Marik Structure Deck.

So I found out a few days ago that Konami will be releasing a Marik Ishtar Structure Deck in October. You know, from the original series. The deck contains a lot of the newer Gravekeeper cards, along with some cards Marik used during the TV series, Temple of the Kings (a banned card) with Serket, and, as a finishing touch, a common Mirror Force.

...

WHY are they only doing this NOW?

Mirror Force has been common in Japan since the first Yugi Structure Deck, which was released when the first series was still going. Everywhere else, it has been one of the most coveted cards in the game since its initial release in Metal Raiders. It was shiny, powerful, and was one of Yugi's favorite traps in the show. Mirror Force was a good trap that was - and possibly still is - used in every deck.


This is another good trap, but too risque for a children's card game.

Semi-recently, they also released a Kaiba Duelist Pack, Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon card sleeves, and a Yugi Duelist Pack with unreleased Japanese alternate arts. They have also released a ton of support for older themes, such as Gravekeepers and Amazonesses. These would have been great ideas from Day 1, when Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon was so coveted that people were paying money for just one rumored release. Now, BEUD's everywhere, and card releases are more or less synchronized with the show.

They did not do it then, so what is compelling them to do it now?

In a word: Nostalgia.

You probably know at least one person who bitches about art today. These people are like the old farts who say "Back in my day..." and get completely lost in the past, even if it was not necessarily better.


Huh? Marik? Is my hearing aid on?

Does it still sell? Oh yes. The kids who grew up watching the original Yu-Gi-Oh! - which wasn't that great, given the anime's numerous retcons and deviations from the original manga - will probably be all too willing to get into the game again as long as it features the characters they love. Furthermore, now that they actually know how to play the game and care about their cards, they will buy matching accessories from collectible dog tags to sleeves to binders, and common, effective cards like Mirror Force actually matter. Konami thinks that their primary target audience is starting to care now.

This is, of course, incorrect. YGO was one of those 'gateway' games. Due to its darker, more mature aesthetic, more adults and teens got into YGO than Pokemon or Digimon. Four companies handled YGO, meaning that many, many cards did not find their way over to the States (or the rest of the world; see the BEUD example for the effects). Since the rarest cards were often the most powerful, adult players weighed packs for foils, ripped off little kids, and did anything they could to get their mitts on cards like Mirror Force. YGO was handled extremely poorly, so many of us learned how to not manage a card game the hard way.

If you surfed the YGO-based message boards long enough, you would have learned that four companies were involved in its transfer over to the States: Konami, UDE, 4Kids, and Shueisha. Konami managed the YGO franchise; UDE printed the cards (and may have dabbled a bit more); 4Kids dubbed the anime, YGO's main source of funding; Shueisha published the manga in Japan, and later got a deal with Viz Media over here. Most people did not give a rat's ass; ignorance was bliss, and if you thought the dragons and magicians were cool, you were pretty much in the clear. (Then people started asking about BEUD repeatedly and found out.)

Yu-Gi-Oh! sells style. That is their main niche; they deal with the more mature, manga-loving demographic that dislikes the 'CoroCoro' look of Pokemon but still loves anime-style art. YGO is based off of a shounen manga series, which is above CoroCoro's designated age group. Half of the people buying YGO do not even care if the game is good; they just like the awesome dragons and/or bishounen from the TV series. The game is largely propelled by character value.


Oh, and LittleKuriboh, but MOSTLY character value.

The characters should have gotten awesome tie-ins while the original series was still running, but a number of company errors prevented the U.S. from getting the same good Structure Decks as Japan. I have had people tell me "OMG KONAMI IS GOOD NOW!" ever since the start of 5D's. Maybe, but it took them ten years...and that is WAY too long.

Support the new series if you must. Giving Konami your cash for a series that ended at least 5 years ago is like sailing a ship too late to save a drowning witch. That's why they're also releasing God Cards again.

Care to Play a Little Othello?

No, I don't mean the Shakespeare play. I mean the board game in which pieces change from black to white and back. This happens in card games far too often.

Nearly every monster-based card game has some set in which a few cards from previous sets 'go dark.' For Pokemon, the first set of this sort was the Team Rocket expansion (which came after Fossil); for Yu-Gi-Oh!, Phantom Darkness (although one could argue about Pandora/Arkana's variant Dark Magician). Digimon had a slew of type and color variations from the get-go - MetalGreymon was originally a Virus type.

So, why do companies do this?

There are a number of reasons. The most prominent one is that everyone, at some point and on some level, wants to see heroes go dark. That was why Toei/Bandai changed MetalGreymon's typing to begin with; in the anime, Virus-Type had been almost equated with evil. MetalGreymon's lost identity as a Virus-Type later made a cameo in Season 2. When there are stark 'good' and 'evil' sides, as there are in many of the series that Japanese card games are based off of, there's always a question of what would happen if the protagonist turned to the dark side a la Star Wars.

Unfortunately, this can be cumbersome in card games. For example, in the Team Rocket set mentioned above, one could only evolve Dark Charmeleon into Dark Charizard, Dark Wartortle into Dark Blastoise, and so on. A similar thing happened with Gym Leader and Team Aqua/Magma Pokemon.

Oh, how Gen III abused its ability to make things with more than one type.

