My Return to Yugioh! Was fun, but it was short-lived and I'm pretty sure I”m never going back

So I'd been playing Yugioh again in recent weeks, having not played since around the times' Hero's were first a thing. No Links, no Xyz's, not even Synchros or many contact fusions. Archetypes weren't even really a thing yet. It was a simpler time, where you would make a couple of plays, and then it would go over to your opponent. It was basic and didn't require a lot of thought if you wanted to play casually.

So here I am, making a few different decks (I'll post the profiles at the end for anyone whose interested) with some goofy gimmicks. Link summoning is an easy to understand mechanic, so I made a deck around Black Garden which gives me more and more tokens to use for links the more my opponent summons, which was a fun deck to run. Then I made a Rock deck mixing a couple of archetypes that was good at calling out Rank 3 and 4s that helped me make some high-end Synchro Monsters, it was a lot of fun. It wasn't as silly of a gimmick as my Garden deck, but it was more versatile.

It sounds like the experience had gone well, and overall it had. But something about the game started to get to me, and that is how painstakingly long a turn could go. My best hands with the second deck I mentioned had me doing a lot of searching, and special summoning as many as four monsters from my extra deck, and all the other summons to make them. I felt a bit bad for how long it took to play out a turn. Then I realized it wasn't that long compared to certain other decks, turns in modern Yugioh just take a long time to make.

And then came the Cardian Deck. I don't know how many people who read this know about this deck, but it is the worst deck ever conceived in modern Yugioh. It's not a matter of how good the deck is, or how much it can do, it's how much it does when it goes off. I ate all of my dinner and this guy's opening turn still wasn't done. There was no lag, the connection was fine, it was just the sheer volume of plays he made. Multiple times he filled the entire field with monsters, sent them all away for all these effects, kept drawing, and then repeated the cycle several times. Half his deck was gone and used after one turn. It's a forty card deck, and your opening hand is five cards. I could have had a quick wank to a pornhub video and finished before this guy finished his first turn.

The worst part of all of this is Cardians aren't even very good. He spent that long to do all that, and there are so many ways to get around everything he spent all that time setting up. Yet people will sit there and play this shit. I am convinced people who play that deck are assholes. I was already getting frustrated to a degree with how long turns can take in this game, but that was so comical I just couldn't take it anymore. It's where I decided my return to Yugioh had to stop.

The Morale of the story is that Yugioh is borderline a game of Solitare depending on the deck you happen to be playing with or against. Unless you are fine sitting there for prolonged periods just watching your opponent play with themselves, don't play this game.

Also my Two Deck Profiles:

Adamancipators and Triamid:

Dark Garden Link Spam: