As a huge proponent of card games and more, I’ve been super jazzed about YuGiOh Master Duel since I first heard about it last year. After all, people have been looking for a way to play a no-frills YuGiOh game online- but the system always seems flawed.

First you had premium titles like Legacy of the Duelist- which had you reliving anime moments and making your own custom deck. But things like progression blocks and the speed at which the base TCG moves got in the way, meaning there weren’t enough people playing, and better cards would release but never see release in the game.

With Master Duel though, we have a near 1:1 experience that basically shadow dropped out of nowhere yesterday. Long story short, I’m incredibly optimistic about the future of this game. More thoughts below, though:

This Is Not Duel Links

One of the most prominent questions I get from the unitiated is how Master Duel will fit against the other YuGiOh game, Duel Links. Presenting, your answer: They’re totally different games.

Duel Links is targeted more at players who want the anime experience of playing the card game, being more like a TCG with hero mechanics a la Hearthstone and a more condensed ruleset for faster matches.

Meanwhile Master Duel is YuGiOh at its purest- it is unabashedly the YuGiOh TCG, with an incredibly huge library of cards and no concessions made for its digital playstyle.

Unfortunately, this does come with some drawbacks- if you’re new and trying out YuGiOh for the first time, expect a really rough experience duelling online. Since virtually every card is available in the game right now, building a near 1:1 replica of your tournament-worthy deck isn’t that hard, even if you don’t spend any money doing so.

As someone with some experience, I can’t tell you how bad I might feel in the lower ranks against someone trying out the game’s free starter deck against a kitted out Masked Hero deck that’s wiping them out in the first turn.

The Game For The Discerning YuGiOh Fan

In a way I kind of respect Master Duel for having the balls to do this- with Duel Links you could argue a lot of the concessions made were for giving new players a chance to feel powerful too (and naturally, making some money off of it thanks to the gacha).

With Master Duel, it seems like the priority was getting the virtual YuGiOh experience as close to its real counterpart as possible- and rules about things like monetization just weren’t allowed to get in the way of this.

As of this writing the game’s barely been out 24 hours, and despite the fact most of the components of my Masked Hero deck are UR in rarity, I’ve constructed a lot of the core mechanics with some level of consistency to it.

With a lot of card games, the biggest problem is the rate at which you get cards- getting a fully consistent deck just isn’t feasible early on, usually locked behind paywalls or gacha and you’ll usually see people learning to sub in cards to make up for their best-in-slot counterparts.

That’s not so much the case with Master Duel- while cards are locked behind certain banners for gacha reasons, you can also make any card in the game’s extensive library using its duplicate system. Basically, with a single button press, you can scrap all duplicates of your cards, turning them into CP for their rarity. Any card in the game can then be bought using 30 CP of its rarity (so basically every 3 dupes gets you one card).

While it’s obviously gonna be harder for UR-tier cards, the most important thing a TCG player will learn is that it’s not always about the big shinies. Instead you can use the CP system to make your various support cards, while using all your gems to pull on the sets that have the cards you most need.

Some Level Of Complication

That being said, there is some level of obfuscation at work. While there are two banners to pull on, the game has what it calls Secret Packs. Basically, getting key cards will unlock specific banners for the next 24 hours. A great example would be like this:

One of the two banners you currently have contains the cared Elemental HERO Shadow Mist. by pulling her, you get a notification that you’ve unlocked the HERO Secret Packs, which contain way more HERO archetypes, so you’ll wanna pull on those if you’re trying to build the HERO deck of your dreams.

My one gripe is that from a new player experience, this could probably be seen as incredibly confusing. An easy beginner mistake would be to waste all your pulls on banners that don’t have what you might need for a good deck.

As someone who’s paid in social acceptability to collect shiny cardboard for decades, it’s incredibly nice to just have a clear path to the deck you want. Considering a lot of higher-level YuGiOh is just slapping cards together and seeing what’s gonna break the game next, I feel like this system is really helpful for that experience. That said, I do acknowledge it might be harder for old players.

