 Yu-Gi-Oh! Prices Have Gone Insane. What's up guys? We're back with another discussion video. In this video, we will be discussing the current Yu-Gi-Oh! Pricing Discourse. Now, Twitter's been going absolutely wild about the price of a card coming out in the new Maze of Millennia set. That's the Ultra Rare Bonfire card. At pre-sell, it was selling for about 70 bucks. I think when it started, that was on, like, Gamers' Choice, I think, in places like that, because TCG Player didn't even have them up yet. If you look at the actual TCG Player graph, you can tell that it started, like, way high, so it was before that. But since then, they were selling at 70, they were selling at 80. They're all the way up now to $125. Yeah, that's an Ultra Rare in a collector rare set. There's a lot of things to talk about about that sentence, I just said. But first of all, this card comes only as Ultra in Maze. It doesn't come in collector rare, it doesn't come in anything else, just as an Ultra Rare. The set does have a QCR. No, it doesn't get one of those. And if you're a regular viewer of my channel, you know that I hate collector rare sets. And they probably have a lot to do with the issue of the pricing here. Another thing I want to note before I go on about pricing and everything is, you should not be buying this card for $125 right now. It's currently at $125 for pre-sale. A pre-sale on TCG Player means that you have to be, like, a verified store to actually be able to list on TCG Player. So very, very few people that have Bonfires or will have Bonfires are able to list right now. So you shouldn't be buying at $125. Don't spend $3.75 for a playset because next Friday, there will be a lot more listings of people like me who, you know, I open a lot of packs, but guess what? I'm not a verified store, so I can't list them right now. There will be random Mr. Joe who went to the local card store, he bought one box and he pulled a bonfire. He might list it on there because it's $125. Why not? Guess what's gonna happen? The price is probably gonna go down because most of the time cards go down after pre-release. Sometimes they'll go up, but starting at $125 makes it very, very unlikely that an ultra rare in a collector rare set is gonna go up. There are 11 total ultras in this set. You get three in a box. You get about a 27% chance to actually pull the ultra you're looking for, which is not a great chance, but at the same time, there's gonna be a lot of cases opened and there will be a lot more pulled. It's not like it's gonna be, you know, one per case or something like that, assuming they didn't short print it, but based on the price and based on Konami's track record, we're not totally sure they didn't do that. So just be patient. Don't spend $125. I know people are freaking out about the price right now, but it's a little early to freak out because guess what? We don't even know what the price is yet. We're gonna wait till it actually comes out on that Friday to see what it ends up at. If it stays at 125, we can probably freak out because that's pretty insane for an ultra. But just be patient on this. Don't buy them right now. I know you guys want your bonfires. You want to play whatever tech it is that they're in. I don't even know. It searches a pyro or something level four. That's all I know. I don't really know what deck it's in, but just wait. Just wait a week. And now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'm just trying to save you guys from wasting your money early because, I mean, 70 was probably fine. 80, you know, once you get up to 125, that's pretty insane for an ultra rare. And should it have ever even reached that price? Because I think that's what most of the discourse is about. It's like, why in the world is this card getting this high? Like it's a ridiculous price. Other TCGs and stuff. They don't have to spend this much for some of their cards. And first of all, keep in mind, you don't have to spend it yet until it comes out. But they do have a point. $125 for an ultra rare is pretty insane. And I have seen a lot of comments saying, this is Konami's fault. Konami, why are you making the card prices so high? You've got to fix this. Why did you make a $125 ultra rare? The fact of it is, Konami's not actually making those prices. Obviously, they sell the boxes at a certain price to distributors. They distribute them to the local stores. And from then it's kind of out of their hands. It just becomes what the market does. And what the market has done here is some people put them up for 70 bucks on their presale and then everybody bought them out. So like, okay, that was too low. They put them up higher. People bought them out. They put them up higher. People bought them out. And what happened was the Yu-Gi-Oh players spent that money on those cards and they drove the price up. So if Yu-Gi-Oh players want to change that, we have to be more patient. We can't just go and like, I need my play set right away. I don't care what the price is. If it's 70, if it's 80, if it's 100, if it's 125, I'm buying it because at some point, you know, like it's just going to keep going up. In theory, if let's say it was at 70 and all those people who bought like immediately waited, they're like, you know what, I'll wait for my play set of Bonfire. The price doesn't go up. It stays at 70. And then when it comes next Friday, you buy yours at 70 or maybe it even goes lower because there's more supply coming onto TCG player. So you can get it for 60 or something like that. That might have happened. We don't actually know because maybe this card is just that good that that many people want it and they think it's worth it