Does YGO have Hand Traps Problems?

Today, I'm going to write a post about hand traps. If you don't care about YGO, then you can ignore this post. Honestly, hand traps existed a long time ago, so this is nothing new in YGO, however, does this game have hand traps problem? I will write the good and bad point about hand traps and how it will affect the game in general.

Back in the old days of YGO, the games wasn't as heavy combo as it is now, even though I played Synchrons with Plants, that still took like 5-8 mins to set up the combo. However, we can set a monster and pass without worrying about getting defeated on our next turn. Yes back then, we have something called turns, where we each have some turns before finishing off your opponents.

Now, if we set a monster and pass, I can guarantee, you won't even be able to last a turn. In fact, setting a monster is dead unless somehow that set monster is your combo to make the deck work. This is the major difference between the modern YGO and the YGO I played back in the old days.

In the old days, we didn't need as much hand traps in the deck builds as there aren't many combo decks out there compare to the modern YGO now. Although, they were optional, some people can run them, some people don't. But the YGO we have now, it feels like it is a must or you will be sitting there for 20 mins waiting for your opponent finish doing a combo.

Pros

• The main reason we need to run hand traps is to stop heavy combo decks. Unfortunately, Konami has made YGO into heavy combo game, if you don't stop their turn 1 plays, its pretty much over on your next turn. This is how I feel about the state of the game.
• I find that control decks can take the most advantages of hand traps, by running around 20 hand traps, but not affecting their own combos. Although, even heavy combo decks could run that much hand traps if they have the room to fit those cards.
• You won't need to wait very long for your opponents to do their combos if we have hand traps answering certain key cards of the combo.

Cons

• Not enough answers to hand traps. I swear Konami literally banned or limited the cards that can answer to hand traps. Crossout Designator isn't very good unless we also run similar or same as your opponents in the side deck.
• Too many hand traps can affect your opening hand. YGO doesn't have a mulligan rule, so if you open your hand with just hand traps, you can't do much, especially when going first.
• Most importantly, it is the cost of hand traps, even a common for a hand trap card isn't cheap, never mind higher rarity cards.

I feel like Konami could fix these problems, but they won't. There's one simple way for this and that is stop making heavy combos deck. If it wasn't for combo decks, then we won't need to have a problem with hand traps and the pricing of those cards. Unfortunately, going back to old YGO will be difficult, because I know setting a monster and pass will feel weird for some people.

Although, there are some decks who doesn't care about hand traps as every cards they draw matters and drawing hand traps could be a dead draw to those decks. I know from playing YGO, especially Heroes, where every draws matter and if I draw a hand trap, it will be useless to my combos. That's why personally I don't really like running hand traps in Heroes, unless my opponents are doing their longest combos, and I can't be bothered sitting there to finish their combos.

To be honest, this is up to the players to decide, there's good and bad point, but it is also the game state that created the hand traps situation. If the game wasn't heavily rely on combos, we wouldn't need hand traps. I kinda blame Synchro era for this, as I personally think Synchro era is where we started heavy combo for modern YGO, or could it be Pendulums? Who knows? I know back then Pendulum was like some combo decks where we can just spam Pendulum monsters for free. Although I didn't pay attention much to Pendulums era as I just played Synchrons to answer those decks.

If you just playing casual YGO and not planning to join tournaments, then we can ignore running hand traps. Although if you want to have some competitiveness, then you would need at least Ash and Imperm as the basic hand traps. The others will be up to you to decide and understand what hand traps works best against what builds.