them. Straight reprints of old cards aren't going to work, maybe erratas, but the excitement is just not there.
I have a small store as my part time job here in Mexico and this release schedule + quality of the product is killing me.
If I weren't a software engineer, I would not be able to keep up with my store, I'm losing money every set thinking I can recover with the next one but it is almost impossible at this point. Let's how the tin goes.
I know people will hate this opinion, but Yugioh would greatly benefit from not only printing less shitty sets, but having different formats like MTG (used to have because they're fucking up by printing too many sets as well).
I don't care much about buying cards anymore. Deck building is just stale in modern Yu-Gi-Oh. I can understand staples like hand traps and board breakers but the fact I have to buy engines from better decks to make my decks even be able to compete,a crutch basically for any non promoted decks, I am at such a disadvantage i shouldn't bother playing outside casuals. Fenrirs and kash package in everything. Runnick in everything. You can't run a fusion/ light or dark deck without branded apparently.therions,etc. Spright in everything. You finish regular combo? Add on this one card starter to make sure you're board isn't being broken, or let your opponent expend every resource they have and then surprise the last card in hand is a spright blue or jet or starter or a Fenrir or a branded fusion. You're playing traptrix but your end board has shangri ira and an ariseheart? Oh cool the illusionist monsters this'll be really interes- branded fusion. Gate guardians? You rock man this is c- oh branded fusion. Wym I'm running dinomorphia wrong by not playing labrynth in it? I'm playing dinos wrong for not having Fenrir? Oh I need to run runnick for it's extra interruption,draw power,free bodies and ability to push through boards/hand traps yeah that's..that's nice ig. But what if, hear me out,I don't want to run runnick in my volcanics or my inzektors or my rescue ace or literally anything
Honestly…a lot of folks may talk shit about master duel but since Konami is making the app into something seriously competitive for players. It’s honestly A LOT! Cheaper. I’d rather grind it out and get all the staple cards I need. Paying 50-100 dollars for a staple card is highway robbery.
The best things stores can do is just band together and order less products, essentially go on some kind of "strike" against Konami. Decreased availability would also mean the cards aren't widely available and potentially make them slightly more profitable in short term. The players would pay the extra cost if less cards are available, but it would be worth it if the store can sustain itself and still keep yugioh on the shelf
Note that I don't mean skip sets. More so order less so that everyone starts feeling the pressure of scarcity. There's just too much on the market right now imo
Won't happen, to many deep discount "stores", they literally could care less if the game died, they just want to move the most product as fast as possible, if that means 1% margins so be it.
Thanks for the math and calcs. It is frustrating too because you have to bank on usually 3-6 months before on orders, so while ocg has some sets in advance, their meta doesn't develop until after the cut off date to pre order.
- 4 core sets at 3 months
- 3 structures per year at 4 months
- Deck build packs (wild survivors, tactical masters) should have a larger influence for the reprint season. While I enjoy these packs a lot, I think if we can increase it with 40 reprints (100 card set) of general cards we can avoid brothers of legends being sadly mid printing a lot of fluff
Great video Ruxin, nice analysis putting the costs into perspective. As a consumer I can’t even keep up with all the new sets, and I’m a pretty serious collector. The average Joe looking to buy a box here or there is surely inundated with all the new releases coming out so quickly. I wish they would only do a new set every month or two
So, I think another piece of this issue for local stores (which I believe you touched on a little), is that a lot of stores stop carrying Yu-Gi-Oh! because no one comes in to buy it. So, besides the speed of product, the market in a lot of places is low. I have been to game stores across my state and surrounding states, and in some of them, they said we don't carry Yu-Gi-Oh! or have a very limited supply of Yu-Gi-Oh! because there is no customers.
Something similar happened back in the late 2000s when children, such as myself back then, were flooding game stores to play Yugioh, while most of the game stores only had Magic: The Gathering or Warhammer. The main difference then was most of those stores either didn't sell much to begin with or never sold Yugioh at all. And all the people who ran these stores didn't want there mediocre and boring games to be surpassed by something truly amazing. Yugioh has managed to maintain it's players through out the years and I still believe they are doing the best especially staying some what up to date on the dumpster fire that is MTG. Where I live and grew up there weren't game stores closer than an hour drive, so for me nothing really changed except I've gotten older.
