I’m someone who has tried to get into the game, multiple times over (and still want to!) but never managed to do it where I feel comfortable playing. This is more of a personal problem, but I remember being able to teach myself the game a lot easier before than now. I used to play DL extensively but gave up after 3 years.

There is a very good reason why Rush Duels exist - TCG and OCG became too saturated and power crept. Konami knows this very well.

Despite best efforts from anyone involved, the game is very closeted and hard to get into because of the complexity and partially because of the community surrounding the game.

That, combined with Konami’s way of marketing TCG (they depend heavily on content creators) means they’ll always be niche by comparison.

Master Duel isn’t helping anyone. It’s its own thing and it is treated as such. Because of that, there isn’t much of an overlap between IRL and digital Yu-Gi-Oh players.

This matters because there’s a lot of IRL players who don’t care about MD whatsoever (and vice versa). This is a pretty big missed marketing opportunity.

Sure, Konami has their reasons for keeping it this way but it’s slowly but surely backfiring as we can see.

Their lazy approach to solving the game’s fundamental problems are starting to show. They wanted to keep good graces of whales (both IRL and MD) because they would be pissed if TCG and OCG were to merge. And that merge would at least allow MD to go inline with IRL game and be a unified experience.

They’re more afraid of losing those potential IRL players, but realistically I think they’d profit more from MD if it followed OCG rules because I don’t believe there are that many new TCG/OCG players coming in, whereas they do have a better potential via a digital game.

I want this game to be better because I love it. It can be better and it’s frustrating when you know that it’s could be better, but it isn’t.