I've been playing yu-gi-oh Master Duel for the past couple of weeks instead of fighting games. Whoops! Master Duel is an incredible, breathtakingly stupid game; I've podcasted the ears off more of a few of my friends about this but I in complete seriousness implore you to study how this game works and more importantly how it evolved from a childlike idea of how a TCG works into a playable game. If you like two hour deep dives, well; here you go . I don't know markdown so if that doesn't work I blame every coder who has ever lived, sorry to the mods of this website.
The only problem with anyone doing a history of yu-gi-oh is that they are usually players of that game, and tend to have some of the same problems Smash Bros. players have with exhaustive knowledge of their own competitive history and little outside context to inform it. Like, yu-gi-oh doesn't have a basic resource? It doesn't have an inherent mechanic like mana or cost or even a way to force decks to specialize like colors in Magic or factions in Netrunner. It launched without realizing it needed those things and had to invent ways to introduce those fundamental mechanics while being limited to what was printed on the cards.
The result is a game with a fair share of flaws and driven by a fair amount of ruthless capitalist impulse but is incredibly fast and very fun, and delivers on some of the most pure and exciting fantasies suggested by a card game that a lot of others don't. It makes playing big monsters EXCITING! It makes them really strong! They launch decks based around your favorite Pixiv tags and occasionally they're not just viable but quite broken. I think those emotions are precious in games even if they're somewhat childish? Compared to the stodginess of Magic, for instance, which has breathtaking art direction and gorgeous monsters that will make a child very sad when they learn how easy to kill they are (I cried about it in sixth grade one time!).
I think if you ever, like, me, thought this game looked incredibly stupid you will be excited to discover it is stupider than you could have dreamed (non-pejorative). You'll learn something from learning about it, at least.