Oh man when I first started playing Magic and I didn't get 'the meta' and I lost all the time and beardy, sneery veterans told me that my decks were garbage, I was straight up holding back tears n shit. I was like, 18/19. Losing to people who are assholes/have decks I don't properly understand STILL hits a nerve, but then I look at my perfectly themed deck of hot vampires/plant musketeers/cute ghosts/singing & dancing Pokémon, and I remember that's what I like about TCGs
i wasn’t playing against an asshole, pay is good people
but yu-gi-oh has this really bizarre thing going on with it
like, i used to play in high school, and things were starting to get complicated back then, but
now they release entire archetypes that are totally self-contained, so you can run a deck where everything takes five minutes to resolve while each card’s rules bounce off of each other
and god help you if you try to interrupt that resolution, because they have baked in protections, so you basically have to sit back and watch The Archetype Show while it plays out every turn
you really hit the nail on the head with one thing you said
these cards are good, but like
they aren’t fun to play against
like, i’ll play a Jinzo deck all day every day, because while I love using the traps in my deck, it won’t fall apart when Jinzo shuts them off
it’s really fun to have an encounter like that where you have to reorganize your strategy based on what you have
but these new archetypes? you can’t reorganize your strategy against them- they all activate in the graveyard, so you essentially have to have a counter deck ready with multiple sources of banishment so that their effects won’t activate
and the cards I saw today are no different from the other new archetype that does so much special summoning and self-protection
they’re all just different coats of paint on the same heap of shit