No, you don't have to use join on a particular column. In fact, most of the solutions on here are what I would call bad practices in that they actually require data from the toys table to complete. You should really just do a count(1) so that when the join is happening underneath it could just use the index to get to the answer instead of requiring a table lookup for the value.

This practice is great, especially if you have a lot of fields and there are some that have aliases. It can take a little more time to read because you have to scroll, but is very clear.