Hi there! So yeah, this is not the long-awaited first segment of Night Of The Loving Dead. I assure you it's a work in progress and I'm in the "watch the show and take notes" section of things. There are so many mirror shots in this show that I didn't notice before, and thus I am in heaven. Anyway, we're putting all that on the back burner so I can spend a morning talking to you about the fucked-up meta of a limited event in a competitive trading card/free-to-play gacha game. Yes, really, but this is fresh in my mind and it's fascinating to me, and whenever that happens thousands of words pour forth from my fingers. I don't think we'll hit more than a 2 or 3k here today, but we'll find out. Together, hopefully. Let me tell you a little about Yugioh Master Duel first.
I've been a fan of the Yugioh card game for... dear God, almost 20 years now. I will spare you the nostalgic memories of 2003 and forging a friendship and circle of gamers for the time being, though I will direct you to this fun post from a few years back, an off-the-cuff piece much like this about a Yugioh video game that interested me. Even though I haven't played the card game for every one of those 20 years, I have kept an eye on things and occasionally jumped back into the fray. Such was the case a month ago when Konami stealth launched Yugioh Master Duel, an official and premium free-to-play Yugioh simulator. You can imagine the deal, I'm sure. Earn in-game currency for playing, spend it on virtual booster packs, upgrade your deck and make it better. Oh hey, they're extra generous for newcomers as well and you'll drown in gems, enough to make two or three good decks. Then the free gems dry up, and if you want to make another deck or upgrade the cards in previous decks to the high-power must-have cards? Goodness me, look at this handy dandy way to purchase gems for real money! Yeah, it's a gacha game. It very much wants you to spend real money on it. A strike against it making GOTY 2022, to be sure, but I with enough responsible willpower and some good fun decks have been enjoying it.
In the end, Konami's generosity is what went wrong. Competing in the XYZ Festival earns you medals, and hitting certain medal milestones gives you prizes. There are tickets to open special XYZ-themed booster packs, but more tantalizing are the gems. Like the free-to-play nature of the game, they're incredibly generous at first before drying up at later medal counts. Even so, the amount is too much to ignore for anyone who's gem-starved. I earned somewhere in the realm of 2000 gems in an evening of playing. For reference, 100 gems are sold in the paid store for somewhere around $2 USD. So yeah. A lot of free rewards are on the line here. What's more, you earn medals as long as you finish a game without conceding. Victory would net you 100 medals, basically guaranteeing the next reward early on in the reward list and rounding out to about half a reward at the next highest tier. Losing would get you 50 medals. If you were using a loaner deck offered by the game, these gem rewards were lesser, but we'll use the math for using your own constructed deck for reasons that will become clear. So it was that I hopped online with my Zoodiac deck and played some games. I was having myself a good time, but there was something looming on the horizon. The meta was about to change, in a weird and wild way that I don't know if Konami could have foreseen.
Here's the thing about a Yugioh game: it can take a bit. It varies, of course, but we'll lowball an estimate of 10 to 15 minutes if you get your power cards out and the opponent can't mount a good defense before being crushed. Things can take shorter or longer, of course, but we'll keep that estimate in mind. The point is simple. You get 100 medals for winning, and 50 medals for losing. The XYZ Festival players quickly caught on that it's actually quicker to intentionally lose two games than it was to legitimately play and win one game. Enter the rise of the self-first turn kill deck, or selfTK as I'll be calling it from now on. Decks comprised entirely of cards with the drawback of doing massive damage to your life, such that a two or three-card combo will drain you down to 0 in a single turn, lose you the game, and get you 50 medals. Repeat, and you've earned 100 medals in less time than it would take to play out a match while actually trying and activating effects. On some level, you can't blame this mentality. People wanted to farm out those thousands of free gems while they could, and get the things as fast as possible. Hell, I wanted free gems. So it was that yes, dear reader, I consulted friends and crafted myself a deck dedicated to self-destruction as soon as possible.
Now, in my defense, I didn't intend to grind out the entire damn event like this, all 20,000 available medals. The generous gem count caps out somewhere in the 3000s, only giving you 20 gems a pop for every alternating reward after that. I would simply get up to that level with the selfTK deck and then go back to my Zoodiac deck and actually play the card game. I found myself laying on the couch on a Friday night with music on, repeatedly destroying myself. A meta of self-destruction breeds some curious things. Like how even though I was playing a card that would only destroy myself, the opponent would still negate it. Was it a shotgun negate of not even reading what I was doing and just going AM NEGATE CARD YOU NO PLAY THE GAME, or was it a spiteful attempt to keep me alive longer? Then there was the moment halfway in where I realized that it was beneficial to go second. If you're matched up against someone actually playing the game, it doesn't matter, you're destroying yourself on your turn anyway. If you're matched against another selfTK player, however, they now have the onus to destroy themselves first and you win the game, getting double the reward. Then there were moments where I wasn't able to destroy myself with all my cards and had to pass, letting the opponent's board of monsters defeat me. Often times they opted to flex, either practicing their combos or just keeping me alive out of spite while they played 20 cards before attacking for game. The absolute best bit of spiteful content though, I'll link below. It's a video from a Yugioh Youtuber who built a deck designed to heal the opponent's life, keeping them alive as long as possible until they inevitably surrendered and forfeited any chance at their 50 medals. Hilarious.
Anyway, I woke up this morning and Konami had actually addressed this madness. Their fix was simple: you still get 50 medals for losing, but you now get 500 medals for winning. No longer is it faster to lose two games than win one; now you'd have to lose ten times to earn what you'd get from winning one, and it would indeed be faster to just play out a game and actually try than do that. I hit the gem cap, so I'm just fine retiring my idiotic selfTK deck. I had some intriguing Zoodiac matches this morning, even! It's a fun deck! I'm happy that I'm incentivized to actually play it, and even though the rewards are small the medal win increase means I can be well-rewarded for a single win. Datamining has shown that Konami has other Festivals planned for other special cards, and it makes me wonder how they'll deal with selfTK nonsense for those. Will they ban the cards that enable it outright? Will they make the reward for winning obviously worth the time spent playing compared to losing repeatedly? Time will tell. Until then, I'm going to enjoy my time playing in the XYZ Festival with my Zoodiacs, and I'll of course set aside some time for watching Zombie Land Saga. I'm sure next time we see each other, we'll talk about that.
In the meantime, I spent all those gems I earned building a Live Twin deck, a deck comprised entirely of girls who are phantom thieves by moonlight and VTubers by daylight. God, I love this big dumb card game.
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