09: YGO isn't Magic

 ...And i don't want it to be.

There's been a lot of criticism of YGO online lately, but while it absolutely does have a lot of problems (*cough* floodgates *cough*), most of the criticism I've seen is just boils down to going in with the wrong expectations. Yu-Gi-Oh is very similar to a Fighting Game, or a tactical shooter like CS2, in the sense that, if you go into a ranked match not knowing what you're doing, you will get absolutely destroyed.

The comparison with a fighting game, especially, is very accurate. In Yu-Gi-Oh, just like in regular fighting games, you and your opponent take turns hitting each other with combos. It's not a back and forth in the traditional sense, like in chess for example, were every turn each player makes is just one move. In Yu-Gi-Oh, the interaction comes from either interrupting your opponents combo, or finding a way to 'break' the boards they've set up. Yes, that does mean that you will spend a few minutes just watching your opponent play the game, but that doesn't mean that time is wasted. It gives you some time to think about how you can break your opponents board with the tools you have available, besides, the amount of time spent doing that will decrease the better you get at the game, as you will build decks that more effectively counter your opponent and get acquire more knowledge about the tools at your disposal. The downside is, that if you're new to the game, it will look like whoever gets the first move wins outright, because you don't know how to effectively use your deck yet/don't have a good deck. Yu-Gi-Oh isn't fun despite the ridiculous combos or the lack of a resource system, it's fun because of them. It gives the designers of the cards a whole lot more creative freedom. An archetype like flower cardians, that basically makes you play a completely different card game inside Yu-Gi-Oh just would not be possible in games like Hearthstone or mtg. If you do not enjoy the fast paced nature if Yu-Gi-Oh, that is completely fine, but a lot of people seem to be making it out to be an objective problem with the game, rather than just a matter of taste. What the problem is that people are actually complaining about is the lack of a good tutorial in games like master duel, and the wrong expectations about the game most people have gotten from only ever having heard about it from the DM-Era anime.