Is modern Yugioh really that much worse than pre-Invasion of Chaos?

[Chaos 混沌 カオス]

What is "modern" Yugioh anyway?

Name a format that was actually more toxic than Yata lock.

[cybercybercybercyber4]

Originally posted by Chaos 混沌 カオス:

Name a firewall dragon format

modern for me means that card advantage stopped being the most important factor to win games.
cant exactly pinpoint it though. probably around 2016.

[Chaos 混沌 カオス]

Pendulums and Links were a mistake, in other words. Which I agree with.

Not sure if Firewall was worse than Yata

[G3]

They're about the same. We're still focused on not letting the opponent play. We're are still running more than half the cards in the deck being the same cards. Chaos engine plus 30 power cards and Ryzeal/Tenpai etc. plus 30 handtraps look about the same to me.

[76561199543893354]

Originally posted by Chaos 混沌 カオス:

What is "modern" Yugioh anyway?

Name a format that was actually more toxic than Yata lock.

Tears tier zero was so comically depressing, specially during the DC when you had to play against the same boring deck every damn game.

[Papa Shekels]

Well, yata lock didn't really exist pre-IOC. You had to already be in a strongly winning position to pull it off before CED.

Gumblar/firewall format is probably the most toxic format that comes to mind. Consistent full hand loops/infinite loop FTKs backed up by some of the strongest engines at the time that could also just pivot into a regular protected board if something went wrong kinda sucked to deal with. At least nowadays you have enough tools for going second to deal with that kind of abomination. There's a reason snake-eye FTKs barely ever saw any play despite there being a dozen viable ones. Even ishizu tear had some blowout cards played against them and would still lose to shifter, d barrier, or enough bystials.

What's modern just depends on what you mean. I would classify it as the shift in gameplay focus on the extra deck instead of beating the opponent through attrition with your 25 identical main deck staples, which naturally also caused a focus on synergistic combo pushes rather than playing the numbers game behind trap holes and torrential. So you could say as early as 2011, or as late as the 2020 master rule revisions that allowed extra deck freedom instead of knightmare spam

[HeraldOfOpera]

There was of course the pre-TCG format that saw Sangan and Witch of the Black Forest nerfed, the one where it was just all Exodia FTK all the time.

Aside: I think it's hilarious that they actually needed a second nerf errata to bring them in line with modern power levels. And they're still fringe playable.

[Zephyr]

I'd say they're about equivalent tbh, just two sides of the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥ coin.

Originally posted by Chaos 混沌 カオス:

What is "modern" Yugioh anyway?

Yugioh as it is now, basically the polar opposite of gen one Yugioh where you get "I summon 4 ED monsters and negate everything you do" non-games instead of "normal summon, set, pass" non-games.

Name a format that was actually more toxic than Yata lock.

Tear Tier 0 comes to mind (and I'd also nominate the current Tenpai ♥♥♥♥ going on now), though likely because that's actually recent. Whenever I think of Yata lock it's now one of those old game things where I can't help but respect it, I got Yata locked during the wind/water event and I thought it was awesome.

[Silyon]

Originally posted by Chaos 混沌 カオス:

What is "modern" Yugioh anyway?

I'd say MR4 and onward. There's an argument to be made for Pendulumn formats and on, but one-card starters into full combo are a very recent thing. Think the very first one was Mathmech Circular.

Originally posted by Chaos 混沌 カオス:

Name a format that was actually more toxic than Yata lock.

God, so many. TeleDAD, Plant Synchro, Dragon Ruler, Pepe, Zoo, Spyral, Firewall...

Thing is the Yata-lock was never the problem in Chaos format. It was a win-more gimmick, because resolving CED by itself was usually enough to end the game on the spot. Especially if you had already gotten damage on the opponent via a Ring of Destruction or Magic Cylinder. Even within the scope of that format there were more aggravating things going on, from Magical Scientist FTK to Empty Jar.

[Soji]

I guess it depends on worse in what way. To me, pre-IOC and to an extent pre GX era yugioh in general was incredibly bad because archetypes really didn't start becoming a thing until then. In a game like yugioh with no special resources like colored mana in MTG or classes like Hearthstone, you need to give players different reasons to try out different kinds of decks and archetypes imo were a great way to do that.

To that extent, I guess you could say that also applies to what would be considered Modern yugioh, but i dont think anyone would agree that 5ds was the start of the game we are playing right now and neither would I really, just the bones of the game starting to form which up until that point was a game still unsure of what kind of path it wanted to make for itself. The start of this game becoming what it is now, I would say is probably around Duelist Alliance. Decks like BA and Nekroz and Shadolls being introduced really ramped up the idea of what a yugioh deck could be then and its evolved from there basically.

As far as what I would consider the worst format, idk its so subjective on these things I tend to not really think about it in an objective sense, just what I personally felt. Formats like Dragon Ruler/Spellbook had me quit the game for a few months until BAs came out, but I know a lot of people actually really enjoyed that format. Others will say its ones that had Tier 0 strats like Zoodiac and others will say anything that isn't anything before IOC lol.

It's hard to say the objectively worse formats, but if i had to take a stab at it, it was PROBABLY any format that had a situation like with crush card virus. It being a prize card at the time caused the price of it to be so insanely expensive and it wasn't printed in anything else for I want to say like 2 years? I dont think prize cards should ever be something strong or if they are, not tournament legal. Because it leads to situations like that.

[Kaulu]

I'm gonna throw my vote for modern yugioh starting with Spell Ruler. The battle searchers were one of the first actual decent things that made people actually look at attributes and types when they were building decks, which began the shift from generic beatdown and staple decks to decks with actual themes. Technically we had some really terrible type specific equip cards in LoB, but even as kids almost everyone avoided those. The field spells were also not really good enough, given the general lack of monster card density. But Spell Ruler is where the idea of having themed decks really started. I'd say everything that makes up modern was a gradual growth from that point.

[Abaxoth]

Originally posted by sr5123rs:

Originally posted by Chaos 混沌 カオス:

What is "modern" Yugioh anyway?

Name a format that was actually more toxic than Yata lock.

Tears tier zero was so comically depressing, specially during the DC when you had to play against the same boring deck every damn game.

Legit that was disappointingly funny because since I do not want to build or play a tears deck, I ended up adding macro cosmos, dimension shifter and dimensional fissure on my decks that time 🤣

[Exacrion]

It became bad when summon spam was no a longer a niche strategy of some loops ftk but just what to expect from every deck, it started in the synchro era, got fixed with some quick bans and things were good all during the Xyz era until zoodiacs which broke the lid and then it continued to be more and more annoying, hand trap spam was just the cherry on the top to just stop playing

[Astrallight]

Morden YGH is what you see now.

[76561199378662608]

"Same-same but different. But still same."

[DontMisunderstand]

Yata garasu isn't even toxic. Grow up.