Whammy's Blog

she's desperate to stay in this world that she sees as false, where she's a funny cartoon character and she can still brush off the pain she causes as silly cartoon antics

the despair it leaves us with, the satisfaction it denies us, leaves us to yearn for things to have turned out differently. it leaves us thinking about what could have been done, what decisions could have been made, what different circumstances could have prevented the tragedy? dissatisfaction drives us to act

when your dad calls you by your full government name

and this has created the funniest neocash chat board ever

With the finale out now I think a central theme that I've recognized and really adore is "all of these characters are more complex than an audience would appreciate." They are all being squished into a child-friendly set of archetypes, be that by Caine, Jax, or metatextually, the fandom. Caine doesn't want them complaining, swearing or having sex, they just have to go on endless, mindless, youtube-monetizable adventures. He's the ringmaster, he puts them in a bright poppy's playtime ass stage and demands for funny to happen. Meanwhile, Jax doesn't want to address the dire reality of their situation and copes by playing along, treating himself and all the characters as flat archetypes with no internality, so that the elephants in the room can safely be ignored. The fandom, meanwhile, is quietly guilty of all the same things. "Why isn't my favorite character acting in accordance with my headcanon? Which characters are flatly evil so we can hate them? Will they achieve my perfect happy ending? Because if not I'll be mad about it."

It doesn't work. Because they're more complex than that. They're people, they need more, they have emotions and traumas and wants and needs. Ragatha isn't always cheerful, she's not just the mom friend, and she's not some manipulator either. She's a person, trying her best, and very often failing. Pomni isn't always anxious, she's a natural leader and she wants the best for everyone, but she's not perfect either. She's a person, trying her best, and very often failing. And Jax isn't just a villain, he's a very complicated ball of traumas whose consistent first instinct is to push everyone away, hurting others so that he won't get hurt. He's a person, trying his best, and very often failing. She might even be a girl. Zooble isn't just a grump, Gangle isn't just a wimp, Kinger isn't just crazy. They're humans. And humans aren't always good. They're messy, screwed up, complicated things. They're things that can't be flattened down to archetypes, no matter how much Caine, Jax, or the fandom wants it.

The fandom wanted a bunch of cookie cutter adventures with good guys and bad guys, but what we got is just a bunch of people, stuck together, their traumas rubbing up against eachother until something catches fire and explodes. And I think that's way more interesting. I'm glad the show is that. I understand not everyone feels that way, though. A lot of people wanted something less nuanced. But I don't think the show not matching your expectations is the show's fault. I think people just need to come at it with the right mindset. Meet the story where it's at.

Basically, Mr grifter announced that he might be getting into the collecting side of yugioh, which would lead to the scalping hell that now plagues the Pokémon and One Piece TCGs

As a joke, MBTYugioh gave them pointers on what to “invest in”, recommending some of the WORST shit products that this game released in the years

He then followed up with a tongue-in-cheek, clearly trolling video recommending shit like Legendary Duelists sets, Duelist of Deep and Synchro Storm, and the Platinum cards, and exclusive COINS before ending the video with “Don’t invest in yugioh. You will lose money due to this game’s reprint policies”

Like, it was very obvious for anyone with half-a-brain cell and is familiar with Yugioh that the video is a joke

BUT a bunch of scalping bots took the video at face value and bought out these doodoo, worthless products immediately after his fuckass video came out

Traditionally, pricing in Yugioh has always been dominated more by competitive viability rather than collector value. Not to say that there isn't a collectors market, but it's definitely not to the same size that Pokemon or Magic has been and is often limited to either anime-based archetypes (particularly Dark Magician and Blue Eyes) or fan favorite and historically important archetypes (like Sky Striker).

So, for the most part, the reason Yugioh has been pricey to get into is that often core staples and deck engines often were high rarity with kind of rough pull rates. Just to use personal example, I dropped playing Yubel because Nightmare Throne came out at $40 for an Ultra (a 3 of card) and knew Fiendsmith engine in a few months would be worse (Engraver was a $100 secret rare).

However, once time moves on and new decks come out and banlists hit engine, pricing usually goes down on cards. Furthermore, Konami has been more aggressive with reprints of staples, though we're now in mid transition with the older, cheaper staples starting to show their age and new expensive staples (like Forbidden Crown being $85-90 at time of this writing) taking their place.

Point is, outside of a few beloved archetypes, Yugioh's never had a particularly strong collector's market, even for the specialized rarities like Starlight or Quarter Century rares. Tying so much of product value to competitiveness has led to a lot of this loss of value in long term and a lot of dead sets that go below market value due to not impacting the meta (see the Fire and Water themed Legendary Duelists sets for examples). This has legitimately caused market issues as older sets sit dead on shelves and stores decide to stop carrying Yugioh.

Cue the Overframes and serialized cards, which are meant to start introducing theoretically more beneficial collector value to help keep card value long term and encouraging digging into older sets. Current Overframes are just reprints of existing cards and have been coming in Ultra and Starlight Variety, so outside of something like Branded Mirrorjade (Branded being a beloved lore archetype for years) they're pricey but not impacting mechanical play as there are other versions of the cards available. The Overframes that are new cards are, to my understanding, going to come in non-overframe versions as well so that there's mechanical equivalence without having to drop money on overframes.

That said, they are kind of putting these Overframes into sidesets so far, and Rarity Collection V and Battle of Legends (just saw the list today) are otherwise kind of mid-products, so those Overframes are seriously doing the heavy lifting in value. Konami's set design on these side sets has been a serious criticism of the past. Furthermore, the set the new ones are set to come out has gotten criticism from fans for being $35 a set for basically 18 cards total. It'll probably still sell well cause Overframes, but it will be a good test to see how much patience Yugioh fans will have for Overframes (unless that set list is absolutely cracked with reprints and new cards as well).