Today, Konami walked back their changes on Time Wizard formats. Somewhat. They will no longer enforce modern game rules and current card errata for old formats like Goat and Edison in Time Wizard events specifically. In the future, the company will use the name “Time Travel format” to denote their Master Duel version of Time Wizard, the one without old cards and with stupid floodgate rules. This name comes from the wish to invent time travel in order to avoid the immense backlash from the community that followed the absurdly idiotic decision to kill older formats for no reason.
Apparently both Time Wizard (format, not the card) and Time Travel (format, not the concept) will be supported on an OTS level, which means players will no longer have to secretly hide underground and host illegal OG-Goat events for OTS packs to avoid breaking rules Konami place on participating OTS stores. It is still unclear whether the company will support Time Wizard instead of Time Travel in future side events of large tournaments, but my money’s on “bwahahah, of course not!”
Konami did not apologize for pointing the metaphorical gun at Mr. Edison’s head and threatening to pull the trigger, but they at least gave an explanation. Now that the gun is pointing at a vaguely similar direction, Konami representative J. K. responded to my inquiries with this email:
“We here at Konami would never wish to harm innocent formats. We’ve seen the community feedback, especially the fact that Gage actually uploaded a video, which is like, wow, that one was not even about Master Duel! We’d like to inform our players that this change was never intentional and was, in fact, made without our knowledge by a rogue employee. This employee acted completely on their own, posted everything and left no trace. Oh and they’re the ones who cancelled those European Battles of Legend boxes everyone was mad about. Now could you please let E3 Yu-Gi-Oh know about this? He’s been standing outside my house for hours now and I’m terrified.”
As much as these recent disasters pissed off the playerbase at large, we really can’t be mad at Konami for the actions of a lone rogue employee. Especially since they’re probably the one who just dropped new support for Solfachord. Go read that, it’s good!“
