A few weeks ago, Konami released 25th Anniversary Tin: Dueling Mirrors for the Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game. To say that these tins were met with applause and praise would be so far from the truth it’s not even funny.

These tins are one of the most hated products that Konami has released for the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG in quite some time. In fact, I have not been hiding my frustrations with them either from friends. But why are people so mad about these tins?

I want to not only outline problems that duelists are having with these tins, but also discuss how I think they could be saved for next year’s tins, and even see if we can find any positives with the release of Dueling Mirrors. While I cannot personally recommend buying these tins, if you really want to you can buy them from your local OTS or game store for $21.99.

Before we get into all the points I mentioned, I do want to first cover what the Dueling Mirrors tins offer duelists. Inside the tin, you will find three Mega-Packs. Each Mega-Pack includes 8 Commons, 3 Ultra Rares, 1 Prismatic Secret Rare, and 1 Quarter Century Secret Rare.

Overall, it doesn’t sound too bad. There are 400 cards available in the set with 50 QCSR, 100 PSR, 150 UR, and 100 C. The bulk of cards come from the following sets: Power of the Elements, Photon Hypernova, Cyberstorm Access, Duelist Nexus, Age of Overlord, Maze of Memories, Amazing Defenders, Wild Survivors, and Valiant Smashers. I think that’s enough basic information to start with.

Also, I do want to acknowledge some positive effects of the Dueling Mirrors tins. First, the actual physical tin looks nice and it is functional. A lot of people like to use these tins to store cards (typically the Commons) and they do work for that.

Second, whether we like it or not, the prices of cards from the tins have decreased. Before the tins, S:P Little Knight was $75+ and now you can get one for about $40, so while it’s still not ideal, it’s far better than it was and we do need to admit that.

My final positive is that I am a sucker for alternate artworks and quite frankly, Dueling Mirrors has quite a few and they are awesome. That Raigeki and Red-Eyes Black Dragon go hard! Now let’s discuss the not so good.

Let us start with probably the most noticeable problem with Dueling Mirrors: the size of the card pool. There are 400 cards in this set. That is over 100 cards more than the 2023 tins! This set is so bloated that even if every card was the same rarity, you would not have great odds of getting any given card that you wanted.

To add insult to bloat, so many of the cards are just bad. For starters, there are cards that are two years old included! Then, you add all of the nostalgia bait and two tokens and the tins are already not in a good spot. Why is there so much nostalgia bait in here?

Here’s how I would fix the large card set: just lower the count! In my opinion, a tin should have no more than about 200-250 cards in its set and it should be a celebration of the last year (give or take) of the game offering the best cards from that timeframe.

Honestly, that solves a lot of the problem. Second, the nostalgia bait should have been limited to no more than about 10 cards. “But Tommy,” I hear you say, “how will people enjoy their favorite bad nostalgic card in the shiniest rarity ever to celebrate the game’s 25th anniversary?”

I’ll tell you how. There’s an upcoming product called Quarter Century Bonanza which is a perfect container for nostalgia bait! That set has a 200-card nostalgia pool which are cards guaranteed to be Platinum Secret Rare or Quarter Century Secret Rare! It makes a lot more sense to me to have Link Spider in that set rather than the tin.

In addition, the two tokens and the three new cards should have been promos. You don’t have to include all five in every tin either. You could just have a special 3-card promo pack that has some combination of the five. This incentivizes multiple purchases, reduces the card pool, and feels better to duelists because they have some kind of guaranteed pay off for their purchase.

The next big problem is the rarity selection. The QCSR pool feels so scatterbrained to me. There are some cards that make some sense such as Yubel and the Exodia pieces, but so many others like Link Spider, Crystal Beast Ruby Carbuncle, and the Gadgets seem so bad and better served in a product like the upcoming Quarter Century Bonanza set than a tin!

Then, we have the PSR pool which is not only massive, but most of the cards in that slot were already either a Secret Rare or Ultra Rare meaning that they were already pretty hard to obtain.

The massive UR pool does have a mix of rarity bumps such as Shadow Ghoul of the Labyrinth as well as some rarity downgrades including Gold Pride – Roller Baller, but many of these were just cards that no one seemed to care too much about because every chase card was put in at PSR.

Finally, because Konami decided to ditch Super Rare in this tin which is really the ideal spot for big chase cards, we have a bunch of Commons that I’m pretty sure were already Common and therefore most duelists already have playsets of the useful ones. Therefore, we could honestly just remove the Common slots period.

