This game is free to play and is very generous with in game currency. The story mode is decent with good tutorials and rewards although I'd prefer if there was less catagories that made you use a premade deck instead of your own. Overall really nice but the online multiplayer is kind of a turn off for me personally since it is we'll very very competitive and I'm more of a old Yugioh fan who kinda just wants to chill with simple rules rather than having my opponent play 15 cards in 1 turn. Also on a side note the music actually goes hard.

It's Yu-Gi-Oh. Gone are the days of throwing down a facedown and ending your turn, it's OTK, control, or bust.

The menu and in-game UI is solid, and I've got very few complaints on that end. Card sorting is a bit iffy but that's to be expected with thousands of cards in the database.

Most shocking of all is that free-to-play is viable, and you can make one or two complete decks that'll take you all the way through ranked if you know what you're doing.

If there's one glaring flaw, it's the single-player duels. They start off as a tutorial to ease people into Yu-Gi-Oh, and do a decent job of explaining the rules, but they don't do much to tell you how the archetypes they showcase actually function. Instead you find out how they work when you jump into a duel with one of their loaner decks and immediately watch the AI pull out their boss monster with a better version of the deck they made you play. I don't want to get rolled by Inzektors again just give me my gems konami

It's been about 10 years since I dropped Yu-Gi-Oh and Master Duel brought me back. Now I'm an old dog when it comes to the card game and I have loved the anime as a child so imagine my surprised when I hear that there is a new online game called "Master Duel". I got to say "This game slaps". The game gives you enough gems to make at least 2 deck archetypes (I did DragonLink, Virtual World, and later on Dragonmaid). Got my self into Plat and am excited to play more. The game is a great way for people who got out of Yu-Gi-Oh to get back in, for people who thought about playing the game to try it out, or for veteran players to just play the game online with others. The game itself has plenty of archetypes for you to try out and craft to your liking.

Now even though I did enjoy the game, there are some things I don't agree with in the game and could be better. Getting gems is really time consuming there were times when I would play for days and barely have enough gems for 10 or 11 packs (I recommend not purchasing cause the gems are expensive). There is no casual quick play where they just have you match someone else to play with, although you can manually search for a room with players. The efficiency of the duels leave a bit to be desired, some of the players take forever to take their turns and part of that is the way the game is programmed, for example at the end of the turn there is a rule where you can only have a max of 6 cards in hand and you have to discard all the excess cards this is done by selecting the cards and confirming one by one and if you have 7 or 8 yeah cool but it does get annoying after 9 and this is something that is slowing down the turns a player takes and can be better efficiency wise.

All in all I did have fun playing the game it got me back to the physical card game (if you do go physical understand the game rules are different). The cons are disappointing but there are ways around some of them.

It's the closest we've ever gotten to an official yugioh hearthstone-like and as a result of that I found it alarmingly easy to sink a good 30hrs (and some money) into this in less than a week. I feel more at peace playing EDOPro or Legacy of the Duelist because I know they're not going to prey on my implusive buying habits, but I know it's inevitable I will find myself playing this again whenever the next battle pass drops.

The presentation is nice. Eldlich players please get a different hobby. 4/5

I would like to preface this saying that this will be less of a review of YGO the video game and more of a review of Master Duel as a client. I'll talk about YGO the game but it's surprisingly not relevant to the discussion of Master Duel. Also this post was made on 4/25/2022 incase in a year from now i'm proven incredibly right or incredibly wrong.

An important thing to note about Master Duel is that Konami was not just competing with their TCG competitors, but its own community? Obviously this is putting itself into the same market place as other classic TCGs with online clients, like WOTC's somehow successful despite endless complaints in MTGA and the pokemon TCG online client which is getting its own mass redesign in the near future, or CCGs that began and exist solely as digital clients, like hearthstone or shadowverse, but more importantly for a very long time the YGO community has had not one but multiple simulators for playing YGO online. Some are automated, some are fully manual if you prefer a closer to IRL simulation, card lists are generally up to date with new releases, customization, set up rules for older formats incase you saw endymion master of magic and damn near had a heart attack, and more importantly it's Free.

