James Nixon said:
Feel like getting into a card game and can't decide between these two. Played quite a bit of YuGiOh on the PSP and played Duels of the Planeswalker on the PC and enjoyed both. Can't afford to buy cards for both so I'm wondering which is more fun in the longterm.
Magic can be more complicated, but there is balance and reason in the complexity.
What complexity there is in Yugioh is ruined by the fact there are way too many combos of cards that can't be countered, and if there are counters chances are there is only one card that can be used as a counter.
The beauty of Magic is that there is no truly unstoppable deck builds. Every card can be countered in some way and usually has a list of 20 or more cards that can do so.
In Yugioh, the only way to counter some of the mostly unstopple decks, is to copy the same deck and it comes down to who gets the better draw. Other than that, awesome cards like Monster Reborn(brinkg one monster back from the graveyard), and Raigeki(destory all of the opponent's monsters on the field) are banned, because boohoo, they don't have drawbacks to them, so they are cool cards that can be used without worry of harming the player's position. So what, it isn't like the cards couldn't be countered and that they weren't limited to one per deck.
Magic has cards like Raigeki and Monster Reborn, and sometimes they have even better effects and there are no real draw backs, just manna cost, and I have never run into mana cost being too much of a problem. I'm making a green Elf and Beast deck that has this card:
Yeah, the only drawback that can be seen for this card is the mana cost, but with such an effect, I don't see the mana cost as a drawback. I could care less about how much power the thing has, with my Elf deck, I would hope my opponent kills it because then I can bring it six 1/1 elves that all have some awesome abilities of their own. Such a card effect in Yugioh would be banned, even if it could be countered.
There are some cards in Yugioh that I see as far worse than then cards on the banned list, because they can start unstoppable chains for little cost. But stupidly they don't see it as a problem, because they think that because the player paid something to activated it, it is fine, it doesn't matter that there is probably only one way to counter it and it is usually a rare card that only a select few(with money)can afford.
With Magic, if you find a good card store that isn't ripping off customers, you can buy all the cards you need to counter anything in Magic for mere dollar or two, in some cases for a couple dimes.
What I can't stand about Yugioh, if you play the online game, the bann list doesn't just effect tournaments, it also effects the casual online play. I would prefer casual online play to model casual play in real life. When I play with friend in both card games, there are no banned cards, we say that if the company made the card, it can be played in our games.
So, if you can only play one, play Magic. It is a better structured game that flows much better than any card game I have ever played. Plus it has been round for a decade longer than Yugioh and has a larger fan base, meaning it is much easier to go to a card shop and find a Magic game group going than a Yugioh one. Also, Magic has a much larger library of cards to choose from with so many combinations of decks that could be made that it seriously makes Yugioh look like child's play.