If you're like me, someone who played the game about 2 decades ago and felt like trying out the game again today, this is actually a great way to get started. It starts from way back in the era where you'll feel comfortable and the campaign gradually takes you from one generation to another while adding some interesting support cards here and there. It's a very nice way to get into it, and it includes tutorials to help you figure out how to play the mechanics you may not be familiar with.
I genuinely had a great time playing through the game, the UI works really well both for playing and deck building. I went in expecting to get overwhelmed quickly with the new mechanics, but I was surprised to find that the new mechanics themselves aren't very complicated. Whenever I finished a tutorial (there's one at the start of all 6 generations to get you up to speed) I would be like "Huh, that's it? Okay."
Here's how I feel about how the game progressed through the years based on my experience playing this. At the very start, the game was iconic and cool as hell, but very imbalanced in obvious ways and they still had to figure some things out. Then they started fixing some issues, like making it so that fusions and ritual monsters are worth using, they added more 1 tribute monsters that were worth playing so that not every deck is stuck running Summoned Skull, things like that. Normal monsters became less interesting since a lot of effects are too good to pass, but then they added things like synchro summoning, which could use normal "tuner" monsters, and other effects that work only with normal monsters, like Advanced Ritual Art. I found that pretty clever because it kept a type of monsters that would quickly become useless in a state that belongs in some good decks, and it even allowed you to still put a Blue Eyes White Dragon or Dark Magician in your deck for an actual reason.
On top of Synchro, adding XYZ really brought up the game to a state where decks could make solid plays a lot more consistantly, but it still felt like yugioh. It felt like an improved version of the game even, since you would brick a lot less often, and compared to how often you'd end up with barely any options back then other than praying for the heart of the cards to give you the top-deck you need, I was very much okay with that.
Then came out Pendulum monsters. I was very open minded given my experience up to that point, but that's when it started to feel like, it was just too much for very little gain, and I don't mind that the cards were bad or weak, I mean that from a gameplay perspective, making a good game is always a matter a balancing "how fun" and "how complex" is it becoming. Pendulum monsters didn't really make the game more fun, but it made it a heck of a lot more tedious to play. With every card having 2 essays to read just to open play patterns that have you play solitaire a bit longer before you end up with a board, I would consider that mechanic a huge fail. The game was better without it imo.
Then I reached the end of the campaign with VRAINS, which technically brought us the Link summoning mechanic. In reality, the game still sprinkles link monsters (and even synchros and XYZ) here and there ahead of time just so you get to play with them just for fun, and honestly I think that's cool. I actually enjoyed using some link monsters, even though I was not really trying to make actual links between them, I just liked how they gave me more options to turn useless monsters on the field into something cool from the toolbox deck *cough* I mean the extra deck.
The issue is that along with link summoning, VRAINS brought the game to a new level of speed, complexity, and non-stop interactions. When a typical game would last maybe 8-10 turns back then, it went down by a small notch with the new mechanics that I enjoyed, but now the game is essentially decided on turn 3-4, sometimes pretty much on turn one. The term OTK (one turn kill) is common place when talking about modern decks. That's almost a benchmark, like if your deck can't OTK, you're probably doing something wrong.
Let me put it like this...
Getting started in old Yugioh: You could take pretty much any deck, draw your first hand, look at the cards and be like "okay, I know how to use these, let's play." Then your opponent would play a card you don't know, that's fine, you look at the card, within 5 seconds you know everything about it and you keep playing. You know you have a monster that can beat it, or you have a card that destroys monsters so you know you're okay. They added a set card on their back row? Oh maybe they have a trap, you'll have to think about that, they could kill your stronger monster or maybe counter your spell card. That was the extend of how complex the game was, and that was okay. You didn't need to know much to get started. You'd just put the cards you thought were cool in your deck to make it your own and played them out against whatever came up and it was all good fun.
Getting started in today Yugioh: If you picked up a random hand from a deck you don't know, you would start by saying "Give me like 10 minutes to read all this" and then you would be like "Okay so I guess this probably has a couple different targets in my deck because it's suppose to search stuff, but if it ends there it's kinda weak so there's probably more to that. Oh right, let me check my extra deck, give me another 5 minutes." Don't worry, your opponent is patient. So then you're like "Okay so this guy needs that type of monsters to syncrho summon, I have a tuner but not that type, I can search a specific type of monsters but only if X is happening, maybe I could get to X if I had Y.... oh right I have a link monster that I think does Y, yeah it does that. Okay I think I'm ready, I'll just play this monster, to search something, okay I'll get that thing that can be special summon for some reason, and then I can turn those into the link monster, and hum.. oh yeah now I have Y so I can do X, and now I'll..." but then your opponent stops you "Ah sorry, I discard this card and counter that." and you're like "What? okay, then huh.. I'll set these 2 cards and end my turn..." Then your opponent starts his turn and plays a card that searches his library for a big monster that looks impossible to summon, you have a card that can counter an effect one time, but maybe it could be useful for something else. There's no way that monster will come out right now, right? Do you use it? Because from that point he'll play solitaire for 15 minutes and by the end of it all your set cards will be destroyed and they will have a Godzilla with bees in its mouth equiped with farts of fire which he can activate whenever you blink to make you punch yourself in the face, unless you counter just the right thing, so good luck.
The majority of cards belong in only one deck, like its own "tribe", but there's essentially only 3 type of cards anyway. There's the broken cards that win you the game, there's the "get to the broken card" cards which play some role in the 10-20 steps process to get to the broken card, and there's the disruption, AKA "hand traps" because playing a trap is too slow, they'll have won before you even set it down.
Just for fun, here's a comparision with a card from MTG.
Name: Aerial Responder
Effect: Flying, vigilance, lifelink.
If this was a yugioh card, it would read like this:
Name: Aerial Responder
Effect: This creature can't be blocked except by creatures with flying and/or reach. Attacking doesn't cause this creature to tap. Damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much life. This card cannot attack or tap to activate effects the turn it's put on the field.
This game was fun, but it really took a wrong turn at some point imo. Maybe some people do prefer it like this, but I feel like it should just be another game entirely. I now understand why people say it doesn't feel like Yugioh anymore.