Kusoge But Make It Cards

If you’ve never heard of YuGiOh, prepare for one of the most fun card games out there right now. YuGiOh is to many TCGs what anime fighters like Blazblue or Guilty Gear are to other fighting games. It’s fast, laughably aggressive and between skill levels it can look like you’re playing a totally different game. Cards are designed to break the game’s own rules, such as Amorphactor Pain, The Imagination Dracoverlord that straight-up makes you skip portions of your turn, or Masked HERO Dark Law, who stops your opponent from sending cards to the graveyard by removing them from play instead.

Just like an anime fighter there’s plenty of mechanics at play too- math-heavy Synchro summoning, consistency-rewarding XYZ to even weirder ones like Link Summoning and Pendulums. It can all be overwhelming- so I strongly recommend just picking a monster you find cool, then building your deck around that.

Solo Mode

If you’re not in the business of sending random internet strangers to the Shadow Realm, there’s still things to do in YuGiOh Master Duel. The game boasts a Solo Mode, which separates itself from previous YuGiOh titles by being about the cards, rather than any kind of anime-based campaign. Better yet, these missions give card rewards too, so including structure decks to try out YuGiOh’s multitude of archetypes.

It’s really fun for people who are just massive nerds for card lore, since these explain the history and backgrounds of various YuGiOh cards, such as the Monarchs. On top of that you can also get tutorials for YuGiOh’s multitude of mechanics, such as the math-heavy Synchro Summoning while getting more gems for you to pull for your dream deck.

If you’re looking to spend, you can also spend your currency on things like custom tables for dueling, as well as Duel Mates who are adorable mascots conveniently made of cards banned from ever coming back like Pot of Greed or Sangan.

Monetization

It’s hard to complain about YuGiOh Master Duel being “Pay to Win” when, all things considered, that’s very much the card game itself. All things considered though, Master Duel is very much the most F2P-friendly card game I’ve played so far. At launch there’s a lot of ways to earn gems, since the game has various challenges that all reward gems like destroying monsters or logging in.

Solo mode is also a good source of these, and you can also get rewards by winning competitive duels with the game’s two-battle-pass system. Admittedly this is where I had the least fun- the rewards of the battle pass aren’t that great, and you’d need to climb pretty high just for your cumulative gems to be worth anything. That being said they’re also a great source of CP- so if you’re really desperate to generate that card you want, you’ll need to start grinding that battle pass.

Of course there’s also a premium battle pass, but from a cursory glance it doesn’t look like there’s too much of an upgrade in terms of rewards there, either.

Closing Thoughts

All things considered, I’m really having fun with YuGiOh Master Duel. It’s a great proof of concept that not every game has to cater to newer players, since so much of the design feels like the target demographic just really likes to duel, and doesn’t always need to be motivated by things like a Battle Pass track or gacha pulls.

Overall though, we’ll need to see how well Master Duel is received by the greater public. I can imagine anyone who didn’t spend the past 7 years dueling their friends is going to feel extremely lost, but it’s a side effect of just how 1:1 the game is to its source material. It does help that the game is pretty as heck, with key cards getting live-2d models, and staples like Monster Reborn even having their own effects. Heck, special summoning has its own animations too, so it’s not like the game has no spectacle to it.

I also do wish they had a little bit more anime fan service- simple things like the life point noise would have been great to feature anime sound effects, as are things like the duel field since anyone who’s watched Duelist Kingdom probably wants one of those giant duel fields instead of a crumbling ancient temple.

But even gripes aside, as a hyper-faithful adaptation of a children’s card game YuGiOh Master Duel is an absolute blast. Rather than having to squeeze the game through the mold created by games like Hearthstone, it feels like Master Duel has simply done its own thing, and only taken what it feels best matches its goal to support the game financially.

What can I say man, dueling is fun.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel

Publisher: Konami

Developer: Konami

Release Date: 2022-01-19

Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

The definitive digital edition of the competitive card game that has been evolving for over 20 years! Duel at the highest level against Duelists all over the world.