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The end of another year, and the hope for another

Well, here we are at the end of 2025. The last couple years have been extremely different to what we expected. Back in 2023, I had sold the sites (this and Yugipedia) to GGRecon, in large part because of the changing ecosystem of website directing and the resources they had to help bring these sites to modern stabilities. Unfortunately they encountered similar issues with how the net was changing and they themselves didn’t survive the changes, so we’re back at square one, but thankfully with a lot of the upgrades they provided.

We’re now a full year in of me being back at the helm and while the sites are up, they weren’t the healthiest. I’ve fixed up many of the WordPress plugin issues and Yugipedia’s downtime problems seem to be (mostly) resolved, where the only remaining reports of issues have been by people who are stuck with cache or cookie issues, and deleting their cookies/clearing their cache resolves them, which is great.

That being said, part of the solutions involved trying out different ad strategies and changing providers. A move that came with big financial risk, and didn’t pan out. I’ve been leveraging myself to keep the lights on but it’s gotten to the point that we’re forced to explore some less desirable options if we want to keep YGOrganization and Yugipedia going.

Both websites are undergoing dramatic upgrades, with Yugipedia getting a new MediaWiki version (which is taking an extremely long time to do, but is out of our hands unfortunately, as the dev in charge of it works at his own pace) and YGOrganization is getting an entirely new layout. The current site layout you’re reading this on was implemented as a sort of “YGOrg 3” by GGRecon after YGOrg 2 lasted for 10 years, and while it’s been functional, it’s also been unpopular. I have spent the last year designing and developing YGOrg 4 with the team, and our Patreon backers have already been using and loving it. I hope to launch it in its full public form by the end of the year. This tangentially relates to the first thing I’d like to draw attention to: The Patreon.

https://patreon.com/yugioh doesn’t really offer much, as I’ve never been sure what to offer on it (and if you have things you’d like to see, please do let me know), but its primary offerings are ad-free logins and access to our Patreon-only Discord chat on the YGOrg server where we debut upcoming things early and speak more candidly about news and upcoming releases. This is also the Patreon for Yugipedia, and if this grows enough, it’d solve all of our problems and allow us to remove all of the ads from Yugipedia entirely, which is, naturally, the dream.

I do not, however, expect people to just bail us out for nothing, so I am planning a livestream where I auction off, and giveaway Yu-Gi-Oh! themed items from my personal collection: playmats, Starlight Rares, graded cards, and more, to anyone who is subscribed to the Patreon, or donates to a fundraiser I’m going to host.

The YGOrg/Yugipedia Fundraiser

A Genesys tournament with livestreamed prizing and giveaways. We will host it on Duelingbook as that currently serves as the easiest medium in which to play Genesys format that serves our needs.

The idea is simple: You can donate $1, $5, $10, $20, or any other amount. $1 enters you into the draw for prizes, $5 or more enters you into the tournament (if you wish), $10 enters you into a higher prize tier for drawing, and so forth. We will livestream commentary and rounds from the tournament, and between rounds, do draws for giveaways of things from my collection, tiering based on stretch goal benchmarks similar to a Kickstarter.

A subscription to the Patreon counts as a $5 donation. Part of the funds raised will be given out to the Genesys tournament top-cut based on amounts raised. Items to be auctioned off and/or given away include Sealed product like Booster packs and boxes, Playmats, High-end rare cards like Starlight Rares, Graded Cards, Speed Duel Locator cards (never released!), and other special collectibles I’ve kept for years, sometimes even secretly, if we reach certain fundraising benchmarks to justify it.

If you are interested in joining the commentary, or donating anything to the charity to be given away, such as autographed cards, your own playmats etc, please do reach out to me. We already have one such participant in this, “Ultimate lol” has contributed a 3D shadowbox card for the charity, so huge shout-out to him. You can check out some examples of his work on his Reddit.

The planned date for the charity stream/giveaway/auction, and Genesys tournament, will be January 17th. Any changes will be made with at least one weeks notice, as the logistics get finalized and sponsors etc get in contact with me. I also want to get as much feedback on our Discord from our users before I lock in any specific stretch goals or items.

I’ll also entertain offers for partial ownership of the websites if you are a serious investor, as I need to explore all possible avenues to keep these projects going. They’re too important to me, and to our audience, to not take as seriously as possible.

Thank you all for reading not only this long post, but this site for 13 years. With any luck, we’ll be around for a lot more. If this tournament goes well, we will start running them maybe as often as weekly!

Any donations or subscriptions made before the event starts will still enter you into any and all prize draws. If you are a subscribed Patron who wants to enter the tournament, please let me know on Discord.

Please consider donating here:
Subscribe to our Patreon here: patreon.com/yugioh
Join us on Discord at discord.gg/theorganization for feedback, questions, and/or to join the Genesys tournament.