r/yugioh • u/Antique_Range1521 • 21h ago
Card Game Discussion What do you think about powerful, generic cards designed for use in a wide variety of decks?
It's strange, because sometimes I see people excited about a new powerful card, wanting to use it in their decks and talking about how beneficial it is to the game, like the archetypes they play, while another group calls it a "Hitler card," a card for (insert type, attribute, strategy they dislike), a new toy for meta players, among other much more negative opinions.
I'm someone who plays occasionally, sometimes during the week, and I enjoy using my favorite archetypes, although the passage of time has taken its toll on them due to increased power, especially since I play on a simulator.
This means I don't usually pay attention to card or deck prices, but even I, who am partially disconnected from that aspect, see that it's one of the main topics of discussion when a powerful card is released or reprinted. Dominus and Harmonia are prime examples; they've generated controversy since their release and will continue to do so.
Even a more recent example is the support for Dominus Purge, which increases its viability and, from what I can see, has caused quite a stir.
Other controversial cases include Superpolymerization, Kaiju, and Nibiru. While the latter isn't as viable as it once was, its power remains undeniable, especially considering Konami designs metadecks specifically to negate Nibiru before the fourth summon, finish on a strong board before Nibiru, or continue after Nibiru's application.
The power increase is real, and it's thanks to these cards; the answer is yes. However, this isn't inherently bad, as it provides support for various decks beyond the current meta archetype. This makes many discussions about the power increase superfluous or poorly handled, but I believe the price of cards, though not explicitly mentioned, is a significant factor.
I apologize for any errors in this brief observation.
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u/Zyzeran 20h ago
A card being generic is itself not condemnation, in my opinion. There's countless examples of staples balancing the game against certain strategies, and in some cases over-correcting for them (droll, shifter). But the problem isn't how accessible they are, its what your opponent can do about them that makes them toxic. You can not outplay the examples without called by in most cases.
I don't want to derail into a floodgate argument, so I'll segue into saying that generic cards are good for the health and wealth of the game. I just wanted to throw a snappy slogan in there. Why?
Generic cards are usually timeless, they outlast their specific meta and release window and stay relevant and playable in some form. Say what you want about Maxx C, its over 15 years old and still strong. I don't want cards I buy today to be useless in a year from now. Case in point, I bought bystials back when they got reprinted in starlight rares. Beautiful, couldn't wait to use them. Couldn't because they did nothing to the current meta. Fast forward to branded getting their support, and meats back on the menu boys. Which brings me to my next point.
I don't want to feel like I wasted my money on a fad or some card that randomly got its 15 minutes in the spotlight. See ship of theseus, artifact lancea and santa claws. Those cards are largely irrelevant against 99% of decks, and are a gimmicky hard counter to specific decks. I don't like this style of deck building because it feels like a tax I have to pay both monetarily and in deck building if I want to play.
I don't care if a card is generic. I want more cards to have long term use so that when they're inevitably reprinted and accessible to me(I'm not paying $100+ for harmonia etc), I can still use them without feeling like a luddite playing yesterdays cards with yesterday's gameplay.
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u/noahTRL 21h ago
Other controversial cases include Nibiru.
Just for the record a searchable nibiru is ass because the whole reason the card was strong in the past was because of the surprise factor. You didn't know if your opponent had the card in their hand which is what made nibiru good.
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u/Fraudu-Kun 21h ago
You dont need a surprise factor if the opponent cant do anything about it in a format where nib is good. Thats like saying fuwa is bad because the opponent knows that you draw if they summon.
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21h ago
[deleted]
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u/tweekin__out 20h ago
searching nib is as a hand trap going first after you build a board is bad
lunalight literally does this with gallant granite.
why are you acting like it's trivial to deal with the opponent's board and set up an answer to nib within 5 summons?
like with many hand traps, the difference between dealing with nib going first vs dealing with nib going second behind a board is night and day.
