Everyone Read This Article+Ranting By Me

Hello everyone! I have decided to bring back my blog as a tribute to Kris Perovic and his incredible article about the current state of the game: http://kperovic.com/blog/ygo-the-state-of-the-game/. He states in this article that it is the duty of the community to help each other out instead of holding out on information for your own benefit, while also providing a suggestion to create our own sort of Metagame.com to do coverage for events, and then the game will be saved as we know it. While I think that he brings up some valid points, I would like to address some points that he did not. The worst (imo) problems with the game are with overpowered themes being consistently released along with fairly terrible formats. I mean in 2006 could any of us have imagined a deck like Inzektors? Wind-Ups? Or would you have imagined that BLS-EotB would ever come off the list (I even lost a bet due to this card being unbanned)? The thing about this is that it isn't just the evolutionary process of the game, it is more like the degeneration of the game.

Yu-Gi-Oh! generally used to be accepted as a game that required skill to win. To get out of jams and execute plays perfectly. To make great reads and be rewarded for it. But something that Frazier Smith said to me at Long Beach (he probably doesn't remember) was that themes were ruining this game. We aren't in a game where we can actually deckbuild for certain events and accurately predict the meta to use techs, we are in a game of themes. Techs can't even work anymore due to the sheer amount of decks that even exist. Now anyone can just drop 3 Xyzs, set 3 backrows and still have cards left over and dominate. The game punishes you for drawing the wrong hand and rewards you for drawing the better hand, not for skill. I would even argue that there's practically no skill at all. Themes don't promote skill, they promote being able to draw your pieces before your opponent and beating them because of that. That's not skill, that is luck, something I hoped would never become a central factor in the game, but here we are.

I can't even fathom about the formats that have been produced since the last "good" format (TeleDAD as most people would say). I mean who wants to play in formats where a deck like Lightsworn or Chaos Dragons dominate? Or a format where someone can open Rescue Rabbit against you going first and increase their chances of winning tenfold? This would normally just lead back to Konami being really dumb and creating dumb cards, but it is also their inability to hit these cards before hand. When creating formats, it is very clear they don't test these formats and find all the real problems with what will go on in the format and it is also very clear that they don't care. Take for example Lightsworn/Zombie format for September 2009. Lightsworn was legal for almost 2 years, and because it wasn't a "problem" in TeleDAD or Synchro-Cat formats (although it was still widely used), they decided not to touch the deck at all while nerfing every other deck. What does that give you? A shitty format revolved around milling better than your opponent.

However these 2 points bring me to my support of Kris Perovic and his call to action. These 2 points are something completely out of our control and something we will never be able to control. It is rather unfortunate that we cannot do so and that Konami just tries to just make money at the expense of those who have loved the game for so long, but that is the way things are. However what we can do is try to make the experience better for the whole community. Konami has completely disregarded us and has practically disregarded competitive play from their goals (as shown through our declining prize support and new OP themes being released every set), so only we can really help ourselves. So I beg you all to read Perovic's article and think about it for a while, because he kept it real and provided some great insight and hopefully we can try and churn something out like what he has envisioned.

NOTE: I agree and disagree with his points about ARG as well but I'd rather not post about it because it is a completely different subject than the point I am trying to get across. ARG is a cool site with great players doing decent articles, but I do believe he is right about the articles being half-assed, but I also think these artciles seem so shoddy because of the fact that it is practically impossible to explore higher levels in this game anymore so I can't fault the writers.