Okay, bear with me here. This is probably one of the goofier things I've ever said.
For a start, let's get this out of the way here, that Magic is not literally Yu-Gi-Oh! now. Nor is it even in the figurative-but-you-would-call-it-literal sense that probably makes English teachers and the internet fun police who formerly (and perhaps still) get called, or even sometimes call themselves, "grammar Nazis"1 mad. For a start, even when Magic art gets a little sexualized, and even when it gets a little anime, there's still a wide gulf of difference between that and what Yu-Gi-Oh! can muster. Also, outside of Universes Beyond products, which barely even count as Magic sets (as far as I'm concerned), there aren't uses of any real-world mythology or symbolism here, just things that may strongly resemble them. For example, the Magic world Amonkhet is based very heavily on Ancient Egypt and features a crocodile-headed god named Bontu, greatly resemble the Ancient Egyptian god Sobek. Yu-Gi-Oh! spells the name a little differently but just straight up has Sobek on a card. In fact, one might perceive the introduction of extended-art cards and serialized uber-rare treatments in Yu-Gi-Oh as a step toward it becoming more like Magic, which now includes untold amounts of treatments and alternate arts for some cards in sets, not to mention serialized prints of only a limited number of certain cards. Yu-Gi-Oh already had about eight trillion different foil formats, but these are specific things that I think Magic innovated on more, especially the latter.
You know, just to help shut the weirdos up. I know it won't work, but still.
Yu-Gi-Oh! has become unrecognizable from the game I remember as a kid. Honestly, that was the case by the time I graduated high school, and I think it's fair to say that it has basically become unrecognizable from the game I remember in community college. When we were just on the cusp of the release of Xyz monsters. So too has Magic: The Gathering become unrecognizable from the early years. Whatever, games evolve, right? Well, weirdly enough, it seems like it's following the same patterns of "evolution," in a lot of ways. Allow me to explain!
Yes, I get it, vanilla creatures are not very interesting, which is probably why they've all but gone extinct in both games. However, this is part of a growing trend of creature power-creep in both games.
Overall, I suppose neither game is made worse by this on paper, but it does make me sad. Normal monsters and vanilla creatures tend to be some of the most memorable critters in my opinion; many in Magic are archetypal, such as Gray Ogre and Grizzly Bears, while the Yu-Gi-Oh critters I remember the most are either the heavy hitters of the classic braindead beatdown era (e.g. La Jinn, Gemini Elf, even Summoned Skull... not so much Blue Eyes White Dragon, though), or the most stupid and useless piece of trash anyone's ever seen (like Skull Servant... which eventually got a whole massive archetype that actually builds to a pretty fun deck!).
One major way in which the two games differ, though, is how these plain fellas are supported. Yu-Gi-Oh features a lot of Normal Monster support; Magic does not. I think a big part of this is that the role of Yu-Gi-Oh monsters is different than those of Magic, and because, by virtue of being able to deal combat damage to the defending player when fighting and killing an attack position monster in Yu-Gi-Oh, they fundamentally have a partial form of Magic’s trample ability, which, obviously, vanilla creatures in Magic don’t have, because trample is an ability, and if they have that… they kind of stop being vanilla creatures. Additionally, it’s often quite hard to word certain support effects for vanilla creatures, because Magic is so reliant on keyword abilities. You can’t give these creatures those abilities, which means that, say, giving them first strike requires awkwardly having a card that has the ability that lets the creature do that. For an example, look at Dust Corona; a creature enchanted by Dust Corona does not gain an ability. The effect is an ability of Dust Corona. Do you see how weird and crusty that is? (Yu-Gi-Oh monsters typically do not get given abilities, and they remain the ability of the source card (see Fairy Meteor Crush) and I’m pretty sure they stay normal monsters anyway because Normal Monster is effectively a designation).
