In the Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game, the anime series’ iconic catchphrase “You just activated my trap card” would be uttered so many times in a single round that you’d be hoarse by your second turn. This is combined with gameplay that puts long combo chains and reaction-based activation at its heart, making it difficult for newcomers to understand exactly what should happen when - or how they went from their full 8000 life points to zero in the space of a single turn. With no universal resource like MTG’s mana or Pokémon’s energy to tie everything together, individual cards end up doing the heavy lifting, leading to an intimidating learning curve for players as they encounter each of the thousands of unique cards and their effects. In Yu-Gi-Oh!, the central action of summoning monsters has fractured from a fairly simple tribute - where cards already on the field are discarded to bring in higher-level powerhouses - to a litany of different ways to summon cards, often with inscrutable names like Xyz, Synchro, Link and Pendulum. Pokémon’s battles are instantly familiar to anyone who’s played the video games.
Magic: The Gathering’s central loop has remained largely untouched for decades - you play lands to acquire mana, which is used to play creatures and spells, which do exactly what they say on the card. While MTG and even Pokemon hide complexity in the limitless deck combinations of their vast card libraries - now totalling tens of thousands of unique cards - Yu-Gi-Oh! is somewhat different in that the game’s core rules appear to get increasingly more difficult to parse with every new set. Unlike fellow nineties trading card games Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon, the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG has developed a reputation over the years as being impenetrable for players who haven’t already been fans for at least a decade.
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