at 70 because if there's that many people that think it's worth it at 70 or at 80 or at 125 that's just going to be what the price is. No matter how much we complain about it or people want it for less, it's just going to be that price if enough people are buying it at that price. But if you're somebody who's like, I really don't want to buy it at 125 but I'm scared that it's going to go higher. You're the people that could maybe hold back. You could be like, it's expensive, but I'm going to wait. I'm going to hold out me and some people are going to decide I'm not spending 100 for this card. I'm going to wait for it to go down and that, you know, there's less demand then and the less demand means there's a better chance that the card goes down versus it going up because if people are panic buying thinking they're going to miss out, they may or may not get a good price, but it's also going to be driving up that price more and creating that price discourse on Twitter and everyone's going to be so angry about it. So that's what players can do when it comes to these crazy cards. But I said earlier, it's Konami's out. It's out of their hands. It is out of their hands once they release the set. But where it's not out of their hands is how they make the sets. It's all about the composition of the set. So I've said earlier, I don't like collector sets. I've said this many times on my channel. I think the composition of these sets sucks. You open a 24 pack box, you get three ultras guaranteed. You get 21 supers unless you happen to get a collector rare or QCR. QCRs are most of the time not even in collector rare sets. They have been in the last two. There's one in this one, three in the last one. Before that, it was all collector rare. So you get one every three boxes, you get a collector rare. So three ultras, you might get a collector rare. I think they're like one per case for QCR. So you're probably not getting one of those. So basically, most of the time you're going to buy a box, you're going to get three ultras, which is not that exciting when it comes to a lot of other boxes that you have. They have secret rares, they have prismatic secret rares, they have collector rares, QCR, starlight rares, ultimate rares, you know, which is OTS, but we're throwing those in there. There's all kinds of different rarities you can get in cool-looking stuff that you don't get in CR sets. You get boring old ultras, which I made a little rarity tier list recently. And I actually stated that I like supers more than ultras, which you may or may not agree with, but I think supers are more subtle and the subtlety makes them cool. The ultras are like subtle, but they also have the name thing and the gold looks kind of iffy. And it's kind of like, I'd rather just have a secret rare at that point. So I don't really like ultras in general. So with that being the highest rarity, you only get three of them, you know, three pulls and 24 packs, $60, whatever it costs you, feels terrible. And what they did with this CR set is they took the best card in the set, assuming it's the best card based on the price, you know, bonfire. They put that at ultra rare and they didn't even give it another printing. They didn't bother to give it a CR, just to diversify a little bit because then you could pull the ultra rare bonfire or the CR. So while the CR is pretty rare, one in four cases, if there's like a bunch of different CRs, you're probably not going to get that CR, but you at least have another chance to get a bonfire in a different rarity. They decided, no, we're not going to do that. We're just going to do ultra. And they've done this before. You guys remember DPE when it first came out in burst of destiny, didn't get a starlight rare and then they later printed the starlight, which people were not happy about because it's like, why was that not a starlight in the first set? Just doesn't make sense. And they've done the same thing here. Basically saving the bonfire for a future reprint to sell another set, which is always a little bit, you don't really love that because it's like, you could have just put it in this set and made this set even better and give us more chances at the bonfire, but instead you give us one print. So it makes it even harder to get it makes the price go even higher. That is something that they can change. They cannot do that in the future. They could also maybe here's a theory out here. I don't know if it would work. I don't know if it wouldn't. It's just an idea I have. You could make bonfire a super rare. Wow. Low rarity card. That's really good. Maybe it's a $5 super because supers are pretty easy to pull. Maybe it's even a $10 super $30 play set. That feels a lot better than $375. You could also put bonfire as a super and a collector or and as a QCR. So that way you have the more accessible version for players. So players are not spending $400 on a play set, but if you're a collector or you're a high rarity guy, you can get that QCR. You get that collector and it probably costs you 100 bucks, 150 bucks for a card, something like that. And it ends up being about the same as the ultra cost here. And I'm not saying they need to do rarity collection style because I don't think they need to do seven prints of everything every time. I think doing two prints, you know, early on is great because you know, it gives you a chance to have two different ones, but it doesn't over print it immediately because you don't want the prices to be zero. I know the players want the prices to be zero, but when it comes to the stores and the distributors and everybody running the actual business of selling the cards, they can't afford