Back in ye olden days of Yu-Gi-Oh, there were certain rules on how strong a creature could be at Level 4 (the highest level that required no other inherent cost to play them, for the non-fans in the audience). At most, for a while, you could get only 1800 attack with no sacrifice, and some of those had negative abilities; very rare were those with positive abilities. A select few creatures broke this after a point, and they were all very sought-after for at least a little while. Nowadays, however, you’re allowed to get a 2000 attack normal monster at level 4. Part of why this is, is because of the overall increased power of combo-oriented decks and the use of archetypes (for Magic players in the audience, think kindred and typal strategies). Decks are no longer about just normal-summoning a beatstick and having a few busted spells with minimal interaction attached to them. To an extent, this makes a more interesting game. But modern Yu-Gi-Oh has the same kind of reputation as Magic’s Vintage format, i.e. games that end turn one or even, god help you, are decided "turn zero."
Magic’s creature power creep sits in a very similar place, but the numbers often feel more obscene - probably because Magic just uses smaller numbers, so the change from an 1800 for no sacrifice to 2000 for no sacrifice versus the change from a 1/1 for one mana to a 2/1 with an ability for one mana feels more drastic (after all, the Magic creature doubled in power!). Make no mistake, early Magic’s creatures were dog shit, almost to a one. I think I can count on one hand the number of pre-Mirage creatures I still would want to play, and two of those are contingent on my not being in a mirror match. By Tempest, you had a step in the right direction with the Slivers. Slivers are a creature type whose particular funny hat is that they were, effectively, all "lords" (i.e. they gave every creature of their type a buff). Consequently, your opponent could profit off of your slivers, but unless you’re in a mirror match, who cares, your board actually finally had some good bodies on it. Slivers, being a hive-mind of insectile creatures, were a flavor slam-dunk, not to mention fun to play, so Wizards kept returning to them (including later making them asymmetrical to make the mirror less of a feel-bad situation), but we’re not here to talk about that. Point is, creatures spent most of early Magic history being either bad or bombs. One of the oldest books about how to play and deck-build for Magic that I ever read, dating back to Fourth Edition, even recommended a creatureless deck. Yeah, that should tell you something. That idea isn’t really a common one nowadays.
This is, again, probably good, because it means the board state matters for more than just playing artifacts unless the guy across from you is trying to do something with spamming Shadow creatures and Dauthi Warlords, hoping that you cared too little to pack removal. A lot of people - primarily combo players - like to deride modern Magic for being so creature-heavy and being more about "turning things sideways," and I get it, but it’s either that or the public masturbation involved in spell-oriented combo decks. Even turn-one Dark Rit-Hippie is more dignified than the type of combo people like that imply they want (even if it’s not what they actually want). Good creatures are good for the game. Nevertheless, this push might be a little bit overkill if Colossal Rattlewurm feels unusable.
On June 14, 2019, Wizards of the Coast released Modern Horizons, printing cards directly into Modern and other eternal formats and skipping over Standard entirely. This basically changed Modern forever because it was able to sit at a power level similar to, or sometimes even in excess of, that of past sets, because it would not disrupt Standard with its massively powerful card base.
I'm pretty sure you've all figured this out, but the whole purpose behind card games is to try to get you to spend money on them. Wizards of the Coast's primary way of doing this in Magic - which was ultimately carried over to Pokemon (or perhaps it was already intended that way by Creatures Inc. and it was just serendipitous that WotC was putting Pokemon out way back when) - was with Standard and Extended, which are rotating formats. Every year or so, sets from two years ago (for Standard) would "rotate out," i.e. become illegal in tournament play. Wizards could then release new sets, and the impetus to buy those would be to… actually have cards to keep building decks and playing with. On paper, this can help keep the average power level roughly the same. How successful they were varied heavily, of course - ever heard of the Urza’s block? - but the sentiment was fairly sensible. It’s motivated wholly by corporatism and all that entails, but it’s good for the health of the game.