Many Team A/M Pokemon were, you guessed it, cross-typed. They were often Dark/Whatever they usually were. If nothing else, they no longer had 'dark' in their names, and had more evolutionary options. I realize that Dark-Type wasn't around when the TR set was released; Nintendo updated that idea in "Team Rocket Returns" using actual Dark-typing, as well as slipping 'Dark' in the name. There was also an outlying Dark Celebi in EX: Hidden Legends.

OK, whatever. Using Dark like that is understandable, right?

Enter Delta Species. The idea behind it was that some scientists in the Holon region (which is not accessible in-game) were trying to locate Mew via electromagnetic waves. This caused mutations in the Pokemon of the surrounding area - namely, type changes.

Game-wise, this was done to make sure that relatively underpopulated types - Fire, Electric, and Steel - got more coverage. Delta Pokemon retained all other attributes of their former types - that is, a fire-type Pikachu (that did not exist, but as a hypothetical example) would still be weak to Fighting as opposed to being weak to Water. It would make a mono-Fire deck a bit harder to counter. Smart idea.

While the Pokemon Company meant well, they really could have done more with the whole 'Delta Species' concept. For example, there was a Grass-Type Dragonair; wouldn't it have been sweet to see a green Dragonair using Razor Leaf? Wait a sec- Dragonair don't come in green.

That's the thing that made Delta Species suck: They diversified the attacks well enough, but did not do so with the art. Black, Dark-type Shiny Charizard was a good move; they also made a Fire-Type Gyarados to coincide with its alternate red coloration. They were already breaking the rules with Delta Species. Why did they not go one step farther and change colors as well? It would have been interesting, challenging, and engaging to see, say, a Milotic using a Fire attack.

While this may seem like an unwise move on Pokemon's part, Yu-Gi-Oh! is the master of atrocities when it comes to giving creatures alternate forms. Othello is no exception to this rule.

Dark is one of the strongest types in the game. It has been since the days of the very first set, "Legend of Blue-Eyes White Dragon." Despite the set's name, back in those days, everyone was running Fiend/Spellcaster decks (called F/S Beatdown) with Blue-Eyes splashed in if present at all. It only got stronger when Chaos came around (removing 1 Light and 1 Dark Monster for a 3000/2500 BEAST -> Mokey Mokey + Skull Servant = GG). If anything, all other types were unbalanced in comparison.

Then "Phantom Darkness" came out. Then, everything else REALLY became weaker than Dark-Types.

In Phantom Darkness, the super-strong "Dark Boss" monsters were released, along with powerful support cards like "Allure of Darkness." These cards were not just good- they were AMAZING examples of type support done right. For example, Dark Armed Dragon required exactly 3 Dark Monsters in the Graveyard to be Special Summoned. Once on the field, it could wreak havoc with its amazing 2800 ATK and monster-destroying power. It stuck to its grits as a 'retrained' Dark Armed Dragon Lv7, bearing similar stats and abilities. The other Dark Bosses generally followed suit (with the exception of Dark Simurgh, who outshines its non-Dark counterpart in every way EXCEPT stats).

If Dark-Types had really needed the help, this would have been welcomed. Atlantis ("A Legendary Ocean"...up yours, 4Kids) and Daedalus were much-needed Water-Type support. Dark already had a plethora of things making it good. It did not need the help that nearly every other element did.

So, why did Konami do that? For the same reason they do everything: "Because it's cool." Never use Invader Zim logic in the real world. You'll make money, but it will not have a pretty effect on the metagame.

So how do you do it RIGHT?

You all have heard me bitch on and on about how card game companies like Konami and Bandai are constantly screwing things up. Some people probably think that I'm almost impossible to please. That's not true. There are some companies that have constantly done things right.

As much as I hate to admit it, 4Kids is on this list. What they lack in dubbing skill they make up for in marketing prowess. Yes, Nintendo and Konami no doubt had hands in making their respective franchises successful, but this doesn't change the fact that 4Kids is a marketing behemoth. They know how to advertise, and they know what appeals to their target audience - kids. 'Slifer the Sky Dragon' was named after a 4Kids executive producer that loaned Konami a HUGE hand when it came to making YGO a household name. If he was able to replace the name of Osiris on a key card in the animated series, whatever he did had to be pretty damn good. This is not a one-time deal; 4Kids handles their own CCG, Chaotic, which does reasonably well, and had some sway with Pokémon in the past.

However, Nintendo also knows what it's doing without the help of KHAAAN. Pokémon remains a hot seller on card and toy shelves. There is not nearly as much merchandise as there was when Pokémon first appeared as a 'fever' across the globe, but despite complaints about the Gen IV designs, I cannot see Pokémon leaving any time soon. Nintendo handles it very gracefully. Its only flaw is the stale animé, which could totally use a protagonist change at the very least. No offense, Pikachu, but you're the only character with any sort of development on that show. Nintendo has all of its other bases covered.

Wizards of the Coast, the creator of Magic:the Gathering, also deserves mention. These are the people who STARTED trading card games to begin with, but that's not what puts them up here. What has kept Magic: the Gathering going on for as long as it has is that WotC learns from its mistakes, and is constantly trying new things. That is VITAL for a card game's survival: Always be seeking to improve, but if something doesn't work out, for Cthulhu's sake, don't repeat the error!

See? I don't hate everything.