LGS store owner here! Beckett is correct. Average cost for Legendary Duelist for an LGS was between $42-$45 while main sets are between $55-$60, depending on your order size. Not sustainable is an understatement in 2023. We used to crack a pretty good amount of cases for singles (between 40-70 on release) per set but in the end you have 4-5 bad sets and only 1-2 good sets with the result being you are underwater 60% of the time. We have the math and for an LGS to mass crack any main set for singles and sell on tcgplayer, which cost $55-$60 per booster) they’d have to have a cost between $42-$45 ($10 below actual cost) to just BREAKEVEN. Singles suck and selling sealed also sucks so it’s a pick your poison scenario we have on our hands in 2023.
Yeah I've noticed that Konami has been releasing sets too frequently and figured that would end up being a problem. One thing you probably forgot to mention is that most people won't buy a new release if an upcoming one looks better like the one centurion will be coming out of. I like how they're releasing so many new archetypes and reprints but at the same time it's hurting the game and sales. Another thing is reprinting cards too soon also hurts sales. The price of the card that had been reprinted will drop making purchasing singles more favorable than buying a bunch of boxes for the price of 3 of those cards with a chance of getting 0-2 of the chase cards. So why buy a bunch of boxes trying to get 3 cards that you may not get 3 of when you can just buy the singles for the same price or less. They definitely need to stop printing so many cards although I'm not against them consistently making new support for older archetypes. I think they should just release a new set every 2-3 months with only 1-2 new archetypes instead of 3. The rest of the set can be reprints (especially the ones that haven't EVER had a reprint) and support for other existing archetypes and generic support.
The sad part is that even the DISTRIBUTORS are losing money on yugioh. I'm a seller as well and both of my distributors that i have accounts with currently have almost EVERY recent set on overstock currently (literally every set set since hidden arsenal 1, aside from LOB 25th). Core sets are $60/box and legendary duelists are $56. They're sending out bulk discounts multiple times per week to desperately get people to buy their stock that doesn't profit. And even these bulk discounts are BARELY profit.
If even the distributors who are getting product directly from Konami can't profit, how can anybody else? Yugioh selling nowadays is literally just the stock market. You buy a set, hold onto it and hope that it goes up. And if it doesn't.... well, you just keep holding till it does. Sometimes 1 year+ later...
My opinion is that Konami is just disconnected with what collectors want. The new cards look terrible compared to what we got with 5D’s and prior. Not the artwork themselves but layout and look of the new cards is just not the same.
I feel like yugioh will need a big reset if it’s to stay relevant in years to come
They have to bring back the anime for one, reduce the MSRP to vendors so they can stay in business, make these collector rares exclusive not common. Lastly get rid of those ugly ultra starlights and go back to the originals 😂
I agree. Battles of Legend, Legendary Duelists, the tins, 2** game changing structure decks (like traptrix, albaz strike), thats 5 releases right there. Then 3 core sets for the competitive "seasons", and 2 collector sets. That's 12 releases, one per month. Also that's not mentioning speed duel and holiday products like Magnificent Mavens, special editions, whatever "gold" comes out that year, Legendary Collection *?*, etc. One thing that's worth mentioning, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE to become a OTS store that can order cases from Konami (months in advance btw). A specific chair/table amount, signage, a building ZONED for retail, and once you get that final stamp of approval you're paying bills for months before your first set of cases come in. Side note, I've noticed pokemon releasing more than usual the past couple years as well.
You know it’s serious when Ruxin has the glasses on 😂 in seriousness, they could have put a good reprint in this set and maybe a ghost rare of Blaster the Dragon Ruler since it would fit well with a fire archetype… idk, but yeah the fire duelist pack kinda sucks and I just wasn’t interested in it, not even the ghost rare.
facts
It doesn't help that as you mentioned, there's no good reprint, or high rarity chase card. Ghost Blaster would go hard. But yea, it also doesn't help that the set is all salad support, battlin boxer support, and volcanic support. Nothing else. Unless you play these decks, this set is a massive waste of your time and money.
