What's Good About Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel

Back in the day, Yu-Gi-Oh was my jam. Be it spending my parents' money on structure decks or watching the anime when it was airing, my brothers and I could not get enough of it. Weirdly enough, I could never get into the video games because of my attention span and lack of patience for wading through story mode stuff when I just wanted to play the card game. When I saw Master Duel, the new Yu-Gi-Oh game that was announced at the time I thought “I’ll give it a try once or twice if it’s twenty bucks”. Then it stealth dropped on Steam and home consoles last Friday for the low, low price of Free Ninety-Nine. I absolutely love it.

There’s a multitude of reasons why I love this game, but I want to get to the most important one. It’s geared to get you to play as much of it as humanly possible by giving you a decent amount of solo content on top of both the ranked and casual modes. The game starts by giving you a quick survey about your familiarity with the property, and this is a great way of gearing how much of the tutorial it wants to introduce to you. I still highly recommend playing the tutorial because if there’s one thing I’ve learned since I’ve not played this card game in around…15 years(?), it’s that the game has understandably changed...a lot.

You still have the main purpose of using a deck of around 40-60 card main deck and 15 card extra deck to deplete the other player’s life total from 8000 to 0, but they’ve made some changes to monster summoning in ways that are new and interesting in their complexity. You still have normal monsters, effect monsters, fusion monsters, and ritual monsters, but there are three new summoning methods and monster types that can have entire decks and playstyles focused around:

• Synchro summoning and monsters that focus on getting powerful monsters out quickly
• Xyz monsters (pronounced as “ik-seez” according to the wiki, I know, it’s silly) that don’t have levels, but instead ranks that can be increased and decreased for differing effects
• Link monsters (that can only be placed in the new extra monster zone) that focus on only attacking due to having no defense rating
• And Pendulum monsters, where the monsters can also double as spell cards with their own effects when used on the pendulum zones that are denoted as the furthest left and right of the spell and trap card zone, which allows for pendulum summoning, which can be done once per turn to summon multiple monsters at once with the scales of the two cards in the pendulum zones determining the levels allowed (i.e. if you put down a 1 and an 8, you can only summon monsters levels 2-7).

If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. I probably butchered a good 90% of that description because I’ve only barely scratched the surface while futzing with these mechanics despite all of them being REALLY fucking cool. The pendulum stuff in particular is the exact kind of silly bullshit I love about Yu-Gi-Oh so much and I want to try it more when I feel confident I won’t fuck it up somehow.

These mechanics all go a very long way to adding a lot of complexity and depth to the game in ways that are incredibly dynamic and the tutorials all do a much better job of teaching and explaining these mechanics than my silly ass could. So that’s nice. And these tutorials are also the best way to get cards and gems because they give that stuff out like it’s going out of style. You can get gems to card packs and upon completion of tutorial wings and even entire solo sections, full-on structure decks to add to your collections. Between this and the free missions, I haven’t even spent a dime on this game and I love it. I’ve even made a deck or two as an experiment.

This goes into the business model even further than I mentioned just now. The game is free to play and has purchasable gems that you can use to get card packs that have a lot of RNG associated with them, but with the amount of free stuff they give you, it becomes less of an issue due to you getting access to secret packs that have a guarantee that half of the pack has the cards you need for a specific set and after a while, you can just start dismantling duplicates to get materials to make the cards you want directly. It’s possibly the most generous I’ve ever seen a digital card game get and I fucking love that.

The game also has a lean aesthetic that’s clean easy to read and has the capacity to be incredibly extravagant when calling forth the more powerful monsters. There were legit moments when my friends and I were narrating our plays like we were duelling on the show because goddamn it, I’ll always have my collectable card games cut with silly nonsense. The pomp and circumstance, the showmanship, and being an extra bitch are half the appeal of Yu-Gi-Oh and Master Duel has that in spades. One of my closest friends and I played a string of games together one night and it was the one thing I was missing the last few months because I used to play with my brothers all of the time and we haven’t really been able to do that since they both got a place of their own and we’ve all been busy because life is just like that. It was nice, it reminded me of a simpler time when we could all just spend hours playing this ridiculous card game, tweaking our strategies, and seeing what kind of silly bullshit we could get away with. I don’t like to wax nostalgic often so forgive me this one time.

Yu-gi-Oh Master Duel is the perfect representation of the card game in video game form. The single-player content cuts out the fat and teaches you the basics of how to duel while also giving you access to the entire card library (that they are going to keep up to date as well as with an up-to-date Ban list, which is fucking fantastic by the way) and letting you craft your own deck to your heart’s content. Between that, the incredibly generous doling out of card packs and gems, and the game being updated going forward, I think Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel is going to be my new “Forever Game” that I play when my main forever game, Destiny 2 doesn’t have anything going on. And I think that might just be the highest praise I can give a game these days. God, I missed this silly card game for kids.