So Konami has to compete with not just the standard competition, but also their own community with an established and entrenched series of free simulators of their own game. They also have talked about it from an esport view, which would make sense because YGO has a popular competitive scene and WOTC has had a lot of success with competitive MTGA tournaments even though that game doesn't even have a fucking spectator system.
They sorta have to knock it out of the park. they... kinda do at first glance, but also they drop the ball really hard at times?

Lets talk good. First, it's definitely the prettiest of the modern TCG clients. A clean UI and presentation, all the playmats you can get look very nice, and designed key cards have fancy but not overly long animations based on their art when they enter the battlefield (no matter how many times i see it, seeing the board vanish and that nibiru animation flying on in never gets old) for a very refreshing to looking game. Not too much, still has some drama and flair to playing. It also has... a remarkably good soundtrack? Not something I'd expect to ever say about a TCG client but not only does it have good tracks but it also has triggers to change music for when keycards are played or a player's LP gets low. Again, it adds flair and drama that you can only get from the music suddenly changing and a fancy card animation shows up on your screen. I'd like more spell and trap animations (idk if there's ANY for traps? and despite all the iconic spells/traps in this game only monster reborn/black hole get cool animations), but in the 200+ hours ive put in this game I haven't even thought about turning the music off and listen to my own music like i do with every other TCG client so that's a W if you ask me.

It is also probably the most generous of other online CGs (i cant just turn this into the OCG because there's a very important YGO acronym with that so lol)? I haven't played them all but i've played a fair amount. It obviously can't compete with the totally free YGO simulator clients but i gotta give konami and slack and say they do want to make some money off this game. The game will frontload you with gems off the bat, and while the gem amount from dailies is pretty whatever the events they put out and pretty regular, there's always atleast one cheap deck you can farm with if you dont have a deck for that format, and gives out insane amount of gems. the daily gem payouts isnt even really that bad, it's just that you're better off just buying 10 packs instead of singles so you aren't like buying a pack a day like you would in other games if you were pack ripping.
By far the most important part is the secret pack system. YGO cards are mostly designed around archetypes and are made to work in tandem with other cards in their archetype, and many decks are composed mostly of 1 or 2 archetypes of cards. Secret packs are effectively "rate ups" like those new fangled "mobile games", where half your pack will only be from select of cards from the secret pack, often based around 1-2 archetypes. Want to play blue eyes? Craft a blues eyes or related SR/UR, get its secret pack and do some pulling, and even from 1-2 10 packs you will likely walk away with a lot of the core deck. There's still staples that are "mysteriously" not in any secret packs for the sake of getting you to spend your dust and a lot of extra decks will be made up multiple one offs of a UR from another pack but it's w/e. Since starting the game I have completed 4 standard playable decks with no cheap substitutes while spending less than $10 on the game, which doesn't sound amazing but when I opened MTGA for he first time in a while, a game I have put significant more time into than MD, and i got very frustrated thinking about how long it was going to take me to make an Arcanist historic deck without spending money. However, secret pack is the kind of system that mostly works with out YGO decks are made and wouldn't really fit into a lot of other games so it's w/e. Also you still can dust cards for solid rates (those super shiny cards equal a free UR of my choice bro) unlike MTGA fuck you WOTC no one is ever goign to use silent submersible let me turn it into wildcards i beg you i will play standard again if you let me do this please.

Other minor cool things: This game is on every fucking platform with cross accounts, and works really well on a controller. I was computer-less for a few days and played rounds on PS5 and it worked great, and I really enjoyed playing it on controller. Duel Live is a great system and I think games should have it because watching two randoms fight is some really swell fun. Sometimes ill just eat dinner at my desk and let duel live play and see some insane shit happen because YGO is a freakshow of a game. Also replays and spectating tools is something I feel like should be the norm by now but they aren't so I appreciate this game having it.

Good presentation, one of the easier games to collect decks, and feels like an actual modern game.

Lets talk problems.
The biggest for me is lack of format options, most importantly a lack of Bo3 option (there isn't even a way to make a sidedeck for your decks). The game's only way of playing is ranked ladder, which is BO1, and walking into random lobbies, which doesn't have rule set ups if you want to play particular formats/ect.
A lack of a real unranked queue is insane, if you feel like playing a less good deck for fun you're walking into people who are trying to ladder and you're gonna get clobbered with no hope, and it'll just tank your rank. It also means that laddering is exclusively through Bo1, which i think is just a terrible format to ladder through, which is not a YGO exclusive issue I think it's bad in every TCG. It's why a lot of decks in ladder are decks that are strong in BO1 but weaker post sideboard, why there was an issue for a while where people used bots to climb with DD Dynamite, which instantly loses to any sideboarding but you can't so you just randomly lose rank at times, it's why people in MD are built their decks with only 13 extra deck cards to beat DD dynamite bots, or why decks are loaded with sideboard or going second cards in their decks because risking a brick in some matchups is worth having a card that demolishes in other matchups. Bo1 obviously has its place, but Bo1 is killer for motivation in laddering and leads to dumbass deck decisions out of necessity.

So we're already throttled with basically one format, but the second most curious thing about this game is its card choice. YGO is already a bit of a land mine here because there's technically two games, the TCG and the OCG, which have some individual card differences and more importantly different ban lists. Master Duel goes brave new ground by being... neither TCG or OCG? It has its own banlist (which recently had its own banlist addition which will be discussed later). Even most confusingly the game is not up to date with the actual game card list. It's roughly 6 months behind on pack releases, as well as some particular cards that are in rerelease purgatory (s/o to air neos), and since the game came out there's only been one update to add more missing cards.

It sets a bad precedent for the game, where it feels like the game is always going to be 6 months behind the physical game. It makes new card additions to MD less exciting because we know whats going to be good. we know when they get around to adding DPE/adventures the meta is going to shift to those decks, because it's already happened in the physical game.
It hurts the game as an esport attempt, because due to the game being behind on card releases and its own cardlist/banlist it is simply not a digital replacement to either the TCG or the OCG. if you want to practice for TCG/OCG tournaments digitally you're playing one of the sims because those are actually the tournament format. They cant swap to MD at times like WOTC have done with MTGA because it's not the same game, specifically MD tournaments will basically be playing the format from 6 months back, which btw the client also still doesn't have a system for Bo3 so either they're Bo1 tournaments or people just have to submit on paper what their sideboard is and that's lol. And obviously you can't swap full time to MD because it's not like you can just drop the card game that's so much money and will lead to very, very angry people throwing molotovs through your windows.

Master Duel feels like a whole client to play the 6 month old format in Bo1 only, and if you described the game like that you'd have a lot less people playing it.
This also coincides with the recently released new master duel banlist, an incredibly confusing and ominous for the future list that does such impact thins like bring benten to 1 but keeps Eva untouched, conquistador to 1 but all of eldlich's flood gates untouched, casually hitting a card that's core to a FUTURE deck with semi limiting fusion destiny preemeptive response to DPE (which btw still doesn't actually nerf how good the deck is cuz verde lol) and casually dropping one copy of multiple random cards that happen to be in popular decks, and changes absolutely nothing about what decks will be good or what is the most common decks you'll see laddering. infact the biggest change in that banlist is that DD dynamite bots are probably actually dead so that's pretty neat but also they needed to nerf a bad deck in response to rapid bot use instead of actually looking at the bot part of it. Doesn't really spin a lot of confidence.

Master duel is a very pretty, a very modern online TCG client, that acts as a great introduction to a beloved and long lasting card game for people completely new or haven't touched it since the school yard, and will absolutely die if Konami doesn't treat it seriously. The game cannot continue to exist as some bizzaro bo1 old format game. Even the people who get into YGO through it are gonna start jumping off to go play the sims for either the current format or to play different formats, or actually go play the TCG/OCG (which i guess is a best case scenario for konami but i prefer to not think about the concept of konami producing this whole game just to get people into YGO and then abandon it so the new people jonesing for YGO can go buy cards).

