First day of summer...and a nice little rant about the plights of this game.

Yes! School is finally out and I just had my first sleep-in of the summer. Hopefully with this new found time I will be able to post more frequently about Yugioh shit.

One thing I would like to step out and talk about is this game in regards to thievery, cheating, collusion, or any sort of illegal activity in the Yugioh real or in reality. This game is plagued by these various issues and have become sort of a staple in competitive Yugioh. They are a product of the ever flowing secondary market of Yugioh and the constant growth of the number of people attending each event. You see that often people are complaining about what things are wrong with the game such as card design, shitty RnD by Konami, retarded rarities, etc, but I feel like the real plights of this game lie with the obvious deception of numerous players that occur in tournaments every day.

It's devastating to lose anything you may own in this game. I myself haven't had anything stolen since a TeleDAD deck was taken from me at a local I had attended for over 2 years. I thought I could trust the people there but I guess I was wrong. But the feeling that you get when you get something you worked so hard to gain and have it just ripped from you is gut wrenching. I know when I couldn't find the deck, I was on the verge of flipping a table. But to anyone who experiences this, I feel your pain. A lot of people would just say "maybe you should have taken better care of your stuff!" But what they don't realize is the fact that people are getting craftier and craftier every day. There are just times where it is beyond your control. There are people in this game that practice stealing cards in the stealthiest ways possible. I have learned from my mistakes and haven't had anything stolen since that TeleDAD deck. Just remember to always be weary of people around you. You can trust practically no one in this game, and if you leave your deck out for maybe 30 seconds at a Regional, it won't be there when you get back.

Cheating, it happens in every game in the world. There's a reason to every action we make in this game, it is often to win, to lock out our opponents, to become the best and win everything. It's called game theory. One thing we also have to factor in is the fact that maybe our opponents may be intentionally breaking the rules to use for their own advantage. Obviously cheating is wrong, but so what? People will keep on doing that. Yugioh is a game that has stepped far past moral inhibitions and people are too dumb to see it occur right in their faces. Everyone cheats or has cheated in their career, no one can deny this. When I played actively in 2007 before I quit, I soft cheated like crazy just for some shitty store credit at a local. When I returned in 2008, the amount of cheating I saw befuddled me. I swore to never cheat and to only better myself through playing and that's it. It sucks that no one else can take that pact. There are numerous rumors on the internet spreading accusations of people stacking, angle shooting, calculator stacking, what the fuck ever but everyone has to realize, everybody cheats. Any given opponent you can play against can and will cheat against you. It doesn't matter if they're 8 or 40, there are examples of both I could list within that area of people that have tried to cheat me. The best thing you can ever do is just be weary of cheating and never take your eyes off of your opponent and deck. To prevent soft cheating just always be up to date on a lot of the rulings on your cards. Don't be afraid to call judges or make appeals to the head judge. Most importantly, if you think someone is cheating against you, have the balls to say something about it. Call a judge, call your friend over, call a head judge, do whatever to make sure this guy never does it again to anyone else.

So while I can easily blame Konami's shitty tournament structure and their card design as flaws in this game, the worst part about it is the amount of cheating and stealing in the game. I would allow Konami to put Judgment Dragon at 10 if all of the cheating and stealing in this game would stop. If this is meant to be a childrens' card game, then why must everyone, children included, feel the evil of others when they get their decks stolen? You can blame it on being naive, but you can't blame a girl for being raped.

Good luck dueling~
-Jhub