These are all great points and make sense on every level. Every card game has its hang up. I play Magic, Yugioh, and Digimon. All three are great. The only thing is, I just can’t stand cards that you need to use other cards like A+B to get C. Love making causal decks and collecting but, feel like it’s scary to see what happens in the future because all of these tipping points could end them 😅

The funny thing is that you said so many things about how broken tearlament was, but still just barely scratched the surface. You didn't even mention how one havnis could make you a full board on your opponent's first turn. Not to mention the broken synergy with the ishizu cards, which allowed tearlaments to be perfectly consistent in milling.

Yu-Gi-Oh is the only one that I've played on this list. I played it until around 2016 when I got tired of keeping up with the new sets and power creep cards. From a competitive standpoint, the biggest problem is that the investment into building these $400+ competitive decks isn't matched by the prizes from events. Yu-Gi-Oh is notorious for having some of the lamest prizes for winning big events. Other games like Lorcana, Grand Archive, and Flesh and Blood that post very respectable cash prizes that allow top players to recoup their investment into the game keep a lot of people interested in buying new sets to stay competitive for a chance to win.

Its crazy because as a YGO player i think this game has ALL the issues that the other games have and more. It's solely down to the delusionally whipped meta players dedication to spending however much money it takes to compete that keep YGO alive. That and the very few that just love the artwork and will collect the cards regardless.

Pokemon tcg player here. Biggest threat to pokemon is pokemon not printing cards to demand.

The price to play competitive yugioh is whats killing that game. On top of that theres no reason to pay that price when the prizing offered is poopoo

Here is why I don't like Pokémon TCG... My favorite part of Pokémon TCG POCKET is that there aren't many cards that just allow you to pull your strategy right out of the deck. For draw cards, you have Professor's research (2 cards) and Poke ball (one basic), and a new Psychic slab card (Draw 1, discard if not a psychic). It's clear it's set up like this because games are supposed to be short but I also love this design. You are trying to play with what you got until you get a lucky draw, fighting for your life and prolonging the battle as much as you can. I find that in the regular TCG, there are just too many cards that allow you to pull out exactly what you need, or draw TONS of cards, or skip steps entirely. Ultra ball lets you get any Pokémon from your deck just by discarding 2 cards. you can play a rare candy on Charmander and get your Charizard EX in play and OH he also instantly gets filled up with Energies (Something that would normally take 2+ turns to get and attach to your Pokémon), enough to do his crazy attack. Oh, did I mention you can just buy this Pre-built deck from the store? I feel like this is the equivalent to you just giving me a fully decked out team to defeat the Elite Four in the Pokémon games, rather than me building up my team from scratch. I am just a casual player but I was immediately turned off when I played TCG Live and went up against decks like this. I prefer to have the game ramp up slowly, and it's up to you to use your smarts to survive long enough to pull your best cards, not have them given to you because you have 30 trainers cards in your deck that help you get that Charizard in a few turns.

9 maxx c now.... it is miserable

One good thing about the Pokémon TCG is that the cards that are sought after by collectors are just prettier, full-art versions of cheaper cards. If you just want to play, a $1 Iono works the same as the $100 one People have brought up scalpers and that certainly hurts any game, and I feel that a bunch of players buying Pokémon cards just want to have a card of their favorite Pokémon or trainers, and scalpers are threatening that silent majority of casuls that hardcore Nintendo fans often dismiss

As a non magic player, the main reason I got interested to play it is because of Miku haha. So your point is correct.

I think content updates and popularity are the wrong ways to think about the death of card games, but the "dead game" discussion has been said and done about games in general. Imo, card games shouldn't need new sets to drop now into perpetuity, nor should your LGS have a dedicated night for the game for it to be playable. As long as you enjoy playing it and find a group of people you enjoy playing it with, then it doesn't matter if the game is dead in that sense. And with the advent of Discord and Tabletop Sim, you can still find a playgroup for abandoned or unpopular card games. The only game here that can really, truly die is Hearthstone, because it's an always-online game hosted by a company that has no obligation to keep it running forever. At some point, Hearthstone will literally be unplayable

