Yugioh anime and game really degraded over time

The original Yugioh was one of the most interesting anime I ever watched. Once God cards were introduced, anime became much more fun and you could really enjoy and it felt like it had a greater purpose.

Even the game was fun and dueling was very simple and well enjoyed.

Then Yugioh GX came, and it felt like a slight downgrade, and the reason why it felt like a downgrade can only be understood if you know what made original Yugioh so good.

In original Yugioh, Yugi often fights for something much greater, everything, life of his family, of his friends, even his life is often in danger. People use all sorts of dirty tricks in duel and outside of duel to bring him down. However, his friends always support him and support each other. Yugi has to make all kinds of choices, even losing duels only to avoid harming innocents.

Then there is great rivalry between him and Kaiba, but Kaiba isnt the bad guy in the anime, he just wants to defeat Yugi in a duel and always wants to prove his superiority, which makes it more fun.

GX felt like it lacks a lot of that. The design of characters went from "cool" to "lets be funny and look funny".

It lost the serious look and serious story.

Then 5D came, and it became even worse. Duel while racing? Its monster animations, despite being produced years after, somehow looked much worse than original yugioh.

Then all the other ones, zexal, arc v...

The animation just kept getting worse. 

Even Yugioh game is becoming worse and worse.

Konami figured out the money making combo: Release cards more powerful than previous, making all previous cards useless and forcing players to buy new cards all the time. Do it over and over.

Of course, if you duel online, you dont have to buy cards, but other problems are still there.

People just copy top decks, forcing you to either use top decks either lose 80% of games.

You spend your time making and understanding one deck, only to have it be made useless by new cards, or destroyed by ban list.

I have bunch of decks from before which are now useless and cant win against top decks. Its just that top decks are on a whole other level. For example, Kashtira deck can obliterate the field, discard opponnent's hand cards, prevent summoning by blocking field zones, summon bunch of high attack monsters where each has a search effect or combo to add cards to hand, has basically 12 cards which act like monster reborn/special summon from deck.

Its not possible for many of the older decks to compete with that. Simply, the engine is too consistent and too good for it to be matched by some deck from 10 years ago.

Yugioh combos are also becoming more like entire chess games.

Some combos now take 30 or more actions being made in one turn.

Compare that to simple old Yugioh where you would make 2 to 3 actions and end turn.

I was always into Pokémon, so I don’t have clue what any of this is about.

Thats probably better.

I'm with you on both fronts. There are a lot of aspects of the original show that I'm still very fond of, even if it got a little weird at times (maybe especially because it did). My brother and I played a lot of the card game and always tried to run more subversive decks that didn't follow the meta, but the restricted and banned list, as well as some updated rules on how certain cards play, ruined that playstyle and just made the meta absolute.

Yugioh original season 3 (when they get God cards) was most interesting story. In season 1, some duels were also very good, especially final duels. It seems that by rating, most people agree that original yugioh was best, and it feels like every next one wasnt even produced by same producers.

About game, I hate playing meta because it limits me to 2 or 3 top decks and I cant play anything else. However, I also hate losing. I have made many decks, but there are some great cards like "Winged dragon of Ra - Sphere mode" and "Lava Golem" which only work with meta decks which dont need normal summon, so they can use it for Lava Golem.

There are some good cards like raigeki, change of heart, snatch steal, alpha the master of beasts, ultimate slayer, super star typhon... which work in non-meta decks, but the main problem is that whatever works in non-meta decks also works even better in meta decks, just making meta decks stronger.

Its just impossible to release independent support for non-meta decks alone without also giving it to meta decks.

There is anti-meta, but that only works to some degree if you already know what deck opponent has to counter it. Its not worth to run it.

I find it easy to beat meta decks with meta decks, but non-meta usually has weaknesses which cannot be overcome. Once I dueled with dark magician deck against bystial, and bystial just banished all my magicians from graveyard, since its monsters can do that, which made it impossible for me to summon dark magicians anymore, so I lost because that was one of main weaknesses of my non-meta deck.