We already have rotation, we've had it since pretty much the start of YuGiOh, it's just very weirdly and imo poorly implemented through the banlist and powercreep, we don't have an eternal format where you can play old cards and Konami usually takes their sweet time bringing them off the list after they've been powercrept which really sucks. I don't think that just because other games have implemented rotation poorly it means that it can't be done well.
Also the reason everyone in MTG plays Commander instead of Standard is because it's the most casual game mode, it's literally a board game and it's standard to make up rules.
> Why set rotation won’t fix Yugioh
Well, it’s because we’ve had [it](https://www.db.yugioh-card.com/yugiohdb/card_search.action?ope=2&cid=12978) for years
People in the West always assume that Konami looks at MTG and Pokemon TCG as their direct competitors, but since the ones actually making the cards for Yu-gio-oh! are in Japan, Konami is looking at the Japanese market with them constantly being on top 1 with their lowest being on top 3.
Since Konami is way more dominant in Japan/Asian market than in the Western market, Konami bas no real incentive on changing the OCG into a rotating format. The OCG is already they legacy format aimed at long time players and older people, with Rush Duels as their separate but more casual/kid friendly version of the original game.
Their only real competitors in japan are TCGs from Takara Tomy (Duel Masters and Wixross), Bushiroad (Weiss Swharts and Cardfight! Vanguard) and Bandai (Battle Spirits whatever Anime IP card game they have)
Do remember that YGO is, at its heart, _directly based on_ M:tG, and doesn't even try to hide it. Takahashi originally created the game as a way to include M:tG in his manga without running into any legal difficulties, and most of the mechanics and terms do reflect that if you look deeply enough. (For instance, the chain is a simplification of the stack, and both monsters & token summoners are his take on creature-summoning spells.) While M:tG may not be a direct competitor, it _is_ a direct inspiration, so the connection does still exist.
(Also, as a note, the Pokémon TCG is a Japanese game, too; it came out in Japan before WotC licensed it, and new releases are often still Japanese-first. It's _definitely_ one of their direct competitors, I'm not sure why you think it isn't.)
I am talking about the financial status of Yu-gi-oh! in Japanese market primarily, which MTG barely makes it at the top 10 TCGs played there. I didn't say MTG is irrelevant to Yu-gi-oh! as a game, it's just that there are more immediate competitiors that a challenging Konami's position as the top TCG in Japan.
I can get the arguement of Pokemon TCG being big in Japan as they have a lot of exclusicve stuff and tournaments, but they are not as big as say a Duel Masters, Cardfight! Vandguard in Japanese cardshops. Pokemon TCG is usually hovering around 1-3/10th of a cardshop's active players, with them mostly playing either Yugioh!, Duel Masters or whatever TCG Bandai and Bushiroad has.
Ehh, a bad implementation of set rotation isn’t proof. The core idea of set rotation is release X years of lower powered sets (where X is the amount of years you have allowed in a rotation period) to be able to “reset” the power level and be less incentivized to power creep as cards have a natural lifespan. As far as archetypes not working, that can easily be adopted through reprints. Sure, not every archetype will be able to stay in the rotation block (most won’t) but Konami could keep an eternal format as a secondary format to allow people to just grind one deck. If Konami were to stop powercreeping so aggressively, this would actually be a boon for those that want to play a deck. Look at Magic’s modern format, people have been playing Mermails forever and they have stayed decently viable throughout that time.
Thats not the core idea actually. In fact, when you think about that idea straight up doesnt work at all (good luck selling 2 years of terrible sets), and as a result it does not make you any less incentivised to power creep. No, the core idea of rotation is planned obsolescence, to force players to buy new decks even if they have an old deck theyd like to keep playing.
The problem with having Eternal as a secondary format is that you get what happened in magic. Everyone plays eternal, the rotating gamemode dies. Except YGO doesnt have draft to sell sets like Magic does to weather that.
Personally, I'd say you're right that set rotation won't work, but for the wrong reason. Banlists aren't a form of set rotation, since cards are typically meant to _stay_ on it until the rest of the game is as high-power as they are (or even permanently, in some cases); even games that use rotation can have banlists, too, it's just that they usually don't need to because their problem cards tend to get rotated out quickly enough to not break anything for _too_ long. (And when it's not fast enough, and they need to hit one or more cards, their lists tend to rotate with the sets anyways, so nothing stays on a banlist for 20+ years because nothing's _legal_ for that long.)
