Master Duel, One Year Later

tl;dr It was fun, but I think I won't be competitive anymore anytime soon.

Well, well, it's been a year since I started playing Master Duel, and it's been quite the ride. Over the past year I've pretty much collected all the waifu decks in various serviceable conditions, and I thought I should pen down my thoughts on it.

The Lowdown

Master Duel is extremely fun, albeit when the decks are of equal power levels. The fun gets sapped out of the game when two decks of very different power levels get matched together.

I know I started playing Master Duel because I wanted to play old school style Relinquished/ Toon/ Gravekeeper decks, but the problem is that all routes to building them... sucked. Try as I might, there was no great path to making a competitive Relinquished deck without some sidetech like Halq overpowering the main theme, and I might as well have played Swordsoul + Halq instead.

While they don't work very well, some mid-tier waifu decks do still work; especially those which got new deck support like Evil Twins and Marincess.

Competitive At the Highest Levels Kinda Sucks

At its heart, YGO is a game about Hyperconsistency.

Your deck WILL do what it is supposed to do uninterrupted, and it presents a challenge to your opponent to get past it. This is great, coming from MtG, where sometimes you don't even get to play due to reasons completely out of your control.

My problem with it is that at the highest levels, the game revolves around NOT letting your opponents play, using cards which have such tight counter conditions that it becomes probabilistically impossible you have the out, or you have to start shoving catchalls in your deck like kaijus.

These two problems added together mean that the best deck is the deck that can dodge the most answers, which resulted in the crossout your crossout your crossout gameplay in the first Duelist Cup.

Duelist Cup

Speaking of duelist cup, something I've noticed is that my desire to play drops DRAMATICALLY after each duelist cup. I only really came back for the anniversary (I was also playing Elden Ring during this time) and the cool playmat. Duelist Cup really brings out the worst of competitive YGO, myself included. The climb to R20 each time is great, but the anxiety of Stage 2 is not. Usually I am too tired to play Stage 2 anyway, since I fell majorly ill the last Duelist Cup.

There also is not much change in the meta compared to paper, or Konami purposely sculpts the meta in a way that it follows the established paper meta. I've mentioned this before on my podcast, and it's quite interesting how they do it. The timeline seems to be going the expected way; Sprite is taking over, mermaids will be next. I'm personally waiting for evil Ecclesia because I like evil women.

Since I am not that into robots, I think an extended break to work on AI art is in order.

I'd Rather Play Waifu Decks

But not every waifu deck can be a giant beater. At a certain rank, perhaps gold and above, sure you have to retool your waifu deck, and I think that's okay. Trying to force a waifu deck to become ultra-competitive means killing a little bit of the flavor, and ultimately it's up to you to decide whether that flavor kill is worth it.

I'm far along in YGO now that I can pick and choose from any of my ten plus waifu decks and mess around each day, playing a different deck. Sometimes I forget the main combo lines, but it's a great feeling to play what you like instead of what is strong. Considering that I also made Duelist Cup multiple times already, I don't really need any outside validation to know that I'm okay at the game.

Last Word

I enjoy the waifus, I enjoy the card game, but I don't really enjoy the ultra-competitive aspect of it. In the coming months maybe I'll come back for Duelist Cup (oh god, no!) playing something stupid like Labyrinth (oh god, yes!) to see if I can make Stage 2 with it. Perhaps the real challenge is to take Marincess to Day 2, and failing that just Swordsoul my way on the last day lol.

I also have AI and writing to worry about now, so while Master Duel was a nice tagalong during my writing of /Conspiracy/ Girls, I’ll be playing quite a bit less seriously and quite a bit less now. I do have a couple of waifu decks just sitting there, not used very much, so I ‘ll be playing those as well.

In the end, play the way you like, Anon.