 Yu-Gi-Oh has a major problem. And no, I'm not, this isn't like just clickbait because obviously you know, there's a little bit of going on with the thumbnail and everything but I think this is pretty serious. What is this major problem you ask? I got my glasses on today because this is a studious type of video. There's gonna be some numbers in here. There's gonna be some thinking in here. It's not just opening and getting hyped so I had to put the glasses on. Are people quitting the game? Are collectors tired of collecting high rarity cards and putting together binders? Maybe people have finally gotten tired of opening packs? No, it's none of those things. The problem is Konami is printing too many Yu-Gi-Oh cards. How is that possible? You can never have too many Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Yeah, you can. Konami has always put out a ton of new sets but I think we're actually reaching a tipping point. I started thinking about this problem after the release of the most recent set, Legendary Duelist Soul Burning Volcano. I, as a Yu-Gi-Oh content creator, barely realized when this set was releasing. It stuck up on me like the end of a streaming service free trial. Bam, you owe 20 bucks and you didn't even finish that show you were watching. Crap, I went on about opening this set just like I do any new release, posting three videos and I was gonna do the usual live stream opening like I normally do, looking for that rarest card. But I immediately noticed a significant disinterest in the set. No one was watching the first opening I posted, which are usually some of the best on the channel. Secondly, a lot of the comments talking about the set were either negative or disinterested. Not particularly excited for this one but appreciate the love for older archetypes. I'd like to see future Legendary Duelist that feature a Ghost Obelisk or Slyther. Maybe one day we'll get that. Wing Dragon Arayura, the only ghost rare for some reason. I hate this set. I've never in my life opened 20 packs and pulled one super rare. Literally was the worst opening I've ever done. I'm not gonna lie, the Legendary Duelist sets don't excite me too much but instead of getting a box I'll get a few packs at the store and see what happens. Way to support your locals, man. Seeing all of this, I decided to check the price of the box and what's the going rate for this thing and I had a bad feeling because Legendary Duelist usually do not do too well in terms of price, which we're gonna get to. Currently it sits at about $35 per box, a ridiculously low amount for a brand new set that released less than a month ago. But this isn't unique for the Legendary Duelist sets. In 2021, Konami released Legendary Duelist Synchro Storm. This set had a similar trajectory and price currently sitting at about $39 per box. Oh, but Legendary Duelist Duelist from the Deep Police in 2022 must have been better, right? How about way worse? This box has a whopping $25 per box. An entire box of 36 packs for $25. That is insane. But is this just a Legendary Duelist set issue? Is the composition of those sets messed up and wrong and that's just making them bad? Yes, yes, there is, but it's not the only set that's struggling. While they are the absolute worst offenders of the last few years, nearly every Yu-Gi-Oh! set release this year is losing value from its release. And here is the big issue I was alluding to. While I was pondering making this video, I saw a post on Instagram by Beckett Castle TCG, which seems to be a TCG hobby store of some kind. I don't follow them, but someone shared their post and it piqued my interest. They posted a product line update with three different TCG updates. One of them referred to Yu-Gi-Oh! They wrote, and I quote, We have made the unfortunate decision to discontinue carrying Yu-Gi-Oh! In our opinion, the market rates for boxes at release are just absurd and we are losing thousands per set. We have our current product and clearance on our website with extreme below-cost discounts. For example, Soul Burning Volcano released this past Friday. It's literally been a week, guys. Our average cost is $48. I assume that means per box, they didn't say that. They're selling on TCG for $35. These and shipping are another 30% of that. I think 30% is a little high, but we're gonna do the numbers after this. Duelist Next has had an average cost of $61 and are selling for $53 before fees and shipping. This is not sustainable. We will carry Yu-Gi-Oh! through the 25th anniversary rarity collection on November 3rd, but that will be our last set. Our apologies to our Yu-Gi-Oh! fans. Come clear out our clearance. Now, obviously that is an extremely sad thing to read that a hobby store that is literally the blood, sweat, and tears of Yu-Gi-Oh! I mean, that's where you go to play. That's where you go to find your product at your local place. You see your friends there. You experience all the new decks and everything before you go to like a YCS and stuff like that. And they're literally unable to buy and sell the product because it's too expensive. They claim to literally be losing thousands of dollars per release. It depends on how many cases they're buying and everything, but they're losing hundreds to thousands of dollars. This is just a bad thing for Yu-Gi-Oh! in general. If these hobby stores who are literally the most passionate people in the world about Yu-Gi-Oh! and other TCGs can't afford to buy and sell the cards, who is gonna sell them? I