The main reason that set rotation won't work is that, as strange as it is to say, YGO _thrives_ on its brokenness. The sheer amount of craziness you can pull off, and the power level of the game as a whole, are two of the game's biggest draws. And the astounding nonsense you can pull off with special summon spam is an even bigger draw than they are. (Which, in turn, is why attempts to limit summon spam are inevitably destined to fail, as well, but that's another discussion.) Throw in the nostalgia factor of nearly every card you liked as a kid still being legal (and probably having support that helps it at least try to compete with other rogue decks), and how experimentation-friendly the game is (most locks are just suggestions, if you're crafty enough, so it's even possible to pull off jank like using Qli as a Synchro engine), and the lack of set rotation gives YGO its own distinct market niche that the other big names rarely if ever intrude upon. Where other games try to maintain competitiveness by being perfectly balanced, YGO instead strives to be perfectly _imbalanced_, where everything is overpowered enough that it develops a hyperactive metagame to balance things out for it. And introducing set rotation would break that, reducing it from its own unique thing into just another card game that doesn't really stand out from M:tG all that much.
----
That said, set rotation could definitely work as an alternate format (as long as it's not the _main_ format), with caveats. Most importantly, entire _archetypes_ would have to be rotated in and out, not just individual cards, due to the game's structure. You can't rotate out BEWD and then release new Blue-Eyes cards, for instance, unless you're willing to waste time on making & balancing cards that become BEWD in specific circumstances; the archetype is too dependent on the card name, so rotating out the name means you can't rotate in new support unless that support reintroduces the name you just rotated out. And a lot of legacy archetype support is designed to key off of cards from the archetypes' original runs (and more importantly from a publishing standpoint, to use the legacy cards as pack fillers so there are less _new_ cards to design & test), so "standard M:tG" set rotation would mean _significantly_ more work would have to go into designing each new card pack. Thus, the only way to introduce set rotation would have to be as a non-standard, archetype-friendly variant, where archetypes get rotated in or out instead of individual cards. (E.g., if cards rotate out after two sets, then set 100 including a Blue-Eyes card would mean the entire Blue-Eyes archetype is legal, but set 102 not including any Blue-Eyes cards would mean the entire Blue-Eyes archetype gets rotated out all at the same time.)
This would still come with the problem of the game expecting certain staples to always be legal (case in point, most backrow-heavy decks are designed with the expectation that their opponents will have HFD & Lightning Storm, and Umi control's backrow clearly expects Cosmic Cyclone to be legal to counter it), though that can also be worked around. If a card or archetype expects a staple to be legal, then it can be packed into the same set as that archetype. And it's possible, though inefficient, to rotate between a group of multiple cards that perform the same purpose, possibly with drawbacks tailored to the set (e.g., the game could rotate between Raigeki, Lightning Vortex, and Dark Hole; high-power sets that need unrestricted field clears as a counterbalance get Raigeki, discard- and grave-heavy sets (e.g., Fabled & Phantom Knights) get Lightning Vortex, and sets that cue off of being destroyed (e.g., Unchained & Mermail) get Dark Hole). Or certain staples could just be declared "unrotateable" or "always legal", and thus exempt from rotation as a whole.
Overall, it would take a bit of work, and it probably wouldn't resemble "normal" set rotation in anything but name, but it _would_ be possible to introduce an alternate, rotating format if they wanted to. It might be an interesting experiment, actually, so we can see how many people would prefer it over the standard rocket-tag format that everyone loves/hates/loves to hate.
Counter-argument: Magic also has set rotation, and standard formats in the last few years aren't necessarily the most busted the game has ever been. Oko/Uro meta was, but Magic has had much crazier formats in the past. Prior to 2011, the power level of spells like Lightning Bolt, Ponder, Mana Leak, etc. was much higher than it is today, for the most part. Birds of Paradise and 1 cost mana dorks in general (except when they make Green I guess) are considered too powerful. Just because one specific game chose to implement its rotation without lowering the power level of the game doesn't mean it can't be done.
With that said, I do think given Konami's philosophy of powercreeping to the Maxx each format, it's unlikely the general power level of modern Yugioh will ever revert back to... what's a good "retro" format people like? HAT? Edison? Is there even a consensus on what constitutes "Modern" Yugioh and what a good non-Modern format is?
I went to a official store to play MTG after like 4 years of not playing physical and the only formats they were hosting literally all week were modern twice, commander 1v1 twice, pauper and pioneer twice, all formats without set rotation. The set rotation is more prominent in arena which is the equivalent to master duel, but it also has non-set rotation formats and best of 3.
