The theory of card games: Powercreep. The similarities and differences between Magic and Yugioh.

I started this Blog because of my passion of the best Magic format, namely cube, which is a collection of powerful cards that are drafted from packs. However, with the quarantine, my ability to play cube with my friends and therefore also my general enjoyment of Magic drastically decreased. I started searching through my mountain of cards and found my Yugioh cards. I started watching more Yugioh content. Today (yes, I wrote this a bunch of months ago), I found a video collaboration between one of my favourite MTG and Yugioh youtubers, namely this video. I would recommend watching this video, because it gives a lot of insight into Yugioh as a MTG player and vice versa and generally gives a good introduction on the similarities of card games.

Quick side note: I played Yugioh from 2002 to 2015 and I regulary went to tournaments from 2010 to 2013. I stopped playing because of the Qliphort archetype and the introduction of Pendulum monsters. Magic players might wonder what I mean by an archetype:

An archetype is a certain set of cards that (mostly) only work with each other via extreme synergies. The Magic analogues would be the Energy package from Kaladesh or the Food package from Eldraine. 

One should say that certain cards from those decks like for example Gilded Goose are also playable in decks that are not centered around the Food archetype.

Then I thought about why I quit Yugioh. There were two reasons: First, nobody in my area played Yugioh and I had to travel a lot to go to tournaments. Secondly, I quit because the game became to degenerate. Most Magic players may have noticed a sudden increase in powerlevel since War of the Spark, too. One thing is clear: Powercreep is a necessary evil in any (collective card) game. The product itself has to provide some innovation, and this innovation usually comes with new cards that have to be viable in some way. If they are not viable, nobody will play them. Every set, cards have to be exciting and therefore have to do new things. New things often lead to degenerate things because new things are harder to balance. I want to stress that I don't necessarily think that insane cards have to be printed on purpose; but creating something broken is unavoidable if one keeps being innovative. I play(ed) Yugioh, Duel Links, Magic, Duel Masters and Hearthstone and each of those games is or was subject to powercreep.

In Yugioh, with each new saga (roughly every 5 years), there comes a new type line. The first being Fusion monsters, then Synchro, Exceed, Pendulum and latest Link Monsters. These cards usually start in your extra deck (except for Pendulums, but those are weird anyway).

An extra deck is a set of 15 cards that start outside your normal deck. Those cards can be summoned from your extra deck if your board/hand fulfills certain criteria. Normally, you have to use resources of you from your normal deck to play cards out of your extra deck.

The extra deck is one main aspect of Yugioh that heavily distinguishes it from other card games in my opinion. You have a variety of cards that can be played outside your deck that are useful in certain situations. The best analogy of that in Magic's case is a recent one, namely the so-called Companions. For the Yugioh players out there: Magic has no sort of extra deck. You only have cards in your deck and have (very very) limited access to other cards (namely in your sideboard). Companions are cards that start in your side deck and can be played from there if your main deck meets certain criteria. The problem was, that those criteria were not restrictive enough. Hence, we got two of the most powerful cards every printed, one even got restricted in Vintage, namely Lurrus of the Dream Den. The card was errated together with other ones that had the same effect.

In MTG, there are multiple so-called constructed formats. We have Standard, where only the cards from the last 2 years are legal, Modern, where cards since 2003 are legal, Legacy where mostly all cards except the most broken ones are legal and Vintage where every busted card is legal (although you may only play one copy). There are separate banned lists in every format. There is also a format called Pioneer, but that one is dead. 

The vintage format is the equivalent to the standard Yugioh format. In Yugioh there is only one constructed format, where every card ever printed, that is not on the banned list, is legal. There is no rotation. Hence, nowadays every new set of Yugioh has to bring playable cards to this format. For Magic players; imagine that every new standard set has to bring playable cards to the vintage format and warp that format. That sounds... familiar. In the last two years in Magic, we saw that more and more cards are playable in Vintage although they should be designed for Standard. For Yugioh players: We recently got a card named Oko in the new standard set and it was so powerful that it got banned in multiple formats, even in Modern and it is still a problem in Legacy and in Vintage.

