u/curry-is-a-drink

I'm gonna put this under rant because I know I'll just sound like a whiner, and I'll take people calling me that; but I feel like after my brief hiatus, the game kind of feels impossible to catch up with now more than ever, maybe you can pin that to the decks I currently have

I don't know when exactly it happened, but hand info no longer feels sacred anymore, certainly there were bullshit handrip cards back then like Omega (and maybe his good friend Dis Pater), Trish, Lovely, Talents even sometimes, etc, but those used to feel like outliers or treated more like their secondary options, Lab players in particular will start yelling at your unfair treatment of Trap decks because you're a comboslop enjoyer if you ever mention her handrip ever actually winning games

Elfnote will handrip for one, Rotary tells you full hand info, even "bad decks" like R.B. has Lambda Cannon for hand info, it no longer feels like you can really "surprise" your opponent anymore Going Second which is half of the tension of Going First, because even the most fuck off negate board still has to worry about getting dropped Kaiju or something, or getting Evenly into Droplet, or an unexpected Talents steal, and that feels like it just doesn't exist anymore because seemingly the promised Tearlament day of Turn 0 plays is gradually coming to decks whose power level are far above old Turn 0 play decks like Fluffal

I don't think anyone misses the Barrier Statue Floo days, but a notable difference there is that Floo can't just set up a hyper-specific board to account for your hand, they just gotta pray they can beat your hand with Stormwinds and either an omni or a Compulse

Maybe one can say we're in a rough transitional period between the "one-card combo" era into the "Turn 0 engine" era, maybe somewhere in the future it'd be standardized, and truthfully that would be great, I think the Turn 0s K9VS and Dracotail provide are (mostly, no thanks to Winda) fun, I find enjoyment in breaking boards and I do actually enjoy dealing with interrupted combo lines, god even Synchron, one of the most legendary fuck off negate board deck might have as much Turn 0 plays as pure Tear once Fidraulis and Emergency comes out

It's just that I feel like I'll never be able to enjoy that sort of design because decks are so UR inflated these days that it feels like it takes a lot of effort just to make one deck that does that, they just do not give you a good enough deck to catch up with the current state of the metagame, I've been stuck making Blind Second Raptors work because it's literally the most viable deck I'm working with, Bystial-heavy Dragon Link has been awkward to deal with, I don't feel like the Bystials are good enough as a form of interruption for most decks

If I put in the time, maybe I can do a barebones core for one of those decks, but I thought about it and wondered if it's even worth it once they somehow powercreep those decks and I have to repeat that grind, not to mention new UR staples I'll have to get, I still remember the arm and leg I have to give up just to play Primite Blue-Eyes, all that for one deck

I don't necessarily hate Master Duel or anything, and you can get by the game for free, but it doesn't really feel like it respects your time if you do that, as if the game doesn't already not respect your time by punishing you for going on a break, MD never really feels free as opposed to just you paying with time instead of money; the comeback campaign is just not good enough, they hand you a deck that's relevant like three years ago if you don't play for long enough (I think you need a friend code for that too which makes it worse), you're on your own on the staples, even DL is generally better than that because they usually hand you a competitive Skill even for a barebones version of the deck

Konami certainly has the right to make money, but I also feel like I have the right to comment on how they do so, not that it matters assuming they're probably drowning in it from whatever whale market they seemingly captured, any other gacha game would be dead if it had MD's level of gatekeeping plus the several FTKes the game has enabled

I'm not sure if I'll keep playing, maybe I'll just keep it installed if a friend asks me to play together