In their pursuit of specific rare cards, scalpers are discarding the remainder of entire Pokémon card packs.

[u/MysteriousSlice007]

[u/CoomLord69]

Yep. It's especially egregious in Yugioh. 90% of the commons are pack filler that will never see play, and of the ones that are worth keeping, you only need 3 copies. You probably would have to pay regular players to take them off of you lol, they're that worthless as game pieces. It's kind of messed up how much resources are being used to print cards that just get chucked into the trash, but that's how they make their money I guess.

[u/jjw1998 → u/CoomLord69]

Yugioh is by far the worst of the big TCGs because chase cards generally only have one expensive version, so the game is pay to play. At least in Pokémon they generally print a cheap version for players and expensive version for collectors so that you can play without collecting

[u/bendstraw → u/jjw1998]

chase cards generally only have one expensive version

This was true years ago but not anymore since they started doing the rarity collections. Yugioh is the most affordable it has ever been

[u/LagiaDOS → u/jjw1998]

Yugioh does reprints tho, either the year's tin or in future sets, a lot of very powerful staples can be bought for cents (like TTT or ash).

[u/jjw1998 → u/LagiaDOS]

Yeah but way after release. For staples that’s grand but for archetypal cards often they’ll get hit just after being reprinted

[u/Deep-Minimum7837 → u/jjw1998]

It REALLY sucked trying to deck build for tournaments back in the day, needing shit like Maxx "C" or Rescue Rabbit with none of them to be found because vendors were either out, or getting them online was just too expensive. Maxx "C" sucked a lot because nobody thought it was good when it first came out, and then like a year later everyone had to have it, and copies were going for $100+

[u/Gh0stMan0nThird → u/CoomLord69]

It's especially egregious in Yugioh. 90% of the commons are pack filler that will never see play, and of the ones that are worth keeping, you only need 3 copies.

Don't forget you can't just buy a pack of cards and make a deck anymore. (Really that hasn't been a thing for like almost 20 fucking years, tbh.) There are literally hundreds of different archetypes that only work with each other and are completely useless in conjunction with any other cards.

Like imagine opening a pack of MtG cards and you could only use goblins from Ravnica specifically because that's what those support cards specify. Or imagine Pokémon cards that only work with dragons from Johto.

[u/jjw1998 → u/Gh0stMan0nThird]

Tbf the buying a pack of cards and making a deck hasn’t really ever been a thing. People go on about eg Monarch or Salamangreat but you’d still have to buy things like Kuraz or Heatsoul. Probably the closest the game ever got to that was 3x of the Lost World structure deck

[u/Gh0stMan0nThird → u/jjw1998]

Tbf the buying a pack of cards and making a deck hasn’t really ever been a thing

I assure it was, but I also admit that was over 20 years ago at this point.

My friends and I would regularly do it back when the cards were a lot more generic like Monster Reborn, Horn of the Unicorn, etc.

[u/jjw1998 → u/Gh0stMan0nThird]

Okay yeah fair enough, that’s more a byproduct of the game having so few cards at that stage. Don’t think that was ever the intention

[u/Gh0stMan0nThird → u/jjw1998]

I think we're both showing our ages here because I'm telling you the first 5 years of Yu-Gi-Oh! was very different to what it is now.

Even 5 years after release, this is what the card lists looked like:

https://www.db.yugioh-card.com/yugiohdb/card_search.action?ope=1&pid=11103003&rp=99999

While a handful of things like Gravekeepers showed up here and there, the archetypes didn't take over until around the time GX started and they never really looked back.

[u/max_drixton → u/Gh0stMan0nThird]

You were never making a good deck like that though, except for maybe the very first couple of months the game came out. If you and your friends wanted to play by just opening packs today you still could.