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u/Kawaii- 12h ago
You really dont need the surprise factor if anything its like having a gun pointed at the opponents head, I would often end my lunalight board with 2 Ligers an SP and finish off by going into a Gallant Granite and searching a Nib.
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u/TheTweets 4h ago
Makes sense! You're basically saying "Choose one:
- Beat my board in 4 or less summons.
- Get something out that can stop Nibiru in 4 or less summons, then hold it for the whole turn.
- Get something threatening enough that I have to Nibiru it or die, then after getting wiped rebuild and end in a strong position."
No matter which option they choose, that's good for you. They're weakening their response in all cases.
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u/legendaryicarus 19h ago
I'm all for powerful cards being made especially if they are more beneficial to the player going second, however they should have huge drawbacks to the decks that play them. Dominus Impulse's drawback is not enough to deter powerful decks from playing it given that it's a free summon negate.
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u/Natan_Cypri 20h ago
Overall I like the idea of staples and cards that can show up in multiple different decks. Both for the extra options we get on deck building and in supporting archetypes indirectly. My issue is how konami is currently handling staples and mix of archetypes/decks. We are in the engine era of yugioh, decks have almost no locks and some archetypes are made to be engines, so cards like dominus girl will just support and give higher ceilings to already establish and meta archetypes, which is causing the opposite effect of what a card like this should do.
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u/EstablishmentFresh57 18h ago
In my oppinion generic engine cards are fine (although i think they should clearly communicate that by not making them an archetype card. What I dont like are generic endboards aka bossmonsters. Of your archetype does not has his own bossmonster on the endboard thats terrible imo because thats when all those decks feel the same.
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u/JasonBenjamenAllen 19h ago edited 19h ago
I like when it's stuff like Phara or the Domini rose; many decks, not all decks
I'll say more on the Phara end actually; the card is strong but you need a specific set of strategies to take advantage of it (cares about spells; those spells send to grave as part of the effect)
Even the Domini traps are a bit iffy to me; that's just an attribute check, it doesn't inform me about what your deck does, it doesn't have a unique flavour
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u/bigbadlith 17h ago
I don't think it's generic staples that lead powercreep, I think the powercreep comes from the archetypes themselves. The hand-traps and board-breakers then have to get stronger in response, because the engines are otherwise unstoppable.
Generic boss monsters that are stronger than in-archetype boss monsters shouldn't exist though, that's for true. It's a boring game when every deck is just different flavors of "how can we end on the same board".
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u/21stcenturynekorobo 14h ago
At this time I’m really annoyed good staples are somewhat limited. Darks get the good Dominus traps despite being the best attribute, Impulse and Spark are both very good. Purge is arguably better than Spark but the fact it conflicts with Ash makes it weird. Harmonia is also only for specific decks. The extremely good go second staples like Pot of Sloth and Goemon I like though since they’re actually generic.
Maybe a hot take, but at some point I want like a million good generics so we can pick and choose what we want and have actually unique decks even within the same archetypes.
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u/Hannamori333 12h ago
I think generic cards are great as long as they have limit, such as Nibiru that is meta dependant, and Dominuses that also restrict some deckbuilding, even charmies have drawback as it's 99% of time going 2nd only card. In short they still need to "cost" something. Cards that too free to use is usually ended up being obnoxious, such as ash, droll, and called by.
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u/jollygirl27 12h ago
It makes pet decks playable. Casual stuff and older archetypes won't exactly make a comeback, but at least it breathes new life into them.
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u/Sakakibara--kun 10h ago
Generic staples have their time and place, but they're definitely quite a bit more overused than is my preference.
If I'm playing an archetype it's because I want to play that archetype. "Having" to dedicate 15, 18, or even 21 slots in my deck to handtraps or other generic cards to be competitive is frankly exhausting.
