It's almost impossible to break into yugioh at this point. The people playing it today are mostly the same people who kept playing it since childhood. The powercreep is so bad that it's all a sequence of different "archetype" decks that do their own specific thing and if you're not familiar with each one, you're gonna have to do a lot of reading either on the spot (great gameplay experience) or get a master's degree in yugioh on your own time.

Card text length, phrasing, esoteric rulings etc all make it very inaccessible unless you're willing to devote a lot of time to the game. I came to the conclusion that's it's not worth it for me right now but you could try playing some of the older video games to gradually learn the new mechanics and cards and then spend time in Master Duel if you're willing to put in the time.

is this a children's card game?

no. yugioh is like that because of decades of strange and bad design decisions from Bandai-Namco. they don't want to do keywords, so you have a wall of text. they don't want to have a rotating standard, so they have a banlist that's a mile long. there's also several instances of them making cards that don't actually work by the rules of the game. i like card games, i appreciate the different design decisions of the basic game of yu-gi-oh, but my god do the actual design decisions of cards themselves have flaws. it's not a good game to pick up casually. just on the basis of card availability and price for meta decks, pokemon is by far the most accessible card game in paper right now.

ngl this sounds like poor teaching, newbies should get to make cool monsters punch each other instead of being subjected to combo bullshit

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.

The game used to be a lot slower. Like 15 years ago you might even make it to turn 5. Like I'm sure everyone else said, they had a set of mechanics, and then they kept adding mechanics and adding mechanics and almost never took any mechanic away once it was added (though they banned or restricted individual cards), and that produced power creep that also encouraged general power creep in stat inflation and after a couple of decades, here we are. It's the classic issue of designing with almost exclusively your existing consumer base in mind, because it's all very manageable for them to learn this piecemeal over decades, but then a new person comes in and needs to learn all of it at once.

Tell your friend to stop trouncing you with meta decks and just make a deck from like Duelist Kingdom just so you can work with something manageable first.

Most of the game's mechanics come from a time when it was much, much slower paced. It has probably the worst power creep out of any card game I can think of, and they never updated the rules to account for this, so now most games are decided entirely by the first turn and every deck has like 90% identical cards to every other deck.

I honestly don't know why anyone would want to play it in this state, you might as well just flip a coin and declare victory that way.

I would recommend giving goat or Edison a try. Much slower formats

YGO is just like that, has been for a long time. If you wanna play in person I'm like everyone else here in that I suggest a legacy format.

If you want to play a version of modern YGO, I would suggest giving YGO: Duel Links a try. It's IMO a much improved format over the base game, with most of the awful turn 1/2 kills taken out back and shot (or at least it was when I played it a few years ago, hopefully they haven't broken it). It's a f2p game that you can play on PC or phone and the individual matches don't take too long so it's a good toilet or bus stop game.

I like Legacy of the Duelist Link Evolution story mode to start learning to play. New mechanics are introduced in a more pleasant pace that way. It is multiplatform. It goes until Vrains tho, I think there are more animes now.

It's been a while, but I did enjoy the reading the card figuring out the overall outcome. Idk. Used to be fun when I had the time. Oh, also I played it with physical cards so you know you had what you had.

I suggest, if possible, try to stick to older cards?

Sacrificing your soul explains the card. Or alternatively, learn to trust in the heart of the cards. As I understand it, it also helps to be a billionaire or some sort of magnate?

I liked Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid but dipped out before synchros were a thing but learning about all the crazy shit that came after is fascinating to me

They really had zero concern for power creep and the mechanics are so stupid lmao

The game went from fusions that were worse than their materials to one turn pendulum combos

The gimmick of yugioh compared to other TCGs is A) it's very fast paced and B) it's anime. If you don't like at least one of those things, you probably will not enjoy competitive yugioh.

I got back into YGO as an adult, and I can tell you a few things.

Keep your deck simple to start, there are a lot of gimmick decks that can be fun once you've got the hang of everything, but the simplest decks are built around just a few cards that you're trying to get on the field and keep on the field.

There are a ton of cards, but there are also a ton of cards that almost everybody puts in their deck regardless of what they're running, which can be surprising if you're coming from something like MTG. Most of them are counters or target specific archetypes.

Xyz is pronounced Ekzeez and it took me a while to figure that out.

Hopefully some of that helped.

You can play a fur hire tri brigade deck like solitaire. You’ll need to disrupt properly if going second, but it’s basically a flowchart deck based on your draw.

Might be worth your while to check out the older formats. I've dabbled a bit in ygo playing simulator versions like the power of chaos games and edopro and it's a much simpler game to understand. From what I gather about modern format ygo is the game is structured around winning a game on the first turn, which is loonytoons and defeats the purpose of playing the damn game.

There's some channels on yt dedicated to old formats and there's sims like I said edopro or the power of chaos trilogy by konami for pc.

I mean, pretty much the whole appeal of modern Yu-Gi-Oh is that you go ridiculously fast and set up crazy convoluted combo lines. A lot of people get mad that modern Yu-Gi-Oh isn't the same game it was when they were kids, but what can I say, the game is more than 25 years old and has changed a lot in that time.

This is why yu-gi-oh in the past 15 years SUCKS to play with people who are really into it. Fuck XY summons, fuck Synchro, fuck your seven samurai, fuck your deck milling, fuck your optimised bullshit chain of bullshit. It is not fun for me to sit here 15 minutes while you do a chain of made up twattery.

If I ever want to enjoy a yu-gi-oh game, then I have to agree with my opponent to completely limit play to just fun/simple card effects, like flip effects, a few fun trap cards, or even the frog deck isn't too crazy. If a card or its effect takes more than two sentences to explain to me, it shouldn't be allowed.

TL;DR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBIsZlV1jHk

The trick is to play the formats before the 2014 set Duelist Alliance which upped the power creep to a never before seen degree for that era of the game. That way you can still have relatively complex decks with the archetypes and the usage of the Extra Deck with Synchro and Xyz monsters which is one of the good design decisions of the game imo, since it enables toolboxing in a way you won't see in MTG for example

I really like how complex the game is with its 1000s of mechanics but it does make it really hard and exhausting to play.
There’s something uniquely satisfying about building decks that completely screw your opponent over. And the amount of cards gives you a huge sandbox that allows for a lot of types of decks.

But yeah the downside is that getting into it is REALLY hard.