Yu-Gi-Oh has no such rotating format. In order to help push product, Yu-Gi-Oh has to keep putting out new cards that players have a reason to play over things in previous sets to keep the game selling. They cannot simply wait for your Grizzly Bears to rotate and then introduce you to Runeclaw Bear, who is totally different and not just Grizzly Bears but uglier. When you have enough 1800s to make your beatdown deck play, well, meet 1850.2 It’s why an old-school Yu-Gi-Oh deck struggles against a newer-era deck unless you lift the old game’s ban list. And even then, that’s not always true; Raigeki, the infamous "kill all your opponent’s creatures for nothing" spell from Yu-Gi-Oh’s early days, perhaps the chase card to end all chase cards back then other than maybe the big dragons, was one of the first cards banned. It is now only restricted in Yu-Gi-Oh by the limitation of three per deck and a minuscule point cost for the relatively young "Genesys" format. (Speaking of which, if Yu-Gi-Oh can have a point-cost-list format, why can’t we have that for Commander? Would that even be a good choice?)
With Modern Horizons, Magic circumvented this rule for the first time, printing cards into a high-power format meant to not only expand it, but of course, to push a product. So they had to be strong. Compared, you understand, to Modern. A format where all the fetchlands are always legal and the card pool stretches back to Mirrodin, the second-most-powerful block of sets in Magic history. So, needless to say, many cards in Modern Horizons really push the limits of good taste, and it has only gotten worse with subsequent Modern Horizons releases. Now imagine if WotC ever had the cojones to print a set directly into the true eternal format, Legacy, which is even more powerful and where several Modern Horizons cards creep in on occasion.
Oh, right! They did that! They continue to do that! It’s called Commander-oriented products.
Now, to be fair, cards bleeding from Commander into Legacy or Vintage is fairly rare. But it does happen from time to time, and also, even though Commander is technically a strictly casual format, it is still an eternal format, and one of the most popular casual formats. So when Wizards prints literally just a Power Nine with a fake stipulation directly into Commander, circumventing Standard (thus allowing them to refer to Commander-only features), they are just doing the same thing they did with Modern Horizons, but to something played only at the kitchen table. I also feel that WotC has been treating Commander as a big enough thing that they have to start dumping massive and truly unnecessary amounts of some types of cards, notably legendary creatures, into sets to make them appeal to Commander players.
Thing is, that’s really not that necessary.
Commander is a casual format, and plenty of players use it for the style of self-expression this style of game is especially permissive of in a more carefree environment. Commander players have historically always loved finding some janky, non-competitively-viable card(s), and finding (a) home(s) for them. For example, Dauthi Embrace would surely be worth about nine cents if it weren’t for Commander. There has historically been plenty of room for innovation in the main game, and there will be for a while. Commander should probably get expanded on due to those innovative sets instead of having them forced into places that don’t make any sense, or worse, added into releases that exist for the sole purpose of checking things off on a list; on some level, making cards that reference the command zone in rules, or objects therein, were probably a mistake. Hell, there are plenty of things the playerbase wants - legendary nephilim, for example - that can just be incorporated into actual sets. A story about Ravnicans fighting off a new brood of nephilim would have made for a much more sensible set than Murders at Karlov Manor! It could be like Magic attempting a kaiju set! But then again, maybe four-color creatures wouldn’t be very likely to hit it big in the tournament scene unless they made an environment where color basically meant nothing. That’s a challenge I’d leave for Set Design, then.
As Wizards gives into their desire to introduce new blood to non-rotating formats in what I would consider an unnatural way, they push the overall power level of the game further. Obviously there are still certain taboos that won’t be broken, but maybe some of these new cards are just as OP as cards from the past and you just can’t really do an apples-to-apples comparison with some of them.
(As an aside, back when Generational Duel was still a format, I think Yu-Gi-Oh had a version of this in TCG regions, because I believe some old cards that were Japanese exclusive (i.e. from the OCG - let’s just say things are weird here) got printed into some of the old generations’ list of permitted cards; unfortunately, I can’t think of examples of this because it turns out my go-to, Fusion Sage was printed in 2005, way earlier than I thought. Also I may have screwed up my terminology; don’t get hung up on that part, please.)