Yugioh and Pokemon TCG are the least likely to go down since the main people handle are in Japan, where the TCG gaming space there is much more crowded compared to the West, with really good JP exclusive card games like Duel Masters, Battle Spirits, Build Divide and the other IP based TCG to go up against. They have handled their respective dominant share of the JP TCG market for 2 decades now, soo they intrinsically know what their playerbases and target demographics want, and release products accordingly that satisfy said playerbase. Reason why MTG is betting more on these crossover promotional products with their Universes Beyond initiative is that Hasbro wanted to copy the sucess of Bandai's IP TCGs, mainly One Piece TCG. WotC and mainly Hasbro are way too complacent that MTG for the longest time being the number 1 TCG in the west, soo they became more focused of trying to bring in more players than keeping the existing playerbase happy in an attempt to show even more growth. A similar thing with Hearthstone really, as Blizzard became too complacent from being the top online TCG that they are way out of touch with the playerbase that do not want a stagnant railroaded meta they want to impose on.

i dont this its UB that will kill magic, UB can co exist with actual magic sets if the sets are good and not just chandra in a race suit or jace in a detective cap. thats imo what will do the most harm to magic, the fact that the actual sets from magic's ip will be cheap and have close to no effort put into them ( their theme, i think the cards can still be good gameplay wise but if the theme of the set is pretty unimaginative there will be less hype for it.)

Good thing NSG has kept the Netrunner LCG alive and thriving.

I don't play Magic, but Call of Duty has added so many crazy different skins and crossovers over the last few years, one I seen recently was a finisher where you summon a unicorn from thin air and it shits a rainbow out at the enemy.... It has come so far from it's military shooter roots that it feels like it no longer has a focus, and only recently have I decided it's gone way too far. The first MW Remaster had some fun skins, and although sometimes a little fantastical, didn't stray TOO far from it's original vision. If I were to ever try Magic, I think I would see it the same way. It wouldn't really be that hardcore fantasy card game with it's own unique lore that I've always seen it as (which seems badass), now just a mish mash of random crap.

The biggest problem with YuGiOh for new players are rulings. Example 1: You are using Polymerisation to Fusion summon a Guardian Chimeara using 2 cards from your hand and one from your side of the field. You activate its effect as Chain Link 1 and your opponent chains a book of moon as Chain Link 2 targeting it in response. How does this resolve? Exactly, no one actually knows. Example 2: Your opponent has both Zombie World and Rivalry of Warlords active on the field. So how is this interacting with your cards, what exactly are you allowed to do? Well....the answer is to google Forum posts from 2011 from a judge or reddit thread. It's mindblowingly stupid. Example 3: Your opponent controls an Unchained Blue Dog Link 2 and you control a Sauravis Ritual monster. You normal summon any monster to which your opponent chains the effect of their Blue Dog. Are you allowed to use Sauravis effect to negate the summon, since Blue Dog is known to Link summon by game mechanics? I actually dont even know and I play for 20 years. Absolute garbage. Imaging being a new player and you literally have to argue with your opponent how cards work and interact with each other. Or even worse when there isnt even an official ruling but instead there is cross reference from another card.... why would anyone play a game like this.

Pokemon letting you go through half your deck and put cards back and forth between your deck and discard pile all in a single turn if you get a good hand is really half the appeal of the game compared to other tcgs

Yugioh really has a bigger root problem, if the new player problem is a tree, then the forest is really Konami's monetization strategy over the years. Just look at how well established and relatively well balanced custom formats such as Reaper, Edison and Progression formats are, where banlists, and hence card design, are defined by a good format of yore or player input where the incentive is to make the game fun. New players would have no problem getting into those kinds of formats, it's just the TCG that is so expensive and hyper focused on pushing ever more competetively attractive cards at a quicker pace than most can keep up that then leads to all of the problems most players, new and old, might meet in the game.

