Why Magic: The Gathering is Better Than Yu-Gi-Oh

As someone who was just recently indoctrinated by my friends into the cult that is Magic: The Gathering, I’ve been realizing more and more just how much better Magic: The Gathering is than my previous favorite card game Yu-Gi-Oh (and by previous I mean like in 5th grade, but still). So, I thought it’d be cool to inform people of just how fun a card game Magic: The Gathering really is/squash all Yu-Gi-Oh comparisons.  I’ll give you the rundown in 3 quick reasons:

1. Longevity 

With every new YGO set it seems like all the cards from the previous sets have now become entirely useless. My friend recently tried to get back to playing YGO the other day only to find that his deck was essentially a relic and was completely worthless. The people who he was playing with were using cards that he’d never seen before and destroyed him without him even getting a single hit in.  With MtG, although some of what were once powerful creatures are not anywhere near as good as they used to be (e.g. the original Elder Dragons), by and large they do a great job implementing the new card sets rather seamlessly into the existing canon; in fact, all of my magic decks are bound to have a healthy amount of spells and creatures that all originally came into existence well over ten years ago.

2. Price-Performance

Possibly my biggest problem with YGO, even moreso than the fact that they consistently make all their previous cards irrelevant every 2-3 years or so, is that the strategy in YGO is exceedingly simple: just buy the best cards available.  With MtG, on the other hand,  price rarely comes into the equation. When trying to create the best deck you can in MtG, just buying all the most expensive cards you can find just won’t cut it.  Often times you’ll find that a card worth three cents works much better for your deck rather than something that costs 20 dollars!

3. Depth

Let me break it down like this: when you have one card game that makes all of its previous cards irrelevant every few years, then having the only cards that are any good being the ones that cost the most vs. the card game where price isn’t really something you worry about and has 20 years worth of cards to choose from, it’s pretty easy to tell which has more to it.  Unlike YGO where all of the best decks are fairly similar because everyone is using the same cards, in MtG every deck (especially in the Commander format) is much more idiosyncratic, making each game almost an entirely different experience each time.

(Anybody who reads this and and wants to play MtG and goes to UIUC, Facebook message me.)

image from http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/stf/22