Today, a well-known and less-respected TCG company has announced sweeping changes to beloved classic formats, which famously didn’t hurt anyone and didn’t require a small loan to start playing. The changes – which include such head-scratchers as making your cards not work like they used to or increasing the power of floodgates – have received widespread negative feedback.
Some players are resorting to the primary weapon of a disgruntled customer – calling the faceless company names. The second-strongest insult used by the community seems to be “braindead”. Unfortunately, since we are a highly esteemed publication, we cannot print the strongest insult on the list. The Reddit post announcing this change received a large number of upvotes and was the sixth most popular post of the day, behind other valuable discussions like the Rush Duels banlist and something titled “What if Tristan and Téa dueled in Duelist Kingdom.”
This change is especially surprising as the TCG company is launching a reprint set, with the only valuable cards being the ones played in the beloved classic formats. The same ones that have just been killed. Some have theorized that the controversial move was done to increase sales, as the upcoming set will print cards with the new, stupider text, and players might feel pushed to buy the new cards to replace their old ones. This is wrong, actually, as the real reason was that the TCG company just remembered there was a last bit of joy in players’ lives that it could still kill.
reads like ai wrote this
Thanks for your comment. It really might read like it’s written by a large language model, but in fact I’d argue the opposite. LLMs were trained on material most commonly found on the internet, and wouldn’t you know – uncountable amount of news websites and blogs have published a LOT of articles, serving as the basis for the training material. Many of these news outlets and blogs use a specific writing style, and The Handtrap is no exception. Therefore, I believe it’d be more fair to say that AI is writing like this article reads.
And now personally, as someone who enjoys and admires genuine creativity, I absolutely abhor the use of so-called AI in any creative work and I would rather shut the website down than have a language model write for it.
what changed?
Konami-hosted events for old formats like Goat and Edison will now follow modern-day rules and card errata. Staples and favorite cards in the format, like Goyo Guardian and Future Fusion now are utterly unplayable, significantly weakening or outright killing some strategies. Rules changes affect even more cards and decks, such as changing how priority works makes Judgement Dragon much weaker, while making floodgates annoyingly “see into the future” will turn them and the decks that use them insanely busted. Fans of these formats never wanted these changes, and it’s obvious why – they fell in love with old formats BECAUSE of these old cards and rules, not in spite of them.
The full list of changes, impact and response would be much longer than the article itself, which was why it was omitted entirely to make the headline work for any time our beloved TCG company screws its customers often.