to open boxes that provide zero value. So it has to be a little bit of value there and that's where the QCRs and the CRs come in, you know, having some value pulling those and then maybe putting some good cards in lower rarity so you have like four or five dollars supers. If you do mass openings, those really add up, but they're also very affordable for players. You're not spending, you're spending $15 on a play set. You're not spending, you know, hundreds of dollars. So there is a very fine balance there that you have to keep in mind and right now the balance feels like it's a little bit out of whack with players taking the big, you know, big brunt of it, having to spend so much on those crazy, crazy cards coming out. And I will say like recently, I think that Yu-Gi-Oh players have short memories. You know, we see bonfire. We go crazy. We're like, oh my gosh, I'm spending $400 for bonfire. It's crazy. Kanami's done pretty good reprinting a lot of the sables recently. When it comes to rarity collection, 81 cards getting seven prints. A lot of those being stuff like Ash Blossom, Lightning Storm, Infinite Impermanence, Evenly Match. All those cards used to be $70 cards, $50 cards, you know, whatever they were, they're like $2, $1.50 in super rare now because of the rarity collection print. So they have done things in a good way when it comes to pricing for you guys. And rarity collection was also so popular. It did well for stores as well. And that's what we really have to care about. It's not necessarily the market later, which as someone like me, I like to be like, oh, I hope my cards stay valuable, but it doesn't really matter that much when it comes to players buying the cards and getting them early and then rarity collection, selling well for the stores and the distros early on because the prices of the boxes later, while it is somewhat important, it's not nearly as important as the set selling well initially because if the stores have boxes that sell well right when they come out, that's super beneficial to them because they are able to buy them and sell them out of profit and you guys are able to buy them and get cards that are actually worthwhile and that keeps things going. So the only thing you have to be concerned about with that is future reprints being diminished because they reprinted them too much, but that's something we can deal with down the road. So if they if they're able to provide awesome sets of players can afford and distributors and local stores can sell, that's a win for everybody. And one thing I did want to mention regarding those staples and stuff like that that I was just talking about. I saw some other comments about other TCG's having more affordable staples than Yu-Gi-Oh does and stuff like that. And while I just mentioned our staples are a lot more affordable now. I think they just mean cards in general because right now it's not necessarily staples that are so expensive like Bonfire. I don't think is going to be used in every deck. I think it's just going to be a few decks that are really good. I could be wrong about that. And you know, I'm not playing that much except for of course when I'm winning YCSs, but other TCG's like Pokemon, especially Pokemon have a huge advantage over Yu-Gi-Oh when it comes to that kind of stuff because Pokemon is about I would guesstimate 10 times bigger when it comes to trading cards than Yu-Gi-Oh is and a large portion. I would say 80%, 90% of those people are casual Pokemon fans that just like opening packs. They're not really involved with the TCG at all. They don't really care about what happens in the tournaments. They just want to open it up. They maybe they're open it with their kids. Maybe they're opening it to collect. Maybe they're opening it to buy and sell. Whatever the reason is they're doing some sort of opening that they then don't use those cards in the TCG which provides way way more supply to that TCG. So if you think about it, Pokemon being 10 times as big as Yu-Gi-Oh, you know, 10 times as big as Yu-Gi-Oh. Then you consider the fact that Pokemon tournaments, I think I saw they had like a 3000 players at like one of their big tournaments. Yu-Gi-Oh has 2000, maybe 3000 at some. So very similar sizes of tournaments. So about the same amount of players if you if I'm just using these very rough estimates but somewhere in the ballpark at the same amount of TCG players, but they have 10 times the supply. Yu-Gi-Oh simply can't keep up with prices of Pokemon stuff because there is so much supply on the Pokemon side. Those prices are never going to get up to $120 for a staple because there is Joe Schmo over there with his son Addison opening for a Charizard and they pull 12 of the new awesome TCG trainer card. So they just sell it on TCG player. And so now all the TCG players are that's confusing the TCG players on TCG player. That sounds weird. Are able to go buy those because those people don't care about them. They just want that Charizard they were searching for in Yu-Gi-Oh. There's a lot less of those people. So there's not as many people just opening packs like me searching for the new awesome Starlight Rare or whatever and then selling the cards. It's basically just distros, YouTubers and maybe a few like random people who are fans of the card game just opening a few boxes and selling them. But Pokemon it's like the majority of people. So comparing those two things is really unfair to Yu-Gi-Oh because unless we become like we get an anime that becomes amazing because like the original anime is great but they kind of stopped doing it. Unless something crazy happens and all of a sudden Yu-Gi-Oh catches up to Pokemon it's not