Yu-Gi-Oh! Gateball

　One overwhelmingly great thing about our generation is that we were kids who followed things like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, and Digimon from the very beginning. I even went to see the Toei version of the Yu-Gi-Oh! movie, I got hooked on the original Pokémon and was thrilled by every new Gold and Silver reveal in CoroCoro, and Digimon was where I first learned that glitches and tricks existed by messing around with bad contact.

　As we got older, we grew up riding the highs and lows of these franchises as they boomed and sometimes slumped. But even after all the twists and turns, it’s amazing that all of them are still going and have even gone through generational turnover. We’ve reached the age where products aimed at “the dads who played back then” are targeting us directly.

　So when we sink into nostalgia, stories from the early days of these series hit our brains in just the right way, and lately I’ve been leaving YouTube channels on in the background that feature matches played under the early Yu-Gi-Oh! and Duel Masters formats. For Yu-Gi-Oh!, the period just before Synchros is probably my favorite, and for Duel Masters, it’s around a little while after Bolbalzak appeared.

　With Yu-Gi-Oh!, I started to get tired of it right around the time “theme decks” clearly became the norm, and Lightsworn especially made me think, “Isn’t it all the same no matter who’s using it?” I was totally deflated. I just couldn’t stand how unfair cards like Honest felt... By the way, Digimon Card Game is often talked about as one of those games people “collected but never knew how to play,” but I actually got pretty into it because I kept playing the WonderSwan Color game by myself for ages. There was just nobody around to play with in real life... And then there was Dragon Drive, Zatch Bell, Shaman King, One Piece (the early one), and the Dragon Ball card game—basically, I drifted through the dawn of card games, enjoying them with friends enough to at least learn the rules.

　So, after watching several Yu-Gi-Oh! channels that duel using the formats from back then, I noticed that videos where people fool around with old decks while reminiscing had “gateball” in the title.

　And yeah. That really is gateball for our generation.

　A bunch of nerds with nothing better to do casually escap­ing reality in an afternoon park, taking things easy and competing just seriously enough not to turn it into a real fight. It was a completely ridiculous era. Sometimes Chaos would show up and the match would end instantly, or all the various “Pot” cards would gather together and mill your whole deck in one turn. It’s the kind of format where you can’t possibly say “things were better back then,” and instead you just clap and laugh together at how absurd it all was.

　When I brought this up with the people I make things with, they said, “Then let’s do a match where we only use a few hundred random cards pulled roughly from a card shop’s bulk storage.” Kind of like a draft. Ah, what a dream of a suggestion. But you know, I got scared that if we actually did that, it would be so much fun that I’d never be able to go back. Yeah... that really is gateball.

　At least I still had enough self-control to hit the brakes and say, “It’s still too early for me to start playing gateball for real!”

　That said, I still can’t stop myself from being drawn back to those days.

　I’ve pretty much watched all the Yu-Gi-Oh! gateball content by now, so these days I’m really into early-format Duel Masters matches. The simple, satisfying way cards like Dual Fang and Crystal Lancer come flying out and overwhelm everything... yeah, this is it.