The issue with Yugioh is that as it constantly changes how the game is played, it scares off old players as well as becomes far more intimidating for new players. Add in that it's not even much of a card game anymore where "games" tend to not last more than a single turn, and it can quickly cause many players to no longer be interested in it. Pokemon and Magic have a strong playerbase due to how it is a game but also can appeal to a much larger audience while many of their cards don't lose value and relevancy through new sets and rotations.
One thing you didn't talk about is that product is sold within the first week, and is often sold at a higher value. The problem you are talking about are for stores that over-order and cant move all their product in that week. I do agree with less booster product releases, but would like more accessories releases. Think the yugioh accessories market could be improved to be a win for the local stores.
We got the same issue in France : Local shops and retail store doesn't sell Yu-Gi-Oh products anymore. The reason behind that ? if your a professional you're paying about 65€ for a Soulburning Volcano Set, after taxes you're barely making 5€ per Set but, in the meantime, online resellers are selling the same set for 45€ (that's the price you get your set from a professional retailer before taxes).
Online shops are just killing local business, 10 years ago we got like 10 shops selling Yu-Gi-Oh products in our city, Nowadays we got only one left..
As someone who is just returning to the game after 20 years of not collecting, i agree that there seems to be too many products.
I'm still trying to enjoy Deulist Nexus! The set is really cool IMO and there are still a handfull of cards I'm trying to find. Meanwhile, the new Legendary Duelists set doesn't really do anything for me.
Honestly, a lot of my buddies that played even just 2 years ago competitively almost all just stopped. The cards coming out just aren’t good enough so you either pull the banger yourself or cough up a stupid amount for a set. It’s just getting to a point where to pursue a competitive deck is costly, there’s too much fluff, and local shops are cutting back on tournaments.
Couldn’t agree more. I have been a single box collector for each set that releases for the last 3 years and this is the first year I’m struggling to keep up with releases based on finances due to too many boxes dropping so fast. I understand it’s the 25th anniversary but maybe a month or two in between to let everyone catch up.
Exactly
This is a great video. Honestly, I never minded Konami printing so many sets, I actually love seeing it. But if they're gonna print so many sets they gotta bring down the cost per set. They seriously need to cut the distribution price in half. I've seen so much less Yugioh in card game shops and big box stores for years at this point. I can only assume they're losing market share and if they're not distributing at a rate their sellers can make money off of then they just aren't doing a sustainable business model. Would love to see them cut distribution sales price in half to create a guaranteed margin even for their sets that sell like shit. Set a recommended market price that's basically what all the box sets start at these days, maybe even cut it a bit to try to get more people interested in card games to consider Yugioh as a more affordable option than it currently is, but keep it up enough that even if the market price drops by 1/3 the stores will still be able to make a profit. Konami should be able to do that pretty easily. I'm sure they're enjoying their current margins, but that will not last if no stores are willing to carry their products. Konami really needs a good slap in the face to see what they're doing to destroy this brand and get their business plan on a sustainable track. Could be fairly easily doable and have every set released this year be profitable for the stores that sell them. This is an active choice by them to do this
Yeah I just started collecting again after a 20 year hiatus and I completely agree with you. Its just overwhelming the amount of sets and they churn out in the space of 3 months. Honestly its becoming a downer trying to collect them all. Its the same in the pokemon tcg space as soon as one set releases another is announced for the following month.
As someone who plays comp yugioh, just dont try to collect everything. Ive seen so many people jump in with the same plan and quit after 3 months. The game is not made for that
Pokemon in the west releases new sets every three months on average. Between the core (non-reprint) sets of Silver Tempest and Scarlet Violet Base set this year, there was a gap of almost 5 months.
@@harleystachel7225 I think the issue is that OP IS a collector. They want to get the cards, not just be a competitive player.
@@KreuzDrache fair enough. Then maybe yugioh as a whole isnt the right choice
Months ago I finally found a local card shop, went in ready to buy some packs, but they only had Magic and Pokemon. I didn’t have the heart to ask why they didn’t sell Yugioh.
Kinda crazy that both ygo and mtg are having product fatigue at the same time. Really makes you wonder wtf the big wigs are thinking in these companies..
