Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel and the details of all its modes that you must know before playing

Free-to-play digital card game, Yu-Gi-Oh! MASTER DUEL, peaked third on Steam’s concurrent player count. Now sitting in fourth (still above Apex Legends and GTA V) the game has so far received 147,857 concurrent players since its launch yesterday, with today’s player peak also sitting at 159,158.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel and the details of all its modes

Duel Mode

There are two ways to play in Duel mode. Ranked and Room duels. Ranked duels are pretty straight forward. You take your deck into a randomly paired match against somebody else looking for an opponent in the same tier as you, and play a duel against them. If you win, you might even gain a rank. Each game also awards bonus points based on performance, and raises your level through xp gain, as well as earning rewards towards Duel pass. There is a lot of encouragement to use this mode, the rewards are absolutely bountiful.

As of writing this, it appears Platinum 1 is as high as the ranking will let me go. Room matches are a bit different. You can set up a bunch of specific settings and invite friends, or provide a separate invite code for spectators to watch matches.

Deck Mode

Deck mode is where the magic happens. Here you build your deck for Solo and PVP modes, craft and dismantle cards using Crafting Points, and target Special Packs to help you with your gem usage. I’ll cover that in the Shop section below. In Deck Mode, you can see your deck list and add/remove cards with right click or drag. When you select a card, as I have here with Blue-Eyes white Dragon, you can see how to obtain it, dismantle it for Crafting Points (10 for regular, 15 for glossy, 30 for Royal), or spend 30 to generate a new copy of it. You can even generate copies of cards you don’t own yet at all!

UR cards only dismantle for UR Crafting Points, SR for SR crafting points, and so on. No amount of R’s will get you a SR card unfortunately. This does however mean that every 3 SRs you pull that you didn’t want, you can convert into an SR you did want for your deck. There is also a 1/10 chance the card you craft is a glossy variant, and a 1/10 chance the glossy variant is a Royal Rare instead (1/100 chance total). I tried over 400 times to craft one of my N cards as a Royal Rare and did not get one, so roll at your own risk. Personally I would have preferred a sort of threshold system where after you craft 50 copies of the same card, the odds go up from 1/10 to 1/5 on glossy cards becoming Royal Rares, and after 50 more, raising it to 1/2, if not just increasing the glossy rate every 10 copies of a card you make.

I’m not going to tell you what to play, as part of the beauty of Yugioh is how much variety there is in the card pool, and how many viable decks there are. Some really strong ideas to start with are Dinosaur, Virtual World, Zoodiac, or Pendulum. If you’re looking for something more budget friendly, the best advice I have would be to get the cards Forbidden Chalice, and Book of Moon. These are only R’s and extremely, extremely powerful.

Solo Mode

There have been a lot of cool Archetypes over the years that didn’t get a lot of attention, like Elementsabers, and Konami are here to make sure you learn how to play them anyway and maybe give them a fair shot.

Solo mode is a great way to unlock a lot of free cards. It’s a series of story-driven ‘campaigns’ where you use loaner decks (and sometimes your own, for extra rewards) to complete conflicts and progress the story while getting rewards and ultimately even entire decks. In each story mode there is also a gate that is locked behind one of several coloured ‘orbs’, that you get as rewards from other archetypal campaigns. There is more than enough orbs of each colour to do every single path, and even powerful cards like Reinforcement of the Army are given for free for completing these!

Some of the loaner decks are extremely bricky, the gem-knight one comes to mind where you can just open 5 Normal monsters and automatically lose, but you can just keep trying until you get a real hand and get your rewards! If I can beat em, you certainly can. You also get lots of player XP for doing these. A helpful tip is enabling this setting, it can make or break some of those tougher matches!

Shop Mode

In shop mode you can spend your gems on a mountain of useful things. Normal, Secret, and Bonus packs are the first thing on the list. The only bonus packs i’ve discovered are the legacy pack. You get these from PVP and solo mode, and each pack contains two cards from a nearly 4000 card pool exclusive to this product. You must either craft these cards or pull them here, so I’d consider them the best possible use of your Crafting Points.

The normal pack is the Master pack. This is where the other nearly 7000 cards are found. Every pack contains 8 cards, with the 8th one always being a rare or better. If you pull a SR or UR card that is found in one of the secret pack sets though, you’ll unlock that pack for 24 hours. You can also craft a SR or UR from a secret pack to again awaken it for 24 hours.

Secret packs work a little differently. You still get 8 cards in your pack, but the first four are still from the master pack pool. The second group of 4 are also technically from that pool, but they’re more targeted. Secret packs contain usually 80 cards narrowly focused on one to three styles of cards, and the second group of four (including that 8th card that’s always a rare or better) will exclusively be these focused cards. If you spend 1000 gems at once, you also can turn the 8th card in the 10th pack into a guaranteed SR or UR. If you open these 10 packs and pull no URs, then the next 10 pack bundle will guarantee an UR in that slot.

The last thing to note would be the ‘Selection’ Packs, currently Stalwart Force and Revival of Legends. Stalwart force is actually the best set to be opening right now unless you have a specific deck you’re trying to make. These selection packs only exist for 60 more days as of writing, and new ones will appear. These too are 80 card sets, containing cards from all over the pool, but ONLY these 80 cards, in all 8 slots, making this the best targeted acquisition method. Every SR or UR in stalwart force unlocks a pack containing what most would consider to be a ‘meta’ deck. So 10 packs of stalwart force is a fantastic use of 1k gems to unlock a secret pack via your guaranteed SR, will let the game choose a deck for you if you’re looking to just fool around, and that deck will assuredly be very good.