In my opinion with yugioh its also the power creep. Sure, other card games have it too but when you look at what newer yugioh cards do compared to older ones, it is just getting ridiculous.

if only the rumored Chaotic renaissance would happen, I'd legit be EXTREMELY hype for it😸😸😸

Can you make a review of KARDS, A WW2 Card game that is quite interesting since it has a self-balancing gameplay that only certain deck within the game could be considered "meta"

In my opinion, the exact moment when magic started loosing its "spark" if you'l forgive the pun, was when the return to Kamigawa wasn't to Kamigawa two, five, or ten or even a couple hundred years in the future, but "Kamigawa 2077." The "we're chasing that Cyberpunk audience because everyone's excited for the new CDPR game and making it painfully obvious" move really, REALLY micturated in my cornflakes, because Kamigawa's classical, mythological Japan setting wasn't one that needed to be destroyed and was one of, it not my particular favorite setting in MtG itself. You *could* have made a Night City plane onto itself, and by all accounts that's what R&D would do now, if the same opportunity arouse - but what we got then was telling; this plane you like, that exists, that the team build and crafted to have its own identity, that has a story, characters, and history, that you might have really liked. It's gone now. Get bent. We don't want to build our world, we want to bulldoze it to make room for the new trend to chase.

MtG died for me when they announced that Universes Beyond would become Standard legal. I literally haven’t touched it since. It’s just gross. UB is “fine” but I don’t want my Rabbit tribal deck to have to go against SpongeBob and Spider-Man.

Im not hopefull for Hearthstone at all... The way monetazation & balancing is handled just shows more and more Blizzard wants to milk this game dry.

Konami needs to make the GOAT format official ASAP

For Pokémon you missed the excessive amount of bloodsuckers attached to the game. The greatest danger to it is also a new player problem, because all the people treating it as an investment make it very unaffordable. I‘ve been trying to start playing the game for a while now, but the new sets don‘t seem like a good time and the older cards have ridiculous prices. But then again I‘m not interested in Pokemon beyond the Diamond and Perl era, so that‘s why new sets don‘t appeal to me

Hahaha. Fantastic. "And this is why these games are doomed... And now, on to pokemon and what will kill it... Its fine... I cant think of anything... And now, on to hearthstone..."

Flesh and Blood, and Lorcona wont last. Just like how Vanguard didn't last. Edit: For YGO, just run more "going second cards" over hand traps then you won't have to worry about when to ash when you have dark ruler in hand. personally i hate hand traps and i hope YGO prints more "going second" cards because in my eyes that makes the games last longer and have more back and forth. Which is great for card games imo

Maxx c is balance U want to do full combo with little to no resistance ? Bullshit

Personally, I don't mind Universes Beyond like many people do. If it wasn't for it, I wouldn't have sticked to the game enough to engage with the Magic universe. I joined MTG sometime after the Lord of the Rings set came out (not because of it, just a coincidence) through Magic Arena. As someone who watched the trilogy when I was a kid, I naturally gravitated towards those characters I knew and it's honestly what mostly kept me engaged. All the other stuff seemed overwhelming and confusing. After playing for a few weeks and seeing some cards multiple times on the field, I started getting more curious about the Magic world. "Who is this Gix guy? And this Urza and Mishra? What is Phyrexia" I decided to look things up, reading articles and watching videos. I quickly became interested in various aspects of the lore and started to enjoy the game even more, beyond just Universes Beyond content. Today, it's one of my favorite games. I love the Magic universe and I engage with the game, its lore and community daily. If it wasn't for the LotR set, I probably would've dropped it in the first few days. WotC's execution of UB might be clumsy, but I can't say it is killing Magic when it's the thing that helped convert me into a Magic player.

I could see Yugioh going extinct in the next 5 years. Konami’s greed when it comes to paper play is getting worse and worse and the game basically isn’t picking up any new players. Why would anyone choose to start a card game that has extremely terrible pull rates and the most complex rules? I love yugioh and I’ve been into for as long as I can remember but I can’t even justify buying sealed product anymore.

The Pokemon TCG will die once game freaks decides to only continue making Charizard and Pikachu cards

why is there dumb overwatch slander slop in my card game video

I disagree with your take when it comes to there being nothing wrong with the Pokemon TCG, I get that having collectors as well makes the game healthy but at the same time it can be the game's own downfall, with how bat shit crazy insane some collectors are. Just recently a card shop posted that they refuse to hold the next main line Pokemon TCG set out of the safety of their employees and their store, and let's not forget the Van Go Pikachu card fiasco. If collectors buy every single stock of the tcg, the competitors can't get the cards they need, and thus just quit the game all together because of it.