Oh yeah, i guess I should actually talk about the game huh? yeah YGO's fun. it's a grimey, complicated and mean as fuck game that wants you to go balls to the walls and some people will hate that and some people will love it. You ever watch high level gameplay of some fighting game like marvel 3 or w/e anime game and you watch someone get stuck in a 30+ second block string into getting hit by a 2L and then they're in another 30+ combo and just fucking die, and when you talk to the players they're like "yeah that was awesome i love this game"? it's like that but for card games. Your experience will vary, but i get a little hard OTKing with rank 10s so it's pretty dope.

As a longtime-ish Yu-Gi-Oh! fan, I really can't recommend this simulator to beginners. Master Duel is egregiously slow to play both in Duels and in the menus. It's also prone to random glitches that really shouldn't be on a current-year simulator for an over 20-year old game. It has difficulty running on low-powered devices, to the point where a friend of mine literally could not play it on their phone.

I feel this game is also very unintuitive when it comes to trying to teach new Duelists how to play the game. I have tried twice now to use Master Duel as a platform to teach but both attempts died hard. This is in part due to the really strange way they decided to go about handling Gacha mechanics. For some reason, while you CAN unlock (sorta)Archetype-specific packs by drawing or crafting, they only stay accessible for a short amount of time. Speaking of, the Gacha is also very stingy. You don't get enough of the in-game Gem currency to warrant trying to deckbuild proper. And even if you wanted to, paying actual money for packs is hilariously expensive for what it's worth.

I mentioned Card Crafting as well. While at first I thought it was a neat mechanic, I soon found out actually gathering materials for crafting is a pain in the ass. In summary, you need to destroy cards you currently own to get materials of its rarity. Usually they only give you 10 material points, which can increase depending on if the card is prismatic. However, to craft one card, you need at minimum 30 of the crafting points of its rarity.

This means reliably getting URs (which you will NEED for any decent deck) is virtually impossible without paying Konami the big bucks. The only way to get around this is to make a fucktonne of alts, one focused on one deck and one deck alone.

The presentation doesn't really make up for this either. Most of the game is just PNGs (that occasionally move upon summon ooo) which doesn't help its case against the free sims. The music is also kinda.. meh? It's not bad or anything just really samey... and generic. Compare this to the 2016 effing Mobile-only game Duel Links with its great soundtrack, engaging presentation and unique fully-animated Summoning cutscenes for Boss Monsters. There's really no competition there.

One last complaint; the matchmaking is borderline archaeic. They did it so well in Duel Links, having multiple different ways to take on Duelists from across the globe, be it for a casual or competitive Duel. But in Master Duel? Either you make a room and send out your room code to someone from outside the game or you suck it up and play Ranked. That's it.

Overall I think Master Duel is quite a bit shit. Play like Duellingbook or EDOPro or Nexus or something.

Rest in Peace, Kazuki Takahashi

Was planning to save logging this until a little later, maybe after the first year anniversary but I figured it was as good as ever to write up some thoughts about Master Duel and, in particular, how it led me to rediscovering my love of the card game.

Prior to me downloading it, I had only ever played the card game via Dark Duel Stories, Forbidden Memories, a few casual battles i played as a kid, one GBA game I downloaded a rom of and a bit of Duel Links which is a different, speedier format from the norm.

Needless to say, much of my enjoyment in getting back into Yugioh through my college years came solely from the anime rather than the actual card game. I kinda assumed if you missed out on years of TCG history it'd be a pain to catch up so I never bothered until Master Duel. Even downloading this was basically a whim as I saw there was a free bonus for psplus owners on 50 tickets (these end up sucking), I figured I might as well check this out in case I was interested at a later date.

Upon doing the tutorials the game just bombards you with a deluge of gems and it was easy to get suckered in from there. This on top of the mobile version coming out a week or so afterward meant that I'd be spending most of my downtime at work (and admittedly time i was working) on this app.

