One-Year Rule, No More?

With Comic-Con happening this week, it has been a helluva week for YGO product news, which I'm sure everyone is aware of by now. Although the official product page hasn't been updated to include all of this, enough pictures have surfaced which clearly show what upcoming products we have in store and content details. The various images/videos can be found by looking around Pojo, DGz, and Youtube.

- Wave 1 Collectors tins -
Evolzar Dolkka tin:
- Evolzar Dolkka
- Wind-Up Zenmaines
- Dark Highlander
- Scrap Dragon
- Genex Neutron

Excalibur tin:
- Excalibur
- Zenmaines
- Blizzard Princess
- Wind-Up Rabbit
- Evolzar Laggia

- Wave 2 Collectors tins -
Heliopolis tin
Hanzo tin
No promos known for either tin

- Legendary Collection 3 -
Notables: Secret versions of many staple cards, Ultras of many GK cards, Ultra Morphing Jar and Decree, common Chain Disappearance, Solemn Warning, Gold Sarc, and Soul Taker. Each box comes with a Seal of Orichalcos, Five-Headed, and a Gorz token among other things.

- Return of the Duelist SE -
Promos still unknown

- Abyss Rising SE -
Promos still unknown

So looks like we *finally* got the Scrap Dragon reprint that people have been waiting for for several years now. Too bad not many decks would run it these days anyways, so it's kinda late to the party. Besides that, it looks like basically everything good from PHSW is getting reprinted besides Rescue Rabbit, which kinda makes it redundant to put PHSW packs in the tins themselves. Abyss Rising having a Special Edition is an unexpected surprise since it breaks the traditional "every other set there's an SE" model. I've always liked Special Editions though so I'm pretty happy about this one.

There has been a lot of discussion in the forums about Konami's business model of releasing broken must-have-to-compete Secret rares and then reprinting them a year later, or earlier in some cases (like with these PHSW cards). The "general rule" of the "one-year rule" seems to have basically been thrown out the window, with PHSW coming out in November of 2011 and these tins coming out in August, for about 9 months total. One can bring up the old examples of Battle Fader and Drill Warrior getting quick reprints, but to my knowledge both were anime cards so they had "justification" to reprint those earlier than expected. Surely cards like Dolkka, Wind-Up Rabbit, and Zenmaines, all exclusives, aren't in the anime though. Maybe they are, I wouldn't know though since I haven't watched the show since the very early part of GX.

As a competitive or even semi-competitive player, what are we to do? It's not feasible to play the waiting game and be left in the dust by not running the broken Secret rare cards that Konami releases. If you do, you're basically at a huge disadvantage for the majority of the format. This makes it tough for the casual/budget players. And if we do invest to obtain them, we are always at potential risk of it getting reprinted in something and losing value of what we had to put in. It has basically gotten to the point of asking yourself "will I be OK with investing in this if it gets reprinted in 6 months?" It is an unfortunate Catch-22 but one that surely makes Konami a lot of money. They wouldn't do it if it didn't. After seeing that Wind-Up Rabbit was getting reprinted, I listed my deck on eBay a few days later. I made up my mind that for the rest of the format I'd just run something cheap and chances are wouldn't get hit. Even if it did, it wouldn't really hurt in terms of value anyway.

Between reprints and the ban list, you basically have to sell everything off or risk taking a big hit if you have various expensive cards. I've always made it a point to minimize the hits I take, so I suppose I have to play by Konami's rules around this time of the format.