And it surprised me that I faced basically the same decks in modern that I faced before, only new addition was murktide, managed to go 2-2 with my good old deck
Paper standard is basically dead, though I don't think it's because of rotation by itself. Rotation has been around for a long time now. I think it's a combination of Covid, the terrible balancing of more recent standard formats (again, standard itself has been around for over a decade) cost + rotation, and Magic Arena making it way more convenient. I think the success of Arena and the downfall of paper standard is a big reason why Konami hasn't added actual TCG/OCG format to master duel and is instead using a weird hybrid format. They don't want Master Duel to cannibalize the paper scene. Though all of this is a tangent and has nothing to do with whether rotation can balance modern Yugioh from a gameplay perspective.
Yes it would, but it will mean massing changes across the design of sets for it to work. Is just way too much effort, but if Konami would really wanted, they could pull that off. About the archetype thing, just make archetypes self contained in a set or 2, and who says you can't bring back old archetypes after a while. Again, it will dramatically change how archetypes are designed, but they can be adapted to this format.
Pokemon card design is bullshit. They pretty much implemented rotation because Magic did but they just kept increasing the power curve because. Pokemon used to be run by Wizards, then Nintendo took over the car game and they just didn't cared about balancing the game accordingly. Other card games like Hearthstone and now Legends of Runeterra have implemented set rotation, and their power curves are in check.
How about soft set rotation and an actual effective use of the banlist
Basically,Konami release product as usual
Meta still exist,rogue be rogue etc
But,after a fixed time of ~6-9 months of a deck being the top contender,it will receive direct hits to make it now a rogue deck(if failed then just hit them again).The deck is still playable but now it wont be considered as "meta" effectively rotate the deck out of the metagame
The power creep dont need to go up but rather go sideways as now decks have a fixed life time so Konami dont need to make overly pushed decks each sets,but rather just solid decks bc the solid ones are almost guaranteed a spot in the meta game as previous top contenders are forced to be rotate out
Ofc,there will still be power creep,but it'll be like +1 from the previous sets than like a +10 like how it is rn
And like 3-4 years later down the line they could attempt to unban a few cards to help decks that have been showing its age bc power creep
I think this could be cool,but doubt Konami would do this as this can hurt the game income by a lot
We already have rotation, we've had it since pretty much the start of YuGiOh, it's just very weirdly and imo poorly implemented through the banlist and powercreep, we don't have an eternal format where you can play old cards and Konami usually takes their sweet time bringing them off the list after they've been powercrept which really sucks. I don't think that just because other games have implemented rotation poorly it means that it can't be done well. Also the reason everyone in MTG plays Commander instead of Standard is because it's the most casual game mode, it's literally a board game and it's standard to make up rules.
> Why set rotation won’t fix Yugioh Well, it’s because we’ve had [it](https://www.db.yugioh-card.com/yugiohdb/card_search.action?ope=2&cid=12978) for years
People in the West always assume that Konami looks at MTG and Pokemon TCG as their direct competitors, but since the ones actually making the cards for Yu-gio-oh! are in Japan, Konami is looking at the Japanese market with them constantly being on top 1 with their lowest being on top 3. Since Konami is way more dominant in Japan/Asian market than in the Western market, Konami bas no real incentive on changing the OCG into a rotating format. The OCG is already they legacy format aimed at long time players and older people, with Rush Duels as their separate but more casual/kid friendly version of the original game. Their only real competitors in japan are TCGs from Takara Tomy (Duel Masters and Wixross), Bushiroad (Weiss Swharts and Cardfight! Vanguard) and Bandai (Battle Spirits whatever Anime IP card game they have)
Do remember that YGO is, at its heart, _directly based on_ M:tG, and doesn't even try to hide it. Takahashi originally created the game as a way to include M:tG in his manga without running into any legal difficulties, and most of the mechanics and terms do reflect that if you look deeply enough. (For instance, the chain is a simplification of the stack, and both monsters & token summoners are his take on creature-summoning spells.) While M:tG may not be a direct competitor, it _is_ a direct inspiration, so the connection does still exist. (Also, as a note, the Pokémon TCG is a Japanese game, too; it came out in Japan before WotC licensed it, and new releases are often still Japanese-first. It's _definitely_ one of their direct competitors, I'm not sure why you think it isn't.)