know a lot of people think stores do not buy for as much as I buy. Like I buy a box for 60, stores buying for 30. That is not true. Distributors do not sell boxes for $30. They sell them for what they said was 48 on average for Legendary Duelists. We're gonna estimate $45 for Legendary Duelists. We're gonna do $55 on Core Sets, which they said was like 61, I think, which is probably closer to reality, but we're gonna do 55 just to give them a little bit of a chance, right? We're gonna see if that $55 box can they make money? We're gonna assume that they're selling on eBay and there's gonna be eBay fees and then shipping costs. Let me show you just how dire this situation is. First set released this year, amazing defenders, selling for $55. First of all, that's how much it costs from distributor, so we already know we're gonna lose money on this one. After that whopping 13.25% eBay fee, plus 30 cents, you gotta add in that 30 cents, and a $5 per box shipping, they're making $42.42. So each box is losing about $12.50. Multiply that by 12 boxes, you end up losing about $150 for a case, and a local store is probably gonna be buying at least 10 cases, maybe even more. That's a $1,500 average loss. The second set, one of the best sets of the year, Photon Hypernova, that's gotta be making money, right? These are selling for just under $60, a little bit better than amazing defenders. With the $8.25 eBay fees plus the $5 shipping, they're netting about $46.75. That's not $55. They're now losing about $8 per box, which is $96 a case, and about $1,000 per 10 cases. Maze of memories, this set surprised me. It's $61 box, it's actually doing better than Photon Hypernova. Still at a $48 net, though. Losing $7 per box, $84 per case, and $840 per 10 cases. Cyberstorm access, now we're really looking poor. $51 a box, $39 net after all the fees and the shipping and everything. Losing $16 per box, $192 per case, and nearly $2,000 per 10 cases. Wild Survivors, they're at $50 a box, $38 net. Losing about $17 per box, $204 per case, $2K per 10 cases. I think collector wear sets may be cheaper. I'm not totally sure, because I don't have a distributor, but I think you might be able to get those at a little bit less, so maybe the losses aren't quite as bad there, because they might be like $50 a box, but even then they're still losing money there. Battles of Legend Monsters Revenge, always a banger set. Battles of Legend is a hard carry for stores, $61 per box. So it's the same thing as we saw earlier, about $840 on a 10 case. You're losing about $84 per case and $7 per box. Now, LLB 25th anniversary, they reprinted the first set ever. It's gotta be doing well, and guess what? It is actually doing well, $79 average cost per box. They're making about $63 after fees and shipping, $63.25, profiting about $8 per box, $96 per case, and $1,000 per 10 cases. That's a banger. It's one of the best sets of the year, and it was just released. But guess what? It was released in July, the first set in the entire year that a store is making money selling on eBay. Oh, but I forgot to mention, you probably had to buy the MRD and SRL and all those with LLB, and let's see how those are done. MRD is at $58 per box, which is a $45 net, losing $10 per box, $120 per case, $1,200 per 10 cases. There goes all the profits just for metal raiders, and I'm sure Ferro Servant and Magic Ruler slash Spell Ruler are not doing much better. Dualus Nexus, 52 per box. We kind of saw this one earlier. They said 53 per box, so they went up a little bit more generously for the price. $40 per box after fees, losing $15 a box, $180 per case, $1,800 per 10 cases. And finally, the stinker of them all, the one that really inspired this video, legendary Dualus Soul Burning Volcano. They only have to pay $45 a box instead of $55 here, so you think, and that would help. They're $35 per box right now. After fees, it's $25 a box. They're losing $20 per box, $240 per case, and $2,400 per 10 cases, $2,400. That is insane. After seeing that, you might want to say, well, they get to avoid all the shipping fees and everything, and the eBay fees, because they have a store. They can sell them in-store, right? That's true, they can do that, but they're not going to sell nearly the volume most likely. And even if they do, only Photon, Hypernova, Maze of Memories, Battles of Legend, metal raiders and LOB are selling for more than $55. So all those other ones are still losing money, even if they have zero fees. And don't forget credit card fees and stuff like that that they have to do when people swipe their card in their store. And all those sets besides LOB that are actually profiting are only making $3 to $6 per box. Is that going to cover those credit card fees? Is it going to cover their overhead, like their rent, their employees? No, definitely not. Now, some of you might be thinking, wait, Ruxen, why don't the stores just skip the sets that suck? Like, okay, I see that LOB is going to be a great set. I'm going to buy a bunch of LOB, and that's it. I'm not going to buy anything else. Here's why. First of all, they have customers, they have people in their store that want to buy the new set. So that's an obvious first thing that you probably thought of already. Here's something you might not know. Distributors give an allocation of boxes for each set. So if you want to buy a lot of LOB and you want to buy like a hundred cases because you know it's going to be awesome, they might only allocate you five