Yu-Gi-Oh!: An Anti-Drug?

Yu-Gi-Oh! players, as I've said before and will say again, are the human equivalent of magpies. They copy each other and like shiny things - the shinier, the better. This somehow makes them a lot like drug dealers. They will do ANYTHING to get their shiny cards, from making their own to scamming.

I wondered, after looking at my shiny YGO cards for too way long, what happened to making custom Secret Rares. Yes, you read right: There is a method of making those crappy Supers and Ultras shiny as all get-out. There was a thread on Pojo once with a few decent tutorials on how to do this. Not wanting to miss out on my Secret Rare Triangle Ecstasy Spark (seriously, I will take those off your hands), I tried looking it up again:



The commenter who said 'keep the SCR on you fool' or something along those lines is 100% correct, BTW. (That said, I'm also interested in your Marshmallon Glasses.)

However, some of the other videos made me realize that, wow...Yu-Gi-Oh! is a lot like drugs!



Now, I bet you're wondering...What is so bad about scaling children's trading cards? After all, aren't these people just beating the odds? Couldn't they just wind up with junk like anyone else?

Weeelllll...that's the thing. There is no 'anyone else' around scalers. Sure, maybe a few of the more generous ones will leave the Super Rare packs alone (they weigh slightly less than Ultras and Secrets), but if you are in scaler territory, your odds of getting anything shiny are slim. That's why they have a territory chart - so that other scalers won't come after their gold.

This means that the rest of us without scales take a gamble. Have our packs been scaled? We don't know (unless we have also seen that chart). There is no visible difference between scaled and unscaled packs. We have to hope that our stores disallow scaling.

If they do ban it, these people have powerful retorts. From memory, one response to being denied scalage in a retail store is to buy a ton of packs from a place that does permit scaling. Then, show the manager (or the person who presumably stopped you) the receipt from the place that DOES allow it. These people aren't lookin' for any trouble; just hand over all the shiny cards and nobody gets hurt. Capice?

Seriously, though: What DOES this say about the state of the game? If nearly all good cards are shiny, and a handful of people have a lot of the shiny cards, then only a handful of people have a chance at making any sort of gain. I mean ANY sort- nobody likes pulling junk, and if enough people pull enough junk, there will be a mass-exodus of players. You don't want that, Konami.

Worse still, this is hurting Konami's target audience: Children. If little kids eventually learn that, hey, they'll never get anything shiny from YGO packs, they will give up. Card advertisements every Saturday morning are effective, but even children have brains. Once they learn that over half of the most recent Yu-Gi-Oh! sets are Rare or higher, they will give up.

You're digging your own grave by making the best cards so rare, Konami. UDE is not without fault, either, but they're not in charge anymore. Konami busted them for making real counterfeit cards. I have never seen a card game so tightly kept under lock and key in my life; when Pharaonic Guardian came out, packs had to be kept behind the counter. It won't be long before they'll be just as 'need to know a guy' as drugs - at least, for anyone looking for any real 'fix.'

Card games are serious business.