I (Probably) Can't Write the Next "Who's the Beatdown?"

This one is TCG content about TCG content.

The Introductory Narrative

I went to a high school with a one-to-one device policy. What this meant is that I had a laptop I took to all my classes, as did everyone else. As one can imagine, a significant amount of time on these student laptops was spent on anything but school work. I have distinct memories of my classmates watching football game VODs instead of looking ahead.

Personally, as someone with relatively niche hobbies who was good enough at classes and bad enough at paying attention, I spent my time in class on Discord and with articles, both reading and writing them (the blog I ran at the time is now defunct. In hindsight, I doubt there’s any particular insight there. I was pretty average or perhaps even subpar at the games I played).

This affected my trajectory in multiple ways. First, I developed my writing style to the point that I had a reputation as one of the kids who was really good at English (currently, it’s my major). Second, I gained an appreciation for the article. At the time I was a bit of a contrarian about Magic: The Gathering so my touchstone articles are things like V-Mundi’s Cardfight!! Vanguard clan breakdowns and Buddyfight Theory’s “Judgement! Monsters as Spells.” I hadn’t really gone as deep as I can assume a lot of people had but I would still say that I was doing pretty well for my age.

Now that I’m in my last year of college I still have an appreciation for the article. I’ve also allowed myself to interact with a little bit of Magic, which I think is a boon to my understanding of other games. After all, Magic: The Gathering is the first functional card game. Every game since owes much of its structure to Magic and as a result the theory tends to map at least decently from Magic to other games.

A Strong Foundation

Magic is remarkable in that it has a much stronger lineup of timeless articles than other games. YGO has its hits like This Video Will Make You Better At Yu-Gi-Oh! or “How Many Normal Summons Should You Play In Yu-Gi-Oh?,” certainly, but these are few and far between compared to things in Magic like “Who's the Beatdown?” that have proven evergreen. In addition, many of the points made in those YGO pieces are indebted to the work done in MTG.

Now, here’s where I point you to MBTYugioh, whose recent videos and posts I owe a great deal of debt to. In WHY ARE WE SO BAD AT TALKING ABOUT YUGIOH CARDS?, and this X thread, he posits many things that boil down to this: YGO lacks the same depth as Magic when it comes specifically to disseminating information from the best minds of the game.

The best players that share their mindsets tend to limit themselves to videos. Personally, I find videos an inferior method of conveying information. While, yes, visual aids can be useful, much of the time in these videos is spent with a screenshot of a deck up while someone provides the same information that could be in an article. The differences are that I can’t scroll back up as easily and following breadcrumb trails of information is more difficult. Depending on the creator, as well, the comment section may be there more for riffing and entertainment value than attaining greater understanding.

People dedicated to specific decks tend not to have much incentive to innovate, as deck Discords (the de facto “best place” for information about a given deck) tend to have FAQ sections that completely rule out techs from the beginning. MBT’s example is the Virtual World server but I’ve seen the same thing in places like the Swordsoul server immediately writing off Ringowurm, a card with synergies in the archetype that constantly fluctuates between being one of the deck’s best enablers and an unplayable card that turns off many of your crucial cards by not being a wyrm. While, sure, this may be the conclusion people have reached, the issue is in the posture of leading by saying, “It’s bad. Stop asking,” that actively discourages people looking to innovate.

In addition, MBT mentions in his video that there’s a mentality even top players have picked up that “winning with your favorite deck is a virtue.” While, certainly, having preference is fine, pigeonholing yourself into one deck pretty much necessarily means closing yourself off from the breadth of options in a given format. One-tricking as a practice tends to be employed by more casual players as a result.

To give credit where it’s due, there are some deck Discords with some fantastic stuff. The Plunder Patroll server, for example, has a lot of resources available as well as users with credentials that are always working to push the deck even further. From what I’ve heard, there’s been a bit of a sea change in the wake of some of MBT’s content where Discords are freshening up their combo guides and primers. There are also people like Daimax writing articles like "Please Stop Making Worse Centurion" aiming to educate players and encourage innovation. I’m glad to hear about these things and am excited to see more.

Where Am I Going With This?

Well, the ultimate reason for my making this article is that the really high-level insight is incredibly hard to come by. Certainly, there are content creators that are going through sets card-by-card or making in-depth tier list videos. I think that both of these are essential, especially the latter given that it’s the type of content that tends to influence players’ decision-making on a macro level. However, I have yet to find a Digimon article that feels like it’s evergreen. There are deck primers written on Digimon Card Meta of varying levels of insight (and, frankly, legibility. Many of these could use some proofreading) but there’s no “Who’s the Beatdown?” type of article. The theory of Digimon that I’ve seen as a new player seems to be things taken for granted influenced by other card games.