cases. And so you only get to buy five. Man, that sucks. And you know what else sucks is you might be able to buy a lot more for the bad sets because not as many people are buying them. But if you happen to say skip that set, they're not going to allocate you as much on the next good set. So let's say before LOB, you didn't want to buy whatever was before that, like Cyberstorm Access or something. And you bought zero of that one because you're like, that's a stinker. I don't want that. When they get to LOB and you go for a hundred cases, they might give you two cases instead of five or 10 or whatever it would have been. So stores feel pressure to like follow through with each new set to buy stuff so that they can get the good ones when they show up. Now I say all of this we've been talking about not to just like say, let's go to our local store, let's get them a tip jar, let's put our entire paycheck in there so that they make some money. That's not what I'm saying this. I just want to bring up the point that Konami is printing too many sets and they're reprinting too many cards. There are just too many sets to keep up with. Look at this release schedule from the last few months. Wild Survivors, June 2nd release. Battles of Legend, Monsters Revenge, June 23rd release. Five legacy box reprints at once. July 14th release. Duelist Nexus, two weeks later. July 28th release. Legendary Duelist, Soul Burning Volcano, August 11th release. That was back to back to back every two weeks. And that first one had five releases at once. So just throw that in there. I didn't even mention the OTS release on July 19th. So I mean, that's a forgotten thing. There's an OTS set too with more reprints. Which honestly, that's probably a good thing because that just gives people access to, you know, higher rarity for playing in tournaments. That's probably not something we need to be concerned about but just another thing that's happening. There's so many things coming out in quick succession that players barely have time to like catch up with their decks, play in the meta. I mean, you got to be buying and selling as even a player just to pay for your deck if you don't have like a crazy income because you don't want to pay $2,000 for your deck to play in the next YCS tournament. And collectors like myself barely have time to even attempt to pull the newest star lights or 25th anniversary cards before a new set drops 25 more of them. I literally opened product for a living and I can't pull half of these 25th anniversary cards before there's 25 more of them. And don't get me wrong. I love that there's a lot of high rarity cards. I think it's awesome. But if you're just a regular guy buying like one box and you're trying to collect all the cards, pulling them, there's just absolutely no way. And even if you're like buying them, that's 25 times like an average cost of $200, $2,500, like that is insane. And having so many of them out, they're kind of like lessens the awesomeness of some of them. Like we're getting to the point where like X-Tox Hydra is a 25th anniversary card. Like, does that need to be a 25th anniversary? Can we just have like 10 bangers or five bangers and you know, call it a day? I personally think Konami needs to scale back the releases and give each set some room to breathe. This will allow cards to find their current place in the meta, whether they're good, they're bad, whether people want to invest in them and actually play the deck for like, maybe a month or two instead of two weeks. It will allow high rarity cards to be actually obtained for collectors and it'll give time for the sets to actually sell for a reasonable price for the local stores. They won't have to be selling at a huge loss for every single set just to move their product, get the cash flow to buy the next product. If Konami were to carefully craft every new set, which I'm sure they are carefully crafting them. I know people at Konami are working hard on these sets. They're trying to make them as good as possible. But if they had an extra like month or let's say, instead of every like, you know, three sets a month or two sets a month, we did one set a month, they'd have twice as long of work on it. Perfect each card that needs to be high rarity, that needs to be low rarity, that needs to be playable, that needs to be like a nice common that actually might be valuable in a couple of months when they release a new set. They just have time to balance everything even better. I think this would help keep local stores alive, which in turn would keep Yu-Gi-Oh alive, which obviously we all want to see for years to come. I hate saying this because I actually do love new releases and they're great for me because I get to make tons of content out of new releases and some of the best performing content on my channel. But I am afraid that all this awesomeness right now might slowly choke out Yu-Gi-Oh in the long run. Let me know what you think about this problem in the comments. It's a little bit of a different video, but it was something I've been thinking about for the last few days and I want to know your opinion. Thank you guys for watching and I will see you guys in the next one. Shout out to Toamfo Show, Dax, or JT Show, Puffins of Doom, Ernesto, Deanna, America Doidster, Supreme Stage 21, CJ, Leo Guine 62, another Thai show, Ian Moosa, Junior Barney, Mimic Gecko and Robert F. Thank you guys for supporting the channel. I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace.