The Joke with Yu-Gi-Oh Championships and their Champions

Yu-Gi-Oh Championships and Champions

I've come to realize another thing regarding the franchise. The tournaments are filled with copy-pasted Decks. There's no actual skill involved to be a champion Duelist. I've listed reasons why below.

1. Topping.... When you look at what's topping at tournaments, it's easy to see it's the same Decks. All one has to do is find out what's doing well, copy that Deck, then copy the winning movies and you'll win. There aren't really any rogue Decks either, especially since Konami doesn't really care enough to give any other Decks a chance to play against them. This basically means you take part in an event that is going to be won by 1 of the Decks Konami has allowed to win by default. Might as well just hand out the prize cards to everyone that intended on competing. You may believe it's not a fun idea and you'd be right but that doesn't seem to bother anyone else as they're perfectly fine with spending thousands to build a Deck that gets kicked to the curb later that year.

2. Prizes.... So now you've reached the end. The tournament is over so you expect great things as a reward. Instead, the "prize" is either a card that is forbidden in tournaments as a whole or it just flat out sucks. It's a total waste of time, money and effort. Much like the above point, players continue to compete despite this glaringly obvious setback.

3. Plagiarism... Another big problem is that Konami not only allows copying of Decks but they basically encourage it. Look at all the articles they release. They're always hyping up the next product's cards as a means for you, the consumer, to venture out and make said purchases. If Konami truly wants originality, they need to support older Decks more often and not just ones that were popular. People might protest that generic cards are often broken but there aren't many generic cards like that. The only ones that truly demonstrate that are from the early days and most of those have since been nerfed or unbanned.

4. Too fast..... People also seem to love winning in as few turns as possible. Okay sure there's that quick answer of victory but you generally have 40 minutes per round. What's your rush? You're not going to get to the prize money faster and you'll have plenty of downtime with no way to kill time with all the other players still playing. Besides, it's better to maximize the time you have with the Deck, especially since Konami is just going to take away its power in a few months anyway. I don't really understand the benefit of a quick Duel, especially since you probably traveled quite a ways. All that tells me is the "champions" are conceited and don't care about anything but victory. It's now "How quickly can I beat you?" instead of "Let's have a friendly game and may the best Duelist win."

I see some of you in the back ready to ask "Do you even play this game?" How could I write this article if I didn't play it? Of course, local events are hard to come by for me, especially with the current state of the country and since I couldn't care less to venture into regionals as they're not only further away but have little value in competing since I'd have very little variety with opponents and Duels would be over in a mere few turns.