my friend is trying to get me into it despite me not having played it at all before or watching the anime (online version only, tcg on omega, it's not like i can buy the cards or anything) and i feel so fucking dumbfounded. is this a children's card game? why is there a turn mechanic when you won't be making it past turn 2? every goddamn card comes with two paragraphs of text and the fun part is the punctuation fucking changes the gameplay, and your opponent will lay them on you nonstop. and even if they are a good sport and allow you to read you will lose the plot with the third card they pull.
your opponent will keep adding and removing cards back and forth and you can't keep up how things have been stacked and what effects are active or not and by the end of turn one your opponent has probably pulled out 15 to 20 cards out of their 60 card deck, and those are just repeats so in reality they've basically done all of their combos. i know preparing a good deck for combos is part of the game but come on how can a new player even keep up? this is insane.
Last time I checked it out (like a decade ago?) I was turned off just by the fact that the "summon 1 monster per turn" rule might as well not exist because everything's just a special summon. Fundamentally, I think Konami is just not interested in making a well-written or good game.
I kind of like that rule, since the special summons work on such varied conditions. I think it's more interesting than just having it gated by X amount of mana.
I don't like most of their other design decisions, admittedly, but I like that one.