Yu-Gi-Oh had massive hype when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. It still has an ongoing TV show and plenty of merchandise to keep the franchise alive and potentially bring attention back to it. Yu-Gi-Oh is still very big in Japan, but in the West it seems to have faded and never really reached the same peaks it did in the early 2000s. The demographic that played Yu-Gi-Oh as kids should now be old enough to have disposable income and want to buy nostalgic items, much like what happened with Pokémon. But nothing happened.
I’m curious why you think Yu-Gi-Oh hasn’t had a comeback pattern similar to Pokémon.
it’s more focused on playing, while Pokemon was historically more appealing to collectors. I think it was a common experience for kids to have Pokemon binders, buying packs, without ever learning a single rule of the tcg; while in general if you liked YGO, even because of the anime exposure, you were buying cards to play.
yes YGO it’s a powerful brand, but is not at Pokemon level imho. It lacked transversality, and being able to be a recognizable presence in different sectors or demographics (merchandising, movies, small kids, girls). When Pokemon was suffering because the TCG or anime lost popularity, it was carried by the gamers; now that the games started being unappealing to some (or simply suffering from competition) it is carried by TCG and merchandising. The YGO anime and video games were good, but no way as iconic as Pokemon & appealing mainly to male kids/teenagers, so it failed to scale.
the actual Pokemon (as characters) are simply better at this: they’re recognizable, personable, colorful, you can pick your favorite and they’re easy to remember (like Sanrio characters). YGO on the other hand, has thousands of different characters, a lot of them very obscure to the general audience. I don’t want to be harsh since I’m a ygo collector and fan, but the truly iconic YGO characters are like 10-15 at best
Too complex to collect for a novice: it is cheaper when compared to Pokemon, but it has a ton of reprints and variants, and way more cards available. It also lacks the beautiful resources that we have in Pokemon (well made cards database, forums, and so on. When they exist, they focus on players)
not every old brand is bound to be a collectible powerhouse, the “kids should now be old enough to have disposable income and want to buy nostalgic items” isn’t largely true in most cases imho. Pokemon simply had the perfect storm in that sense, and was already successful as a TCG appealing to collectors
YGO enjoyed the slipstream created behind the Pokemon hypetrain. It just didn’t have the same level of depth and both financial and creative investment in the franchise. The appeal for Pokemon was always much broader from the jump, too.
I can’t add much to the discussion, but personally, I tried to get into Yu-gi-oh multiple times and the size of the font on the cards genuinelly frustrates me. Why why why is it so small? Why is it smaller than the set code, or the name of the illustrator? It’s even worse in real life.
This isn’t totally accurate. Prices for a lot of Yugioh cards/merchandise have gone up but it hasn’t exploded like Pokemon has. I would argue that Yugioh is still quite popular today but nothing is going to touch Pokemon’s popularity.
I think @decoypalmette nailed it with their answer but I’m just going to add this as well
I think Yugioh has a problem with bringing in new players/collectors. Right now there is no anime airing on TV that kids can get into. Even if there was, the game has become so complicated compared to where it began that it would be difficult for a kid to get into it. For the same reason, I think that makes it harder for old fans of the show/card game to get back into it. So Konami with the card game and other companies selling merchandise have to appeal to people who are already into it. For example, Nike is doing a collab with YuGiOh where they are releasing Jonouchi’s (Joey’s) shoes that he wore in the manga.
I think there could be a few factors that come to mind. First is, Pokemon I feel had & still has the broader overall appeal to it. Not only did you have the TCG that people loved to collect, you also had all the video games, anime, plushies and other merchandise. It was extremely popular in 1999, you could literally put a Pikachu on anything and it would sell. This was not the same way with Yu-Gi-Oh, not even close to the same level of on-going hype and excitement that Pokemon had back then.
I think another factor as well is that by the time Yu-Gi-Oh was growing popular, Pokemon popularity & hype was starting to die down among the generation who largely experienced it. It would basically be impossible to match or surpass that experience we all had prior to Yu-Gi-Oh. So most of us had our starter decks and things (including myself), but it was sort of just another ‘fad’ in comparison to Pokemon and it did not sustain itself nearly as strongly or for as long either.
I liked the Yu-Gi-Oh anime as well - but I do not believe it was enticing as Pokemon for most people. To me it was just not the same as Pokemon where people literally fell in love with a certain Pokemon because of something in the anime, games or some other reason. Even a lot of adults or older people were in on it, while Yu-Gi-Oh was just not taken as seriously to me. So to me Yu-Gi-Oh is very card focused in all areas - which is cool - but it’s not like Pokemon where it extends well beyond the cards and other forms of media in it’s overall appeal.
Anyway, I still love my old Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I’ve collected a few LOB, MRD, MFC singles and have been building binders of the starter decks for nostalgia reasons. But I really do not believe or expect it to grow like Pokemon has, to me it’s simply more niche overall and just not as popular in the West as Pokemon is/was it seems, they’re simply in different leagues overall at this point in time.
When I got into YGO as a kid, it was primarily to play the game. So when I was feeling nostalgia and felt the urge to collect again as an adult, that’s why I went straight to Pokémon. No other TCG has perfectly nailed the joy of collecting like Pokémon.
Cause collecting yugioh is not nearly as fun and easy as pokemon collecting. Yugioh is also very dependent on the og series whereas pokemon has pretty successfully had support throughout its lifetime. The games help keep pokemon fresh and in the minds of everyone whereas yugioh just has a show that people stopped caring about.
