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Pojo's Yu-Gi-Oh! Reader's Top Ten Lists
Top 10 Mistakes Konami Made Early On
by Baneful

November 2, 2016

Nobody's perfect and mistakes are lessons, but nostalgia is often blind.  Back in 2002 and 2003, in the States, Yugioh survived off it's anime, lore and brand.  Collecting the cards was fun.  Playing the game was fun because it was new and there was nothing quite like it.  But from a game design perspective, there were numerous imbalances Konami could have corrected sooner had they adjusted their priorities sooner. 

Bad Starter Decks 

Starter Deck Yugi and Kaiba were iconic, yet also horribly designed.  They had proportionately too many tribute monsters.  Aside from a few strong removal cards like Dark Hole, there were few ways to get over even a La Jinn or Great White.  Weak monsters + weak equips = still too weak. 

Healing and Direct Damage 

These seemed good at first, but they tricked many new players into thinking the game was about immediate life point advantage rather than hand and field advantage.  Cards like Hinotama and Goblin's Secret Remedy could have at least had a bonus effect to them. 

Rituals and Fusions 

Card advantage was an issue.  Fusions required two specific monsters on hand/field, plus a specific Spell.  Rituals required a specific Spell, a specific monster and 1-2 other monsters in order to activate.  Both cases were a -2.  Almost no Fusions/Rituals had effects either. 

Double Tributes  

Summoned Skull was a 2500 beater for 1 Tribute.  Very good.  But for an additional card to give up, Blue-Eyes White Dragon wasn't significantly stronger and Dark Magician had the same ATK (though higher DEF, but who cares).  Let's not start on monsters like Great Moth and Gate Guardian. 

Equip Cards 

While not as inferior as other card types I mentioned, they require a monster (and die with the monster).  This makes them a -1 in worst case scenario, so only the best few were used while most were neglected.  They tried added bonus effects but many of them didn't make weaker equips better than Axe of Despair or United We Stand.  Removal was just better than stat boosting plain and simple. 

Weak Monsters 

Most monsters early on were junk.  They had much lower ATK than other monsters out and very few of them had good effects (or effects at all even).  They were probably fun to collect for the art work but eventually people realized they were buying packs and not getting a single practical card out of them. 

Disparate Spells 

Some spells were really powerful: Pot of Greed, Raigeki, Painful Choice, etc.  Staples.  Decks needed them.  It couldn't be just monsters.  But what happened was that some spells were really powerful and the majority of them were bad.  That didn't give much choice or customization in deck building. 

Paywalling 

In Magic Ruler and Pharaoh's Servant, staples were upgraded to Ultra Rare.  LV4 beaters were capped at 1800 ATK, but LV4's that exceeded that (Gemini Elf and Mechanicalchaser) were very expensive.  Spell/Trap removal was sparse because MST, Heavy Storm and Dust Tornado were all holos.  That made matchups against rogue decks tough.  In later metas, as the card pool expanded, you had both cheap and expensive options.  Early on, we were just thankful that most of our classmates didn't have rich parents. 

Archetype Design 

In the first 5 sets, archetypes didn't really exist.  Sometimes decks can lean toward a certain Type/Attribute, but otherwise, not much.  Some were very undersupported, like Spirits and Toons.  Others were based on a concept that made them super-situational from the start, like Unions and Guardians. 

Holding Anime Releases 

Many cards from the original anime were not released in the first two years of the game.  Dozens of them, to this day, haven't been released.  Many of those early sets could have used more good cards.  The problem is that many of the anime cards that were released late (or have yet to be released) were hit with power creep.  They would've been a good addition to the meta back in 2003, but now they're outdated.  Chasm of Spikes, for example, would've been great until Dimensional Prison came out.

 

 


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