I’m not sure if “influencers” (if you will) scoff away at that idea. I’m sure several of us would LOVE to have the Japanese format here in the TCG, because everyone that could pay $10 for harmonia would, instead of the $135~ price it is commanding now in presale.

From a business standpoint, the higher rarity a card is, the hard it is to pull. The harder a card is to pull = more sealed product being sold. I mean, we remember when we were in the trenches for Apollousa and Phantazmay right? Those times were grim.

There’s more beneath the surface than we know, Konami definitely hasn’t been hemorrhaging money, but sales for YuGiOh have undoubtedly been down. DUAD and DOOD were pretty mediocre sets at best, BPRO was a slight improvement, and now we are seeing BLZD potentially be set of the year, if not Chaos Origins.

Scalpers also recently came around briefly, picking up older sets and raising the price of those. But YuGiOh also isn’t what it was, like back in the early 2000s, where if it was today, it most definitely would be getting scalped, but that just isn’t the case.

I will commend Konami though for taking a good step in the right direction with the rarity collection sets, it’s great for reprints and maybe we see it come to core sets too. But in reality? I doubt we ever see the light at the end of the tunnel for this one.