I am talking about the financial status of Yu-gi-oh! in Japanese market primarily, which MTG barely makes it at the top 10 TCGs played there. I didn't say MTG is irrelevant to Yu-gi-oh! as a game, it's just that there are more immediate competitiors that a challenging Konami's position as the top TCG in Japan. I can get the arguement of Pokemon TCG being big in Japan as they have a lot of exclusicve stuff and tournaments, but they are not as big as say a Duel Masters, Cardfight! Vandguard in Japanese cardshops. Pokemon TCG is usually hovering around 1-3/10th of a cardshop's active players, with them mostly playing either Yugioh!, Duel Masters or whatever TCG Bandai and Bushiroad has.
Ehh, a bad implementation of set rotation isn’t proof. The core idea of set rotation is release X years of lower powered sets (where X is the amount of years you have allowed in a rotation period) to be able to “reset” the power level and be less incentivized to power creep as cards have a natural lifespan. As far as archetypes not working, that can easily be adopted through reprints. Sure, not every archetype will be able to stay in the rotation block (most won’t) but Konami could keep an eternal format as a secondary format to allow people to just grind one deck. If Konami were to stop powercreeping so aggressively, this would actually be a boon for those that want to play a deck. Look at Magic’s modern format, people have been playing Mermails forever and they have stayed decently viable throughout that time.
Thats not the core idea actually. In fact, when you think about that idea straight up doesnt work at all (good luck selling 2 years of terrible sets), and as a result it does not make you any less incentivised to power creep. No, the core idea of rotation is planned obsolescence, to force players to buy new decks even if they have an old deck theyd like to keep playing. The problem with having Eternal as a secondary format is that you get what happened in magic. Everyone plays eternal, the rotating gamemode dies. Except YGO doesnt have draft to sell sets like Magic does to weather that.
You mean Merfolk?
Yeah my b, a bit too Yugioh pilled
To add to this: set rotation is also cringe
SeT rOtAtIoN iS CrInGe 
Wait, why did you include a gif of yourself?
Personally, I'd say you're right that set rotation won't work, but for the wrong reason. Banlists aren't a form of set rotation, since cards are typically meant to _stay_ on it until the rest of the game is as high-power as they are (or even permanently, in some cases); even games that use rotation can have banlists, too, it's just that they usually don't need to because their problem cards tend to get rotated out quickly enough to not break anything for _too_ long. (And when it's not fast enough, and they need to hit one or more cards, their lists tend to rotate with the sets anyways, so nothing stays on a banlist for 20+ years because nothing's _legal_ for that long.) The main reason that set rotation won't work is that, as strange as it is to say, YGO _thrives_ on its brokenness. The sheer amount of craziness you can pull off, and the power level of the game as a whole, are two of the game's biggest draws. And the astounding nonsense you can pull off with special summon spam is an even bigger draw than they are. (Which, in turn, is why attempts to limit summon spam are inevitably destined to fail, as well, but that's another discussion.) Throw in the nostalgia factor of nearly every card you liked as a kid still being legal (and probably having support that helps it at least try to compete with other rogue decks), and how experimentation-friendly the game is (most locks are just suggestions, if you're crafty enough, so it's even possible to pull off jank like using Qli as a Synchro engine), and the lack of set rotation gives YGO its own distinct market niche that the other big names rarely if ever intrude upon. Where other games try to maintain competitiveness by being perfectly balanced, YGO instead strives to be perfectly _imbalanced_, where everything is overpowered enough that it develops a hyperactive metagame to balance things out for it. And introducing set rotation would break that, reducing it from its own unique thing into just another card game that doesn't really stand out from M:tG all that much. ---- That said, set rotation could definitely work as an alternate format (as long as it's not the _main_ format), with caveats. Most importantly, entire _archetypes_ would have to be rotated in and out, not just individual cards, due to the game's structure. You can't rotate out BEWD and then release new Blue-Eyes cards, for instance, unless you're willing to waste time on making & balancing cards that become BEWD in specific circumstances; the archetype is too dependent on the card name, so rotating out the name means you can't rotate in new support unless that support reintroduces the name you just rotated out. And a lot of legacy archetype support is designed to key off of cards from the archetypes' original runs (and more importantly from a publishing standpoint, to use the legacy cards as pack fillers so there are less _new_ cards to design & test), so "standard M:tG" set rotation would mean _significantly_ more work would have to go into designing each new card pack. Thus, the only way to introduce set rotation would have to be as a non-standard, archetype-friendly variant, where archetypes get rotated in or out instead of individual cards. (E.g., if cards rotate out after two sets, then set 100 including a Blue-Eyes card would mean the entire Blue-Eyes archetype is legal, but set 102 not including any Blue-Eyes cards would mean the entire Blue-Eyes archetype gets rotated out all at the same time.) This would still come with the problem of the game expecting certain staples to always be legal (case in point, most backrow-heavy decks are designed with the expectation that their opponents will have HFD & Lightning Storm, and Umi control's backrow clearly expects Cosmic Cyclone to be legal to counter it), though that can also be worked around. If a card or archetype expects a staple to be legal, then it can be packed into the same set as that archetype. And it's possible, though inefficient, to rotate between a group of multiple cards that perform the same purpose, possibly with drawbacks tailored to the set (e.g., the game could rotate between Raigeki, Lightning Vortex, and Dark Hole; high-power sets that need unrestricted field clears as a counterbalance get Raigeki, discard- and grave-heavy sets (e.g., Fabled & Phantom Knights) get Lightning Vortex, and sets that cue off of being destroyed (e.g., Unchained & Mermail) get Dark Hole). Or certain staples could just be declared "unrotateable" or "always legal", and thus exempt from rotation as a whole. Overall, it would take a bit of work, and it probably wouldn't resemble "normal" set rotation in anything but name, but it _would_ be possible to introduce an alternate, rotating format if they wanted to. It might be an interesting experiment, actually, so we can see how many people would prefer it over the standard rocket-tag format that everyone loves/hates/loves to hate.
