Zitat:
Yu-Gi-Oh wasn't originally a card game. It was originally a manga, written by mangaka and tabletop gamer Kazuki Takahashi as a love letter to his hobby. It actually covered a wide variety of tabletop games.
Takahashi was a big fan of Magic, so he wrote a manga chapter that was specifically about it. Of course, Magic is a bit too complicated to explain and show a game of within the pages that Weekly Shounen Jump will give a single manga chapter, and also owned by Wizards of the Coast, so instead of "Magic: The Gathering", the characters played "Magic and Wizards", a lawyer-friendly variation on Magic with simplified rules. Notice how the games played in the manga and anime resemble a game of Magic more closely than they do a game of Yu-Gi-Oh? That's because that was the feeling Takahashi was trying to capture.
Magic and Wizards was a hugely popular concept, so Takahashi then based an entire arc on it. Then he moved on to other tabletop games, but Magic and Wizards remained such a popular concept that when Yu-Gi-Oh got an anime adaptation, it focused exclusively on Magic and Wizards (called "Duelmonsters" in the English dub). Then the anime got popular enough that Konami was contracted to make an actual trading card game based on the show.
In other words, Yu-Gi-Oh is literally a Magic: The Gathering fanfiction that got way out of hand.