Adopting OCG's style of card text with numbering would also help so much for card visibility.

I think a lesser talked about problem with Yu-Gi-Oh!'s new player experience is just how the cards have barely any formatting in their text. The card's effects are wordy enough but having just a huge block of word salad with no seperation between different effects and no special formatting for different types of effects also makes it much harder for new players to even read the cards in the first place.

"Just Read"
I time out before I finish reading all of the swarm of cards played.

Fun fact: preconstructed mtg commander decks deliberately don't have any searchers in them because asking a new player to look through a pile of 70-80 cards and pick which is the best one which meets a certain criteria is simply too much complexity to hit a new player with.
The designers also generally make fewer and less powerful searches than they used to for similar reasons.

Damn shame that yugioh doesn't function without a bunch of searchers now.

Honestly, the real new player problem is the enfranchised ones telling you that you're 'playing too slow' when all I am doing is reading the cards as my opponent plays them. Guy got so mad at me that I stopped doingnit halfway through the match and he used niche rules interactions to kill me and I am like... yall are toxic man babies. Either make the matches take longer or use a chess clock or something idk. But if I want to learn I am too slow and if I am going fast it's 'read the card' make up your damn minds.

The most effective way I've had so far of introducing new players to the game has been by starting them from day 1.  1v1 with the first structure decks circa-2004, and letting them gradually work their way up from there year by year as they experiment with new builds, plus a custom-made deck that has mostly vanilla monsters and equip spells, but also all the extra deck summoning methods to try out.  Eventually they find one they like, so I offer to boost its power up a bit by introducing some more modern cards.  It's nowhere near modern Yugioh, but being able to gradually advance towards modern gameplay as a player realizes "this newer thing is stronger than my older thing" is a heck of a lot better than dumping them into a ten-minute combo and telling them to simply Ash when applicable.

"Just read the cards" is the Yu-Gi-Oh equivalent of the Smash community's "don't get grabbed." While it does technically explain the solution, it does so in such a reductive way that it ignores all the nuance surrounding the issue as well. Yes, new players will learn the game by reading what the cards do and understanding what the effects are, but you also need to figure out how different cards synergize with other cards and how different cards interact with other cards, and comprehend how one card sending this card will teigger it's send to gy effect, while also understanding that that is the archetype's chokepoint, and consider if you can make that chokepoint less punishing if you include a certain engine or consider if there are combo lines that play around the current hand trap meta, so on and so forth. Yes, reading the cards will help you understand what the cards do, but not necessarily what they are able to do. And the new player problem comes when you expect a new player to be able to perform all of those complex skills on the same level as a pro.

As someone with decades of experience with Magic, and who also plays Digimon, Yugioh card formatting is so confusing. I think that makes the amount of text harder to deal with.

Funny enough I came to the game in 2022 bc of a video of a guy challenging himself to summon an insanely difficult boss monster (a-z armed dragon cannon) and he did it first try going first, it was so amazed by the posibilities and complexity of the game that I joined right away. Complexity might scare a lot of players but it reels in others like me.

I just wanted to say, as a PTCG player with no interest in YGO at all, your videos are really good and I watch all of them. You obviously have a lot of knowledge and are very considered in what you say in every video. The style is clear and concise whilst also being very informative. Also I like how you clearly love all these games and don't try and start boring wars about which is better or whatever. Sorry for the cringe wall of compliments but I know how hard YT can be and you're doing great. Keep it up!

I got into modern yugioh by the Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution game on the switch. During covid, I couldn't put the game down it was so fun learning the new mechanics with the story decks. I remember spending HOURS formulating a way to beat Don Thousand's deck in the ZEXAL game mode with the Utopia deck and it was so hard but so rewarding. I wish Master Duel's solo modes were more like those because they did them so well imo and the packs were fun to open.

Another way that Konami could make this game more accessible is by using the OCG rarity system as the current system makes decks way more expensive than they need to be.

One of the biggest hurdles to playing Yugioh, at least IRL, is the sheer cost of card. Konami continues to make it prohibitively expensive to complete meta decks by locking staple cards behind single extreme rarities to gouge serious players, while everyone else has pray for reprints upwards of a year later. Master Duel is basically the only way to play, which sucks if you like actually holding cards or just want the social aspect of playing a game with someone face to face.

The biggest issue is that the "rules" are driven by the card's text rather than the rulebook's. Cards essentially instruct you how to ignore the rule book.. it's like telling a story backwards but with more words. Pokemon & MTG explain effects laterally and with fewer words due to keywords and symbols that are self explanatory in name and number LOL.

The on ramp for modern Yugioh is pretty steep. We used to have speed duel, a simplified format, to get more people into the paper game. But the gap between Speed/Edison and the Modern is still MASSIVE.

Yugioh has the problem of needing to know the meta way more than any other game. In Hearthstone or Magic you can just read what cards your opponent plays and you are fine. In yugioh? You need to know the entire archtype by one card.

In Magic you play your cards or counter whatever feels relevant and you're golden. In yugioh you need to know the exact combo and the exact place where to stop it for it make sense.

I've played Duel Links a lot and knew the meta well, but the first time I encountered Metaphys I just ran down the time. It's just impossible to know how to interact with those decks because each spell or monster has like 3 effects and they are also mostly irrelevant so hard to remember.

I still say the easiest way to fix the core issue is colour coding Activation, cost and Effects of cards so it is easy to see at a glance.

Master Duel added line breaks and that was already a massive upgrade

peak thumbnail game, good sir

My introduction to wanting to play Yugioh was watching KO heartz play skull servants Master Duel replays on Youtube. They looked goofy, made a little guy with a big number, and I loved their artwork. From there I copied most of what their most common cards were, later trying out and mixing other generic zombie support, to trying out there cards I never thought of nor considered, leading up to where I am now.

I also learned how to play other decks by watching other people use them, trying them for myself, and editing the structure to fit what I wanted. While Skull Servants are still my bread n butter, I've expanded to Watts, Ojamas, dabbled in mimighouls, Quantals, and Suships.