What kept me hooked was doing the other solo training tutorials and learning the few summoning mechanics i had not yet understood. All this time I thought XYZs and Links were this extra layer of nonsense and yet they end up just being these pretty cool mechanics that are pretty easy to combo/integrate into a deck, it felt super rewarding finally understanding what these meant (pendulums are still weird). The solo decks/campaigns are also a nice touch as they give you a good look at the various legacy archetypes and also fuses some of these stories with other similar archetypes, like a loaner deck with a mix of Gladiator Beasts and Tri-Brigades.

This also being based on the OCG (Yugioh's 'Asian territories' division as opposed to the western TCG formats) makes this an interesting game as you run into cards that are banned or more limited than western tournament play. I'd be lying if I didn't say I love the Maxx "C" mindgames.

The look and music to the game are also extremely appreciated. As the battlefield become more destroyed as a sides' life points drop, both players have a little buddy that cheers them on (thanks sangan), various key monsters upon summon will play a summon cut-in with high-res animated/tweened art of the monster...and the current track playing shifts into a much more upbeat version of the song. Yasunori Nishiki did an excellent job with the dueling music, as each theme puts me in the mood to duel and as the battle progresses the theme gets tenser and tenser.

The game does need a lot to integrate a lot more modes/formats that anybody can try out on a whim. Right now its just ranked modes, solo campaigns and the monthly 'event' formats. While I dont have too much problems with ranked (admittedly im not good enough to stick around platinum or higher for too long), I do wish there was a format/mode better suited for decks i build that I know aren't suited for meta specifically. There's also a lot of bot problems that arise every now and then, which always ruins the mood.

All in all this is the best official simulation of the game currently and even with its F2P/MTX nonsense and meta-power creep shenanigans, ive been putting a lot of time into this as a downtime game. You do get a ton of gems at the start but I do wish getting the optimal 1000 was a bit easier as dailies are kinda lackluster. Not helped by the fact there's a ton of different archetypes I want to check out. Been mostly using plant archetypes and Harpies but I've been wanting to check out Spyrals, Darklords, Toads, Burning Abyss, Marincess, The Weather, way too many archetypes.

I think the moment everything started to click and I began to fall in love with the game was upon building my Rikka deck. A waifu deck certainly, but as this 'secret' card pack was one of the first to appear for my account I thought I'd try it out since it looked more unique at first glance. As it turned out they weren't half bad- but not meta shattering, which fits into my playstyle just fine. What really made me fall in love was running into intimidating boss monsters with effects like 'Cannot be destroyed by battle or card effect' or 'Cannot be targeted', etc. As it turns out Rikka's have a lot of effects that wipe monsters off the board but their effect text specifies Tributing rather than destroying monsters. This one difference means the difference as cards like 'Rikka Flurries' mean once I tribute a monster from my side of the field (easily done with this archeype's playstyle), I can activate Flurries to have my opponent 'tribute' a monster of their own choice. This card isnt OP and can be countered fairly easily, but its those loopholes and combos in card effects that make this game that much more engaging to me.

I'm hoping Konami does a lot more to fix some of its rewarding issues, expand its format options and do a lot more to encourage unique deck building, as I've had a blast returning to the card game through this.

Aqui você vende a sua alma e sanidade para o META. E quando não conseguir esse feito, apenas desista.
Mais tarde você se lembra que um amistoso entre amigos consegue ser bem divertido.

Gosto tanto de "Yu-Gi-Oh!" a ponto de jogar o card game físico por pelo menos 7 anos, só que é mais um "vai e volta" do que jogar direto. O que sendo bem sincero é saudável kkkk.
Porém, com relação a acessibilidade dele no geral fica difícil de querer arriscar algo. Tipo, se você duelar contra alguém que segue o META tu vai acabar assistindo o cara jogar sozinho ou só dando a vitória à ele.

O crafting eu achei zuado e muito demorado, vão para o Ômega ou EDOPRO. São mais acessíveis.