I feel like this problem requires a bit of discipline to fix. As duelists, we love our shiny cardboard. The shinier, the better, right? However, Konami needs to implement some unspoken (or maybe spoken) rules.

The first big one would be no horizontal upgrades. If a card was originally released as a Secret Rare, it should not be put in the tin as a PSR. To coincide with this, rarity bumps should focus on cards that were Super Rare and below.

I think it’s great that cards like Shadow Ghoul of the Labyrinth got upgraded to Ultra Rare from Rare. That’s a rarity bump that makes me feel good as a duelist (especially since I play a Gate Guardian deck at the moment).

Seeing Triple Tactics Thrust go from Secret to UR to PSR or S:P Little Knight go from Secret to PSR, does not feel good. These tins should put the best cards from the last year in new rarities to either give them rarity bumps for people who want shinier versions for their decks or rarity downgrades to make them more accessible.

On a related note, the big staples (including original URs like TY-PHON) should all be downgraded at least one rarity.

Yet another area where Konami fell short was in their general card selection. I’m not sure what Konami’s criteria is for selecting what packs will be available in a given tin. I know in the past, the tins have been like a celebration of the last year of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG.

Based on a little bit of research, it appears that tins now go back roughly one year. For example, the 2022 Tin of the Pharaoh’s Gods featured cards from 2021. Even last year’s 25th Anniversary Tin: Dueling Heroes was full of cards from 2022.

However, Dueling Mirrors goes all the way back to August 2022 with the most recent pack being Valiant Smashers from November 2023. To make matters worse, they were very selective on what cards from different archetypes to include and completely ignored other fan favorite archetypes to give us garbage like Bunny Ear Enthusiast.

Why were Ghoti cards not reprinted here? Why was the only Memento card included the field spell, Mementomictlan? Why weren’t the new Gate Guardian Fusion Monsters given a rarity upgrade? It’s really weird to have their Main Deck monsters now all available in higher rarities than the boss monsters. So many of these choices just seem baffling to me.

How would I address this? Just be more purposeful about the cards in the pool. If you want to include one card of an archetype, include at least a handful and make sure that handful includes key/good cards.

For example, if they wanted to include Mementomictlan, they could have added Mementotlan Angwitch, Mementotlan Bone Barty, and Mementoal Tecuhtlica – Combined Creation at the very least.

There are a lot of cards in the 400-card pool that duelists just simply do not care about and there were a lot of cards that at least some duelists would have gotten excited for that got ignored. Keep archetypes together, and make sure to include higher value pieces.

So, now that I’ve gotten all of that off my chest, I want to share my ideal version of future tins. In an ideal world, Konami would combine the legacy of the tins (aka celebration of the past year of the game) with their possibly most successful product ever, the Rarity Collection model.

I know this is extremely unlikely to happen, but if they chose 100-150 cards from the last year of Yu-Gi-Oh! (they could decide to be more like the original tins and have 2025 be about cards from 2025 or they could stick with the more modern choice so that 2025 would be about cards from 2024) and each card is available in every rarity available in the set, people would be so excited for every tin.

They don’t even have to include the fancy rarities like the QCSR or Collector’s Rare or Ultimate Rare (although that does make things more exciting if I’m honest). This is a much smaller card pool than the current tins which is already a bonus, but you could inflate it over the Rarity Collection I and Rarity Collection II to promote a bit more of that chase.

This smaller pool would also promote (hopefully) more careful selection of included cards so that relevant cards from archetypes are kept together. Instead of a Memento here and four Vanquish Soul there and then complete garbage that will probably never get played, remove the garbage and give us key Memento and Vanquish Soul cards along with fan favorites like Ghoti.

In addition, because every card is available in every rarity, that automatically means that each card is simultaneously a rarity bump and a rarity downgrade helping the secondary market so that more people can actually buy cards and play the game while also giving duelists bling for those max rarity decks.

I know it is highly unlikely that Konami will read or care about what I’ve laid out here. I do think that the Dueling Mirrors tins were very poorly designed and a show of bad faith on the part of Konami.

I know there are a fair number of people who have recently left the game or are very earnestly looking at jumping ship because of how products like Dueling Mirrors are being handled.

I love this game and want to see it be better and I think I’ve provided some good ideas that could help repair some of Konami’s image.