I'm so lost at whats going on above right now, I stopped right after they banned E-Stratos.

My Hero deck was like a non working tank.

I stopped as soon as they introduced Pendulum. Once I learned how that mechanic worked, I knew that there was no way for me to keep up.
I ran a Gishki control/Beatdown deck, and doing that was particularly hard once they limited Mind Augus for no reason beyond assholes making infinite stall decks involving it, but I made it work even as the game advanced.

But once Pendulum was announced, it was basically like they just hit a hard restart button for everyone. Either you built Pendulum or counter Pendulum, or you have to learn to deal with your opponent basically getting a full field again the turn after you wipe them. I just don't have the money to try to continue playing after that.

I think I stopped playing once GX came along. I did buy some boosters and build a Hero deck, but after that I kinda lost interest. However I only played casually so I don’t know squat about how the game is played seriously anyways.

I still buy cards from time to time if they print classic manga /anime cards I like, but more as a collector than a player.

GX was actually what reinvigorated the spark for me to keep playing :lol
It made the game interesting since it evolved from "10 turns of dicking around and then summon your big guns and win."
Card effects became bigger than the spells and traps, so while it got more confusing (The amount of times I had to pause a game to have my opponent tell me a card effect, then read the effect myself to make sure they weren't bullshitting me was rather often :lol), but it made things more interesting without having to introduce a new mechanic.

(That is to say, I didn't like the anime one bit, but I stopped enjoying the anime around the Dragons arc)

GX was what got me into Yugioh when I was a kid. After a few years, I phased out of it, until around mid to late Zexal in middle school did I try and get back into it. I like XYZs and Synchros, but it was just so hard to keep up with the rule changes, and then Pendulums became a thing. Ugh.

I realize now Yugioh has essentially been one big power creep to sell cards. Any OP deck formulas recently introduced would be nerfed in about a year, but a stronger deck would come out. For fuck's sake, the game at the beginning was a lot slower and required tributes, but by the time Zexal came around, you could almost make monsters out of thin air by just so happening to have monsters with the same level.

Yeah the anime stopped being enjoyable once the fillers became too obvious. Even as kid who never read the manga it was too "different" for me to be enjoyable. There were some good parts in the anime, but the filler arcs definitely aren’t a part of that IMO.

And I do think the game became more interesting, but I think once GX came along I was in that age where you were only allowed to be interested in "cool" things because how other people think about you was important back then. Fuck puberty.

I never stopped, but I haven't got any new cards since Primal Origin.

So, this has been floating around the 'Net for a couple days-

https://vimeo.com/160783498

Some kinda redub (or fandub) of the first episode of "Duel Monsters"

*looks at Goat Control,Chaos,Yata and Exodia*

Unless you mean the VERY beginning where Summoned Skull was considered the best monster in the game.

That's what I mean.