Rant on Team Hoarding (Vol. 1)

Hey guys, it's been quite a long time since I've posted on this blog. There are multiple reasons that I've disappeared for so long, but now I'm back and ready to blab some more!

Anyway, now that exams are over and the summer holidays have begun, I've began to return to locals and personally have begun pretty disillusioned with the game. Not that I played Yugioh in the first place to gain money or anything, but even as a hobby – simply losing money every week when I could easily be working at a minimum wage job and earning more than 10x the money I get at locals is slightly disheartening. Some might argue that going to locals is supposed to be a fun experience ... but when who wins is essentially decided by a die roll and who pulls the least normal monsters in the first hand is not my definition of fun.

And it shouldn't be yours either.

Increasingly frustratingly also is the fact that my local store essentially sharks the players out of their entry fee. While it is a generally understood fact that the store owner / organizer does need to profit off of the tournament in order to justify running it in the first place, there arises a problem when the player only receives one or two packs when they win the entire tournament because the store has jacked up the prices of packs. ($8 CAD for a pack of Photon Shockwave? Ridiculous.)

In addition to this, while there are many “noob/newb” duelists at every local, the environment is very hostile to a lone player when there are a few “teams” of 3-4 players which look out for each other and cause the entire scene to be very difficult to thrive in, whether it be in the actual store tournaments or in just trades. Again, it already isn't easy to make even a small margin of profit off a trade, and it only becomes worse when such teams begin to snatch trades away to benefit themselves. Logically, this is of course a sound plan for their team, but it cuts the fun factor out of trading because of this constant fear of having your trade jacked.

The combination of poor prize support as well as the increasingly hostile environment makes it very hard for a single player to thrive (again bringing up that point.)

There are a few solutions of course.

1. Go to a different Local
2. Form your own team.
3. GENUFLECT

While going to a different local tournament would help to alleviate the problem of the terrible prize support, it does not change the fact that a single player cannot make much impact on his/her own when so many factors are pitted against them.

Therefore, forming your own team is probably the only way you would be able to “fight back” against the other teams. After all, alliances between smaller powers have always been the way that the larger powers have been kept in check in history, and the same logic would apply to this, albeit not directly.

All in all, it is still an important point that Yugioh actually has an incredibly active secondary market which is incredibly toxic to those which are new, and that if one intends on competing at any level of tournament or trading for any cards at said tournament, it should be remembered that the environment has always been and will always be tended towards those who have large amounts of experience in the game/market, and that going in without proper preparation is tantamount to throwing money away.

More or less this post was me blabbing about how I dislike the nature of my (and many other) locals, but the fact that “teams” of players will continue to sweep locals for “profit” is both a fact that must be accepted...and something which causes me to facepalm at how they could (again), be earning more money working at Tim Hortons/any other minimum wage job, and have greater financial security.

This rant may develop into a series, but in the meantime ... do read and leave your thoughts in the comments section.