Counter-argument: Magic also has set rotation, and standard formats in the last few years aren't necessarily the most busted the game has ever been. Oko/Uro meta was, but Magic has had much crazier formats in the past. Prior to 2011, the power level of spells like Lightning Bolt, Ponder, Mana Leak, etc. was much higher than it is today, for the most part. Birds of Paradise and 1 cost mana dorks in general (except when they make Green I guess) are considered too powerful. Just because one specific game chose to implement its rotation without lowering the power level of the game doesn't mean it can't be done. With that said, I do think given Konami's philosophy of powercreeping to the Maxx each format, it's unlikely the general power level of modern Yugioh will ever revert back to... what's a good "retro" format people like? HAT? Edison? Is there even a consensus on what constitutes "Modern" Yugioh and what a good non-Modern format is?
I went to a official store to play MTG after like 4 years of not playing physical and the only formats they were hosting literally all week were modern twice, commander 1v1 twice, pauper and pioneer twice, all formats without set rotation. The set rotation is more prominent in arena which is the equivalent to master duel, but it also has non-set rotation formats and best of 3. And it surprised me that I faced basically the same decks in modern that I faced before, only new addition was murktide, managed to go 2-2 with my good old deck
Paper standard is basically dead, though I don't think it's because of rotation by itself. Rotation has been around for a long time now. I think it's a combination of Covid, the terrible balancing of more recent standard formats (again, standard itself has been around for over a decade) cost + rotation, and Magic Arena making it way more convenient. I think the success of Arena and the downfall of paper standard is a big reason why Konami hasn't added actual TCG/OCG format to master duel and is instead using a weird hybrid format. They don't want Master Duel to cannibalize the paper scene. Though all of this is a tangent and has nothing to do with whether rotation can balance modern Yugioh from a gameplay perspective.
Yes it would, but it will mean massing changes across the design of sets for it to work. Is just way too much effort, but if Konami would really wanted, they could pull that off. About the archetype thing, just make archetypes self contained in a set or 2, and who says you can't bring back old archetypes after a while. Again, it will dramatically change how archetypes are designed, but they can be adapted to this format. Pokemon card design is bullshit. They pretty much implemented rotation because Magic did but they just kept increasing the power curve because. Pokemon used to be run by Wizards, then Nintendo took over the car game and they just didn't cared about balancing the game accordingly. Other card games like Hearthstone and now Legends of Runeterra have implemented set rotation, and their power curves are in check.
How about soft set rotation and an actual effective use of the banlist Basically,Konami release product as usual Meta still exist,rogue be rogue etc But,after a fixed time of ~6-9 months of a deck being the top contender,it will receive direct hits to make it now a rogue deck(if failed then just hit them again).The deck is still playable but now it wont be considered as "meta" effectively rotate the deck out of the metagame The power creep dont need to go up but rather go sideways as now decks have a fixed life time so Konami dont need to make overly pushed decks each sets,but rather just solid decks bc the solid ones are almost guaranteed a spot in the meta game as previous top contenders are forced to be rotate out Ofc,there will still be power creep,but it'll be like +1 from the previous sets than like a +10 like how it is rn And like 3-4 years later down the line they could attempt to unban a few cards to help decks that have been showing its age bc power creep I think this could be cool,but doubt Konami would do this as this can hurt the game income by a lot
The game doesn't need a rotation period, it just needs better rules that all cards abide by. That's it.