going to happen. And we're never going to be able to match that sort of demand when it comes to the availability of our TCG cards. And finally now that I know nobody else is watching I can talk about a couple of reasons why it's good that prices are high and by keep good. Okay. Before you freak out, I know all you are not watching anymore but before you freak out good is in quotations like it's not really good because it sucks for all the TCG players but there are some people who are benefiting from this. So I will mention them and the people who are excited about that are anybody who opens a box loves that there's a really high expensive chase card in there. So that's me. I like it. I like it for me. I don't like it for you guys. I like it that I get to open a box and maybe pull $125 card. That's exciting. It's I'm not the only one. There's the people who go to their local store. They like opening products. So they buy a box. You know, if you buy a box for the best cards 20 bucks. It's not as exciting as when the best cards 125 bucks. Like that's just an obvious statement. And I did see a lot of people just like how in the world could you defend these high prices? I'm not even trying to defend high prices. I'm just putting it out there that if maybe you open a box, you will probably be more excited about that box because there's an expensive card. Not necessarily. Wow. I'm excited. It's $125. I hope nobody can buy these cards. That's not what anybody thinks. And those local stores are going to sell those boxes faster because the people are casually buying it. They're trying to get that $125 card. You know, they're going to buy those boxes. They're not necessarily going to buy Battles of Legend Monsters revenge or whatever. Some other not so great set when they had the chance at buying a box with $125 card. And that's great for locals because locals are the people who are supporting the card games. They're providing us a place to play the game, trade cards, you know, just hang out with your friends, all that stuff. So I can't say it's a bad thing that locals are selling boxes faster. That is one of the main benefits of having expensive cards. So there is a very fine line. I've already mentioned there's a fine line between our locals doing well. We don't want necessarily us to, you know, be dying and the locals to be like, you know, millionaires, you know, making tons and tons of money because we have to buy $125 cards. But we also don't want the sets to absolutely suck. I made a video about how the sets sucked several months ago and nobody was buying them. And now it's completely flipped on its head. The sets may, I mean, I'm not saying the sets great, but it does have really expensive cards that people are going to want to buy the set for. So there's a, there's a middle ground, you know, where the card doesn't need to be $125. But it also, there needs to be good cards at the set. They need to be worth something. So this discourse is fair, you know, people have a right to complain. If you are a Cimo pill by the singles only person, you know, you don't ever want there to be $125 cards. You don't even care about the locals. Just screw them. I get to buy my cards at $3. It's way better, but then you do kind of care about the locals because that's where you go. That's where you play with. So that fine line is something that Konami needs to figure out. I just spit everywhere, but there is, I gave a couple of ideas, but I'm not Konami. They got to figure it out. They got to figure out how can we keep the players happy because you don't want players leaving right now. There are so many awesome new TCG's coming out one piece, which has its own problems with pricing at the moment. I've heard people might leave and go somewhere else. They might play another card game because if you can just go to Pokemon and play for $100 decks. I mean, that's something someone might do. If we can't get this figured out, we might lose some players from the TCG. And while I'm mostly a collector, players are what drive the Yu-Gi-Oh card game. It's not as much a casual opening TCG like Pokemon. It's more of a players play this game. They love this game and then you might love the game and open product or you might be one of the few that just opens product, watch the NMA old school Boomer like me, but it's mostly TCG players. So we need to find a way to keep those people happy while also providing sets that the locals will have success selling and they can continue to invest in Yu-Gi-Oh in the future. So if you have an idea about how to fix the pricing, let me know down below. Konami, they might read the comments. I doubt it, but who knows somebody from Konami might read the comments on this video. If it becomes something huge and people really, really are upset about it, Konami might read the comments of this video. So go leave a comment. Let me know down below. How can we fix the pricing where it's not, you know, completely killing locals, but it's also affordable for you guys and you're not spending half your month's rent payment or all of it on your next deck or whatever. So thank you guys for watching this discussion video. It's obviously important to me that Yu-Gi-Oh survives. So I want this to be figured out. I want everybody to be happy. I don't want people leaving Yu-Gi-Oh, because obviously, I'm dependent on Yu-Gi-Oh. So come on, Konami, let's figure this out. Shout out to Tomfosho, Puffins of Doom, Ernesto Dian, America Doit Steer, Brad, KK Beatz, Annotatai Show, Ian Musa, Junior Barting, Robert F., Thomas Beclaim, Chen Galing, and Joey Castle. Thank you guys for supporting the channel, and I'll see you guys next time. Peace.