Mentioning Legend of the Five Rings really hurt me. Man, what a great game. How AEG fumbled the ball with it is WILD to me

I've been playing MtG since 2005 and a dedicated player buying most of the products since 2009. I've built and owned well over 50 commander decks, including a $1,700 Sliver deck. I've played Vanguard, Commander, Tiny Leaders, Oath Breaker, Brawl, Modern, Standard, Draft, Pauper, Plane Chase, and Explorers of Ixalan. I spent 8 years teaching new players how to play and created over a dozen pods with them in that time. Through it all, I've seen WotC devolve into a worse company with scandal after scandal, but overall, I stuck with the game. Universes Beyond broke me as a dedicated player. I don't buy products anymore and only play causally a couple of times a year now, but if I see a UB deck at my table I'll bring out a toxic deck to focus them down the entire game. Those products are ruining the game, and I don't tolerate them whatsoever. Mass land destruction, repeatable land destruction, and Mindslaver loops are on the board if I see a UB deck.

Great video. . Excuse my long post, but I always wonder if the big 3 design the games with harvesting specific types of players. . - MTG has had a Product saturation and Universes Beyond issue for a while, so much that keeping up with sets and trying to be immersed in the world is difficult. The lead designer Mark Rosewater was asked about this on his blog and responded more or less they adjusted to the markets. Universes Beyond was printed well because it sold well. And as magic players, you have to be open to new players and product. So I wonder if retaining the old crowd who sticks around and gaining enough new players is enough. The last year of sets has kind of given up on building their own stories and just borrowing from history and pop culture, from 80s horror movies to medival anthro fantasies. So i feel like being in the magic universe isn't worthwhile. I imagine Magic is trying to sell to a more generic uncaring audience and hardcore player. - YGO has long suffered the "new player problem" but I wonder if sustaining the a reliably large group of cash burning power creeping players is enough for Konami of the US. The last 10 months had tier 1 meta decks, tenpai and Maliss, that could be competitively affordable at under $200. However, players are often eager to spend a lot more. Then so many supplemental products have been designed to solve the "new player problem". Master Duel does get people in the game, but less than they hoped. Speed Duel was cool but had a poor card pool with skills doing more. And then when they can't sell well enough, there's probably no point in trying to market to those new players. The worst part is that OCG has decks that are affordable like Pokemon and shifting relatively well. - Pokemon is in a good spot with healthy affordable meta decks and collectors. However, the collectors have repeatedly bought out the market and ruined the game. I hope the Pokemon company keeps them in check. . A lot of the newer games don't have to deal with the problem because they need to draw in a player base quickly or die. They have more of business reason to burn money and give bigger prizes. Battle Spirits tried to revive itself and fail. Lorcana sustained itself well enough to grow beyond the collector's market that it had at its start. Thanks for helping me gather some thoughts on the matter

You could honestly say every card game is one majorly bad decision away from death. Many years ago there was a facebook game zynga bought and added a new pack that said "All cards in this set are immune to cards from every prior set." And added them to every single format. In one update the game died. Then for "balance" they made it so you had to play with a deck partially containing rares from the new set to play at all, and it was carzy. It was dead in days

Druid also got control archetype. Handbuff paladin. Shaman got combo/burn archetype. Aggro/pirate warrior. And combo DH in both lifesteal into damage and repeat fel spells.

As a Yugioh player, 1 other arguments for its potential demise is power creep and tunnel visioned card design. Yugioh is the game with the most amount of power creep and over the years has seen such an amount of power creep that the viable gameplan of decks in general has been reduced to 3 types: Control (mid-range), Combo (all-out turn 1) and Stun (floodgates). When a new archetype is released, they almost always do 1 of those gameplans, but in a different way. The end boards always try to achieve the same thing, and that is to prevent your opponent from playing the game. Going first in Yugioh has become incredibly powerful and despite many suggestions of how to improve the game from a card design perspective, the card designers seem unable or unwilling to change the direction direction, always focusing the archetype design on going first only rather than going second, or being able to go both first and seconds. Then there is the price of Yugioh outside of Japan. It is ridiculously expensive to get into competitive Yugioh. Playing the best deck in 2024 costed you almost 1000$ on the secondary market due to artificial scarcity. This also forms a huge barrier for getting into Yugioh. While casual decks are a lot cheaper (you can build a fully playable deck for less than 30$), there aren't any casual friendly formats. Then there is the Yugioh anime. Players traditionally always got into Yugioh through the anime. While there is a Yugioh anime running right now, it is based around Rush duels, which is a Yugioh TCG spin-off that is only available in Japan. The anime brings in no new players into Yugioh as it isn't focused on the game itself. The cross-over from Rush into Yugioh is also negligable. All of these compounding factors have lead to an aging Yugioh community and eventually a gradual decline and death of the game unless Konami gets new young players into the game. The best way to do it is to do a soft reboot of the game coupled with an anime and create a new format that is friendly for new players (preferably one with set rotation to keep power creep in check).