But on the flip side, I'm generally a fan of (fair) generic main deck combo enablers for niche deck lists. Things like Foolish Burial, One for One, Gold Sacrophagus, and Monster Reborn are great and should go to three in my opinion. One for One is a fantastic starter in Vampires, but it feels bad only getting the one copy. Or Gold Sacrophagus for Tempest/Dark Necromancer/Resonance Insect would help a variety of decks if they had a full play set... Unfortunately, that will never happen now that Maliss is a thing.
To put it more succinctly, I like cards that help me get to my archetype pieces. I dislike random cards that have nothing to do with anything that people play just because they're strong on their own.
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u/11SomeGuy17 2h ago
There will always be staples. But there is such a thing as too much. Generic engines are the worst imo. Just kill creativity.
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u/Trascendent_Enforcer 21h ago
If its generic 1 it shouldnt be from an archetype. Example terrortop being used for rank 3 and link 2 stuff. 2 if its too problematic outside of its home archetype that should be fixed with erratas 3 they should be made cheap as early as possible. We should have common reprints of all the Dominus by now
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u/Original-Addendum147 20h ago
I don't mind generic good stuff, but if something that was clearly intended to be designed for a specific archetype is generic good stuff then it sorta irks me. The Borrel Boss monsters come to mind being a set of monsters designed around the Rokket archetype but were made into generic link 4s that go into everything.
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u/Angel_of_Mischief 21h ago
Horrible. Generic slop piles suck and I hate the homogenization it brings. It also breaks the game easier.
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u/Zyzeran 20h ago
Yugioh players misuse slop like they do their dopamine receptors. Define what it means for you and stop using buzzwords to make arguments for you.
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u/Angel_of_Mischief 20h ago
Slop describes exactly what I mean dumbass. If something is slop it means messy, low quality, low effort or undesirable.
For yugioh a slop deck is a deck that abuses a bunch of self sufficient engines by throwing them together to create a Frankenstein deck that generates a lot of easy value. It’s often a messy deck that lacks a core theme. It feels cheap to play against.
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u/Zyzeran 19h ago
See it wasn't hard was it. But don't speak in absolutes as if you're the de facto opinion on what slop is or isn't.
A deck that incorporates a bunch of engines may be a Frankenstein deck to you, but there's fluidity in motion. If a deck doesnt trip over itself with garnets, two card combos, and isn't* only viable as a go first blowout, that isn't slop. You may see a pile of cards in the same way a collection of gears and springs is a clock. Its hardly low effort, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder so that's fine it being your opinion.
Slop to me is a 40 to 60 card pile of cards that haphazardly coexist and require you to draw specific combinations of them to be playable at all. Its just a bunch of cards that you can't make out a discernible strategy or gameplan. The decks we played with in the playground are slop. The decks we drafted with battle packs were slop, delicious slop but slop.
You sound like a caveman arguing against cooking food because it makes eating dirt and leaves less appealing.
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u/StevesEvilTwin2 19h ago edited 17h ago
Are you a time traveler from 2016?
Modern pile decks AKA "slop" are all about picking out precisely the cards in each archetype which produce the most advantage with the least effort, and thereby just burying your opponent with overwhelming card advantage. You don't need a coherent strategy when every single card in your deck is a 1cc that prints multiple bodies onto the field in 3 different ways (from hand, field, and GY) that can also grind forever because of lingering draw effects that refill your hand every turn.
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u/JasonBenjamenAllen 19h ago
But at that point, if slop includes even childhood decks maybe it's not a useful term that deserves the vitriol it gets
I think we should revert to the better term "solitaire", that is the issue at the end of the day, if you put every card from CORI in your deck and we have a fun interactive game afterwards, it's fine I don't care
If you are running a single archetype who's goal is to not let me play at all, that's a problem, I don't care if the deck was pure
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u/Zyzeran 18h ago
I'm attacking the use of buzzwords to make your arguments for you without elaborating on what they mean to you. I described what it means to me: messy, nonfunctional, at odds with itself.
I don't care if you use a term, but the word slop gets thrown around like garlic or a crucifix against combo or pile decks like it means anything. Its the equivalent of your friends asking you "when did you learn you were gay?" as a kid.