For me, Yu-Gi-Oh was more for playing & not collecting during school years. I played a lot but never collected or actively traded them like I did with Pokémon.
At one point as an adult I was interested in getting some old cards back for nostalgia, but the sheer amount of reprints put me off.
The average casual pokemon fan could probably name ~100 of them and at least recognize 200-300.
For Yugioh, the numbers are probably 10 to 20x smaller (ie. could name 5-10 monsters)
I would say that this is one of the core differences. The level of knowledge about each monster is totally different too. “Catapult turtle” is a turtle with a catapult on it. Whereas you know what kind of personality Psyduck has, what it sounds like, how it always has a headache, how it gets powerful when it’s headache gets stronger, what it evolves into, how it evolves, what attacks it knows…
The most basic form of pokemon card content that got people back into the hobby is opening a pack on camera and going through one card at a time. It doesn’t need to be explained what each pokemon is. You don’t need to explain why pulling a charizard is exciting. When you see a Psyduck in a pack, all the knowledge and context is already baked in your brain. When you see XYZ Spiderling Devil Canon there’s no context for the thing you’re looking at or why it matters to anyone other than a player.
From my own experience of being there “in the day”, we transitioned onto Yugioh when we moved into high school and felt that we’d originally outgrown Pokemon or that it wasn’t acceptable to be openly into anymore.
Yugioh comes along with more badass monsters and evil artworks and pretty much everyone I knew got into it.
However, we were still growing up and getting into new teenage things (sports, girls, socialising, videogames like GTA etc.) so Yugioh didn’t last long because we were done with TCGs in general. What I’m saying is that it was popular but only in a very short window.
It also didn’t help that people didn’t seem to take to the GX anime anywhere near as much as the Duel Monsters originals and finding anyone with post-Ancient Sanctuary cards was very rare.
LOADS of stuff came along and burnt brightly for a very short period of time in that early-2000s time though. Beyblade, Crazy Bones, Duel Masters…people cared for about a month or so and then it was something else.
Don’t forget that post-WOTC Pokemon suffered the same fate in this era where very people continued collecting into the EX era, and when Pokemon came back into the big time, it was mostly the WOTC era that boomed.
For me, I was also into Yu-Gi-Oh and MTG during my childhood (the latter in my later childhood and still now, to an extent), but I never formed the same nostalgic connection to those franchises or the characters.
So very well said. Pokemon are more than just monsters. A lot of times they are actual characters people care about.
There’s the joke that when you’re a kid, you just look at how big the HP or attack damage was to determine how cool the card is. And sure, we did do that to a degree, we also cared about everything else you mentioned. With YGO we looked at the attack and defense numbers… And that was it. It never went deeper than the mechanics.
The explosion of Pokemon isn't just within nostalgic adults who now have disposable income, there are now crypto bros and stonkers looking for unregulated markets to play with. This doesn't work to Yugioh because they print to demand. It's quite beautiful actually, how you can get your favorite cards from childhood for very cheap. They're always doing older sets but with different foil finishes and such. The only cards that will ever be expensive are OG sets 1st edition, such as Stardust Dragon Ghost Rare which goes for like 600? in a psa 10. It's still a very popular game, but kinda immune to crypto bros because of how much they print. I'm currently finishing a few binder pages of my favorite characters from childhood since they came out with a new rarity foil for their 25th anniversary (way better than the ugly 25th stamp on pkmn cards), and it's run me about 2$ per card.
Here’s my $0.02 from someone who was there in 2002, never left, and continues to collect graded cards from the Duel Monsters era even to this day.
Yugioh arrived at the perfect time to capture the kids who were just starting to outgrow Pokemon, but weren’t quite old enough for Magic the Gathering (or found MtG cards boring due to lack of holos). Yugioh had a great anime and they made quite a few attempts at other non-TCG forms of entertainment in Dungeon Dice Masters and various adventure/board based video games. So in the beginning I do believe they did a lot of things right.
The original Duel Monsters series, Battle City, and even GX were pretty successful and drew in a large crowd of people. 5D’s didn’t have near the pull of Yugi or even Jaden as protagonists. As the anime’s went on, they became less and less relevant. This should be clear because Konami continues to reprint original and GX era cards and people continue to buy into those sets. They should have kept Yugi running just like Ash imo.
The second problem is the lack of rotation for their TCG. Both Pokemon and Magic do this and it’s essential to making sure your game remains (relatively) simple and accessible to new players. Nowadays Yugioh is nothing like its former self and the amount of knowledge required to play the game at a fairly competitive level is insanely high. Everyone likes to talk about how much “skill” is required to play their TCG (Pokemon has memorizing prize cards and being able to attach energy ahead of turns as two quick examples), but Yugioh takes this to an absolute extreme. You must be able to recall YEARS worth of a card pool and understand how lots of archetypes combo off. Eternal formats have their place, but they aren’t what attract new players to your game. In the long run this is hurting the game’s life.
Not sure what’s in store for Yugioh, but I genuinely can’t see the current state of the game lasting another 10 years. Then again I’ve thought that since 2008 lol. Yet the game continues on.
Either way I’m determined to collect the holos from the DM era sets LOB - AST, tournament packs, starter decks, and video games. Even if the game dies off.