Just feels like a 'grab as much money from this IP as we can' and then just let it burn to the ground. Somehow like both companies are 'bored' with the whole thing and wouldn't care if it crashed and burned tomorrow.
@@TaskMaster5 I think it's more of a "this product is keeping the company afloat so PRINT MORE" situation.
We can confirm that distributor prices are indeed much higher than people think. As an example, on average, core sets go for about $48-$61 per box (depends on set & distributor). TCGPlayer charges, on average, 10% on total cost (so if you charge for shipping they, collect a percentage of that). After that, shipping is usually around $7-$15 for the shipping label, $1 for the box and, depending on who's packing it, about $2-$3 of employee or owner time to pack and ship it. Total cost to sell is usually around 30%.
Therefore, if we look at that $48-$61 cost figure, and then the average sale price on TCGPlayer (which is about $55-$89 for core sets and $25-$45 for side sets) the amount of money made is around $38.50-$62.30. Then, we have other costs involved - storage costs, employee pay, any interest on any loans/credit cards/MCAs that may or may not have been taken out to buy said product, rent, payroll taxes, income taxes, internet/phone bills, etc.
I hope this helps bring more clarity as to what we as vendors have to deal with regarding this issue.
It's less of an issue of too much product, and more of a problem with literally every set being incredibly short printed or rarity upshifted for what's essentially the same effect. Buying packs and or boxes is a horrible decision right now. It's not worth it for the players and it's not worth it for the hobby stores. We're getting fisted too hard by konami. The reprint tins bring hope, but idk man. I'm losing faith.
Heck, even as a content creator trying to keep up with the sets is hard because we have to buy singles and cases for videos is hard. I honestly have gotten to the ponit it's really hard to keep up and I just do what I can. Konami needs to slow down and quit making crappy sets like soulburning volcano that has absolutely NO value to resell or open. This is a serious problem and I'm glad you made a video about it.
A case from the distributor is about $700 for 12 Boxes. So about $58 per box at cost. This is for Core sets. Side sets is about about the same. Legendary Sets is about $550 per case. That's about $45 a box. The OTS stuff is free from Konami to support Local Tournaments. But those are supposed to cost $5 (Entry price of locals).
I miss the old days of only main sets being the only product that releases every 3 months with a side set or starter/structure once in a blue moon. Now every card game essentially always has side sets releasing right after main sets, it's annoying.
I have become a bit of a larger collector recently (I guess only compared to the average person - 1 box per new set) and it has been a bit rough to keep up with all these new releases. It is nice to have more cards to open so frequently, and thankfully I can afford to keep getting the boxes I want, but I can definitely see how too much of a good thing can be a bad thing here even just for the players, before even considering the more concrete financial impact on stores. I still like the game and opening packs and collecting cards, but it would be nice if this was something they looked into and addressed. Even if they just spread out the existing releases over the course of a year without changing their overall product line, it would probably make a difference and give people some time to enjoy each one as they see fit instead of eternally being in the waiting room for the one they care about most
My locals was essentially threatened to be cut off completely if they didn't order at least a few cases of every set, even if they knew the sets would underperform for them.
I think they should do more 25th anniversary but with the first 5 packs from gx, 5ds and so on so there could be more sealed play not only for dm
Ruxin I think it’s great that you’re looking into this. The crazy thing is that stores are actually losing more than this. On eBay those fee percentages are taken from the amount the buyer pays (which includes tax). So the 13.25% is taken from an even larger sum (unless you accounted for this and I missed it!). Only a couple states don’t have sales tax so the majority of sealed product ordered will have that additional hit to profits
His math was a bit off, as someone with a LGS that sells on ebay and has maxed out discounts on ebay fees, at wholesale on good sets, profit is like 2-4$/box, most sets it's ~10$/box loss. This is after fees//shipping.
The crazy thing about Konami releasing so much product right now is that it is the dead period after worlds and kashtira is still the best deck in the TCG gate keeping the majority of other decks like volcanics that have gotten a new wave of support and need the grave to function properly. They frustrate stores and their player base by being incompetent and lackadaisical when it comes to bringing out ban lists after major tournaments to help engage the community.
