How Konami Could Fix YU-GI-OH! Cans for 2025

A few weeks ago, Konami released 25th Anniversary Tin: Dueling Mirrors for the Yu-Gi-Oh! collectible card game. To say that these cans were greeted with applause and praise would be so far from the truth that it’s not even funny.

These boxes are one of the most hated products that Konami has released for Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG in quite some time. In fact, I didn’t even hide my frustrations with them from friends. But why are people so angry with these cans?

I want to not only outline the problems duelists are having with these tins, but also discuss how I think they could be saved for next year’s tins, and also see if we can find any silver linings with the release of Dueling mirrors. While I can’t personally recommend purchasing these boxes, if you really want you can purchase them from your local OTS or game store for $21.99.

Before I get into all the points I mentioned, I first want to cover what Dueling mirrors cans offer duelists. Inside the box you will find three Mega-Packs. Each Mega-Pack includes 8 Commons, 3 Ultra Rares, 1 Prismatic Secret Rare, and 1 Quarter-Century Secret Rare.

Overall, it doesn’t look that bad. There are 400 cards available in the set with 50 QCSR, 100 PSR, 150 UR and 100 C. Most of the cards are from the following sets: Power of the Elements, Photon Hypernova, Access to the Cyberstorm, Duelist Nexus, Age of Overlord, Labyrinth of Memories, Defenders Extraordinaire, Savage SurvivorsAND Valiant destroyers. I think that’s enough basic information to get you started.

Additionally, I want to acknowledge some positive effects of the Dueling mirrors cans. First, the physical box looks beautiful and is functional. Many people like to use these boxes to store cards (typically Common) and they work for that.

Secondly, whether we like it or not, boxed card prices have dropped. Before launch, the S:P Little Knight cost over $75 and now you can get one for around $40, so while it’s still not ideal, it’s a lot better than before and we have to admit that.

My last good thing is that I have a soft spot for alternative works of art and, frankly, Dueling mirrors He has quite a few and they are fantastic. That Raigeki and the Red-Eyes Black Dragon get busy! Now let’s talk about what’s not so good.

Let’s start with probably the most obvious problem with Dueling mirrors: The size of the card pool. There are 400 cards in this set. That’s over 100 more cards than the 2023 boxes! This set is so over the top that even if every card had the same rarity, you wouldn’t have much chance of getting the card you want.

To add insult to inflation, many of the cards are just plain bad. For starters, there are cards that are two years old included! Then add all the nostalgia bait and two tokens and the boxes are already not in a good place. Why is there so much nostalgia in here?

Here’s how I would arrange the set of large cards: Just lower the count! In my opinion, a box should have no more than 200-250 cards in its set and should be a celebration of the last year(ish) of gaming by offering the best cards from that era.

Honestly this solves most of the problem. Secondly, nostalgia bait should have been limited to no more than 10 cards. “But Tommy,” I hear you say, “how are people going to enjoy their favorite nostalgic ugly card in the shiniest rarity ever to celebrate the game’s 25th anniversary?”

I’ll tell you how. There is a product coming called Quarter century bonanza which is a perfect container for nostalgic bait! That set has a pool of 200 nostalgic cards that are guaranteed cards like Platinum Secret Rare or Quarter Century Secret Rare! To me it makes a lot more sense to have Link Spider in that set rather than in the box.

Furthermore, the two tokens and three new cards were supposed to be promos. You don’t even need to include all five in each box. You might just have a special 3-card promo pack that contains a combination of the five. This incentivizes multiple purchases, reduces the card pool, and makes duelists feel better because they have some sort of guaranteed profit for their purchase.

The next big issue is rarity selection. The QCSR pool seems so careless to me. There are some cards that make some sense like Yubel and the Exodia pieces, but so many others like Link Spider, Crystal Beast Ruby Carbuncle and the Gadgets seem so bad and better served in a product like the upcoming Quarter century bonanza set of a box!

Then, we have the PSR pool which is not only huge, but most of the cards in that slot were already Secret Rares or Ultra Rares, meaning they were already pretty hard to get.

The huge UR pool has a mix of rarity boosts like Shadow Ghoul of the Labyrinth and some rarity downgrades including Gold Pride – Roller Baller, but a lot of these were just cards that no one seemed to care too much about because every chase card is been included in the PSR.

