Yugioh has been a long time hobby of mine, I might have been about 10 when I first got into the game. I've always picked up the game off and on again.
My first tournament I entered with a stack of random cyberese cards with no synergy, then I picked up an structure deck for blue eyes white dragon, and eventually picked up one copy of "blue eyes alternative dragon", which was a pricey card at the time. I had some idea of how to play and went to tournaments every saturday, still had no idea how to build my deck well, I had virtually no cards I ran three of, and had no idea what cards were good and why. Many people along the way gave me staple cards like "solem judgment", I learned what hand traps actually were for once, and others gave me advice in terms of deck building, and countering the meta.
The first store I went to tournaments at consistently stopped running yugioh because it was no longer profitable due to lack of attendance. I had taken a break from the game but eventually got back into it when I found a large ammount of Star Pack Vrains booster packs for only a dollar each at a dollar tree. I ripped a healthy ammount of packs from that set, and noticed I had a lot of Trickstar cards, I did some research and learned what cards I was missing to complete the deck and eventually found a new store to play at with this new deck.
Fastforward about a year, I had slowly dropped cards from my deck turning it into a deck less focused on trickstars, and more focused on burn, until eventually I just dropped the trickstar cards entirly and switched my deck to chainburn. Shortly after, "mystic mine" came out and I was able to secure more games than usual. Around late 2019 or early 2020, my local gamestores shut down events, and I stopped playing Yugioh for a while.
On my return to the game I realise mystic mine is banned, all the other decks I have played before or kind of unviable. I picked up 3 copies of the "Beware of Traptrix" structure deck and returned to the game.