I went to a local shop that stopped selling cards and stopped hosting yugioh games, I asked why and the answer shocked me. He told me that the yugioh players that would go there were toxic. They'd trade kids but do unfair trades, be loud and disrespectful. This may have just been local issue but has anyone else heard of this kind of thing happening in your area?
I completely agree with this analysis. I love this game and I have invested a lot of time and money into it over the past couple of years and as a player it's starting to dawn on me that maybe it's time to slow down a bit. Recently I lost a lot of money with a large investment I did in finishing a full Branded Deck, only for the contents of the new tins to be leaked and all my $50+ cards going down by a large portion of their price (like Cartesia and Bystial Lubellion). I really hope Konami can start realizing their mistake and hopefully start improving, even if just a little bit.
But the cards shouldn't be $50, let them be in a price range of $5-15, outside of chase variants in SL/QCSR/UTR, reprints like the tins *are not the issue*
I’ve thought this since I came back to YGO in early 2021. Like every month there’s 2 releases weather it be sets, starter decks, ots, etc. it’s impossible to keep up with collecting modern & vintage
Yeaaaah... we can just sweep this video under the rug, too, right?
Every year since 2015 there are videos like this and absolutely nothing has changed.
You don't need to see the numbers to know this, you just gotta use your eyes
not really an issue considering the power creep the game went through from the beginning. best to end the game while we're ahead and never circulate better cards that we would have to waste resources acquiring. i remember the days when effect monsters and beatsticks were rare enough that the game was mostly balanced and the game didnt have gimmicks like pendulum or xyz.
Gonna make a video on this myself. You illustrated it perfectly.
Tons of good points in this video! One other thing that didn't come up is how people have changed how they buy TCG products.
Everything in this video was priced in Boxes or Cases.
Both of those, up until relatively recently, were considered wholesale quantity to most players. For most of the game's history, players were buying packs not boxes or cases.
When a store breaks down a box and sells it at $4-5 a pack, the profit margins are entirely different. But as players have gotten older and more experienced, they have more disposable income and want to take advantage of the same bulk discounts retailers were getting historically.
Just one other dimension to this conversation to consider.
Pull rates have always sucked so I mainly buy boxes when they're heavily discounted or stick to structure decks and singles.
Very well said. Definitely agree with several of the other comments that these release schedules are a little too tough to keep up with for most major current TCG, CCG, etc. Not sure what other viewers might think but I'd find it interesting to hear a complementary video about the state of the game as a whole. I feel like there is a stronger correlation between playability and collectability of a card or set in Yu-Gi-Oh compared to other games. I don't seem to hear. Value seems to be from it being either a meta staple, high rarity(which is being diluted), or a nostalgic card.
yeah from the perspective of a new player who got back into after years, i would never buy product from a local store when online prices on TCG are 30% cheaper. Surprised physical stores are even selling ygo product
I've noticed that the Booster Box Sets that Konami has been releasing lately were beyond terrible... I've bought multiple entire Booster Box sets and never ever getting the cards I've wanted. If I'm lucky, just one copy... I've stopped buying Booster Box sets and started to only buy the Deck Box sets and Structure Decks now. It just ain't worth it anymore. Especially in a recession.
Less Booster Box sets. More Deck Box sets and Structure Decks.
Edited: 9:30 - You're spot on man. I've noticed that Konami was dishing out these Booster Box sets like crazy. I just can't keep up. Part of the reason why I'm just gonna buy the Deck Box sets and the Structure Decks now.
It’s really strange how things work? Here in Japan, some core sets sell out at local stores in a matter of days and order quantity for preorders is limited depending on projected popularity of the set. Core sets are 30 packs, 5 cards per pack, and cost is roughly 176 yen per pack ($1.20). Side sets are 15 packs (deck builders/ legendary duelist, etc…). Structure decks and usually 1 holiday set in December and lately 1 rarity Collection in February. There are basically the reprint sets. Konami in the US does put out too many sets, but also too much in volume for a higher price. OCG core sets are only 80 cards/ 125 cards for a master set. Side sets are 45 cards with a few rarity bumps on certain cards. The OCG has its share of bad sets, but quantities released to toy stores is limited compared to local OTS stores. Wish I had all the shipping and store costs for you. Yugioh is by fare the cheapest card game in the OCG even with the price bump on rarity collection and holiday box sets. They produce lots of sets but in lower volume and for a lower price. Even though I can get a good deal through Tier Zero, OCG is more affordable for me in the long run and my TCG is moving more towards buying singles. Not to mention stores like Walmart, Target and other local stores that have other sources of sales that allow them to sell TCG products at a loss that really doesn’t help local stores that depend on cards and related product sales as the main source of revenue. Sorry to see Yugioh go like that. It will be found online for inflated prices, especially on streaming platforms. Good luck!