This isn’t really evidence of anything, it’s mostly just funny.
Yu-Gi-Oh has a long tradition of crossovers with other Konami properties as cards, including referencing such series as Gradius, Metal Gear, and even Ganbare Goemon! Magic has only very recently started to get into this game. Although the Universes Beyond crossovers are far more famous, thanks to how contentious they are, a few years ago, Magic introduced products set in the universe of Dungeons and Dragons. Additionally, official Dungeons and Dragons supplements exist to allow you to play a campaign set on one of various Magic planes.
Like I said, this one’s just more of a funny parallel than actual evidence of anything going badly with the game.
Both games have had this feature for a while. I, of course, am a huge mark for this kind of thing, for the same reasons as anyone else who gets tied up in it.
See, both games, especially in their early years, are Millennium millennial icons. A lot of people got into Magic in the 90s, especially as supply became greater. And of course, Yu-Gi-Oh was big at its debut. Obviously, even the later parts of the series have their fans, but there's a strong trend of late-90s-early-00s nostalgia with a lot of these instances. Magic just recently finished up a story arc concerning the Phyrexians, an on-again-off-again story spanning the game's entire history that was conveniently concluded right near the game's 30th anniversary. Outlaws at Thunder Junction, being a celebration of 100 Magic expansions, was a nostalgia set too, primarily thanks to very heavily featuring popular 90s villain Kaervek and popular 21st Century villain Oko - a real "new school meets old school" moment - not to mention everyone else from the franchise's rogues' gallery that showed up, with the main heroic characters turning out to be Jace and Vraska. Aetherdrift is a nostalgia set oriented around the unfinished stories of Avishkar and Amonkhet, and also Muraganda - a plane that has never otherwise been truly shown in Magic, but whose two references in Future Sight were quite popular due to being quirky cards centered around two of the most simple things in the game: vanilla creatures and basic lands. Edge of Eternities features, in its backdrop, Slivers, the Eldrazi, and a crew member's pet cat being named Mirri, in reference to a character from the Weatherlight Saga. (Arguably, every return set is nostalgia bait, but also, that's stupid and shut the fuck up.) And these are just main sets.
Yu-Gi-Oh, meanwhile, has been milking the original saga and monsters contained therein basically throughout its entire history. There's a new version of Dark Magician coming soon. There was a set a few years ago themed around Ishizu's cards. I bought Structure Decks themed around the Egyptian God Cards a couple years ago. And also, every single Skull Servant support (see point 1, I guess).
As always, I know why this happens. It's because these are recognizable parts of the property that create instant hype and sell packs regardless of the quality of the cards. But as much as I love these stories, there's plenty of space to tell other new ones! The thing that bothers me more is the sheer amount of cards that are intentional throwbacks to other cards - and indeed, "bothers" is a bit of a stretch, but it does make the games feel like they're stuck smelling its own farts on a constant basis. How can I get excited for these new sets when it feels like they're making no forward progress or anything interesting and new?
The answer to the leading question is "not really." But it's interesting to see that some of the flaws (and some things that aren't flaws but are noteworthy features!) of both games are so similar.
Nevertheless, the direction that Magic has been taking over the last half-decade and change is one where Wizards of the Coast has been openly leaning much harder into the obvious nature of the game as a "product" ahead of anything else. It's not like that has ever not been the case. But it sure feels bad when they're so up-front about it!
1. ↑ Huge red flag if anyone openly calls themself a "grammar Nazi," by the way. What kind of a person actively wants to compare themself to a Nazi? Only an evil person.
2. ↑ Note that this scenario did not literally happen because Mechanicalchaser was printed in English in a Tournament Pack, which muddles things a little; you had to actually play good to get that guy. In this case, it’s a rough example of the type of thing that would happen.