Change in card text?

The Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG has too many rules.
Don’t
get me wrong, the basic game rules are pretty simple. Everyone’s seen
how they work from the TV series and the manga. The big problem is with
rulings on specific cards. There are so many. So why is that, anyway?
Yu-Gi-Oh!
TCG is a game designed to be played by everyone. Whether you’re in
elementary, junior high, or high school; college, grad school, or law
school; working for a living, playing with your kids, or playing with
your nieces, nephews, or grandchildren… the game is designed so anyone
can pick up some cards and start to play.
Because
of this, we’ve always avoided making the cards sound too “technical.”
If we write the cards in geekspeak so you need a user manual to decipher
them, that’s not much fun. It would feel less like a game, and more
like you’re taking a test or visiting the DMV.
So
as much as we can, we’ve always written cards the same way that plain
folks talk. And for a long time, it worked fine. But as we approach 10
years and almost 5,000 different cards, we’ve run into a problem: Using
plain folks’ language limits the number of ways you can write things.
There are only so many ways to say “Joey ate an apple,” after all.
But
we have a lot of different apples, and eating each one needs to be
described a different way. We wind up using the same phrases to describe
cards that work slightly differently, and there isn’t enough available
language to spell everything out in detail without taking up the entire
card box.


Problem-Solving Card Text
The year 2011 marks 10 years of Yu-Gi-Oh! on TV in North America. As part of our 10thAnniversary
celebrations, the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG will undergo its greatest text and
rules retrofit ever. Starting in July 2011, all cards will be written
with what we call Problem-Solving Card Text.
The
new text took a while to work out, and we needed to wait until we had
enough different kinds of cards and effects to look at as examples. The
new text doesn’t just have to work for the cards we have now. It has to
work for everything we make in the years ahead.
We had 3 main goals for the Problem-Solving Card Text:
1. The text needed to be precise.
2. The text still needed to be easy to read.
3. The text can’t sound like a textbook.
In
other words, we needed a way to write cards in plain English, but at
the same time inject so much exact science into the card that all the
complicated rules could be fixed.
Not an easy task! But we finally managed to do it, and you’ll be seeing the results very soon.


Your Cards & You – The Future
So what does this mean for you?
Up until now, if you ran into a complicated card situation, this is what you had to do:
First: read the card.
Second: run to the web to find out how the card works and how to resolve the situation.
Third:
assuming your specific situation was covered online, continue playing.
Otherwise you need to write in and ask for an answer.


Doesn’t that seem kind of silly? Especially since the main point of the game is that each card tells you what it does.


From now on, here’s what you’ll do, instead:
First: read the card.
Second: apply logic and figure out the answer.
Third: continue playing.


Rules
posted online will be limited to super-complicated and really weird
situations. Imagine going down to a dozen pages of card rules, instead
of a thousand. It could happen.
That
still leaves the billions of cards we’ve already got in circulation, of
course. For existing cards, as we reprint them in Decks, Turbo Packs,
Duelist League, and other places, we will update their text to the
Problem-Solving Card Text. Over time, rules questions about existing
cards won’t just be answered. They will cease being questions in the
first place.


What’s Next
In
order to help everyone with this transition, we’ll be taking you
through it one step at a time over the next few weeks. Every few days
we’ll explain another part of how the Problem-Solving Card Text works.
By the time the new cards start rolling out in July, you’ll be
up-to-speed on how everything works!