Learn more about the History of the Yugioh Tournament Packs here: https://bit.ly/3Y8X6vQ

This would make a great series, going through the history of meta progression

12:37 So what your telling me is the scene where Kaiba gloats about owning 3 Blue Eyes in the real world is him gloating about his mechanical chasers.

Always funny to look back and realize Power Creep was woven into Yugioh’s very invention

I think the worst contender for almost killing the game was definitely Crush Card. Tournament prize only, then short printed in one set and immediately banned afterwards. Actual evil business practices

I only played against this card once as a kid, who was very proud of acquiring it. The other guy went first and summoned it right away. I set Wall of Illusion and he attacked it on his next turn, sending it back to his hand. He summoned it again and I brought out Summoned Skull the next turn and blew it up. Don't remember how the duel ended but will never forget the crestfallen look on his face.

I never realized how the starter decks mirrored each other, that's a very nice little detail

Great video. Only thing I think this is missing is how important the DARK attribute was in the first few sets of the game. Sword of Dark Destruction and Yami were the only equipment that saw play until Metal Raiders gave us Sword of Deep Seated. While the equip meta would die off by the third set, the inclusion of enough kids at locals playing Yami made La Jinn much more valuable an asset than Seven Colored Fish. The fact that Chaser could also combo with Jinzo and Limiter Removal was also quite nuts.

That actually a really well put documentary about that stupid 1850

I will never forget the time and feeling of using Dark Magician equipped with Book of Secret Arts, with Yami and Witch’s Apprentice on the field to destroy my brother’s Blue-Eyes White Dragon and winning the game.
3500 Dark Magician vs a 2600 Blue-Eyes White Dragon. 900 damage to his 800lps.

Funnily enough the only time I EVER saw Mechanical Chaser back in the day was when my opponent ran it into my Wall of Illusion and lost two turns later. Don't get me wrong, it was a strong card at the time but it wasn't a guarantee to get you at the top of the bracket like some people make it out to have been. An extra 50ATK wasn't as explosive as you think when generic spells and traps were absolutely bananas out of the gate.

5:25 I totally thought you're gonna plug a cardmarket ad in here lmao

Oh man, this sent me on a nostalgia trip. Bazoo is possibly my favorite monster ever, and I still have my deck with three copies of it.

Man, I love some cardgame history

I miss when the meta was like this instead of the 25 min OTK turns we have nowadays.

I remember playing labyrinth wall where it's so obvious that it gets summon with 1 tribute, no one attacked the facedown labyrinth wall unless the game got long enough until the opponent forgot. We were kids that time so still gold fish memory sometimes

Yu Gi Oh has a history of doing things like this. I remember when pot of duality was about $150 a card, and Tour Guide was $200, eventually Konami releases a lesser rare version and by then new cards get released that outshine the old card.

Great video, I'd love to see more of these kinds of videos about cards that ruined some formats by being both too good and ridiculously hard to get, like Crush Card Virus for example.

my friends and i were organizing tournaments in my area (we had a shop that sold the cards but that's it he didn't even know about tournaments). Our official TO (who was 22 at the time) was doing all the stuff for the shop while also playing in the tournament (heck we were like 20 people at first). Anyway: After several tournaments he did manage to get 3 Mechanical chasers and of course was kinda always the winner of our tournament and in our whole area (even when other players from other cities came over). That changed when the shift to Upperdeck came and suddenly all available cards in America were suddenly legal (before: only german ones so we had LON at the time while USA had IOC) and suddenly Chaos Decks flooded our national qualifier which we held in a small restaurant (yeah ... really it was a small restaurant next to an ice hockey arena). There no on of us did qualify of course but when we a week or so later travelled to a different city over an hour awaay my friend actually DID win against a chaos deck and secured his ticket to the German Naionals. It was of course luck since the guy just didn't draw any chaos monsters but also ... he couldn't get over Mechanical Chaser and Gemini Elves since every monster in a chaos deck had max 1800 ATK (Kycoo the Ghost destroyer) xD
Long story short: a friend of mine did win his nationals invite (i think in 2004?) with a german only deck with cards from LOB - LON while cards until IOC were legal (we did play soul release in main deck though *lol*)
But yugioh had a heavy barrier to competitive play without Mechanical Chaser: you needed 3 La Jinn (from a Starter) a Raigeki (a Super Rare), 3 Trapholes (mostly from the starter), 3 Summoned Skull (from the starter mostly), Torriental Tribute (UR), Mirror Force (UR), 3 Man eater Bugs (mostly from the starter) and heavy Storm (Judgment wasn't played that much at that time) so at least 3 Seto Starters, 3 Yugi Starters (or salvage someone for the cards) and several SR/UR cards which were hard to obtain and were incredibly expensive on ebay back then. (though most winning decklist from that time didn't had Chaser because it was so rare)

A crazy rule that we had at my school was that if you had no cards in your hand, you could draw 2 cards (not once per turn). Basically, if you had a spell / trap card as your only card in hard you could set it and then draw two cards for free. It wasn't until I actually went to a tournament that I learned that that wasn't actually the rules.