My History with the Yu-Gi-Oh Card Game

[moon_blitz]

In addition to watching the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, I also play the physical card game. I got into the card game around the same time the anime started airing in Canada (so...2002ish? I was in junior high), and I think my first deck was the one that came in Joey's Red Eyes Black Dragon tin. Back then, I just played with my friends, so having an awesome deck wasn't a big deal. Cyber Jar and Pot of Greed were still A Thing, and the one of the strongest monsters in the game was Blue Eyes White Dragon.

As I collected more cards, at some point I started building my main deck, and the deck I still use today - my Water deck. It's been tweaked and added to over the years, but the core parts of it are still the same. Now, I took roughly an eight year break from both the Yu-Gi-Oh anime and card game starting around 2006 due to various factors (finishing high school, Duel Monsters finishing, slowly moving away from watching anime in general), so while I played off and on after that, my deck mostly stayed the same.

And then it was 2014 and Arc-V was starting, and suddenly I was 13 and in love with the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise all over again. So I dug out my old deck and went to a local shop that held weekly tournaments. And realized my trusty deck was way, waaaay out-of-date.

The break I took meant I missed the introduction of Synchro and XYZ monsters, and that, combined with the then-new Pendulum monsters made my head spin as I tried to get up to speed on how all the new mechanics worked. When I had stopped playing, card archtypes weren't really a thing - Elemental Heroes were just starting to come out, and the only Extra Deck monsters that existed were Fusion monsters. Nowadays, most decks are centred around cards of a specific archtype like Cyberse or Performapals, whereas my deck isn't - it's a collection of a bunch of different monsters, most of which are Water-types, with some spell/trap cards that support them and some that don't. I have a couple cards in my Extra Deck, but I don't really use them since my deck wasn't built with them in mind.

My deck has never been competitive, and so it tends to get stomped on by top-tier decks in a matter of turns (losing to a nine-year-old in several turns was a humbling experiences, let me tell you). But if I'm facing a slower deck, like a dragon or a Black Magician deck, I can sometimes pull off a win. Even if I don't, I can usually surprise them at least once a duel, which is nice. I haven't played much since Link Monsters were introduced, but I think they're an interesting concept and I like the changes they've brought to the game. I'm hoping some cool Water-type Link monsters come out so I can add them to my deck, but I'll be fine if they don't.

If anyone is interested, I can post my deck cardlist in a separate post - I don't think any of them are super rare/expensive if someone wanted to recreate it physically, and I'd be interested to know how it does in Duel Links.

Comments

[kalloway]

I had bought... well, probably Yugi's starter when it came out, and played against an equally curious friend. We didn't really understand the rules and would often summon in cards from other games/collections, or sometimes physical objects, but we had a great time.

After uni and when I had my crappy retail job, so maybe late 2003/early 2004, I actually had a coworker who played and knew what he was doing and he just creamed me so badly that... I never bothered again. I still have a handful of the cards I really liked the art on, but that's it.

[ikinkuriboh]

I didn't get to grow up with Yu-Gi-Oh! and I never got to play the cardgame. I'd love to play with other people face to face but since I don't have much money to build a half-decent deck I mostly mess around with Duel Links.

(I also live in a pretty small town so I don't have a local shop to even go to if I desperately wanted).

I started playing Duel Links while I was still going through the DM anime and I didn't watch or read anything about the TCG so imagine my surprise when an opponent suddenly starts pulling out all this fancy summoning crap I'd never heard of and smoked me!

I'm a slow learner on the best of days but it's still fun for me to mess around with the app. I have some physical cards but I haven't really organized a deck because there isn't a rush--again, I live in a rural area and I'm the only person I know who even likes Yu-Gi-Oh! so having a physical deck to actually play with isn't a priority.

[straightforwardly]

I fell out of the card game before Synchro summoning, etc. were introduced, but it had been a good chunk of my life before then. There was a group of card players in town who met up every Saturday, and I went to those meet-ups for many years. My main deck for much of that time was one that I'd cobbled together with various cards from booster packs + pieces of a starter deck (the one with Black Luster Soldier), though my big brother did make me a ritual deck based around my Black Luster Soldier near the end of my YGO card-playing days. (Later on, he also made me what we called a "mermaid ritual deck"— built around Gishki monsters, I think— but I lost it in a move before I ever got to use it.) I do still have the other two decks, though they're currently packed away in storage.

My most recent YGO rewatch did make me feel really nostalgic for the card game, and I started playing Duel Links because of that.