I can assume that the standard deck ratios of 12-14 level 3s, 9-11 level 4s, 6-9 level 5s, and 4-8 level 6s comes from somewhere but I can’t really find too much insight past “it’s the way people do it.” I could infer that people found it by doing the math on getting X level by your Nth draw, much like Vanguard ratios. However, there isn’t an easily accessible explanation for why. Perhaps it’s buried under months and months of content on a YouTube channel for someone who doesn’t upload anymore or something.

I suppose the question is, “Why?” I think it’s the ecosystem in which Digimon’s been created. It’s a new card game in the grand scheme, which means several things:

1. Most obviously, the newness means that there’s just been less time for these articles to be written. Of course if YGO has two decades on Digimon and MTG has 6 years on YGO, the other two games will have a greater field of articles. That’s just how time works.

2. It’s smaller than other games. There’s less incentive to succeed when events are less frequent and payouts are lower. Part of Magic’s success comes from the fact that, at the highest level of competition, it’s possible to do pretty decently for yourself financially. In YGO’s case, prizing necessarily can’t be cash. In Digimon’s case, regionals happen relatively infrequently and have more hoops to jump through.

3. There is a way to support yourself through the game, which is to make content. This puts you at the mercy of the various algorithms of platforms like Substack or YouTube, the latter of which especially encourages continuous content. As MBT said in his video, “You have to put out something.” This means that instead of longer think pieces content creators are encouraged to talk about whatever the newest reveals are or decks from the latest set. You can’t innovate! You have to get your deck profile out in the 2 weeks while the hype is still flowing! Hell, the term “content creator” itself frames this work as something that is necessarily consistently repeatable. Instead of taking time to elucidate theories, the expectation is that any piece of writing or video from a player will be followed up with a new one soon.

   1. As a sub-point here, I think that card games aside from Magic have generally turned their backs on articles. Especially in YGO, where the only written communication from Konami tends to be “buy our new product. Banlist someday,” there’s just not a culture of readers. Instead they’re video-driven, and many of the Digimon players I know tend to come from games that aren’t Magic.

4. The game moves quickly and there’s really only one game in town. What I mean is that, just like Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon has its principle format that consists of the entire cardpool with a banlist. Because of this, the newest stuff is usually some of the best stuff in the room. This is a heuristic that tends to work for a lot of games like this, and it’s easy to see why. That being said, though, following it generally means that you’re skipping fundamental exercises in card evaluation, which will inevitably lead you to missing techs and ideas. This is elucidated in MBT’s video as well as a great article that mentions it. Game communities are in part at the mercies of the companies that make the games.

5. It’s hard! I kind of hinted at this above, but writing things as good as “Who’s the Beatdown?” and "Innovations: The Theory of Everything" fundamentally asks several things of its author:

   1. Credentials: For the most part, people aren’t going to listen to some local legend. Hell, I can almost guarantee that the majority of people reading this are only reading because they’re a friend who subscribed after my tournament report and not really competitive players.

   2. Experience: This goes hand-in-hand, as it’s what credentials prove. Knowing the card pool, fundamentals of gameplay, and matchups takes time. It’s hard to get that when most people have one local tournament they go to a week and regionals are so few and far between. Much like MBT’s statements point out about YGO, Digimon lacks the infrastructure to provide that experience to anyone but those very small and tight-knit groups at the top, assuming those groups exist in the first place.

   3. Ideas: Obviously, you won’t write an article that changes the world if you don’t have anything to say that could change the world. This one’s pretty simple.

   4. Desire and ability: This is probably the hardest one, if you ask me. If ideas are a prerequisite, there needs to be a desire to even share that idea in the first place. As mentioned before, videos are the de facto place to disseminate information for YGO and (I’ve found) Digimon. I could go on for hours about the pros and cons of videos vs written blogs but it boils down to this: If your video isn’t well-made or your blog is poorly written, people won’t care about it. You can often get by in that “content creator” way on the back of production value, but ultimately information is only as strong as the method used to communicate it. It’s difficult to find people who have these ideas who are good at expressing them in a way that’s accessible.

Great. Now What?

I mentioned it in my non-TCG-focused blog and I kind of alluded to it in the title of this post, but I don’t think I’m capable of changing this alone. I lack the experience with the card pool. What I can do is try to get new people into the game—when more people play a game more people will explore the ideas within it—and I can critique. I think it’s important to acknowledge where the community has done well, where it can improve, and where other communities act as examples of what could be.

On my own, I think it could be interesting to do something like PAK and review my own gameplay to improve as a player, hopefully to arrive at stronger fundamentals. I don’t know that I would make content about it, but I’d like to be able to fuel more innovative content on this blog and that seems like a means to that. I also would like to do more tournament reports, though, as those are relatively accessible and easy to pull together. I hope that I can bring some people along for that ride.