LogFAQs > #979019370

Kenri posted...

Legends (the set)

82/100

I don't know if Legends has aged well or poorly for most people. So many of the titular Legends are wack in design, in mana cost, and color identity. As the very first set after Revised, there still wasn't much knowledge on card design, and it showed. You could look at two cards with the same mana cost and rarity with bewilderment. For some reason, Albert fuckin Einstein was on a white enchantment.

For me though? It's aged so well. Look how many kickass, iconic cards came from Legends. The Elder Dragons, who would be part of Magic lore for decades to come. Tetsuo Umezawa, the building block from which all of OG Kamigawa's story came (Toshiro is Tetsuo's distant ancestor). Famous enchantments like Moat and The Abyss still used to denote modern cards. Some of the jank was fun jank, too -- I loved playing Hazezon Tamar in EDH and abusing the fact that I don't get the tokens immediately. The whole set is packed full of wild, cool designs that just wouldn't be possible now.

We won't get another Legends, and that's probably a good thing. I'm so glad we got one, though. One was enough.

Anagram posted...

Yu Gi Oh TCG

Takahashi did explicitly base Duel Monsters on Magic, so this gets a pass.

Anyway, 14/100

I jammed silly games of Magic with my buddies in boy scouts, but yugioh is where early-teen Trdl cut his teeth competitively. Early yugioh was a blast: There was a beautiful flow and simplicity to the gameplay, there was room for brewing and interaction, and combat actually mattered. Young me didn't have the vocabulary for that, though; I was just glad I couldn't get mana screwed. (Yes I appreciate the irony in me saying this after claiming the land system is OK)

That game is not modern yugioh.

Master Duel did encourage me to try it out, and every meme you've heard is probably accurate. The game is slammed full of force-fed "archetypes" that leaves precious little room to breathe. Games regularly end with one player only getting two turns max. Every card is a tutor for another card. Turns take longer than Zero combos in MvC3 and have 5% of the skill expression.

Say what you will about the state of Magic, but aberrations like Dredge aside, Magic still plays by its fundamental rules. The fundamental rules of Yugioh are irrelevant. "Special" summons aren't special if everyone does 6 a turn. The fact that you can "destroy" cards from hand or deck, which is different from discarding, which is different from "sending," just so you can get distinct triggers? Atrocious design to get around Konami's own stupid errors.

Worse than the game is yugioh culture. I have never seen as much theft and violence as when yugioh cards are involved, and I can't tell you why. Konami's judge program is a joke (and outright offensive to me as a long-time Magic judge), where judges often get carte-blanche to make weird rulings that set some kind of common law precedent because Konami can't be bothered to make comprehensive rules and tournament rules documents held together by things sturdier than chewing gum and twine. A high-level player got a suspension for deliberately having a token in his deck box that his deck couldn't actually make -- in Magic, we call that, "your opponent played themselves." On the opposite end, if you have a card that, say, names a card and makes your opponent discard it if they have it in hand, they apparently can refuse to show you their hand and just say "trust me bro it ain't there." You can call a judge to have them confirm, but given how low their QC is for judging...

There's plenty more asinine design and cultural aspects to the game, but I can feel my blood pressure rising.

I will still occasionally play Master Duel. Sometimes I just get a sadistic urge to inflict pain on someone. I break out a deck designed to play like a Jund deck in mtg and smile with a glint in my eye as players squirm under the bizarre circumstance of my deck actually playing to interact.