4/10 on the dead scale it's hard to find stores to play in but those stores are usually full of active players all waiting to get pegged by my mermail deck

>>97411689
It's still being played pretty actively, but it has a crisis of having difficulty acquiring and retaining new players. The barrier to entry includes getting your head around the complex plays that are prominent in the modern game after all of the power creep, as well as the potentially annoying costs to build decks. I don't think this game will properly die unless it goes through a long streak of competitive metas that are absolute dogshit.

I recently began to purchase cards because I want to pick up a card game besides Pokemon (Magic is too aesthetically directionless now).
I have watched a few videos explaining the basic rules and still confused as to why there needs to be five unique ways to summon a monster.

>>97412387
Because early on they fucked up when trying to adapt Takahashi's vision for fusion and ritual monsters into an actual game and the meta never recovered from those decisions

>>97412387
why is that confusing to you? I also recently started playing and like no shit there's multiple ways over the years to summon monsters, some of which clash with one another. Its for balance and flavor. This is just such a weird thing to type out.

>>97411689
You know Duel Masters is way bigger than Magic right? MTG is literally only relevant in America and western Europe. Its completely eclipsed by Duel Masters in the east.