TCG distro price is chasing whales, and the set design of includes, reprints, and rarities reflects this since they only print the most meta stuff from the OCG sets as high rarity and leave the rest as set filler. There's a further issue of drafting not being possible because of the format and set design including fragments of support for lots of different archetypes, which means that people buying the cards are only in it for a few specific cards rather than a wider selection of the cards in the set, further making it less likely for people to buy packs unless they have money to burn.
Rarity collection will be where we can tell how much they are thinking about the long-term health of card prices.
Pretty sure the goal for these companies would be to go completely online/digital. They probably wont care too much if the physical cards quit selling in locals.
25th Anniversary boosters here in NZ are $120 USD.
Not a fan of the meta and recently back into collecting, the rate of new cards and products is overwhelming. Not sure how they keep it up. Maybe it is just nostalgia but the 2002-4 era seemed to have more breathing room for strategies and products...which is why something like IOC is so well known
It's not the amount of sets printed, it's the quality and price point. Consumers don't want the product because the product is terrible. Why should someone play $60+ for 2 random secret rares or 3 ultra rares? People aren't stupid and there's so much quality competition on the market right now.
Konami needs to change their structure if they want to maintain sales and growth. OCG boxes are around 30-40 and have no secret rare locked cards. It's why the OCG is so much cheaper and more successful.
I worked for an LGS and handled all the ordering, the yugioh problem has been a huge issue mostly due to distributors locking you to what you ordered for the previous set. On top of that you get no guarantee when a set is an absolute banger and they have to allocate you down even if you went ham on a bad set to "guarantee" a larger amount of the next good set. Distributors even go so far as to lock OTHER TCG product to you ordering bad yugioh product. When they rolled out having excess of some of the original Modern Masters sets for MTG they forced us into cases of the infamous yugioh advent calendar.
Great video and info!
Yeah if all the cards were revealed before the orders were put in nobody would buy them
What ruined the game for me was that they kept changing the rules and making things too difficult. In the old days, you just had to sacrifice some lesser monsters to summon stronger ones and fuse monsters with one magic card, but now, there are all these stupid conditions to summon and fuse. The game was just fine as it was and very easy to learn, but now it has SOOOOOO many rules that learning to play is even worse than learning math in school. Nothing will ever make me stop loving the series, but they need to reign themselves in
It's not the too many prints killing it, it's the secondary market full of people buying tens of cases ripping them open for their highest rarity cards and re selling them at ridiculous prices. If konami kept printing at the same rate as years before, all the sets would be gone in a day or 2 because scalpers, collectors and "content creators" would have had already bought 99% of it preorder, not to mention the ones that abuse nepotism and get sets Pre-release just because they know or are friends with a store owner. Secondary Market killed the "trading" aspect of the game.
I get that sets are too expensive and I agree this is a problem. However these prices just seem super off, if a store is buying cases at these prices and not marking it up enough when selling the box as a whole that’s their problem. These boxes are often sold as individual packs that make way more money that way, it just feels like all these prices are super under cutting what stores are actually charging (UK POV)
I baffles me that Konami failed to take lessons from Bushiroad having to reboot a cardgame TWICE because of this reason
I hate how fast yugioh releases products. I say, for the year, there should be 4 core sets, 2 structure decks, and the tins if they still want to do that.
These things happen when people allow scalpers to actually succeed by buying their products. I owned a store in 2010, i got my products for $30 selling at $40-$50, but because people started to buy from scalpers i stead of actual retail price, the money hungry companies said ok lets raise the price because there are low IQ people out there that will pay anything for cardboard.