Finally, since Konami decided to ditch Super Rares in this box which is really the ideal place for Big Chase cards, we have a lot of Commons that I’m pretty sure were already Commons and so most duelists already have playsets of useful ones. Therefore, we could simply remove the common slots period.

I feel like this problem takes some discipline to fix. As duelists, we love our shiny cardboard. The brighter the better, right? However, Konami has to implement some unspoken (or perhaps spoken) rules.

The first big problem would be the lack of horizontal updates. If a card was originally released as a Secret Rare, it should not be placed in the box as a PSR. In conjunction with this, rarity increases should focus on Super Rare and lower cards.

I think it’s great that cards like Shadow Ghoul of the Labyrinth have been upgraded to Ultra Rare from Rare. This is a rarity boost that makes me feel good as a duelist (especially since I’m currently playing a Gate Guardian deck).

Seeing Triple Tactics Thrust go from Secret to UR to PSR, or S:P Little Knight go from Secret to PSR, is not a good feeling. These boxes should put last year’s best cards in new rarities to give them rarity boosts for people who want shinier versions for their decks or rarity downgrades to make them more accessible.

On a related note, the big core titles (including original URs like TY-PHON) should all be downgraded by at least one rarity.

Yet another area where Konami fell short was overall card selection. I’m not sure what Konami’s criteria is for selecting which packages will be available in a given box. I know, in the past the cans were like a celebration of the last year of Yu-Gi-Oh! GCC.

Based on some research, it appears the cans are about a year old. For example, 2022 Pharaoh’s Pond of the Gods featured cards from 2021. Even those from last year 25th Anniversary Tin: Dueling Heroes it was full of 2022 cards.

However, Dueling mirrors dates back to August 2022 with the most recent Valiant Smashers pack being November 2023. To make matters worse, they were very selective about which cards from different archetypes to include and completely ignored other fan-favorite archetypes to give us garbage like Bunny Passionate Ears.

Why weren’t the Ghoti cards reprinted here? Why did the only Memento card include the field spell, Mementomictlan? Why weren’t the new Gate Guardian Fusion Monsters given a rarity update? It’s really strange to have the Main Deck monsters now all available in higher rarities than the boss monsters. Many of these choices seem baffling to me.

How would I address this problem? Just be more proactive about the cards in play. If you want to include a card from an archetype, include at least a handful and make sure that handful includes key/good cards.

For example, if they wanted to include Mementomictlan, they could have at least added Mementotlan Angwitch, Mementotlan Bone Barty, and Mementoal Tecuhtlica – Combined Creation.

There are a lot of cards in the 400 card pool that duelists simply don’t care about, and there were a lot of cards that at least some duelists would get excited about that were ignored. Keep the archetypes together and make sure to include higher value pieces.

So, now that I’ve gotten all that out of my stomach, I want to share my ideal version of future cans. In an ideal world, Konami would combine the legacy of the boxes (i.e. the celebration of the game’s final year) with perhaps their most successful product ever, the Rarity collection model.

I know this is extremely unlikely to happen, but what if they picked 100-150 cards from the last year Yu-Gi-Oh! (they could decide to be more like the original boxes and have 2025 be about 2025 cards or they could stick with the more modern choice so that 2025 is about 2024 cards) and every card is available in every rarity available in the set, people would be so excited for each box.

They don’t even have to include fancy rarities like QCSR or Collector’s Rare or Ultimate Rare (although that makes things more exciting if I’m honest). This is a much smaller card pool than the current pots, which is already a bonus, but you could inflate it beyond that Rarity Collection I AND Rarities Collection II to promote this hunt a little more.

This smaller pool would also (hopefully) promote a more careful selection of included cards so that relevant cards from the archetypes are kept together. Instead of one Memento here and four Vanquish Souls there and then completing the garbage that will probably never get played, remove the garbage and give us key Memento and Vanquish Soul cards along with fan favorites like Ghoti.

Additionally, since every card is available in every rarity, this automatically means that every card simultaneously represents a rarity increase and downgrade, helping the secondary market so more people can actually buy cards and play games, while also giving duelists jewels for those . maximum rarity decks.

I know it’s highly unlikely that Konami will read or care about what I’ve laid out here. I think the Dueling mirrors the cans were very poorly designed and represented a display of bad faith on Konami’s part.

I know there are a good number of people who have recently abandoned the game or are seriously looking to jump ship because of how products like Dueling mirrors are managed.

I love this game and want to see it better and I think I’ve provided some good ideas that could help repair some of Konami’s image.