I want to compare the history of Magic and Yugioh, because I noticed that the evolution of powercreep is very similar to some degree.

I. The innocent Birth

It seems characteristic for card games to start with really broken cards. This is normal, because the game has to be explored first and certain aspects of the game are not clear yet. The funny thing it, that both Magic and Yugioh started with the same outline:

Magic started with insanely powerful sorceries and interupts/instants and insanely weak creatures.

Yugioh started with insanely powerful magic (now spell) and trap cards and insanely weak monsters.

For the first set, it is literally the same setup. One beautiful analogy is Ancestral Recall and Pot of Greed.

Ancestral Recall let's you (or your opponent!) draw 3 cards for 1 mana. This card is absolutely busted in Magic. Normally, drawing 2 cards costs from 3-4 mana. Pot of Greed is the best card ever printed in any card game ever. It costs nothing to play and you get 2 cards for only 1. It is the best card in Yugioh in the sense that every deck would play three Pot of Greeds if it could as it is free card advantage. Both of those cards are iconic. Side note: One of those cards costs 10.000$ whereas the other one costs 5 cents plus shipping.

Magic and Yugioh quickly recognized that these cards are very powerful and that one should not print anything as powerful as those. For Magic, Ancestral Recall was a blessing: It established how much mana drawing a card is worth. Unfortunately for Yugioh, Pot of Greed established that card draw can't really be included as easily. Hence, for a long time (until Upstart Goblin), we saw barely any cards that straight up draws a card without any meaningful restriction. This changed of course with powercreep (Pot of Avarice, Pot of Desires, etc.)

II. The first Rise

I would consider the first intentional spike in powerlevel in Magic to be the introduction of Urza's Saga. In Urza's Sage, we see a lot of cards that are still powerful today and therefore are played in Legacy, Vintage, etc. Most of them are sorceries, instants, enchantments and lands (the Yugioh analogy would be magic and traps cards).

In Yugioh, the first spike of immense powercreep comes with Invasion of Chaos. But not in the form of spell and magic cards (Magic analogy: instants, enchantments, sorceries, lands), rather in the form of immensely strong monsters (creatures).

For Yugioh, the most obvious contestant is Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End. A monster (creature) that can be basically played for free which completely messed with the resource management of the game at that time, mainly considering the summoning resource management. In Yugioh, you may only summon one monster per normal summon each turn. In addition, you must tribute (sacrifice) two monsters (creatures) to play a creature with 8 stars (high CMC). However, Chaos Emperor Dragon can be played for free (without a tribute/sacrifice) by removing from play (exiling) a Light and a Darkness monster (creature) from your Graveyard. Both Magic and Yugioh players can imagine that his is not hard at all. Immense advantage for virtually zero cost is the result.

I searched for an analogy in Magic and I settled with Time Spiral, a sorcery (spell card) that is free at the point where you play it. In Magic, you have to spend mana to gain an effect. Cards do X for the cost of Y. Time Spiral, while costing six mana, untaps six lands. Hence, after playing Time Spiral you are back at the point where you started, except that you drew a ton of cards. As a result, Time Spiral is free at a certain point in the game and similarly to Chaos Emperor Dragon provides immense combo potential because it is playable for efficiently zero mana.

Of course, those two cards do very different things, but both of them fundamentally mess with the resource management of the respective game at that time. The interesting thing is that these two cards should have set another limit to the game. Chaos Emperor Dragon should have taught us, that monsters (creatures) should not be playable for free if they have an insane upside in Yugioh. But Yugioh did not learn from this initial mistake and printed another dragon, that can basically be played for free, too. We will come to that eventually. Time Spiral should have taught Magic that free spells are dangerous, no matter at which point you can play them. Virtually zero mana cards are dangerous for Magic.

Everything would be fine in a game, if the creators of cards would set these cards as upper bars for design. Learning from mistakes and design accordingly. 

For Yugioh, we should have learned that huge monsters (creatures) should have a real cost. 

For Magic, we should have learned that free spells are dangerous.