This problem will only be fixed when people stop buying from scalpers, let the sit on their overpriced merchandise and wait until they have to put their prices down to retail or below. If you buy above retail, you are part of the problem.
It won’t be great for Konami’s bottom line, but limiting releases to a certain level would probably help. I think we can all agree that Battles of Legend Armageddon was one of the best modern sets of all time, and it’s price surged because it was a limited run. Scarcity sells, and it makes the chase card values explode. Less is more sometimes
Some other problems from a player's point of view :
1)Even in locals people won't know or understand the opponents deck with all these cards and will usually get bored to read the wall of text. So only one at a time will understand what is happening, while attempting to pull his combo.
2)The 'good' decks are extremely expensive for something you will probably play 4 times /month (casual player following the meta). So you buy the good deck and boom after two months you have nothing. On the other hand you play a tier 2/3/4/5/6 deck and lose a loooottt. Then you get disappointed for wasting time and probably not having fun.
3)There is almost no reason for someone new to start the game. Only nostalgia brings back some people, who after a while see that the game is not even close to what it was. (Throwback) Sincerely there was a time when the most broken card, which was playable in almost all decks could be purchased at maximum rarity for 15-20 euros (ghost stardust for example) or low rarity for 1 euro.
4)There is no variety in meta top decks. Today they only make a super broken deck (tearlaments for example, with spright and flo following) and then they put it down in two months. So you either lose to that and get disappointed because you do not even have a turn to play, or you buy it (pay an extreme amount of money for the support package - people paid ~200 euros for the isizu cards) and you cannot play it after two months because it gets banned. How many times can someone lose to the tier 0 or buy the tier 0 ?
(Throwback) Back in the days you would pay an absurd amount of money (for example lightsworn deck - a.k.a the old tearlaments) in order to have everything in super high rarity (ghost - secret - ultimate, all in one set all in one deck!) and you could play the deck for at least one year. Meanwhile that did not mean it was tier 0. It could be defeated by almost anything (macro monarchs, zombies you name it).
5)In the past the game pace was just right. You could follow your opponents moves, you had a lot of time to pull the trigger on the choke points and think about both players moves and what was happening.
6)Anyone could win - even kids with three structures (for example machina mayhem) could win. The cards had simply texts which were understandable by everyone. Usually only boss monsters (for example colossal fighter - less than a euro card) had a lot of text but as everyone played them everyone knew what they did.
7)The backrow was valued as much as monsters and you would think before you commited. Decks would consist most of the times of the same amount of orange cards and purple+green cards. The handtraps now are only a bad way to slow the pace.
8) The game was starting to lose its appeal around the time XYZs came out (samurais and infernity were the first to only be played for 6 months). The cards begun to become absurd (for example the solemn judgement for infernity or the giant rat for x-sabers)in terms of price/time played and effects.
9) The community is not friendly. No one will sit and help you understand as themselves cannot understand.
10) The number of participation in tournaments have dropped astonishingly. To not be tricked the time of the tournament is roughly the same as each player will go for a 20 minute turn to establish a board only to follow a forfeit or a bitter loss in one turn.
11) The shop owners are making everything they can to survive that means less prizes and an absurd amount of tournaments in one week.
12) Although different players tend to like different rare cards for the collection, almost every single rare card has an insane prize. You cannot be satisfied even from a collector point of view.
13) This cow is milked of its blood. The original creator - Takahashi - died in the sea and most likely the game, we once enjoyed, died with him.
To conclude the game is extremely expensive, not fun and not challenging. Moreover it is boring and exhausting with all these new cards, the short banlists, the imbalanced meta and the constant imbalanced changes. As a result the player base is becoming smaller and smaller with fresh people dropping it .
I am not saying that it was perfect back in the days but it could give you some casual fun for a long period without draining your wallet / pocket money.
If you read that wall of text thank you but I really do hope that you did not !
Agree with this, got back into TCGs around 2020 like a lot of people, but the pace of releases has pushed me away again. From a casual fan standpoint its just way too much, too expensive to grab a handful of packs.
Also, do other locals actually drop prices for bad sets or is that eShops only? Everyone by me still sells like legends mako for $75ish/box in store and I always chuckle when I see it.