There are currently two starter decks available for 500 gems each, based on Pendulums, and Utopia. You can only get these 3 times each and you cannot dismantle the cards for Crafting points. You can get these if you like, the Utopia deck in particular is very good for those looking to be pure F2p and not wanting to grind for lots of drops. Ultimately these would be the lowest priority use for gems, as far as cards are concerned.

Accessories also exist but all the best ones come from solo mode in my opinion. These are also a bad use of gems especially for a free to play user.Lastly is the Duel Pass and Bundle Deals we mentioned before. The Duel pass pays for itself, and the Bundle Deals are each the best possible use of your starting gems in the game. Get all 4 of these right away!

If you have any further questions or just want to hang out, we’ve got a pretty active Discord Channel in the YGOrganization server dedicated to Master Duel you can check out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KO0H7Xcu4Y

YuGiOh Master Duel Is Teaching People The Busted Joy of YuGiOh Whether They Want It Or Not

If you’re coming from the YuGiOh anime, you might have certain expectations of YuGiOh Master Duel. Some of the earliest arcs of the card game anime largely revolved around summoning monsters, then just having them attack your opponent for big damage with the occasional boss monster with a quirk for our heroes to work around.

Anyone who’s actually played Konami’s TCG would know that’s very much not the case- YuGiOh is a brutal game where not only are you expected to be familiar with every laughably broken combo someone might use at you, you’ll also need your own if you’re going to keep your head above water.

It’s a huge praise to just how 1:1 YuGiOh Master Duel is, considering almost every card in circulation is currently in the game. Anyone with a rough clue of what they’re doing could simply just spend a few hours grinding and build their real-life tournament terrors and start tearing up the ranked duel scene.

The Struggle Of Anyone Not Running A Killer Deck

Unfortunately, that does impact less competitive players, who aren’t prepared to have their opponents play long turns that end in them winning the game.

“Man this game is hardcore, so it’s been a while since I played Yugioh but I decide to try out this game and man people are so strong even in lower ranks in ranked duel, literary in the first ranks, supposed to be the beginner ranks I only fought people with fully build decks, not any decks mind you, really good ones…and they knew exactly what they are doing, I can only wonder how it is in higher ranks”, writes redditor Lipefe2018.

While some might call the behavior sweaty or being a tryhard, the one thing you have to remember is that in the TCG scene, this is simply how you play the game. YuGiOh is the anime fighter of card games, giving you an incredible amount of freedom to come up with the most busted decks, especially with Japan’s OCG format (which Master Duel uses).

You can’t remove things like OTK decks from YuGiOh- they’re literally the high octane gameplay people pick up the game for
YuGiOh decks are all inherently built around combos. These are long chains of cards, whose effects all work with each other to produce effects like summoning powerful monsters like Blue-Eyes Chaos Max Dragon to give you a beatdown or even setting up cards like Masked Hero Dark Law to punish your opponent for trying to have fun.

They’re incredibly satisfying to pull off- and absolutely a core part of the YuGiOh appeal alongside its huge host of card archetypes and mechanics. While some players might complain at the absolute torrent of rules and mechanics to remember, it’s very much a case of “but this was the game the developers wanted to make”

Letting New Players Play The Game Too

Still, that doesn’t mean that some players aren’t calling for a way to allow newer players to fight each other instead of worrying about a Chaos Max OTK deck to blow them asunder.

The problem isn’t just that new players are losing their games- it’s the sheer scale of how badly you can lose at YuGiOh. For many games, putting two cards down is a fairly standard opener. In YuGiOh, there’s an incredible pressure that if you haven’t taken steps to setting up your deck’s win condition in your opening moves, your opponent might luck out and execute theirs first.

You don’t have to be a top tier deck user to have this, either. I use a laughably off-meta HERO deck and even I managed to end a player’s first duel on the first turn I was allowed to attack.

The best you can do is end the duel early for them

“I wish there was an option for players who barely know what their doing to be able to fight only other people who barely know what their doing. I’ve been sitting here for like five minutes whilst this guy takes his first turn, summoning a shit load of these Sky Striker fuckers as I play like 2 cards a turn from this basic dragon deck. Beyond tilted, lads, beyond tilted”, writes redditor NevTheLad.

“Performing full Drytron combo on some poor 7 year old in Bronze IV just to feel something”, writes lcmaier, without an ounce of regret. “Everyone starts out at beginner rank” sounds a lot more sinister when it comes to YuGiOh
The solution is pretty self-explanatory- as the game goes on, more competitive players will naturally climb the ranks, creating a more balanced beginner ranks. We see it all the time in fighting games- since it’s all down to your individual skill, you won’t have to worry about “false Golds” since you’d have to actually be capable of winning duels.

That being said, the ability to learn combos is never gonna go away if you want to play competitively. Metas are metas for a reason, and telling people you only want a deck full of normal monsters with no gimmicks isn’t going to stop them from using your deck as a rag to wipe the floor with. Even if a deck isn’t top 10-worthy, YuGiOh duels very much have their own language, and you’ll need to be able to speak it if you want to maintain a competitive edge.

 

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