III. The first Sin

Pod of Greed and Ancestral Recall have an excuse to exist. The game just started and the game was not explored enough because it obviously had not existed yet. In addition, in the beginning of these card games, the creators probably did not expect a huge community that would get really mad at new printings of insanely strong cards and would call for their bannings.

The first powercreep in Chaos Emperor Dragon or Time Spiral may come unintentionally. This is inevitable. One has to explore design space to learn what is fine and what it not. There is a difference between what I call a rise in powerlevel and a sin. A rise comes from exploring new design space. A sin is doing the same mistake again knowingly, although one already made the same mistake. 

For Yugioh, the introduction of Phantom Darkness, introduced the famous DAD, namely Dark Armed Dragon. For Magic, we went to Phyrexia and got a lot of cards that cost zero mana.

Dark Armed Dragon is a 7 level monster (high CMC) that can be played without tribute if you have exactly three Darkness monsters in your graveyard. This may seem like a huge restriction to you, but it is a trivial one. Yugioh has a lot of ways to manipulate your graveyard size and therefore the number of Darkness monsters in your Graveyard. Even then, the card would have been fine if not for the outrageously overpowered effect by being able to remove from play (exile) a Darkness monster from your graveyard to destroy one card on the field. NOT ONCE PER TURN. The card is the incarnation of Chaos Emperor Dragon and intentionally so. 

Gitaxian Probe is one of a bunch of cards that use Phyrexian Mana. This mana can be paid by normal mana or by lifepoints. Hence, Gitaxian Probes reads: "Pay 2 life, look at target player's hand, draw a card." Yugioh players will see the similarity to Upstart Goblin. The card is insanely busted and therefore banned in every format, being only legal in Vintage, while restricted to one copy only, like Ancestral Recall. When a Magic card is playable in Yugioh, you know that the card is nuts. 

IV. Branching Paths

I would consider that up until to this point, the two games went through roughly the same history. However, at this point in their respective histories, it becomes clear that Yugioh and Magic went into different directions. 

Magic really lowered the powerlevel and although good cards were released, nothing really messed with the fundamental aspect that  I used as an example here, namely zero mana cards. It took a long time to see another outrage of multiple broken cards printed, namely War of the Spark, M20 and Eldraine, where we saw Once upon a Time, yet another card that basically draws a card for zero mana (even more powerful than that because you can choose between five cards). Of course, there have been other instances of zero mana cards that were problematic but Once upon a Time fits well here as a carddraw spells.

In Yugioh, it is different. I seemed like Yugioh decided to drop all of its initial design philosophies, one major one being the tribute rule for cards with level 5 or more. It seems like at this point Yugioh decided to start introducing archetypes that I explained in the beginning. Nearly every archetype that was released in Yugioh at this point included at least one "Boss Monster", similar to Dark Armed Dragon, which can be played with very easy conditions and has insane upside. One reason I can see for this is that these Boss monsters are really exciting. Every new archetype brought another powerful way to generate advantage out of nowhere with no real cost. Of course, this is not the exact truth. With the release of Synchro Monsters (Exceed Monsters), we returned to a more "good stuff" format where every deck had access to the new boss monsters. However, with passing time, new archetypes established that broke the respective mechanic. For synchros it was not that bad, but with Exceed we had Windups, Burning Abyss, etc. which all had access to very powerful exceed monsters that were only playable in the respective archetype.

I will continue with a second part, where I talk about Yugioh and Magic individually. I would probably write about Yugioh first, namely on its continuous increase in powerlevel and then compare it with the powercreep in Magic that we see in the last 2 years. 

I will also write about what I love about Magic today and why I quit Yugioh in more detail. One of those reasons is the lack of play modes in Yugioh. I am currently trying to construct a Yugioh Commander format, which I am currently trying with a few friends of mine, but it needs much more time to setup (as Covid is still here, this is still in progress).

In Magic, there is a Commander format, where you usually play with 3-5 people. Any deck is 100 cards and you may only play one copy of a card in your deck. Nearly every card is legal. One card in your deck (a legendary creature) may be your commander, so it basically starts in your opening hand and can be played multiple times (albeit with a restriction for each successful summoning).

I hope you enjoy the read.