Man's really gonna slam hearthstone for power creep but not mention power creep with reference to mtg 😅😅

I think further zooming out, the thing that is killing MTG is commander. Yes, it’s the most popular format. But overindexing on commander is ultimately feeding the beast that will kill magic. The focus on UB is primarily for commander. Standard and modern sets are taken over by commander focused designs which end up breaking the competitive metagame. Organized play is abandoned because of commander. Rather than building out their own IP, they’re trying to make a pick up and play game, but that is going to lead to the game being trivialized with no audience attachment.

Honestly, I just feel Chaotic was before its time. The premise of it was so good and, now that smartphones are ubiquitous, an app would be so perfect with it!

There are some pretty cool Decks that are more on the simple side, that I bet newcomers would love, but getting to that point, or knowing what to get, is hard. Master Duel would profit alot, from rehauling the Solo-Mode. And giving us new Structure Decks. And maybe making the starter decks we get, filled with some SR Staples atleast. Introduce Hand-traps with D.D. Crow, or make a solo-mission where you need to beat a cheater with Droll & Lock bird. Stuff like this can help the game alot, it just needs a critical eye to implement.

MFW digimon tcg 2020

As an MtG fan I find the idea of more than half of new MtG set being literally not MtG disappointing to say the least. At this point I feel the game overstayed its welcome.

Hearthstone is destined to die, because it isn't a physical medium, I think. Every set is designed specifically for the meta and eventually the interest will die down and then you will have no other real aspect that keeps you engaged, unlike any of the paper games. There you can at least collect the cards and enjoy having them in a binder or box, or you show them off to friends. But what are you ultimately gonna do with your HS collection where it's all digital anyways and you can easily craft every card? This will be the deathknell, but it will obviously take a long time. Any of those games will not die any time soon and it's all just potential reasons for what could topple them (like MTG sure UBs might drive out old players..and then they'll just release a few old Magic style sets like Foundations and people are excitedly picking it back up).

Magic players still not voted about UB sets made for standard. If sales will be low, WoTC may change the course.

Reasons why Magic could die: "They could make too many sets that arent actually the Magic IP and it might dilute the game too much." Reasons why Yu-Gi-Oh might die: *rambles on about myriad effects that I don't understand* "Oh, I get it. I understood nothing. Thats why I don't play Yu-Gi-Oh."

So many thoughts on this. I don't think Magic will ever die. Even if the game becomes unrecognizable, it's just a great game at its core and unlikely to ever be abandoned. As for other games that died. WoW TCG died because Blizzard wanted to launch Hearthstone. In this way, most games are susceptible to their parent company just deciding to stop making them in order to make another card game or product. Another dead game is Gwent, which is a pretty fascinating story in the digital card game world. They basically released a better version of the game (gwent beta version) which was one of the most interesting mental games I ever played. They then decide to completely revamp the game (due to low design space in the original form) and create an abomination that nobody wants to play. The new game has a ton of seemingly inconsequential decisions to make in a turn, that are actually super consequential and practically overload the player with decision making. This is in contrast to the older game which had one decision at a time (2 if you still had the leader power) which was super engaging. They even managed to screw the old game before the revamp by adding cards that "Discover" random cards. The first iteration was similar to chess where you knew everything that can happen and had a tight deck. The second iteration added 1 power common cards that discovered another random common card. These cards completely nuked the strategy aspect of the game as it was better to put those in your deck than the actual commons you wanted to play, as well as making it impossible to know what your opponent was playing. The death of card games happen when developers don't understand they got a good thing going.