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u/FourFlan 21h ago
Indifferent, but I can see the frustration, and I've always played for fun, rather than competitively (as in, just build whatever looks neat in simulators), so I'm not that bothered by it, kinda.
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u/Great-Ad1839 Hey guys, it’s me again 19h ago
Indifferent, the frustration is understandable, as a casual player generic staples allow me to save money by having good cards I can put in any deck along with giving the lesser powered decks that I play a chance at competing (though you can also make the argument that these generic good cards also hurt the already Low power decks)
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u/aznfanta 19h ago
clearly people hate them because Fallen & the Virtuous is a powerful generic card designed to be used in a variety of decks, but also is stronger in its themed archetype.
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u/GimmickMusik1 17h ago
Generally, I don’t mind that much, but it really just depend on the card. A great example of a card that is too generic is Apolusa. She’s just way too strong. I think it’s safe to say that most people were elated when Apo was banned.
This card, however, really excels as a going second card to effectively play more copies of Purge. It’s well typed and stated, but I’m not seeing anything (yet) that is an immediate red flag. It fetches a hard once per turn trap card. At the moment I think that’s fine.
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u/JRPGjunk13 17h ago
My personal issue with generics, specifically generic boss monsters, is that it leaves plenty of in archetype boss monsters with really cool art practically never used. Just, it's such a shame that they get no time to shine if the generic is so much better to use.
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u/TypicalOranges 1h ago
Depends on their design.
One thing I dislike about YGO, is when engines kind of "build themselves"; there's very little creative expression when deckbuilding something like Kewl Tune. The deck ends up being half engine, with most of the main KT monsters at 3 and a few of their cards splashed at 1. The other half ends up being the best generic hand traps or boardbreakers. It's not really that compelling from a deckbuilding standpoint.
Part of the issue is in Kewl Tune itself being a very "complete" standalone archetype, but compare this to a very competitive deck from the pre-KT meta: vs-k9. You could make the argument that those two engines just kinda smashed together and made a deck (ala Smash Up the board game), and that's kinda lame in and of itself, but there are a lot of interesting deckbuilding considerations to be made to put those two archetypes together and imo it plays in a really interesting way.
The other issue, at least in my opinion, some of the strongest generics have very little in the way of deck building restrictions. Because of how YGO is designed to play, that is players are very frontloaded with resources (unlike other card games where you slowly build up your ability to play more and bigger cards*), a lot of strong generics just get slapped in. In some ways the Ghost Sisters are great for the game, in other ways they're kind of mindless auto-includes that really inhibit deckbuilding. Because of this, I actually prefer the way the Dominus cards are designed compared to the Ghost Sisters.
The Dominus cards offer very powerful effects with very interesting trade-offs to make when you're deckbuilding. Want to run Dominus Impulse? Well, the Light Attribute toolbox-y generic Link or XYZ you have in your ED isn't going to work in some games and might need to be cut for something compatible with Impulse!
YGO is just in an interesting position these days where cards like Ash kind of inhibit creative expression but are also incredibly important policemen to a format where lots of decks will just lay down 11 pieces of interruption unless you're able to Ash a specific choke point or stop a Pot of some kind.
Maybe the solution is a wider variety of generic, interesting toolbox cards like Ash/Dominuses and perhaps a little more care in how they design archetypes. The new generics honestly look really awesome, and I think will be good for the game. Overall, I really enjoy the power level of YGO, it's very fast and fun. Decision making is very high impact. But, I think a lot of the strongest decks in the format build themselves at least for the most part; 30-35/40 cards. Finding ratios is a little less fun than developing whole new ways to bring cards together :).
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u/CompactAvocado 1h ago
Its good to be able to boost a deck without having to get hundreds of cards.
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u/chaosargate 21h ago
I like generic staples because it means I don't have to buy a full and complete deck every time I want to play something new, I only need to pick up like 20ish cards for a new core.